I’d have to ask him later, when he wasn’t expecting it, to see how fiercely his brain would cramp. Brothers did that—joked around with each other. The three primary sources of information in my life now had taught me that: Stefan, movies, and the Internet. I’d gotten good at it in the past few years—so good that sometimes when I opened my mouth, Stefan’s eye would twitch before I said a single word.
Now with Raynor done and gone, we headed east, driving five hours, twenty-two minutes, and thirty-five seconds, before stopping at one a.m. at a motel in St. George, Utah. The Institute GPS tracker had indicated Peter and the rest had stopped too. They had been in the same position since I’d entered their codes into the tracker from the data I’d taken off the Institute computers. I’d studied the tape, every face. I’d known them all either my whole life or their whole lives . . . starting at the age of three. If you were three, you were old enough to sit quietly at a desk and learn, said the Institute. You were also old enough to fathom the consequences if you didn’t. That was something the Institute didn’t say—it proved.
And where were the ones younger than that? I tried hard not to think about it. Raised by foster-type families, Stefan had guessed. Or by their own family if they were like me and harvested instead of grown in a surrogate. That was his second guess. I didn’t guess at all. I would search the Institute’s computer files to see if I could find mention of a place, an assassin’s day care. I’d look for facts, not guesses. But I’d do that later. Better to take on one impossible crusade at a time.
Peter and the others were in Laramie, Wyoming, at the moment, which was curious. They could’ve gotten much farther in two weeks. Then again, where were they going? Were they going anywhere in particular at all? Or were they making the entire country their new Basement, their Playground? If the only thing that satisfied you was spreading death, you could do that anywhere. Location, location, location—that meant nothing to a chimera. Anyplace that hosted a single living thing was your Playground.
At the motel, I began to pull my bags from the backseat of the Ford Mustang we’d stolen off a random exit. The SUV and its GPS we’d driven off the interstate and torched before continuing on. Simple arson wasn’t challenging. I hadn’t participated. Saul had seemed to enjoy it, however; the same Saul whose hand slapped me on the back as I wrestled the bags out. “How’s it going, Mikey? Long time no see . . . in person anyway. E-mails lack that personal touch. By the way, how’d that plane work out for you?”
Saul was Stefan’s friend, although they’d both deny it and swear to their graves it was a business relationship only. Saul was also something of an acquired taste, like Brussels sprouts. Our landlady brought us dinner once a week without fail and it always included Brussels sprouts. It was like Lolcats—if people bothered with that tasteless shit or, conversely, with an incredibly bad-tasting vegetable, then there must be a reason. If people ate those disgusting things, there had to be an explanation. I hadn’t figured out what it was yet, not after a year of grimly forking down their repulsiveness on a weekly basis, but I’d been determined. There was an answer and I’d find it. The fact that everyone else figured it out when they were eight instead of nineteen didn’t deter me one bit. They might get AP credit in Brussels sprouts, but I’d catch up. Geniuses always did.
I didn’t have to be a genius to know that Saul was a Brussels sprout. I didn’t get what Stefan saw in him. It might take a few more years, but, as with the vegetable, eventually I would. “The plane worked adequately.” I heard Stefan snort and ignored him. “It’s not Mikey. It’s never been Mikey. It’s not Michael either. It’s Misha now.” I hefted one bag and tossed the other over my shoulder. “I’m also two and a half years older, have several degrees, blend in”—although my drug dealer persona needed work—“learned to fly”—more or less—“and I’ve picked up considerably on my cursing. I think I’ve been fairly productive.”
“Cursing?” I turned with the bags and Godzilla looped around my neck to see Saul’s hand immediately cover his mouth, muffling the rest of his words. “Good for you. Next to screwing, cursing is one of life’s greatest pleasures.”
He was mocking me. He knew what I could do, what I was. Stefan and I had debated long and hard about telling him, but when it came down to his being willing to hire the mercenaries and help us take the Institute back, he did deserve to know what he’d be facing in them. And in me. Yet here he was, laughing silently. I narrowed my eyes. “You aren’t afraid of me, are you?”
