by Rob Thurman
Slippery slope, I was repeating to myself, same as I had in the coffee shop, when he shook my arm again, harder this time. Slippery, slippery slope.
But then again, what was one ski run, really? Just the one?
This once, I gave in to nature. I looked at the tourist and tried not to smile. I didn’t think I was successful and I doubted it was a friendly smile. Not that employee-of-the-month one. “Alcohol is harmful to your liver and not all that great for your stomach either,” I said, pulling my arm free. His eyes widened, he dropped the Danish he was holding in his other hand, and I backed away quickly. I made it in time as he bent over and threw up on the sidewalk. I’d done the same to myself earlier in the coffee house bathroom, but not quite so . . . explosively. I should’ve been sorry, but I wasn’t. He deserved it. Out of range and unsplattered, I turned my back on him and kept walking toward my car. I heard him vomit one more time, curse, groan, and then vomit again. He would keep it up for approximately the next fifteen minutes until he was empty of everything, including yesterday’s breakfast. He would chalk it up to strong coffee, whatever alcohol he’d put in it, and the Danish. After all, what other explanation could there be?
Well. . . .
Other than me?
He was fortunate I wasn’t more like my former classmates. If I had been, that one touch of his hand to my arm, that hard shake he’d given me—I could’ve ripped holes in his brain, torn his heart into pieces, liquefied his intestines. After all, that was what I was: a genetically created, lab-altered, medically modified child of Frankenstein, trained to do one thing and one thing only.
Kill.
All with a single touch.
Isn’t science fun?
Besides, vomiting didn’t hurt. It was only annoying, like the man who was doing it.
Mr. Fat-ass Danish would never know. I climbed into the car, pleased for a split second. Mr. Fat-ass Danish . . . the phrase had come out naturally, no work at all. Cursing was one thing that had proved difficult to learn. I was getting better at it. Then I remembered Anatoly, and the pleasure popped and disappeared like a soap bubble. Stefan and I needed to talk. I started the car. His babysitting days were over. That took me to the most simple of physics lessons: immovable object, unstoppable force. I sighed and pulled the car away from the curb.
All right, his babysitting days were mostly over.
Fifteen minutes later I was telling my brother the same thing that I’d told the tourist when he’d asked for his coffee.
“I am not a kid.”
And I wasn’t. My brother called me that daily at least, but since he had lost me when I was seven years old and only gotten me back when I was seventeen, I understood. Calling me a kid was his way of trying to ignore or reclaim those ten lost years. It was an emotional and appraisal-based mixed coping skill.
Again, still smart.
As I denied my inclusion in the kid category, Stefan wiped the back of his hand along his forehead, not that there was any sweat. Moisture, but no sweat. I’d spent most of my life in Florida and so had he. But when you were living in Oregon, when there was water dripping down your forehead, it wasn’t often sweat. It was the air. You drank your air in the Falls; it was that heavy on every molecule. It was July now and around fifty-five degrees today. I didn’t mind the drop in temperature compared to Florida and Bolivia. It was green here in Cascade Falls, everywhere green, and it was cool on the river. I was surprised to find I liked that. I was usually surprised when I liked anything. “Prepare for the worst and get the worst.” That had been an unspoken Institute motto among the students. I’d been raised there with suspicion as my very best friend since my first memories. That meant everything I saw, touched, tasted, heard—it was all evaluated through a filter of wariness. But in the time since the Institute I’d had more pleasant surprises than unpleasant ones.
That, ironically, surprised me too.
I liked Oregon and I was lucky to be able to have an opinion one way or the other, which made me like it more. I didn’t mind the lack of ocean. I’d seen it in South Carolina for a short time, and I’d have liked to have seen more, but if I needed water, there was also the river. But more than that, there was Stefan.
He was overprotective and he called me kid, but he was my brother—mine—and I sort of loved him. Not that I’d say that. You couldn’t just go and say things like that aloud. TV said so. Movies said so. General guy culture said so—I’d learned that from close observation. Everything said so.
