by Rob Thurman
“You really weren’t surprised?” Ariel tilted her pink head, curious. “You knew?” Her gaze, the lifelong familiarity of blue and green—there was a brilliant, almost explosive shine of life behind those eyes. She had a love of life—her own. It was too bad there was no love for humanity.
“I gave you a clue, you know.” I gave a rueful smile. “My fake name. Bernie. Short for Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli.” I wouldn’t admit to myself I’d hoped she would pick up on that and leave this all alone, disappear, and save herself. Stefan wondered when his father died if someone could love a cold-blooded killer.
Now I knew.
“Oh, that was clever. Clever, rotten, and sneaky. I love it.” She gave me an admiring salute with three fingers, all bearing brightly colored rhinestone rings. “But tell me, Misha, what did I do? How’s a girl going to learn if she doesn’t know where she went wrong? What made you suspicious?” Beneath us, the river roared as it hurtled over the dam, a monster of nature ready to gobble whatever fell into its maw as it had gobbled up Wendy. With so many monsters gathered in one spot, the natural and the unnatural, it was enough to make a skeptic like me believe in fate.
“Nearly everything. You were too good, Ariel. You’re smart, far too smart. You would’ve come to the same conclusion that I did with the information I gave you and the genetic samples themselves. There’s no way to synthesize a drug to cure a chimera, but you lied. You agreed with me, questioning a few things once or twice to make it more believable, but then you ‘helped’ me find the nonexistent solution.” This was how Wendy had found out I’d tried to make a cure and why she was so intent on punishing me. Ariel had told her.
“Anyone as intelligent as you would’ve known there wasn’t one. You’re also too psychologically adept,” I said. She preened as if it were a compliment. Hell, it was. “You asked questions that seemed innocent on the surface but actually tunneled deep beneath it.” She did it better than I could and I’d been a star pupil in the Institute’s psychological interrogation class.
“You used verbal and physical cues to make me automatically trust you. . . . That was why you were so insistent on the video feed. When I talked, you looked at me as if I were the only other person in the world and as if every word I said were the most fascinating thing you’d heard or would hear.” All the best con men could do that, and con men were nothing compared to a chimera. “You dilated your pupils to indicate arousal.” We hadn’t been taught to follow through with seduction; we weren’t taught why seduction was seduction; we were only taught it was bait and a way to get a wary target close enough to touch and kill. That was all the Institute needed us to know—enough for that one touch. More than that was a waste of time and profit. “You did lead into it a little early, though.”
“It couldn’t have been real? Dr. Theoretical, I think you underestimate me.” Her pale pink lips curved playfully.
“It could’ve been.” On my part I knew. On hers I could only guess. “But you were too good at it. Not off by a single note, not once. And then there was this.” I pointed a finger beside my eye to indicate where her mermaid tattoo was. Temporary or permanent; that didn’t matter. It was Disney, and that did. She apparently had fonder memories of those cartoons from Institute days gone by than I did.
“Too good.” She laughed as I’d heard her do many times before, but this time I was positive it wasn’t an act. “Undone by my own brilliance. I do like you, Misha. I really do. It took being with you in person to find that out. Which is why I let Raynor ‘catch’ your girlfriend. I wanted to meet you, know you in real life, not just as pixels. Before that, I honestly didn’t know I could like someone. I didn’t know how. None of us do, do we?”
“No weakness. No limitations. No mercy,” I said.
She nodded, her hair swinging at her jaw with the motion. “Jericho would be so disappointed.” She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her wide mouth. “The bastard, which makes liking you more fun. I was his first; did you know? That probably confused you, that you didn’t recognize me from the Institute. I’m not twenty-two; I’m twenty-nine and his very first success. He had a run of bad luck after me, batch after bad batch, before he finally had production going smoothly. Assembly-line assassins. I graduated when I was seventeen and you were this tall.” She held down a hand to indicate. “I killed my owner when I was seventeen and a half and walked away. I liked being free.