He dropped his hand. “Sorry, Mikey, but nope. I’ve seen killers. Hell, I am one myself. I can tell when someone doesn’t have it in them—not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“There is everything right with that, in fact,” Stefan interjected firmly as he passed us on the way to one of the rooms we’d rented.
“So, sorry, bucko. Not afraid of you.” The same hand swatted my shoulder in apology.
Not afraid of me. That was . . . irritating.
It shouldn’t have been. In Cascade Falls, no one was afraid of me—of my persona, Parker. Saul should’ve boosted my belief in myself and my conscience. I didn’t want to hurt people, right? I wouldn’t kill people, ever.
But I could.
I was the same as a gun. I had my safety on, but that didn’t mean I didn’t deserve to be treated with caution and respect by those who knew me for what I was. I should be given the consideration of any other weapon. Not by my brother, but certainly by a tantric-practicing, horny old criminal who from the neon bright blue, purple, and green of his shirt was color-blind. Forty-five if he was a day. Definitely old. Practically in senility territory. He might be a vegan, Stefan had said, but there were so many things in the body that could go wrong with only the slightest push. You were never as healthy as you thought, especially with a chimera around. And worst of all, he had called me Mikey. I growled low in my throat and followed Stefan to our room.
When the door shut behind us, I tossed my bags onto the bed farthest from the door. Old habit—before we’d settled in Cascade Falls with rooms of our own, Stefan always slept on the bed between me and the door. “I can make him impotent, you know. Or all his hair fall out. I wonder how he’d like that.” Saul had a thick head of hair . . . for his advanced age. That would destroy him. Bald and impotent—no more tantric sex camp; his life as he knew it would be over. I gave it consideration. Close or casual—whichever it was, I wasn’t going to admit to it.
“Getting cranky, are we?” Stefan dumped his own bags. “And Saul likes you.”
“He called me Mikey.” And he acted as if I were as harmless as a goldfish.
“He’s just yanking your chain. That’s what he does to people he likes. People he doesn’t like . . .”—Stefan shrugged—“he hits in the throat and crushes their larynx. It’s a distinction I think you can make. Besides, you’re not a woman and yet he can actually still see you. For Skoczinsky, that’s huge.”
“He looks like an orange-haired peacock,” I grumbled. “I think his shirt destroyed my retinas.”
“I remember your first shopping trip. Trust me, your taste wasn’t any better than his then.” Stefan locked the door and jammed the chair under the handle. It was done as automatically as it had been years ago. We were both falling into the old ways.
I couldn’t deny his claim. I’d gone from barely seventeen with shirts portraying Einstein, Freud, Marilyn Monroe, and Marvin the Martian to simple, gray long-sleeved T-shirts, jeans, and a dark brown leather jacket. At first it had been to not stand out. Then it had become routine, and finally it had become me—as buying planes and playing a drug dealer had become me.
I’d kept the Einstein magnets on the refrigerator, though, a memory of my first days free. But they were gone now too—burned to a crisp. Except for . . . I opened up my backpack, pulled out a wad of soft, faded material, and saw one of Marvin’s eyes winking at me from the folds. I laid it beside the pillow and Godzilla hopped from my shoulder with a satisfied chirp to curl up in it.
>
Stefan sat on his bed after stripping off his jacket and pulling the Steyr out of his shoulder holster to lay it on the bedside table. “Michael . . .”
“Misha,” I reminded him. I wasn’t Michael. I wasn’t one of them anymore.
“Misha,” he repeated, aggrieved—only mildly, but. . . .
Aggravation was one of the easier emotions to identify and use. Simple irritability could be escalated to an attention-drawing rage with the few right words. Then, while chaos ensued, you could slip away and be within touching reach of your target within seconds. A chimera didn’t need seconds. We needed only the most fleeting of touches.
I blinked and shook my head slightly. Other old habits, pre-Stefan ones, were coming back as well. Not habits, lessons. And I could forget them if I tried hard enough . . . not today or tomorrow. I still needed them, but someday, when freedom was permanent.
