Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure

“What what?”

“You were sort of smiling.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know why.”

“You know, Max,” he said after a few more minutes. We’d slowly turned in a huge circle and begun to head toward home.

I looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“You know I love you.”

I almost dropped right out of the sky. I literally forgot to flap my wings for a couple of seconds, and plummeted about fifteen feet before they started working on their own.

“I know you were programmed to love me,” I said cautiously, rising back level with Dylan.

“Maybe I was,” he said. “I don’t know. I just know I do. And I know that love has to go both ways. You might not love me now, but I hope you will, in time. I can wait. I’m not going anywhere.”

I said nothing, and we flew together wordlessly, higher and higher, as if we could touch the sky.

12

THERE WERE NO days. There were no nights. There were tubes and bright lights and indistinct voices. And pain. Always, always pain.

When Angel was finally put into a kennel, she whimpered with relief. This had to be better than the crisp white sheets, the stretcher that meant scalpels and masks and gloved hands always reaching for her. She shuddered violently, thinking of those hands, and shrank into herself. She never wanted to be touched again.

The kennel was meant for a large dog, but Angel still couldn’t stand upright in it. She felt around in the cage, her hands brushing against the cool metal of the bars. She searched for a water bottle; her throat was sore from the feeding tube. She winced as she shifted her small body in the cramped space. She was covered with bruises, and her healing wounds stung.

Angel could hear muffled voices in the hallway, echoes of footfalls on the linoleum floor, the squeak of rolling wheels—seemingly innocuous sounds that now haunted her dreams—but she didn’t cry out. She was way past that.

“Help!” she had shrieked at first, for days it seemed, as loud as she could. And later, when it was clear no help was coming, she had only croaked “Why?” as they probed and prodded, her voice a thin, wheezy rasp. But there were no answers, so she had stopped asking.

Angel had always felt stronger and more capable than everyone—well, than Max—thought she was. But in the end, she was still just a little kid, with bones that could snap and a heart that could break.

She was broken. And totally alone.

A long, silent sob trapped in her chest, Angel curled up on the thin towel in the corner of the kennel and went to sleep.

“Wake up!” a voice barked after what seemed only moments.

So it wasn’t over, then.

Her heart raced in time to the familiar fear, the dread that made her whole body quiver, but Angel resisted. For several long, delicious moments she allowed herself to indulge the fantasy that it was Max calling her to wake. Even if they were on the run, even if Max was being bossy, even if… Well, anything would be better than the reality she would find when she opened her eyes.

“Wake up! There’s no sense pretending! Your brain waves show you’re awake.”

Her blue eyes fluttered open just as a bucket of icy water was dumped on her head. Gasping, Angel scrambled farther into her corner, but she was a trapped animal, and she knew it.

The back of her head stung unbearably from the icy water and she tentatively touched it with her fingers. A small section of hair had been shaved, and a neat line of small stitches made tiny ridges under her fingers. They’d operated on her brain. A pitiful cry escaped her lips.

Max, Angel thought frantically, overwhelmed with horror. Max—help!

13

“LOOK HERE,” the voice commanded. “Pay attention.”

Angel blinked water out of her eyes and squeezed her hair, feeling chilly rivulets trickling down her back. Outside her crate, the room went dark. Angel saw extremely well in the dark, but then a lit screen flickered on, several feet away.

She saw a young child, a boy, with pale, almost white hair. He was lying on a table, very still, covered with a sheet. A crisp, white, sterile sheet. Angel shuddered involuntarily, the wounds on her body aching in response to the image.

The camera panned to look down on the boy, and Angel saw that he was in an operating room. He had a mask over his nose and mouth, and his eyes were clamped open. Angel recognized the look in them. It was a feeling she knew well: pure, undiluted terror. Angel felt an icy coldness in her temples as the view zoomed in. There, on the little boy’s neck, was the trio of freckles, right where she knew they’d be.

Iggy.

It was Iggy as a little kid. Before…

Angel swallowed hard, her eyes trained on the large screen as gowned and masked doctors came in and shone spotlights onto Iggy’s operating table. One doctor, his eyes hidden behind large magnifying glasses, spoke directly to the camera.

“Today we’re experimenting with a new technique, only recently developed. It involves a surgical stimulation of a certain area of the rods and cones in the backs of this hybrid’s eyes. We estimate that the subject will have its night vision improved by at least four hundred percent.”

Then Iggy’s panicked blue eyes filled the screen.

Angel shook her head, horrified. She couldn’t watch. They weren’t really going to make her watch…?

But the video continued, and she couldn’t look away. She stared as the scalpel found its mark and plunged in as if slicing a boiled egg, as tweezers pinched and needles probed, as blood pooled and tubes suctioned it away.

As they hacked into him, like butchers.

She listened as Iggy’s agonized moans grew more and more frenzied. They sounded visceral, verging on madness, louder and louder and louder.

He was awake. The whole time.

Angel shrank back into her crate and squeezed her own eyes shut, the screams echoing in her ears. She had just seen a film of the crazy whitecoats at the School making Iggy blind.

“No!” she wailed, her voice joining Iggy’s. “No no no no.”

The movie flickered to a stop and the room’s lights came back on.

“That was thirteen years ago,” someone said from out of view. “The techniques were unbelievably primitive, which no doubt caused the less than optimum results.”

Less than optimum? Angel thought with rising hysteria. You mean the total blindness? That result?

Once again she tried to hack into someone’s brain, the brain of even one person in this awful torture chamber. But it was like the room itself had a dampening field—she hadn’t been able to read a single thought the whole time she’d been there.

“But you see, Angel,” the voice went on smoothly, “we’ve made tremendous progress since then. Those were the days of cavemen. The science, the technique, is vastly improved. This time, it will go beautifully.”

“No,” Angel whispered again, her adrenaline surging and making her voice seem small, fuzzy. “No, please —”

A gloved hand reached for the door of her crate.

This time, they would operate on Angel. On her eyes.