Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports Read online

  His face flushed as he caught their expressions, and I felt really sorry for him. He’d gone from being a cute three-year-old kid to being a hulking patchwork monster within four short years. He knew what he looked like, knew he was dying, and he didn’t understand why any of it had happened.

  101

  “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I told the whitecoats, and they almost jumped when I spoke, staring at me with new curiosity.

  “Ah, hallo,” one guy said in heavily accented English. “We will ask you some questions, okay?”

  I rolled my eyes, and they murmured excitedly among themselves.

  “You have a name, yes?” he said, pen ready over his clipboard.

  “Yes,” I said. “My name is seven-five-nine-nine-three-nine-ex-dash-one. Junior.” I heard ter Borcht hiss over at his desk, but he stayed out of it.

  The whitecoat looked at me in confusion, then turned to Nudge. “What is your name?”

  Nudge thought. “Jessica,” she decided. “Jessica Miranda Alicia Tangerine Butterfly.” She looked pleased with her name, and smiled at me.

  The whitecoats murmured among themselves again, and I heard one of them whisper, “Butterfly?”

  They turned to Angel. “We will call you Little One,” the leader said, obviously deciding to dispense with the whole confusing name thing.

  “Okay,” Angel said agreeably. “I’ll call you Guy in a White Lab Coat.” He frowned.

  “That can be his Indian name,” I suggested.

  One of the other ones spoke up. “Tell us about your sense of direction. How does it work?” They all looked at me expectantly.

  “Well, it’s like I have a GPS inside me,” I told them. “One of the talking ones. I tell it where I want to go, and it tells me, Go twenty miles, turn left, take Exit Ninety-four, and so on. It can be pretty bossy, frankly.”

  Their eyes widened. “Really?” said one.

  “No, you idiot,” I said in disgust. “I don’t know how it works. I just know it has an unfailing ability to point me in the opposite direction of a bunch of boneheads.”

  Now they looked a little irritated. I gave them another, say, five minutes before they cracked and this interview came to an exciting end.

  “How high can you fly?” one asked abruptly.

  “I’m not sure. Let me check my tummy altimeter.” I looked down and pulled up my sweatshirt a couple inches. “That’s funny. It was here this morning....”

  “As high as a plane?” Guy in a White Lab Coat snapped.

  “Higher,” said Nudge. They whirled on her.

  “Higher than a plane?” one asked eagerly.

  Nudge nodded confidently. “Yep. We can go so high that we can’t even hear the rubber band making the little propeller go around—thwip, thwip, thwip.” She made a circling motion with one finger. She frowned. “You meant a toy plane, right?”

  Ter Borcht exploded to his feet. “Enuff! You vill get novere vis dese failures!”

  “Now, now, Borchy,” I said. “These nice people came all this way to talk to us. They know we can fly really high. They know we can always find our way, even in the dark. They know we can go faster than, like, a hundred miles an hour. I’m sure they want to know more about us.” Let’s just dangle a carrot and see what they do, I thought. It would be my little science experiment.

  The five whitecoats were busy scribbling down these tidbits. Ter Borcht, looking furious, sat down heavily.

  “You know, Borchy,” I said in a loud whisper, “you might want to lay off the fried foods.” I patted my stomach, then pointed to his much, much bigger one. I winked at him and then faced the questioners seriously. “I guess you guys also know that we need lots of fuel to keep going. Every two hours. Stuff like milkshakes, doughnuts, chicken nuggets, steak, french fries, uh...”

  “Hamburgers,” said Angel. “And carrot cake and pastrami and, um, French bread and—”

  “Waffles,” said Nudge. “And baked potatoes with cheese and bacon. And more bacon by itself. And peanut butter sandwiches and Snickers bars and root beer an’—”

  “Hoagies,” said Ari in his rusty voice. They looked at him, startled, as if they hadn’t figured him capable of speech.

  Then the five whitecoats huddled and talked excitedly among themselves while I wiggled my eyebrows at my flock and got hopeful about a major snack headed our way.

