Describe the setting- include location, time period, and socioeconomic characteristics. Max and her friends use to live at a stinking cesspool of evil called the School, they were created by scientists. The scientists grafted avian DNA onto there human genes. The school is the Death Valley. Max and her friends ran away and now live in the mountains called Sangre de Cristo. They are poor. They barely have no food, they have to go out and find food.