“That’s three names now, four if you count Parker. One more and I’m just getting it over with and calling you Cher. So, Misha,” he said, emphasizing it carefully, sarcasm in every letter, “what do you think they’ll do now that they’re out? Peter and his Dickensian gang of would-be criminals? What would they want?”
Dickens, Charles. Born 1812; died 1870. I shuffled through my memory. Fiction, boring, gray, and grim . . . unless the orphans were singing about starvation on stage. That might rev it up some, but I had never watched it and didn’t plan to, so that was a theory unproved. “Dickensian? I guess they are Dickensian, if Oliver Twist ever made anyone vomit up their own intestines.”
No longer irritated, but blank, Stefan looked over at his gun. It was the kind of emotional vacuum some people—good people—needed to do what was necessary. “I know. I don’t want to. Hell, they are kids, but, yeah, I know.”
But he didn’t. He didn’t know. He only thought he did and he might as well jump off the Empire State Building if he couldn’t do better.
“For the last time, Stefan, they aren’t kids,” I emphasized. “ ‘Kid’ is a measure of age in the outside world. In the Institute, it has no meaning. Look at what Wendy did, and she’s ten. You wouldn’t ask a rattlesnake how old it was, would you? Age doesn’t matter. From ten to eighteen”—which covered Peter to Wendy—“any of them can and will kill you, given the slightest opportunity. And that is what they want.” I stroked Godzilla as he slept, chirring in his sleep, paws twitching. “They’re not like me, Stefan. Not these thirteen.” It was an unfortunate number, just as history claimed it to be.
“They like what they are and what they can do. They like it more than anything. They aren’t going to settle down in some little town.” I felt another pang at losing Cascade Falls, shoved it down, and pushed on. “They are going to kill people. And I doubt there will be any rhyme or reason to it. They’re out of the assassin factory and in the chocolate factory. Every day is dessert Sunday and everyone they come across is potentially . . .”—I shrugged as unease tightened my spine—“dead meat.” I’d almost said “victim,” but that made it too desperate, too gut-wrenching. When facing the Institute’s best and worst in one, we’d have to be as cold as they were or we wouldn’t have a chance of surviving. Pit emotion against a chimera and you would die.
Stefan looked at me with a more familiar expression. He didn’t get it, despite what he said. “No, they’re not like you. I get that, believe it or not.” He got up to move to the bathroom, shoving my head lightly as he passed me. “I’m glad you get it too.” He closed the door behind him, and I heard the shower start. I fell back across the bed and stared at the dingy yellow ceiling. No, he didn’t get it and he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t understand Institute-born were never kids, never children. It was the damn age thing; otherwise he would’ve gotten it and known a murderer when he saw one. I wasn’t the only one who’d spent years surrounded by killers. Stefan had done his time too. He was like me in that way.
We were two peas in a poisonous pod—or two peas who’d escaped their pod and were living the life they wanted. Hardworking, good people who wouldn’t hurt a fly if they had their way. I noticed Stefan’s gun was gone. It would be with him in the bathroom and I remembered the man he’d shot only this morning.
Okay, maybe we fell somewhere in between.
Sitting up, I reached for the laptop in my duffel bag and checked to see if Ariel was online. She kept both late and early hours, the same as I did. She’d once said there was so much to do in life that she would sleep when she was dead. I pointed out she was a Buddhist and would never be dead, only reincarnated. She said I was a smart-ass. And I was smart, but I hadn’t meant to be an ass. It was a clear supposition: You can’t sleep when you’re dead if you’re never actually dead. Then she said she was Buddhist only on Tuesdays. She practiced a different religion or philosophy every day. How else could you learn?
It was a good point. I personally thought Buddhism was too challenging. With Christianity, you said you were sorry and poof, you were forgiven. In Buddhism, it didn’t matter how sorry you were. If you did the crime, you did the time—boot camp for your soul. That was why I hadn’t picked a philosophy or religion yet. I wanted to check out all my options and find the one with the most loopholes combined with the least amount of time consumption. I had things to do. Garages weren’t going to blow themselves up, now were they?