  “You don’t need to eat,” ter Borcht said more calmly. “You are dying soon anyvay.”

  The head whitecoat went over to him and talked, and ter Borcht started looking angry again. I heard him say, “No! It’s too late.”

  “Why can’t you get into their heads?” I whispered very softly to Angel. “Make ’em see ants everywhere or something.”

  “I don’t know,” Angel said, disappointed. “I just feel...shut out. It’s like I start to get in and then I get pushed out again.”

  “Now I’m really hungry,” Nudge whispered.

  “Me too,” said Ari.

  “Me three,” whispered Total. “I’m ready to eat one of them.”

  The rest of us made “eew” faces, but then the door to the lab opened, and everyone turned to look.

  It was Mom. And frankly, she didn’t look that happy to see me.

  102

  Mom—Marian Janssen—greeted the Chinese scientists warmly, so I figured they were offering her a big chunk of change to buy us as weapons.

  “Are you finding out the information you need?” she asked. Ter Borcht snorted loudly over at his desk, and she cast him a glance.

  “Are they cooperating?” Marian asked the room in general.

  “What do you think?” I asked, just as Guy in a White Lab Coat said, “No.”

  Marian took out a PDA. “I told you I had much of this information, but I understood that you wanted to interview them yourselves. Now, what do you need to know?”

  “How fast can they fly?” asked one.

  Marian clicked her PDA. “Max, here,” she said, gesturing to me, “has exceeded two hundred miles an hour, straight on, and upward of two hundred sixty miles an hour in a steep dive.”

  The scientists looked impressed. I started to feel an icy chill creep down my back.

  “How high can they fly?” another one asked.

  “Max has been documented at altitudes of approximately thirty-one thousand feet for short periods of time. Her oxygen consumption increased appropriately but created no hardship. Her normal cruising altitude is usually between fifteen thousand and twenty-two thousand feet.”

  Again the scientists looked impressed and made notes. One entered things into a calculator, then whispered results to the others.

  I felt Nudge’s and Angel’s eyes on me, but I had a sinking feeling inside and didn’t want to look at them. I was betting that Spy Mom had gotten all this information from my chip, the one I’d had Dr. Martinez take out.

  The head guy looked at me speculatively. “How much weight can they carry?”

  “We believe they can carry up to four-fifths of their own body weight for periods of up to an hour,” said Marian. “And one-half of their body weight almost indefinitely.”

  Like our backpacks, for example.

  “How much body fat do they have?” asked one of them. “Do they swim well?”

  I decided to keep my mouth shut about Angel’s ability to breathe under water.

  “We believe they have normal swimming abilities but with greatly increased endurance,” said Marian, cool as a polar bear’s nose. “Their body fat is extremely low. Max is five-eight but weighs barely a hundred pounds. Of that weight, extremely little is fat or bone. Mostly she’s made of muscle.”

  She’s made of muscle. Like I was a kit that had been put together.

  Okay, I get it. Shut up.

  “But they can swim? They don’t sink?” asked one.

  Marian shook her head. “Their bones are extremely light and porous, filled with tiny air pockets. In addition to their lungs, they have peripheral air sacs along ea
ch side. They don’t sink.”

  “Okay, this is stupid,” I said in a bored tone. “There’s no point in discussing this—except that it shows how clearly you need to get a life—because there’s no way we’re going to be weapons for anyone.”

  “That’s right,” said Nudge. “I’m not carrying bombs or assassinating anyone!”

  That’s right. We have standards, missy!

  “You’ll do what we tell you,” said Marian chillingly. “I’m sure we can find some way to motivate you.”

  Instantly I thought that if they were hurting one of the others, I would do just about anything to stop it.

  Again, information better kept to myself.

  “I have to tell you, we don’t work cheap,” I told the Chinese scientists. “We’ll need serious bling, big-screen TVs, vacations in Hawaii, and the best cheeseburgers that money can buy. For starters.”

