by Rob Thurman
The lunch bag didn’t drop from his hand, but I saw his fingers loosen. He was stunned and why wouldn’t he be? Anatoly was dead. His father was dead.
Then his fingers tightened and the paper bag crumpled under his hand. I could guess, sort of, what he might be thinking, his first thought. We’d talked about Anatoly since my rescue and I’d gotten a fair picture of Stefan and his relationship. Anatoly and mine, not as much, but I knew Stefan and his father—our father—as much as I could. What do you think when your father dies, when he never was a father at all but an imitation at best? How can you love and respect a man who ordered people killed as easily as he ordered dinner in a restaurant? You pretend, I guess. Pretend, and when that man dies, you mourn what should’ve been . . . what you wish could’ve been, not what actually was.
Stefan had said he’d never killed anyone in the mob and I believed him, but if it had come down to it . . . if it had been kill them to have the money to save me, I knew what his decision would’ve been. He would’ve killed his own soul for me. He thought that made him and Anatoly not so different. He was wrong. Anatoly had done it for the money and the power. Stefan would’ve done it to save me, because Anatoly wouldn’t give him the money then to chase ghosts. To Anatoly, that was what I’d been. He’d given up on me when Stefan never had. No matter what Stefan thought, he was nothing like our father. And I only called Anatoly our father aloud and in my mind for Stefan.
Stefan had told me once that he didn’t know that Anatoly didn’t love his sons, because he didn’t know for sure that he didn’t. Murderers could love their own—couldn’t they? I didn’t know, and I didn’t think Stefan knew for sure, but I agreed they could. It was what he had wanted to hear. That was something I’d learned on my own, not at the Institute.
“Stefan?”
He blinked at the sound of his name, his real name, and corrected me automatically—“Harry.” Here we were Harry and Parker Alonzo, not Stefan and Michael Korsak. Stefan and Michael Korsak were on at least two kill lists. Fake names kept it that way, because you came off those kill lists only when you were dead. I’d picked the names . . . from another old movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was my favorite, though it was older than I was.
Stefan had snorted when I’d suggested it and promptly said that if I wanted to call myself Sundance, he supported my bold and very personal decision.
I’d called him an ass, another curse word I’d learned to use, and gave him Harry. It was Sundance’s real name and I used Parker, Butch’s last name. He was the smart one after all, I’d told my brother smugly, although I wasn’t being too bright right now. Harry was also the name of Stefan’s horse that was shot and killed on the beach the day I was taken by the Institute. I thought that might bother him, but he’d said no . . . that we leave memorials scattered through our lives in different ways. Gravestones were frozen in time, but memories you could take with you anywhere. Names too—you could keep them with you always. He hadn’t thought Harry would mind.
“Harry,” I corrected myself with my frown returning, this one directed at my own forgetfulness. I was better than that and had been trained to be exceptional in all areas of deception. I wasn’t being exceptional now. “We should go home. I’ll tell Mrs. Sloot that a pipe burst. It’s flooding the bathroom. You have to go home and fix it.” I turned to go inside the house, but then I hesitated long enough to say over my shoulder, “I’m . . . as I said—I didn’t think . . . I’m sorry.” It was the most awkward handful of words to come out of my mouth probably ever. It was self-conscious and tongue-tied five times over, but it seemed to mean something to Stefan. The darkness in his eyes lightened a little.
He cleared his throat and replied, “Thanks, but he was your father too, even if you don’t remember.”
I nodded silently and went on into the big house with trim the color of half-fresh mint green and half-faded lavender. As I did, I heard the lid being hammered back onto the paint can. Anatoly was gone and there was Stefan covered with paint, doing a job his father would’ve had hired someone to in turn hire someone else to actually do. If it didn’t involve a gun or a knife, manual labor was far beneath him, I imagined. But he was the man who’d bought Stefan his first bike or at least had been the one to give it to him after having his own handyman put it together. Stefan had mentioned the bike. Anatoly probably wasn’t there for school things . . . whatever school things there were—plays or football. But he’d been there for Christmases, Thanksgivings, birthdays, at least half the nights of the week. I’d seen the pictures when recuperating in South Carolina. I doubt he’d hugged Stefan much, though, except when he was younger than three. A web strung together from what Stefan had told me and what logic trumped. That was what I thought and with years of being near the top of my class in psychological training, and, with a failing grade being a failure at survival, I thought I guessed right.
