I squinted through the bars of the cage, expecting a dungeon or a lab, maybe—but we were in the middle of a lecture hall. Kids sat in the rows of seats rising up all around us.

Some of them were burned like the girl had been, and some had those weird golden cataracts in their eyes. Others’ eyes just looked glazed.

The words came back to me then: One Light. That was what the little girl had said right before she’d knocked us out with the gas.

They were Doomsday followers.

Iggy had been brainwashed by the cult once, so I knew how hard it was to get through to them. Still, I had to try.

“Yo, Children of the Corn!” I reached an arm out of the cage and waved. “Snap out of it! Let us out of here and I promise to return your brains in one piece.”

“Shh!” A girl in the front row glared at me.

“The Remedy is speaking,” another chided.

The name was like a bucket of ice water to the face, and I jerked my head around toward the front of the hall.

As I gripped the bars of our cage and gaped at the small man pacing the platform, the pain and devastation I’d felt in Africa and then New York flooded my heart, and for a second, I couldn’t breathe. This was the man who’d destroyed the world, the man who’d killed billions of people.

This was the man I’d been hunting.

As the mastermind of world devastation, he wasn’t much to look at. He wore a wrinkled suit and had a scraggly brown beard. His voice in the microphone was shaky and high-pitched, his manner feverish. He was short, balding, and giving some sort of lecture on Napoleon. Images flashed on a huge screen behind him.

“So you’re the piece of scum known as the Remedy!” I shouted. “You look more like the Problem!”

The man on the stage stopped pacing, startled to hear sounds coming from his zombified audience.

“Napoleon fanatic—go figure. I gotta be honest, I thought you’d be taller.”

The Remedy reached up to smooth his thinning hair and walked down the stairs, stopping far short of our cage.

“It can talk,” he observed, more to his pupils than to me. “I thought they’d bred that out by now. This mutant is definitely out of date and toward the end of its life span.”

The kids in the bleachers chorused their approval, gawking at us like we were zoo animals, and I stood fuming in front of Harry, who probably didn’t even know he should be offended right now.

“It can even form full sentences,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “And it is Maximum Ride, in case you want to memorize the name of the mutant who’s going to destroy you.”