Ten minutes later, we were still standing on the front porch waiting on Sunny and Hawk.
“What’s taking so long?” I called into the house.
“I can’t leave my hair products! I can’t!” Sunny cried from the boys’ bathroom.
I rolled my eyes. “Sunny, you don’t need to use hair products. We’re on the run, for God’s sake! We don’t even know if we’ll have a bathroom!”
He poked his head out of the bathroom to glare at me. “Of course I need hair products! Otherwise my hair won’t be perfect!”
I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed. I didn’t think I’d ever understand Sunny. He spent more time in the bathroom every morning than the rest of us combined.
“If you don’t leave the hair products, I’m shaving your head and getting rid of them anyway.”
He gasped and reached a hand up to his beloved hair. “You wouldn’t,” he accused, glaring at me.
My eyebrows went up. He’d learned a long time ago that I didn’t make idle threats. Fuming, he came to join the rest of the group. With one problem solved, I turned back to the house just as Hawk appeared at the end of the boys’ hall. He had a perplexed look on his face.
“I can’t find my go-bag,” he said. We kept bags ready with supplies for in case we ever needed to split, like now. I was only thankful that we weren’t necessarily in a hurry, because the whole point of the go-bag was to be able to grab it and get out fast. I was still a little worried, though, as I knew there could be more demons or other things created by the Labs coming any minute. I wasn’t sure if the demons were monitored or given a time limit or if they just escaped and happed to find us. I hoped it was the last one, but I highly doubted that it was true.
I turned a knowing look to Falcon. “Where is it?”
He hung his head and headed into his room to pull Hawk’s backpack out from beneath his bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I moved it so long ago that I forgot I’d hidden it.”
Hawk took the bag and sighed. “Let’s just get out of here,” he said as they joined us on the porch. I pointed Beast, Russ, and Sunny in a direction, and then took off running, Russ in wolf form. All of them were much faster than any human, and as long as we didn’t fly overly fast, they would be able to keep up with us. I still gave them a little bit of a head start.
Falcon took off first. He was a Generation One angel. He seemed huge to us, but really, he was only about six feet tall. The only thing about him that made him inhuman was his wings, but that wasn’t a good thing. He was so heavy that he had to have a wingspan of over eighteen feet, over three feet longer than Hawk’s, and they were also about a foot wider. They were huge and bulky and slower than ours, and he hated it. He took off after the others.
Hawk went next. The scientists had learned from the mistakes of Generation One, and Generation Two was made lighter. Hawk’s bones were hollow like a bird’s, plus he was simply so much leaner than Falcon. If we were normal teenagers, Falcon would be on the football team as a lineman, and Hawk would be a track star. His wingspan was about fifteen feet, and he weighed just over a hundred pounds—half as much as Falcon.
He would have been perfect if the scientists had left it at that. But, of course, they didn’t. They were trying to create things that didn’t really exist, and they’d taken some liberties, like not giving vampire the weaknesses they had in myths. They’d decided that angels should have unbelievable senses, but the human brain wasn’t built to process that much information. Hawk’s had overloaded and he’d lost his sight. Others had lost different senses. Some had lost all of them.
By my Generation, Generation Three, they’d fixed that problem. I had a wingspan of just beneath fourteen feet and weighed just less than a hundred pounds. I was a couple of inches shorter than Hawk, and all of my senses had been heightened without losing any.
Unlike Falcon, whose wings were built just to hold him up, mine and Hawk’s had been build for speed and maneuverability. They were narrower than Falcon’s, and small enough that we could hide them beneath cloaks in a pinch. We looked like we were hunchbacked old people, but it was better than being a freak. Falcon couldn’t hide his wings even with a cloak. In the air, we were faster, and often had to double back so that Falcon could keep up.
When I got up into the air, Hawk was waiting for me, and we took off after Falcon and the group on the ground. We caught up in less than a minute, and slowed to their speed. I kept my eyes on the group on the ground. Russ was running in the middle, and I couldn’t help but laugh. His go-back was one of those dog vest things, and it looked so weird on his hulking wolf form. Beast and Sunny were on either side of him.
I fingered the dog tags around my throat as I watched them. I’d had them my whole life, since my first days in the Labs. They were just a way to identify us. There were so many of us that the scientists at the Labs had a hard time remembering who was who. My tags read:
Kite: Angel 3-1
They’d named most of us after physical traits. Hawk’s looked like a hawk’s, Falcon’s wings looked like a falcon’s, and my wings looked like a kite’s. Russ had russet fur. Beast didn’t technically get a name. Her tag only read Werewolf 1-10. But she’d taken to calling herself Beast after we escaped from the Labs. And Sunny… well, they’d given him his name as a joke, I guess.
Then the tag had the type of creature we were supposed to be: angel, werewolf, vampire, or demon. The numbers represented our Generation and number. I was the first angel born in Generation Three, so I was Angel 3-1, Hawk was Angel 2-15, Falcon was Angel 1-3, etc.