“Speaking of like, did you like me back? Though you knew I was lying to you? And especially now you know that I’m an older woman.” She smiled again. Happy. Always happy. Happy to watch movies and chat online; happy to kill. She didn’t see the difference between the two. Not yet . . . even with her doubts now regarding Wendy. Not yet and maybe not ever.
“At first. Then I sort of loved you. I still do.” Unlike her, I didn’t sound happy. I wasn’t. Loving Ariel wasn’t a love to savor or cherish. Loving her meant I might not love again. She was a sociopath and as she’d said, she liked me, but that didn’t mean she would or could learn to like anyone else. A friend? A neighbor? Fun was fun, and toys, like her engineered superflu, were hard to give up. Like Wendy, Ariel wouldn’t tolerate tedium. Loving her didn’t mean I didn’t know what she was. It was why I kept e-mailing her, kept in touch, kept her thinking I was on her hook, because all chimeras had to be cured—even Ariel.
“How many people have you killed since you dropped your owner and ran? How many people did you kill when you weren’t ordered to or forced to? How many people, Ariel, did you kill because you liked doing so? How many people, not counting the ones you’d kill with what you made in your lab, will you kill in the future if I don’t cure you?” I asked.
“Please. So serious. People are like potato chips. You can’t kill just one,” she said, radiant with humor. When I didn’t comment, the dimple and smile disappeared. “Why does it matter? That’s what we do. That’s who we are. We are evolution in progress, Michael. Everyone else”—she gave a shrug as pretty as her first one and utterly dismissive—“their time is over. Our time is now. Why shouldn’t I have fun with them?”
“How many people, Ariel?” I repeated.
She stared at me. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand; she was psychologically incapable of it—at least now. And now was all we had. The water was louder now. Nature knew evolution better than we did. It knew a wrong turn and we were that. “You do have a cure, don’t you?” she asked slowly, for the first time seeing something in me that was similar to what she’d been wary of in Wendy, something to be feared.
“I do,” I said quietly.
“And you’d use it? On your own kind?”
“As Wendy had killed our own kind, I will. There’s no other way.”
“I didn’t know that about Wendy. That she would kill her own, kill one of us. I hope you believe that.” She shook her head then, denying it. “Whatever it is, you know it’s not a cure, Misha. It’s a poison, to strip us of what we are.” She took a step back from me.
“No, it is a cure, but not for you or the others. It’s a cure for the human race. We’re not right. We’re twisted. We were made that way. We’re a malignant cancer and, as with any cancer, the cure is a poison. You won’t be able to kill anymore.” I hesitated, because it was dark and ugly, but it was necessary. She’d lied to me; I’d lied to her. I’d lied to everyone for all my good intentions and promises to the contrary, but that was over.
“And you won’t be you anymore. You’ll still be intelligent, that won’t change, but Ariel will die. Someone will take her place. Someone who doesn’t care what color her hair is or that she likes mermaids and short skirts or purple sandals. She’ll be a new person—not an interesting person; brilliant but not clever; alive but she won’t care particularly if she is or not. She won’t have hopes and dreams, and fun will be only a word to her. But she won’t kill again and that’s the best I can do. We’re not the next step in evolution. We’re a mutation created by a madman and brainwashed to be monsters. Monster
s belong in those movies we watched, Ariel, not in the real world.”
That was when Ariel chose to take herself out of the world. She spun on one heel, spread her arms wide, and sailed over the low concrete wall. For a moment she seemed to hover in the air, a butterfly in color and light, too much a part of the air and sky itself to fall. But fall she did, with a graceful dive that would take her into the same thrashing crush of water that had swallowed Wendy.
It was beautiful, that incredible soaring flight and inevitable plunge, and I hadn’t taken a step to stop her. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, and more rarely the cure is worse than death itself. Ariel couldn’t be anything less than she was and she made her choice. But she took the virus canister with her. Metal, it would sink to the bottom of the river and the airborne virus would never see the light of day. Ariel’s last gesture wasn’t a gift to the world or to Cascade Falls; it was a gift to me.
She wanted to surprise me. I let her.
With that surprise, that gift, she redeemed herself—in my eyes at least, and my eyes were the only ones that counted.