Stefan had once said Anatoly thought I’d hung the sun and the moon—that I was special. I honestly didn’t care what Anatoly had thought about long-ago Lukas. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the thought that counts. What did count was a rescue ten years later by a brother who had refused to give up.
I knocked on the door to the house and as the sign, painted in loops and whirls with tulips and roses, told me to, I went on inside. There, Mrs. Sloot—“Adelaide, sweetie. Call me Adelaide”—tried to stuff me with sugar cookies. “Such a skinny boy.” I might be almost six feet, but I didn’t look nineteen. Seventeen was the best I could hope for, but I could’ve looked fifty and still had grandmotherly women trying to shove food down me. It happened all the time.
I learned to live with it, take the cookies, and be grateful I was too old for them to pinch my cheek—although the lady in one of the tourist shops in town had, only a different cheek. I hadn’t told Stefan. He would either laugh or break her arm, and arm breaking wasn’t part of the whole lying low thing. “Yes, Miss Adelaide, water’s everywhere. Harry’s going home to fix it.”
Her poodle jumped at my feet, then nipped me on the ankle as she tsked about our bad luck and gave me another cookie. “Oh, Parker, sweetie, look at my new tchotchke. I know you like animals. Sookie-Sue loves you. You’ll think it’s cute as can be.” I did like animals and Sookie-Sue was the first one to not like me back, but. . . .
It was too late. She’d shoved a small statue into my hand. It was an armadillo, I guessed dubiously, dressed like a clown, with a happy pointy smile, soulless red eyes, and balloons held in a gloved hand. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “It’s nice,” I lied effortlessly. I hadn’t been an enthusiastic student at the Institute, but I had been a good one. Sookie-Sue nipped me again. I sighed patiently, but I did like all animals, including the ones that made it a challenge, and I didn’t nudge her away. “What is it?”
Adelaide pursed her lips, coated with bright orangered lipstick to match her hair, and her drawn-on eye-brows arched. “I told you, dear: it’s a tchotchke.”
My own eyebrows, and I actually had some, went up at the answer.
She scooped up Sookie-Sue. “Teenagers these days. Don’t know a thing. A gewgaw, knickknack, bit of froufrou.”
Stefan’s hand landed on my shoulder and he said with the friendly handyman’s persona he’d perfected, “Useless dust collector, Park. Don’t you start collecting’em.”
“Ah.” I handed it back to her with as much care as I would for something not nearly as hideous and worthless and corrected my mental file of Adelaide Thomasina Sloot from mostly harmless with three unpaid parking tickets to bizarre, dusty, possible automotive maniac, with the ‘harmless’ designation to definitely be reevaluated at a later date.
Background checks were useless if you didn’t update them frequently.
“Let’s go home and get that mess cleaned up.” Stefan steered me toward the door.
My mess. It wasn’t all over the bathroom floor, but it was all over just the same. All that training . . . I wonder if the Institute knew how unreliable it
was. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, and you never were quite sure which would be which. The Institute’s students didn’t fit in, no matter how many classes they gave us. We couldn’t always act like normal people. We could manipulate them, but not act like them . . . not be normal people. Of all the training they’d given us, in the end we were good for only one thing; we could excel at only one thing over those normal people.
Killing them.
Chapter 2
“Michael.”
The classroom was gray. Everything was gray at the Institute. There were no windows in the room. There were thirteen students, including two more Michaels—Michael Two and Michael Four. But I was the first Michael. I didn’t need a numbered designation. Our creator, Jericho—that was what he called himself—our creator, had thought it humorous to name us after the lost children of Peter Pan. In the story, Michael, Peter, Lily, and Wendy hadn’t been among the lost. In the Institute they were. Every child here was as lost as he could possibly be.
