by Rob Thurman
One hundred and fifty? I was one hundred percent positive on the cure, seventy-five at best on being able to deliver it. “People are different from birds and chipmunks. They’re bigger and I haven’t healed one before.” Belatedly I remembered this wasn’t quite true and added, “Except for the kid in the taco joint. I cured his tonsillitis, the little monster. I should’ve left him as he was. Oh . . . and I worked on that cut on your forehead from the plane crash. I barely gave it a boost, enough so you won’t have another scar with my name on it.” Another memory popped up. “Ahhh, yeah, and you and Saul. The chlorine gas in Laramie was the real thing, not a weak version. I didn’t exactly tell the truth on that one either.”
“You don’t exactly have telling the truth down to an art, do you?” he commented mildly. I’d have felt better if he’d growled it. I was still waiting on that other shoe. “Regardless, whether you can heal other people a little or a lot, that seems like a good thing to me.”
It did? I sat in a puddle of water as the dirt ran off me in streams. I’d told him, but not clearly enough. “The healing isn’t about healing, Stefan. It’s good to have, but that’s not why I learned how. It’s about Wendy.
“If we can’t get the drop on Wendy, surprise her and take her down before she knows we’re there, then I have to be able to protect us. This was the best thing I could think of to try.” We’d always planned on rescuing those left in the Institute and I’d known all that time it wasn’t Bellucci we had to worry about. It was Wendy.
As Wendy’s abilities were purely destructive, I might be able to keep her from killing us at a distance by blocking her with the same ability, only turned on its end. Reconstructive. Opposites collide and cancel each other out. All we needed was a second to shoot her with the tranq gun. Three years I’d been thinking and practicing. If I managed to buy us that one second, I’d be damn grateful. Hard work had made me more than Jericho could’ve guessed and three years of fully maturing on top of that made me ten times what I’d once been. My chances seemed good . . . until I thought of what three years of growing up might have done for Wendy.
I was hoping practice made perfect.
I leaned my head back against the shower wall and let the water beat down on me. My eyelids drooped and I was headed fast for sleep when Stefan spoke again. “And the cure? If you have some doubts about Wendy, what about this cure? Will it work—now that you’ve included me in your need-to-know circle that was formerly you and the ferret?”
I winced and it wasn’t my ribs. Exhaling, I put a hand on the edge of the tub, heaved myself up, and turned off the shower. I caught the towel he tossed me and dried off. When I looped it around my hips, I repeated what I’d been thinking. “The cure is one hundred percent effective. If I have a chance to give it, it’ll work. There’s no question about that.”
“None?” He moved aside to let me out. I took the few steps necessary, dropped the towel, and climbed under the covers and cool sheets. They felt better against me than any clothes I owned. If we did survive, I was sneaking more money from the Caymans for better sheets. I rolled carefully onto my stomach, increased my endorphins enough to take away the remaining pain, and closed my eyes. “Peter looked goddamn perky as he ran off with not one but two darts in him,” he pointed out.
“I’ll quadruple the dose. I promise you, Stefan. It will work.” The world was slipping slowly away. Cocooned in warmth and darkness, I didn’t mind.
“You want me to trust you on it?” Right before I heard Stefan shut the shower door, I heard him murmur, “When you think why I should, Misha, you let me know.”
He’d trusted me time and time again, but I’d lied time and time again—calling it anything but lying to fool myself. When was too much? When did that last straw come along? It was lucky that I had time to sleep on it, because right then I didn’t have a good answer for his question or mine.
The only one I had, the only true rebuttal, neither of us would want to hear.
Days ago I’d been thinking I wouldn’t lie to my brother, but I had been, more or less, for three years. Call them lies or omissions or secrets—all the things we said we wouldn’t do—but at the end of the day we never failed to. Sometimes they were a convenience or a habit or at times the only kindness you could give someone. Stefan should know that.
He had a secret too and it colored every part of his life.
And mine.
