by Rob Thurman
“I know.” Keeping her in view, I turned my attention to Peter who stood in front of them all. Peter who’d led us on this chase, had tried to kill my brother and my friend over and over, who had taken down the Institute from the inside practically on his own. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater. Peter, the Pied Piper of death. “I’m here, Peter. Now what? How are you going to punish me?” I was tense on the inside, tense enough I could feel the sharp ache of it . . . of waiting for Wendy to try anything aimed at Stefan, Saul, or me.
Peter smiled at me, that same charismatic, smug smile I was sick to death of. He said nothing. “All of this and you’re going to stare at me like an idiot? This is it, Peter. You said I had to pay. I had to be punished. Where’s your big punishment?” I wasn’t waiting. This was a perfect chance and I was taking it. Without their leader, they’d be confused if only for a fraction of a second. It would have to be enough. While I was still talking, I shot Peter in the chest with the tranquilizer cartridge at the new dosage. He had the speed—my speed—to avoid it, and I was ready to keep shooting until I hit him.
But he didn’t move—not before the shot, during, or after. He simply stood and the smile slowly fell off his face.
He looked down at the dart, puzzled, and said, the words already slurring, “What do I say, Wendy? What do . . . I . . . say . . . now?” He dropped bonelessly to the concrete, unconscious.
“Poor Peter,” Wendy chirped before her voice hardened to stone. “He was always so hopelessly stupid.”
She stopped the kicking and leaned a little as if to study me more closely. “The same as you, Michael. You reek of stupidity. You always did. You’re soft and worthless as a human, even worse than one actually because you have the gift. Not much of one, but enough. You never had the will, though.”
“You. God, I should’ve known. Peter was nothing special other than loving to kill, but you—you were always special.” She’d fed him every line, every word, all along. Every action that had been taken, the entire plan, the rebellion, it had all been her. I’d grown. I’d become a man. Wendy had grown and I had no idea what she had become.
As Saul would’ve said, we were well and truly screwed now.
“As special as they came, that I am. And that was a problem. A very large fucking problem.” Her voice had gone from little girl to adult and now it went to as rich with hate as a death row inmate. “I was bored. I’d been bored forever and they kept running out of people for me to kill at the Institute. They also started thinking,” she said, her smile coldly vicious, “and they should have. What would happen when I was bored and the Basement and animal labs were empty? I couldn’t let them think about that too long, could I? Because they knew what would happen. I wasn’t Jericho’s favorite anymore. He was gone and Bellucci—he was always afraid, from the first day he took Jericho’s place. But even if they hadn’t been starting to think I was more than they could handle, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was bored, bored, bored, and there weren’t enough people in the Institute to entertain me. The world, though, the whole, entire world—how much fun would that be?”
I saw something I hadn’t guessed at when Wendy and I shared a prison. “You were never obedient, were you? Of all of us, some more than others, you never were at all.” I thought she had been. Their goal and hers were the same—death. She had appeared perfectly happy and content. But I’d been blind. The likes of Wendy wouldn’t bow to anyone—not even to her own creator, if he’d lived.
“When I was young, I pretended. Now that I’m not . . . I stopped pretending.” She was ten years old and she thought—she knew she wasn’t young anymore. Her face, rosy pink from the wind, hardened. “They should’ve graduated me when I was three, because even then I was the best of all of you in every way.” She kicked again. It was to be shocking in its cuteness, to entertain herself by making our brain rebel at the incongruity of what she was, the inner and the outer mismatched enough to make your stomach churn. “Bellucci wasn’t Jericho of course. Security became lax. Lax, lax, lax. I like that word.” She smiled, pretty as a picture. “Until one day there was a new researcher—an older woman with a deeply buried maternal instinct that would’ve had Jericho screening her out simply by looking at her. It took a while, but I am sweet and adorable and she, like you, Michael, was stupid. I asked one day if she’d show me how to play a game on her computer. After I popped a few cells in the decision-making part of her tiny brain, she could see no harm in that.” Chimeras were never allowed on or near a computer that could access the Internet—with good reason. “That was that.”
