Waterwings Read online

  Gazzy and Iggy crowed some more and slapped high fives again. Somehow, even though he can’t see, Iggy never misses a high five. It’s a little creepy.

  I opened the front door slowly. There was a wide, charred circle around the house, littered with ’bot bits and smoking electronics. “See if there are any salvageable weapons,” I directed. The Ari dobblyganga doppergung dobblemunger look-alike was lying on the ground, mostly in one piece. Mostly human, with a ’bot substructure. Again, ew.

  I walked over to him, and it was pretty awful. I can destroy a hundred ’bots and still whistle cheerfully, but this poor mess on the ground seemed as much a victim as we were. Some crucial parts of him were missing, but his eyes blinked as I approached. This close, he still looked a ton like Ari, but I could tell it wasn’t a perfect copy.

  Then I remembered that this creature had been prepared to exterminate my family, and that my own mother had been kidnapped, and that the flock had been hiding in the dark wondering if they were about to die.

  “So,” I said, leaning down a bit, “how’s Mr. Chu, that scamp?”

  His head twitched, and the light behind his eyes went out.

  “Tell him hi for me!” I said, then looked at the flock. “Pack light. We’re moving out.”

  25

  THE PHONE RANG just as we reentered the dark house. I stared at it.

  “Regular corded phone. Not connected to the electrical system,” Iggy clarified, somehow knowing what we were all wondering.

  I grabbed it. “What?”

  “Max — good, you’re there,” said John Abate. “We’ve got some details about Valencia’s disappearance, but I don’t want to discuss them on the phone. We’ve been tipped that your house might be under surveillance.”

  “Um, not so much,” I said, thinking of the mess outside.

  “To be on the safe side, we’re sending a car for you. It should be there in about an hour.”

  “It’ll be dawn then,” I said, suddenly feeling exhausted and headachy and newly upset about my mom. “Better make it an armored one.”

  26

  THE SIGHT OF DAWN breaking over the horizon, slowly dispelling the darkness with tendrils of pink and cream, literally the start of a brand-new day — you know how that fills people with joy and hope and a will to somehow go on?

  Those people are nuts.

  Our dawn showcased a football field of destruction: charred earth, shattered cacti, a blackened spew of twisted metal and melted wires, plus the mangled wreck of some poor sap who had been created to be a weapon in someone else’s war.

  We were all waiting in the living room when the armored Hummer arrived in a cloud of dust. Angel and Gazzy were asleep. Nudge was sitting, unusually quiet, her chin resting in her hands. Iggy and Total were snoring on the other couch.

  I was purposely not looking at Fang. After making some progress, so to speak, with whatever was happening between us, I felt all my protective shields firmly locked in place again. I couldn’t believe how vulnerable I’d allowed myself to be. It had been a mistake.

  Fang was going to kill me when I told him. Yeah, I was looking forward to that.

  When the car arrived, I checked it out from behind a curtain. Dr. John Abate stepped out of it, looking anxiously at the evidence of the fight. I opened the front door of the house.

  “Hi,” I said. I’d met him several times, and he seemed okay. I knew he was one of my mom’s best friends, and his face showed the worry he was feeling.

  His face relaxed, and he came over. “They got the worst of it, huh?” he asked, gesturing to the piles of remains.

  “Always do,” I said tiredly.

  “Max!”

  I froze at the new voice. Yes. To make my evening of horror complete, Dr. Brigid Dwyer stepped out of the Hummer and hurried over to me with a big smile, her red hair flashing.

  I allowed myself to be hugged.

  “I’m so, so sorry about your mom,” she said sincerely. “We’ll get her back — I promise.”

  I nodded, then stood there like a dummy as the rest of the flock came out of the house to be hugged by Brigid. Watching her hug Fang, seeing his arms go around her, was almost enough to make me hurl.

  I might need to rethink my protective armor a bit.

  “Let’s hurry,” said Dr. Abate. “We’ve got a plane waiting. On the way, you can fill me in on what happened. And vice versa.”

