by Rob Thurman
“I bought one in case some of our other backup plans didn’t work, and Raynor cancels out at least three of them. I bought it with the money from the Caymans. Who does our banking, remember? You’re horrible with numbers. That was why that old lady hit you with her cane when you were in the ten-items-only line with sixteen items.” I crossed my arms and Godzilla came slithering out from under the seat to paw at the glove compartment. He knew where the goodies were. “Besides, it’s only a Cessna.”
“Only a Cessna? Damn it, Michael, Misha, whatever. The government tracks that sort of thing, especially since 9/11.”
“No problem. It was a totally illegal and untraceable purchase. I have quite a few friends of that sort on the Internet, but that time I went to your friend Saul. I told him not to tell you, that it was a surprise. He thought that was pretty hilarious.” “Goddamn fucking hilarious” was what he’d actually said. “Then I found one of my friends from the Net who said there were a few people with flexible morals at the Burns Indian Reservation who would hide it for us in case we needed it.” Like now. With Raynor, we definitely needed a plane, because he was going to the same place we were: the Institute. Not that he’d think we’d go there. I imagined he thought that was the very last place we’d go. A man like him wouldn’t understand trying to save what you could own instead. No, he knew it was the best place to get his own fresh-fromthe-oven baked assassin, a special one, because he’d seen what I could do when merely annoyed by a fake tourist. He wanted to be prepared. He didn’t know I wouldn’t use what I had in me to kill . . . that I wasn’t like him or Jericho.
I hoped.
“What? They’re hiding a plane? Jesus, they’ll think we’re terrorists, and hauling around pipe bombs isn’t going to help with that impression.” His knuckles were bone white now, and he was going to get hoarse soon if his voice became any louder.
“No, don’t be ridiculous. I thought about that, so I told them we’re drug dealers,” I said with the complacent certainty I had in any of the plans I’d thought up. The Institute had taken my life, but they had taught me to plan like a son of a bitch. More cursing. It seemed I only needed adrenaline to bring it out in me. I probably shouldn’t have been pleased by that accomplishment, but I was.
“Drug dealers? And they believed you?” Now he was looking at me, not at the road, which wasn’t the best way to drive, and that amber I’d never seen directed at me was beginning to glint in his eyes.
“Why wouldn’t they?” I reassured him. He no doubt thought I’d made a mistake. Big brothers were like that . . . always questioning the younger ones and never letting them grow up. “I pay them to grow marijuana. It took them a while to get . . . the hang of it? Right, the hang of it, but last month they finally said they’d figured out the correct temperature, hydration, where to get better grow lights, and they said they have a great crop now.”
He blinked, his darker skin turning nearly as red as a sunburn. Pulling the car over into the emergency lane, he turned back and rested his forehead on the steering wheel and said nothing. I waited about five minutes. It was just a plane and some barely illegal drugs, which I thought should be legal. It was no worse than beer. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to drink beer yet as I wasn’t twenty-one and Stefan was as strict as a TV grandmother with things like that. Plane, drugs, only just illegal . . . and if I could’ve gotten a doctor involved, maybe not illegal at all—surely five minutes was enough to recover from my “surprise.”
I slapped him on the back and went on to be, admittedly, an utter ass. “Are you okay? Was the healthy breakfast too healthy? Did it upset your normal intestinal workings? Do you want a Three Musketeers to counteract the health?”
“Tui nemnogaya dermo,” he said without lifting his head.
I frowned. “You little shit? You called me a little shit. I am as tall as you now. I am not little.”
“But you are a shit. What happened to that agreeable kid who used to be afraid of grocery stores? Who only scared me when he wanted the sex talk? Where did the pipe bomb–building drug lord come from?” He leaned his head back against the headrest and covered his eyes. “Where did I go wrong?”
