O falling star; O beautiful one.

There's a hard and sparkling smile on her pretty, pretty face, and if you didn't know her, you could say she's happy. Or if you knew her a little better, you might say she's angry -- mad about having to go to a stupid place like this, angry as hell about being a test subject again.

Jeb's expression is balanced and blank. I'm watching him carefully, keeping an eye on him. He says he wants to help Max -- and I can see worry in his eyes -- but I don't trust him.

He's still setting up the things he needs to run this test, whatever it is, moving around the lab and adjusting pieces of equipment I don't remember. I stand next to Max and don't wince when she squeezes my hand hard enough to hurt.

"So, Jeb," she says, in a voice bright as her smile, artificially fluorescent. "What exactly are you planning to do?"

"Nothing really," he mutters, fingers playing over something that looks like one of Gazzy's Lego kits, adjusting gleaming metal pieces until he judges their place acceptable. He looks up, says nothing, drops his eyes again.

Being with Max has made me good at reading unspoken emotions. And Jeb's not hard to read. Compared to her, he's an open book.

"It's OK," I say to Max, whispering in her ear.

"I know," she whispers back.

Jeb, back to us, fiddles with some broken mechanism for longer than he's spent on anything else in the few minutes I've watched him flutter about the lab. He makes a quiet, frustrated noise, and then calls out to the tall whitecoat leaning on the counter just a few steps from him. "Roland?"

The tall whitecoat looks up from typing rapidly on the sleek little laptop he's set on the counter in front of him, pretending he's not sneaking glances at the miracle birdkids every two seconds. "Hmm?"

"Come look at this."

"OK." He walks over to Jeb.

"Right here," Jeb says, and the tall whitecoat leans over his shoulder and looks.

"Huh."

I lean over and whisper into Max's ear. "Think he speaks more than one word at a time?"

She cracks a smile, and her grip on my hand lightens a little. "Maybe. I don't know."

And something about the name tickles inside my brain. Like I know someone named Roland. Or like I've at least heard it before.

I can't place it, though, so I file it away.

The tall whitecoat and Jeb confer for a moment, speaking in low technical-jargon voices. Then the tall whitecoat turns around and addresses Max.

"We just need to do a blood draw," he says, and although it's the same 'this won't hurt a bit' tone I've heard from a thousand whitecoats, it feels like less of a lie from him. He flashes a smile. "It won't take but a minute."

He doesn't say 'I promise' -- and they always used to -- and that makes it a little bit better.

"OK," Max says, and a hard bright light flickers in the tall whitecoat's eyes, like Max's smile. Then he blinks and it's gone.

He turns around and unwraps crinkly paper wrapping from something. Then he turns around and he's holding a needle. Max squeezes my hand, and I feel the bones grate together.

"You know the drill," he says, and Max does -- because we all do, even Angel.

It doesn't take long, and from the way Max's death grip on my hand lightens even more, it doesn't hurt as bad as it usually does.

I kind of like this Roland, whoever he is.

Finally it's done, and the tall whitecoat files the vial away. Jeb smiles quickly and motions us out into the hall, already fiddling with whatever mechanism is broken now.

Max and I walk out together, her still gripping my hand.

"That bastard," I say quietly to her. "You're his daughter. He ordered this. And he wouldn't stop playing with his fancy toys long enough to do anything for you."

She smiles, bright and healthy and happy. "You know how he said everything was a test?" And I know that memory like it's mine.

"Yeah."

"I think this really was one."

"What about it?" Her hair's growing out long again. Either she hasn't had time to cut it or she wants it long. I won't ask, because if I do she'll tell me I need a haircut.

Max laughs. "The tall guy."

"What about him?"

"Didn't you catch his name?" Her voice is teasing, light, playful. This isn't a Max I've heard before. Or maybe I have and I just can't remember.

"Yeah. Roland."

"And that doesn't ring a bell?"

"No, it doesn't," I tell her.

"You've seriously forgotten?"

"I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!" she says, in a pretty fair imitation of Gazzy, and I can't help but to smile.

"Aww, no way," I say, thinking about how they could and could not be the same person. They look roughly the same, ter Borcht and Roland -- hair, height, fair skin -- but there are two crucial differences that make me doubt. "He didn't have an accent."

