"DYLAN!" I SCREAMED. I knelt down beside him, feeling pukey and fuzzy and like the wind had been knocked out of me. He was holding his arm (sigh of relief) tight, grimacing. Blood leaked out through his fingers.
"It"s fine," Dylan said tersely. "Bullet went right through-bone seems okay."
I didn"t even have a second to give him my best I"m-really-glad-you-didn"t-just-die-because-I-kind-of-like-you-more-than-I-thought I"m-really-glad-you-didn"t-just-die-because-I-kind-of-like-you-more-than-I-thought look though, because- look though, because- "Max, watch out!" Dylan shouted and shoved me. Stage right, an older man with wild hair and plastic-like skin was firing a gun at us.
"Mark, no!" shouted Beth, the Queen of the Cult. Big of her.
The guy pushed the girl aside and aimed, and I dodged a bullet that came close enough to nick my feathers. I tried to drag Dylan out of the way, but the guy was still popping off as many shots as he could.
"Max, go! Don"t protect me!" Dylan yelled. "Go!"
Then, Holden, the little Fang gang kid, came out of nowhere with an apparent death wish. He raced directly toward the maniac with the gun shrieking something that sounded like "I am Starfishhh!"
Holden looked like Swiss cheese for a second as Mark used up the last of his ammo, but the holes on the kid"s arms closed up in seconds flat. This little daredevil had some serious chops, and by now most of the flock and the gang were closing in. The gunman, looking more than a little freaked out, ran offstage like a five-year-old girl.
I was still leaning over Dylan-the bullet hole was already healing, and he had some color back in his face-when someone cut in.
"Need a hand?" Fang asked. Dylan looked at the hand wearily, but took it, pulling himself up.
I raised an eyebrow at Fang.
He shrugged. "What? I"m trying to learn to be a team player." Dylan actually smiled and, get this, fist-b.u.mped my ex.
I nodded, a little dazed, and moved to the other side of the stage to herd out more of the confused former One Lighters.
It was actually kind of amazing to see two of the guys I cared most about in the world, different in so many ways, fighting together side by side. Fang covered Dylan"s weak side, and together they were doing some serious damage. We"ve come a long way, baby, We"ve come a long way, baby, I was musing, when suddenly a heavy weight hit me in the back. I was musing, when suddenly a heavy weight hit me in the back.
Then two viselike hands clamped around my neck.
76.
"YOU COULD HAVE ruled your own country!" Mark, the cowardly shooter, yelled into my ear. Lesson number one: megalomaniacs never give up when they should.
I tried to rise up on my hands and knees, but the guy was on my back and weighed a ton.
"Whoa!" I coughed, struggling to breathe. "What"d you get enhanced with-ham?"
"You could have been a princess in the New World! But now you"re going to die like a lowly, ordinary human." He practically spat the last word, though he appeared to be human himself-a heavily Botoxed, steroid c.o.c.ktail of a human, but a human nonetheless. This guy needed an intense course on overcoming self-hatred, stat.
"The thing about being a princess," I managed to say, still struggling to get out from underneath him, "is that... you have to... kiss... a lot of... frogs! frogs!"
He was strong, and I clawed at his fingers with shockingly little effect. He clamped down harder on my windpipe, and I started to get really worried. I heard blood rushing in my ears, heard my heartbeat slowing. Not good.
This wasn"t how it was supposed to end.
"You are a black cloud over the One Light," I heard the man say, as if from a distance. "You won"t destroy everything I"ve worked for and planned for all these years!"
Suddenly my head got yanked to one side, and the vise grip around my neck slackened a bit. I pried off his fingers with difficulty as I heard his voice, full of hatred and rage, shrieking, then a rush of air whooshed into my lungs so fast it was almost painful. I gasped like a fish, sucking in air with a wheeze, and then I heard my voice snarl, "That"s not how it"s going to end, dirtbag!"
I got up on all fours, wobbly, my head starting to clear.
But it hadn"t been my voice after all. It had been Maya"s. She had broken off a piece of a metal barricade and beaned ol" Mark with it as hard as she could.
Of course, Mark, pumped up with who knows what, survived the blow. With an angry bellow, he got to his feet as I stumbled out of the way. Maya hauled back and smashed the metal pole into Mark again. There was an awful thwock thwock.
"You know," I choked out, "the bigger they are..." I lined myself up with Maya and grabbed the other end of the pole.
"The harder they fall!" Maya said, and the two of us rushed Mark using our combined strength to clobber him one more time. He staggered backward, looking surprised, and just as he started to look angry, he fell back off the stage, flailing through the air.
He landed ten feet below with a sickening crunch-I"m guessing his enhancements didn"t allow him to bounce back up like a ball. We call that a design flaw.
