Maximum Ride Forever (2 page)

HOURS LATER, THE swirling wind had turned into a pouring rainstorm. I squinted into the rain and billowing steam, scanning the horizon, searching for the silhouette of a kid with a fifteen-foot wingspan.

I began pacing back and forth across the rocky ledge on the northern side of the island, which was our go-to meeting place. All I saw was the volcano in the distance, still belching its plume of black smoke into the sky.

Just three months ago, this island had been a tropical paradise, a safe haven for dozens of mutant kids like us. That was before some kind of huge meteor had crashed into Earth and killed most everyone on it, as far as we knew. Then the resulting tsunamis arrived to flood our paradise, including the underground caves where the dwellings were.

Where my mom and half sister were.

We’d tried to leave, but the meteor’s impact had devastated everything within immediate flying distance. The neighboring islands? As black and crispy as toasted marshmallows. And part of me couldn’t just leave without some hope that my mom and Ella had somehow survived the floods. But now, with this erupting volcano as a strong motivator, we had to go whether I wanted to or not.

Dylan’s coming. He’s on his way. He’s fine.

I was pretty beat up, with serious burns on my arms and legs, singed feathers, and a lump the size of a goose egg growing out of my temple. I clenched my teeth and tried to focus on the pain, but even that didn’t distract me.

“Max, listen to me. You have to get in here,” Nudge pleaded from the mouth of a cave, where Fang was building a barricade. “It’s like a hurricane out there. You’ll get blown off the cliff!”

Unlike the now-toppled place where we’d made our home before the eruption, our new perch was high and safe from mudslides and lava. But from gale-force winds and acid rain? Not so much.

I’d already lost my footing more than once, but I shook my head. “Everything looks different from before. He probably just got turned around.”

Nudge’s curls got soaked immediately and stuck to her tan cheeks as she stepped out to survey the landscape. She frowned. “He would’ve found shelter by now, though. Dylan knows the rules.”

The members of my flock had survived because we looked out for the group first. If you went off on your own, you took your chances—there was no room for risk.

But this was different. Dylan would never, ever run away from me. That I knew.

“Come inside the cave,” Nudge urged, bending down to put her chin on my shoulder. We’re all tall and thin for our ages, but this past year twelve-year-old Nudge had shot past me and was now almost six feet tall—as tall as Fang. “We’ll crack one of the cans for dinner and—”

“Dylan!” I yelled suddenly, thinking I spotted movement on the horizon.

But it was just the charred trunk of a tree blowing around, and the only answer I got was the howl of the wind.

Nudge sighed, patted my back, and ducked back into the cave.

Gritty pellets of water whipped against my face. Who was I kidding? No one could fly in this weather. Well, almost no one.

Maybe I could just—

“No, you couldn’t. You’re not going anywhere,” a voice said from behind me.

I let out a breath. “Angel, just because you
can
read minds doesn’t mean you have
permission
to root around inside my head.”

Angel crossed her arms and studied me with a stern look, or at least as stern as a golden-haired, blue-eyed
seven-year-old
can
look. We’d pretty much resolved our differences since she tried to overthrow me as leader of the flock, but she still had her moments. Right now, dirty-faced, wild-haired, and firm-chinned, the flock’s youngest member looked like a short, blonde dictator.

I narrowed my eyes.
And who’s going to stop me? You know we need to find Dylan. We don’t abandon our own.

“Fang!” Angel shouted in response, her eyes never leaving mine.

Well. She’s not the only one with a firm chin around here. Without hesitation I turned on my heel and jumped off the edge. But before I could even unfurl my wings, I saw a flash of black out of the corner of my eye, and felt the breath knocked out of me as Fang’s body slammed into mine.

Together, we crashed back to the rocky ground, tumbling dangerously close to the edge. I kicked Fang’s shin, and pebbles skittered over the cliff. Fang wrapped his arms around mine, but I
do not react well
to being pinned. Bucking and writhing, I desperately tried to throw him off. Suddenly all that mattered was breaking free to go after Dylan.

“Max, calm down!” Fang snapped, and I pulled a fist free and punched him hard. “Whoa! What’s wrong with you?”

By now the others had come out to see what the commotion was.

“We. Need. To. Find. Dylan,” I ground out through clenched teeth. “Get off me!”

Cautiously Fang let me go, then jumped back out of my kicking range. He knows me so well.

“Max, we can’t go right now. It’s a toxic stew out there,” the Gasman explained. He should know. He’d earned his name when he was little, thanks to the toxic stew of odors he always produced. “I’m talking melt-your-face-off.”

“I can get through it.
Dylan’s
out there,” I spat. “Doesn’t anyone care about him?”

Gazzy chewed his lip and glanced away, and Nudge looked concerned. Of course they cared. Mr. Perfect had caused some strife in our flock at first, but he was one of us now, and even Fang looked grim as the reality of the situation set in.