“Yes, Instructor,” I said promptly. You were always quick and you always performed above average or you wouldn’t be around much longer to fail at both of those things.
“Name the proper technique for avoiding suspicion in scenario twenty-seven.”
Scenario twenty-seven was smiling wide and shaking the hand of the president like a good Boy Scout, essay-writer, or boy who’d saved the lives of a burning preschool full of babies. Whatever story it took to get you within touching distance of a man someone, it didn’t matter who, wanted to die. “After inducing a fatal heart attack or aneurysm, he falls, and I cry and ask for my mother.”
“Mommy. At your age, you ask for your mommy,” the Instructor corrected me.
I nodded. “Yes, Instructor. I ask for my mommy.”
My hands were folded and the desk was cool under my skin. I was eight or close to eight. I didn’t know for sure. I’d say young, but there was no such thing as young at the Institute. I had no idea what an eight-year-old in the outside world would do after killing a head of state, but the Instructors told us what to do, how to emotionally manipulate, how to imitate the real thing—a genuine person. Imitation—it was what the best predators did. The biology Instructor told us that.
It would turn out that nothing they’d taught us had been as effective as they’d thought. Killing they hadn’t had to teach us. Killing had been stamped on our genes. Killing was as easy as breathing.
Being human was a hundred times harder.
“Misha?”
Misha, the Russian nickname for Michael, was my real-life name, no matter how much I sucked at real life today. Actually, Lukas was my birth name, but I didn’t remember it. Since I had lived with the name Michael for all the time I did remember, Lukas was one thing too many when Stefan had shown up. I’d been rescued, dragged into a world that I didn’t know from true experience but only through books, movies, and field trips. I’d been told I had a brother . . . every second there had been something new, something strange, something frightening. And although a monster had given me the name Michael, it was the only familiar thing I’d had then—on the run as I was. I was stubborn and kept it, like a security blanket. Stefan had seen I’d needed it and had gone along. Lukas’s memories were gone. In the time since my brother had found me, I hadn’t gotten a single one of those memories back, so Lukas himself was basically gone. I did my best to make sure Michael was the next best thing.
Stefan had started his pickup truck, ladder and paint loaded in the back, but he hadn’t pulled out of the driveway yet. His hand was on my shoulder, giving me a light shake. I left the Institute and came back to the here and now, almost as emotionally lost as I’d been then. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t have seen the news. I shouldn’t have thought you’d be keeping it to yourself . . . I should’ve thought and not thought a lot of things.” I managed to shut up and dive for the glove compartment.
Since Stefan had brought me out of Willy Wonka’s Assassin Factory, as his friend Saul called it, he’d always stocked the cars and trucks we owned with Three Musketeers. He’d said they were my favorite before I’d been snatched and they were my favorite now—a seven-year hole in my memories didn’t make a difference there.
Comfort food was always comfort food. That was one of the first things Stefan taught me and, unlike the teachings of my old instructors, his lessons were always right and true. I held on to the candy bar and felt the chocolate and filler squash under my fingers. “I’m sorry. I screwed up. He was your father. I don’t remember him being my father, but he was yours and I’m sorry.”
“He was, but you’re my brother.” He wrapped his arm around my neck and pulled me close enough to rest his forehead against mine. After all this time, I still felt a knee-jerk reaction to tense up, but I didn’t. Stefan had taught me I didn’t need to and if I did, it would make him feel like shit. I wasn’t going to do that.
“Some family you’re born with,” he said, “and some family you’re goddamn lucky to have. You’d better know which one you are. Got it? And you didn’t screw up. Burning down our garage, now that was a screwup, but this . . . this is just family shit. Nobody gets that off the bat and it’s always messy.” He bumped his head against mine, a light knock for every word. “You . . . did . . . not . . . screw . . . up.”
