Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure

My adrenaline finally caught up to the insanity and the world rushed back into place. I scrambled to my feet, looking around wildly. I didn’t know what I was looking for—just an answer, a direction I could follow.

“Everybody’s at the caves!” Fang wheezed over the now furious wind. Smoke and ash billowed around us.

I shook my head stubbornly. “Not Angel,” I croaked, my throat raw. Fang looked me in the eye and saw what else I couldn’t say: Or Dylan.

They’d be at the cliffs, rounding up the rest of the community.

Like I should’ve been from the start.

Together, in silent agreement, Fang and I shot into the sky. A few hundred meters away, all the trees were scorched—a few more seconds of that heat and we would’ve been human fireworks. As we raced over the smoking jungle toward the coastline, we saw trees crashed down on one another like dominoes. Their trunks were stripped of bark and branches from where the fire had come.

Suddenly then there was a bang like nothing I’d ever heard—like a bomb connected to an amp had been detonated right inside my skull. It sounded like what the fiery explosion should’ve sounded like, but it came more than a full minute later.

It was like I’d been shot.

I felt it in my teeth, and vibrating through my brain.

I felt it in my wings as I flapped and spun uncontrollably.

It sang through my eardrums and made my eyes blur.

And then we were falling.

Down.

Down.

Like Angel knew we would.

I watched, helpless, as the ash whirled around and the jutting precipice of rock raced up to meet me.

Then the eyes of the world winked shut.

85

GET UP, A fuzzy voice shrieked. Get up get up get up. It sounded water-soaked, low and slow. Was it my Voice, or Angel’s, or someone else’s entirely? I didn’t even know if it was real.

The ringing in my head grew, turning into a sound like the hiss of rushing water, an echo bouncing around like a rubber ball inside my head. Wind whipped around me and the hiss grew to a wail. My brain throbbed.

I covered my ears and felt wetness. The metallic smell of blood burned in my nostrils. I pried open my eyes, and that’s when the hurricane-strength needles of rain started to hit my face.

I turned to look for help and felt my stomach lurch as a strong arm yanked me back, keeping me from plummeting over the edge of the cliff. “Get up!” Fang yelled in my face, finally piercing through my confusion and dragging me to my feet.

I looked across the cliffs for the other kids, but saw only a wall of water out in the sea. Not just a wall—a massive wall, miles long and taller than a skyscraper. Surrounding us. The monstrous wave grew more massive by the second, almost blotting out the smoking sky as it surged toward the precarious crag we clung to.

A mega-tsunami.

I instinctively tried to flap, but a searing pain shot through my mangled, bleeding wing. Panic froze my heart. This was it.

There would be no more.

I felt a sob of self-pity building in my chest, but Fang held my face in his hands and looked at me urgently, his eyes locked on mine.

“I love you, Max,” Fang said, and those words, the ones I’d been waiting to hear forever, towered above all the chaos, making everything else fall away. Whole universes were built and destroyed by those words. There were tears in his eyes. “God, Max, I love you so much.”

I know, I thought. I’ve always known.

Then Fang’s stormy eyes grew blacker than I’d ever seen them as they looked past me, at our fate. I turned to see the wave swelling toward us, seconds away, the white foam of its mouth howling higher and higher. But I wasn’t surprised, or scared, or even angry. I accepted it like a friendly wind, come to fly me home.

It’s okay, I thought. And it was.

Fang kissed my eyelids, my cheeks, and then my lips one more time, whisper soft. Then he clutched my head to his chest and we took one last deep breath, wrapping ourselves in each other’s arms for eternity as the warm water crashed over the cliff and swallowed us whole.

I love you, too, Fang.

Epilogue

MAX’S

LAST

WORDS

NOW, DON’T GET all weepy on me, dear reader. No chin-quivering or nose-sniveling, either. These pages do not need to be all soggy with your mucus.

There’s nothing to moan and groan about, anyway. The truth is, I am the luckiest girl in the world.

Don’t give me that I-can-see-right-through-you-Max- and-not-just-because-you’re-freaking-dead look. I’m serious.

Think about it. When the end comes, will you be buried in the arms of the one you love? Of the one who knew you your whole life, who loved you your whole life? The one person who could really and truly love you like you needed to be loved?

I hope so.

Because I was, and I wouldn’t change any of it—not for anything.

Not even the world.

Okay, I can see that you’re upset. I know you must be wondering, just like I’m wondering right now: Was I really supposed to save the world, or was it all just a big lie?

In other words, did I fail? (Gosh, it sounds so ugly when you put it like that.)

Or was my life just a metaphor for what we’re all supposed to do with our lives— that each of us is supposed to believe that we can, that we must save the world? That the world will be saved only if we each take that kind of responsibility?

Because if this life has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t leave anything up to fate or chance, or for someone else to clean up. Because in the end, “special” people are still just people. Because, PS, those so-called special people can’t actually save us.

We all have to save ourselves.

Or maybe this was a lesson in carpe ever-loving diem—seize the day, kiddos, and hold tight to your loved ones, the only part of life that really matters, and live each moment to the fullest, because you never know when an explosive ball of gas is going to light up the sky and blow you into oblivion.

But no, really.

Was it all just a big shrug of meaninglessness that will now plunge you into a pit of existential emptiness and melancholy?

I hope not. At least, don’t blame me for it. What, carrying the weight of the whole world wasn’t enough? I have to look out for your happiness, too?

Jokes aside, I really do hope that my life meant something in the end—that it meant all of those things. I don’t know what’s next—what any of us can expect—but I do know