For a brief second I wished I’d done more to that asshole of a tourist, because then I might have felt better, stronger, more able to cope. But that was wrong, more than wrong, and I knew it. It didn’t change the feeling, however. It did manage to add to the guilt, though. Wonderful.
“It was a joke,” he said, squeezing my arm lightly. “A very bad gallows humor joke, and I’m sorry I made it. In my former line of business, it was the only humor we had. Not-so-good humor for not-so-good people. Smack me if I do it again.” He squeezed again, then let go to start typing and then to read, eyes staring unblinking at the screen.
As he did, Godzilla came slinking across the living room floor and climbed my leg to perch in my lap and rest his chin on the table. All those scratches on the wood were from him, but there was no food there now, which meant he had no interest. I stroked his back with one finger; he made a contented mrrrp sound and casually gnawed the edge of the table with his sharp teeth. Stefan pretended to only tolerate the ferret. Hmm, that wasn’t quite right. Stefan did only tolerate Godzilla, calling him a stinky psychopathic carpet shark, but he did tolerate him for my sake and that said more than if he’d genuinely liked him.
Godzilla, naturally, didn’t care if Stefan liked him or not. Neither did Mothra, the blue jay with the broken wing, or Gamera the snapping turtle that was so old he might have been here before the town itself had been founded. Mothra pecked Stefan’s head if he went too close to the storeroom, which Mothra had claimed as his own, and Gamera, who I would have thought was too ancient to be aware of people or his surroundings, slept in Stefan’s closet and snapped at him every day when he reached for his shoes.
Stefan would glare at me, mutter, but finally nurse his sore finger and say, “Maybe you’ll be a vet.” He thought I was trying to make up for the lab animals I’d been ordered to kill in the Institute to hone the skills they’d forced on us, and I was . . . in the only way I could. Fixing up strays right and left, saving lives to make up for the ones I’d been compelled to take. As if you could ever make up for even a single life you’d snatched away . . . but I tried, knowing it wasn’t good enough. It wouldn’t ever be good enough; yet it was all I could do.
But that wasn’t my only reason for the animals . . . for playing doctor. No, not by a long shot.
Sometimes being smart wasn’t enough. You had to be smarter.
You had to be better.
You had to evolve.
Sometimes you had to be the very best or your days on the run would be short. My time with Stefan was the only real life I’d known, but I wanted more, and to get that, I would do what I had to. The animals were part of that—a huge part.
Maybe later, if I had a chance, I would be a vet. Animals had ulterior motives, same as people, but theirs were much easier to understand. “Misha? You might want to go to your room or outside while I read this.” Stefan’s grin was long gone and his face . . . I didn’t want to say what I saw on his face, so I was a coward and I went outside with Godzilla draped around my neck. I’d watched the news piece on Anatoly. He hadn’t died quickly or painlessly, from what the autopsy had said. The saw marks on his bone had been made before he died. That said more than enough. The time we’d spent in South Carolina—the few months I’d known him while Stefan and I recovered from gunshot wounds—he’d looked so much like Stefan. Bad father, bad human being; it didn’t matter. He had saved us both by shooting Jericho. More important, he had saved my brother. I didn’t want to see his fate when it was reflected in Stefan’s face—a younger mirror of Anatoly—so I left.
Outside, I sat on the small front porch, cracked as it was and tilting, and looked at the trees across the road. They were soothing. Green green green. Nothing but green. Green was my second-favorite color.
Years ago I’d been asked that question.
“What is your favorite color?”
The Institute wasn’t a school, not the kind most people knew about, and Dr. John Jericho Hooker wasn’t an instructor. I hadn’t doubted then that he was our creator. Now maybe I thought he was part creator of some, corrupter of others—like me—but in the end it didn’t matter. He’d been the most frightening son of a bitch on the face of the earth. Cursing was automatic at that memory. When Jericho asked you to do something, you did it. When he asked you a question, you answered it. Years ago in that prison, Jericho had asked me my favorite color.
