Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was truly nothing more freeing than being in the air. Sky above, ground below, nothing but my own two wings and warm thermals under my feathers to keep me aloft. Wind whispered through my feathers and tangled in my hair, loose and unkept. For a moment, I closed my eyes against the golden sun, and imagined a world where I’d never have to land. I could just be here in this moment, free and untethered.

Then I tucked my wings, dove like a bullet towards the sea below me, and snapped my wings out just in time to coast over the water, feeling salt and spray cover my skin and my arm breach the water. Waves roared in my ears as I pumped my wings back upwards, clutching in my hand my prize— a silver, wriggling fish. I banked as I gained altitude, setting my sights on the shoreline, and threw it as hard as I could at my target.

“What is wrong with you?” Iggy screeched from his place on the beach, scrambling to find the fish before it could flop towards freedom or directly into the fire he tended. “Max! Maximum!”

I laughed, hearing it echoed from Nudge and Gazzy as they flew in wide arcs over the ocean. The nice part of the beach in fall was that no one frequented them once the temperature dropped below a certain threshold, and the strip of beach we had picked out was hard to get to on foot amidst the thick deposit of seagrass, driftwood, and washed up trash. We had the whole place to ourselves, and the weather might not be good for swimming, but it was excellent for a flight.

“Don’t look at me, it was Gazzy!” I called back.

“No it wasn’t!” He found the fish. He had a knife on him, but apparently a marine animal getting thrown at him from the heavens was enough of a shock to his system that he had forgotten about it, because he bit its spine to put it out of its misery. Truly the worst way to go— yanked out of the environment it could breathe in, catapulted at speeds unknown, and bitten to death by a fourteen-year-old. “Mockingbird is kind and generous and can’t catch fish in the first place!”

“I did it because I hate you!” Gazzy yelled in my voice. 

I scoffed, doing a quick headcount before I refocused my attention on the fish below the water. Nudge and Gazzy were taking the opportunity to stretch their wings over the ocean, trying to mimic the dives of the seagulls without going headfirst into the water. And, in Gazzy’s case, squawk louder than them. Iggy sat next to the driftwood fire, where he had set up a makeshift smoking rack for the fish we caught. Angel had discarded her overalls so she could splash in the shallows, wings soaked, occasionally wandering back out to give Iggy a shellfish she had found in the shallows, or try to convince Fang to let her wade deeper. Fang kept dragging her back, because large bodies of water and seizures didn’t mix, and our experiences with swimming were limited to the Institute’s testing and a stream that was waist-deep at most— I had no desire to test those skills on the ocean.

We had found this place about two miles from the vacated beach house we had invaded, and after ten days of licking our wounds and buy enough food to not starve from the nearest town, I decided we deserved a day trip. Not to mention that there were more efficient ways to get food than buying it, and I was ready to put them to the test. After a morning spent calf-deep in mud, pulling oysters out of the estuary, it was good to feel the wind buffeting through my feathers.

Above me, Gazzy rocketed downwards, flipped on the wind current coming off the waves, and face planted into the water. I winced, even as he came up after a few seconds and spewed water out of his mouth, blinking salt from his eyes. And, because he was a good five hundred feet out and I really wasn’t inclined to test our swimming skills, I coasted down to greet him, grabbed the arm he raised towards me, and yanked him partially out of the water as I flew him back to shore.

“I could’ve gotten out of the water myself,” Gazzy grumbled, feet meeting sand and sloshing out of the surf.

“Sure you could.” I landed next to him. “Can you go help Iggy with the shellfish while you dry off? I promised we’d be back by dusk, so we shouldn’t waste daylight. And…” I raised my voice enough for Iggy to hear it down the beach. “Ig, do you need more firewood?”

“Probably!” he yelled back. 

I patted Gazzy on the back. “You help with scallops, I’ll get firewood.”

“Can’t Fang help with scallops?”

I raked my hair out of my face, and then still had to spit some out of my mouth, because that’s what I got for not having a braid. “They’re on Angel supervision. C’mon. It’s just until you’re flight-worthy again, and then you can get back in the sky.”

“It’s gross,” Gazzy whined. “Can’t we switch? I’ll get the firewood and you have to pry open clams and take their organs out?”

“It’s the circle of life, Gasman. Time to embrace it.”

Truthfully, I had shattered so many oyster shells while trying to shuck them this morning that I was pretty sure Iggy would kill me if I set foot within thirty feet of his fire. Gazzy was the safer bet by far.

It was a cloudless day, which let the sun beat down on my skin and keep me warm, but the wind coming off of the ocean was strong enough to remind me that summer was officially over, and we wouldn’t get many warm days. It was the type of day to get a lot of work done back home, and be rewarded with a big dinner, board games, maybe a movie, and sleeping heavily through the night. I dragged more firewood back to Iggy, allowed him to order me to gather seagrass to throw on top of the coals, and once that was done, joined Nudge in the sky again. She flew tight circles high in the air, dove for the water, and wove between the cresting waves before flapping back into the air.

The sky was washed in pink and gold by the time Iggy finally declared the food smoked enough to stay preserved over the next few days, wrapping it in paper bags before stuffing it into his duffel. He said we’d have to come back tomorrow if we wanted it to last longer— by the cheers from Angel and Gazzy, and the grin from Nudge, this wasn’t a problem. I saw Iggy’s lips twitching, too, and decided that I’d make it my goal to get him into the air tomorrow, even if that meant Fang or I had to tend the fire for a few hours— Fang, at least, wasn’t entirely helpless. We coasted over the miles of tall grasses that slowly turned into a more respectable beach lined in houses until we finally came across a small home with peeling blue paint and rickety stairs leading into the sand, abandoned in the wake of autumn temperatures. I tried to brush the sand off of my legs and feet before I entered.

“Mike, we’re back!” Nudge burst past me, wandering deeper into the house in search of him. In the past ten days, I had almost gotten used to having a human living with us again, and I had gotten good at not thinking about the last time we had let a human into our lives. It helped that he wasn’t anything like Jeb. Michael Rivers— Mike to his friends, which we were now— was off-kilter, sardonic, and all too willing to respond to our less-than-acceptable behaviors with something equally unrefined. Jeb was all warm smiles, dignity, soft corrections of how to behave now that we were free, blood on a rebar and a white coat—

I stopped that train of thought. I had gotten more used to that, too.

Spending two years with Jeb as the closest thing to a parent any of us could hope for, I had developed an impression of a harsh line separating us from people like Jeb. Real humans. And I still felt that, because Mike didn’t bare his teeth the same way most of us did, didn’t look up for escape routes, didn’t track the movements of small rodents in the weeds instinctively. But it had waned, ever so slightly, because he startled at odd things and slept lightly, he responded to our less-than-human mannerisms with a weary indifference more often than not, and never attempted to act like he was something more than us. He still set my teeth on edge. I was pretty sure he would for as long as we traveled together. But he had gotten his entire life uprooted from Manhattan because of us, and he had all of our information on his computer, so I could ignore the prickling on the back of my neck whenever he was in the room.

“She like-likes him,” Gazzy announced as Nudge disappeared down the hall.

Iggy scoffed. “Just because she’s friends with a guy doesn’t mean she likes him. She’s eleven.”

“Mike? Grey?” Nudge continued to call out, thumping up the steps. Another thing about Mike: he didn’t respond to noise unless we were in eyeshot. I tried not to let it annoy me too much. “Is everything okay? Where’d you go?”

I ushered everyone inside and did a quick sweep of the main room before I shut the door behind us, dragging a chair underneath the handle. It wouldn’t stop an Eraser, but it would give us at least a two-second warning. With Erasers, two seconds was the difference between a clean escape and a fighting retreat. On the dining room table were the library books we’d taken out a few days ago about plant and animal identification of New England, which Fang and I had poured over and Iggy had run the numbers regarding how much work we’d need to do to keep us flight worthy. There was a biography on Charles Darwin. I was no closer to figuring out what Project Darwin was, but I felt like knowing about the man it was most likely named after was a step in the right direction. So far, it wasn’t giving me any hints, but a whole lot of information about the birth of genetic testing.

There was also a few unmarked bags, empty tubes of lipstick, and a book of matches on the table. I sighed, opening my mouth, but Gazzy beat me to it.

“It’s for flares, not for bombs!” he defended. “They won’t explode! Probably.”

“Probably?” I replied drily.

“I made these all the time back home in the quarry. They only last for a few seconds, but you can throw them in the air if we’re separated.”

I sighed, shaking my head. “Do that outside, then. We don’t need you two bringing the house down.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

“Max!” Nudge yelled, something in her voice making my hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I was already running up the stairs by the time I registered my own movement and threw open the door to Mike’s room before she could yell again, gasping, expecting to see an ambush, or a body or, even worse, the signs of a fight and a kidnapping, and it would come down to me to decide it we would go after some human we barely knew, but we owed and owed and owed—

Or a bedraggled, tired-looking teenage boy sitting cross-legged on the bed, and my little sister hovering around him. At first, I couldn’t tell why she had called for me. Not over the pounding in my chest and the stark relief that the decrepit house I had begun to feel safe in hadn’t been compromised. 

The split lip wasn’t hard to notice, though. The bruise on his neck was a bit more subtle, blending into his dark skin, but I had good eyes.

“Did someone come in here? Do we need to move?” I asked. Then, trying not to feel like it was tacked on, “are you okay?”

“You okay? I’m fine. I’m fine,” he said the second one directly to Nudge, flipping the collar of his army jacket up and smoothing the wrinkles. “Nothing happened here. Took a bus to Queens to get work done, dig up info, can’t just sit here and rot, someone took issue with my— my—” he gestured to his entire body. Nudge made an awful whimpering sound in the back of her throat, biting her lip, and her hands hovered towards him. Mike flicked her on the forehead before she could touch him. “People beat up homeless kids all the time. Might’ve been a gang thing. Don’t know the good parts of town in Queens like the City and Bronx, don’t really go there, gets crowded and gross and crawlin’ with the finest even on a good night.”

I waited at least five seconds before I responded, because I had learned it was better to take time to organize whatever came out of his mouth by myself than to ask him to repeat it. 

He had gone to Queens. Wasn’t the first time he had done that, and we had already had the song and dance about me telling him not to because it was dangerous and him reminding me that I wasn’t his big sister and he could take care of his own safety, so I’d let it slide. He had somehow managed to get beaten up during that time, even though I didn’t see any injuries besides the bruise and the lip— pathetic beating, in my opinion, but my idea of a fight was probably a bit skewed. 

“Is this enough incentive not to go into New York anymore?” I asked, as if the Institute for Higher Living wasn’t enough incentive for someone who had recently stolen a bunch of their stuff. And, unlike us, he wasn’t an investment— they’d capture us, which was hell in itself, but they’d probably just kill him.

I was trying not to think about it.

“My laptop don’t have an infinite charge. Neither do my charin’ banks. ‘Sides, was workin’ on a lead, couldn’t just let it sit.”

I sighed, leaning against the doorway, and giving Nudge a look that finally got her to back out of Mike’s space. And, after another look, she glared sullenly at me and retreated back downstairs. It wasn’t that I wasn’t okay with her having a friend, or that I thought Gazzy was right about having a crush. Something just made me wary about how quickly she had bonded with the guy, something beyond the mere friendliness that the rest of us tried to maintain, and how it hadn’t seemed to wear off despite being back with the rest of us.

“Tell Nudge not to hover. I’m human, I ain’t glass. I can take a punch,” he said, leaning back on his hands. “She like this with the rest of youse?”

“The rest of us ain’t human,” I replied, smirking. “Are there any other injuries I should know about?”

“No, and it ain’t important,” he said, waving off my concern as he grabbed his laptop from the nightstand, yawning. “I was busy.”

I scoffed, but let it slide. “Did you find what you were looking for, at least?”

“Yep,” he replied, making to scoot past me. When I grabbed his arm, he stopped, looking back in my direction. “What? Thought all youse would wanna know.”

“Really?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

“Yeah, really. Good at what I do, y’know,” he scoffed, pulling his arm out of my grasp. “Seriously, Max. Got your files from The Institute for you, thought we’d be past this.”

I scoffed. “Has anyone told you that you have an ego, Michael Rivers?”

“Y’know what else I have?” he smiled wide— a rarity, and one that looked entirely theatrical on his face. 

“I have Jennifer Xue’s hospital records.”

Chapter Text

On the second day we camped out in the beach house, I had included everyone in making a general list of what we needed to accomplish with the information we had stolen from the Institute of Higher Living. I was working on that— including people in my lists and plans, listening to what they thought was important. It mattered, now that my plans were bigger than spring and summer gardens or when to go into town. And so, it was together that we’d decided that our first order of business was to find Nudge and Fang’s birth parents. They’d be the most likely adults to offer us any help. We also had to figure out if Fang’s mom had any contact with New Tomorrows, or if there was another company to link into this conspiracy. 

