How It All Goes Down
The book opens up by introducing us to Max, a fourteen-year-old girl who also happens to be a human-avian hybrid. She lives in a house with her fellow hybrid friends—Fang, Iggy, Nudge, the Gasman, and Angel. They used to live at the School, where evil scientists created and experimented on them, but they escaped and have been in hiding ever since.
What starts off as a totally ordinary day quickly goes sour when some Erasers—the vicious human-wolf hybrids who live at the School—appear out of nowhere and start attacking Max's group (otherwise known as the flock). They try to fight back, but the Erasers make off with the youngest flock member, little Angel, who also possesses the very cool power of reading minds.
The flock members immediately know that she's been taken back to the school. Max decides that she, Nudge, and Fang will go retrieve Angel, while Iggy and the Gasman stay behind to hold down the fort. Go team.
They take off immediately, but Iggy and the Gasman start to worry that the Erasers will come back for them. To make sure they're not ambushed, they start making bombs and setting up traps around the house… just in case.
In the meantime, Angel wakes up in a dog crate and has to run through a barrage of painful tests that the scientists put her through in order to "test her abilities." During all this, she realizes that Jeb—the scientist who broke them out of the school and brought them to the house—isn't dead. He actually went back to work at the School. Angel is horrified by the betrayal.
While flying with Nudge and Fang, Max spots a girl being picked on by a bunch of bullies. She tells Nudge and Fang to go ahead and wait for her at a meeting point, then she swoops down to defend the girl. In the process, Max gets shot by one of the bullies and has to stay with the girl and her mother—Ella and Dr. Martinez—while she recovers. They provide her with her first taste of a real home, and she loves it.
Fang and Nudge go on to wait for Max, where they find a nest of ferruginous hawks and learn new flying tricks with the birds. Nudge also tries to find her real mother based on some paperwork she saw back at the house, but they get attacked by Erasers and have to return to the hawks. Iggy and the Gasman are attacked by Erasers at the same time, but are able to escape safely and rejoin the flock.
Max meets up with the rest of her flock and they decide to continue on to the School in order to save Angel. Throughout their journey, they are attacked by Erasers, until Max, Nudge, and Fang are eventually captured and taken to the School, where they are locked into cages like Angel. Ugh.
When Max sees Jeb again, she is horrified and feels betrayed, even though he tells her that this was all a test and she is destined to save the world. With the help of Iggy and the Gasman, they all eventually escape. After they leave the School, Angel reveals that she "overheard" some of the scientists' thoughts and learned there's a place in New York City called the Institute with information about the flock… and their biological parents. Apparently, they weren't just test tube babies like they'd all assumed; they had real parents.
The flock decides to go to New York City on the adventure of a lifetime to retrieve all of this precious information. Along the way, Max starts to get these weird brain spasms where lots of images flash in her mind—and she starts to hear a voice inside her head that tells her what to do. Hrm… She doesn't know what it means, but it's pretty freaky.
As they wander through the big city tasting treats (the flock members are really into food) and hiding from the Erasers (who are basically stalking them), the voice leads Max closer and closer to the mysterious Institute. One day, they take flight in a restaurant and end up on the front page of the news as some kind of flying kid hoax.
Max and the flock members arrive at the Institute and print out all of the information they need. However, they also find a bunch of other kids in cages. Yup, there are more experiments here. They decide to release the kids, and as they're running outside, the Erasers come after them. Max gets into a scuffle with Ari—Jeb's son who is now an Eraser—and ends up accidentally killing him. As she runs away with the rest of the flock, she hears Jeb shout at her that she's killed her own brother. What the what?
Max also finds that Angel has taken a dog from the Institute. His name is Total and he looks like a totally normal dog… except for the fact that he can jump super high.
After reading all of the top-secret files, the flock members find that most of their biological families live near the Washington D.C. area. Max tries not to be too disappointed that there's no information on her parents, and she agrees that the whole flock should go to Washington D.C. next to seek out their families. With that, as this book ends, they're onto their next adventure.