"IT'S BEEN FIVE HOURS, Max." Dylan's quiet voice was like sandpaper.
"I refuse to believe that she didn't escape," I said stubbornly, and tried to help superstrong Kate shift some more twisted wreckage from the blast site.
Dylan and I had even crawled through the rubble near the manhole and tried to get back into the sewer system. But the tunnel had completely collapsed, and Gazzy said that while he'd managed to defuse most of the network of bombs, he obviously hadn't gotten to every one, plus the poison gas was still down there.
He'd given me that information through sobs, as I held him, his head on my shoulder.
Angel's last words to me kept replaying in my mind: It'll be okay, Max. I'll be with you always, no matter what. And Max—I believe in you. Forever. What had she meant by that? Had she had some premonition that she might not come back? Had she made the ultimate sacrifice? She'd talked of all my sacrifices. I was haunted by the idea that she might have chosen to make one of her own.
Next to me, Kate sat down. Star held out a bottle of tepid water, and Kate drank it. She looked exhausted. I sighed and bent down to move another chunk of cobblestone.
The police had closed down the entire area, evacuating the buildings that were still standing, clearing the Place de la Concorde. We'd hovered above the Louvre, waiting for them to leave, after Fang had made sure that his gang was okay. They'd been great, helping to rescue at least twenty people trapped under the rubble, helping to get hurt children to nearby hospitals. Now they sat on a curb, looking wiped, like Nudge, Gazzy, and Iggy. Only Fang, Dylan, and I were still on our feet. Just barely.
An aerial search had turned up nothing, but after two hours we'd found one of Angel's pink sneakers, two blocks away. It had been ripped apart, its sole dangling. A section of it was stained with blood.
That's when I had finally broken down.
"I tried to get to all of them," Gazzy sobbed. "I thought I had. There must have been like a remote setoff that I didn't know about. I don't know what happened." I remembered the wires sticking out of Mark and shuddered.
Would Gazzy ever forgive himself? I was the one who
had decided to let him try. If I had insisted he leave there, made all of the flock get out of there and let the DGers…
We'd all be safe, but thousands of people might be dead, Paris would be even more ruined than it was now, and I'd still never be able to forgive myself.
This was the hard stuff, the leader stuff, the save-the-world stuff that I just couldn't stand having to deal with. At a certain level, there are no best choices, no right decisions. Only choices that are less bad, decisions that are less wrong.
It was dark now. It was hard to accept that we'd found all we were going to find. We'd all been crying, off and on, for hours, except for Fang and Dylan. Somehow they had remained strong as they worked side by side with me, shifting the biggest boulders and the heaviest pipes.
Now I stood looking at the crater, wondering how the DGers could have done such a thing. How could that guy Mark have lived with himself? It was all too much. I wanted to go home, but I wasn't even sure where home was at that point. I didn't even know what had become of my mom or Jeb. Or Ella. Had they been part of this in some way? I wasn't certain about anything anymore.
I hung my head, and I felt someone, Fang, gather me gently to him. My cheek rested on his shoulder, and my silent tears soaked his torn shirt. He felt warm and strong and heartbreakingly familiar. And at that moment, not a single thing in my life was certain, strong, or whole. Nothing.
Least of all Fang.
