confused with someone?”
He turned his head so I’d be sure to hear him the first time. “I think we’re all pretty sure that you’re both fantastic and obnoxious, an almost guaranteed outcome of Max plus Fang.”
I started to say something about where the obnoxiousness had come from but pressed my lips together. No more Drop the Phoenix.
“Do you know for sure where we’re going?” I asked instead.
“Yes.”
“Do you know for sure Max is there?”
“Eighty percent sure,” Fang said.
“What happens if this is the twenty percent?”
“Then we keep looking. It took almost nine years to find you. I came to get you while the others kept looking for Max. I figured out the best way to you was through the prison. And right when I got myself arrested in that hellhole of a city, Gazzy found Max.”
The air rushed through my mohawk and made my longer hair stream out behind me. My eyes watered from the chilly wind but I didn’t dare let go to wipe them, or my nose, for fear of triggering a Drop the Phoenix. A thousand other questions filled my head, but I didn’t know where to start. He said—they all said—that he was my dad. And I knew I looked like him. Somewhat. Okay, a lot. Did that mean I got to ask him anything? He was still scary sometimes. I’d seen him get angry, and I didn’t want to get him angry at me. At least, any more than I had to.
Gazzy, Nudge, and Iggy had been helping to fill in the blanks. But just a little. As if there was some stuff they didn’t want to tell me. Some things it hurt too much to remember or talk about. I was like, you’re talking to someone who grew up on the streets of the City of the Dead. I bet you can’t shock me.
Except they could shock me, and they did. They shocked me every time they were kind or acted like they cared about me. Or when they wanted me to be with them on purpose. Sometimes just by looking at me. Nudge could make me practically cry by the way she looked at me.
I mean, was this going to be my life from now—
“Uh-oh,” Fang muttered and nodded at Gazzy.
“No! No more freaking goddamn Drop the Phoenix!” I bellowed. “If you drop me, I’ll take a bunch of your hair out with me, I swear by the sun!”
“No,” Fang murmured, reaching way back to pat my shoulder. “Look. Up ahead.”
There it was, shining in the middle of this freaking huge ocean. It looked like an enormous rock, but there was a metal cagelike thing covering the whole place. Right now, three helicopters were hovering over it. Soon we were close enough to hear megaphones.
I glanced at the others. They looked grim.
“Looks like we found Max,” Nudge said with a tight smile.
CHAPTER 68
“What is that place?” I asked Fang.
The Flock had quickly risen upward and was now circling about four kilometers above the rock, the helicopters, the noise.
“Here, switch to Nudge for a minute,” Fang said, angling over her. Something in his voice made me do it without question, jumping off of him and landing on Nudge’s back, perfectly between her wings, aligning my body with hers. Weird that I already trusted these people enough to try something like that.
“But what is that place?” I asked again.
“It’s one of the highest-security prisons in the world,” Gazzy said, his voice unusually solemn.
“Why… is Max in prison?” I remembered why Fang had been imprisoned—for killing a bunch of kids. I almost didn’t want to know about Max.
“A job went wrong,” Nudge said simply. “Max was caught. This was only a few months after she and Fang left you with our friend. She’s been missing for ten years.” Her voice sounded thick with tears, and I saw her quickly swipe one hand over her eyes.
“What makes you so sure she’s down there?”
Gazzy answered, finding a current and gliding in a big circle. “One, this is the last Class D prison left for us to check. If this doesn’t pan out, we’ll move on to all the Class C prisons—like any of those could hold her. Two, the metal cage on top. Putting a cover on high walls, on a rock two hundred kilometers from anything in the middle of cold, shark-infested water, seems a bit like overkill. Makes you wonder what they’ve got in there.”
“Just a bit,” Fang said, peering downward.
“Three,” Iggy said, now continuing, “experience