  They nodded eagerly, thrilled at my giving in, which, frankly, was pathetic. I mean, don’t they have cynics in China? Clearly these guys were not the brightest crayons in the box.

  103

  “Okay, enough!” the Director snapped. Turning to the scientists, she said, “We can get you any other information you need. In the meantime, we’re going to work on a serious attitude adjustment.”

  “Basically, I have two speeds,” I told them. “Hostile or smart-aleck. Your choice.”

  Ignoring me, Mom ushered the whitecoats out the door.

  “That wasn’t clever,” she said, turning back to me. “Your survival depends on your extreme cooperation.”

  “Dere iss no survival!” ter Borcht said angrily, standing up. “Dey are dead!”

  She ignored him too.

  “You were designed to be very smart, Max,” she told me. “We electrically stimulated your synaptic nerve endings while your brain was developing.”

  “And yet I still can’t program my TiVo,” I said.

  I thought I heard Total stifle a snort, but I didn’t look down.

  “It’s time to start using your smarts,” the Director went on tightly. “Dr. ter Borcht is not the only one who wants you dead. Working for the Chinese is your one opportunity to continue living.”

  I stared at her in amazement. “How do you even live with yourself?” I said, genuinely dumbfounded. “You’re willing to sell children to a foreign government so they can use us as weapons, possibly against other Americans. I don’t get it. Were you hiding behind a door on morals and ethics day? Then you have the gall to call yourself my mother? You couldn’t mother someone if they shot five gallons of estrogen into your veins! What about their mothers?” I waved at the flock. “Please tell me their mothers aren’t half as lame as you!”

  “Their mothers were nobodies,” Marian said. “Donor eggs. Lab workers, techs, anyone we found. That was the point—that we could create a superrace out of anything. Out of trash,” she said meanly.

  I heard blood rushing through the veins in my head. “Well, you’re right there,” I said. “Because we are a superrace. And I did come from trash.”

  The Director clapped her hands, and the Flyboys at the door snapped to attention. I felt Ari and the others straighten up, go on higher alert, waiting to see how badly this situation would devolve. Which it was guaranteed to do.

  “You’re a child, Max,” she said, obviously trying to control her anger. “Which makes it unsurprising that you can’t see the big picture. You’re still putting yourself at the center of the universe. It’s time you found out you’re just a small speck in the big scheme of things.”

  “Which means what?” I demanded. “That I’m nothing? That I’m not a person? That you can do anything you want to me and it’s okay? You’re so full of it! But you’re wrong. I know that I do matter. I am important. And you’re a pathetic, cold, pointless wastoid who’s going to grow old alone and die, then roast in hell forever.”

  I have to say, that sounded dang good, considering I don’t even know if I believe in hell. I do believe in hateful rhymes-with-witches, though, and I had one standing right here who was glaring sparks at me.

  “This is what I mean,” she said. “Your childish insults don’t affect me. Your useless anger doesn’t affect me. You’ll end up doing what I say or you will die. It’s that simple.”

  “That’s one of the many, many differences between you and me,” I snarled. “I have enough smarts to know that it’s never that simple. And I can make this more complicated than you could possibly imagine.” I put real menace into my voice, leaning forward threateningly and clenching my fists. Her eyes flickered.

  “See, you don’t know squat about me, Mom,” I went on icily. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. Just because you made me doesn’t mean you know what I can do, what I’ve done. And here’s a news flash: My chip is gone. So you can take your spyware and shove it.”

  Her glance quickly shot to my wrist.

  I dropped my voice and stared into her eyes. I could tell she was trying hard not to look away. I was so furious I could have cheerfully ripped her head off. “But you’re going to find out, Mom,” I said very softly. “And it’s going to give you nightmares for the rest of your wasted life.”

  Oh, my God, I was so badass. It was all I could do to not give a mwa ha ha ha!

  The Director clenched her teeth and visibly controlled some shallow breaths. Finally she spoke. “You’re wasting your time, Max,” she said. “You can’t hurt me.”