“She took yoga and ballet,” I said, more to myself than Stefan or Saul. “If anyone could fly, she would be the one.” I didn’t go to look over the side. It made it easier to believe.
Fly away, bird. Fly away always.
Then there was work to be done.
Energy already recharging, I knelt beside the nearest chimera. He had fallen facedown when the tranquilizer dart had hit him. I rolled him over. Dark blond hair, light-skinned; it was Michael Three. It seemed somehow right a Michael would be my first. I laid my hand on his forehead. What I was doing was almost as complex as putting Stefan’s heart back together. The physical connection helped.
“What are you doing?” Stefan squatted beside me. “You just said there was no cure.”
“Not a genetic one, no.” The cartridges we’d shot the chimeras with hadn’t held a mixture of “cure” and tranquilizer—another lie. They’d been nothing but pure tranq, because there was nothing else to mix with it. “I’m basically destroying a good deal of their amygdala and a particular portion of their frontal cortex and hypothalamus.” I felt the cells die in Michael’s brain, leaving a lesion of darkness I could’ve seen if I’d closed my eyes. I moved to the next one—a Lily. She had brown hair and dark skin—Lily Four, then. “I’m giving them highly improved lobotomies or a variation of an amygdalotomy combined with other procedures. They should retain almost all of their emotions, except aggression.”
“Almost”—it was a word that encompassed more than a person could imagine.
“You said chimeras naturally blocked other chimeras from damaging them? And if that’s what you’re doing, won’t they heal?” He didn’t like this. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like it either.
“All that practicing I told you about, all the healing I did on the animals and myself for almost three years every day, it increased what I can do tenfold. We weren’t taught to try to be more than what we were. I don’t think it crossed any of the researchers’ minds that we could actually increase a genetic trait by exercising it, but I did. I worked Jericho’s gene until I could make it do fucking backflips.” Lily went quicker than Michael and the third even faster. “If you can build something up, you can tear it down more easily and efficiently—even if it is a chimera.” It was a simple logic and I thought the only reason Jericho hadn’t thought of it was that healing others and building, not manipulating, wasn’t part of his mental wiring.
I looked at all the fallen chimeras around us. “They couldn’t stop Wendy and they can’t stop me now. They can’t heal what either of us does to them. They’re not strong enough.”
“There was no cure, was there? All along there never was.” Stefan stood, his hand resting on my shoulder.
This was my last omission from all that I’d told Stefan and Saul. I wasn’t going to say it was my last lie. I knew better now.
“I am the cure.” I raised my eyes to him. “There’s no way to turn off the gene Jericho gave us. It would fight off any attempted gene therapy, any bone marrow transplant. And I can’t stop the gene from functioning either, not without killing them. It’s an intrinsic part of our DNA, not an extra chromosome. Not something we can do without. I turn the gene off, I turn them off, permanently. This”—I rested my hand on the next forehead—“is the only answer.” That was one lie I hadn’t told. I had researched for a way, which was how I’d found Ariel. I’d had hope, but I was a child of Jericho and that meant reality and ruthless necessity always trumped hope. When I finally accepted the truth, I used the time to become what I was now. I found the cure inside of me, not in an outside world nowhere near ready to scientifically understand what we were, much less change that.
“Misha. . . .”
The sympathy in his voice was strong. He knew. I knew. It didn’t have to be said aloud. I’d pledged day in and day out that I wasn’t a killer, but I was a thief of souls. The twelve that remained here, they might as well have been the Four Horsemen, bringing death and despair to the world. They had to be stopped. But which is worse? To take who a person is, for good or bad, and erase his free will, or to kill him? If I’d asked them, every one of them would’ve chosen the same fate Ariel had. I didn’t give them that choice. I did what I thought was best. I played God . . . just as Jericho had.
But with him dead, someone had to.
“They can’t murder without aggression,” I said, “and they can’t have aggression if I destroy the part of the brain that births it.” It was the best I could do—a very poor best.