  “Max,” said Nudge, and instinctively I braced. I’d known something was up.

  “Get in the car, sweetie,” I said, pretending not to notice anything was wrong.

  She swallowed. “I’m staying.”

  “You can’t. It’s not safe.”

  “I’ll be safe at the school, in the dorms,” she said. She gestured limply to the house, its surrounding wreckage. “I can’t do this anymore. I want to go to school. I just want to be a kid. At least for a while.”

  I had a million excellent arguments why she was wrong and making the biggest mistake of her life, and I opened my mouth to get started, and then it hit me: it would be pointless. Nudge wasn’t four or five. She was around eleven and would be as tall as me in another year or so. She really meant she couldn’t do this anymore.

  If she didn’t want to be with us, didn’t want to fight, she would get hurt — bad. She might cause one of us to get hurt or killed. I needed my flock to be fierce, bloodthirsty warriors. Nudge’s heart just wasn’t in it, and I couldn’t fix that. Oh, God.

  I swallowed hard, making my chin stiff, my mouth firm. I’m the flock leader because I can do the gnarly jobs. “You may not get your wings taken off,” I said sternly.

  Wonder dawned in her big brown eyes as she realized what I was saying. A huge smile lit her face, and she hugged me fiercely, forcing the air from my lungs. “You may get your ears pierced,” I croaked, trying to breathe. “Or your nose. Or — actually, nothing else. And you absolutely, positively, may never, ever get your wings removed, or I swear to God, I will come kick your skinny, fashion-conscious butt into next week. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes!” Nudge said happily. “Yes, yes! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I love you so much!”

  Ever notice how often people say that right before they say good-bye?

  Part Two

  WE ALL LIVE IN A DEADLY SUBMARINE

  27

  THE ARMORED CAR drove for about an hour through the desert, ending up at a military airfield. Nothing like passing through heavy, barbed-wire-topped gates to make a girl feel secure! And by secure, I mean supertwitchy. At least we could fly out of here if we needed to. I eyed the antiaircraft guns mounted on turrets and hoped they’d be considered overkill for bird kids.

  Despite the fact that we were really tired, really hungry, and really upset about my mom, we did manage to fill John and Brigid in on everything that had happened. John showed me the two faxes they’d gotten. Seeing my mom looking straight ahead, fear in her eyes as some goon held a gun on her, made my blood boil.

  I was going to track down the kidnappers if it meant flying to every single boat in the entire world.

  “We’re taking a military jet to San Diego,” said John. “The FBI is meeting us at the navy base there. We’ll go over all the information we have, and see what we can get out of it.”

  I nodded numbly, looking at the soldiers bustling about, each one having somewhere to be. I wondered if Nudge was back at the school yet. I guessed she was.

  The armored car drove right up to a small jet, its stairs already pulled down.

  “Please tell me there’s food on board,” said Iggy.

  “Yes,” said John. “A whole lot of it. I was warned about how much you guys ate on the Wendy K.” His tired smile made me think back to our days of living on that boat with Brigid and the other scientists.

  I glanced over at Brigid as she talked quietly to Fang, and my stomach knotted. He was paying attention to her but also looking at me pretty often. The whole thing was complicated and messy, and I hated it.

  B
ut I loved him. And I guess the messiness went along with that.

  “It’ll be okay, Max,” Angel whispered, patting my hand.

  I looked at her, wondering if she was talking about my mom or Nudge or Fang.

  “Everything,” she said softly. “Everything will be okay.”

  I managed a tight smile, and then we were all climbing out of the Hummer and walking across hot tarmac to the jet.

  A quick, happy bark made my head snap up. There, at the top of the jet stairs, was Akila!

  “Oh. My. God,” Total breathed, stopping dead. He stared up at her as if he were a starving man and she was a Snickers bar. He shook his head. “I know it’s daylight, because the sun has started to shine again!” He inhaled deeply. “And the air — the air is suddenly perfumed with —”

  “Jet fuel, hot tar, dirty bird kids, and a Malamute,” I said, nudging him forward with my foot. “Just get on the plane.” Not everything has to be a Broadway show, you know?