I woke up to the smell of eggs, bacon, coffee, and pancakes. I savored the moment: soft bed, sheets that weren’t comparable to one-ply toilet paper, and no pain. My ribs were whole and healed.
“Room service. I know that has to be high on your list of the most incredible things invented in the history of time,” Stefan said.
“You can’t eat a pyramid.” I opened my eyes and sat up. Through the curtains, I could see the sun rising. “I slept that long?”
“Hit by a truck and a building. That sort of thing deserves a few extra hours. Give yourself a break.” He was already at the table, munching on bacon. “And if you want any food, you’d better hurry. I’ve had too much fast food lately.”
I climbed out of bed, dressed, and took a seat to rapidly fill my plate. He wasn’t serious, but food was just below sex in life’s great pleasures. I wasn’t taking any chances. “I thought about what I said last night.” He started, pouring more coffee. The scrapes and tiny cuts on his face were going to make shaving a bitch this morning. “And I was an asshole. Your badass mobster big brother got his delicate feelings hurt and I projected.”
He covered the smile, faint but there, with his cup of coffee. After he swallowed, he added, “See? I listen to all your psycho-techno babble. My eyes glaze over, yeah, but I listen.” He picked up a triangle of toast before dropping it, interest gone. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Misha. It’s that after all this time, you don’t trust me. Buying planes, recruiting drug dealers, the pipe bomb thing—Jesus, the pipe bombs—the healing and, damn, that’s the least of all the rest you told us. You didn’t tell me any of it.”
I leaned back in the chair and pushed away my plate before I took a single bite. It took one painful topic to kill both our appetites. “I didn’t keep it to myself because I don’t trust you. Well, except for the pipe bombs. You never would’ve gone for that. It was because I want to be normal, Stefan. I want to be like my big brother. Isn’t that what all younger brothers want? When they’re little, they tag along. When they’re grown, they want to be half the man their brother is.”
I ran fingers through my bed hair and made it worse by ruthlessly scrubbing my scalp. “Keeping you up to date every day on my progress at becoming more different and less human wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m not like everyone else. I’m not like you, but I wanted to pretend I was. I wanted you to, hell, forget that I’m not. I want to forget I’m not.”
“So we’re both idiots.” He pushed my plate back in front of me. “No, you’re not like me. You’re better. A better person, a better goddamn everything. Now, eat your breakfast. And if you open your mouth to say you aren’t everything I know you are, I’ll stuff a bagel in it. Plain. Without cream cheese.” Healthy food—the ultimate threat.
“We are idiots, aren’t we?” I took a bite of the blackberry pancakes covered in syrup and butter. “In the future, if I do sort of accidentally keep some things to myself, will you know it has nothing to do with trust? That it’s not you; it’s me.”
““It’s not you; it’s me.’ Jesus. You’re something else.” The grin was quick. “We’re not breaking up, Misha. And, yeah, I’ll know. Eat.”
Now that my secrets were out, it was time to work on Stefan’s. I had another bite of my pancakes before moving on to the bacon as I sidled into the subject slowly. I’d made bombs. Stefan’s secret was one I was going to have to defuse.
I’d worked on finding a cure for years, the second I managed to get a computer and a stack of books on genetics. That was where the cure had to be. Jericho had genetically altered us to add the ab
ility to make human bodies our psychokinetic playgrounds, and that meant genetics would be the only reasonable assumption to reversing it. I read and I researched. I learned, and I didn’t like what I found out.
It was impossible to take a person, a natural human chimera already born with no supercharged healing or killing abilities, and change his genetics to become what Institute chimeras were. My kind of chimera had to be built from the ground up. The process had to start at the very beginning. Once one cell became two, the work started. There was no other way.
I hadn’t mentioned it then, when I discovered the truth, but as we might not survive Peter and the others, I wanted . . . I wasn’t sure what I wanted—a different type of truth, maybe, the only kind that mattered, that one being the one between Stefan and me. I’d once asked Stefan how he thought Jericho knew I was a chimera ripe for scooping up for the Institute. He’d said probably through a pediatrician’s office or the hospital where I’d been born. I’d been fresh out of the Institute then. I hadn’t known much about the real world. Now I did. They didn’t do DNA tests on healthy children born in hospitals surrounded by Mylar balloons and blue teddy bears. DNA tests were rare, unless you were sick, and many times a DNA test wouldn’t show a chimera—not a human one. It took several tests, testing several different sites in the body.