I rested my hand on the forehead of the last one—Peter. He’d played genius and villain well, while all the time Wendy had been pulling his strings and feeding him his lines. He was a killer too, same as the others, but he wasn’t what I thought he’d been. He was both predator and prey, because there was nothing in his mind now except silence. Wendy’s last act before falling away, besides killing the sniper who had shot her and his companions, had been to turn Peter off as if he were a toy she was done playing with. Only his brain stem worked now, keeping his lungs inflating and deflating, his heart beating, but the rest was dark and dead. He was brain dead. She’d made a true puppet of him, empty and hollow. It would’ve made her laugh, the irony, even with a bullet in her small chest. Peter was gone and I couldn’t fix that. The other chimeras wouldn’t be able to undo what I’d done and I couldn’t undo what Wendy had done. She and I were a new breed of chimera—with a new balance of power.
Ariel had been a chimera, able to survive a good deal, but the unquenchable hunger of water at the bottom of the dam? No. I had no hope there. Wendy, though . . . the Grim Reaper himself would be afraid to touch her long enough to take her life. Fine. If I saw her again, I’d do it for him.
Somehow.
Chapter 15
For the second time in his life Raynor was going to do some good. The first had been having one of his men shoot Wendy, because Raynor knew as well as anyone that Wendy wasn’t viable for sale, profit, or life in general. He’d saved Stefan or Saul from having to do it—if they could’ve lifted a hand to do it. It didn’t matter how evil a ten-year-old little girl was; putting a bullet in one would haunt your nights for years to come—unless you were Raynor. The only regret he would have was a lack of a commemorative photograph to hang on his wall.
“Well, chaps, it looks like you’ve done my work for me.” He had walked around the sheriff’s car and was heading toward us, his gun up and aimed at the cluster of the three of us. “One, two, four . . . twelve unconscious chimeras wrapped up in a bow and ready to go to rehab. Learn to mind their masters.” He didn’t know what I’d done to them and I wasn’t inclined to tell him. I didn’t know what kind of life they would have now. The ability to kill remained within them, but they wouldn’t use it. They couldn’t. With a complete lack of aggression, they wouldn’t be able to kill, even in defense. As I’d told Ariel, they’d be smart as they’d been before, but they’d be
blander, milder, less interested in life in general. When they woke up from the tranquilizer, my best guess was they’d keep the Institute story to themselves—they’d know by now that would only end them in a psych ward. They’d wander off and do as Ariel had done; as I’d done. They would make fake IDs, get jobs, live their lives—but without flavor or zest. They would be gray people in a gray world, but without leaving a trail of torture and murder in their wake.
Raynor would say you have to break some eggs to make an omelet. Raynor was a dick.
“Stefan,” I said.
Stefan shot him in the right shoulder. It was his right hand that held his gun. Raynor dropped it as he clutched his shattered and bleeding shoulder. Saul whistled. “You’re fast. How’d you get so damn fast? I was in the rangers and I’m not that fast.”
“I think Misha juiced me up some. Either that or you were a piss-poor ranger.” Stefan walked over and swept Raynor’s legs out from under him. “All your men up in the hills are dead now, Raynor. A couple months’ paychecks and all you have are a pile of dead mercenaries to show for it, thanks to one little girl. And I’ll bet my last dollar they’re mercenaries because you wouldn’t share the Institute with anyone else in the government. Too messy and much less money for you.” He kicked him in the stomach next. “I hear you shot my brother in the head with a rubber bullet. Not nice, asshole. Not nice at all.” He kicked him again and air whistled out of Raynor’s trach tube as he doubled over. “Nice. Maybe I can get you to whistle ‘ “Yankee-fucking-Doodle Dandy’ ” on that thing.” He kicked him once more, in the ribs, and harder this time. I had the feeling, if I let him, he would go on kicking Raynor until he was dead. I didn’t mind that too much, but we needed him for something first—that second good thing he could do.
“Stefan, we need him,” I said, catching his arm before he launched another kick. “We could call it in ourselves, but no one knows how intelligent a chimera can be, especially one like Ariel. We need him to find the bomb.”