All it took for her to learn a way to reach the outside world was one woman who wasn’t quite as soulless as the rest of the faculty. She’d have obtained her password. Gotten access to “play games” now and again, but now and again was all Wendy would need.
“I learned how much more lay outside the Institute than they ever told us. How many more people. Endless numbers of playthings. I also found a friend.” From her lips, “friend” was a word in an incomprehensible alien language. “I found one of us who’d taken care of their owner, brutally I hope, and found freedom. It made me think. What would I do if I were free?” Her smile was hideous. “What wouldn’t I do?” She looked past us. “Lily One, come say hi, hi, hi to your boyfriend.”
Stefan and Saul shifted their stance enough to see whose footsteps were coming up behind us . . . although they already knew. I’d told them. When I’d told them about everything else, I’d told them this too—that she was a chimera. It had been one reason I hadn’t worried when she’d disappeared at McDonald’s. No one could take care of themselves as she could. She stepped into sight, her smile more natural and familiar than Wendy’s. Her eyes, now chimera blue and green instead of just blue, were clear and happy. She was as she’d always been: glorious.
“Ariel.” I nodded. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”
“Misha,” she scolded, her pink hair mixing with the blue of the sky and the green of the trees like an Easter egg. “Way to turn a girl’s smile upside down. I wanted to surprise you. You’re no fun at all.” In one hand she held a metal cylinder about seven inches long and three inches in diameter.
Wendy didn’t like not being the center of attention. “Bellucci told us you were in Cascade, Michael. We could’ve killed you much sooner for your presumption without all this running around, barely playing at all, but we were waiting for Lily to finish up with her work and make her way out here. Did you plant it, Lily? Is it done?” Wendy asked.
Ariel nodded. “In the Portland International Airport.” She gave the “international” portion of the title a roll of the eyes, the same as I had, although my eye roll had been internal. “It’s barely international, but good enough for a test run, to see if the theory works.”
“A theory is useless without proof,” the twelve other chimeras all murmured. I caught myself before I did the same—another Institute rule; another Institute lesson.
“What did you do, Ariel?” I demanded.
Her smile was dreamy this time. “Remember SARS, the bird flu, swine flu? They all had people in a panic, didn’t they?” She tapped a pink fingernail against the metal cylinder. “This will have them too dead to worry about panicking. I whipped it up in my lab. It’s airborne, has a seven-day incubation time so people can travel far and spread it wide, and a thirty percent mortality rate. I could’ve made it higher, but then who would we have to play with? You can’t break all your toys. That wouldn’t be very bright of us, would it? The one in the Portland airport will go off at eleven a.m. tomorrow morning. There are quite a few travelers at that time. I wonder how far it will go. How much of the world we’ll touch.”
“They’ll shut down the rest of the airports,” Stefan said.
“If they find the mechanism, but they won’t. I didn’t even go through security before I planted it. And if they did find it, did discover it was a man-made virus and not a new, natural version, which they won’t with the work I’ve done, they can’t shut
them all down forever, can they? I thought it was a little much, so many people. I play, but on a smaller scale, but Wendy insisted. And when she said she’d free the rest of us, I thought it was worth it.” She frowned, only now seeing how few chimeras there were. “This is all that survived the rebellion?”
“This is all that survived Wendy,” I said quietly.
“These were the worthy,” Wendy snapped. “The rest would do as they were told, but they didn’t have the heart or the hunger to be what we were born to be. We are the birth of a new race and only the best will be part of that birth. Only the best shall have the world as their new Playground.”
“But why?” It was Saul this time; Saul who’d seen war and worse, and this was beyond him. “What’s the point to all of this? Just killing for killing’s sake? And soon you’ll get bored of that too and kill the entire world?”