I’d thought carefully. This was a year or so after the question of the Instructor on what to do when I killed a president. I couldn’t see how giving my true feelings could hurt in this one case. “Blue.” The blue of sky, the blue of ocean. The blue of my dreams.
Jericho’s ebony eyes stared unblinking at me. His prosthetic hand, replacing the one taken by one of his students—one of his creations who was much braver than I’d been in those days—rested on his desk. “What is your favorite color?”
I’d shown no fear. Those who showed fear were weak, and the weak did not often “graduate” from the Institute, although they did graduate from life . . . early. I thought again. I’d seen the movies, the books. I’d seen the trees and the grass on the screen and in the pictures. “Green.”
Those frozen artificial fingers clicked against the top of the desk and the eyes narrowed. “Michael, what is your favorite color?”
Third time was the charm. I’d read that before in those same books. But third time was never the charm here. That I was offered a third time was beyond the best I could’ve hoped for. Yet here it was, my third and last chance.
It was so simple. I couldn’t believe I’d been fooled twice before. I knew the answer—the right one this time. I knew what he wanted to hear. “I don’t have a favorite color.”
“Good. You’re learning. You have no thoughts but the ones I give you. Do not forget that.” His lips curved, the creator pleased that his experiment had performed adequately. That was what I was—an experiment; less than human, different from human, but made to be a reaper of them.
I was glad he was dead. If Stefan’s father had ever done anything right, it was in killing Jericho. Frankenstein had died on a beach like the one where I had been ripped from the real world. It didn’t get any more fitting than that.
It was a story I hadn’t made Stefan repeat time and time again, as much as I wanted to in an effort to get back those vanished memories. He told it once, and once was enough. He’d . . . fractured when he’d told me, like winter ice cracked and shattered by the first warm spring day. It was days before he was back to his usual self. How could I ask again? I’d memorized what he’d said, though, the whole thing and the bits and pieces added throughout the next few years, of what my life had been before the Institute. Anatoly had been big in the Mafiya. He and his wife, Anya, had emigrated from Russia and we were born here. Anatoly had brought the mob with him or the mob had brought him, but whichever, their children had lived a privileged life. When Lukas—I could think of that long-ago child only as Lukas, not me—was seven and Stefan was fourteen, they’d lived in a big house on a private beach near Miami. They’d been given horses for their Christmas presents and when the adult all-day Christmas party started, they’d taken those horses and gone to that beach to race the wind.
He said it was his idea . . . as if that made it his fault. A fourteen-year-old kid wanting to ride horses on the beach with his brother and he said it as if it were a capital crime. Whatever he’d said, it had probably been my—Lukas’s—idea—a big adventure to a seven-year-old. It didn’t make it my fault either. It was only Jericho’s fault. He made killers out of chimeras and that was what I was—a chimera.
Chimeras started out as twins in utero, but then something would go wrong and one embryo would absorb the other. If you were fraternal twins, you could end up with two sets of separate DNA. Human squared. It didn’t mean anything, normally; you just had two sets of DNA, not comic book superpowers. That was true until Jericho came along and made a difference that nature had never intended.
Stefan said he didn?
??t know how he found out about Lukas—through hospital records most likely; blood tests from his birth—but he had found out and he’d come for his chimera. The surprising part, unbelievable in a way, was he’d waited so long before adding a new one to his collection of other children, the majority of whom had been fetuses implanted in surrogate mothers for pay—drug-addicted and hopeless people no one would miss when they didn’t show up again. Marcus Bellucci, the man we’d thought was his academic rival, had told us that. He hadn’t been a rival, though, or the fountain of information we’d thought he’d been; he’d been a combination of silent partner and silent alarm. He’d warned Jericho when we’d tracked him down and shown up asking questions; then when Jericho died, he’d disappeared.
The Institute had to have a creator.
The Institute was still out there and we knew where. We hadn’t forgotten those left behind. Ten years or the seventeen it had felt like, I wouldn’t leave anyone there to be discarded if the twisting and brainwashing didn’t take hold. And the brainwashed needed to be saved as much as the potentially expendable who fought it off. Nearly three years later we hadn’t made a move to save anyone yet, because what do you do with the brainwashed?