  I grinned evilly, and she flinched for a split second, then made her face expressionless.

  “Yes, Mom,” I whispered. “I really can.”

  104

  I’m sure some of you get sent to your rooms sometimes by your parents. All I have to say is, the next time it happens and you’re lying there all mad thinking about how hard your life is, just picture me standing next to you, ready to smack you upside the head. When I get sent to my room, it’s in a freaking dungeon! With rats!

  Plus, how many of your parents chain you to the wall? I’m betting not that many. Okay, maybe some. I don’t know how regular families work. But probably not many, am I right?

  “Yeah, you showed her,” Total muttered, licking his paw where his shackle was chafing it.

  I made a face at him. “God, my mom’s such a witch.”

  “We’ve been in worse places, in worse situations,” Nudge said.

  “For all we know a PetSmart truck is pulling up outside, unloading dog crates,” I said gloomily, unwilling to be comforted.

  The speakers wired to the walls crackled to life, and I groaned as more multi-culti propaganda began to assault our ears.

  I inched over toward Nudge and Angel. My chain let me sit between them, and I unfolded my wings and shook them out. Then I carefully wrapped my wings around Nudge and Angel, encasing them in a warm, feathery cocoon big enough to hold all of us. Total couldn’t be left out, so he dragged his chain over and crawled beneath my wings too.

  I looked over at Ari. He was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, so he wasn’t part of the feathery fun fest.

  It was quiet and dim here; the stones were cold under my jeans, and I could feel a chill starting to seep into my skin. Another hour or two and we would be miserable with cold. How long would it take Fang to get here? How could he even get here?

  Total pricked his ears and raised his head slightly. Looking into the shadows, I saw a tall shape moving toward us. In an instant I had recognized the gait, the height, the body language. Jeb. He was like really spicy Mexican food—kept coming back on ya.

  I didn’t have the energy for more sparring.

  When he was close enough, I said, “Please tell me that icebox was kidding about being my mother.”

  He knelt in front of us, and I gathered the younger ones more closely under my wings.

  “The Director is a brilliant woman with a global vision,” Jeb said.

  “Yeah, a deranged global vision,” I said sourly.

  “She’s a remarkable, gifted scientist.”

  “Why
can’t she use her powers for good instead of evil? Like, cure cancer or something. And no, killing everyone who has cancer does not count as a cure.”

  “Dr. Janssen is an ambitious, talented political strategist,” Jeb said. “She could very well end up running the world. One day she might be the most powerful person on Earth. As her daughter, you would be in a position of unimaginable advantage.”

  “Except that I would have changed my name and dyed my hair and would be living incognito somewhere to avoid the embarrassment of having a ruthless, power-crazy Dr. Frankenstein for a mother,” I pointed out.

  “Even if she were the most powerful person in the world, and being her daughter would give you almost unlimited power too?” Jeb asked.

  I made a face. “If I had that much power, the first thing I would do is slam her into jail.”

  Jeb just looked at me. “What else would you do?”

  “Put her in jail,” I repeated. “Plus all the others who lent a hand to this hateful Goldfinger plan of world domination. Plus, I would say that all wars would be fought only on foot with nothing more than swords. No guns, no missiles, no bombs. Only swords.” I looked up, warming to the idea of World Emperor Max. “And I would seize all the offshore hidden bank accounts of companies and people who had contributed to ruining the environment. With that money, I would make sure that health care and education were available to everyone for free.”

  I felt Nudge and Angel smile against my shoulders, and I sat up straighter. “Plus, housing and food for everyone. Companies that polluted would be shut down and banished. People in the government who ignored the environment and started wars would be booted out of office and made to work in the fields. And—”

  Jeb held up his hand and stopped me. “You just passed another test, Max.”

  105

  “Excellent,” I said, irritated all over again. “Then get us out of this stinking dungeon.”

  “What test did she pass?” Nudge asked, raising her head a little.

  Jeb turned to her. “She’s incorruptible.”