by Rob Thurman
“Ah, Stefan Korsak, your brother.” The way he said “brother” told me he knew something.
Knew too much.
“I killed him,” he went on matter-of-factly. “Real bullets this time. I’d say it was painless, but I don’t think it was. I shot him five times in the gut. You’ve not seen true pain until you see someone die of that. The trauma. The shredding of the intestines. The acid pouring from the stomach and eating away at everything it touches. But unfortunately my time was short. I let him suffer in excruciating agony for a moment or two, then finished him with one to the head. Like putting a lame horse out of its misery. I do occasionally have my kinder moments. You may thank me at your convenience.” I turned away from him, away from it all, and rested my forehead against the window glass.
Stefan.
Thank God.
Thank fucking God.
Raynor was lying. Unless he’d rolled Stefan over in his sleep to shoot him, that whole story was, as Saul would say, bullshit with a side order of day-old crap for flavor. The story didn’t matter, though. I would’ve known he was lying without it. He’d taken psychology classes with the best and the brightest of the CIA, but he was just a human. Institute training trumped CIA training and chimera trumped human. The most minute of facial expressions, pupil dilation, the heart rate I could sense speeding up slightly . . . I didn’t care. I didn’t care how I knew, only that I did know. My brother was alive. Through sheer luck or Raynor’s need to make his escape with me quickly, Stefan was alive.
No thanks to me.
I’d thought I’d known best. I’d thought I was doing him a favor by helping him rest. I should’ve thought I was a dangerous idiot with the skills and a lifetime of training but not the experience, because that was what I was. The glass was cool under my forehead and I closed my eyes. But now Stefan would wake up and I would be gone. He’d search for me, but Raynor had proved, for a human, he was a formidable and cunning opponent. I had no idea how Stefan could hope to find me now. That might kill him the same as Raynor’s imaginary bullets. And it would be my fault the same as if there had been a gun and I’d been the one pulling the trigger. I had done this to my brother. Raynor didn’t matter. It had been me.
If I lived at all, how was I going to live with that?
There was a stirring in my jacket pocket and I slivered my eyes to see Godzilla poke his nose out. He knew danger when he smelled it and had obviously stayed hidden while Raynor wrestled me into his car. I gave a low hiss of warning, inaudible except to ferret ears, and he instantly disappeared back into my pocket. If Raynor found him . . . I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about my failures, my screwups, my fuckups. I didn’t want to think about anything right then.
I didn’t get my wish. Big surprise.
“Ah, don’t be like that. It’ll make for a boring trip. We’ve had the Institute, which can be rebuilt as we have the day care to supply it. But you—you and the others are a problem we haven’t faced before. Therefore, a new place shall be created for you and them—what should we call it? Probation? Detention?—where naughty little assassins are taught their rightful place.” Raynor’s gravelly voice was far too cheerful for me.
“But you look down in the mouth at that news.” He tsked, the sound odd through the trach valve. “I know—let’s bring your friend up. You’ll have company. That’ll put the pink in your cheeks. You might work up the curiosity to ask me precisely what they’ll do to you when I have the probationary program fully staffed. I hate it when I concoct devious plans and no one can be bothered to ask me about them. My ego becomes quite bruised. Since I’m going to stop, are you sure you don’t want some Tylenol for that formerly fractured head of yours?”
“No, thanks,” I said without any emotion he’d be able to detect. “I’m not deficient. I’m not weak.”
“Like me, you mean?” The car had pulled over into what had once been a rest stop. It was now a deserted, crumbling place except for us. “I suppose I should be offended by that, on my behalf and on humanity’s behalf as well, but, Michael. . . .” He put the car in park and smiled at me. It was full of gloat and triumph. “This deficient human has certainly put you in your place, now haven’t I?” He opened the driver door, but paused to gift me with a last few words before exiting. “Your place in the grand scheme of things is slave, chimera. An obedient, servile slave and I’ll make damn sure you never forget that again.”
He slammed the door behind him. I didn’t bother to think about being a slave again, because I’d die before that happened. I did think about what he meant by bringing my friend up. What friend? Saul?
I heard the thump of the trunk, muffled sounds of outrage, and then the other door to the backseat was flung open. I saw pale skin, a flash of long legs under a short purple, blue, and green filmy skirt, lavender sandals that had ties that crisscrossed up the calf to tie in a neat bow just under the knees, and toenails painted pink—cotton candy pink.
The same as the girl’s hair.
“Ariel?”
