Rain, Calypso—I’m coming for you.
CHAPTER 46
“Fill me in!” Nudge shouted at me as we flew.
I’d told them to fly back toward Incarceration. Fang’s bruised face had flinched at my words, but he hadn’t changed course.
“They’re being held at the Labs,” I said, then gritted my teeth. The Flock knew that. Blinking against the greasy clouds, I wondered which facts were important.
“How many of them?” Gazzy asked.
“Three,” I said.
“Good fliers?” Iggy asked.
“Uh… not fliers at all?” I said, and four pairs of eyes focused on me. “They’re just… well, freaks,” I said. “But they don’t have wings. I’m the only person I’ve ever seen who has wings. I mean, till now.”
I focused on flying while everyone looked at me. I was used to being stared at, but not by bird-people. They’ll get over it, I thought grimly, trying to move my wings more smoothly yet forcefully, the way the others seemed to.
“Okay,” Nudge said, raising her voice to be heard. “You’d called them freaks, and I just assumed—”
“Moke is taller than me,” I said. “He’s… his skin is blue. Rain is really pretty, younger than me, but her skin looks like it’s melting? Like from acid rain? Calypso is almost eight. Sometimes she knows things before they happen. She’s started growing antennas out of her back.”
I tried to breathe in on my upswings and out on my hard, downward pushes. I’d never tried to improve my flying before—it’d been enough to fly at all. But looking at the Flock, it was like I’d been on level two, maybe, of the Flying Skill Scale and they were all like on level ten.
“But they can walk?” Iggy kept up with us easily, never running into anyone, knowing when to land and all.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “They’re all doped up. Plus, there’s Clete. He’s okay, in hiding, not locked up or doped or anything.” I hoped this was still true. He’d been clean for a long time, but we’d been through some shit lately.
“So we each take one,” Nudge said, speaking to the Flock. She counted off on her fingers: “Moke, Clete, Rain, and Calypso. Fly them to safety.”
That was another thing I had to figure out—where was “safety”? Then I thought of something else. “Clete weighs about… maybe a hundred and ten kilos? And Moke is probably eighty, eighty-one kilos.”
For reference, I’m one point eight meters tall, and weigh less than fifty kilos. Iggy was the tallest of the Flock, almost a head taller than me, and weighed, I guessed, less than sixty-five kilos.
“A hundred and ten kilos?” Fang repeated, his voice still raspy.
“Shit,” I said miserably. “I didn’t think about any of this. I just want to get them out of the Labs.”
“And then?” Iggy asked, sounding a bit ticked off.
“And then I’ll figure it out!” I said loudly, working my wings extra hard to shoot ahead of them. We were close enough to the Labs that I had to trust them enough to take the gun off them. I’d need my hands free when we got there. “I always do!”
There it was, right ahead of me: the Complex. Which we’d just left an hour before. Inside, I was furious and embarrassed about my lack of planning. Had I thought we’d just go back to the Children’s Home to wait for the next time they needed lab rats? The truth was, the only places that were at all safe were the tops of tall, empty buildings. And what would my gang do up there? Plus, more and more I’d heard about the families of the Six starting to move into the empty buildings, make new headquarters there.
“The Children’s Home is down there,” I said, pointing. “I’m gonna go down, see if my friend Clete is there.”
“Okay,” Fang said.
“Okay,” I said awkwardly, then angled my wings back and flat to dive. What did Fang think of me? Was he disappointed in me? Had he hoped for someone else for a daughter? Did it upset him that the first thing I did when we broke him out of jail was point a gun at him?
If so, he should have goddamn been here for my childhood, goddamnit! Because the truth was I might have pointed a gun at him anyway!
I landed quietly behind the trash dumpster in the courtyard. I’d scanned the area for guards but couldn’t see any. Over at Incarceration, the place was lit up like Crismins, floodlights everywhere, choppers circling overhead.
Well, a lot of prisoners had escaped. And there was a