Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

112

Growing up in the lab at the School, where we were surrounded by dog crates filled with mix 'n' match genetic experiments, we'd seen pretty much any combination of two living things that you could imagine, and probably a thousand that you couldn't. Virtually all of them had been unsuccessful, or "nonviable," as the whitecoats said. A tiny percentage made it past the embryo stage, and a few struggled along for a year or two before their horrific deficits caught up with them. As far as I knew, we, the flock, had been by far the most successful hybrid. Us and the Erasers. Even the Erasers only lived about six years or so. We were ancient compared with them.

Today we were seeing some successful hybrids, like Mara. After SpotGirl, the Director trotted out two people who could control the color of their skin just by thinking about it.

"Can they turn blue?" Nudge asked, fascinated. "Or purple?"

"Who knows?" I said, and then my stomach twisted as the people onstage literally turned camouflage right in front of us. I thought about what the military people of various countries could do with that and felt ill.

We saw people who could increase their height by about four inches, just by controlling their muscles and skeletal structures with their minds.

"Combine that with the skin-changing types, and you've got a recipe for a bank robber deluxe," I said. "They'd never be recognized."

We saw people with hard, scaly, bulletproof skin, or GatorGuys, as we called them. We saw a woman who could scream at pitches too high for any of us to hear but had Total writhing in pain on the ground, biting his lip to keep from shrieking swear words. Her voice could break glass, which isn't totally unusual, but it could also shatter metal, which seemed new and different-and completely horrifying.

"Think of what a successful nag she would be," I said to Ari, and he tried to smile but couldn't. His skin seemed to have a grayish cast, and he'd been unusually quiet for several hours. I wondered if he was near his end.

"These things all look like soldiers," said Nudge. "Like they'd be good in a war, you know?"

"They look all warry because they were built to be an army," I told her.

"Well, that would do it," she said.

"Don't these people ever think about anything else?" Total muttered in disgust. "There's more to life than world domination, you know."

"Max? What's that?" Angel asked, pointing.

I looked. Up on the stage the Director seemed to have a remote control in her hand. Then I saw a small swarm of glittery copper-colored things circling around her. Were they bugs? Had they started engineering bugs? Oh, great. Just what the world needed.

The Director motioned to someone. He opened a large plastic box, and hundreds of beautiful butterflies flew out. It was a weird jolt of color in this gray landscape. Well, besides the camo people, that is.

The glittery things weren't bugs.

They were nano-bullets, with their own internal guidance systems.

Within seconds they had locked on to the butterflies, and moments after that, all that was left were bits of shimmery wings, floating to the ground.

Nudge, Angel, Ari, Total, and I stared at one another in horror.