From there, we had to find proof that New Tomorrows, and possibly the other, yet-undiscovered company, was connected to the Institute for Higher Living— preferably through a bill of sales, which probably wouldn’t be electronic if the people hiding it were smart. Paper documents couldn’t be hacked the same way electronics could. And if we could find our bill of sales, if wasn’t a stretch to think we could find more. 

Finally, with that information, we could determine the areas with the most concentration of stolen kids, and release the information— what we had now, what we’d find later— to as many independent news sources in those areas, and as many parents of those kids— that included Mrs. Gavrilov, assuming we’d be able to find her. Maybe it wouldn’t work with every reporter or every parent. Maybe the Institute would shut down most of them; if the Institute had connections to the government, they’d be able to shut down even more. But if we worked fast enough, not everyone could be silenced before the truth gained traction.

It wasn’t a foolproof plan, I knew. And it didn’t provide us any promise that making the information public wouldn’t send every company with dreams of being the next Institute of Higher Living to our doorstep. But that’s what finding Fang and Nudge’s families was for, as well as every family whose child had been stolen from them: people to notice if someone tried to make us go missing again.

After the list, written down in bullets in my notebook, we had a long discussion, and reached a decision, with most of us in agreement: Between Nudge and Fang, Fang’s mother came first. And now, with some recuperation time under us, we had a lead. I allowed us one more day in the beach house to return our books and gather what little food we could, but I didn’t want to waste any more time than that.

We had Jennifer Xue’s hospital records. On those hospital records was a living address from fourteen years ago.

And with that, we had a conspiracy to solve.

“You’re absolutely positive you don’t want to come with us?” I checked. By Iggy’s quiet sigh and pause in sorting through our bags and condensing everything we had accumulated, he was getting tired of hearing me ask.

“Think I’d rather die.”

“We can carry you. Iggy and I are strong enough if we take turns.”

“Be more efficient to snap my neck here.”

I glared at Mike, even though he wasn’t looking at me. He was still working on his laptop, fingers moving so quickly they nearly blurred. Making arrangements, from what I could tell— trying to figure out where it was safest for someone without the benefit of wings to live in an unfamiliar city. He had been so laser-focused on his task for the past few hours that he had let Nudge work two braids into his hair, starting at his temple and tying up into his ponytail, with little purple beads in them. She had offered to do something with mine, too, but mine was…

Short. I was calling it short, because I had bigger things to worry about than my hair being choppy and uneven, unable to even be tied back properly. The hack job I had performed when escaping Ari— rebar cracking into armor, claws digging into my neck, my nails and his eye and a weapon from my mouth that his father was dead, dead, can’t touch either of us anymore— wasn’t something that could be fixed by Nudge’s braids. It needed scissors.

Fang usually cut our hair. They were good at it, and even cut their own. And they were…

Something prickled on the back of my neck, reminding me of crawling beetles, and I turned with a jerk towards the stairs.

“Would you make some noise when you move?” 

Fang stood in the stairway, tips of their wings dragging lightly across the floor and hands tucked into their sleeves, silent as the grave as their gaze swept the room. I felt something pinch in my face as I looked at them— eleven days was enough for everyone to recover from their scrapes and bruises, even the burns spanning Iggy’s hands. In sharp contrast, though, Fang’s eyes had sunken further into their sockets, their cheeks had hollowed out, and their wings were dull and in the disarray of a premature molt.

We had done a lot over the past eleven days: sorted through the seemingly-endless files on Mike’s laptop to learn as much about ourselves as we could, made our plan together, tried to learn about Darwin, and how to forage whatever we could from the wild in autumn. Iggy and I had even bitten the bullet and sat Nudge down for a conversation to hear about everything she’d experienced while she was alone in Manhattan, and everything on our end that she’d missed. 

She had cried when we tried to explain exactly why Fang was so distant from the rest of us. Why they acted like they were already gone, because in their mind, they were. She had cried, and I had cried, and Iggy had stood up and walked away from us so I could pretend not to see him scratching at his healing burns until blood congealed under his fingernails. And when we were done explaining, she announced that we needed to find Jenny Xue before we found her own parents, because maybe they’d fix something that we couldn’t.

“The kids are down for the night,” Fang rasped, coming to sit next to me. “Still think we should go to Arizona. Nudge’s parents—”

“Nudge wants us to go to Baltimore,” Iggy interrupted. “It’s more efficient than flying all the way back to Arizona, and she thinks it will be easier if she’s not the first person to meet her parents. Besides, if we did go to Arizona, we might actually have to leave that one alone—” He stuck a thumb over towards Mike “—since someone is so convinced he can get to Baltimore by himself.”

“What part of hitch-hikin’ don’t youse get?”

“The part where a homeless schizophrenic teenager thinks he can do it without getting mugged,” I replied. 

“Otherwise specified schizophrenic spectrum disorder,” he corrected, cadence surprisingly musical compared to how he usually spoke. I had the feeling he was mocking someone, but at least I was pretty sure it wasn’t me. On this, we had a common ground: doctors were the worst.

“Seriously. If we’re going to be meeting in Baltimore anyway, we can fly—” I started.

“I ain’t having you fly me to Baltimore.”

“So if even Nudge thinks we should put plans about her parents on hold so we can pursue yours, I think we should do that,” Iggy finished, ignoring the other half of the conversation going on. “Besides. We already have Janny Xue’s address. We can’t do nothing with it.”

“We’re doing nothing with your parents,” Fang replied.

Iggy’s expression puckered, and there was a sour note in in his voice when he answered, “Yeah. Because I killed one of them. I don’t think Daddy Dearest is gonna want to talk to me after that.”

Note to self: address… literally all of that.

Fang set their head down on the table in lieu of response, looking every bit the dead body they were trying to be. We had been arguing this particular point for days— Iggy got to opt out of tracking down his father, but Fang didn’t. Iggy was mentally sound enough that I could allow it, if only barely. Fang wasn’t.

And, under all of my tactical logic, our longterm plans, the monster that we were trying to take down with the information we had bargained dearly for, there were the stark, unforgiving matters of the short term: I didn’t know if Fang could make the trip to Arizona.

Fang didn’t have to like it. They didn’t have to like any of this. 

“We’re not changing the plan this far in. We get to Baltimore. We meet up at Pratt Enoch. We go check out the address she had. It’s only been fourteen years, so it’s not crazy to think her parents still live here. And from there, we—”

“Tell them their grandkid’s dead?” Fang interrupted without lifting their head from the table.

“—get her current address, and an actual ally. One who isn’t homeless. No offense, Mike.”

Mike was fully ignoring me.

“It seems cruel.”

“Yeah, well, no one ever accused us of being good people. Except maybe Mockingbird,” Iggy sighed. “Checked through our bags, and we’re good to go. We all have spare changes of clothes now, print-outs of the most pertinent information in case we’re separated, food, the flares… anything else we’re missing?”

“Missin’? Wait, one thing,” Mike finally looked away from his laptop, reaching to sort through the bag hanging off the back of his chair. A few seconds later, he came back with something black and rectangular in his hand, which he slid over the table towards me. “So we can keep communication. Just in case.”

I looked down at the device. 

A phone. 

It was bulky, with a number pad and small, lightless screen instead of the touchscreens that were more common, but it was still more of a connection to the outside world that any of us had ever had. On the back was taped a piece of paper with a ten-digit number scrawled in black ink.

“Plan’s pre-paid. Well, pre-established. Haven’t paid for my minutes in— but it’s so obsolete that even I can’t track it unless makin’ a call directly to me. Know your number, so I’ll pick up if you call.” He went from typing to drumming his fingers against the table, marking out a numbered pattern across different fingers.

“How’d you manage to afford that?” Iggy asked.

“Afford that. It was fifteen dollars, and I didn’t actually pay for its minutes.”

I looked at Mike. Mike looked at me, gaze indecipherable. And I thought getting a read on Fang was hard.

“Did you get this yesterday?” I asked.

“Youse need a phone.”

“And came back with that not-at-all-shady bruise on your neck and a split lip that’s totally unrelated to everything we’re doing?”

Mike shrugged. “It’s Queens. Maybe it’s normal there. My jacket has a Yankees patch on it, so… Mets fans are crazy, I guess.”

I narrowed my eyes, and he had the decency to acknowledge my open suspicion, even if it was just to shrug. Out of a place with the population of a small country, I was still unsure how my sister decided to become friends with him. I was even less sure how the rest of us decided to follow in Nudge’s footsteps. 

I couldn’t deny it, though: he was helpful to have around. I’d go as far as to say I’d miss him if he disappeared.

“Well, need to get going if I wanna catch a ride soon,” Mike stowed his laptop away and zipped up his backpack. I opened my mouth, but he interrupted before I could speak, “I ain’t flying, already said goodbye to Nudge, so don’t bother. See you in Baltimore.”

“I was going to tell you to be safe, actually,” I replied. He went still for a moment, like being nice didn’t compute in his brain. It probably didn’t— if there was one thing he didn’t understand, it was displays of basic decency. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what to do. If it were anyone else in this house, I’d give him a tight hug, or pull the big sister card and forbid that he go off by himself, alone and undefended. If he were anyone else in New York, I wouldn’t give him a second glance as he left.

He still wasn’t moving, so I gave him a stilted pat on the top of his head. He twitched, batted my hand away as he muttered something more to himself than to me, and shouldered his bag. For a moment, he looked on the verge of saying something else, but then he gave me a jerk of his head and turned on his heel, disappearing into the night.

“What do you think about the likelihood that he runs off and leaves us high and dry?” Iggy asked conversationally, packing away the rest of our dried food.

“I mean, he gave us a phone, so I think it’s pretty low,” I replied, reaching over and squeezing his hand, feeling the rough calluses and smooth scars overlapping under my fingers. “We’re going to be fine, Igneous. Let’s try to get some sleep so we can start early tomorrow.”

He nodded, squeezing back. I pulled him to his feet, helped him pack away the rest of our food and meager belongings, and when that was done, hugged him with one of my outstretched wings and stood on my toes so I could kiss his forehead.

“Max, that’s gross!”

Yeah, that exactly was the reaction I was looking for. I ruffled his hair. He elbowed me in the gut and stumbled in the direction of the stairs until his fingers found the wall and he could orient himself, muttering about gross sisters the entire way upstairs.

I turned back to my other sibling, who hadn’t lifted their head from the table this whole time.

“You know, when I asked you to put the kids to bed, that was permission to go to sleep, too.”

They shrugged. “Not tired.”

The thing was, I was starting to believe them when they said stuff like that— not necessarily that they weren’t tired, hungry, thirsty, or in pain. But that they didn’t feel any of it anymore. Or if they could, they certainly couldn’t realize what it was. They got like that before we left home, too, but it always passed. They always came back to their own body. The one time I got them to describe what it felt like to me, they said it was like being caught in a river current and finally coming back to the surface, only to realize they had inhaled mouthfuls of water— a relief to to feel air on their face and hear the world around them in full, but with the heavy, aching knowledge that their time underwater had left its mark.

I had never learned how to make them come back. Just waited. And now, I didn’t know if they ever would.

“You look tired,” I whispered.

“I don’t look like anything,” they snapped, but at least they lifted their head from the table, glaring at me for about half a second before their vision wavered elsewhere. They coughed, shoulders hunching, and looked at their hands folded on the table. Nudge had replaced the bandaids over their nails again, bright purple against the pale grey of their skin. I was pretty sure she didn’t need to do that anymore— the beds had scabbed over weeks ago, and their nails were starting to grow back— but at least this way, Fang didn’t have to look at them, and neither did the rest of us.

“That upset you,” they muttered quietly.

“That… I don’t like seeing you hurt. But I want to know what you’re feeling,” I replied, hoping it sounded less worried than I felt.

“Don’t feel anything either. That’s all you, now,” their lips twitched into the faintest of smiles, and my heart clenched. “You do a good job taking care of them. You don’t have to do it to me, anymore. You should sleep.”

“Fang…” I needed to talk to them— actually, properly talk, instead of trying to insist that they were alive, and hoping they’d accept my words as truth. I needed to figure out what to say, what to do, to keep them from slipping further away from us.

I didn’t know how.

“Let me take care of you. Just for a little longer, until… until you wake up, or you pass on, or whatever. I know you have your beliefs, but I’m still placing my bets on you coming back to us,” I said, brushing their hair out of their face before I stood and pulled them to their feet as well. 

“I want to take care of you. Please, let me.”

When I hugged them, resting my cheek on their shoulder, I could feel the bones underneath me. They didn’t respond.

“Let’s get both of us to bed,” I murmured, squeezing them tight. “We have a big day ahead of us.”

Chapter Text

I estimated the trip from Long Island to Baltimore to take about four hours, because I had a feeling that if I assumed the wind would work in our favor, I’d bring down every misfortune possible on all of us.

I was proven right about the misfortune: it took two and a half hours before Fang faltered and lost about two hundred feet of altitude in thirty seconds, and we had to call a break before they fell out of the sky.

“Deep breaths,” Iggy whispered softly, kneeling with Fang in the dirt with a hand against their neck. They didn’t raise their voice to address me, just turned slightly and reported, “Their pulse is fast and weak, and their skin is clammy. They probably started getting dizzy and got too weak to stay in the air. Do you want to lay down?”