I wasn’t offended. In fact, if I’d known it would be this entertaining, I’d have told Stefan about all my plans—although some of the others might give him a heart attack—at least a year ago. I grinned, though he couldn’t see it, and punched him hard on the shoulder. “I grew up. I’m a genius, I was raised to be an assassin, and I’m trying to figure out a way to bring down an entire Institute of assassin-makers while curing the assassins they made. What did you think I did in my spare time? At least I didn’t build a nuclear bomb in the garage, which, by the way, is so beyond easy you wouldn’t believe it. . . .”
Stefan sat up and clapped his hand over my mouth. “Michael . . . Misha, you’re my brother and I love the hell out of you, but I think right now it would be a good thing if you didn’t talk. For a while. A couple of hours at least.”
I scowled at him, but this was brother stuff and I got it. I did. Stefan, despite killing a few people—a lot of people—to save me and being an ex-mobster on top of it, was delicate, apparently. I’d have to dole out the information in smaller bits so his brain wouldn’t explode. He knew emotion; I knew everything else—together we were unstoppable. Again, I hoped.
He took his hand away from my mouth. “I have only one more question and then silence. Okay? Silence, so I can escape having a stroke and not take that damn stinky-ass ferret and beat you with it. One question.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked interested. I genuinely was. What could he think I possibly left out of the plan?
“Do you know how to fly this plane? They taught you that at the Institute?”
Please. As if I would forget about that. I restrained myself from an annoyed snort. “No. I taught myself. There are classes for everything online. You can also order instructional videos, although of course they say those are only supplementary study materials and you can’t learn to fly a plane just from watching one.” Those who said this were nongeniuses. I had absolutely no doubt about that. “So yes, I can fly. Plus it’s a Cessna. It’s barely an airplane. More like a roller skate with wings.” I gave Godzilla, who did not stink . . . not too much anyway, a PayDay candy bar, and he crawled back under the seat.
Stefan was starting to turn redder. I needed to check his blood pressure. He wasn’t old enough to be worrying about that yet, but some of these things are genetic. “You really think you can fly a plane by watching something on the damn Internet?”
I grinned again. “Theoretically.”
He didn’t hit me with Godzilla, but he did seem intent on not speaking to me again for the conceivable future. I used the time on the computer, when I could get a connection . . . and when you hack into a satellite to control its orientation, you’d be amazed at how much your Internet connection can be improved. Others might suffer, but they could go to their local coffee shops. That wasn’t an option for me right now. I contacted Ariel in New York. We’d been in contact for two years now. She was twenty-two and went to the Weill Cornell Medical College. Well, she didn’t go; she was like me, a genius. She already had her MD and had started college at fourteen. She was a researcher at the college and after much surfing and looking and the thorough checking out of people at medical research sites, she was the one I thought who could help me the most. She had access to all the equipment that the money Stefan and I had couldn’t buy. She could do the experiments on the genetic material I provided. She could help me look for a cure, though she thought she was only helping another researcher at a facility with far lesser equipment write a paper on one of the wilder theories she’d heard.
She was pretty too. Not that that had anything to do with anything. She wasn’t blatantly sexy like Sara at the coffeehouse. More . . . cute. And I could talk to her because she was smart enough to understand me; sometimes I thought she might be smarter than I was. And that was hot. She had sleek pink hair that fell t
o her jaw, pale skin, and the tattoo of a tiny mermaid beside one of her blue eyes. When I asked her about it when we talked over webcam, she’d laughed and said being smart meant you had to try extra hard to see the fantasy in the world—the magic. And what was a world without those things?
See? Smart.
I found my fantasy in movies and she found it in mermaids, but we both knew you needed something. The smarter you were, the more you saw the world for what it was, people for who they truly were, those inside-out people, and if that was all you saw . . . you’d be in therapy 24/7. You needed to make your own reality because the real version could make you doubt humanity, except for your brother and someone you could’ve maybe thought of as a . . . ah . . . friend you’d made online. Just a friend. Either way it would be nice to think that there were people in the world worth anything at all—not just Jerichos.
It would be nice.