  Total shot me an aggrieved glance as he trotted up the jet’s stairs. At the top, he and Akila happily licked each other’s faces, their tails wagging. It was — well, actually, I hate to admit — it was kind of sweet. In a slobbery kind of way.

  We were all waiting for Total and Akila to move inside when Total stepped back and, with a flourish, opened his small black wings. Akila blinked. And if a Malamute can look surprised, she looked it.

  “Regard, my princess!” said Total, fluttering his wings. “At last, I might be worthy of your beauty!” He knelt before her and kissed one of her front paws. She licked the top of his head. I glanced around, and everyone was grinning.

  Oh yeah. Love is great, just great.

  28

  THE MAN IN THE CRISP WHITES saw us as soon as he came in the door. We were in some building smack-dab in the middle of the biggest naval base on the West Coast. Frankly, I’d rather be at the San Diego Zoo, but at least this place was air-conditioned.

  We were in a conference room, ready to meet with some grown-ups, and I was thinking that I had already played in this scenario more times than I could count. Who remembers any of those situations ending well? Go on, raise your hand. No one?

  Right.

  However, using insidious and irresistible mind-control techniques such as offering us Mountain Dew and a ton of nachos, the naval bigwigs had managed to corral us in this room for a debriefing.

  Unfortunately, every time someone said “debriefing,” the entire flock had one image: someone’s tighty-whities disappearing in a flash. We were smothering our giggles, but it was getting harder. Coupled with the whole “naval this, and naval that,” with its undeniable belly-button connotations, we were essentially turning into a sugar-jacked, sleep-deprived flock of incoherent, silly, recombinant-DNA goofballs. This was not going to end well.

  This guy had come in, and everyone turned to him as if now the party could get started. Tucking a sheaf of papers under one arm, he frowned and looked at the woman in the blazer with all the stars on the shoulders. We’d met her. She was Admiral Bellows. (I am not making this up.)

  “Why are these children here?” he asked brusquely.

  “Thank you for joining us, Commander,” said Admiral Bellows. She had short, tidy gray hair and seemed extremely no-nonsense. “These children are integral to our investigation. For one thing, this child, Max, is Dr. Martinez’s daughter.”

  Huh. She’d called me a child, not a mutant freak. And I was a daughter, not just the result of one of Dr. Martinez’s eggs being fertilized in a test tube. It felt weirdly — normal.

  “All the more reason this conference is inappropriate for children,” the commander said pointedly.

  “We’re very sensitive, you know,” said Iggy.

  The admiral shot Iggy a sharp glance, which of course was wasted on him. “These children are different,” she told the commander. “Please come in and share your findings, Commander. Time is of the essence.”

  I decided I kind of liked her.

  The commander paused as if trying to think of a new way to win the argument but was distracted when Total put both front paws on the conference table.

  “Excuse me,” he said, using one paw to brush a nacho crumb from his muzzle. “You think you could scrounge up some pico de gallo? Maybe even some guac? And how about a nice cold Evian for my lady friend here?” He gestured to where Akila was sitting with quiet dignity by Dr. Abate.

  The flock managed to remain straight-faced.

  “It’s okay, Commander,” I said in the deafening silence. “Like the admiral said, we’re different.” I shrugged out of my hoodie and extended my wings, all thirteen feet of brown glory. They are stunning, I must say. Even with the still-slightly-visible boo-boo on one.

  Everyone in the room except John and Brigid were mesmerized. The commander’s mouth actually dropped open a bit, and I ruffled my primary feathers a little. “So how ’bout we just get on with the show, eh? We’re talking about my mom here.”

  Between the talking dog and the girl with wings, the commander was pretty much a squashed bug. Wordlessly he gave a DVD to a navy guy working the computer, and the lights were dimmed. A PowerPoint presentation began on the white wall opposite the table.

  The first slide said: THE BIRDS ARE WORKING.