“I’m fine,” Fang mumbled. But they didn’t resist when I made them drink half of a water bottle, or when Iggy laid them across his lap, intermittently checking their pulse and reporting as it slowly strengthened.

We had made the right call to pursue Fang’s parents before Nudge’s: there was no way they were making the trip to Arizona.

“Are they going to be okay?” Gazzy asked the moment I walked back to the other three— I had managed to convince the younger kids that crowding Fang wouldn’t help them, and they’d agreed reluctantly, but all three were practically vibrating as they waited for information. Gazzy’s voice was Fang’s soft rasp, but it was stronger and healthier than Fang sounded, now. It hurt to listen to. “Was it a seizure, like Angel? She’s never had one of those in the air, but—”

“It wasn’t a seizure. They’re dehydrated and their pulse is fast, but they just need to rest for a bit. We could do with the rest, anyway,” I said. While we didn’t strictly need to rest— we had worked for far longer than two hours back home— I knew all of us were tiring more easily than we used to. Days that were too long, nights with too little sleep, not enough food between the six of us. A break mid-flight would do us some good, especially for Gazzy and Angel, who weren’t the strongest flyers, and could probably do with a midday nap. There was plenty of light left in the day, the woods we had landed in was familiar compared to the city, and I could probably find some food for lunch, and then we wouldn’t even have to go into our reserves until we got to Baltimore.

“You should go see them,” I said. “Oh, and tell Iggy to start a fire as soon as he can. We need to eat.”

Nudge and Gazzy were quick to join Iggy, and I watched Fang sit up enough to hug the both of them and sign some reassurances before Iggy pulled them back down and checked their pulse again. Angel stayed beside me, linking her pinkie with mine.

“Can I go with you to find food?” she asked.

“Of course, sweetie. I bet we can find some blackberries. And I hear that most honeysuckle is invasive on the east coast, so it’s all ours,” I replied, doing one last head count before I set my eyes on a narrow animal trail that we could follow.

Foraging wasn’t high on our methods of food acquisition this time of year; early spring was when our reserves were at their lowest, and we were all aching for something fresh both to supplement our calories and because there were only so many ways Iggy could cook dried or canned produce before we got sick of it. But mid-autumn had leftovers from summer harvest and fresh food from fall, so there was no need for it, save for the occasional journey to the nearest black walnut or pinyon tree. Still, I knew my basics, and I hadn’t been reading about it for nothing. Not to mention there was one noticeable advantage to foraging: our digestive tract was built half-avian, and it opened the door to a lot of foods that were otherwise poisonous. There was probably a lot that we could take, but I still took care to only harvest from plants that I recognized, pointing them out to Angel as we walked and filled the tote bag Nudge had bought before we left. Normally I’d call it a frivolous purchase, but considering we were living out of two duffel bags, it was good to have a separate place to keep the food, so our clothes wouldn’t smell like smoked fish.

Besides, I could admit it was cute, patterned with teal checkerboard and bright pink daisies. Angel liked it, too, and they deserved cute things.

“What we really need is a good basket,” I said, boosting Angel into a tree so she could get to the crabapples above my reach. She scrambled up a few branches, wrinkled her nose, and threw her shoes down to me. I sighed, but didn’t bother throwing them back up, instead gathering the ones that were more on eye level.

Angel promptly started pelting me with apples. I yelped, scrambling to catch as many as I could, and she laughed from her position up in the tree. 

“You could totally learn how to make a basket. You’re super smart. We can look it up in Baltimore and then make them when we’re in the woods.” She threw down her coat after her shoes and climbed higher. “I like it out here better than New York. I don’t think we should hide in cities anymore.”

“I don’t like cities either, but… that’s where our information is going to be, sweetie,” I replied, stooping down to gather her coat and the apples I’d failed to catch. Not to mention that we might be better at feeding ourselves in the wilderness, where money wouldn’t be a concern, but I’d rather sleep under a bridge, away from the elements, than risk one of us getting sick from exposure.

“And Mike,” Angel reminded me.

Right. Him. He might be able to navigate the urban scene better than all of us combined, but I doubted he’d last two days in the woods.

Angel nailed me in the head with another crabapple. That’s what I got for not paying attention. I kept the tree in my sights as I wandered further, keeping my eyes out for anything we could eat. There wasn’t much, but after a few minutes of wandering around thickets and trees while still keeping Angel in my sights, I found a hazelnut shrub, and allowed myself some smug satisfaction that I’d successfully identified it in the first place. There weren’t many pods on the branches— either too early in the season for a good harvest, or so late that the other fauna had beaten us to it— but food was food, and they had to be easier to break open than black walnuts.

Angel finally jumped down, slowing a fifteen-foot fall with a single beat of her wings, and even pulled her shoes back on before she ran over to me and dumped the last of her findings in the tote bag, looking up at me with wide blue eyes.

“We’re good people, right?”

“We— what?”

“Are we good people?”

I knelt down beside her, so her eyes were a little above my own, grabbing her hands. Both of ours were dirty under the nails, proof of weeks on the run. Her head was free of its scarf while we flew, and her hair had grown back in white chick fuzz. She looked… older, so much older, than she had a few months ago. 

“Yes, we are good people,” I replied, and shoved every doubt in that statement to the back of my mind. If there was one thing I believed and I could tell my sister— my sister who looked worn and tired, who still looked healthier than I did at age six, who could even ask these questions when those had been beyond me until long after I escaped— it was this:

“The Institute could choose to cut its losses and let us go at any time. They’re the ones who keep sending people after us. You… we are not to blame for defending ourselves from them, even if we don’t like what we have to do,” I said, smoothing out the ruffled collar of her overalls. “I don’t like hurting people. But I’m not going to let the Institute convince me I’m a bad person for protecting the people I love. That’s on them, not on us.”

She blinked, ducking her head so she wouldn’t have to look me in the eye. “You really think so?”

It was more complicated than that. I knew it was. Because if it was really that simple, I wouldn’t keep thinking of the crack of my rebar against Jeb’s skull, and how I hadn’t stopped hitting him once he stopped moving.

I hope it hurt. I hope he was scared, I had told Fang. It had felt true, when I said it.

“I do think so,” I whispered, and hoped it was true enough that she wouldn’t catch everything else I thought. “What do you think?”

“Ari also thinks he’s a good guy,” she replied. I winced, trying not to let my hands tighten around hers. I remembered blood, bruises, and eye matter under my fingernails. The scars he’d left on me over the months, and wild curls that ended jagged at the base of my neck. “He was really mad when you said you— you—” she swallowed, tears gathering in her eyes. “That was his dad.”

“He could still be alive. He probably got the best medical attention the Institute could pay for,” I said, even if the response felt weak. I didn’t know whether I wanted it to be true or not. Why did he deserve to live, when he had let so many of us die? When I had already dirtied my hands with the Erasers he sent after us?

“And Ari is… he’s…”

Complicated was a tame word for it. It was hardly his fault that he was like this— I didn’t know why he’d changed into something less-than human, but I knew enough to assume he’d either been pressured or forced. Either way, it wasn’t his choice. But at the same time, hadn’t I offered him an out? Hadn’t I told him I’d take care of him if he ran from the School, and he decided to stay? Wasn’t it his choice to stay?

“He hates us,” Angel responded, matter-of-fact, which probably explained why he’d turned down my offer so quickly. Then her eyebrows raised a little bit, and she corrected. “He hates most of us. He’s scared of some of us, too. And he loves you.”

“He…”

Daughter, I remembered with a sickening clarity, the world feeling very far from me. Said to hurt me, to manipulate me, to keep me exactly where Jeb wanted, as if he had the right to do that to me. As if I still wanted to be his daughter after what he’d done. And maybe once upon a time, I would dismiss it without a thought, because Jeb would never do to his own flesh and blood what he allowed to be done to me. But he had proven that wrong with Ari himself. Why would Ari love me, call attention to me over all of my siblings, if not—

Then, probably more logically, less playing into Jeb’s hand, came the thought, grossest crush ever.

“I think there’s something very wrong with Ari, Angelita,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Hopefully he’ll get over it.”

That startled a laugh out of her, and I smiled back at her, rising back to my feet and brushing the dirt off my knees before shouldering the bag. I offered her my pinkie, which she linked with her own.

“Come on. Let’s see what else we can find.”

By the time we made it back to the small clearing we had landed in, it was mid-afternoon, and Iggy had started a small fire that was more embers than actual flame and in no risk of spreading. Fang had been released from laying down and had their elbows planted on their knees, letting Nudge braid some sort of wildflower into their hair. Gazzy’s eyes lit up as he saw us approach, and he rushed towards Angel with his hands clasped around… something. I hurried towards Iggy before I had to figure out what it was and tossed the bag to him, which hit him square in the chest. We hadn’t found much, and I hesitated to go into our smoked meat since it wouldn’t go bad for a while, so we divided the crabapples and rosehip I’d found as evenly as possible. It wouldn’t do any good if Iggy or I fell out of the sky, and I had a feeling that any uneven divides on our part would turn Fang’s lack of enthusiasm into an actual argument.

Just a few more days at most. We had a lead on Jennifer Xue, and once we found her, we could explain everything to her— and if not her, if she was estranged or otherwise unreachable, then Fang’s grandparents. Either way, people who could help us. If not with the evidence we needed, then with the simple things: food. Shelter. 

Something in my gut shifted, nauseous and guilty, as I finished the last of my apples and wrapped an arm around Fang’s shoulders, letting them lean against me as we watched Iggy start shifting charcoal at the edge of the fire to bury the hazelnuts inside, which was how I remembered that hazelnuts were easier to dehusk once they were dried out. Fang tucked their head against my shoulder, loose braids tickling against my neck and cheek. They smelled like honeysuckle and violet.

I had made a promise to myself days ago, even if I was too much a coward to voice it to anyone else. The one person I wanted to consult was Fang, and they were too distant from me.

We might be able to stay in Baltimore for weeks. Months, even, if the Institute didn’t catch onto us, there was nowhere more pressing for us to go, and Jenniver Xue’s charity extended past her flesh and blood child. But we couldn’t stay forever. And if they still believed they were gone, they were nothing more than the hallucinations of a family that couldn’t let them go… 

Then maybe we were part of the problem. And I would let them go, and hope their family could do more for them than us. 

“We should get going. Slowly, and if any of us start feeling tired, signal to take a break before you start losing altitude, okay?” I said once we’d finished eating, throwing dirt over the fire to put out the embers as everyone began to finish their meal. Iggy dug through the ash to retrieve the hazelnuts, seemingly without any regard for the heat, and wrapped them in the spare paper bag before tucking them away in the tote. I helped Fang to their feet, waiting to make sure they didn’t wobble or turn white, but they seemed steadier on their feet with a bit of rest under them.

Hopefully, they’d be steady on their wings. 

The wind above the treeline had picked up while we were eating, and most of the birds had gone to their nests to avoid being tossed around in the air currents. I had us fly lower to the ground in a tighter formation to keep us from being blown off track. We weren’t going to make good time on this flight, but with the smell of rain in the wind, I wasn’t going to call for another break unless we had no other choice.

By the time the sun was beginning to turn from yellow to orange, and the salt of the ocean had once again found its way onto the air, we saw a glimmer on the horizon, which quickly solidified into a criss-crossing maze of streets, highways, and skyscrapers, glittering grey against the ocean.

Baltimore, Maryland. And somewhere within it, out of the thousands of individuals below us, was the one woman we were looking for.

Chapter Text

Leading a team that had never before worked together, on what might be the hardest mission of Ari’s life, was…

Well, at least they got along. Mostly.

Sequestered away in one of the barracks for new initiates, they had been alternating between rigorous training, surveillance, and halfhearted attempts at team bonding, because that was something they needed to do when everyone in the team could talk. Aether remained fairly solitary, following his orders without question but sometimes with a doubtful turn of her lips or a mocking tone in her voice. Devin alternated between dead silence and flitting between everyone, always circling back to Ari— Ari was unsure if it was because he saw Ari as an authority figure or as someone to protect, and was trying to steer him towards the former. At least he got along with Katherine and Star decently.

Katherine and Star had arrived in New York before Ari had, and still stuck pretty close together. Kate was largely the same from all of the times he’d seen her in passing: straight-backed, short black hair that was slightly more styled than strictly allowed, shorter than most Lycaons but with more than enough stockiness and strength to make up for it. Star, in many ways, looked like her polar opposite, with paper-pale skin, hair shaved to her scalp, usually sitting in a crouch near the floor rather than standing at attention. Unruly, referring to everyone with a casual, bordering on disrespectful tone regardless of their authority over her, but Ari had seen her jump across the whole room and kick through a training dummy with one blow, so he couldn’t deny her usefulness.

He didn’t have to like her, just like he didn’t have to like Aether, currently perched on the back of a chair, watching everyone with the same leader-like intensity that Ari was. He just needed to put both of their skills to good use.