We could’ve taken them off after we escaped, but we’d all kept them. We’d never talked about it—we never talked about much that related to the Labs—but we all wore them all the time. I personally felt like they were a part of me, and they reminded me of everything that I had to lose if we got caught.
The Labs wanted us dead, last I checked. It was the reason we’d been rescued. One scientist had thought that it would be a waste to get rid of every specimen of their first experiments, even if we had become obsolete. So he took one child from each of the remaining Generations and brought us here, gave us the information for a bank account, and abandoned us.
I couldn’t really hold it against him. He did save us from that horrible place. I started to shake just thinking about going back. We were kept in a huge room in stacks of crates four high. Each crate was about two or three feet tall and wide, and about four or five feet deep. So at the time, it was barely enough to sit up and stretch out to sleep. Now, we wouldn’t even have enough room for that.
I mentally shook myself. I shouldn’t think like that. We weren’t going back; I would make sure of it. I glanced behind me at Falcon. He was struggling to keep up, and had fallen a few feet below us too. I felt really bad for him. His wings beat almost twice as much as mine, and he could still barely stay aloft, especially for long periods of time.
I looked to my left at Hawk. He was perfectly even with me, our wings beating at the same time. We were always perfectly in time. He was my best friend, the person I’d depended on most my whole life. And just as he knew me better than anyone else, I could tell when he was troubled. Most of the other misfits would take his silence as normal; he was a pretty quiet guy. But I knew there was something else to it.
I angled myself so I swooped closer to him. “What’s up?” I asked him when I was within good hearing range. Not that he would have had any trouble hearing me from where I had been before, with his super hearing, but it wasn’t within conversation range for me.
He sighed. “I wish we hadn’t had to leave.”
I understood what he meant. For most of us, leaving that house had been leaving behind a home, a safe place. For Hawk, it had been more. His independence relied on him being able to get around on his own, which he’d only been able to do in our home because he knew it so well. Falcon liked to mess with him by moving furniture. He thought it was just a joke, that it didn’t matter. I knew it was more than that. Hawk hated relying on others; he saw it as a weakness. And by leaving our house, he was leaving behind the familiarity that had allowed him to be almost entirely independent.
I wanted to move closer, put a hand on his shoulder, comfort him physically. But not only was it impossible while flying, I knew he wouldn’t want me to. So instead, I said, “I know. I’m going to miss that place.”
He was quiet for so long that I thought our conversation was over. That’s how it happened sometimes; he wasn’t the kind to carry on long conversations. Sometimes he would go for days without saying anything to anyone at all. He could go weeks only speaking to me. But then, finally, he spoke so softly that I almost didn’t hear him. “What if we go back?”
Anyone else would have thought that he meant back to the house, but I knew him better. I knew what he really meant. The Labs.
“We won’t. We’ll get away and find another safe place.”
He fingered his own dog tags. “Maybe we won’t get away. Maybe they’ll catch up with us.” His fists clenched. “Why are they even after us again? Why do they care? We’re supposed to be dead. It’s not like we’re trying to out their experiments. We just want to be left alone.”
I was shocked to hear such an outburst from him. He was usually a boy of few words. “I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe those demons just escaped and thought it would be fun to mess with us. Maybe the Labs thought they should fully terminate us. I don’t know. But I’m not letting anyone get caught, and no one is going back. I promise.”
He fell silent again, but I knew he wasn’t fully convinced. I knew that nothing I could say would fully convince him that everything would be okay. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I distracted him. Tapping his wing with mine, I flew off, shouting, “You’re it!”
After a moment of shock, he streaked off after me. You’d think it would be easy to play tag with a blind boy, but it really wasn’t. He could hear exactly where I was, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get him off my tail. Soon we were both laughing, flying circles around the rest of the misfits and I continued to try in vain to shake him off my tail.
Finally, I tucked my wings in and dove for the ground. I spread my wings just short of landing on Sunny’s head and streaked back towards the sky, laughing as I went. Sunny squealed like a little girl and covered his head, only making me laugh harder. In fact, I didn’t think I could laugh any harder.
And then Hawk plowed straight into Sunny. He didn’t open his wings soon enough, and they went down in a tangle of arms and legs. For a moment, I circled closer, worried that someone could have gotten up. Then Hawk hopped to his feet, grinning as Sunny glared at him from the ground.
“Look what you did!” Sunny yelled, leaping to his feet and trying to brush mud off of his clothes. I could barely keep myself aloft because I was laughing so hard, and Hawk and Beast were literally rolling on the ground laughing. Even Russ was making these weird barking noises that sounded almost like he was choking.
Sunny glared at all of us. “It’s not funny!” he yelled, trying to get mud out of his hair. We only laughed harder, and Falcon, who had just reached us, joined in. It was good to see that some things never changed. Sunny would always be Sunny, even when I made him leave behind his hair products and threatened to shave his head. Finally, even he couldn’t glare at us anymore, and we all laughed together in the middle of the woods with no home and no one to go to for help.
And I was happy.