“Burning down the garage was a possible side effect of my experiment. An acceptable risk,” I muttered, trying to sound annoyed and failing, before straightening to hand him the Three Musketeers. “Comfort food,” I explained.
He accepted it and curled his lips. “You’re a good kid, Misha. The goddamn best.”
I could’ve said, again, that I wasn’t a kid, but this time I was a little smarter and kept my mouth shut.
And I didn’t burn down the garage—only half of it. Big brothers—they couldn’t let the little things go. I almost managed to smile to myself at the thought. Life I might not ever get a handle on, but the brother thing—that I would. I refused to believe anything else.
People are strange.
That’s a polite way of saying people are nosy, snooping, and meddling. I didn’t consider myself those things merely because I’d used the Internet to gather a file on every citizen in town. It was a small town, so it didn’t take long, and I had an excuse. It was a good excuse. People wanted to kill me.
Other people though, those without targets on their backs, they didn’t have that justification for their why, where, who, when, what, and on and on. Stefan had rented the small house on Fox Creek Road because it would be hard to explain how a handyman could buy it outright and worse trying to pretend we needed a mortgage. Saul Skoczinsky in Miami, Stefan’s link to all things convenient and criminal, sent us good fake IDs. I’d since learned to make better, but banks like their background checks as much as I did. It was best to just rent the run-down ranch house with no neighbors in sight, but that didn’t stop our landlady—Adelaide Sloot’s doppelganger, only with bleached-blond hair—from asking where we were from. Why had we moved? How old was I, because Cascade Falls had a woooonderful high school. There had been so many o’s in that “wonderful,” I automatically knew she had a relative who taught there, a grandchild who went there, or received a commission for every teen she scooped up and dragged clawing through their doors.
That was one subject the Institute had been somewhat dead-on about: psychology. People walked around turned inside out. If you knew enough to look, everything you wanted to know about them was there to see—things you didn’t want to know too. The way she clutched Stefan’s arm and hung on every word of his made-up story; the way her eyes didn’t leave his, not once, as she led us through the house on the showing. She’d lost someone who looked like my brother. Maybe they had just had dark hair and an olive complexion, maybe only the brown eyes. They might have died or left her just because people leave. If Stefan had wanted, he could’ve gotten her to rent the place to us for half or maybe a third the price. He could’ve used the woman’s
loss, as I’d been taught to use weakness against others. But he didn’t.
Mr. Ex-Mob paid full price and even painted the place, because it could use it. Patches were peeling off everywhere. I called it the Leprosy House until he finished painting it yellow—yellow paint was on sale that week. Then I called it the Bumblebee House and eventually the Bumble for short. “Are we going back to the Bumble for dinner?” On the inside, I called it home, but home was another word that made the universe notice and then crush you. There was no saying that aloud either—no tempting fate.
When we pulled up out front on the patch of gravel that was the driveway, Stefan passed through the door first. If we were together, he always did—a somewhat less than bulletproof vest. He was my own Secret Service, only without the cool wardrobe.
Inside, Stefan went straight to the kitchen table where my laptop was and opened it up as he sat down more heavily than usual. It would be quicker than finding the story on the television. His voice was heavier too. “Any best site or should I just Google ‘dead dad’?” I was surprised those words didn’t fall out of the air to scuff the well-worn tile of the floor.
I exhaled and reached around him to type in the most informative news site. “Was that a joke?” I asked uncertainly. I didn’t always get jokes, especially dark or grim ones. And just when I would think I was getting better at playing human if not actually getting back to being human, I fell flat on my face. Stefan reached over and took my arm and pulled me down into the chair next to his. The table was round and covered with scratches. I wished I could’ve looked at them instead of Stefan. He didn’t look twenty-seven now. He looked fifteen years older and as tired as if he’d been up for days. If I’d not jumped to conclusions, if I’d figured things out, and told him better, told him right, he wouldn’t look like this. He would look better and feel better, because I would’ve done better.