“Is it an orientation thing? Like, can you tell up from down if you close your eyes?” Star asked, crouching with her elbows resting on her knees as she watched Devin, who had looped his legs around the railing of a bunk bed, hung upside-down, and was throwing a ball up in the air and catching it with his new arm brace. Made of silver and black metal, whirring faintly, the doctors said it would make his bad arm even stronger than his flesh and bone one. He was lucky they were being so generous, even if moving the limb in question still made Devin’s lips thin into a tight grimace.

“I’m not a spider. I still understand direction. Feel which way gravity exerts itself.” Throw, catch. “It’s about the math. Force of the throw versus gravitational pull doesn’t change based on my orientation, neither does air resistance or directional shift.” Throw, catch. “You calculate that, you calculate where your hand should be, and technically you could do this without hand-eye coordination at all. Or with an arm you can’t feel.” Throw, catch. Little grimace as the wires and screws shifted beneath muscle, stimulating electric impulses that had been cut off from the rest of his body for over two years. Five days post-operation, and he still smelled like an open wound. 

“You really expect me to believe that you’re doing all that while the ball’s in the air?” Star scoffed.

Throw, catch. Throw, catch. Devin looked over at Star, and only then seemed to figure out that she expected him to respond.

“Not all of it. Only the parts I can’t do naturally— calculus is just putting numerical values to equations that our bodies already know how to do. And I’m not sure if being upside down is as disorienting for me the way it is for other people, either. Catch.”

He tossed the ball to Star, who caught it with ease and threw it back full force. Devin, to his credit, caught the ball, though Ari noted that he still used his left hand over his right whenever he had to operate reflexively, and his right didn’t even tense or flinch back— having capability in both arms didn’t mean he always remembered that capability. Hopefully that wasn’t something the Avians caught onto, if he got close enough to the action to fight at all.

Behind him, the Lycaon on surveillance gave a sharp whistle. Ari turned as he flicked his ears towards the monitor and Ari went to look over their shoulder, taking a long few seconds to figure out what he was looking at. Then, he felt his face split into a grin. Something hot and molten thrummed under his skin that made him want to break out running, but his voice was level and commanding as he spoke,

“Look alive, everyone. Six unidentified flying objects were just seen flying into Baltimore’s airspace, and a storm front’s rolling in. They’ll have to land soon if they don’t want to be caught in the wind, and if we want to catch them, we need to meet them before the storm blows under. You—” Ari tapped the Lycaon’s shoulder, “—get every security feed we can get in Baltimore. I’ll send a proper team to get you to look through the data, tell us the moment you find anything. Everyone else, suit up and head out. Meet in the van in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll drive,” Star offered with a smirk, rising fully to two feet and stretching her long arms over her head. Standing straight, she was the only person there taller than Ari, standing at six feet and then some.

“You absolutely will not,” Katherine responded, looking to Ari. “I can drive, if you want. You can focus on strategy and the information coming in that way. And…” she grimaced, ever so slightly. Ari felt his lips twist in response, and it was enough to make her rethink what she was about to say. “You have more important things to do.”

Ari nodded and dismissed them to go to their bunks, pulling out their gear as Ari went to his own quarters to do the same. Fifteen minutes on the dot, a black van was pulling into the streets of New York, heading towards Baltimore, with Ari radioing the proper authority channels of their status and whether or not they needed backup.

“Baltimore’s a big city. How are we planning on finding them before they take off again?” Aether asked as she stretched her wings as much as she could in an enclosed space, testing the limits of her tact gear. Her visor was on the bench beside her, leaving her face uncovered, and her eyes flashed gold in the dim lighting when she rolled them. “That’s not a challenge, Aristedes. I’m not here to ruin your life, I just want to strategize. Isn’t that what teams do?”

“Use my name when you speak to me, Aether. Or sir, ” Ari said.

Aether raised her brows, eyes flicking over to Devin, who had his hand over his mouth to try and hide his snickering. “My… apologies. I was under the impression that Aristedes was your full name.”

“It is,” Devin uncovered his mouth long enough to say. Considering he was wearing a shock collar that connected to a clicker in Ari’s breast pocket, he was being recklessly disrespectful towards authority. Then again, shocking him wouldn’t be the best way to start their first mission together— it was meant to dissuade escape attempts and refusal to follow orders, not petty annoyances. 

On the other hand, he was supposed to be a leader, and that meant he had to command respect and fear. His fellow Lycaons understood the chain of command, but with this team, he had to enforce it. Ari made sure to tap the pocket where the clicker was while Devin was watching, eliciting a flinch and another bout of snickering, just to make sure he wasn’t under the impression that Ari would be lenient because they had once been friends.

He didn’t like the flinch. He didn’t like the collar in the first place, digging points into his neck and humming faintly at all hours. Star had a matching one, also controlled by Ari, but she didn’t flinch when he went near it. She scoffed and leaned back in her seat, looking thoroughly unimpressed.

“Ah,” Aether replied, and amended her statement. “That’s not a challenge, Mr. Batchelder.” More polite, but somehow worse. “How are we planning on finding them?”

It was, granted, a decent question. He’d give her that.

“Baltimore might not be as…recipient to our tracking as New York, but we it’s also smaller, and we have people looking through security feeds as we speak. We know they haven’t left Baltimore airspace, either. They had to have landed there.”

“Why would they do that?” Star asked. At Ari’s look, she shrugged and continued, “look, maybe it’s a grown-in-a-lab thing, but if I were a bird hiding from whatever unnamed organization we’re part of, cities are the last place I’d want to go. From what I read, the only reason they came to New York was to steal something, and they left the moment they got it. What’s in Baltimore that’s important enough to steal?”

That… that was true. Ari couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it earlier— when they were tracking her from Colorado to California, the reason Max was hard to find and harder to catch was because she stuck to the countryside, far away from easy access roads, and where she could escape to the sky at a moment’s notice. The only time he had seen her in a town, they were towns of small populations, and she was only stopping there for food or supplies. When she came to New York, it was from one of the Institute’s pet projects luring her, and the only reason that lure even worked was because she had the motivation and means to steal Institute documentation. 

She wouldn’t go to Baltimore if she could avoid it. Not when there were plenty of small towns and swaths of wilderness to retreat to, instead— small towns and swaths of wilderness that she had, presumably, been sticking to for nearly two weeks. There had to be something specific they wanted to do there, and the Institute didn’t have a presence in Baltimore the same way it did in New York, so it had to be something else. Something they couldn’t do in the wilderness or a small town. Something… personal, maybe.

“What did they steal from our shady shadow organization, anyway?” Devin asked. “Papers, probably. Evidence if they’re smart, or future plans that this place has in store for them, keep one step ahead. Maybe it led to Baltimore.”

“Why do you ask questions out loud if you’re just going to try to answer them yourself?” Aether asked.

“Hm?”

“They took the Institute’s records on them. The Institute of Higher Living, if you and Star are going to keep fishing for its name. You can just ask these things, you know,” Katherine called back from the driver’s seat, and promptly laid on the horn. “How does anyone get anywhere in this city?”

“Okay… so if Star and Devin are onto something, it probably has to do with whatever they stole. What about those files points to Baltimore?” Katherine asked.

It had taken the guys at IT over a week to figure out what exactly Michael Rivers had been after, and how much of it he had gotten. This was only made more difficult, because he had apparently corrupted several files, losing the Institute swaths of research on one of their most prominent projects. Ari’s mission might be the birds, but he knew the bruised egos of the scientists would jump on the opportunity to get their hands on the human as well. He hadn’t read through all of those files, because he didn’t understand most of the vocabulary in them and hadn’t seen the relevance, but he could ask some questions to people who would be more familiar with the contents. Narrow down what the birds were looking for.

At least Max and her flock were predictable. They might be hard to find and harder to catch, but if he had the right bait, they would come to him.

“I’ll put someone on it. Just get us onto the highway for now.”

And with that, they descended into an unsteady sort of quiet. 

Ari was plenty of use to the quiet while in transit— a side effect of working primarily with Lycaons that didn’t have the correct type of vocal chords to imitate human languages, and who only learned the most simple of sign language. But it was different, with people who could talk. Aether calmly sat, taking inventory of the supplies in her gear and checking through what they had in the van, foot bouncing rhythmically against the ground. Star sat hunched over, elbows on her knees, periodically clenching and unclenching her fists as her face turned progressively paler every time the car took a sharp turn. Devin stared up at the ceiling, still as a corpse, humming the tune of some song he used to sing to Ari and the other kids at night, when they were both in cages and hospital gowns instead of in tact gear. He was one of the oldest there, so after he was alive and lucid enough to understand where he was, he considered it his job to look after the people around him. 

Now, he did it like he wasn’t aware anyone else was there to listen. But that was okay. Ari didn’t need some other kid looking after him— he was responsible enough to look after himself.

Ari scoffed to himself, shaking himself out of his thoughts and standing to make his way up into the driver’s cabin. Katherine had her jaw set into a harsh glare as she accelerated down the crowded highway, weaving in and out of traffic as aggressively as any native New Yorker as the radio fed them incoming information from the scientists and other superiors.

“Ari,” she greeted quietly.

“ETA?” he responded.

“Well, we left in the middle of NYC rush hour traffic, so you can imagine that’s slowing things down. If this becomes a multiple-strike mission, I’m putting in a respectful request for a helicopter,” she reported. Still, she was getting through traffic faster than Ari would be able to manage. He appreciated it.

She lowered her voice further, until they could at least pretend that it was just the two of them— everyone in the van had good ears, so he had no delusions of how private the conversation actually was— before continuing, “How are you feeling about… y’know. Your dad hasn’t had any changes, has he?”

Ari clenched his jaw so he didn’t snap. “He has the best doctors looking out for him. Their prognosis is positive. He’ll be back on his feet soon, and by the time he is, his projects will be back in hand.”

“That’s good to hear. The Institute values him greatly, and he seems to value his work,” she said. She scoffed a moment later and added, “I’m sure the birds will love to have him working on them, as well.”

Ari’s lips twitched slightly. He could give them like a gift to his father— the girl who tried to kill him, the telepath, and the younger kids would be most valuable to him, even if Ari brought Maximum back with one of her eyes gouged out cleanly to match his. And Maximum would have to behave if he had her precious brothers and sisters somewhere she couldn’t protect them. The quiet one with the pretty black hair would have his jaw rewired, of course— Ari had seen enough of the damage they they could dole out— and probably kept isolated from his big sister. He was clearly her favorite. The Institute could make her do whatever they wanted if they could threaten him. 

Ari could make her do whatever he wanted.

“How’s your eye treating you? Should someone cover your left when we’re fighting?” Katherine broke him out of his daydream as she accelerated past a car, cut them off, and sped onto the exit ramp to the sounds of car horns blaring.

His eye was fine. Blurry, overly sensitive to light, but no longer so disorienting that it would slow him down. Not when he had a task to accomplish, and he was so close to doing it.

Looking at one of the side mirrors, his lip curled into disgust. One of his eyes was blue— same as his father’s, and the one he’d known all his life. The other, though, on the side that was washed in a blur of dull colors, was dark brown, and entirely foreign.

“Focus on the road, Ms. Tan,” he replied.

“Of course, Mr. Batchelder.”

They stayed in silence as the sun set, save for a few scant conversations between Aether, Star, and Devin, from whether or not they knew how to use certain types of weaponry to if any of them needed the night vision visor or if it would simply cause migraines— apparently they helped Star, Aether to a far lesser extent, and Devin couldn’t wear it more than two seconds without his eyes burning. Katherine sped down the highway like a bullet train, jaw no longer set and eyes lacking the flint they had in New York. If anything, she looked calm when she was on the road.

In Ari’s pocket, his phone buzzed. He pulled it out, scanning through the message, and then reading through the attached file.

He whistled low. That explained some things.

“Good call, Star. We have our lead,” he said, smirking. Katherine’s eyes flicked to him, flashing a reflective green under the passing lights. “I hear Baltimore has a lovely Chinatown.”

Chapter Text

We stopped shortly at Enoch Pratt Library— it was slightly less gaudy than the New York Public library, though not by much— to track down Mike. He had made it safely to Baltimore, seated on a bench in the entryway, working on his laptop. He was in no more pieces than the last time I’d seen him and claimed he hadn’t encountered anything more dangerous than a mildly unpleasant car ride, so I’d take it to mean that we were still flying under the Institute’s radar.

“And you have a place to sleep? You know it’s safe? We… well, we’re later than I wanted, so we might not be back until morning. You shouldn’t wait up on us,” I checked.

“I’m homeless and psychotic in a weird city. Nowhere’s safe,” he replied dryly. “I’ll… probably sleep on the subway, it’s worked before. Try not get jumped. Look for work. Youse good on the address?”

It wasn’t the reply I wanted, but it wasn’t like I could ask for better. At least it was honest. I tried to offer him some of our fish before we parted ways for the night, which was how I learned that Mike avoided meat— something about nonviolence and worrying about contamination. Quietly, I thought it was stupid of him to turn down food, but I didn’t say that out loud, because it was rude. Just bid him farewell with plans to meet here again in the morning, and set off towards our target.

