Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure

“Dylan’s right that this thing’s big,” Angel says after a few minutes. “I’m tapping into Dr. Martinez’s thoughts, and they’re monitoring satellite connections all over the world from inside the caves. This wasn’t the only event. It’s triggered a ripple effect. There’s been major volcanic and tectonic activity. Whole countries may be covered in water, ash, or flame. It’s unclear at this point.”

The two of us are silent for a long moment, letting that sink in—that the whole world and probably most of the people we know in it are done for.

“I’m so glad that it wasn’t me, that it wasn’t us,” Angel says, her eyes brimming with tears. “Isn’t that selfish?”

I shake my head. “It’s not selfish. We’re here. We’re alive. I’m not going to apologize for surviving.” That might sound harsh, but through the grief and the devastation, I can’t help feeling hope, too. If you could choose between life and death, wouldn’t you leap toward living with everything you had?

No one wanted life as we knew it to end. But we were made for this. Surviving, I mean. And the truth is, we weren’t that great at fitting in to life as we knew it, anyway. In fact, life as we knew it kind of sucked. Stuck in cages, trackers implanted beneath our skin, all that power they shoveled between us, turning us into sideshow freaks.

That’s all over now. The whitecoats only know how to live in a world where they can have cushy homes and order factory-farmed, premade food. This is definitely not their world.

It’s ours.

“I know what you mean,” Angel says, reading my thoughts. Her blue eyes have a faraway look, and even without the ash in her feathers, she looks older, more mature. Like she grew a century in an hour. Like she grew into that Voice of hers. “It’s almost like we were meant for this world, and not that other one. Like it’s finally our time.”

It’s a dark thought, but one I can’t turn away from. This is an environment that requires a little something extra from its inhabitants. Half of it is underwater. And we have gills. The other half is made of unreachable cliffs and towering trees. And we have wings. This place is primal, and it’s raw.

I was made for this.

And if I’m going to start this new life being who I am truly meant to be, there is something I know I have to do.

I look beyond Angel’s windblown curls and see that Fang has returned and is looking at me.

I walk over to him, our gazes fully locked. And when I reach him, I don’t hesitate to say what I know is the most important truth of my life. The only truth.

“I love you, Fang,” I whisper.

He smiles and takes my hand.

We stand together on the precipice, opening our wings to their full span and watching the long feathery shadows reach out over the land below.

In a way, maybe I did die in that wet grave, because it’s like I was completely reborn when I came up from that water. The air feels different to me now. I’m breathing it differently now. Like my body is a whole new machine.

It is my time.

The time of Maximum Ride.

I have some really bad secrets to share with someone, and it might as well be you—a stranger, a reader of books, but most of all, a person who can’t hurt me. So here goes nothing, or maybe everything. I’m not sure if I can even tell the difference anymore.

The night my parents died—after they’d been carried out in slick black body bags through the service elevator—my brother Matthew shouted at the top of his powerful lungs, “My parents were vile, but they didn’t deserve to be taken out with the trash!”

He was right about the last part—and, as things turned out, the first part as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Please forgive me…. I do that a lot.

I’d been asleep downstairs, directly under my parents’ bedroom, when it happened. So I never heard a thing—no frantic thumping, no terrified shouting, no fracas at all. I woke up to the scream of sirens speeding up Central Park West, maybe one of the most common sounds in New York City.

But that night it was different.

The sirens stopped right downstairs. That was what caused me to wake up with a hundred-miles-an-hour heartbeat. Was the building on fire? Did some old neighbor have a stroke?

I threw off my double layer of blankets, went to my window, and looked down to the street, nine dizzying floors below. I saw three police cruisers and what could have been an unmarked police car parked on Seventy- second Street, right at the front gates of our apartment building, the exclusive and infamous Dakota.

A moment later our intercom buzzed, a jarring blat-blat that punched right through my flesh and bones.

Why was the doorman paging us? This was crazy.

My bedroom was the one closest to the front door, so I bolted through the living room, hooked a right at the sharks in the aquarium coffee table, and passed between Robert and his nonstop TV.

When I reached the foyer, I stabbed at the intercom button to stop the irritating blare before it woke up the whole house.

I spoke in a loud whisper to the doorman through the speaker: “Sal? What’s happening?”

“Miss Tandy? Two policemen are on the way up to your apartment right now. I couldn’t stop them. They got a nine-one-one call. It’s an emergency. That’s what they said.”

“There’s been a mistake, Sal. Everyone is asleep here. It’s after midnight. How could you let them up?”

Before Sal could answer, the doorbell rang, and then fists pounded the door. A harsh masculine voice called out, “This is the police.”

I made sure the chain was in place and then opened the door—but just a crack.

I peered out through the opening and saw two men in the hallway. The older one was as big as a bear but kind of soft-looking and spongy. The younger one was wiry and had a sharp, expressionless face, something like a hatchet blade, or… no, a hatchet blade is exactly right.

The younger one flashed his badge and said, “Sergeant Capricorn Caputo and Detective Ryan Hayes, NYPD. Please open the door.”

Capricorn Caputo? I thought. Seriously? “You’ve got the wrong apartment,” I said. “No one here called the police.”

“Open the door, miss. And I mean right now.”

“I’ll get my parents,” I said through the crack. I had no idea that my parents were dead and that we would be the only serious suspects in a double homicide. I was in my last moment of innocence.

But who am I kidding? No one in the Angel family was ever innocent.

“Open up, or my partner will kick down the door!” Hatchet Face called out.

It is no exaggeration to say that my whole family was about to get a wake-up call from hell. But all I was thinking at that particular moment was that the police could not kick down the door. This was the Dakota. We could get evicted for allowing someone to disturb the peace.

I unlatched the chain and swung the door open. I was wearing pajamas, of course; chick-yellow ones with