Not all of the students were like me. I’d hated what I could do. Not all others had. What do you do with genetically manipulated killers who have been taught to enjoy killing? When they’d as soon kill you as take your hand to be rescued. . . .
What do you do?
Godzilla mrrrped again and then bit my thumb for attention. I sucked the blood away, then watched as the puncture clotted immediately. In less than a half hour it would be gone. We healed quickly, Jericho’s children—a much better talent than killing. I rubbed the ferret’s head with the fingers of my other hand. With just that touch and a thought, I could’ve shut down the vessels to his heart, his brain. Or I could’ve opened them so wide that there wouldn’t be enough blood pressure to keep his heart beating. I could’ve weakened the walls of his organs until they ripped open, or could have caused them to literally explode. Only a touch and a thought. That was what Jericho had made out of me . . . and every child in the Institute. I could kill but I couldn’t undo a lifetime of conditioning with that same touch.
So what did you do to save those who didn’t want to be saved?
It was a hard question and blind hope was not much of an answer. Neither was a leap of faith. Jericho’s children weren’t built for faith. Not that it mattered, because we were built for determination—success no matter the cost. “No weakness, no limitations, no mercy” was the credo we repeated aloud at the beginning of every single class.
No weakness. No limitations. No mercy.
That, not that it was meant to, was going to help me now, because despite those who might not want to be saved, there was a way, whether they knew it or not. Look at me.
I was saved.
I was smart.
And I was working on it.
Not a born killer, but an engineered one. Taken. Rebuilt. Changed. That was what Stefan knew had happened to me. I’d wondered what Stefan would be if his brother hadn’t been kidnapped. I didn’t wonder the same thing at all about me, because it was beyond imagination. I couldn’t picture it or fantasize about it. It was impossible, and it was for the best, I thought. If I could have dreamed up an alternative to the life that I had lived under Jericho, the memories of the Institute would’ve done what it couldn’t do now—crush me.
Godzilla wrapped around my arm and sniffled, puzzled, for the vanished blood from where he’d bitten me. Like me, he had a bit of a killer in him. When Stefan found that out, about the Michael Korsak compared to the Lukas Korsak—the killer part of me, when he’d found out what I was—he hadn’t been afraid of me or what I could do. Not for a moment. I would’ve known it if he had; I’d have seen it on his face . . . in his eyes, but I’d seen nothing but acceptance. To him I wasn’t an assassin-in-training or a human bullet all the way down to the genetic level. I was his brother, pure and simple, and nothing else made a difference.
He’d actually been a little exasperated that I wouldn’t use what I had in me to protect myself. The drunk outside the bakery was one thing. But when someone attacked me with every intent of murdering me or, worse, taking me back to the Institute, it wasn’t the same. With that kind of adrenaline running through me, starting something was easy. Stopping it wouldn’t be. Stopping it could be impossible.
It had happened once, before Stefan pulled me out of the Institute. As a test—to them it had been only another test—a guard had been sent to kill me. Instead, I had been the one to kill . . . if only once. Wasn’t once far more than enough? It wasn’t going to happen again.
Jericho had changed me in biological ways, but I wouldn’t give his dead corpse the satisfaction of ever having changed who I was as a person. He gave me the genetic skills to be a psychic executioner, but that didn’t mean I had to use them. And, as far as I was concerned, he could rot in his grave for eternity before I became the assassin he wanted.
“Hey, kid.” Stefan sat beside me on the porch. “Have a Fluffernut sandwich.”
He handed me one of the two I’d made for him that morning. I took it out of the plastic sandwich bag and fed a bite to the ferret. The kid issue I simply gave up on for the day. I was nineteen for God’s sake, nineteen and made to kill, but when it came to Stefan, I wasn’t sure he’d let himself ever see me as anything but a little brother. “Do you know what happened . . . to Anatoly?” I should’ve phrased it better. I knew very well what had happened. According to the news report, someone had taken an electric saw to various parts of him. If Anatoly had been alive, and he most likely had been, since the saw had probably been just an interrogation tool, he’d most likely considered anything that happened besides that as merely incidental.
