I gazed at Jeb and Anne, feeling cold rage turn my face into a mask. “How’s that working out for you? Able to look at yourselves in a mirror? Able to sleep at night?”

“We’ll get you something to eat,” Anne said, and she walked quickly out of the room.

“Max—,” Jeb began.

“Don’t you even talk to me!” I spat. “Take your little traitor with you and get out of our death chamber!”

Angel’s expression didn’t change as she looked from me to Jeb. Jeb took her hand and sighed, and they both left the room. I was shaking with emotion and in a last surge, strained against the Velcro straps with all my superhuman strength.

Nothing.

I flopped back against the bed, tears forming in my eyes, hating to have the flock see me like this. I wiggled my left fingers and looked for the scars. Nothing.

“So, that went well,” said Fang.

43

43

Okay, here’s a knotty little question: If you’re dreaming that you’re tied up by mad scientists in a secret experimental facility, and then you fall asleep and start dreaming, are you really dreaming?

Which one is the dream?

Which one counts?

How can you tell?

I’d been torturing myself with these pointless circular conundrums all day. Which raises another question: If I’m torturing my own brain by trying to figure stuff out, does that still count as Them torturing me? Because they caused the whole situation to happen?

At any rate, at some point I must have “fallen asleep,” because at some point, a hand shaking my shoulder made me streak back to “consciousness.”

As always, I leaped into wakefulness on full alert, automatically trying to assume a battle position. Pretty much impossible when you’re all strapped down.

I see perfectly in the dark, and it took only a split second to register the familiar hulking bad news leaning over my bed.

“Ari!” I whispered almost silently.

“Hi, Max,” Ari said, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t look that mental. I mean, every time I’d seen this poor screwup in the last couple months, he’d looked more and more as if he were standing on the edge of insanity with one foot on a banana peel.

But now he looked—well, not anything close to normal, but at least all the frothing at the mouth had stopped.

I waited for the first volley of venom.

But Ari had no snide remarks, no taunts, no threats. Instead he undid one of my arms, then pulled it down and strapped it to the arm of a wheelchair.

Hmm. Could I still fly if I was strapped into a wheelchair? I thought maybe I could. I guessed we would find out. In fact, if I could get some serious speed going on this thing, it might lend a significant boost to an exciting takeoff.