Almost three years with him and the possibility of losing him said so.
Funny the things you don’t want to say and tempt fate, the things you don’t want to admit to yourself, no matter how often you think them. We were free and alive now, but that might not always be true.
“I’m not a kid and that ladder is too high. You could break a leg,” I said. Yet there I was, thinking it again. People were fragile. They were like ancient glass found in Roman ruins waiting to shatter into pieces at one simple touch, thousands of pieces that could never be glued back together. Easily . . . extraordinarily easily broken, those normal people.
I wasn’t normal. I tried to be, but I wasn’t. The Institute had made certain of that.
Stefan was painting Mrs. Adelaide Sloot’s house today. Every morning before he left, I made him leave a schedule pinned to the refrigerator with my Albert Einstein magnet. Fine. I was forced to admit it: the babysitting thing went both ways. Now with my showing up, he let the brush fall back in the can of mint green paint and looked the ladder’s entire ten feet plus half of his own size down at me and my scowl from where he perched on top. “Okay, that’s out of nowhere.” He meant the kid part, not the ladder complaint. He’d made it clear I was profoundly overprotective lots of times before. Profound was an exaggeration, as was pathological. I thought he’d been carrying around a dictionary that particular day—stuck on the letter P. I was cautious, that was all. Besides, considering what he’d done to protect me in the past, I wasn’t sure I came anywhere close to falling in the same category.
Anatoly’s death and Stefan’s not telling me about it proved that, didn’t they?
He ran a hand through his short, wavy black hair, leaving flecks of green. “I promise to be extremely careful with this Tower of Babel–tall ladder.” He said it solemnly enough, but I had my doubts. “Why aren’t you at work? You fought kicking and screaming to work in a public place, and now you’re skipping?”
“I did not kick or scream. Are you mocking me?” And I had to be out in public eventually. I couldn’t live my entire life sitting in the house, afraid I’d be spotted by employees of the Institute. I wasn’t letting them take more years away from me. They weren’t taking any more of my life. This wasn’t about me, though. This was about Anatoly, what Stefan had done, and how to approach the subject without making him dig in his heels harder. He was stubborn. I was too.
As I thought about it, I swung a bag in my hand that I could easily throw up to him or at him, depending on his mentioning kicking or screaming again. I added, “And, I repeat, yet again, I’m not a kid.”
“I would never mock you. Make fun of you or tease you, maybe, but never mock.” That was twice as solemn and earnest and a flat-out lie. Maybe his head. I could hit him in the head with the bag. No. Then his chances of falling that treacherous ten feet only increased. Revenge was tricky that way. “And what’s up with the kid thing? Am I wearing a T-shirt that says you’re a kid?” he went on with a grin. “Did you hear me talking in my sleep last night and going down the hall to the bathroom, calling you cute names? Things like ‘puppy’ or ‘skipper’? Something that made you resent me enough to chase me down while I paint gingerbread?”
Cascade Falls was a long way from Miami, or Bolivia, where we’d spent two years before coming to this tiny Oregon town of “homey” but expensive restaurants; small artsy stores; happy, pleasant people—or unhappy, unpleasant people with excellent acting skills. I was still debating the last part. Caution and suspicion—
they kept you alive. There were also tourists, the newlywed or nature type—and the puking type, thanks to me—but definitely not the mob types Stefan was doing his best to avoid. The town also had several bed-and-breakfasts, as did the surrounding small cities.
Bed-and-breakfasts, like Mrs. Sloot’s, seemed odd to me. It didn’t matter that all the Web sites and brochures talked about your “home away from home.” Why would I want to stay in the home of someone I didn’t know, didn’t trust, and didn’t have a thorough background check on? At least, theoretically didn’t have a background check on. White lies didn’t hurt when your brother thought you spent too much time on the computer.
Despite all that, there was one positive to bed-and-breakfasts—they always had gingerbread trim in need of painting. Stefan now had more than enough money in offshore accounts his father—our father, he kept telling me—had given him before we’d left for Bolivia. Anatoly Korsak had made a massive amount of it in his time running the majority of the Miami mob for twenty or so years. Now, part of that money let Stefan work as a handyman and still afford to feed us.
