to get a glimpse of the view I’ve got. Not me. For me, that window and slice of sky is pure torture. And torture is what McCallum’s good at, making me think about being free. Being able to fly. Like I used to.
Like I used to. That’s the phrase of the moment. Of the Year. Of the Years. Everything I’d once had, had once been, was like I used to. Thoughts started to creep coldly into my mind, the savage fingers gripping my memory and forcing me to see—Iggy. The Gasman. Angel. Nudge. And… Fang. And my baby. My baby Phoenix. Because Max + Fang = Phoenix.
I’d been there when she’d first walked, first spoken (her first word was Why?), and first flown. I couldn’t call it flying, actually. Just the memory of it made me laugh. Have you ever laughed at the thing that caused you the most pain of your life? That was me, remembering five-year-old Phoenix, running and jumping, letting her wings out. She’d been practicing constantly, working on her down-push so she’d have enough power to catch air in her feathers.
This time she was astonished as she rose three feet into the air, five feet, seven feet, still working her wings, already sharp and beautiful even at five years, their colors a glorious mix of Fang’s and mine.
“Get ready,” I murmured to Fang.
“On it,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
And at ten feet in the air, she crashed into the apple tree she was under. How could she have not noticed that she was standing in its shadow? She rose right up into it, breaking some small branches, getting scratched… and totally losing her focus and momentum. She made an anguished, silent face, then fell, a disappointed, feathery mass, into her father’s arms—where she promptly had a temper tantrum at not being allowed to immediately go back up.
“That was so goddamn cute,” Nudge had said.
That was as far as I got down memory lane before it turned into Memory Road to Hell, and the pain of losing them, losing all of them, just gutted me, left me kneeling on the ground, pounding the concrete until my fists bled. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”
And that’s why I try not to remember. Anything. My “childhood.” My awkward teenage years, which were spent on the run from Erasers, crazed robots, mad teachers, anarchists—
Then the explosions. The chaos. The destruction that had forced us underground for years. Phoenix had been born underground, had spent her first few years living in tunnels, like a rabbit or a mole. When we surfaced, when she felt actual sunshine on her toddler face, reacting with pure shock to the outside world, my heart had burst. She had pointed at the sun and said, “What’s that?”
No kid should live in a world where they don’t know what the sun is, I’d told myself. And I’d promised I was going to make up for the hell of her first years with nothing but paradise to follow.
But paradise couldn’t last forever. Here my memories began to shred and fragment, overlaid with the constant, head-splitting noise of McCallum, day and night. He promised, cajoled, reprimanded, raged. None of it meant anything. I saw others shrink beneath his weapon of the Voxvoce, which made grown men and women cry and fall to the ground. Sometimes they just screamed, hands over their ears, trying to escape the lances and blades of vicious noise, their own sanity winking in and out, like my memories.
My mind grew cloudy and my memories faded like woodsmoke as soon as I tried to capture them. I didn’t know what had happened or why me and my flock were suddenly on the run again after years of peace. I’d tried to remember so many times, until tears ran down my face, and headaches raged along with my temper.
I’d been interrogated. That was just a Sunday walk in the park for me—I could be interrogated all day long, and in the end, the questioners would be ready to tear their hair out, more frustrated than I was by a long shot. I’d be fine. Bloodied, sore, but fine. That is, as long as I knew that Phoenix was safe with her dad or one of my flock. No one else. Ever.
Then… I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. I can’t even imagine what kind of scenario would have made me leave my baby, my firstborn. The world must have been about