A DIFFERENT FOREST. Not telling you where.

Okay, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that funerals suck. Even if you didn’t know the person, it’s still totally sad. When you did know the person, well, let’s just say it’s much worse than broken ribs. And when you just found out that the person was your biological half brother, right before he died, it adds a whole new level of pain.

Ari. My half brother. We shared the same “father,”JebBatchelder, and you can believe those quotes around “father.”

I’d first knownAri as a cute little kid who used to follow me around the School, the horrible prison-science facility where I grew up. Then we’d escaped from the School, withJeb’s help, and to tell you the truth, I hadn’t givenAri another thought.

Then he’d turned upEraserfied, a grotesque half human, half wolf, his seven-year-old emotions all askew inside his chemically enhanced, genetically modified brain. He’d been turned into a monster, and they’d sent him after us, with various unpredictable, gruesome results.

Then there had been that fight in the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. I’d whackedAri’s head a certain way, his neck had cracked against the platform’s edge… and suddenly he’d been dead. For a while, anyway.

Back when I thought I had killed him, all sorts of sticky emotions gummed up my brain. Guilt, shock, regret… but also relief. When he was alive, he kept trying to kill us- the flock, I mean. Me and my merry band of mutant bird kids. So if he was dead, that was one less enemy gunning for my family.