Three hours of fast flight later, we saw them: an eighteen-wheeled semi parked off the road in perhaps the most desolate, unpopulated spot in all of Arizona. You could not call 911 from here. You could not run for help. You could send off a flare every half hour for days and not be seen by anyone.

“Looks like the place,” I said, sighing. “And look at that crowd down there. I thought all the Erasers were exterminated.”

“So the Voice lied to you?”

“No,” I said slowly, as we coasted on a current. “It’s never actually lied to me. So if those things aren’t Erasers, then they’re the Erasers’ replacements. Oh, joy.”

“Yep.” Fang shook his head, so not into this. “Five bucks says they’re worse than the originals. And they probably have guns.”

“No doubt.”

“And of course they’re expecting us.”

“We did everything but RSVP.”

“I hate this.” Fang deliberately looked everywhere but at my useless left hand.

“That would be because you’ve still got a tenuous grasp of sanity.”

I circled wide, trying to gear myself up for an impossible fight: We would be outnumbered a couple hundred to two, by something worse than Erasers. I had no idea if the rest of the flock would be able to help.

It was pretty much a suicide mission.

Again.

“There is one bright side to this,” said Fang.

“Yeah? What’s that?” The new and improved Erasers would mutilate us before they killed us?

He grinned at me so unexpectedly I forgot to flap for a second and dropped several feet. “You looove me,” he crooned smugly. Holding his arms out wide, he added, “You love me this much.”

My shriek of appalled rage could probably be heard in California, or maybe Hawaii. Certainly by the unknown army down below. I didn’t care. I folded my wings against my sides and aimed downward to get away from Fang as fast as possible. Now that he had filled me with a blind, teeming bloodlust, I was ready to take out a couple thousand Eraser replacements, no matter what they were.

Which, I admitted to myself, may have been his point.

Amazingly, we were able to thump to quick-running landings on the roof of the semi without getting punched full of little unaerodynamic bullet holes.

Heads swiveled to look at us, Erasery heads, but there was something different about them. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.

“Iggy?” I yelled.

“Max!” I heard his strangled cry from the rear of the truck and trotted over.

“You guys ok—,” I began, then I saw Jeb, Ari, and Angel standing on the ground. “Angel!” I cried. “Are you okay? I’m gonna take these guys apa—”

The look in Angel’s polar-ice eyes stopped me.