Gazzy took a lump of modeling clay out of his backpack and handed it to me.
“We want long, thin flat sheets,” he said, showing me how to smack it and stretch it.
“Where’s the explosive?” I asked again. Why was he having me play with clay? Had they been lying to me? Was this all a joke?
Gazzy looked at me in surprise and held up his own modeling clay. “This is it.”
“C-10 then, Gaz?” Iggy asked.
“Easier to get than Semtex6,” Gazzy told him. He’d already molded two flat sheets and had laid them in a row across the roof. I handed him mine, still confused. He saw my face and explained, “C-10 is a moldable explosive. But it doesn’t explode by itself, so it’s great to carry around, have handy. Not even a bullet could make it explode.” He leaned toward me eagerly, warming up to this topic.
“Here we go,” Nudge murmured as we all automatically ducked from the floodlights.
“What does C-10 stand for?” I asked.
“Composition number ten,” Gazzy said happily, laying down two more sheets. “It’s made up of a bunch of different things. They keep making it better, refining it. This number ten stuff is amazing—easy to control its explosion, much lighter in weight, and you use much less than C-5 or even C-8.”
Nudge met my eyes and gave me a pointed look, like, Do not ask him about explosives again.
The Gasman gazed off in the distance, I guess thinking about how awesome C-8 had been or something. We all ducked under the sweep of the floodlights, and Iggy said, “Ready, Gazzy?”
“Oh, one more thing,” Gazzy said, getting back to work. He fiddled with some gadgets, pressed a wire down all the thin sheets of the C-10, then stood up and nodded. “Let’s go over here.” We all flattened ourselves toward the edge of the building, and Gazzy punched some numbers into his phone.
“Duck!” Nudge said, and I dropped my head to the roof and covered it with my hands. Instantly, no questions—just like she’d told me to.
There was an amazingly huge explosion. The roof shook below me as the whole building swayed. Glass sprayed from the windows in the Labs, and there was immediate chaos. Lights swung wildly, alarms shrieked, and from below I heard hundreds of people yelling.
We crawled forward through the debris of concrete chunks, heavy metal wire, and bits of light fixtures. There was a big, rough hole in the middle of the ceiling, about two and a half meters wide and a bit more than three meters long.
Nudge, Iggy, and Gazzy looked at one another and smiled, then turned to me.
“Let’s go get Fang,” Iggy said.
CHAPTER 41
Max
The metal table was cool beneath my cheek. I had drooled, and I felt sticky from it. Hey, this is the unvarnished account of my life, okay? You don’t want gross stuff, don’t read it!
I felt a cold draft on the skin of my back. It all came back to me in one horrific thought: they had cut off my wings. Oh, my god. A bird-person without wings is just a… person. A tall, weirdly skinny person. I mean—Fang had a metal wing. It worked. But two metal wings? Two wings that weren’t part of me, my body, my brain? I couldn’t see how they could work. They might as well go ahead and kill me.
“What are we waiting for, goddamnit!” McCallum wasn’t worried about waking me up. It sounded like he was right there, but he was on a vidscreen.
“I had to rethink my strategy!” the doctor said testily. “The micro scan showed some nerves and arteries looped across an unexpected bone between the wings!”
“An unexpected bone? Surely you can do better than that, doctor. Pretend she’s a holiday turkey. And I. Want. A. Wing.”
I hated McCallum so much. But… thoughts started lining up in my numb, drugged brain. They… they hadn’t operated yet! And yes! I sent a signal to my primary feathers, and they responded, Right here! I still had my wings, I still had my wings!
That meant—I had to ditch this place. I was on my own. I couldn’t hope for anybody to break me out, couldn’t hope for the doctor to have a change of heart and be a decent man. This was on me. I was cold, and on an operating table surrounded by insane people, but surely I had a few things going for me?
Okay—one thing: I wasn’t nearly as sedated as they thought. Two: I recognized this place—after all that