"That, and he's lost weight," Max says brightly, and grins.

Well, that too. I just don't believe it. "Max, how can you be sure it's the same guy?"

"I can't be. Not a hundred percent. But it's..."

"Such a Jeb thing to do."

"Right!" She smiles.

"But why?" I ask.

"I don't know," she admits.

"Not with these guys," I say, playing my familiar role as the other half of her mind, about a heartbeat from finishing her sentences.

"Right." She pauses, looks up at me. "Where are we going, anyway?"

"Well, the cafeteria's right down here."

She watches me with sharp eyes. "Fang, you need to eat something."

I don't mention that I haven't seen her eat in days, and I take the food without a complaint, poking the rice with a flimsy plastic spork.

Nudge and Angel were already here when Max and I came down, sitting at a table trading bites of a slice of chocolate cake.

Max, of course, turned into the avenging angel when she saw this, swooping down on them with almighty fury.

Well, maybe not almighty, I decide as I scoop up an anemic sporkful of rice.

"Hi, Max," Angel said. "Want some cake? We saved you the frosting."

Max gave her that look, the one she reserves for Angel: I'm not killing you, but only because you're six and can read minds.

"Angel, what time is it?"

"Lunchtime." She smiled at me, rather than at Max. "You could have the frosting for lunch."

"No!" Max said. "The frosting is not for lunch. Fang and I are going to buy some real food."

"But Iggy said I could!" Nudge said in defense of Angel.

Max said nothing, only stalked over to the line...

...where she bought this sad imitation of orange chicken.

The spork won't hold much rice, so it takes forever to eat.

Nudge is, predictably, bored with watching me. She hates sitting still, especially in here.

"Max--" she begins.

"What?"

Nudge falters. "Um... why did you get a spork instead of a spoon?"

"Sporks are better," Max says gravely, and that makes Nudge giggle.

"No, they're not," Nudge points out. "I mean, they're no good as spoons, they're no good as forks... what are they good for?"

"Poking Fang?" Angel suggests.

"Bad idea," I warn her.

"OK," she says, remarkably obedient for once.

"But... spoon," Nudge says. She's never known when to shut up.

Max stifles a laugh, and says, deadpan, "Oh. The spoon. I love the spoon."

I elbow her in the ribs and we crack up laughing. Everyone in the cafeteria is staring at us, but we don't care. We're a family, impervious to outside influence.

From one point of view, they're not even the same species as us.

----

"Ohmigod," Max says as we pass an alcove with vending machines in it. "Do they have those oatmeal cookies? I think they do."

"Fine," I say to her departing back. "Abandon me."

We were supposed to be finding Gazzy and Iggy, who have, predictably, disappeared.

Now it seems it's just me on that job, so I keep walking down the corridor.

I stop the first guy in a lab coat I see, and ask him if he's seen a tall pale guy and a little boy wandering around together. He gives me an odd look and some incomprehensible directions.

But I find them anyway.

They're in the employee lounge. Gazzy's camped out on the floor playing a video game, and Iggy is... playing with someone's laptop?

"Hey Iggy!" I say, my voice unnecessarily loud. He looks up.

The guy leaning over Iggy's shoulder as he works looks up too. He's just a geek, I decide on the spot -- tall, pale, kinda bad complexion.

"Hey!" he says. "Did you teach this guy to do this?"

"To do what?" I walk a little closer.

"Your buddy here is blind as a bat," the geek says with a Max-ish snarky tone to his voice. "I loan him my laptop, he asks if he can look at my code."

Hoo boy. I suspect I'm missing a few steps in that conversation, but it's enough to know that Iggy's done something impossible again.

"Whatcha doing, Ig?" I ask, looking at the screen. Doesn't mean anything to me.

"He says he's debugging my code," the geek says.

"I am," Iggy says, distracted.

I glance at the geek, then at the screen, then at Iggy. "No," I admit, "I don't know how he does it."

And Max thought it was weird when Nudge turned magnetic.

"So what's your name?" the geek says. "I kinda got that my new buddy is Iggy, but... I didn't catch your name."

"I'm Fang." I don't shake hands with him, but he doesn't put forward a hand for me to shake.