Fourteen years ago, hospital records from John Hopkins dictated that Jenny Xue had lived in a small townhouse just a few blocks away from Baltimore’s small Chinatown. It was a well-lit, bush-lined street that was far enough away from the bustle of the inner city that the noise didn’t give me a headache— I’d even go as far as to call it picturesque. Perched on the roof across from the row of brick houses, I could clearly see an older couple milling about the kitchen, smiling at each other while they cooked and finally sitting in front of the TV while they ate. They were east Asian, like Fang, though beyond that it was hard to pick out any similarities. Their expressions were unreserved around each other, faces heavy with lines, both of them heavier from age and steady meals. The man’s hair was cropped to a buzz of salt-and-pepper, while the woman was approaching fully white. I could only hope that Fang— that any of us— would live long enough to have wrinkles and grey hairs like they did. 

“Are any of you guys seeing a mole on either of their cheeks?” Nudge asked, propping her chin on her hands as she watched the happy couple, a grumpy-looking crease in her brow.

“They’re not entirely genetic,” I replied. “And even with the genetic factors, the inheritance pattern isn’t the end-all-be-all. Just because they don’t have a beauty mark doesn’t mean they’re not related to Fang or Jennifer.”

Angel flopped onto her back, staring at the sky longingly. She wasn’t taking being back in a city gracefully. I couldn’t blame her, but hopefully she wouldn’t have to be in one for too much longer.

“Fang thinks that calling it a beauty mark is pretentious,” she announced. Fang shot her an indiscernible look, and she added, “they really don’t want to be here.”

“I know,” I sighed. They hadn’t spoken or signed a single thing since we entered Baltimore airspace, even when I tried to talk to them. They’d also tucked their hands into their coat pockets a few minutes ago to try to obscure the shaking in their arms— I couldn’t tell if it was nerves or exhaustion, but either way, I wasn’t sure how much longer they could hold it together. “You’re sure you’re not okay with just ringing the doorbell and asking if they’re Jennifer Xue’s parents? It would get it over with faster, and then we’ll know what to do.”

Fang looked like a deer in headlights as they slowly shook their head. I briefly considered doing it anyway, but I didn’t want them to fight me even more than they were already fighting, nor did I want to trigger a full dissociative episode right before we met their family. Besides, we were already betting a lot on Jennifer wanting something to do with Fang— even if she’d decided to give them up for adoption, it had to mean something that she’d gone through the pregnancy at all, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to say that something could get us a conversation with her, and information about the adoption process if nothing else. The same thing couldn’t be said about Jennifer’s parents; I doubted they approved of their daughter being pregnant at such a young age. Maybe that wouldn’t extend to contempt of Fang themself, but I didn’t want to risk getting the door slammed in our faces.

So instead, we had a different plan.

By 10:30 PM, all of the lights in the townhouse were off, and Angel and Gazzy were both noticeably grouchy from exhaustion. Iggy rolled a tin can between his hands as he sat cross-legged on the roof, eyes closed in a nearly meditative position. They’d be staying here, Angel and Gazzy watching for anything suspicious— cops and Erasers alike— and Iggy ready to reign fire down on anything that tried to do us harm. He said that the bombs he and Gazzy had made would cause more noise and smoke than actual harm, something to alert us on the inside, but I had no doubt they’d still ruin anyone’s day. Paranoid of us, maybe, considering that we had gotten nearly two weeks without seeing ear nor tail of an Eraser, and I was pretty sure that the only times we had seen them in New York were when we were intruding on their turf. But in yet another location that put me out of my element, I was feeling paranoid.

I, Fang, and Nudge would be breaking into the house itself. I wasn’t great with proper locks— hitting one until it broke didn’t count— but Iggy had shown me how to jimmy a window open while we stayed in the beach house, and I wasn’t half bad at it. I landed deftly on the narrow window sill on the second story, looking into a dark, empty bedroom, and steadied myself as I slipped one of the picks through a crack in the window and slowly felt for the locking mechanism. It took the better part of two minutes, but eventually I managed to get enough leverage on it to feel a soft click as it unlocked. I pushed the window open, took out the screen, and silently landed inside the house before motioning Fang and Nudge to follow.

The room smelled like dust and artificial air freshener. It had a daybed by the window rather than a full bed, and most of the room was taken up by an upright piano. There was a desk with an old computer, covered in books about astronomy and a small fish tank full of plants and moss balls with not a fish in sight. I crossed the room silently and eased open the opposite door, freezing when the hinges creaked. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was loud enough that I knew it would have me startling awake in my own home.

These people hadn’t grown up in a place where a door opening at night meant that a guard had taken issue with them or a whitecoat was doing night testing. They had been safe in a city full of humans just like them. There was no indication of movement or startling from elsewhere in the house. I opened the door even slower, breathing a sigh of relief at its silence, and heard the steady sound of snoring echoing faintly down the hall.

There were pictures on the walls of the hallway. Some were yellow and brown from age. One of the larger ones was a large, sepia-toned family portrait with at least four generations shown, with an older couple with lines on their faces, a much younger couple kneeling in front of them, and a withered old woman sitting in a rocking chair with a toddler on her lap. Others were of a young couple: A young man and woman wearing red, eating at a banquet table; the same people posing in front of this very brownstone house and holding a JUST SOLD realtor sign; both of them kneeling on the ground while a young baby held onto their hands to stay on two feet. I walked closer to one picture of them, with grey hairs and crows feet, standing next to a girl dressed in graduation clothes and holding a framed diploma. 

The girl had a wide smile that made her nose wrinkle, straight black hair styled in a pixie cut, and a single mole on her right cheek. On her high school diploma was written the name Jennifer Xue.

A soft hand came to rest on my arm, and I looked down at Nudge. Her pupils were so wide that they swallowed her iris entirely as she looked up at me, something close to hope in her expression. These were Jennifer Xue’s parents. These were Fang’s grandparents. We were right. Everything we had been through in New York had been worth it, because Fang’s family was right here.

I felt faint. More than that, I felt sick.

“Can you stay up here?” I whispered to her as loudly as I dared, with the sounds of snoring coming from the master bedroom less than ten feet away from us. “Keep an eye on the door and the exit. Yell if something happens, and listen for Iggy outside. Fang and I can go downstairs alone.”

She nodded, even as her whole body shook. I took Fang’s hand and pressed both of us to the edge of the stairs as we descended, pausing when anything creaked anyway. The main floor was tidy and organized in a way that our house never was, everything perfect in its place. I found a basket on the TV stand with letters that I rifled through, though all I found was billing information and coupons. Beside me, Fang slowly sank to their knees, eyes wide as they just… looked. 

There were more pictures on the walls, and a few art prints. Fang’s grandparents seemed to like abstract art with bright colors. Fake plants, and one or two ailing ones that smelled more real. The distinctly artificial smell of roses. A beautiful home— one that Fang and I both looked horribly out of place in, with our dirty clothes, scars across our skin, and parts of us that were blatantly inhuman. Wings, talons, teeth. Everything that went deeper, beneath the skin, that made it clear that we didn’t belong in this picture-perfect home. We were intruders, plain and simple. 

I thought about that sepia picture, of a complete family gathered around what had to be Fang’s great-great grandmother at least, and thought of how I didn’t even have parents. No connections except with each other, a single generation forged through the worst experiences of our lives. Fourteen years— maybe a little longer, if there were test subjects before us that didn’t even make it out of utero. It felt so small in the wake of this family. Pointless, almost. Fourteen years of fear and pain, and for what?

He says you’ll save the world, you know.

How vague. How small and petty to put that on us, on me, and use it as an excuse to deny us a quiet, happy life in a clean house with its walls covered in pictures. Was that so much to ask for?

Giving Fang’s shoulder a squeeze as I passed, I padded silently into the pristine kitchen, where the artificial rose scent was slightly tempered by the vase of dried flowers that smelled like old, but slightly more real, lilies. On the refrigerator were dozens of magnets from every National Park imaginable, and a few that I hadn’t known existed. There were also a few childish drawings that reminded me of Angel’s art— Jennifer’s childhood art, maybe?— and enough cards and envelopes stuck to the refrigerator that I could imagine the fluttering sound they’d make whenever the door opened and closed. Most of the post-its were written in a different alphabet, but the cards were all in English, and one—

One was a postcard. It showed a bright blue waterfall and purple butterfly, with looping script that read Niagra Falls on the front, and a short note on the back: Thanks for getting us here. Can’t wait to tell you all about it! -Jenny&Lyra

And a return address, in case it was lost in the mail. Also in Baltimore, with an apartment number and all. It couldn’t be far from here, because it had the same zip code. 

My hands shook, and for a moment I wanted to shove the postcard in my pocket and take off here and now. Instead, I pulled the notebook out of my coat and copied the address before putting it back on the fridge where it had been originally. Nothing taken, and nothing left behind— no evidence we had been here. I committed the address to memory as well, just in case something happened to the notebook, and went back over to Fang.

“I got it!” I whispered. “We were right, they have Jennifer’s address— hey, hey, what’s wrong?”

I knelt next to Fang and took their hand in both of my own. They didn’t look at me or raise their head as tears streamed down their face, shoulders shaking and hunched in on themself. They didn’t even attempt to disentangle their hand from mine, even though I belatedly realized I was probably keeping them from speaking. I let them go, and then let them slump onto me, burying their face in my shirt like when one of us would sneak into the other’s rooms after nightmares.

“This place is so clean,” they murmured into my chest. And then, even quieter, “I was a mess.”

“You’re— Fang… we’re all messy.” I whispered, heart aching for them. I couldn’t blame them— If I somehow found my grandparents and broke into a house that looked like this, tracking dirt on the floors because we had been sleeping in abandoned houses and subways, I’d probably be feeling the same way. Even if we didn’t come in as intruders, if we rang the doorbell and did things properly like normal, well-adjusted kids did, none of us were all human. No good manners and clean clothes in the world could change that.

“She didn’t want me. And I—” they hiccupped. “I would’ve wanted this.”

I closed my eyes and hugged them. “Oh, darling.”

Of course they would. Far more than me or Iggy ever could. Probably more than I could even understand, because when I lost the last hope of finding my parents, I’d been upset, but I’d also felt relief. Fang, though— they would’ve been just as thrilled as Nudge, if only we had gotten this information earlier, when they could pursue it without having to drag their body behind them like a puppet.

“Should’ve just died in Colorado,” they whispered.

I jerked back, grabbing them by their shoulders so tight I could feel their bones shifting beneath my hands. They didn’t flinch at the contact, but I still tried to loosen my grip as soon as I realized how tight I was holding them. They wiped their face, smearing tear tracks across their cheek, and took my hands off of them.

“Would’ve been better. Would’ve gotten buried instead of— of— and you’d move on.”

“No I wouldn’t. I’d never. I have never moved on from anything in my life, you know that. There is no universe where I would have left you behind to— to rot somewhere alone in the ground.” My voice cracked at the words, eyes burning, and even though they were all fake and Fang was right here in front of me, I felt a stab of fear and desperation. “You shouldn’t have died in Colorado, you shouldn’t have died in California, and— and you’re clearly here enough to be upset by this, so I don’t care whether you died or not. You’re here enough to want something, so we’re going to go get it. Okay?”

They shook their head. “Too late.”

“No it’s not. Fang—”

“Max,” it came out half whisper, half cry. They shook their head again. “Just… let’s leave. Please, let’s leave.”

I sighed, fight leaving me in a single gush of air. I rested my forehead against theirs for a moment before I finally rose to my feet and grabbed their arm to haul them up. They were unsteady on their feet, looking around this beautiful, pristine house like it was something entirely alien. And no matter what I said— what I meant— I could understand why. They might be the spitting image of their mother, but it was hard to picture them in this house, or in that sepia portrait. Weekends of running around in their grandparents house, fully human, an only child, as if that was ever in the cards for them. It hadn’t been, not even if the Institute hadn’t gotten involved. 

But they would’ve wanted it. They would’ve wanted it, and I would find a way to get it for them, and keep it safe for them until they could want things again.

We were just as quiet getting out as we had been coming in, giving a sharp nod to Nudge as we ascended the stairs and left through the same window. I didn’t bother figuring out how to re-lock it. With any luck, they wouldn’t notice for a long time, and assume they had left it open on accident. We didn’t speak until we touched down on the roof next to Iggy, Gazzy, and Angel. Angel shot awake as we landed, and Gazzy startled, but Iggy didn’t so much as twitch.

“Anything good?” he asked, still rolling the tin can between his palms. I could see the sheen in his eyes, moving as they tracked the bright lights of passing cars that echoed up the street and onto our roof. Above us, the dark clouds had begun to gather, promising a rainy night.

“Yeah. We have Jennifer’s address, and she’s living with some girl named Lyra. Girlfriend, maybe,” I replied. “It’s in Baltimore, not too far from here.”

