Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure

what would happen if he didn’t escape right now.

He gave another sudden jerk, surging against their grips with all of his strength, and… they let go.

Suddenly, he was free.

Free-falling, that is, hurled into empty space, toward the crashing waves of Lake Michigan, broken wing and all. Right off the edge of the cliff.

40

ANGEL SCREAMED FOR what felt like eons, until her own wordless howl hurt her head so much that she shut up. Her throat was raw, her eyes like sandpaper and still unseeing.

She’d had another horribly real nightmare—this time, Fang was the one who was dead. She’d seen him falling, falling…. Just like she’d seen Maya.

And now Maya was dead.

Angel winced, pressing fingers to her throbbing temples. She lived her own nightmare while she was awake, and she lived others’ nightmares when she slept. There was no escape. No escape, ever…

Fang.

Angel concentrated, but she couldn’t figure out the ending. She wanted to see, needed to see what happened next, even if it was as bad as she feared it was.

But she couldn’t.

In her vision, Fang was in a different place than last time. Instead of an empty red desert, the scene had been misty and chilly looking. Instead of the two girls from his gang, there had been three guys there, guys she didn’t recognize but instinctively hated. There had been a car. A sunshine-yellow convertible.

And there had been a cliff, dropping sharply and hopelessly down.

Angel felt tears prick her eyes as she relived the last part of the vision. What stuck with her most was the way they’d smiled, those three guys. They’d been beaming like lunatics as they hurled Fang over, leaning over the ledge to watch him fall.

Angel had waited impatiently for Fang to spread his wings and soar away—grinning triumphantly at the evil humans who’d thought they could hurt a bird kid by tossing him into the open air. Ha, ha, morons! Eat my wind!

But… he hadn’t.

Hadn’t smiled, hadn’t taunted them. Hadn’t spread his wings and soared away.

He’d just dropped, his body twisting and turning awkwardly in the air.

He’d looked broken.

Angel had screamed herself awake from the nightmare right before Fang hit the ground.

But maybe… A tiny part of her whispered, even as she tried to block it out.

Maybe it hadn’t been a nightmare after all. Maybe it had been a… vision.

No. No way. She squeezed her eyes shut. “It was a nightmare,” she said aloud. “It wasn’t real.”

Like now, she thought. Like the nightmare she was in the middle of living.

Right then a screeching, grating sound filled Angel’s ears, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“Not real, not real,” she whispered, even as she shrank back into the shadows of her dog crate.

Moments later, the door to her crate swung open. She pulled herself against the back wall as tightly as she could, ready to come out kicking and punching and screaming.

She expected to feel human hands clenching her, but the sensation was cold, hard, and flat—terrifyingly mechanical. Two large metal paddles had reached in with an awful, gear-grinding sound. They practically filled the crate—there was no way to avoid them. Angel ducked high and low, but eventually the paddles closed in on her, clamping onto her body firmly, leaving her no room to writhe or wiggle free.

With more metallic grinding, the paddles began to retreat, dragging Angel out of the dog crate roughly. Then she found herself suspended in midair, held up by what must have been two warehouse cargo-moving forceps. She shouted and twisted this way and that as she moved through empty air. Then she was dumped unceremoniously on a hard surface. She felt the crisp sheets crinkle against her legs and almost wept with defeat.

An operating table.

Again.

She was too exhausted to struggle. What was the point? They would find a way to make her cooperate. She had no more tears left, so she lay dry-eyed as her arms and legs were clamped to the sides of the table.

“This is for your own good,” someone told her—a whitecoat whose voice she didn’t recognize. “We need to make sure there’s no way you can escape these tests.”

Angel’s heart clenched. More tests. What could they possibly do now? Hadn’t they already taken samples of skin, bone, blood, and feathers? How could they not know every square inch of her, down to the cellular level?

Another pair of cold metal forceps moved along her shoulder blades. They reached under her back, then forcibly unfurled her wings, pulling them out from beneath her. Her wings, too, were clamped to the operating table.

She tried to fight the nausea, but felt bile rising in her throat.

They’d never done this before. Never.

A whole new level of fear streaked through Angel’s body. She realized what was coming right before it actually happened.

Small snipping noises filtered into her brain, followed by a pinching sensation at her primary feathers.

“Done,” the whitecoat said. “Good little mutant.” He left the lab, his footsteps fading away as the door closed, leaving Angel clamped to the operating table. She remained silent the entire time, mute with shock and horror.

They’d clipped her wings.

41

EVERYTHING IS ABOUT to change, the Voice said. Prepare yourselves.

Every single member of the flock heard it.

Your task is to record what happens.

Nudge yelped and dropped the bottle of glue, leaving a glittery blue stain on her scrapbook.

“What—” she began, but was interrupted by the Voice.

Write, blog, take videos on a cell phone—it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you record everything, down to the last detail. Everything. You have to record it all—for the future.

A Voice in her head. Another huge clue that she was a freak. Nudge wanted to cry, wanted to scream at the Voice to leave her alone, to let her at least pretend to be kind of normal! Nudge clenched her jaw and determinedly went back to making her scrapbook of normal, wingless girls.

Nudge, this is about the future. In the future, you will be normal. In the future, you might even get sick of feeling average. But right now, the world needs you. The Voice sounded unusually gentle. This task is the most important thing you will ever do for humankind. So get up, grab your phone, and start keeping a log—for the future.

Nudge hesitated. This felt really urgent. She didn’t want any part of this. But she knew one thing: Max never went against the Voice. Nudge sighed, her shoulders slumping. There would be no normalcy today. “Okay,” Nudge said, defeated. “Okay.”

Don’t let Max out of your sight.

Iggy and the Gasman, in separate rooms, both sat up, listening. The Voice. They’d heard it only once or twice before. They were hearing it now. Like before, it seemed important, vital, that they do what it said.

You must protect Max at any cost—even your own lives, the Voice said.