"What?" Cammy asked, arching her eyebrows at Iggy's uncomfortable expression. "It's not like I'm going to rape you or something once you take off the shirt, okay?"

Iggy rolled his eyes and made a face. "That's not the problem."

Cammy frowned as she studied the peculiar boy. "Then what...?" She trailed off, her eyes drawn to the strange lumps under the back of his shirt. "Hm," she mused. "Would it have something to do with whatever's hidden under your shirt? Hunchback, or something? Birth defect?"

"The last one," he said. "Sort of. Look, this isn't a great idea."

Cammy rubbed her temples. "You are bleeding. Blee-ding. Whatever is the matter with you, we can address later." She controlled her frustrated confusion. "Do you need help with the shirt? I'll cut it off if it'd be easier?"

He hesitated, and after deciding that she wasn't going to relent, he nodded. "I might not be able to lift my arm."

"Right." She pulled a pair of scissors out of the first-aid kit. "Hold still." She cut through the shirt from collar to waist, and pulled it off like a jacket. "See, it's not that..." She stared at his back. "Woah."

"Yeah," Iggy sighed, tentatively flexing the two very large wings that sprouted from his back. They were a golden color, and as he drew them out to their full length, they spanned well over ten feet.

She swallowed and reached out, touching the closest wing and stroking a few feathers. "Okay," she said slowly, "here's the inevitable question: are you an angel?"

Iggy laughed. "Yeah right. Try, genetically altered."

"Oh," she said dumbly. "Well that's new."

He nodded, and said, "Yeah. Okay, so I'm still bleeding."

Cammy blinked and shook herself out of her reverie. "Right, right." She picked up a cloth and spent a moment in the kitchen soaking it with water, and then busied herself with quietly cleaning up the wound.

A silence fell between them as the worked, making Iggy nervous. He shifted uneasily in the chair, wishing that for just one moment he wasn't blind, so he could see what she was doing to him. She could, for all he knew, be from the School and just tending to him until backup arrived.

Speaking of backup, he thought, I wonder how everyone else is. Where are they?

"Woah," Cammy said after a moment, breaking the silence. "I can see the bullet...creepy."

"It didn't go through my arm?" he groaned. "I had hoped it wouldn't still be there."

"Me and you both," she exclaimed, staring at the bullet apparently wedged in a bone. "Now what am I going to do? I'm not exactly a surgeon. Should I call—"

"No," he said quickly. "No ambulances or hospitals." He took a calming breath. "You can see it, so it's not that far in. Maybe you can get it out."

She stared at him, stupefied. "You're kidding, right? You want me to like, stick tweezers in your arm and get a bullet out?"

"Are you squeamish around blood?" Iggy asked. "I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I need help, whether I really like it or not. So if you can do it..."

Cammy surveyed her supplied, thinking hard. From what I remember of anatomy class, there're no important muscles there, but... She sighed. This was so not in the emergency health-care lesson.

"Well?" he prompted.

"Do you actually trust me with this?" she inquired, pulling out the tweezers and glancing at him.

"No," he said bluntly, "but my only other choice is gaining a painful, useless arm.

She laughed mirthlessly. "Oh goody. Well, I already cleaned up your wound, so I guess I can just get to this. Um..." she placed a hand on his shoulder, to keep him still. How the heck did I get myself into this?

"I'm not getting any younger," he muttered. "Just go ahead. I've dealt with worse."

She shook her head. "You sure know how to show a girl a good time." Biting her lip nervously, she worked the tweezers carefully into the gunshot wound, and grabbed the end of the bullet.

_________

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that my wings were in agonizing, aching pain. Secondly, I realized that I wasn't in a cage—I was strapped to a wall. I tried to flex my wings and groaned in pain. They were unfolded and stretched out, also strapped tightly to the wall and pinned through the bone to incapacitate them.

"Where...?" I croaked, glancing at the rest of the room. The rest of my flock was in the same situation—shackled to the wall—and all but Fang were unconscious. Said member was staring hard down at the floor.

"This is not good," he said quietly.

"I've realized that," I mumbled. "Where are we? We're not in cages... Is it the School?"

He shrugged. "I woke up once earlier, and there was a white-coat in here. But she ignored me completely and just stood there, writing on a clipboard."

I sighed, shifting uncomfortably. "My wings are killing me. They really ache."

He nodded in agreement. "It's not going to be easy to get out of here, and you know they realize it."

"Yeah, that's why we're pinned to the wall like a biology diorama," I added.

He shrugged slightly as the single door to the bare room was slung open. I narrowed my eyes in disgust as Ari walked in with an ugly smile. He glanced around before walking over to Fang.

"Well, well," he rumbled, "don't you look comfy. How do you like the new holding cell?" He grabbed Fang's face and chuckled at him. "You're completely harmless now. It's almost pathetic, in a way."

"At least I'm not ugly," Fang replied coolly. "I may be strapped to a wall, but you're disgustingly hideous. I can escape my problem."

Ari's smile flickered and he growled. "Watch it, birdy."

"Where are we?" I asked, changing the subject before tensions between the two of them grew any higher. "The School?"