It was time to ask again. “You know, I’ve wondered for a while how Jericho found me. They don’t do DNA tests on babies at hospitals unless they think there’s something wrong with them.”
Stefan went with the abrupt change of subject so smoothly that I knew he’d been doing some thinking about it himself—for a while; almost three years I would guess. Picking up his toast again, he said, “It was a long time ago, but I think I remember Anatoly and Mom having trouble getting pregnant with you. They probably had fertility treatments done. You know, in case I had to be replaced.”
“Replaced?” I frowned.
He shrugged. “The Mafiya needs sons to run it and life expectancy on those sons isn’t the best. No father would want all his eggs in one basket, so to speak.”
That was good, about the Mafiya. Extremely good. I could fact check it on the Internet, and it was aimed at distracting me by pissing me off that Anatoly didn’t think Stefan was enough. The fertility clinic was better than good. It was brilliant, a place where DNA testing was as common as dirt. He’d done his research. As I’d learned from Stefan, he’d learned from me. But almost three years of psychological training compared to nineteen of the same plus interrogation classes? He didn’t have a hope in hell.
“What kind of treatments?” That was me, intrigued by any kind of science. Nothing suspicious at all. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; the Great and Powerful Oz examining his brother’s psyche.
In the midst of all this—chimeras, Raynor, and digging at the inherent nature of family—I made time to miss my wall of movies. Why not? Another form of denial.
Stefan shrugged and slathered up part of his egg with the toast. “I would’ve been six. I was more into watching The Transformers than wondering where babies came from. As far as I knew, they found me under a cabbage leaf in the backyard. Your cabbage leaf was apparently at some clinic somewhere. That reminds me, I used to tell you babies came from sitting on dirty toilet seats. And boys could get pregnant too. It took them four extra months to potty train you because of that.”
The last wasn’t a distraction. It was a memory and a knife to the heart all in one.
“That’s most likely what happened.” I accepted it and gave him a few slices of bacon. The man was a fool for bacon, and that knife . . . it was in his heart. “Jericho might’ve wanted to see how one of his chimeras, engineered with our parents’ respective egg and sperm, would behave in the outside world for a short while. All good experiments need a random blind study. I could’ve been that study—chimera on the loose. And, P.S., you suck ass on the potty-training thing.”
There hadn’t been a fertility clinic, no blind studies. Before I’d come to the conclusion that all of Jericho’s children were born in a petri dish, I’d already sent my DNA to Ariel. Natural chimeras had the two different types of DNA scattered throughout their bodies for the most part. Jericho’s chimeras had the two in every cell. That was impossible for a human chimera. It was the last nail in the coffin. It wasn’t long after, to double-check my suspicion, I’d done my own DNA testing. Every drugstore had them now. Whozurdaddy? Who-zurmama? I took one of Stefan’s hairs from his brush and proved what I’d already come to know.
I’d seen the pictures. I looked like Stefan’s brother, Lukas. I had the eyes—the universe being ironic again as all Jericho’s chimeras had those eyes—I was about the same age and I’d been within a hundred miles of where he’d been kidnapped. Another irony or my salvation. Stefan’s too.
He knew I wasn’t Lukas now. He hadn’t always. When he’d rescued me, he didn’t second-guess it once. I was his brother. He believed it so deeply that I believed it too. In the face of his pure faith, I’d finally had faith myself. I’d accepted my lack of memories being some form of traumatic amnesia or caused by the fall on the rocks during the original kidnapping on the beach.
