Maximum Ride: ENEMIES AND FRIENDS

What's to be Gone is What's to be Left

  I stretch, unfurling my wings, as I step out of bed. Opening the sliding glass door to the balcony, I step onto the railings, and takes flight.

Over the horizon, I spot the zig zagged that protect the Flock's home. To the left of it is a bank where water flows into a stream that gives off a good source of the water supply and electricity. All insured by Gazzy and Iggy.

It's marvelous how the two kids can just come up with an idea put of nowhere. Without them, even with Max, the Flock wouldn't probably last long.

After one flying swoop, I head back, swinging myself back into my room from the roof to find Jacob's bed empty. He must be helping Iggy with the breakfast. After trying everyone's cooking once from a bet with Gazzy, I've found out he is completely right about that Iggy is the best bird kid to cook for you. I now owe Gazzy forty bucks.

After showering and brushing my teeth, I pull on a pair of basketball shorts and a matching baby blue tee.

Downstairs, Iggy is scrambling eggs while Jacob and Angel wash the wild caught strawberries from her garden. While they do so, Max brushes Nudges hair while giving a lecture at the same time.

"Nudge, all I'm saying is you need to be careful. You can't just fly out to the city! I don't care if Lady Gaga was seen shopping Mango Republic!". Max scolds.

Nudge cringes at both the way she tries to brush the tangles out of her hair, and the fact that Max named a store wrong.

"It's Banana Republic!... Sss, not so rough, Max!" Nudge corrects.

"That's not the point! You could've been caught, and Erasers... did you forget about that?" Max stops brushing for moment to make emphasis. "If Fang hadn't  caught you down while looking for food..."

To avoid the argument, I shake my head, walking into the kitchen to wash my hands so that I  can set out the breakfast plates for serving.

A quiet shadow suddenly looms over me, crowding my vision into darkness. This shadow is like no other. A tall one with red hair and pitch black eyes. Immediately, I realize it the first person I have ever killed. It was the day I was first let out of my cage for lab tests on the way I could possibly react around civilians and Erasers.

Jeb's personal assistant, Hana Miyashino, had brought in here twenty years old half-sister  who had come abroad from Germany as a lab intern. She'd wanted be a Marine biologist, and needed at least a fifty hour internship to graduate.

It was that day that she was on her forty-eighth hour. Her last job, to survey the little twelve year-old bird girl.

The White Labcoats had warned her to stay in the block so that she would be safe, but she said wanted to be hands on. She believed it marvelous that the School had created such a creature like me.

I looked up at her with a bleeding nose, a letter opener stabbed through my chest until it stabbed through my heart. Bullet wounds in variety around my stomach and legs.

They were testing my invulnerability that day. At that time, I was wearing a white dress and was holding a white stuffed bunny with blood red eyes. The bunny was fake, but to me Mr. Coolish was my best friend. My only friend.

"Are coming to kill me?" I'd asked her, staring up at her, trembling in fear.

The short redhead bent down over me, stepping on the chains that connect to the weights locked around my ankles.

I cried out in pain.

  "Dr. Batchelder, bring out Experiment 29. I want to see if she has restraints on who or what she will attack." she demanded.

  They brought out 29. A full grown lion with golden fur. Just as the lioness could sense something bad was going to happen, I could sense its fear.

She smiles at me. "Jesse, is it?" she asks.

I nod.

"It is a great honor to meet you. You are a savior to the world. With you, you will be a sacrifice so that humans can strive." She grins. "And, you know where to start?"

"To kill the lion?" I smile back at her, my anger arising. The first time I could fully control my shadows.

"My name is Hilda Jans, it is a pleasure to meet you... Kill the lion." The woman went from being kind to being evil just like that.

I despised for it.

At that very moment, my shadows erupted. Savagely, they snatched for her as if she was their quench for thirst. "You want me to kill the lion, but, I don't want to. Why don't I kill you, instead?" I sneered with malicious glee, my dark friends finally grabbing hold of her so that they can drop her from the ground.

My eyes shot to the lioness, a lion who stared at me in hunger.

"I won't kill one of my kind." I yell.

The lioness finally had gotten her lunch.