Plus, he’d told me, he had a bachelor’s degree in general studies from the University of Miami, which translated to “Do you want fries with that?” Then he’d explained why that was both funny and sad. I got the funny. Sad? I didn’t tell him it was one of the furthest things from sad there was. Stefan was living with a guilt he’d never be rid of thanks to my kidnapping. I wasn’t going to go prodding at it, especially as he didn’t deserve it, not any of it. It turned out that Stefan liked the work, which was good and he deserved good. He said it gave him a helluva lot more sense of satisfaction than beating up people for the Mafiya.
“Helluva.” That was one of the curse words I kept meaning to add to my vocabulary. I could add it to “fat-ass.” To fit in. Stefan liked his job and Stefan painted a helluva lot of gingerbread. Good. That sounded correct. It sounded like something a real person would say. A real boy . . . just like that old children’s cartoon, Pinocchio .
Except I wasn’t a boy. I was a man and I wasn’t real, thanks to the Institute. Not real, not quite yet, but Stefan was and always had been—more real than he should’ve been forced to be. Choosing real-life decisions in a life he wouldn’t have chosen at all if it hadn’t been for me. Being in the Mafiya had been Anatoly’s calling, not Stefan’s. When he ended up wearing cotton candy pink, sunshine yellow, or mint green paint on his jeans these days, I knew he didn’t mind. His masculinity would survive pastels, I’d pointed out helpfully, or it wasn’t much masculinity to begin with. He’d balled up his jeans and thrown them at me, and he’d laughed. I’d made him laugh. Stefan didn’t laugh much. I was proud of every laugh I’d been a part of.
And it was good work, what he did—the handyman job. Good, and except for tall ladders, mostly safe, and, better, he didn’t need a gun to paint the trim on a house. But he carried one anyway—there and everywhere else.
It made sense when we were on the run from the Russian Mafiya and another organization so secretive and grim that James Bond producers would’ve pissed themselves just reading the script—I knew that for a fact because I’d seen men piss themselves in fear in real life, and I liked James Bond movies. In any case, when you had all that chasing you, you wanted reassurance—as much as you could hope for. Oregon weather was good too for layering your shirts, and that in turn was good for covering up a discreet gun tucked into the back of a person’s jeans. As for me. . . .
I didn’t need a gun.
“You forgot your lunch,” I said, before repeating for the third time, “and I’m not a kid.” I’d had the bag in the car and had planned on driving it over to him at noon. Now it was an excuse for a few more minutes to stall and think how to go about this. He was only protecting me, or thought he was. I had to get him to see that he wasn’t. Not anymore, not by holding back vital information. It was time to treat me as an equal, not as a little brother.
He caught the bag I tossed up to him. I made him lunch every day. I’d considered writing his name on the side in marker, but my newfound sense of humor might get my hair ruffled with that one. And raised in the Institute or not, trained for an obedience and passivity that, in my case, never really took, I was not putting up with that at all.
Lunches were only part of it. I tried to take care of Stefan for all he’d done for me. He said I was an idiot and that it wasn’t necessary and something else after that, but I’d tuned him out by then. He was as overprotective of me, physically and emotionally, as he accused me of being of him. When it came to arguments over who didn’t owe anyone anything, I ignored him and did what I wanted—I gave him what he did deserve . . . or the best I could.
He could talk forever, but he wasn’t going to change my mind about that. Besides, it made me happy, and he liked his brother happy, so he huffed and let it go. I’d discovered peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches were the very best things in the world and that was what I made him every day—two of them in a brown paper bag. I didn’t think people carried their lunches in brown bags anymore, but I’d seen it once in an old movie at the Institute and the image had branded itself onto my brain as the ideal family moment—the handing over of the brown-paper-bag lunch before sending Junior on his way. That was the way it was done and that was the way I was going to do it.