“He’s not stupid,” Fang said. “He’s probably found high ground until the storm passes and the lava hardens. If he’s not back in the morning, we’ll go look.”

“I have to find him
now
!” It came out as a hysterical plea, which was such a shock that I stopped struggling. I’m not usually a sniveling weenie, but this was one of the most powerful calls to action I’d ever felt: I had to find Dylan.

Not we.
I.

Fang blinked and sat back on his heels, looking at me strangely. “Tomorrow,” he repeated, and stood to go back to his barricade.

Slowly, acceptance replaced my unreasonable urge. Finally I nodded and tried to swallow my fear. As I stood up, sopping wet and filthy with ash, I asked myself a
question—the question I had seen mirrored in Fang’s dark, brooding eyes:

Would I have reacted the same way for him, or for any of my flock?

Or does Dylan make me feel… something more?

WE SET OUT the next morning toward the lake where Dylan had gone for water. By then, the heat was unbelievable. It seeped up through the uneven mounds of already-hardening lava under our feet, and the ash cloud above us held it in like a blanket. Of course, heat rises, so flying was out of the question. The least-boiling place was on the ground. We were being slow-cooked like bird-kid stew, and I was the bitter onion, so mad at Dylan I could spit.

Most of us were doing okay regulating our body temperature—mutant genes, et cetera, et cetera—but poor Akila was looking a little rough. Her tongue hung out of the side of her mouth, but there was none of her signature drool, and she was panting super loud.

“Are you all right, my darling?” Total asked, trotting
alongside her. Akila whined, and he jumped to lick her face a few times. That was just about the most real, doglike thing I’d ever seen Total do, and I’ll be honest, it kind of freaked me out.

“Once Dylan stops being an
idiot
and shows up with the water jugs, everything will be
fine
,” I said loudly. Despite our inborn sense of direction, I had no idea where we were—all landmarks were gone. Even the forest of tree stumps had disappeared under the rivers of gray deposits.

Finally we stumbled on the lake, but it wasn’t the blue thermal pool we remembered. A thick gray film covered the surface, broken only by the hundreds or thousands of silvery dead fish bobbing through it. The cloud of black flies hovering over them was even thicker than the ash.

“Well, might as well eat ’em before they rot.” Gazzy grabbed a silvery floater, brushed off the ash as best he could, and bit into the side. Then he looked up in surprise, his face as dirty and gray as the water. “Hey! It’s cooked!”

One by one we grabbed a cooked fish right out of the still-warm water, brushed off the ash, and ate our fill. One downside of our avian genes was a lightning-fast metabolism that meant we were nearly always hungry.

A little farther on, we saw it: Our precious stockpile of water was untouched, the jugs covered with ash but intact. We weren’t going to die of thirst—at least not yet.

Luck loves Maximum Ride
, I thought, cupping my hands so Akila could drink. But then my heart plummeted. If the jugs hadn’t been moved, it could only mean one thing:

Dylan hadn’t even made it this far.

For hours we stayed close to the shore where the ash was less dense, and took turns flying through the debris to search the cliffs. But the volcano was still pumping black smoke, and the air was getting harder to breathe.

I was bent over after one of these missions, hacking up some blood and wondering if my fast-healing ability included my guts, when I spotted a charred gray knob poking out of the rubble.

“Another cave bone,” I sighed. “Looks kind of femur-y.” That’s how we had known the island’s underwater tunnels had collapsed after the apocalyptic meteor: The corpses had started washing up on shore. We were still finding them, almost three months later. I didn’t know if any of the bones had belonged to my mother or my half sister. How would I be able to tell?

“Not necessarily.” Fang’s lips pressed together.

I held it up: Though charred, it was totally a human femur.

Gazzy shook his head. “It’s burned. We don’t know how old it is. The lava would’ve done that if it had been a cave corpse or someone more recently, like…”

Yesterday.

I was having trouble swallowing, trouble breathing.

“Let’s go back to the cave,” Nudge said gently. “We can try another path—”

I whirled around. “Angel, try to tap into Dylan’s thoughts. He’s got to be somewhere. He’s just hiding. Or looking for us. I’m sure he’s nearby.”

Angel looked away.

“Ig? Can’t you smell him or something?”

Iggy leaned heavily against a rock. Flakes of ash fell from his white-blond hair when he shook his head. Though his eyes were unseeing, they were full of pity.

“It’s not him,” I insisted, kicking ash back over the bones.

“It’s like Dylan’s cognitive connection just stopped,” Angel said finally. “Like with your mom and Ella—”

“We never found their bodies.” My jaw tightened. “We don’t know what happened to them. Just like we don’t know what happened… here.”

It was getting harder to say his name.

“Everything is dead, Max.” Angel’s tone was firm. “Everything except us.”

“No.”
I wanted to shake her.

“Guys.”

