43
Okay, here’s a knotty little question: If you’re dreaming that you’re tied up by mad scientists in a secret experimental facility, and then you fall asleep and start dreaming, are you really dreaming?
Which one is the dream?
Which one counts?
How can you tell?
I’d been torturing myself with these pointless circular conundrums all day. Which raises another question: If I’m torturing my own brain by trying to figure stuff out, does that still count as Them torturing me? Because they caused the whole situation to happen?
At any rate, at some point I must have “fallen asleep,” because at some point, a hand shaking my shoulder made me streak back to “consciousness.”
As always, I leaped into wakefulness on full alert, automatically trying to assume a battle position. Pretty much impossible when you’re all strapped down.
I see perfectly in the dark, and it took only a split second to register the familiar hulking bad news leaning over my bed.
“Ari!” I whispered almost silently.
“Hi, Max,” Ari said, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t look that mental. I mean, every time I’d seen this poor screwup in the last couple months, he’d looked more and more as if he were standing on the edge of insanity with one foot on a banana peel.
But now he looked—well, not anything close to normal, but at least all the frothing at the mouth had stopped.
I waited for the first volley of venom.
But Ari had no snide remarks, no taunts, no threats. Instead he undid one of my arms, then pulled it down and strapped it to the arm of a wheelchair.
Hmm. Could I still fly if I was strapped into a wheelchair? I thought maybe I could. I guessed we would find out. In fact, if I could get some serious speed going on this thing, it might lend a significant boost to an exciting takeoff.
I sat down in the chair, and Ari strapped my ankle to the post by the front wheel. Just as I was tensing to make a break, he whispered, “They made this chair with lead bars. It weighs about a hundred an’ seventy-five pounds.”
Crap. Even though I was really tall for my age, I weighed barely a hundred pounds because of all the avian modifications to my bones and stuff. And the fact that I could almost never get enough food. So even though I was really, really strong, there was no way I could get a wheelchair that heavy off the ground.
I looked at Ari with loathing. “What now, big guy? You taking me to your leader?”
He didn’t rise to the bait. “Just thought I’d show you around a bit, that’s all, Max.”
44
“Gosh, a guided tour, from you? Now I know I’m dreaming,” I quipped. But then a thought occurred to me. “They told me all the Erasers had been
retired. And if I wasn’t strapped down, I’d make air quotes around retired.”
Ari looked sad. “Yeah. I’m the last one. They...killed all the others.”
For some reason his quiet, sad confirmation of that terrible fact made my blood run cold. Despite what a walking chigger bite he was, there were still times when I could almost see the little kid he’d once been. They’d altered him when he was already three years old, and his results had been less than stellar, poor guy.
Oh, yeah, poor guy who tried to kill me a bunch of times. My eyes narrowed.
“The flock is supposed to be wiped out too,” I said. “Am I the first to go? Is that why you came to get me?”
He shook his head. “I just have permission to take you around. I know you guys are supposed to be retired, but I don’t know when.”
I got an idea. “Listen, Ari,” I said, trying for a cajoling tone. Since snarling or threatening comes much more naturally to me, I wasn’t sure how successful I was. “Maybe all of us should bust out of here together. I don’t know what Jeb’s told you, but you might be on the endangered list too.”
I was about to go on, but he interrupted me.
“I know I am,” he said, still very quietly. He pushed the wheelchair through the doorway, and we were in a long hall lit by fluorescent lights and tiled with the ever-popular linoleum squares. Suddenly he knelt down and pulled his shirt collar away from his neck.