“Dylan, you can just fly up, like the rest of us,” said Fang. “Jeb, we’ll put down the ladder for you.”
Dylan glanced up at the house’s doorway, frowning. Angel and Nudge jumped up and were through the door with a couple of wing strokes. Dylan looked at me again, then at Jeb. “Yeah, okay,” he said finally.
He set his jaw, rolled his shoulders a couple times, then gave a jump into the air and tried to flap hard. But he hadn’t given himself enough room, and he just thunked back to the earth again, his wings whapping painfully against the ground. Typical newbie.
I heard barely suppressed snickering from Gazzy and Iggy as they flew up onto the porch.
Dylan’s chiseled face flushed as he let out a controlled breath and shook his head. “Not as easy as it looks,” he said wryly. “I’ve been trying —”
“Max taught the younger kids to fly,” Jeb said. “Max, why don’t you take a minute, give Dylan some pointers?”
My jaw all but dropped open. “Oh, he’ll get it soon enough,” I said, glaring meaningfully at Jeb.
“Yeah, it’s okay,” said Dylan, acting casual. “It’ll just take practice. Max doesn’t need to waste her time on this.” I wondered if he didn’t want a girl teaching him.
Incidentally, other people not wanting me to do something has often been Step One in making sure I do something. Plus, for a minute I actually felt a little sorry for him. It’s one thing to be a three-year-old with baby wings and learning how to fly. But this guy was … almost … a man. A little pathetic.
“Well, whatever. I can take a minute,” I heard myself say.
“Yeah?” Dylan raised an eyebrow and looked at me. He seemed to be trying not to look too eager.
“Yeah, sure, why not?” I said, making a mental note to get a good look at his wings. For all I knew, they were remote-controlled and duct-taped to his back.
“Have at ’im,” Fang said easily, and he was on the front porch with an almost silent flutter of his wide deep-black wings. God, Fang’s wi
ngs were gorgeous. They looked like they belonged on the Angel of Death.
“Good — thanks, Max,” said Jeb, climbing the ladder Fang had just lowered, and I indulged in a moment’s fantasy about someone slamming the trapdoor on his head.
Then it was just me and Dylan alone out here in the canyon, in the moonlight, and I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.
“Okay,” I said, but my voice came out weird. I gave a little cough. “Let’s do this thing.”
35
FOR A COUPLE OF SECONDS Dylan and I stood there awkwardly. The night seemed darker and quieter than it had a moment ago. I could smell Dylan’s clean scent, like soap and mountain air.
“I thought flying would come naturally to me,” he said. He carefully opened his wings and frowned, as if testing their strength.
“Well, it’s like walking, or riding a bike,” I explained. “It’s sort of natural, but you also have to practice.”
I remembered Ari, Jeb’s son. He’d been a little sevenyear-old. Then someone had spliced his DNA with Eraser genes and grafted wings onto him, retrofitting them. The result had been a huge disaster, a Frankenstein.
It looked like they had finally gotten everything right with Dylan. No one could accuse him of being a Frankenstein. More like Frankenhunk.
I realized what I was thinking and immediately shooed it out of my head. “So, I, uh … ,” I started babbling. “I guess you flew here … from Africa?” I asked. “Like, in a plane?”
“Yeah. What about you guys?”
“We flew flew here. Took about five days. We were pretty whipped afterward. That Atlantic Ocean is a beast.”
“That’s so amazing.” He gazed at me in open admiration. “I can’t believe how strong you are.”
The dream I’d had about Dylan popped into my head in full Technicolor. “Was it hard for you to get used to being big?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. Chitchat is obviously not my best skill. “I mean, I guess you grew pretty quickly.”
He shook his head. “I’ve always been this size. I don’t remember anything else. They … made me this way.” He hesitated for a moment. “I don’t remember being a little kid. I’ve only been alive for eight months, but it’s been long enough to realize that I’m a … freak.” He gave a sad little chuckle.
“Well, yeah,” I said, not pulling any punches. “So are we. But you’ve got to remember that you didn’t make yourself this way. We didn’t ask for this to be done to us. Other people did. They knew better, knew they were treating us like lab rats, and they did it anyway. They’re the monsters, not us.”