"Kyle," he says. "Nice to meetcha."

"Cool." I walk over to where Gazzy's sitting, absorbed in whatever game he's playing. "Hey. What're you playing?"

"Game," Gazzy mutters, and his thumbs fly on the controller.

"What? Attack of the Killer Poodles?" OK, so yeah, I kind of enjoy bugging him. I'm like his older brother. It's my job.

"Uh-uh." He keeps playing, focused on the screen and the controller.

"Mutant Hens From Outer Space?"

Gazzy looks up at me. "Uh, no. It's this game Kyle showed me."

My geeky friend looks up when he hears his name invoked, and grins sheepishly. "Yeah, I hope you don't mind," he says.

I nod at the screen. "What's this game called?"

"Oh... it's this old game. Metal Gear. Heard of it?"

I haven't. "Nah."

Kyle grins. "You might like it. You wanna play after he's done?"

"Nah, not really," I say, and thankfully, the conversation stops dead there.

Because a guy in a lab coat -- bad sign -- with a pair of goggles around his neck -- worse sign -- comes skidding into the lounge just then, and when he sees me, cries, "There you are!"

Oh boy.

----

He explains on the way, in a hail of technobabble I am cursed by my childhood to understand.

"We just tested the blood -- increased probability --"

He breaks off as he cards us into Jeb's lab, the same one where Max and I came before lunch for her blood draw.

"Are you seriously already done with the tests?"

"Well, no," he says nervously, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "We just... got some preliminary results back..."

"Yeah, OK, whatever," I say. "Just get someone with a doctorate in here and make them explain what's going on."

He dashes back out the door, probably in search of Jeb, which leaves me with a bare minute to stare at the wall and contemplate the fact that no matter how old I get, I'll never be fully free of this place.

Jeb, Max, the guy in the lab coat, and Roland all appear a moment later, like the opening to a bad joke -- three mad scientists and a lab rat walk into a bar.

Jeb is leading Max, who looks confused, and Roland is talking to the guy in the lab coat in another thick hail of technobabble -- and it's the rare kind of technobabble, the kind I can't understand.

"Fang?" Max says, looking bewildered. "What's going on?"

She comes over toward me, and we stand together, taking comfort in each other's presence. The two of us against the world, again.

Except this time, judging by the empty look in Max's eyes that she's trying so hard to conceal, it's me against the world, and me charged with taking care of the girl who's always taken care of me, always given me a plan to follow.

"OK," I say to the three whitecoats. "What's going on?"

The guy in the lab coat grins nervously. "Max, you remember that blood draw we did."

"Yes," she says.

"We've run some tests on the blood, and... turned up some weird stuff."

"Like what?" I say.

"Um..." The guy in the lab coat hesitates, and Roland jumps in.

"There's a mental disorder," he says, and now that I'm listening for it I can hear faint threads of an accent in his voice -- but it's faded, almost not there at all. "Rare, thank God, but... it runs in your family, Max."

Jeb is examining his fingernails.

"It's detectable with a simple blood test," Roland says.

"And I came up positive," Max says dully.

"Yes."

Jeb takes up the thread -- did they plan this? "Max, I started seeing symptoms in you a while ago, so it's not like this is just out of nowhere. You've had this disorder for a long time."

"Is it treatable?" Max says.

"There are medications."

"With serious side effects," Roland breaks in. "They lose effectiveness over time, too -- so you'll have to switch or alter your dosage every few years for the rest of your life."

"Max, we don't even know if those medications would work on someone like you," Jeb says, and it sounds kind of like a nightmare.

"A freak?" Max says.

"Someone with unique genetic structure," Roland says, quite possibly hedging a little.

"A freak."

"We can help you, Max," Jeb says.

"Like you helped Iggy." Who, incidentally, isn't blind and is helping some random geek write code. As we speak. But saying that wouldn't help anyone's case here. I'm just here because I make good moral support.

"No," Roland says. "Do you understand the severity of this situation?"

"Max," Jeb says, "in the United States there's a law about this disorder. If you have it, by law, you must be medicated."

"That's a ridiculous law," Max says calmly. "And the law doesn't really cover me, does it? Being that I'm not really human."

Silence falls, and I take the opportunity to break in.