  29

  “THE BIRDS ARE WORKING.” What the heck did that mean? And what did it have to do with my mom? As you know, I’ve been kidnapped myself, and let me tell you, “total bummer” doesn’t begin to describe it. The thought of my mom going through what I had gone through was making me nuts.

  The slide was followed by a grainy movie.

  “This was filmed yesterday evening at nineteen hundred hours, at twenty-one degrees, thirty minutes north; one hundred fifty-seven degrees, forty minutes west,” said Commander Crisp Pants.

  “In the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Hawaii,” the admiral clarified for us civilians.

  The movie started off with an aerial view, like from a plane, then focused lower and lower over the water. Lots of fuzzy action tightened up to reveal… major bird-o-rama. Hundreds, no, thousands of seabirds. Gulls, albatrosses, cormorants, and a bunch I didn’t recognize. They hovered just a few feet above the water, covering it thickly, and they seemed to be — feeding or attacking in a frenzy or I had no idea what.

  “It’s like, free-shrimp day or something!” Gazzy said, awed.

  “What are they doing?” I asked, impatient to get to the part about my mom.

  “We don’t know. But wait,” said Commander Crisp Pants. The camera pulled back to reveal a small fishing boat, maybe a couple hundred yards away from the bird frenzy. We could see the crew, all watching the birds from on deck, gesturing and looking amazed. Some looked scared. I read the name on the side: Nani Moku.

  All of a sudden, something from beneath the water smashed up through the fishing boat, capsizing it. The boat was literally broken in half. The crew flailed about in the water, trying to cling to debris. What was left of the boat sank within moments. We saw some of the fishermen trying to save their comrades, saw one guy realize his friend was dead in the water.

  “Was that a whale, Commander?” the admiral asked.

  “Unknown. It could have been a whale or a submarine. We’ve gone over this footage a hundred times with no success. But now, look at this.”

  The film ended, and a greenish, dim, very grainy picture flashed up on the screen. I almost yelled: it was my mom. She was looking straight ahead, her brown eyes scared but defiant. It looked like her arms were tied behind her back. Next to her, someone wearing a ski mask held up a New York Times to show yesterday’s date. I’d love to know how they got their hands on that.

  My stomach tightened. Fang’s knee bumped mine under the table, the equivalent of a reassuring hug. Normally that would be all I needed to chill. But right then it hit me: this was not “normally.” Nudge was gone. I hadn’t even realized how much I depended on her sympathy in tough times.

  “The camera focused tightly on Dr.
Martinez, as you can see,” said Commander Crisp Pants. “You can hardly make out any background. Except —” He nodded to the technician, and the picture zoomed in until it was hardly recognizable. The big white blob in one corner was part of my mom’s elbow. The commander moved a red laser pointer over the blurred picture. “Except here. To us, this looks like a window frame.” He moved over an unrecognizable lightish thing. “Or, more accurately, a porthole. And now look back here.”

  He moved the laser pointer, and I saw Total’s head whipping back and forth. I made a mental note to never let Gazzy or Iggy get hold of a laser pointer.

  Through the thick, wavy porthole glass, there was another jellylike blob. The commander ran his laser along a slightly darker blob. “Please enhance the sharpness by three hundred percent,” he told the technician.

  The next second, the conference room went still and silent. Though still way blurry, we could now make out that the darker blobs on the lighter blob through the blobby window were words. They were words on a piece of wood: Nani Moku.

  The commander stood up, and the room lights were turned on. “We believe this picture was taken on a submarine,” he announced. “We think the submarine was in the area, and probably capsized that boat, though we’re not certain. But that’s a piece of wreckage from that fishing boat, and it’s under water. So they must be holding Dr. Martinez under water. And since we know that boat was capsized in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Hawaii, we believe that Dr. Martinez is somewhere around there.”

  I was ready to leap up and fly to Hawaii. From San Diego, it would take me about six or seven hours, I figured.

  “What does ‘The birds are working’ mean?” the admiral asked.

  The commander looked at her. “Again, unknown. But there was an audio clip with the bird film, and when we sped up the sound by five hundred percent, that was the phrase we heard.”