“I keep putting two and two together and coming up with thirty-seven,” I said. “We have the School, the Institute, Itex...us, Erasers, Jeb, Anne Walker, the other experiments we saw in New York. But what’s the bigger picture? How does it all fit together? How am I supposed to save the world?”

I never would have admitted not knowing to the younger kids. Kids need leaders, need to know someone’s in charge. I mean, I don’t. But most kids do.

“I can’t help feeling like the School is the place to start,” I went on, ignoring the instinctive tightening of my stomach muscles at the thought of it. “Remember when Angel said she overheard people at the School thinking about the horrible disaster coming up, and afterward there would be hardly any people left?”

Yeah, you heard me right. Angel “overheard people thinking.” Another clue that we’re no ordinary cast of characters. Angel doesn’t just read minds; sometimes she can actually control them too.

Fang nodded. “And we’d survive ’cause we have wings. And I guess fly away from whatever disaster happens.”

I was quiet for a minute, thinking so hard my head hurt.

“Two questions,” Fang said. His eyes looked like part of the night sky. “One, where’s your Voice? And two, where are all the Erasers?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same things,” I said.

Those of you not in the know will be thinking, What Voice?

Why, the little Voice inside my head, of course. You mean you don’t have one? I did.

Well, Ihadn’t lately, butI figured that was just a technical hitch. It wasn’t like my Voice punched a time clock or anything. It was too much to hope that the Voice might be gone forever, but at the same time I was a little freaked out by how alone I felt without it.

“The only thing I can think of is maybe the Voice is transmitted inside my head somehow, and now we’re out of range?”

Fang shrugged.

“Yeah. Who knows? And then the Erasers, I don’t know that either. This is the longest we’ve ever not seen them,” I said, giving the sky around us a quick scan. I still had a microchip in my arm that I was sure was leading them to me, but we hadn’t seen a single Eraser in four days. Usually they popped up out of nowhere, no matter where we were or what we were doing. But it had been ominously quiet on the Eraser front. “It’s creepy, and it makes me feel like something worse is coming. Like there’s a one-ton iron safe hanging over our heads, waiting to drop.”