Gazzy gasped, eyes widening in something close to excitement despite his exhaustion. Angel shot a glance towards Fang, tugging at her headscarf while her brow furrowed slightly, and Iggy just gave a short nod and stowed his tin can away.

We couldn’t move on the location tonight— not only would showing up on some stranger’s porch close to midnight be possibly the worst introduction we could make other than how Iggy and I met Dr. Martinez, but I had no idea where this street or apartment was, other than in the same zip code that we were in. While we could go street by street, it would be a waste of energy when the library would open in the morning and we could look it up there. With the rain drizzling and the wind starting to pick up, cold enough to raise hairs on the exposed back of my neck, we couldn’t camp out on the roof, either. 

I picked up Angel so she wouldn’t have to fly herself, and set off towards a nearby parking garage, just a block away from the library. It wasn’t perfect as far as places to sleep went, but the walls were partial, making it open to the sky for a quick escape, and the stairwell was sheltered away from the wind and rain. On the top floor, it would be near-impossible to pincer us, and we had the advantage of the noise of the stairwell echoing— we’d hear a door open long before anyone could get to us. 

“We should get cardboard for this,” Nudge yawned as she sat against the wall, feathers fluffing up as she wrapped herself in her wings. When Angel crammed herself under them, she huffed and let her in, obscuring both of them. “Mike uses it when he sleeps on cement. Keeps things warmer.”

“We should convince Jennifer to let us sleep on her floor tomorrow,” Iggy countered. “We have a little bit of extra fish. Should we eat it now, or is that breakfast?”

“Breakfast,” I replied as everyone settled down. We were all hungry. I knew that. We had been hungry back in the vacation home, and it had only grown with our flight, regardless of the break we had taken in the middle. But what else could we do, when I didn’t know how we’d get our next meal?

Nudge leaned herself against Iggy, Gazzy spread over both of their laps, and Fang pressed themself against the railing as I sat on the stairs, looking down into the stairwell. It wasn’t long before I heard soft snores from behind me— Angel and Nudge fell asleep quickly, and when I glanced back, Gazzy was out as well. Fang’s eyes were half-lidded as they stared down the stairwell, barely breathing. Iggy appeared fully alert, and would probably continue to be for the next few hours, if not the entire night. His fingers were entwined in Nudge’s feathers, carefully preening and re-aligning them as she slept. The other hand— his right hand— was tucked closer to his chest. He never favored his left hand, like I did when my right was too weak. I hoped his continued preference was evidence that his wound had healed in a way my arm didn’t, and not that he didn’t care about the pain.

“You two can sleep, you know,” I whispered to them. “I’ll wake one of you up if I get tired, and I’m pretty sure we’ll all wake up regardless if something happens.” I knocked my finger against the metal railing to prove a point, listening to it echo down the stairwell.

“We’ll try,” Iggy murmured. His eyes still stayed open as I leaned against the railing, staring down the stairwell. At least he was resting. They both were, even if Fang was starting to shiver— I hoped they were just cold, and not sick. 

The rain was coming down heavier, now— I could hear it through the ceiling. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine that the draft coming through the stairwell was actually coming through the window screen back home, rain rattling as it funneled into the gutter, bringing the smell of pine needles and fresh soil into the room Nudge and I had shared for four years. The breeze was always cold in the mountains, but we had dozens of blankets to keep us warm, and the one winter the power went out during a cold snap that went into negative digits, we all slept together around the fireplace until the ice had melted enough to fix the turbines.

It was getting harder to remember the smell of our woods and the sound of the trees. Even more so to imagine that the future ahead of us could ever be as good as the past we left behind. Still, I wanted to remember. We had been safe. We had been warm.

Maybe we could be again. It was a nice dream, if nothing else.

I hadn’t realized I had spaced out until a crash echoed up the stairwell, sending me rocketing to my feet. I looked over the edge of the railing, heart pounding even as I tried to convince myself it was probably just a normal human in a hurry.

A person dressed in black tact gear jumped from the landing ten feet below me, snagged the railing, and leaped over it to kick me in the chest. I felt several ribs break on impact, flying back until I hit the wall. They hit me hard across the face before I could regain my bearings, practically a blur in my vision, and was fast enough to dart out of the way before I could grab her and throw her back down the stairs, though not so fast enough that she dodged out of the way of the rebar cracking down on their foot.

Their unprotected foot— where Erasers wore heavy boots to protect their feet, bulky tact gear to absorb impact,  this person had black clothes built for agility, a visor protecting their face, and dark hooves where feet should’ve been. They had jumped ten feet in the air because they were able to do it with ease. Not an African Wild Dog. Not an Eraser.

No, the Eraser in this equation had reached the landing just below us, gun in hand, aiming it at me.

“Everyone up, we’re blown!” I coughed out as I dropped to the ground, the stunner whizzing over my head, but everyone was already awake and alert. Fang blocked the first figure from getting any further up the stairs, dodging and dealing blows as quickly and quietly as any ghost could, while Nudge went for the door to the top floor, where we’d be able to—

The door to the top floor burst open.

“Found you,” Ari’s voice echoed in the stairwell, smug and self-assured, blocking us in.

And just like that, our two-point exit became a killbox.

Chapter Text

I froze for less than a second, staring at the helmeted and visored figure that I knew to be Ari.

It was enough time for Ari grab Nudge by her shirt and throw her against a wall, her scream of shock drowning out all other noise to me as her head cracked against the cement wall. I leapt around Fang and the other figure, aiming for Ari. He’d taken aim at Iggy, who’d shoved Angel behind him, but I got there first, yanking his arm so the shot went wide. 

The shot went off with a sharp pop, briefly lighting up the whole stairwell in white, which apparently was enough for Iggy to get a lock on Ari’s location, because by the time Ari freed himself from my grasp Iggy was at my side, shoving Ari against the doorframe, locking them both in place, and yelling for everyone else to run through. I grabbed Nudge from where she was reeling and pushed her into the empty parking garage, reaching for Angel as I did so, just in time to watch the person Fang was keeping from reaching us dart around them like a snake, twist their arm behind their back, and pull.

I heard a sharp crack and a soft, thready gasp, but Fang gave no further indication that something in their shoulder had just broken, instead driving the back of their skull into her nose a second before their foot connected with the point just beneath her knee. It would make any Eraser reel back as self-preservation kicked in, but she only tightened her hold and moved as to throw them down the stairs, towards where the other armed figure made to aim her firearm towards me.

I dropped to the floor just in time to see Gazzy take the tin can from Iggy’s bag, roll it down the stairs, and jump towards the hooved person. I nearly cried for him to come back, not to engage directly, to stay safe like he was supposed to, but just then the whole stairwell erupted into opaque smoke, and I was too busy grabbing Angel, shoving her to the exit Iggy was still keeping clear— Ari was larger than Iggy by several inches, had the benefit of weapons and armor, but Iggy managed to tank the baton strikes to his torso and legs until Angel was through. Smoke made the space between me and everyone else foggy, my breath coming out in shallow wheezes, and I ran through the exit and into fresh air before I could think of everyone I was still leaving behind.

I skidded to a halt in the near-empty lot, where the walls were steep cement ledges, and otherwise open to the air. Between us and the closest ledge was a slight figure, dressed head to toe in the same black tact gear as everyone else on Ari’s squad, including a facial visor. I wouldn’t have paused if it weren’t for the two dark wings spread halfway open and bristling as she looked at Nudge and Angel. Like a coil, she sprung towards Nudge, who managed to dodge her first blow only to be taken down and flipped onto her back by the second.

“Angel, get in the air!” I ordered, looking at her teary expression as she watched everything happen.

Behind me, I heard a sharp scream, a grunt, and turned just as Fang and Gazzy burst through the stairwell entrance, Fang gasping for breath and Gazzy bleeding from a broken nose. Iggy disengaged from Ari, turning to run, before another figure appeared through the smoke, reached out, and grabbed his shoulder. Iggy used the backwards momentum to spread his wings, flip and gain enough altitude to launch him over the Eraser’s head, and wrap his legs around their neck before toppling the both of them to the ground.

With a flash of a knife, the Eraser sank a knife into Iggy’s thigh once, twice, three times before Ari yanked Iggy off of them, shoving him to the ground, twisting an arm behind his back and a plastic cuff onto his wrist. 

“Ari, you good-for-nothing monster! I hate you!”  

It wasn’t Jeb who said it, but it came out in Jeb’s voice from Gazzy’s mouth, pale faced and backing desperately towards Angel, who’d stayed frozen in the midst of the fight. And it was enough for Ari to jerk, head swiveling towards the voice, and for Fang to bring their boxcutter down directly on his elbow joint, where the armor was its weakest. Ari howled, which was the distraction I needed to close the distance and bring my rebar down on the back of his neck. I ducked a blow from the other Eraser, feet moving fluidly like a dance between the two of them, until Iggy managed to stumble back to his feet and Fang shoved him away from the fight.

“Twelve o’clock with a four foot ledge!” I yelled, my voice coming out in a snarl as I parried Ari’s blows. 

He snarled, grabbed me by the hair in a flash, and threw me across the asphalt floor. I managed to roll with the impact, coming to a skidding halt that tore the knees of my jeans and the skin beneath, and took in the scene. Gazzy and Angel in the air already, Iggy on the ledge, waiting for us, Nudge on the ground as the Avian raised a baton to bring it down on her, just as Fang leapt and drove their boots into one of her wings. Ari and the other Eraser between me and them, Ari barking orders for his friend to give backup to the Avian while he looked at me. 

Through the sheen of his visor, I could see the blue of his eye, and an unfamiliar, dark brown one.

“Hey, Ari,” I greeted with a nasty grin. “See you got a new eye. Ready to lose the other one?”

“Not this time,” he growled.

I remembered Lake Mead, the first fight that actually felt like a fight instead of a mad scramble for survival. The whizzing of stunners, the impact of fist against flesh, the crack of a gun. Ari didn’t have a gun with bullets in it this time, and he must have lost his stunner to Iggy in the stairwell, but he looked three times as angry as he intercepted me. 

I swung my rebar towards his head, and he caught it in one hand inches from his face; I used that point as a pivot to spin, jumping for altitude and landing a kick to the side of his head. He reeled back as I pulled the rebar free, ducking under the other Eraser’s stunner and punching them where their tact gear left their neck exposed. They reared back, and I brought them down with my rebar cracking into the back of their knee. I ran, and was halfway to Fang and that other Avian when Nudge gave a sharp shout.

A force like a sledgehammer rammed into me, taking me off the ground and slamming me against a cement pillar. I crumpled, looking up to see that hoofed mutant staring down at me, blood spattered down one of her arms from where Fang must have taken a chunk out of her shoulder. I stumbled to my feet, but she was faster, moving to grab me by the neck and slam me back onto the asphalt. Behind her, Ari and the other Eraser regrouped, and I realized that I might not be making it out of here.

The world slowed a little bit, blood pounding in my ears as I tried to pry this person’s fingers off of my neck. I didn’t feel calm, I couldn’t, but I did manage a level of understanding. I was going to be caught. There wasn’t much to be done about that. But everyone else— they would be free. That’s what mattered. I was okay with that trade.

With a flutter of wings, I saw Gazzy land back on the ledge, and tried to yell for him to take Angel and get away from here. Instead, what I heard was a faint, barely-audible whistle.

Beside the figure keeping me down, Ari screamed, and the other Eraser dropped to her knees.

I sprang back into action, grabbing one of the fingers around my neck and bending it until it snapped. The figure hissed, loosening her grip slightly, which gave me enough room to twist my neck and sink my teeth into their arm. That got the reaction I wanted; they jerked back, giving me air, and enough energy to crack my head against her visor, splintering the plastic into white webs to obscure their vision. I scrambled out from underneath them, locking eyes on Nudge, who was already at the ledge, and Fang, who was dancing circles around the other bird, not bothering with blocking blows so much as giving her a distraction. I started running again, hitting the other Avian— smaller than me, wings so dark they looked only a few shades lighter than Fang’s in the low light, I couldn’t afford to think about who they were and why they were fighting us, I couldn’t offer to take them with us— with a glancing blow that distracted them just enough to give Fang and opening to run.

“Everyone’s clear!” I announced as I jumped the ledge with Fang right behind me, diving twenty feet before snapping my wings out and shooting into the air, joining the rest of my flock in the sky, our flight shaky as we tried to clear distance between us and Ari’s team. I looked over my shoulder at the garage, where four figures stood by the ledge, watching us. The Avian didn’t jump to follow— in fact, they leaned their elbows against the cement, tilting their head as if considering an interesting experiment.

Or waiting for something.

There were five figures. Four on the top floor, and one on the roof.

A metal cord launched past my cheek, and I looked ahead of myself just in time to hear Nudge scream and Fang collide with her, nearly knocking her out of the air.  The cord pierced through their back, eliciting a gasp that was so soft I could barely hear it over the wind, before they were yanked backwards, plummeting from the sky. The fifth figure rapelled down to where everyone else was standing, giving another yank of the cord. I was yelling at my siblings to keep going while I hairpin turned in the air, entering a dive.