Maya and I looked at each other as I began to wrap my mind around the depressing realization that she had probably just saved my life.
"Max!" Dylan rushed over, and I blinked and looked around. The guards were all taken care of, what was left of my flock was still standing, and the rally had mostly dispersed.
It looked like another job well done. Now I just had to find Angel and Gazzy.
But as I took one last look at Mark"s body on the ground, I saw-were those?-wires sticking out below him. He wasn"t a bot, we knew that much, so were they connected to- And that was when the City of Lights exploded with a thunderous boom! boom!
77.
THE NEXT FEW moments, surprisingly, proved that a lot of what Dr. Hans and the DGs had said was true: those of us with wings and wild-animal DNA were up above the blast in less than two seconds, leaving danger, rubble, and chaos behind. People left on the ground weren"t so lucky: those nearby were hurled into the air by the blast, and more were injured by flying debris. Trembling aftershocks also took a toll.
Through the dust and debris, I saw Fang"s gang, most of it, outside the plaza. I guessed that Ratchet had sensed what was about to happen, and they were strong enough and fast enough to get to safety quickly.
"Everyone okay?" I barked, and they nodded. Next to me, Maya did a quick head count. No Fang. Or Gazzy. Or Angel. My adrenaline surged.
"What happened?" I said, scanning the ground anxiously. "Gazzy"s never never not been able to dismantle something!" not been able to dismantle something!"
"I"m not sensing poison gas," Dylan said, "not that that means anything. It might be odorless and tasteless."
I circled quickly, going lower as the smoke settled. Where the open manhole had been, there was now a huge crater, maybe thirty feet across and thirty feet deep. My heart seized. Where was Gazzy? Angel? Fang?
Suddenly, I saw a smallish birdkid soaring upward, just as another gigantic explosion rocked the street. Shockwaves knocked me back several feet, and I inhaled a bunch of dust.
"Max!" Gazzy"s face was black, his eyes wide and scared.
"Gaz! Thank G.o.d you"re okay! Where"s Angel? And Fang?"
Gazzy started choking, forgetting to keep himself aloft, and I drifted down beside him as he landed on the broken granite pavers and rubble. He opened his mouth to speak, but coughed, then tears started running down his cheeks.
"Gazzy! What happened?" I said, but he shook his head, coughing, Aftershocks rumbled below us again, and I made Gaz take to the air in case of another explosion. He could fly okay, but he looked miserable, and he kept gagging and spitting out dust.
Where was Angel? Where was Fang? I shot a panicked look at Dylan, and he understood immediately, diving down the hole to find them.
Could Angel and Fang really be gone? My brain whirled at the horrible possibility. Gazzy was still wheezing, unable to talk. There were times when I"d thought I"d lost Angel or Fang before. And when Fang left, I never thought I"d ever see him again. But that had felt more like... I wouldn"t see him, but he still existed. What about now? How would it feel if he- I was swallowing shakily, terrified thoughts piercing my brain like shards of gla.s.s. Just as Dylan landed on the street, Fang shot up toward me, coming through the billowing clouds of dust and debris. His shirt was shredded, his face bruised and cut. Like Gazzy, he was covered with soot.
"Gaz! You made it out," he gasped, when he got closer.
"Angel was right behind me," Gazzy said. "Right behind me!" He looked around us, everywhere, as if expecting to see his sister making her way toward us.
I flew right up to Fang and clutched him, if only to convince myself that he was really alive.
That intense joy and relief ended in a nanosecond. I pulled back and grabbed his shoulders. "Where"s Angel?!"
"I-don"t-"
"How could you leave her?" I shrieked.
"Max, I-Gaz was almost done and I thought-Angel said-"
I looked into Fang"s face. His dark eyes, usually bottomless, were full of emotion. His face was ashen. My eyes widened and my hands dropped from his shoulders. I let my wings take me backward, away from him, as a silent, searing scream started to rise in my chest. He didn"t say anything out loud, but he told me just the same: he didn"t know where Angel was, and he was afraid that something awful had happened to her.
My breath caught in my throat, and my blood turned to ice. Had she been trapped by the second explosion? It didn"t seem possible. I remembered her small, earnest face, saying, "I can deal with pretty dangerous."
"Angel, where are you?" Gazzy yelled, turning in circles, bobbing up and down in the sky, then suddenly he crumbled, his face dissolving into tears. My munitions and weapons expert really was just a nine-year-old kid, and he"d just lost his little sister.
And I"d lost my baby.
78.
"IT"S BEEN FIVE HOURS, Max." Dylan"s quiet voice was like sandpaper.
"I refuse to believe that she didn"t escape," I said stubbornly, and tried to help superstrong Kate shift some more twisted wreckage from the blast site.
