“Welcome. Thank you for coming.” A tall man in an olive green uniform came forward and solemnly shook hands with Jeb, then Mom, then all of us kids. “Please sit down. Would you care for something to drink? We have coffee, tea, soda, ice water . . . Oh, and I see you brought your dog. A cute little Scottie.” He smiled uncertainly, as if wondering why someone had let an animal into the building. I bit my lip, wondering if Total was going to mouth off. But he didn’t. He just seethed quietly and hopped up onto his own chair by Angel’s.

The next hour was like, “This is your life, mutant bird kids!” They didn’t have any pictures or film of us when we were little and still living in dog crates at the School. But the past six months were decently documented. They had films of us flying, way overhead, and footage of various fights with people, Erasers, and the latest heinous incarnation of enemies, the Flyboys. There was some footage of us just chilling at Anne Walker’s house in northern Virginia. It made me tense up and get mad all over again.

Last, there were about three minutes of choppy, grainy film that had been shot inside Itex’s picturesque German headquarters. It showed me squaring off against Omega, poster boy for pathetic losers. It showed the riot that some of the clones had started, and the crowd of angry kids breaking through the castle wall.

It showed Ari dying.

The film stopped, and the dimmed lights brightened. Shades lifted automatically, revealing the large windows again.

Now I was in a totally rotten mood. It was bad enough that I was all dressed up like some fashion geek, but I’d managed to not think about Ari for about five minutes, and then I had to watch him die all over again. I snuck a glance at Jeb, who was white faced, one hand clenched tightly around a pencil as he stared at the table.

“You six are most impressive.” A woman in a tailored gray skirt-suit stood up and poured herself a glass of water. She smiled at us, but it was the kind of smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“We’ve asked you to come here today because we’re very interested in your future,” said an older man. “We — the American government, that is — didn’t know of your existence until quite recently. Now that we know, we want to protect you and also explore whether we can be useful to each other.”

They were certainly putting their cards on the table. Usually there was a lot of mumbo jumbo about how special and unique we were, et cetera, but what they were always really getting at was: Can we make you do what we want you to?

So far the answer had always been “Nope!”