Fang hit the cement ledge hard. Ari raised the butt of a stun rifle and hit them in the ribs once, twice, three times for good measure.

I spun to reorient myself in the air, so I could cave Ari’s ribs in with a good kick and take out the goat with my rebar, but the other Avian was faster, meeting me halfway and forcing me to land, skidding across the ledge and ducking out of the way of her stunner. I ducked as she streaked past me into the garage, flaring her wings to turn and have another go.

“Why so quick to leave? Thought you would have jumped to see me, Maximum,” she spat, but I was already running down the ledge. The goat leaped between me and Fang as they choked, trying to pry Ari’s hand off their throat.

With a streak of brown feathers, Nudge crashed feet-first into Ari, dragged Fang over the edge of the parking garage, and let them both drop until the line went taut. I jumped to join them, grabbing my boxcutter and severing the metal cord that kept them in the air. I only barely managed to grab Fang before they hit the ground and landed hard myself, with Nudge landing beside me.

“Run for a side alley and rejoin everyone else in the air,” I ordered, just in time to hear the faint sound of metal cutting through the air. I dodged out of the way of another metal cord, but wasn’t fast enough to avoid the second. A white-hot knife lanced through my shoulder, and in half a second I was ten feet off the ground and ascending until I cut the line and fell, landing hard on my ankle and breaking into a run after Nudge and Fang.

She had their arm over her shoulders, their steps tripping after hers, but we managed to make it around a corner, breaking line of sight with that gunman before I took their meager weight and she launched into the air. I was quick to follow, supporting Fang with their arm around my shoulders. Their wings extended beneath mine, synchronized as best they could to catch the same breezes, but the beats of their wings were weak as we rose into the air to join everyone else. 

“Where?” Iggy yelled. 

“Skyscrapers. Nudge, you pick—” my eye caught movement from the garage, too far from us to shoot but close enough that I could still see the figure in tact gear spread her wings, calmly step off the ledge we had launched from, and catch the breeze to follow us. “Go. We need to go now.”

She was closing on us. She was closing on us even as we flew, because we were slow from our injuries and she didn’t have a single scratch on her. And maybe she couldn’t take all of us, even in this state, but as long as she followed us, she could lead her friends right to us.

She promptly jerked, dropping like a rock out of the sky. 

As I blinked, craning my neck and feeling my shoulder throb as I tried to figure out what had just happened, Gazzy gave a loud screech, and Nudge scrambled to stop Angel from doing the exact same thing. Her dark eyes fluttered, cloudy and nonresponsive to the outside world.

A seizure. Like the one she had caused that Lycaon in California. Only from a further distance, to another Avian, a hundred feet in the air. I saw the other Avian impact against a roof, but still felt myself cringe.

She looked like— could she be…

“You got her?” I asked Nudge, because my sisters were right in front of me, and one of them was a deadweight in the air.

“She’s not twitching, just an absence!” Nudge yelled back. “Skyscraper?”

I nodded, straining my wings as we set off towards the inner harbor, where the buildings clustered more tightly together. The wind still buffeted around us, rain drizzling from the sky and soaking through my hair, the cold making Fang twitch beneath me. Their arm was heavy across my shoulders, nails digging into my coat and making the wound beneath it throb, but if I could carry Michael Rivers across New York, I could carry my sibling to a safe place to rest. We could go from there. My wound burned, slick with blood seeping into my clothes, my ribs hurt something jagged, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as it felt. Maybe Fang wasn’t as bad as they looked.

I watched as Angel twitched in Nudge’s arms, and quickly squirmed out of her grasp and unfurled her wings to fly a few feet below us, breathing hard but flying steady. Aware and alert, if a bit banged up. Gazzy dropped a few feet in altitude to fly beside her, holding his arm close to his chest but his wings unfaltering in the air, with no signs of weakness besides general fatigue. We’d made it. We were okay.

Fang stopped shivering from the cold. Stopped shivering at all, and the weight I was carrying suddenly tripled in weight as they went limp as a corpse in my arms.

Chapter Text

“Fang?” my voice sounded small against the wind, their body a deadweight dragging me down the earth: limp, light, and far too still. “Fang!”

I couldn’t find out what was wrong in the air, so I dove towards the nearest flat roof, barely remembering to signal for everyone else to follow. I landed, ankle nearly buckling from the impact, and I almost dropped Fang beside me in my haste to get to solid ground. They didn’t twitch, even I lowered them onto the cold, wet cement. I didn’t want to touch them. I didn’t want to try to get them to open their eyes. I didn’t want to check their breathing or their pulse, because if it wasn’t there then there was nothing, nothing I’d be able to do.

They hadn’t even tried to fight back against Ari. Just shoved Nudge out of the way and took the beating.

A few feet away, Iggy landed harshly, dropping and rolling rather than running off the impact. He got back to his feet slowly as Gazzy landed, and Nudge touched down a moment later with Angel in her arms. She set her on the ground, ensuring she could stand on her own before sprinting over to me and Fang, dropping to her knees beside us. I jolted back into my body and put my fingers to their neck, holding my breath, barely able to hear over the blood pounding in my ears.

There it was— a faint, stammering pulse, weaker than I had ever felt under my fingertips. But it was enough.

“Get them up,” I rasped, pulling their limp body off the cement. They jerked slightly, letting out a sound I could go my entire life without hearing, but their eyes stayed half-lidded and distant. “Nudge, you need to— let them lean on you, keep them upright, I need to see their back. Stay awake for me darling, okay?”

“Max, what needs to happen?” Iggy said, taking a step towards us. Behind him, Gazzy watched me with wide eyes, while Angel’s gaze was focused on the skyline, towards where the other Avian had fallen.

Nudge wrapped her arm around Fang, letting them lean their weight against her, eyes shut tight to keep herself from crying, and I could finally tear their shirt open and see their back. 

Even in the dim light, I knew it was serious once I wore their shirt open. Worse than the claw marks they suffered by Lake Powell. Worse, even, than the bullet I had taken to the wing. The wound on their back was ragged, flesh torn outwards from a central point lodged somewhere beneath the skin, the metal cord still trailing from whatever it had caught in. It wouldn’t come out when I pulled, and caused them to tense like a snare and shriek, even half-conscious as they were. Their shirt was saturated in warm, dark blood. The back of their head was bleeding from where they had hit cement, and now that I could hear over my own heartbeat, their shallow breaths sounded wet. 

I took my coat from around my waist and pressed it to the wound, leaning as much of my weight as possible against it to stop the blood. Something wracked through their whole body, a whimper leaking through their teeth, and I tried to feel relief that they had reacted to the pain rather than horror that I had caused it. They were alive. They were still there.

How did I keep them that way?

“Who— who else is hurt?” I asked, but couldn’t take my eyes off of my sibling, feebly twitching as Nudge held them. They coughed, and Nudge made a choking noise as blood splattered across her shirt and neck.

“You’re hurt!” Nudge replied.

“Don’t we have bigger things to worry about?” Iggy snapped at about the same time. He was definitely hurt, but I couldn’t look at him, he was standing, he was conscious, and Fang—

Fang tried to shift for a moment, wings spasming in a half-flap that would usually get them to their feet, but there was a hole in their abdomen and blood in their chest, and all that moving could do was hurt them. I didn’t want them to wake up, to realize that the pain they were feeling wasn’t just a bad dream, to start to struggle. Nudge was shaking with sobs as she held them, and for a moment, I wondered if she’d forget about them the moment they died. If that was just what her brain did, no matter how old she got. 

In that moment, stranded on the rooftop in a city that had been so, so close to giving us something good, my choice was easy— funny, how I could abandon every conviction about never returning willingly to a place that could hurt, if it actually required giving something up. Funny, how much of a hypocrite I was.

 I withdrew a phone from my coat pocket with a ten-digit number taped on the back, dialed a number, and called.

“911, what is your emergency?” came the tinny voice of a human over the line, and it took everything in me not to hang up then and there. We stayed free by never letting the outside world know about us, by risking disease and injury and resource scarcity without help because we all knew what a human hospital would do with us. What any human with a modicum of power would do.

“My sibling’s hurt,” I said, ignoring Iggy’s sharp cry somewhere in my periphery. “We’re on— we’re…” I squinted over the edge of the building, towards streetlights that illuminated the buildings below. “We’re on a roof somewhere on Light Street, across from Charlie’s Diner. They— there’s a harpoon end in their back, they’re bleeding a lot, possible concussion, and broken ribs. They coughed up blood, but they’re still breathing.”

“Max—” Iggy started.

“A harp— are the perpetrators still on the scene, or are you being pursued?”

“Not on the scene, not being pursued, we lost them a few blocks back,” I replied, scanning the sky as I said it to be sure. They only had one flier, and Angel had— “Nudge, let them go. Go with Iggy and get out of here before anyone shows up, that way if me and Fang are captured, you’ll still make it out.”

“Is your sibling still responsive?”

“No. Do you have our location?” I asked.

“ We do, and we’re sending a helicopter to your location. Please stay on the line while help arrives. Can you tell us what their breathing sounds like?”

“I’m not leaving you and Fang alone, Maximum Ride,” Iggy bit out.

“Yes you are!”

“You don’t get to ask me to—”

“Igneous, we are not risking everyone else like that. Fang is bleeding out, we need to get them to someone who can actually do something, we can’t leave them alone, and we can’t risk all of us getting captured again, so you’re going to leave Fang with me to keep the rest of them safe!”

“You don’t get to ask that of me, Maximum.”

“If there are others with you—”

“You’re sending a helicopter. You know our location. Get here quick,” I interrupted, and hung up. I stumbled to Iggy and pressed the phone into his hand, ignoring the blood on his shirt and down his jeans, because he was standing and he had to be okay. There was nothing lodged in his body, and that would have to be enough. “Igneous. Take care of them.”

“Let me stay instead. You take the kids, you can actually look after them, and Fang and I can endure whatever they’re going to do to us until then.”

“I have a harpoon in my shoulder. I couldn’t fly even if I wanted to.”

“We’re not going anywhere! Fang’s our sibling, too!” Gazzy yelled, wings bristling, blood still pouring from his nose. “You can’t—”

“I’ll call as soon as I can. If you don’t hear from me by noon tomorrow, then the hospital took us. That’s a good first step to find us,” I told Iggy. A heartbeat passed between us, then another— the two of us, who had made so many promises in the safety of the mountains about how if someone came for us, we’d go out fighting. We wouldn’t go back to captivity to survive. We wouldn’t beg for our lives.

I had never been more relieved when Iggy nodded, breathing hard, pocketing the phone and backing away several steps. 

“We’re not, you can’t make us!” Gazzy screamed.

“Gasman, now is not the time,” Iggy interrupted, voice stony. “We’re heading towards the bay. We’ll find an island and lay low for the night. Angel, can you fly?”

“We can’t—”

“You can fly or I can carry you, Angel. I’m not risking your life. You or Gazzy,” he interrupted.

Gazzy looked at Iggy, mouth open but completely silent. He looked at Fang, their struggles to move growing weak again, then to me, before looking to Iggy again, like any of us would give him a better answer. Then he nodded, eyes watering, taking his sister’s hand and jumping into the air, disappearing into the dark.

“Nudge—” Iggy started.

“I’m not going anywhere. Max told me to keep them up.”

“We’re going.”

“I’m not leaving. You and Max don’t get to tell me what to do. They’re my sibling, too, and you don’t get to say it’s too dangerous, or it’s for my own good. I’m staying. I’m staying, so you should just head after Gazzy and Angel and keep them safe.” 

Iggy walked to Nudge, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her off her feet. I darted forward to catch Fang before they hit the ground, closing my eyes against Nudge’s animalistic scream as Iggy pinned her wings to her back and jumped into the air with her. She screamed curses at her older brother to let her go, begging me to let her stay, but I could not could not put her in danger. 

Beside me, Fang bled onto the concrete. 

“Stay with me,” I whispered, finally lowering them so their head could rest on my lap. “Stay with me, please. Help is coming.”

Their wings spasmed again, and every breath rattled in their chest. I kept pressing my coat to the wound, staunching the blood flow, and begged the universe for it to be enough.

I saw the helicopter flying towards me, painted bright orange and blue like a beacon, long before I heard it over the sound of the pattering rain, or before the wind around me picked up as it drew closer. I waved for it, knowing that my wings were fully on display, knowing my eyes were no doubt reflectant in the helicopter’s searchlights, knowing that my hands were stained in dark blood. It landed in a whir of wind and noise, and two paramedics jumped out, wide-eyed as they set their sights on me. Something wild and sub-human, covered in dirt and blood.

“What the hell?” the woman rasped, her face going stark white. “What— what?”

“They got hit in the back,” I told them, squeezing Fang’s wing until my knuckles turned white in hopes for a response. A twitch, a mumble, anything.

They coughed again, blood coating their lips, and the paramedics jumped into action.