Dylan and I had even crawled through the rubble near the manhole and tried to get back into the sewer system. But the tunnel had completely collapsed, and Gazzy said that while he"d managed to defuse most of the network of bombs, he obviously hadn"t gotten to every one, plus the poison gas was still down there.
He"d given me that information through sobs, as I held him, his head on my shoulder.
Angel"s last words to me kept replaying in my mind: It"ll be okay, Max. I"ll be with you always, no matter what. And Max-I believe in you. Forever. It"ll be okay, Max. I"ll be with you always, no matter what. And Max-I believe in you. Forever. What had she meant by that? Had she had some premonition that she might not come back? Had she made the ultimate sacrifice? She"d talked of all my sacrifices. I was haunted by the idea that she might have chosen to make one of her own. What had she meant by that? Had she had some premonition that she might not come back? Had she made the ultimate sacrifice? She"d talked of all my sacrifices. I was haunted by the idea that she might have chosen to make one of her own.
Next to me, Kate sat down. Star held out a bottle of tepid water, and Kate drank it. She looked exhausted. I sighed and bent down to move another chunk of cobblestone.
The police had closed down the entire area, evacuating the buildings that were still standing, clearing the Place de la Concorde. We"d hovered above the Louvre, waiting for them to leave, after Fang had made sure that his gang was okay. They"d been great, helping to rescue at least twenty people trapped under the rubble, helping to get hurt children to nearby hospitals. Now they sat on a curb, looking wiped, like Nudge, Gazzy, and Iggy. Only Fang, Dylan, and I were still on our feet. Just barely.
An aerial search had turned up nothing, but after two hours we"d found one of Angel"s pink sneakers, two blocks away. It had been ripped apart, its sole dangling. A section of it was stained with blood.
That"s when I had finally broken down.
"I tried to get to all of them," Gazzy sobbed. "I thought I had. There must have been like a remote setoff that I didn"t know about. I don"t know what happened." I remembered the wires sticking out of Mark and shuddered.
Would Gazzy ever forgive himself? I was the one who had decided to let him try. If I had insisted he leave there, made all of the flock get out of there and let the DGers...
We"d all be safe, but thousands of people might be dead, Paris would be even more ruined than it was now, and I"d still never be able to forgive myself.
This was the hard stuff, the leader stuff, the save-the-world stuff that I just couldn"t stand having to deal with. At a certain level, there are no best choices, no right decisions. Only choices that are less bad, decisions that are less wrong.
It was dark now. It was hard to accept that we"d found all we were going to find. We"d all been crying, off and on, for hours, except for Fang and Dylan. Somehow they had remained strong as they worked side by side with me, shifting the biggest boulders and the heaviest pipes.
Now I stood looking at the crater, wondering how the DGers could have done such a thing. How could that guy Mark have lived with himself? It was all too much. I wanted to go home, but I wasn"t even sure where home was at that point. I didn"t even know what had become of my mom or Jeb. Or Ella. Had they been part of this in some way? I wasn"t certain about anything anymore.
I hung my head, and I felt someone, Fang, gather me gently to him. My cheek rested on his shoulder, and my silent tears soaked his torn shirt. He felt warm and strong and heartbreakingly familiar. And at that moment, not a single thing in my life was certain, strong, or whole. Nothing.
Least of all Fang.
79.
THE WEIRD, WEIRD thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you"re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.
Within hours of Angel"s disappearance, while my heart was still raw and bleeding and in denial, Paris was already starting to recover. Cleanup teams swarmed the Place de la Concorde; officials tested radiation levels. Fang had given them information about what still lurked in the crushed tunnels beneath the city, and they"d deployed military experts and bomb squads to finish the job that Gazzy had done so amazingly well, for a nine-year-old.
We"d combed all the hospitals and trauma units, pushing aside curtains, bursting into rooms, praying we"d see Angel"s filthy, wounded face-alive. But we didn"t.
As a beautiful sunset painted the area with blood-red hues, people began to pull themselves together. I wanted to grab strangers and yell, "Don"t you understand what"s happened?" But I knew it was pointless. It was only my pain searching for an outlet.
Finally, Fang came and found me, where I had collapsed in exhaustion, near the blast site. I looked up through dry and mournful eyes. "If we haven"t found her body yet, then she"s still alive," I said.
He sat down, took my hand in his. Slowly, he shook his head. He looked like he"d aged about ten years in the past twenty-four hours. His face was drawn and gaunt. His hair and clothes were still caked with grit and blood. He shook his head again, slowly.
"No, Max," he said. "Probably not."
I wanted to scream, "It"s your fault! You"re the one who left her!" But it wasn"t his fault. Because I had left all three of them.