you put on one finger, because you can’t stab anybody with those). Basically anything they could part with, which meant anything they couldn’t turn into a weapon. They shouted things that made the back of Clete’s neck go bright red, but I didn’t have time to listen to them. I had to plan.
Okay, Hawk, I thought, let’s start thinking about the Labs.
The Labs were very bad. Being taken to the Labs meant your time was up. That keeping you alive wasn’t as important as McCallum finding out if you could live through a new biological weapon, or a new vaccine, or a new treatment for getting all the heavy metals out of your blood. I’ll save some time here and tell you the answer is no, to all. You do not live through it. If by some reason you sort of do and they bring you back to the Children’s Home, you won’t last long. You’ll be like a corn husk, like a walnut shell, with nothing inside. Then you’ll die, and whoever’s left calls the soldiers and they take you away again, this time to dump you over the city wall with the rest of the trash.
“Phoenix!”
Automatically I looked up, looked around. And realized with horror that it was the new prisoner talking. He was looking at me through the bars in his cell. I gave a fierce frown and prodded Clete between his shoulder blades so he would hurry up.
“Phoenix!” the prisoner said again. He pushed his face between the bars, staring at me. I ignored him.
“I knew it was too much to hope that you would still be waiting for us after all this time,” the prisoner said, speaking loudly to make sure I heard. “But I still hoped. And then I saw you from the courtyard!”
My jaw was tight as I marched forward. A few more steps and I’d be past his cell.
“I’d recognize you anywhere,” the creep went on. “Because you look like me. Phoenix, I’m your father. Don’t you remember Dad-man? And Mom?”
My eyes flared and I turned slowly to look at him. “My name is Hawk, asshole! I don’t need your crap and your lie…” My voice trailed off as I realized that, actually, he did kind of look like me. Without the mohawk, the tattoos, and the piercings. And a man. But we had the same black hair, black eyes, thin nose, narrow mouth.
Suddenly my exhaustion and loss of blood made me sway, made the jail go fuzzy and gray for a moment. I grabbed Clete’s shirt and managed to keep my balance. He’d turned at the criminal’s words and now was looking back and forth between us.
“I don’t have parents,” I bit out. “You think I would be here if I had parents?”
The killer winced as if I had slapped him. “You do have parents!” he said, his voice hoarse. “Your mom and I named you Phoenix. We’ve been trying to get back to you for ten years. Your mom is… an amazing revolutionary. Her name is Max. Maximum Ride.”
I held on to Clete as the floor went out from under me, and then I fell, down, down into darkness.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 19
Max
I ran out of wall space to mark the days going by maybe a year ago? Three years? No idea. I’m not super tied into reality these days.
These days. The Powers That Be had been especially cruel, putting me on the top floor of Devil’s Hill. Its real name is McCallum Island Penitentiary. No one calls it that, and Devil’s Hill is a much more fitting name, anyway. But here on the top floor, my window—maybe twenty centimeters by forty, forty-five centimeters?—I’ve never gotten used to this metric crap. Anyway, the “window” that’s too small for any humanoid of any age to fit through, and yet has thick bars every four inches—damnit—ten centimeters—anyway, that window actually looks out on sky. I can see blue sky. I can see scary dark thunderclouds roiling toward me. I can see lightning flash, making my cell glow for a metric fraction of a second. I can hear birds, seabirds, calling hoarsely to each other, but I usually can’t see the suckers. And I sure can’t join them, fly freely among them, swerving and dipping and wafting along on a warm updraft, like I used to.
Sometimes I think that’s exactly why they put me here, in a cell with a window. Other prisoners would think this was the high life, would do just about anything