by Rob Thurman
He’d been there, probably not long after we had. We had guessed he would be heading there after we escaped him, looking for Wendy, his own “freak.” If he was that involved in the Institute, he knew no other student could hurt me or contain me. He wasn’t as smart as I’d originally thought. Wendy didn’t hurt or control anyone. Wendy only killed, and Raynor could do that himself with a gun . . . like the one against my head.
“You know what happened.” This time Stefan did speak, cautiously and slowly. “You saw the tape the same as we did. When there’s slavery, there will always be rebellion. Only these slaves are walking, talking AK-47s, and that is on you.” The caution faded. “You and every other bastard at that goddamn torture chamber. It’s just too damn bad you didn’t happen to be there when it went down.”
That didn’t make Raynor happy. “You’re as mouthy as your father was, at least as he was at the beginning. But then again, a power saw will stop and have a man thinking better. It doesn’t matter what happened at the Institute. I saw the tape, yes. I saw the ones who escaped and I’ll have them back soon enough, plus”—he used his other hand to take a handful of my hair and give my head a light shake—“this one. Jericho didn’t consider him worth graduating, but beggars can’t be choosers, now can they? I’ll take him off your hands ‘as is.’ A better deal you won’t get and that’s a fact. If you want a psychic assassin of your very own, you’ll have to bid the same as everyone else.”
“You’re not taking him anywhere.” Stefan’s words were as dark as Raynor’s eyes.
“Oh, but I think I am. I can take him, and I am, or I can blow out his brains and then do the same to you. You seem fond of your little killer pet. Ah . . . it must be the family thing and all that. Am I right? If that’s so, I’d think you’d rather know he’s alive than know he’s one of two corpses in an SUV that smells of ferret.” The smile was wider. “Now, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to shoot yourself in each leg. I’m sure you have a silencer, so it won’t be heard—no doubt this would be the case with a careful, cautious man such as yourself with your wide range of career experience in that area. Do try not to scream, if you please. And then, when you’ve done that, you will throw your gun—who am I fooling?—you will throw all of your guns into the back where you can’t reach them.”
“Then?” Stefan asked, the darkness suddenly gone from his voice. It was empty—lacking in emotion, lacking in inflection, lacking in humanity itself, and if Raynor had been half as intelligent as I’d thought he was, he would’ve dropped his own gun and run.
“Then Michael and I take a drive, but have no worries. I do want him alive. He’s a valuable commodity, which oddly the two of you have never made use of, but no accounting for business acumen. Oh, and you can be certain my car won’t have an Institute GPS tracker in it as this one you stole does.”
I shifted my glance to Stefan and now he was smiling. I wouldn’t have thought I’d see a smile that equaled Wendy’s, but this one did. Sliding my gaze back to Raynor, I smiled myself. What it looked like, I had no idea. It wasn’t one I’d practiced. It was genuine and sprang from a place of surgical blades and ice-cold metal and human flesh floating in jars. “Asshole,” I said, “did you think we didn’t know that?” Raynor’s own smile faded into a split second of confusion. A split second was all he had time for.
The driver’s window to the truck parked next to us slid down. Raynor turned swiftly at the soft sound and right into the short metal baton Saul slammed across his throat. Mr. Homeland Security fell to the asphalt instantly. He’d dropped his gun to grab at his throat with both hands. From the strangled sounds and the rapid color change from red to blue, his trachea had been shattered by Saul’s blow. He was about five minutes away from death by asphyxiation.
I wasn’t sympathetic. While I wouldn’t kill, I did recognize that in the world we lived in there were people who deserved the ultimate punishment. Anyone involved in the Institute deserved it. Anyone who sent a sandwich-eating idiot to shoot my brother deserved it. Anyone who wanted to sell me as if I were nothing more than a sniper rifle deserved it.
Saul grinned, his white-streaked ginger beard a strange frame to such a homicidally happy flash of teeth. “Okay, I’d rather really be at Caesar’s instead of faking it over the phone, but wetwork costs you double. That makes my bank account get a boner like there’s no tomorrow.” He started to open the door. “I’d better finish the job before he attracts attention, kicking and gasping like a headless chicken. Nice suit, though. I wonder where he bought it.”
Before he could, there was a shout. “Hey, what’s going on? What are you doing to that guy? What the fuck? Someone call the police!”
Good Samaritans more often for those on the run were Inconvenient Samaritans. “Shit. Civilians. I hate civilians.” Saul swore, slammed his door shut, started the truck, and drove off, the vehicle’s tires squealing. Stefan was right behind him. We’d been parked too close, as planned for the ambush of Raynor, for either car to swerve enough to put an end to the government agent without colliding with each other. He would have to take the full five minutes to die as no ambulance would get there in time. It wasn’t as if things were ending differently for him, I told myself. If the rebellion at the Institute hadn’t happened and Raynor had managed to get Wendy out to chase after me—free in the world as she was now, it would’ve been the same. Chases could be long and boring. Wendy didn’t like boring. Eventually she would’ve had to find some way to entertain herself. Wendy would’ve eaten him for lunch.
We just saved her the time.
Chapter 6
We hadn’t had to wait long at all for Raynor to show up in that parking lot. What we’d found at the Institute hadn’t made us forget about him. He wasn’t thirteen chimeras loose in the world, but he was smart and dangerous. He’d found Anatoly. He’d found us. He’d remained very much a threat, if the lesser one. We had enough on our plate to keep looking over our shoulders for him. It was another lesson that Institute and Mafiya teaching agreed on. If one threat is out of reach, take care of the one that isn’t. Raynor had to be taken care of, one way or the other. I didn’t know what had disturbed Stefan more when we’d both come to the separate but nearly simultaneous conclusion: that I could think like an ex-mobster or that he could think like a trained genetic assassin.
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 pe
ople—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.
