But even normal lessons turned out to be a problem. Case in point: everything mathlike besides plain math (+, −, ×, %) was a huge recipe for trouble. Nudge was reduced to tears by the natural–unnatural number conundrum, and tensions were high again.

“Look, I know this has been really hard,” I said, “but we don’t just quit because something is hard.”

Nudge frowned. “Yes, we do. We do all the time!”

Fang brushed his hand across his mouth and looked down at the table, obviously trying to hide a smile.

“Well, okay, maybe sometimes we do,” I admitted. “But I’m not backing down from this. We’re going to be educated if it kills us!” I looked at them seriously. “Because if we’re not educated, I’m dang sure that will kill us.”

“Max?” Angel turned her innocent blue eyes on me. “Here’s something to learn, but it’s funner to read.” She pulled out a book and handed it to me. Alarms went off in my head when I saw the cover: The Way to Survive, by Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen.

“Where’d you get this?” I took the book from her and started flipping through it.

“Dr. Hans gave it to me in Africa. It’s really interesting,”

said Angel.

“Okay,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her. When was she hanging out with Dr. G-H in Africa? “Class dismissed.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I curled up in our deck hammock and blocked out the sound of the TV coming from inside while I read Dr. Scary’s book.

Fang came and sat in the other end of the hammock, so our feet were touching. I thought about the last time we’d managed to really be alone — not counting the night I’d thought he was an Eraser, ’cause that had sucked — and my cheeks flushed. I wished we were twenty years old. I wished we were safe and didn’t ever have to worry about people like Dr. G. I wished we could do whatever we wanted.

“Whatcha doing?”

“This is what Angel is reading. I’m wondering if the not-so-good doctor got to her in Africa.”

“Compelling read?”

“Just kind of horrible,” I said quietly. “At first it seems like he’s talking about how to save the earth, and how mankind has messed everything up, and how we should fix it. But if you keep going, he says that the only way for humankind to survive is if it radically changes — becomes more than human. He calls it skipping an evolutionary grade. Basically he wants everyone to ‘evolve,’ and he’s trying to come up with the technology to jump-start it. If he had his way, no one would be one hundred percent human anymore. Everyone would be hybrids, or have their genes tinkered with, to make them superhuman.”

“We like being more than human,” Fang pointed out. “But we’re only more than human because we’re rare,” I