I looked down the beach. At first I couldn’t make out what Fang was holding, it was so black and warped. Then he turned it over, and I saw a tiny flash of color.

That spot of bright green—a shade Dylan loved, that none of us had seen since the last of the trees had died—was enough to buckle my knees, and enough to force out the awful, wounded sob that had been building in my chest all day.

Because that burned-to-cinders object Fang cradled in his hand was one of Dylan’s size-twelve sneakers.

I WATCHED THE shadow of our V moving across the water hundreds of feet below—one dog in a harness, one bird kid short on the right side—and clutched the charred sneaker tighter to my chest as my wings carried me. We couldn’t give Dylan a twelve-gun salute, or even a funeral. At least we could give him one last flight.

I banked left, and the flock fell into line behind me, following like an extension of my own body. Ahead of us, sunlight peeked through the eerie rainbow of color that had illuminated the sky since D-day. Below us, the water still churned with the rough waves left over from the tsunami, and a chain of volcanoes rose from the depths of the ocean. Their combined cloud of ash was racing to cover
everything, from the pink cliffs of the islands to the white feathers of Angel’s wings.

I’d thought flying would make me feel better, like it always had. Wind rustling my hair and muting my thoughts as I soared into the open. No sounds, no obstacles—just the ocean before us and sky all around. Freedom.

Growing up in a cage makes you really appreciate open spaces.

But it had been a while since I’d seen the world this way, and taken stock of all we’d lost. Cities.
People.
The grief felt like a cold, hard knot in the center of me, pulling me down, down into all that gray water.

I felt a hand on my left shoulder and sensed Fang’s dark figure just outside my peripheral vision. “You okay?” I nodded and slowed down, realizing we’d been flying for probably half a day.

I’d just wanted to get ahead of the cloud, to lay Dylan to rest under a clear sky. But the ash was moving too fast.

I held the shoe out and the kids hovered in a circle. It was just a shoe, just a piece of half-melted rubber. I took a breath.

You have to do it. Do it for the flock.

“Good-bye, Dylan,” I whispered.

“Good-bye,” my flock echoed.

Then I opened my fingers. Just like that.

As I watched the sneaker plummet, I remembered Dylan falling from the roof when I’d taught him to fly,
barely a year ago. The feeling of his body beside mine that night we took refuge in the desert. The tree house he had made just for me. His last words: “I’ll catch up.” Wasn’t he always trying to catch up with me? I drew a shaky breath.

No.

I dove hard, reaching toward the chunk of blackened rubber. But I was too late, and I watched the waves swallow up all that remained of Dylan.

I flipped and shot back into the sky, angry tears streaming down my face. He was just one more person who had fallen beyond my reach. Like my mom and Ella.

I’d refused to believe it. Even when Angel stopped hearing their thoughts from the underground caves, and even when the months had passed without any sign of life other than us, I couldn’t accept that we were all alone.

Their bodies could still be there, somewhere.

“Let’s turn back,” I shouted over my shoulder.

Fang looked alarmed. “You want to go back to the island?”

“It’s our home.” My words were thick, threatening another waterfall.
Their
home.

He flew up next to my ear. “Max, it’s a wasteland,” he said urgently. “And even if we
could
somehow breathe the air, we’ll never make it back before nightfall.”

“It doesn’t—”

“Them’s the rules, Max.”
Angel’s voice in my head.

“I felt a pressure change a couple of miles back—I’m pretty sure we passed land to the west,” Iggy offered from
my other side. Despite his blindness—or because of it—his other senses were sharper than razors. “It might be worth checking out.”

We’d passed other islands before, but most were tiny—no shelter, no fresh water. When we reached the one Iggy had felt, it was different. Bigger. We couldn’t even see where it ended. Actually, we couldn’t see much: Three active volcanoes just off the coast were spewing towers of lava and ash. It made us feel right at home. Not.

It was a big detour to get around them, but once we were closer to the huge island we saw square cliffs in the distance, spaced like jack-o’-lantern teeth. And near the water’s edge, a blur of something big and white and triangular.

Like sails billowing in the wind.

“Is that a ship?” My heart sped up.

Are there people here? Alive?

“No, it’s…” Nudge hesitated. “I think it’s the Sydney Opera House.”

I spun around to stare at her. “How do you know what that even looks like?”

“Because I know things,” she replied curtly. “More than you think I do.” And then, “Haven’t you ever seen
Finding Nemo
?”

I cackled. “That is not seriously what you’re basing—”

“Actually, I think
I’d
recognize the pinnacle of modern architecture,” Total said, “and that is
not
…”

I tuned him out, really studying the shoreline. I saw
the skeletal remains of a bridge in the surrounding harbor, and the white blur started to look more like a building than a boat. But it didn’t make sense—Sydney, Australia, was a huge city.

I worked my wings harder, squinting through the ash to see inland. “That would mean those weird cliffs—” Angel nodded, following my thought.

They’re skyscrapers.