“Can I . . . ?” the doctor asked, motioning his stethoscope toward me. I nodded warily.
He listened to my heart, a look of total amazement on his face.
Then he moved his stethoscope over my stomach, in several places. “Why can I hear air moving down here?” he asked.
“We have air sacs,” I explained quietly, feeling as if my throat were closing. My hands tightened into fists by my sides. “We have lungs, but we also have smaller air sacs. And—our stomachs are different. Our bones. Our blood.” Gee, pretty much everything.
“And you have . . . wings?” the second doctor asked in a low voice. I nodded.
“You’re a human-avian hybrid,” the first doctor said.
“That’s one name for it,” I said tightly. As opposed to, say, mutant freak. “I prefer Avian American.”
I glanced at the nurse, who looked scared and like she’d rather be anywhere but here. I so related.
The female doctor became all business. “We’re giving him saline, to counter the shock, but he needs blood.”
“You can’t give him hu—regular blood,” I said. All the scientific knowledge I’d gleaned over the years from reports and experiments started coming to the surface. “Our red blood cells have nuclei.” Like birds’.
The doctor nodded. “Get ready to give him a donation,” she instructed me briskly.
12
Twenty minutes later, I was two pints lighter and dizzy as a dodo bird from it. I shouldn’t have given that much blood, but Fang needed even more, and it was the best I could do. Now he was in surgery.
I made my way down the hall to the waiting room, which was crowded—but not with bird kids.
Quickly I walked the perimeter, in case they were under chairs or something. No flock.
My head swiveled as I checked one hall and then another. I was already weak and kind of nauseated, and the fear of losing my flock made me feel like hurling was seconds away.
“They’re down here.” A short, dark-haired nurse was speaking to me. I locked my gaze on her.
She handed me a small plastic bottle of apple juice and a muffin. “Eat this,” she told me. “It’ll help with the dizziness. Your . . . siblings are in room seven.” She pointed down the hall.
“Thanks,” I muttered, not knowing yet if I meant it.
Room 7 had a solid door, and I opened it without knocking. Four pairs of worried bird-kid eyes looked up at me. Relief—however temporary—made my knees weak.
“You must be Max,” said a voice.
My stomach seized up. Oh, no, I thought, taking in the guy’s dark gray suit, the short, regulation hair, the almost invisible earpiece of his comm system. Eraser? It was getting harder to tell with each new batch. This guy lacked a feral gleam in his eyes—but I wasn’t going to let down my guard.
“Please, sit down,” said another voice.
13
There were three of them, two men and a woman, looking very governmenty, sitting around a fake-wood conference table.
Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel were also sitting there, with plastic cafeteria trays of food in front of them. I realized that none of them had touched their food, despite the fact that they must be starving, and I was so proud of their caution that tears almost started in my eyes.
“Who are you?” I asked. Amazingly, my voice was calm and even. Points to me.
“We’re from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” one man said, reaching out to hand me his business card. It had a little federal seal and everything. Not that that meant squat. “And we’re on your side. We just became aware that you were having some trouble here, and we came to see if we could help.”
He sounded so sincere.
“How nice of you!” I said, sinking into a chair before I fainted. “But aren’t most people in a hospital, uh, having some trouble? I doubt the FBI comes calling on them. So what do you want with us?”