“You failed,” Dylan announced, leaning menacingly over the doctor. “Jeb is dead, and so are the other Horsemen.” Dylan tapped the screen on his wrist, and the bloody battle replayed on-screen. “You did make me stronger. Stronger than all of them—I’m the only one left.”

“Not only you.” Dr. Gunther-Hagen lifted the sleeve of his white coat, revealing a screen on his wrist that matched Dylan’s. “I injected myself with the serum, of course.” The doctor’s eyes glittered. “My creations shouldn’t be the only ones with a chance at eternal life. You and I are left together, son. Something tells me you didn’t completely overcome your programming, hmm?” He pursed his lips.

Had he? Dylan dropped his eyes. This was what the doctor had done to him—made him question, made him doubt. Dylan had struggled with his origin from the beginning, trying to determine how much was really him and how much was… everything else. He hadn’t become a mindless killer, but apart from that, did he really have any control at all?

Dylan heard footsteps echoing through the entryway and looked at his maker.

“No.” Dylan shook his head sadly. “I just did what you first programmed me to do: I couldn’t stop loving Maximum Ride.”

“You thought you’d won, didn’t you?” Max looked at the doctor from the doorway, her eyes like skewers.

“Oh, I have won, child.” Gunther-Hagen sank back in his office chair, unperturbed. “I was just telling Dylan about our coming eternal life.”

“He injected himself with Fang’s DNA,” Dylan explained.

“Is that so?” Max shook her head sadly at the doctor, but she was smiling. “Jeb told me the serum wasn’t quite there yet. You might’ve been trying to live forever, but I’m afraid forever’s going to stop a little shorter than you’d planned.

“And, bummer for you, there’s been a change in power, so things are probably going to get a little rough from here on out. There’s no way you’re getting out of here, Häagen-Dazs. We have you completely surrounded.”

“The last of the world’s righteous survivors, all in one place?” For the first time, Dylan noticed that the doctor was tapping his fingertips carefully against the screen at his wrist. “How convenient.”

Dylan! Max! There’s a bomb! Angel’s voice rang through his head.

“Where is it?” Max growled, her body rigid with caution, her face muscles twitching in fury.

Dr. Gunther-Hagen opened his pristine white lab coat and started to unbutton his expensive collared shirt, fixing them with his icy, amused gaze.

But when the shirt fell open, there was a mass of wires and steel canisters where his chest should have been. The doctor wasn’t rigged to the bomb.

He was the bomb.