Ari let go of Fang and looked at me. "Not the original School. We're in Mississippi, at a smaller headquarters." He smirked. "A 'mini-school' or sorts."

"And, what," I pushed, "you're going to transport us to the real School later? Is this a pit stop?"

He threw his head back and laughed. "To the place you know like the back of your hand, where you can easily find the escape routes? No." He strolled over to the unconscious Angel and put a hand on her head, stroking her bouncy curls.

"Back off," I snapped, bristling.

He sneered, walking back to the door and saying, "I hope you enjoy your stay." He waved in two white-coated doctors. "We'll try to make your stay as comfortable as possible."

"Ari, you-!" I called out angrily as he left, but the look Fang sent me made me stop. He nodded at the doctors, who were currently unstrapping Nudge from the wall. "What are you doing with her?" I demanded. They ignored me and placed her on a gurney, and wheeled her out of the room. "Hey!"

Fang sighed. "Max..."

I glanced at him before my shoulders sagged and I hung my head. "Fang. What are we going to do?"

_________

Cammy finished wrapping Iggy's shoulder and tucked the gauze bandages back into the box. She surveyed her tweezers and cloth, both coated with a fine layer of blood. She swayed slightly and put a hand on the back of Iggy's chair to steady herself.

"Are you okay?" he asked as he ran him fingers over the bandages, checking out her work.

"Oh sure," she said sarcastically, wiping off the tweezers and putting them and the towel in the sink, to be worried over in the near future. "I just lived out a mini-episode of House, but I'm fine. What about you?"

"Rarin' to go," he replied with an equal tone, twirling his finger in the air. "I could use a shirt."

"Hold on, my dad might have something that'll work," she replied, exiting the room and entering her father's quarters. She pulled open drawers, searching for a decent T-shirt for Iggy to borrow.

How did this happen? She wondered, shaking her head. One second I'm feeding Star. The next, I'm performing minor surgery on a genetically-altered bird-boy! She tugged a brown T-shirt out of the drawer and headed back into the kitchen. Wohoo, Sci-fi.

"Here," she said, handing him the shirt. "It might be a bit big, but it'll work."

"Thanks," he replied, carefully pulling it on his injured arm and then over his head, enveloping his wings underneath. She peered over his shoulder as they folded neatly against his back and practically disappeared.

"There's a recess in my skin on either side of my spine," he explained, as if reading her thoughts. "That's why they're barely visible.

"Why were they so obvious and lumpy before?" she asked.

"I fell out of the sky," he said flatly. "It was all I could do to fold them enough to hide them under my shirt before you blacked out in your hay pile."

"Oh," she mumbled, pulling up a chair. "So, speaking of that, spill it."

He blinked. "Spill what?"

"Everything," she said, spreading her hands out. "You have wings, you got shot, and you're being chased by a perpetual mafia. So, why?"

Iggy winced. "I can't tell you everything, because I can't really trust you."

She frowned. "Okay, well...first question, then: Are there more like you?"

He nodded. "A few others. My flock. I guess they got captured, or maybe escaped."

"What's this organization that's after you?"

"The School," Iggy replied, and he shook his head when he heard her small snicker. "No joke, it's called The School. It experiments on humans. Me and my flock make up a section of the tiny percentage of successful genetic experiments."

"Okay," she said. "And so you were shot by these people, and ended up in my backyard."

"Pretty much." He rubbed his blind eyes tiredly. I shouldn't be telling her anything, but all of this isn't really secretive, so...

"So," she said, raising her eyebrows. "What are you gonna do now?"

He paused. "...I'll go hunt down my flock, I guess."

"You can find them?" she asked. "I mean...blind."

She's right, he thought miserably. What am I gonna do? "I...no. Probably not." I hate being blind.

She watched an expression of exasperated irritation cross his face. "Sorry," she apologized. "Didn't mean to irritate you. I wish I could help." She scratched her head. "Seriously, you're, um...sort of ...stuck."

He slumped down in the chair, exhausted. "So I noticed."

Dad comes home tomorrow evening, she mused. I suppose he might have pity, and... She shrugged and offered, "You can hang around, if you think it's best. My dad's pretty easygoing, and my brother is...well, he'll get over it. Until you figure out what to do next, you can crash here." She looked up at Iggy, and noticed that his eyes were closed. "Well? Iggy?" She waved a hand in his face, then scrunched her nose. He's blind, stupid. Stop that. She gently shook his shoulder. When he didn't respond, Cammy rolled her eyes. "He's paranoid that I'm one of the bad guys, and yet he falls asleep anyway."

Leaving him in peace, she put up the medic kit and began to tend to the mess she'd created, such as the bloody items in the sink. As she threw the towel into the washing machine and cranked it on, an orange blur darted out from under a laundry basket and halted in front of Iggy.

"Scat, Rat," Cammy hissed at her cat (yes, named Rat). "Just because he's half bird doesn't mean that he's a snack for you." She picked up the feline, who purred in response, and she sighed.

"How," she mused aloud, "Will I manage to explain this to Dad?"