In a flurry of movement, they had Fang hefted into a rolling gurney, a mask over their mouth and nose and straps over their chest to keep them secure, and were leading me into the helicopter after them. They attached them to oxygen and other machines, projecting their vitals onto a small screen, before the male paramedic left for the pilot’s seat. We lifted into the air in a manner that felt wholly unnatural, and I tried not to think of where I had condemned my sibling and I both to go.

“Okay, this is… normal. What the hell are you guys?” the woman asked, looking at me like I was some unholy abomination sent to kill her. Then she looked at my shoulder and paled even more. “You’re bleeding, too. Sit down, deep breaths, do you know either of your blood types?”

“We can’t have human—” I stopped, realizing what I had just said, and then realizing that she already knew. It wasn’t like we could get more freakish in the eyes of this woman. “Our blood is different. Human blood isn’t compatible.”

“Alright. Alright. The hell. Are you going to be okay until we get to the ER? We’re five minutes out, so it won’t take long. Just… sit down, stay out of the way, let us work.”

“John Hopkins Children’s, we have two adolescents inbound. The male is unconscious, puncture wound to the back, head injury, difficulty breathing. Female is conscious and cognizant, sustained lacerations to her right arm. We’ll be arriving at your facility in five minutes,” the man radioed, and I sat down and covered my mouth before I could start laughing or screaming hysterically.

John Hopkins Children’s. We were going to the exact hospital Fang had been born in fourteen years ago.

Above me, the helicopter blades thundered in my ears until it was all I could hear. I braced myself on the wall, trying to remember how to breathe, but the more I breathed the more I smelled rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde, and beyond the mechanical sound of blades, I could swear I heard a ticking clock somewhere in this hearse in the sky.

There were several whitecoats on the helipad when we touched down, who took Fang’s gurney and then actually looked at them, then at me. My wings bristled as they took hold of my sibling, weak and unable to defend themself from whatever these people decided to do, and gave a sharp warning cry in the back of my throat. That had them freezing in their tracks, taking in my too-sharp teeth and predator’s eyes.

“Do we need to call someone about this?” one of them whispered.

“You absolutely do not need to call anyone about this. Any questions you have, you ask me. Understood?” I snapped, taking a step forward. It would probably be more intimidating if I could move my right arm properly, or if every step didn’t send knives up my rolled ankle, but one or two people still shuffled back, attention split between me and Fang. And I knew they were running out of time, I had to trust these people because the other option was to let Fang bleed out, but standing on the roof of Baltimore Children’s, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t know how to trust a person in a white coat. I didn’t know how believe they could be anything other than the monsters in my nightmares.

“Let’s… get you to the ER while your friend is in surgery,” the paramedic said, taking my elbow gently, as if I might fall over, or turn on him with talons and teeth like a rabid beast. “I think everyone has a lot of questions.”

“I’m not leaving them,” I replied, like Nudge had done less than fifteen minutes ago, screaming and sobbing at Iggy when he dragged her away. “I’m not leaving. I don’t need treatment.”

The paramedic led me into the hospital, depositing me in a white waiting room, and the doctors led Fang into surgery. I didn’t protest, because protesting against whitecoats never got me anything, and they needed help that I couldn’t give them. At least they didn’t try to make me go to some other part of the building, though, or to a public waiting room. Though it might be more because they had no idea what to do with me— several nurses and doctors looked close to prodding at my shoulder, but I couldn’t let them give me drugs and take anything out until I knew exactly what I’d gotten myself into. I sat in a plastic chair, teeth beginning to chatter as my adrenaline finally started to wane, until a different person came in and told me to come with them. I was sure they told me their name, but I didn’t remember it.

“Why?” I asked.

“We’re doing everything we can for your friend. You need treatment, too.”

“I’m not getting treatment until I talk to someone who knows how this place is run,” I replied firmly, even though I couldn’t look this whitecoat in the face as I said it. “Our blood is different. Our bones, our lungs. You need my help, and I need to be here, not in some separate— I can’t leave them. It’s not safe.”

I heard a quiet sigh. “We’re trying to get someone on-call who can handle… sensitive cases. But you’re not going to get any better sitting here. The moment anything changes, we’ll let you know, but you need to get help now.”

No calls, I wanted to snap, or to beg, but I knew without saying a thing that it wouldn’t stop him. It wouldn’t stop them from drugging me and forcing me to get treatment, either.

I conceded to leaving the surgical hall and getting checked into a room that had a door that closed, blocking me from anyone who shouldn’t see me, and locking me in a place they could keep tabs on me. I let them take my vitals, ask their questions about what was normal for me, listen to my lungs and heart and taking notes that they sent directly to the surgical staff working on Fang. They had me change out of my street clothes and offered me a gown for my modesty, as if that was a thing people cared out in a place like this.

“What are your names?” she eventually asked, pulling out a laptop.

“I’m— I’m Ella. My sibling is… Nicky,” Not like using our real names would do anything, when all of the doctors in this place had already seen our wings, but sitting in this room, entirely alone, I could respect why Iggy lied so much.

“Last names?”

“Xue,” I said before I could think about it, even though it was definitely worse than any other name I could have lied about, and not just because I was no doubt butchering its pronunciation. Because that was their legal surname, and the Institute definitely had records of it.

“Okay, Nicky Xue, and Ella…”

“Xue. Nicky’s my sibling. We’re… twins,” I said. The nurse looked at me sharply, eyes flicking up and down, like he was mentally comparing the person in front of him to what he’d seen of Fang. With my brown skin, curly hair, and hooked nose, I could probably pass for any ethnicity except for east Asian. “What?”

“Nothing. Your twin. How old are the two of you?”

“Eighteen,” I replied, trying to use that flat voice Mike had when he lied about the same thing. The confidence of I don’t care if you think I’m lying, because your opinion doesn’t matter. The nurse leveled a much harder look at me that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and something further away from my prefrontal cortex, closer to my brainstem, snap into place.

“Fourteen,” I corrected.

“Do you have anyone we could contact? Parents, or…” he looked at me. At my wings. Thought of what two fourteen-year-olds could possibly be doing to get two harpoons in their bodies. “...an organization we should contact?”

“No calls. Especially not to anyone outside the hospital,” I said flatly.

“What exactly are the two of you?”

A snarl slipped from between my teeth, at this intake nurse with his pressed coat and incessant questions, looking at me like I was a mystery, or maybe like I was a loaded gun. And I could say a lot of things— I could play dumb, but what would it accomplish? I could bluff and say it was above his paygrade, but that would only bring me more attention. Why was I even talking to this person, who could do nothing to keep us from getting picked up by the Institute at their nearest convenience? Were they just stalling me, so they could stitch Fang up and send them off somewhere, or take them apart in a much more permanent matter? John Hopkins was a research hospital, wasn’t it?

Tick, tick, tick, came the clock from every possible direction, counting down the seconds I had left before I was put back in a cage.

“We’re Asian-American,” I said as blandly as possible. 

His expression twisted, but he didn’t press for a more specific answer. He moved onto more situational questions— who had attacked us, how long ago, where we had been, if either of us had DNR paperwork— which I lied my way through, watching as he connected me to saline and tried to connect me to a painkiller, which I immediately denied. I could handle getting my arm stitched up and a pressure bandage placed without it, and getting the harpoon point out of my shoulder would take an X-ray and probably surgery, so I didn’t need localizers until then. The nurse attached a white wristband to me with a barcode and the name ELLA XUE printed on it— nicer than tattooing it to my scalp, I supposed— showed me how to use the TV, and told me to hit the call light if I needed anything.

“I need to talk to someone who’s actually in charge,” I said.

“The Emergency Physician knows about—” he gestured to all of me. My feathers bristled, and his eyes somehow widened even more. “He’ll be in to speak with you.”

“When can I see Nicky?” I asked.

“As soon as you’re discharged, you can go to the waiting room, and we’ll call you when he’s done. You’ll be able to see him once he’s post-op. We can take your personal effects while you’re waiting, wash them before you’re discharged so you won’t be walking around in bloody clothes. We’re going to get you in for X-rays in a few minutes, so at least we’ll know what you guys look like, at least. We have hospital security outside your door, so they’ll keep anyone out who shouldn’t see… someone like you.”

  Like a lab rat, I didn’t say. 

“They, not he,” I said instead, because if Angel had been able to say it in the Institute, I needed to say it, now. The nurse didn’t reply, but did write something down, so hopefully it did something.

I didn’t want to stay in the hospital bed, so I swung my legs over the edge and dragged my IV pole and heart monitor around the small room, looking through the cabinets. Most of them were locked, and I couldn’t get my hands to work enough to pick them. I probably wouldn’t be able to do it, anyway— that was Iggy’s area of expertise, even if I had the lockpicks at the moment.

God, Iggy. I hoped he and the others were safe, wherever they were. I hoped they’d forgive me.

The unlocked cabinets mostly contained hospital gowns, socks, and vomit bags. Nothing interesting, and now that the adrenaline of the fight and the helicopter ride wasn’t keeping me on my feet, I was starting to feel the dizziness and exhaustion of blood loss. I turned back to the hospital bed, gripping the IV pole a bit tighter, and—

There was someone in my hospital bed. A little girl with amber-yellow eyes and track marks up both of her arms, covered in blood and bruising, looking right at me. A scream was halfway out of my throat before she gasped and dissolved into smoke.

“Code Black: LYCAON backup requested in the Emergency Ward. Repeat: Code Black—” the speakers blared, tinny and crackling from every memory from California. I growled, hobbling back to the bed and collapsing into it, shivering. I threw an arm over my head to block my ears, as if that ever did anything.

Eventually, they got me in for X-rays, having me lay down on the gurney and covering everything below the neck with a hospital blanket so no-one except for select staff would see my wings, with hospital security accompanying the doctors. They took their sweet time in interpreting them, which was taken up by my nurse coming in to ask questions about my anatomy and physiology, to take blood samples, check my temperature and confirm that yes, one hundred and two degrees was normal, to listen to my lungs and heart again because I was the slightly more stable out of their two specimens and they needed something to compare Fang to. Then they got me into my own surgical theater, I talked them down from a sedative to a localizer, lying about having a bad reaction to anesthesia— the lidocaine numbed my whole arm and half of my face, and the relief I instantly felt was testament to how much I had been hurting— and stared at the lights on the ceiling, counting backwards from six thousand by fours to stop myself from twitching, or from doing something even stupider, like screaming until they had no choice but to knock me out. I remembered far too many surgeries that I wished I had been unconscious for, instead only given localizers, still able to feel them doing something even if I didn’t know what. This time, I got to watch as they extracted a long, metal spike with multiple barbs that had dug itself between my clavicle and scapula and embedded itself between two of my ribs.

That sniper was an excellent shot, I’d give them that much. I was going to kill them.

I kept hearing codes over speakers that weren’t there. I kept seeing the broken bodies of little kids out of the corner of my vision. My heart kept pounding in my chest, breath coming out in shallow gasps, as the hospital staff wheeled me to a recovery room and offered me some juice, which I refused because it could all just be another one of their tests. Ari was going to burst in any moment, or Jeb was going to come in and tell us it was time to go home. To Colorado or California, I didn’t know, it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t leave Fang here by themself.

Finally, finally, when the clock on the wall— ticking louder than it had any right to, probably louder than it actually was, I was going to break it as soon as the whitecoats let me out of this bed and back to my cage— read 5:30, I was given a sling for my shoulder, handed a stack of paperwork including information about followup appointments, and given back my clothes, newly laundered but still riddled with various tears and holes over the past few weeks. One of the nurses helped me button my shirt, and gave me a handwritten paper as well, with the name of the doctors and nurses who were in the know. Who, in her words, I could talk to about my condition.

I didn’t know whether or not this woman had handed me a hit list on purpose. I didn’t know if their insistence on keeping us unknown beyond the emergency and surgical department was supposed to be a show of protecting us, or if it was to make us easier to take off the grid.

I rubbed my thumb over the paper as I sat back in the hallway, allowed to sit closer to the surgical theater than the public waiting room in case the surgeons needed me for everything. Occasionally, I prodded at the fresh stitches and bandages covering my shoulder.

It was the first time I could remember that my arm didn’t hurt. That pain had been with me the moment they put a chip under my skin, and my whole body felt off-kilter without it.

I didn’t know what else to do. When Angel had a seizure, I could keep her from hurting herself, count the seconds to keep track of its intensity, and help clean her up and get her to bed afterwards if it was warranted. When Iggy inevitably got himself burnt, I put his hands under running water until the wounds were clean and wrapped them in gauze to ensure he wouldn’t scratch himself until he bled. Even when Fang was still young and frail from the Institute’s treatment of them, wounds from their wires still bleeding on and off, I made sure they always had fresh icepacks, and I could stay at their side. Iggy and I traded off in keeping them company when they got sick. I didn’t have to sit and wait.

I still had that stupid hospital band on. It was nicer than anything I had ever been given, because it had a name on it, and the barcode wasn’t put on my skin.

I sat in the chair, in a room that was as cold and clinical as the Institute, and waited for a group of whitecoats to tell me whether my sibling had lived or died. As if they’d even tell me the truth, when the time came.

I hated this hospital.

I was pretty sure I hated myself even more.