Wendy didn’t answer him. Wendy didn’t talk to humans. “As for why I came after you, Michael, you have to be curious. You know you’re not important enough for my attention . . . except . . .” She did her little-girl repetition again. I didn’t know whether she was aware she was doing it or doing it for the same reason of making us psychologically ill watching and hearing her. “Except, except, except, that when I found Lily One, she told me what you were up to. She knew you for what you were from the beginning.” She hadn’t been the only one. “You’ve gotten as negligent as Bellucci’s security and have forgotten your training. I wanted you, Michael, for one reason only. You dared think you could cure us. You dared,” she said, her face crimson with fury now, “when the only cure needed is for the weak and pathetic previous stage of evolution that covers this world now to die. It’s our turn now and you thought somehow you could stop your betters. That you should stop them. You’re broken, Michael. Perverse. Traitorous. Sick. And the sick need to be put to rest, especially the sick with egos bigger than their abilities.”
I shook my head at Ariel. “You shouldn’t have told her about the cure.” She shrugged. It was a pretty shrug and the smile was dazzling, but there was more unease in her eyes as she glanced again at Wendy, then at the small number of chimeras, and then at me.
“Misha,” she said, “you know there is no cure.”
“You’ve more than earned your punishment.” Wendy was done batting around the mouse. Now it was time for the kill. “And what could be a better one than for you to watch this town, its miserable people, and your unnatural attachment die from Lily’s concoction. Then, naturally, I kill you, the cherry on top of my sundae. I love sundaes.” The tip of a pink tongue touched her upper lip. “They’re almost as good as this.”
I had an attachment to this town, but I had a stronger one and she knew it. Raynor had told Bellucci, and Bellucci had spilled his guts literally and metaphorically all in one. She knew Stefan had rescued me, that I’d lived with him since my escape from the Institute, that he was my family—a word she’d put in Peter’s mouth and in the other chimeras’ brains, but that she’d never understand herself. Understanding didn’t matter, though. She knew where she could hurt me the most.
I felt the shimmer of power hit him. Wendy, the first chimera who didn’t need to touch to kill—Wendy who had only to see or know you existed; Wendy who was trying to kill my brother right now. Trying to rip him apart from the inside out.
She failed.
He fell to his knees from the pain of cells frozen for the smallest measurement of time until I set them free again. There was a trace of blood dripping from his nose over his mouth, but he was alive. He was fine. That was until Wendy tried again. This time Saul and I fell to join him. I held her off, held her back, but I was losing ground and the other chimeras were moving forward, except for Ariel.
I thought I could do it. I genuinely believed I could. But I’d been wrong. Wendy was death incarnate. I could try until the end of my days and I would never be what she was now . . . at ten years old. I had seconds, maybe less, left before she overwhelmed the healing protection I had thrown up over the three of us. The pain was agonizing. I couldn’t lift the tranquilizer gun. I couldn’t move at all, and Saul and Stefan . . . I could feel how much worse it was for them. They couldn’t lift a finger, much less a hand with a gun in it.
Yet a shot cracked clear and loud all the same.
As the material over Wendy’s chest blackened, then turned red, her eyes widened—the cat suddenly finding out what it is to be the mouse—and she tumbled backward over the edge, lost to the lethal churn of water at the base of the dam. But not before I heard screams in the hills beside the river, fainter than the rifle shot but as fatal. Wendy had taken her killer and his waiting comrades with her.
I staggered to my feet, yanking at Stefan with one hand, then at Saul, and started firing my tranquilizer gun at the chimeras who had halted at Wendy’s fall, milling about, momentarily lost. But as I thought at the Institute, they were the varsity team. They were the ones who lived and breathed to kill and they didn’t need a Wendy to do that.