Stefan knew what I meant, though. “No. No idea who snatched him. Mafiya or the Institute trying to track us down.” By “us,” he meant me, but it was nice of him to spread the blame around. “It wasn’t the FBI. They wanted him the most, but, despite Gitmo, no one at the government’s using power saws to get info.” He fed a bite of his own sandwich to Godzilla too. A first—but it was hard to have an appetite when someone had cut up your father with the equivalent of a chain saw while he was still alive.
He cleared his throat. His voice had gotten thick on the word “saw.” “But he couldn’t have given us up. Just as when he was on the run from the FBI and wouldn’t tell me where he was . . . for my own good.” The smile was both hard and regretful. “I didn’t tell him where you and I were. I was more honest, though. I told him it was for our own good, and it turned out I was right.”
“The saw makes me think the mob. There were several vors”—mob bosses—“who’d lost a helluva lot of their territory and power if Anatoly had come back. And that place you were . . .” He hardly ever said “Institute.” It was worse than the foulest word out there for him, from the way he acted. He went on. “It doesn’t seem their style. Torture, yeah, but not with something you could buy at Home Depot. More something scientific and a damn sight worse probably.”
He offered another bite to Godzilla, who considered him and this gesture of goodwill with bright black eyes before biting Stefan’s forefinger and taking the morsel of sandwich. He purred contentedly as he ate the slightly bloodstained bread and peanut butter. I plopped the ferret on the other side of me, but Stefan didn’t seem to notice the slow drops of blood hitting the concrete, scarlet on gray, like the sun setting into a cloud-shrouded, tornado-spawning storm.
I had a feeling that one way or another what had happened to Anatoly would start that storm.
“I called Saul. He’s on some tantric sex yoga retreat or something. Trying to keep up with some women twenty years younger than him,” Stefan said with a darkly amused twist of his lips. “Not that that would have him disconnecting from the outside world and the money that goes with it. He didn’t know anything more than we did, but he’s looking into it—if he can unta
ngle himself from whatever knot he’s tied himself into. Probably has his foot stuck up his own. . . .” He coughed and ate a bite of the sandwich.
I narrowed my eyes. “Nineteen—Jesus, going on twenty. I know about sex, tantric and otherwise.”
He shrugged and swallowed the bite. “Face it, Michael. In some ways you’ll always be the little brother.” His words echoed what I’d thought only seconds ago.
In some ways, always the little brother. In some ways, always seven years old and laughing on a beach. I didn’t need any psych class flashbacks to the Institute to know that wasn’t healthy for either of us. But before I could say anything, Sheriff Kash Simmons drove up in front of the house. The first time I met him, he’d shaken my hand solemnly and said his name was Kash for Johnny Cash and it was my privilege to call him sir. What it was about this town that accounted for no one being able to spell their own names was going to have to remain a mystery, but why the sheriff was idling his gold and brown official car in front of our happy yellow house wasn’t one. The blobby tourist was in the back pointing at me, his mouth moving a mile a minute.
Sheriff Simmons turned off the car and stepped out, giving that same automatic hitch to his belt that all lawgivers in every movie or every TV show did. He had the Stetson, the shades; it was like one of those hyperrealistic video games. Was the Law here to kick ass and take names? No. They didn’t need any names—just more ass to kick. I’d learned a lot of slang and cursing from certain games. But when I’d earned points from accidentally backing over a prostitute, I decided to take all of the experience with a grain of salt.
When we’d first come to town, Stefan had laid down certain rules and sayings for keeping me safe. One of them had been regarding the cops, two total, in Cascade Falls. He told me, “No matter what you do, Misha, no matter absolutely fucking what. . . .” I’d waited for the epic brotherly promise, Dead or alive, I will come for you. I will save you. If I have to claw myself out of my own grave, I will save you. Something like that. I watched a lot of movies, owned a lot of movies. Hundreds. Maybe that was too many, but they did give me great expectations.