Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

48

"Oops," I said once we were alone again. "Guess they forgot to program us with any respect for authority."

"Those idiots," Gazzy said, scuffing his foot against the floor.

We were feeling victorious, but it was still clear: We were captive, and right now they held all the tarot cards.

"I miss Total," said Nudge.

I sighed. "If he ever existed."

"We didn't imagine the hawks...or the bats," Nudge said.

"Yeah," said Iggy. "We didn't imagine those creepy subway tunnels in New York."

"Or the headhunter, at that school," said Gazzy.

"I know. I'm sure we didn't," I said, though actually I wasn't, not a hundred percent, anyway.

Ari came and got me again that afternoon. This time I was actually allowed to walk. Wee-hah!

"I don't trust him. Keep your eyes open," Fang murmured as I was leaving.

"Ya think?" I whispered back.

"So what's this all about, Ari?" I asked, as we passed some whitecoats who looked at us strangely. "How come we're taking these little tours?"

Now that I wasn't strapped to a lead wheelchair, I was memorizing every hall, every doorway, every window.

He looked uncomfortable and still subdued. For a wolverine, anyway. "I'm not sure," he muttered. "They just said walk her around."

"Ah," I said. "So we can assume there's something they want me to see. Besides the brain on a stick and the superbabies."

Ari shrugged. "I don't know. They don't tell me anything."

Just then we passed wide double doors, and one of them swung open as we went by. A whitecoat hurried from the room beyond, but not before I'd caught a glimpse inside.

On a large video screen that took up a whole wall, I saw a map of the world. My raptor vision took in a thousand details in a second, which I digested as Ari and I walked. Each country was outlined, and one city in each country was highlighted.

Above the map was a title card, THE BY-HALF PLAN. I'd heard of that somewhere before.

On an off chance that it would actually get me somewhere, I asked Ari, "So, what's the By-Half Plan?"

Ari shrugged. "They're planning to reduce the world's population by half," he explained morosely.

I almost stopped in my tracks but remembered to keep walking and to look disinterested. "Geez, by half? That's what, three billion people? They're ambitious little buggers."

My mind was reeling at the idea of genocide on that level. It made Stalin and Hitler look like kindergarten teachers. Okay, really evil kindergarten teachers, but still.

Ari shrugged again, and I realized it was hard for him to get worked up about things when he was going to die any day now.

I thought about what else I had seen, and it suddenly hit me: I'd seen some of this stuff before, like in a movie, or a dream, or in...one of those skull-splitting infodumps I used to get. For a while I'd had intensely horrible headaches, where it felt like my brain was imploding inside my skull. Then tons of images, words, sounds, stuff would scroll through my consciousness. I realized that some of what I was seeing, saying, doing right now-I'd already seen it.

Think, think.

I was still concentrating when we turned a corner and I literally ran into someone. Two someones.

Jeb and Angel.