With all three of us firing, several fell, but they were quick . . . like me. Smart . . . I didn’t think so much of that about myself anymore. They were predators from the moment one cell split to become two. This was what they were born to do and no one on Earth was better at it than they were. I tried to keep between them and Stefan and Saul. They couldn’t hurt me. But, as I’d thought, they were smart. One tackled me to the road, taking me and my gun out of commission for a few seconds until I touched him and he fell at my side. I didn’t have to touch now, except Wendy had drained me, and touching was much easier and faster until I recovered. He didn’t move again. I’d done what no chimera before Wendy had been capable of—I manipulated the cells of my own kind.
I wasn’t Wendy, but I wasn’t Michael either, not anymore.
Back up on my feet, I fired at another chimera, another Peter . . . Peter Three. He stumbled and collapsed and I turned. . . .
Too late, I turned. Stefan had turned too. It was only a tranq gun, and the boy was nine at best. He could’ve walked right out of The Brady Bunch, one of those old TV shows that had been on cheap hotel TVs as early-morning reruns when we’d been trying to escape the Institute the first time. The same curls, freckles, happy smile, but with a hand that struck faster than a cobra. It hit in the center of Stefan’s chest and I felt it. I felt Stefan’s heart stutter, I felt it stop, and then I felt it tear in half. I felt him die. I’d worked so hard on blocking Wendy’s type of deadly ability, I hadn’t had the resources to block the usual chimera kind as well.
Saul shot the boy in the back and he probably shot more. I didn’t notice and I didn’t care. I ran, dropping my gun and falling on my knees by Stefan’s side. When this had all begun days ago, I’d imagined Raynor’s fake tourist shooting Stefan, I’d seen the image of his eyes, turning from the brown I knew to the gray of the clouded sky. I’d imagined wrong. They stayed brown, the brown I saw over a breakfast table, that laughed when I did something idiotic or clever or pretty much anything at all, the brown of a brother who hadn’t taken one day of our years together for granted. It was the brown of a brother who wasn’t going to leave me, no matter what he or God or reality thought.
I wasn’t going to let that happen.
I put my hand over his chest in the same spot the other chimera had snatched his life away and closed my eyes. If he’d just stopped Stefan’s heart, it would’ve been simple. But he’d torn it apart and that wasn’t simple at all. Ragged edges—I couldn’t see, but I could feel. They had been viciously torn. How could I join those back together again? God, how?
No. No. I had to remember what I’d learned.
It was flesh, not bone. Bone was difficult; flesh was easy. Wasn’t it? Hadn’t I said so? Hadn’t I proved so? And a heart, that was merely—shit, Stoipah, don’t—that was only the engine that kept the entire body running. You could do without one of those for a good four or five minutes without brain damage; if the body was cold, hypothermic, then longer. I dropped his body temperature
like a rock as I carefully put his heart back together, bit by bit. It had to be right, had to be perfect or it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t. . . .
I stopped thinking and healed—that and nothing more. I poured every ounce of my ability from me into him. I did the impossible. I made his heart whole again but it didn’t beat.
I raised his temperature back to normal but it didn’t beat.
I was terrified, desperate, desolate, and fucking pissed off, and I gave it the biggest bio-electrical jolt I could manage. I gave him everything I had and felt the blackness creeping around the edges of my vision as I slumped across his unmoving chest.
You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down.
Until you do.
The darkness was complete. I didn’t know for how long, but when I opened my eyes, I felt a hand patting my back and saw breakfast brown eyes smiling at me. “You’re a miracle, kid. Did I ever tell you that?”
“Don’t call me kid.” I swiped at my eyes, which weren’t wet; I didn’t care what anyone said. “Ah, Jesus. Call me kid whenever the fuck you want.”
If I let my big brother hug me, I wasn’t going to admit to that either.
Theoretically.
Saul helped us both up. Stefan was steadier than I was, but that was from all the energy I’d expended. Big boys don’t cry and all that manly crap. Around us all the chimeras save one were down and unconscious. Saul shrugged. “She didn’t try to attack us. She didn’t do anything at all. I thought you might want to talk to her before whacking her with the cure.” Both he and Stefan stepped back, not too far, but enough to give us the illusion of privacy.