Some time after that, though, he’d found out Lukas was dead. It had to be from Anatoly. Looking back, I’d first noticed the difference at the beach house with his father. The difference wasn’t that he’d treated me as less than a brother, but that he’d insisted on it even more fiercely. That and he would do anything, once he’d been able to get out of bed after being shot by Jericho, to keep me from being alone with Anatoly. I’d thought the change had been because we’d both almost died. He’d nearly lost me again. And keeping me away from Anatoly . . . once I knew what Anatoly was, made sense. Another monster, another killer in our lives, but a useful one. But Anatoly hadn’t told me anything . . . other than to be kind to Stefan, that he deserved it.
And Stefan did, because for all his searching. . . .
Lukas was dead.
If he wasn’t, Stefan and I would be scouring the earth for his other brother. Not his real brother. I was as real as Lukas had been. I knew that. Almost three years with Stefan—there wasn’t a doubt in me about that. But if Lukas were still alive, we’d have searched until we found him and Stefan would’ve had two brothers. I thought I would’ve liked another brother. From all the stories Stefan had once told me before he knew the truth, trying to prod my memories—memories that weren’t mine—Lukas sounded as if he’d have made a great brother. Stefan didn’t tell those stories much anymore, now that he knew Lukas was gone. I’d start asking again once in a while. I wasn’t Lukas, but telling the stories would bring a part of him back to Stefan, if only for minutes or an hour.
I’d finally found that different kind of truth—a lie that wasn’t a lie at all. Stefan knew I wasn’t Lukas, but he knew I was his brother, the same as I knew that he was mine, that being brothers had nothing to do with sharing the same blood. He wouldn’t ever tell me about Lukas and he would hope I’d never find out. He wouldn’t risk that I’d again feel those doubts that I had following my rescue or that I would think he considered me any less of the brother he’d been born with.
That was Stefan.
And that was fine. That was better than fine. Some things didn’t have to be said aloud.
I also knew that while Lukas was gone, he’d given me a gift, although he’d never known me . . . or rather had never met me. He’d given me the memories of sun, wind, and horses to warm me in a place as cold as death itself. It was his best memory. Galloping up and down the beach, the ocean’s roar loud in his ears, the wind in his face—it was his best memory and mine too, although I hadn’t actually experienced it. Yet Lukas made me feel as if I had. Tangible and real as any other memory I had had in the Institute, that memory had kept me sane.
More than that, Lukas had given me a brother to pull me from that frozen sterile prison and set me free. Lukas had died, but he’d given me life. And as logical and scientifically minded as I
was, I didn’t question the mysterious nature of that. It was as true and real as the sun and the sky above.
“How does it feel?” I asked, taking from his plate a jam-loaded biscuit to replace the bacon I’d given him.
“How does what feel?” he asked with a trace of caution hidden behind the words—hidden to anyone but a genius like me.
I grinned. “To be a free, off-the-shelf baby when they spent big bucks making me? I was the Cadillac of infants. You were barely a Volkswagen.”
He let me have another one of his biscuits, this time fired directly at my head. I caught it. I wasn’t going to duck and waste a perfectly good biscuit. “You’re an ass.”
“Thanks for the lessons in that. They’ve been invaluable.” I continued to grin as I took a bite of the biscuit.
The moment that had descended on my yesterday hadn’t been the best of my life—not the worst, thanks to the Institute—but not the best either. This one was—this was the best moment I’d had. At peace with my family . . . where I belonged.
And then Peter called and turned the moment into a memory. Memories are good too, but they’re only shadows of moments—a sepia photograph of what you saw, heard, felt. Once a moment is gone, you don’t get it back.
Peter’s cell phone rang again.
I was really beginning to hate that son of a bitch.
Chapter 13
“You’re alive, Michael. Good. It’s difficult to keep punishing you if you let a simple building falling on your traitorous head take you out of the game.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and wished Peter were there so I could shove the cheap phone down his throat. As for his calling me traitorous, I didn’t ask him what he meant. I knew—as did Stefan and Saul now that I’d come clean. Peter wanted to punish me because he’d learned of the cure. “It’s even harder to punish me, Peter, when you keep running away. You wouldn’t be afraid of me, would you?”