"So why am I here?"

"Max, I need to talk to you outside," Jeb says, as if I didn't speak at all, and the two of them leave.

I move to follow, out of habit, and the guy in the lab coat stops me. "No. Stay."

"OK, fine," I say, and stay with them.

"We just... kind of have a feeling about this," the guy in the lab coat says, evidently no great shakes at speechmaking on the spot.

"That Max won't want to take her medication," Roland breaks in.

"She wouldn't," I admit.

"You have to make her," the guy in the lab coat says, almost pleading.

"How?" I cross my arms.

"You don't want to see her have a full-blown episode," Roland says quietly, "whether it's manic or depressive. Believe me, they're both terrible to see someone else go through."

"And we don't even know how this disorder would affect a... someone like Max. Or you." The guy in the lab coat adjusts his goggles where they hang around his neck. "So, I guess..."

"We're telling you to be careful," Roland says. "If you can get her to take her meds, she'll be fine. She might never have a full-blown episode."

"That's if she takes her meds regularly," the guy in the lab coat chimes in. "So we called you in here to make sure that she does."

"We know you're close to her," Roland says. "You're probably the only person who could get her to take her medication."

"But why do you guys want her to be normal?" I point out. "I thought you guys liked experimenting on us."

Roland smiles. "To be perfectly honest?"

"Feel free," I say, mustering up all the snark Max taught me.

"We like seeing you guys happy more," the guy in the lab coat says. "Sure, we could get valuable data out of this. But our primary concern with you two is keeping you alive as long as possible."

I laugh. "That's twisted. But you have good intentions, I admit."

"The road to hell is paved with them," Roland says.

She doesn't make it long after that.

They play with her dosage, and to their credit she never has a major episode. Or at least that's what they say. I can't tell, but to me it seems like she goes through dozens of mood swings in the few years we get because of her meds. And wasn't that what they were trying to prevent?

But, Roland tells me after, she makes it remarkably long. None of them -- not even Reilly (which I find out at some point is the name of the guy in the lab coat) -- thought she'd make it half as long as she did. There just isn't medication designed to treat birdkids for mental disorders.

She's at the School for a routine blood test when it happens. From the story Reilly tells me later, her heart rate went through the roof, for no reason they could detect. But they think it was a bad reaction to the medication.

That doesn't matter. Because they can't save her. Max is dead.

At the funeral, a smiling seven-year-old girl with blonde pigtails kisses Max on the cheek in her coffin, and I have to blink to clear my eyes: she could almost be Angel.

But she comes back and sits down between Jeb and Roland, and I realize that Angel's just not that young anymore. She's in middle school now, and Max is dead.

After the coffin's in the ground, Jeb, Roland, and the little girl come up to me before I can run away.

"Hi," the little girl says shyly, and puts out a hand for me to shake. "I'm Elsa."

I shake her hand, and it reminds me of holding Angel's hand when she wanted to cross the street.

But she walks away with Roland, leaving Jeb behind with me.

"Elsa," Jeb explains, "has the same disorder Max had. She's been on medication for quite a while, and she's doing fine."

"So you can do with her what you couldn't with Max?"

"Yes," Jeb says. Because Elsa, so far as I can see, is completely human. "But, Fang..."

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry Max died," he says quietly. "I just -- want you to know that... because of her, we're working harder on new drugs."

"You still can't bring her back."

"No. We can't," he admits.

"That's all right." I nod and smile. "Now, don't you have a family to get back to?"

He does -- he can walk off calmly to his husband and his little girl.

I am stuck here.

I wait, almost lurking, in the graveyard, alone with my thoughts -- well, not quite. Max is here too.

At the same time, she's not here.

I lean against someone's gravestone, thinking and wishing I'd picked up smoking, because then I'd have something to do with my hands. I shove them in my pockets instead.

I'm thinking of Max just before that blood draw. How beautiful she was. And how that never changed, all the years she was on medication.

How it seems, now, like those years were the blink of an eye -- how I feel closer to the morning she had her blood drawn and tested than I do to right now.

I'm falling back into the past, and the last thing I want to do is stop it -- because, if nothing else, Max is there.

I smile, and hope she knows.

O fallen star; O lost beauty.