She wasn’t there the first time I tried. But the second time, four hours later, she was. There was no video this time, too risky, so I didn’t know if she was wearing her favorite freshwater pearl choker dyed in blues and golds and purples—the same as a mermaid would wear. She’d changed her name, she’d said, to the Disney mermaid to remind her to not only believe in fantasy but to always stay a child when she could. She wouldn’t tell me what her name had been before. She said she was saving that for our honeymoon.
Now I could feel my face getting hot and maybe not as red as Stefan’s had been, but definitely not my normal color. Luckily he was concentrating on driving or meditating on not killing me and didn’t notice.
I typed in Hey, so what did you think of the theoretical overriding of the genetic code on the extra DNA strand for my paper? I’d discovered, with Ariel’s help, that the gene connected to the psychic ability to kill—not that that was what I told her its function was—was on only one of the DNA strands, while chimeras like me possessed two. It might be why all the assassins were chimeras. If a person had only one type of DNA as was customary, Jericho’s manipulation could very well not work or could destroy the subject altogether. But to know that, I’d have to create a chimera embryo to see exactly what could happen. I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t the Frankenstein that Jericho had been.
She sent back her response in a flash; she was one fast typer. I think theoretically that a viral explosion with some type of injection would lyse the target genes and inactivate them. I tried it on a few of those gene samples you sent and it definitely did something to them. If not complete disintegration, then close. If you’re talking about doing it to a live person, there’d definitely be bruising at the injection area and no sure guarantee that it would work, much less immediately, but in the realm of theory, it’s conceivable.
She called me Dr. Theoretical for as often as I used the word. She said it was my superpower, but I was being accurate. There was nothing wrong with accuracy. More letters appeared before I could reply. Bone marrow transplant would work much better. I highly doubted I’d be able to pull off a bone marrow transplant on thirty genetic assassins. Any cure would have to be almost instantaneous. Her typing continued. But it’s your paper. Hey, why no webcam this time, cutie? Get a bad haircut? Or did you finally break down and get that tattoo I’ve been trying to talk you into? She kept telling me to get a Cheshire cat tattoo from Alice in Wonderland as I was so theoretical I was practically nothing but a floating smile in midair.
Living life on the run was exactly what I was doing, and I thought best not to advertise it. No, I typed back. I dyed my hair pink to be half the genius you are.
“Tell her that her hair is the color of a rose,” came the suggestion from beside me.
“It’s not,” I said absently. “It’s more the color of cotton candy.”
“A chick probably isn’t going to find that romantic. Go with rose.”
“Why would I want to be romant—Hey!” I glared at Stefan as I slammed the computer closed. “How about eyes on the road and your own business? And I thought you weren’t speaking to me.”
“Revenge is worth it.” His grin was far more wolfish than any I’d managed so far—mirrors and practice don’t lie. “And get ready to play a nineteen-year-old drug lord, jefe, because we’re almost at the reservation. Maybe if you tried some dark sunglasses and stroked your stinky carpet shark like a James Bond villain, they would go for it.”
“You don’t think I can pull off pretending to be a drug dealer?” I knew I was hampered by my face. The Institute made or chose their assassins with faces that were attractive to both sexes but also not so much that we stood out to every eye. We were made to appeal but also to blend in. But we were also taught by them to pull on any mask and play any part or suffer the consequences. “Learn a little faith, Stefan.” I did grab his spare set of sunglasses in the floorboards when we arrived and put them on before climbing out of the car. Stefan brought it to a stop by the first and one of the few buildings on the reservation—a store/tourist spot. The rest of the area was dotted with small wooden houses and the occasional trailer. “I’ll be back.”
“Right, Arnold. I’m sure you will,” he drawled, sliding down in the seat as I slammed my door behind me. Inside the store, I went straight to the cash register, automatically reached for a Milky Way, and said, “I’m looking for Jacob and Johanna Cloud-horse.”
