She looked away. “Since Florida. They...were really mad that I let you beat me.”
“You didn’t let me do squat,” I said.
Sighing, she gave a brief nod. “I was supposed to win. I was supposed to finish you off. They never counted on you winning. And then you didn’t kill me. It was awful.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, feeling fresh anger ignite. “I’ll try not to humiliate you by letting you live next time.”
Max II looked at me sadly, and it really was creepy; so much like looking in a mirror that I felt my face try to assume the same expression, so we’d match.
“There won’t be a next time,” she said. “I’m telling you, this is the last stop. They brought us here to kill us.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” Max II said, agitated. “We’re all slated to die. Every day, more of us disappear. When I first came here, this yard was so full, we had to take shifts. There were thousands of us. Now this is all that’s left.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“With this many of us, I guess we have until...maybe tomorrow,” she said, looking around, mentally calculating.
Okay, this was not sounding good. I thought we’d have a couple days to regroup, find a way out of this. If Max II wasn’t lying, then I needed to step up our time frame in a big way. If Max II was lying, I still had no reason to want to hang around.
We continued to shuffle in big circles, and now both Nudge and Total were baaing occasionally. I was deep in thought, trying to come up with one of my typically brilliant plans, when a mutant bumped into me for a split second, then moved away.
It left something in my hand.
A piece of paper.
Very, very surreptitiously, I unfolded it and glanced down. It was a note, and it said: Fang on his way with flock. Says it better not be a joke.
Inside me, a hard knot of tension that I hadn’t even known I had seemed to unravel. Oh, God. Fang was coming. I would have been more suspicious, but the “it had better not be a joke” thing could only have come from him.
Fang was on the way. With Iggy and Gazzy. We would all be together again.
“Max? What’s wrong?” Nudge looked at me with concern. “You’re crying.”
I touched my cheek to find that I was crying, tears streaking down my face. I wiped them away on my sleeve and snuffled. I was too happy to speak for a moment.
“Fang’s coming to help us,” I said under my breath, looking straight ahead. “He’s on his way.”
99
We all exercised in the Yard of Despair for another half hour. My mind was spinning—knowing Fang was on his way had given me a jolt of adrenaline. I wondered when he had left. I wondered if I would be able to bear it if Fang’s message was all another “test,” if it wasn’t real.
On the other hand, sometimes a happy delusion is better than grim reality.
In the meantime, I took baby steps behind the mutant in front of me, holding Angel’s hand, feeling Total’s little side brushing against my leg from time to time.
And I started watching and listening more intently. I’d thought the mutants were silent, but now I began to pick up on things they were saying so softly that the words almost got lost in the dry shuffling noise of their boots against the grit.
I tapped Nudge’s hand and nodded my head at the crowd. Angel looked up at me, feeling my intention, and started paying attention also.
Like a prison, the mutants were murmuring, as softly as the wind. Unfair. Lied to us. So many of us gone. Don’t want to disappear. Don’t want to be retired. What to do? There are so many of them. Too many of them. This is a prison. A prison of death. Unfair. I did nothing wrong. Except exist.
I moved slowly through the crowd, listening to the murmurs, the messages. Angel was picking up on their thoughts. I saw her blue eyes become troubled with her new knowledge.
By the time a strident electronic buzzer told us to go back inside, I had formed a semiclear picture of the group’s emotions. They didn’t want this to happen to them—what had happened to their fellow inmates. They wished they could change things. Some of them were really angry and wanted to fight, but they didn’t know how. I guessed their fighting instincts had been engineered out of them. Mostly, they were confused and disorganized.
Which is where a—ahem—leader would come in.