“How many fine wines I haven’t tried.” Total sighed. “How many sights I haven’t seen. The Pyramids in Egypt. The Great Wall of China. The bonny, bonny White Cliffs of Dover. Gone, all gone, lost to me forever!”

“Please tell me the end is soon,” Fang muttered.

Suddenly I had a thought: air. We were sealed into this place. Had we used up all the oxygen? Was that why we were so dopey? I twisted around and punched my fist through the snow wall as hard as I could. My hand was so numb it was like I was using a stick. A gust of fresh, icy air blew in, and we all inhaled and blinked.

“Is the storm over?” Angel mumbled.

“No,” came a deep, odd voice from outside.

My eyes flew open wide, and so did Fang’s. Normally my body would have been instantly flooded with adrenaline and I’d have been in full-on fight mode, but this time I could barely react, barely raise my arm.

“The storm is just beginning.” The deep voice laughed, and then the wall crashed down on us.

Chapter 59

59

THEY WERE GHOSTS, ice ghosts, my brain thought sluggishly.

Except ghosts couldn’t drag us out into the freezing air. Despite being half dead from hypothermia, Fang and I still had enough strength to immediately throw ourselves into the air, each of us holding one of Angel’s hands.

“Agh!” I cried, feeling a fine wire net smash against my face. The net whipped us down against the icy ground hard enough to make me lose my breath.

“Max!” Angel cried.

Pushing myself up on my numb hands, I searched frantically for a way out, at the same time trying to identify our attackers. The storm had lessened a bit, so I could see at least a couple feet in front of me. I blinked up through the mesh and saw that our captors were some kind of jazzed-up robots, kind of like short Flyboys with no wings. Only they hadn’t bothered making them look even halfway human.

We just couldn’t get a break.

Fury warmed my blood, and I tried to leap up, snarling, but the net only closed tighter around us, knocking me to the ground again.

I heard laughter, and spun my head this way and that to identify its source. The wind still howled in my ears, making it hard to tell where the laughter had come from.

One of the things was bigger than the others, who were only four feet tall or so.

“Do not hurt them,” he said in the deep, gravelly voice we’d first heard. “Remember, we must save them.”

“News flash,” I spat, trying to rise up again. “Your saving us is practically killing us! Let us up!”