The girl there looked me over before flashing her teeth in a white, happy smile. “Which makes you a troublemaker. Deep shit and all that. I should call the law on you, but since Jacob is my baby’s daddy, I guess I won’t.” I had many names. Sebastian was the drug dealer one. Sebastian had money out the ass, a plane to go with it, and he was here to get it.
I hardened my face and tried for that killer twist of Stefan’s lips I’d seen a time or two, and by killer, I meant the authentic definition. “I know you won’t. Now get them over here. Tell them Sebastian’s here, and I don’t like waiting.”
She looked me up and down more thoroughly this time, her black ponytail swishing over her shoulder. Then with eyes turned to impenetrable onyx, she went for the phone, turning her back so I couldn’t hear her speak. “Look at you. You scared a teen mom, probably all of sixteen. Good for you. Are you proud, ‘Sebastian’?”
I snatched a quick glance over my shoulder to see Stefan standing behind me with arms folded and without any dark glasses because, face it, he didn’t need any. It was practice versus the real thing again. Stefan didn’t have to pretend or put on a mask to scare people—Stefan had to put one on not to scare people. That was what “Harry” had been all about. The real Stefan had only to show his true self, what he’d done, and what he’d still do if necessary; it was all in his face if he let it be. Reality was always more convincing than a mask.
I wasn’t the one who’d pushed the girl into making that call. It was one glimpse of what stood behind me. “You don’t want to be like me, Misha,” he whispered low enough that only I could hear. “I don’t want to be like me either, but that’s my bad luck there. If the means justify the end, let me be the means. It’s nothing new for me. You be yourself, got it?”
That the “myself” he was talking about was an assassin taught and trained was something he never remembered or never believed—the same as I tried not to believe. He moved up beside me and laid a casual arm over my shoulder, making sure his gun showed as his jacket gaped open. “Brother, cousin, or bodyguard?” he murmured.
Oh, damn, the story. What had I told the Cloud-horses . . . ? “Bodyguard,” I replied.
“We’ll go with cousin bodyguard. Gives me more reason to look out for your skinny ass.” I barely heard the words before he said aloud to the girl on the phone, “We don’t have all fucking day. Are they hauling their shit or not? We have a lot of money invested in their asses, and if they don’t give as they have received, like the Good Book says, we’ll take that money out of their asses and anyone else’s we can find, including you. Hell, conveniently located as you are, we’ll start with you, little bitch.”
H
e said bitch as lazily as if that were the only thing he ever called women. Stefan, who painted houses for free for needy landladies and undercharged Mrs. Sloot to paint her gingerbread; Stefan, who treated women with the utmost respect—he even hadn’t hurt the one who’d robbed us at gunpoint years ago at a time when we could least afford it. Yet if I hadn’t known him, I’d have believed every word, and I knew I couldn’t have carried that off. He was right. I should stick to being myself—the myself where my outside reflected what my inner biology wished it was.
But was it fair that Stefan had to be the mean one all the time, no matter his past?
No. No, it wasn’t, especially as much as he wanted to leave that part of him behind. Being a drug dealer was much easier online. The reality of being one or pretending to be one . . . I saw now why Stefan had been so upset earlier. Or pissed off—highly pissed off. Maybe there was a reason all Jericho’s children were like me . . . and looked somewhat younger and guiltless at first glance. We were trained to plan if we had to, trained every day of our lives, but we were made to not need to. Our faces were our alibis. Touch, kill, and who would ever suspect a nineteen-year-old who would probably look like a nineteen-year-old until he was thirty?
On the other hand, one look at Stefan and you’d know what he might do. One look at me and no one knew what I could do and that it was much worse than anything Stefan had in him. It was the perfect disguise. Nature would’ve applauded.
It only made me feel like a freak—as if it were only right I should be labeled “Caution,” “Dangerous,” “Biohazard.” That was as far as my thought process went before starting to spiral bleakly downward until Stefan pinched my shoulder hard—he knew; how did he always know?—and went straight for the Cloud-horse siblings the second they walked through the door.