“Yes, your Easter egg–colored girlfriend from New York.” Raynor tore away the duct tape that served as a gag, taking strands of pink hair stuck in the adhesive. “She was so worried about you that she showed up in Cascade Falls looking for someone who matched your description with the rather boring name of Bernie. Instead, she found one of my men. Mercenaries. You kill one, I simply hire another. I didn’t think you’d go back to the Falls, but you never know. And while I didn’t catch you, I did catch another little fish in my net, or rather one of my men did. She’s quite a loud fish too but a perfect way of keeping you in line, along with the chains.”
Her wary and suspicious blue eyes focused on the finger he wagged in her face. “Now then, scream again, little fish, and I’ll hurt you. And trust me when I say that I’ll enjoy it. Might even make a hobby of it. So let’s use our inside voices, shall we?” He closed the door, the overhead light going dark again. Back behind the wheel, he hit the childproof locks and we were on the road again. “And do keep in mind, Michael, while I can’t do much to hurt you in the more permanent sense without losing a large profit, to her I can do anything I want. My imagination in that area is vast and impressive.”
I didn’t face Ariel, not yet. I had a question first, the same question for both of them, but I asked Raynor first. “How did you find me?”
“Oh, I have a tracker too. I found the house in Laramie the same as you, but as I flew, while suctioning out my new tracheotomy—quite pleasant, thank you—I beat you. I saw the discarded chips inside the house and I knew you wouldn’t be far behind. I waited out of sight and shot your ‘borrowed’ SUV with a magnetic tracking disc. Hands-on operation, that’s what I’m about. And I don’t care for my mercenaries to know too much about what I’m doing. Then I followed you and waited for a chance at you alone, without your rather shady companions. Lucky me, I stumbled across one fairly quickly.”
Again, thanks to me. Now I looked at Ariel. Despite the dark and with the help of the occasional passing headlights, I could see that her usually smooth pink bob was a tangled mess. The faint glitter of light purple eye shadow and mascara was smeared. Her standard pink lip gloss was gone, the same pink as her short fingernails that decorated the hands that sat in her lap. The hands didn’t have much choice. Her wrists were restrained with the same plastic ties the police used. She looked lost, confused, and vulnerable . . . right up until the moment she lifted her bound wrists and smacked me hard across the jaw with them. “Liar!” Then she leaned back far enough to plant one purple sandal in my left ribs. “You are such a filthy liar, Bernie! Or is it Parker? That’s what they were calling you in that tiny little town. And this maniac is calling you Michael. So which is it?”
Strands of hair had fallen in her eyes and she blew them out of the way to gauge that perfect aim one more time. The sandal slammed me again. “When we get out of this, when I kick your brainiac ass, I want to know exactly what name to call you, and it damn sure won’t
be Dr. Theoretical.”
She was petite and slender, but she could kick like a mule. With four inches’ reach thanks to the chains, there wasn’t much I could do about it either. She kicked me one more time before giving up to glare at me. I seized the moment of silence to ask her what I’d asked Raynor. “How did you find me?” Or rather, how had she found out where I had been before going on the run again?
“Oh, please. I’m every bit the genius you think you are and then some.” The tiny mermaid tattoo beside her eye seemed to flick its tail at me in displeasure. “You can bounce your Internet signal around the world a hundred times, but I can still trace it back to the source. It did take me six months. You were awfully thorough, but I have a brother who hacked the Pentagon when he was eleven.” She gave me a last disgusted glance, then used her fingers to awkwardly try to smooth out her hair. “I’ve known you didn’t live in Texas forever, but you seemed like such a good guy that I thought you might have your reasons to lie. And when you disappeared after a few weird e-mails and mentioned a family emergency, I started to worry.” She shifted shoulders under a sparkling top—I’d call it light green, but she’d probably call it sea foam. “So . . . I went for a surprise visit. Because I worried. Because I’m a good person.”
“And, my, I’ll bet you were surprised, weren’t you, darlin’?”
She lifted her foot to kick the back of Raynor’s seat, but then thought better of it and paid him no attention instead. “I flew into Portland using up all my frequent flier miles, rented a car, and when I got to Cascade Falls, I found out there was no Bernie. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since you lied about where you lived.” She was back to glaring at me. “But some coffeehouse bimbo recognized your picture.” She blushed as pink as her nail polish. “One that I happened to have with me. No big deal. I have one of my pet rat too.” Her expression said I was about ten rungs below rat, and not a pet one either. “The bimbo said your name was Parker and you’re soooo sweet and such a doll and couldn’t be cuter and you worked at the coffeehouse.”
The glare was white-hot now. It could’ve cut metal like an acetylene torch. “You’re watching movies with me every week while flirting with some brainless wonder serving up caffeine, lying about your name, lying about getting your PhD. Lying about everything. But I try . . . try to give you the benefit of the doubt. Fake name, fake job when you are smart enough to have two PhDs by now; you love the escape of movies because maybe that’s the only escape you have. You could be in the Witness Protection Program. I liked you so much, I was willing to turn off my own brain cells and go along with that ridiculous excuse.”
