eyes.
“Let’s see what other pearls of propaganda the cult sent to Ella,” I said.
Nudge expertly turned the innards of Ella’s phone inside out, which revealed a bunch of scientific gibberish about unraveling DNA strands and inserting alternate DNA and RNA into the them. It sounded eerily familiar. Like we-were- injected-with-bird-DNA-and-raised-in-cages familiar. Angel raised an eyebrow at me, reading my thoughts, and I remembered her panicked message at Ella’s school about humanicide.
I sat back and let out a long breath. “Well, I guess we’ve got a date with doom,” I said melodramatically.
“What do you mean?” Dylan asked.
“Looks like Ella’s definitely at the facility. If she’s all cute and cuddly with the Doomsday Group, we have to go save her, even if she tries to eat our brains,” I said. “We leave in five minutes.”
43
“WHOA! WHAT’S DOWN there?” Dylan pointed to a small flame on the ground, about a mile away. The six of us, plus Total, had set off from my mom’s house and headed southeast when it was already getting dark, and now we were about five or six miles from the Gen 77 facility.
I peered closer, then remembered Dylan’s vision was way better than mine. “You’re asking
“Looks like a campfire.” He squinted. “Bunch of people sitting around it.”
“My guess is a hellions’ hootenanny,” I said, and Dylan chuckled. “A what?”
He shook his head. Even in the dark, I could sense his rather, um,
Anyone looking up and paying attention would have seen us, seven dark silhouettes against the moon. But these people weren’t paying attention to us. They were gathered around their campfire, singing songs and roasting marshmallows. We circled silently overhead, descending lower and lower, and I think we all spotted her at almost the same time.
“Ella!” Total shouted but shut up pretty quick when I elbowed him in his furry ribs. The culties seemed too lobotomized to notice.
My half sister was sitting there, holding a skewered marshmallow over the fire, singing along with the others. I didn’t recognize the song. They’d put new words to something traditional, and it took several minutes for me to make out the refrain:
“We’ll all go out together when we go
Yes, we’ll all go out together when we go
Oh, how the world will die
In great fire from the sky
Yes, we’ll all go out together when we go.”
“Call me old-fashioned,” Total huffed, “but I’ll take ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’ over that anytime.”
“Yeah,” said Nudge. “I mean, grim much?”
We climbed about a thousand feet so we could talk normally. “Ig, have I told you lately how happy I am to have you back from loony land?” I said. He smiled, but it was clear he was really shaken up about Ella. “Okay, flock. Suggestions?”
“A raid!” Gazzy said. “A blitz! I’ll make a diversion, a little ways away, you guys swoop down, grab her—”
“They’re pretty far away from the facility, but we don’t want to do anything that might show up on surveillance,” I interrupted him.
“Basic hand-to-hand combat?” Dylan suggested.
“That would work, but then we’d have a bunch of beaten-up kids with stories to tell,” I pointed out.
“I have an idea,” said Iggy.
44
AND SO IT WAS that the Great White Spirit descended from the heavens and appeared to the lost pilgrims in the desert.
Iggy floated gently down through the smoke. With the firelight shining on him and smoke plumes wreathing around his head and wings, he did sort of look like a scruffy angel. You know, if God had a sense of humor about it.
Now, Iggy is nearly six feet tall and superskinny. He has really pale skin, reddish-blond hair, and practically