Ariel was online. Her icon picture popped up immediately on IM. Instant messaging was a little riskier than e-mail for hacking, but I had so many fake addresses bouncing this and my many e-mail addys nearly a hundred times around the globe that you’d have to be a computer genius times ten to track my location. Institute personnel, except for Jericho, had never had the imagination for that—hacking is an art, not a science. Institute students didn’t have access to the Internet, and no World of Warcraft basement dweller-hacker wannabe knew I existed. Security was as good as I wanted it to be.
Where’ve you been, Dr. Theoretical? We were supposed to watch Tombstone tonight. I promised I wouldn’t mock your preoccupation with horses and testosterone. And then Ghostbusters to see who of us could diagram a working proton pack first. I had popcorn waiting and everything.
We had a standing weekly movie . . . thing. It wasn’t a date, definitely not; only a . . . thing. We watched the movies at the same time and IM’ed back and forth, either mocking it or betting we could do it better. The flux capacitor battle had been going on for months now.
Ariel’s icon was her smiling face Photoshopped onto a mermaid’s body with tasteful shells covering certain areas. Mine, since I’d taken her suggestion to heart, was a floating grin, wide and wicked, and nothing else. The Cheshire cat—now you see me, now you don’t.
And to Raynor—now you never will again.
Family emergency, I typed back. Which means I’ll have to turn my paper in early. You’re absolutely certain the solution would work giving all the hypothetical guidelines? The surplus chromosome on the extra DNA strand would become inactive?
Yes, yes. Will you stop questioning my brilliance? There was a smiley face icon, but, like me, Ariel couldn’t leave anything alone. The usual yellow smiley face was now pale pink, the eyes had lashes, the bottom had a scaled tail, and the top had a wild pink seaweed mass of hair. It also had Poseidon’s trident, which meant she was annoyed. I’m going with ninety-five percent chance of efficacy. But it’s all work, work, work with you, cutie. And worse, you won’t share. That chromosome is like nothing I’ve seen and you’ve only given me half the information on it and won’t tell me where you discovered it. But, hey, I get it. No one wants to share the Nobel.
I would’ve laughed at that, but more in resignation than anything else. I couldn’t go to a real college and I couldn’t practice in a field, not one that attracted science types. The Institute was gone, but day care remained. I had no idea if they had the older children’s files or not—my file. For now, it was coffeehouses, bookstores, and in Bolivia, busing tables in a restaurant where tourists tipped as if the money were superglued to their hands. No Nobels.
But if I did get one, I’d share with you. Promise.
There was a pause; then the icon’s trident disappeared and a bowl of popcorn appeared instead. Okay, you’re still my Bernie, but don’t forget, there are lots of guys around here who’d love a movie night with me right in my own apartment building, but I chose you and your brilliant-ass lives in Texas! Sorry to hear about your family, though. Hope everything turns out all right. She didn’t pry. That was one thing that had made me so comfortable with her at first—that and her ability to keep up with me in any scientific field. Same time next week for cowboys and proton pack races?
Bernie was yet another fake name to go along with Parker and Sebastian, and Texas was a fake home. But movie night was real and I was afraid I was going to miss it for a while . . . if I was lucky—forever if I wasn’t. I didn’t say that, though. All my life was hiding and living a lie. Ariel couldn’t be any different, whether I wanted her to be or not. I’ll bring the butter, I typed.
The icon bounced and turned red in the cheeks. Aren’t you the naughty one?
For the popcorn, I typed hastily.
“You are in way over your head, Misha. And tell her it’s cotton candy–flavored butter because it makes you think of her hair. See where she runs with that one.”
Once again I ended up slamming the laptop shut in midconversation to keep Stefan from bugging the hell out of me. “Would you stop that. And how can I be in over my head?” I added reluctantly. “I’m not a virgin. I’ve had sex seven times”—six and a half, I admitted to myself, but that was need-to-know information only—“and Ariel is a research colleague and e-mail friend. That’s it.” I finished the rest stiffly, slightly embarrassed as it wasn’t strictly true, in my mind anyway, and I also knew Stefan was more than aware of it. He was also aware as much as I was she couldn’t be any more than that, although we had different reasons for that knowledge. I waited for the teasing, but it didn’t come—not exactly.