Movies were how I learned a good deal about life in the Institute—where there was no peanut butter or marshmallow. Three years in the real world hadn’t changed movies or me as much as I’d thought it would. Stefan said there was nothing wrong with that. I liked movies and real life . . . though it wasn’t always one hundred percent likable. I didn’t blame myself for preferring the fake version once in a while. Stefan wasn’t actually thick. He was smarter than I was in a lot of ways.
He opened up the bag I’d tossed and caught the whiff of peanut butter and Fluff. I know, because I did too. The smell made me hungry. His lips twitched with a particular amusement I hadn’t quite figured out yet before he rolled the top back shut to wait for lunchtime. “Thanks, kiddo.”
“For the fourth time, I’m not a kid. I’m an adult.” I folded my arms and gave him a grim frown. “Nineteen. Almost twenty. A goddamn adult.”
“ ‘Goddamn,’ huh? We’re having a serious moment here. And legally maybe you are an adult, but you’re kind of scrawny.” He grinned. He always grinned or smiled or bumped my shoulder. He kidded about calling me a puppy, but you’d have thought he was the most harmless, puppylike grown man with matching puppy brown eyes if that was all you saw—him with me. When you saw him with other people, he was different—harder, cynical, not to be messed with. When you saw him with people who wanted to hurt us, he was lethal. Period. And his smiles then were nothing near puppyish. They were the smile of a wolf before its jaws closed on its prey, and those brown eyes went pure rapacious amber.
Stefan could go from puppy to predator in a heartbeat and then end yours.
Right now he looked like a happy Labrador. The scar that ran along his jaw from his chin almost to his eyebrow only made his grin look wider. He yawned, up and out to work before dawn, and looked me up and down with a dubious snort. “If adult were measured in pounds, I don’t know . . . it’d be close.”
I let my frown deepen. I’d grown since I’d been with my brother. I’d gone from five foot nine to five foot eleven, the same height as Stefan, but I was . . . not skinny, but light, built like a runner. Considering our lives, that was a good thing. I was just your average teenager with average brown hair and slightly less average green eyes. One of my eyes was blue and the other green. Far too distinctive, which was why I wore a colored contact lens to give me matching green eyes. To the people in town, I was nothing out of the ordinary—as we’d planned and as being in hiding required.
I was stalling, but I had to stop. It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but it was time for the truth. “This is serious. I am an adult and you have to accept that. I mean it. Stop being so overprotective.”
�
��I swear,” he said, a puzzled furrow appearing between his brows. The Institute had a class on reading facial expressions. I was seventy percent effective at it—not that great among my peers, but passable. I could tell if someone was uncomfortable by a crease, whether it was physical or emotional distress by a line, and the cause of it by a flicker of their eyes toward the source. I could diagnose an STD faster than any doctor and without having to see one single crotch scratch.
“I don’t have a clue why your panties are in a wad,” Stefan went on.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” I tilted my head, trying to figure it all out. “Unlike you, who just reads the comics”—a lie; that was only every other day—“I watch the news every day.” As well as reading it online . . . every day, several times a day, alert for any pertinent fact that someone was on to us.
“And?” he asked, looking more confused than before.
Oh, shit.
That cursing came naturally for the third time today. I didn’t have to check my mental folder for it. I’d made a mistake, a big one. I stopped frowning and ran a hand in unconscious imitation of him over my brown hair. I could’ve kept my face from tensing—in the acting class at the Institute we learned that perfect assassins are perfect actors—but I didn’t. Because that would have been a lie and I wouldn’t lie to Stefan. Not unless it was for his own good. “You don’t know. About Anatoly. You don’t know.”
Because he was painting. Because he wasn’t by a TV. Because he didn’t listen to the radio that often while working.
Maybe I wasn’t smart. Maybe I was as idiotic as they come.
I took a step backward, the longtime natural instinct of a former prisoner, then reversed to take one forward, a new instinct, hard won. “He’s . . . gone. I’m sorry, Stefan. They found his body. He’s been dead for about four weeks. Anatoly’s gone.”