This time she did kick the back of Raynor’s seat. “Until this asshole has some goon grab me, toss me into the trunk of his car, put me on a private plane, fly me out here, and throw me into another car trunk. That is not Witness Protection. Homeland Security, Gitmo, or plain criminals, that I can see, but not Witness Protection.”
“You’re right about that, but kick the back of my seat again, girly, and I’ll but a bullet in that pretty little foot of yours,” Raynor warned.
The threat didn’t intimidate her—I wasn’t sure anything would—but she used common sense and tucked her feet under her in an impossibly flexible move. “And now this dick says your name is Michael.” The fury faded from her eyes and transmuted into speculation. “Well?”
“Well what?” I asked cautiously.
“What’s the truth? What’s your name? Who are you? What’s going on? That ‘well.’ ”
She was every bit the Ariel I’d come to know over the past years . . . and more. That should’ve made me happy. Taking into account the situation, I was anything but. “Oh. You’re done. I wasn’t sure,” I said. “I thought you might go on for a couple more hours.”
“Do you want me to kick you for hours, because that I can do. I take yoga. My stamina is profound. Absolutely goddamn profound, got it?”
I got it. “My name’s Michael, but I go by Misha, and I was in hiding. That’s kind of obvious.” I shook my chains to demonstrate. “That was why I lied to you.”
“And?” she asked when I stopped.
“And that’s all I can tell you.”
“That’s all? What do you mean that’s all? After you used me? Because that was what it was, wasn’t it? You were using me for. . . .”
The next words out of her mouth were going to be “genetic research,” and that was the last thing I wanted Raynor to hear and be thinking about. It would muddle things and have him ordering someone to make a run at Stefan to get my case with the delivery system of tranquilizer guns. That was not going to happen. I couldn’t kick her, in turn, to keep her quiet, not with my shackles.
I went with the next best thing, cutting her off with a brusque, “Fine. Okay. I used you for computer sex. I typed with one hand and jacked off with the other. When I wasn’t screwing Sara from the coffeehouse and was home bored, you were better than porn. All right, another lie. You were almost the next best thing to bad porn. If you’d shut up once in a while, I could’ve moved you up a rank or two. The Internet is full of horny guys. Don’t tell me I’m the first one you’ve come across.” I slid down in the seat. “Jesus, Raynor, you couldn’t do better than kidnap my computer humpday special?”
I took back everything I’d said and thought about Saul. Channeling his perverted ways had created the perfect excuse to fit the situation.
I heard the faintest of choking sounds beside me and slanted my gaze toward eyes that, despite the gravity of the situation, were luminous with suppressed laughter. Liar, liar, pants on fire, she mouthed silently. I almost smiled. She was right. There wasn’t a chimera born who didn’t know how to lie.
Not the kind who lived very long.
We were headed north. I could tell that easily enough. But where? After an hour I gave in and asked. “Aren’t you the curious thing?” Raynor said. “And I do mean ‘thing.’ We’re going to Montana. I already have contractors in place building a new Institute and an adjoining rehabilitation facility. Busy, busy, busy. I’ve a lot to do and I was never one to let flies light on me.”
Ariel opened her mouth when he said Institute, her smooth brow under pink bangs creased. I shook my head at her and she remained quiet. “And you think you’ll be able to catch the others the same as you did me?” I said.
She started to open her mouth again when I gave the same shake of my head. You’d think being kidnapped would have anyone afraid, man or woman. So far, I’d seen her pissed off, highly pissed off, extremely pissed off, and entertained by my lies, but I hadn’t seen fear on her face once. She showed what the old movies called moxie or spunk. She would know. She had watched those old movies with me from across the country, every week.
“Then why don’t you let Ariel go? She won’t be any use to you at a new Institute.”
“I told you. She’s my assurance you’ll behave. You’re a very naughty young man, Michael, what with trying to kill me and all. Not to mention we will need a starter kit, so to speak, for the new Basement. You can’t have a Playground if there’s nothing to play with, can you? I think she’ll do nicely.”
“How much assurance do you think that is?” I asked flatly. “She’s better off dead here than in the Basement.”
Her eyes widened slightly and this time when I shook my head, she kicked me again. I was lucky to be a chimera or my ribs would’ve been sore for a month. “I like you, Misha. I really do. I always have. You’re special and brilliant and quirky and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known, but if you try to shut me up one more time, the next kick will be to your face. It’s a pretty face too. I especially like your eyes . . . fox green, but a fox that would never eat a chicken or clean out a henhouse. A vegetarian fox. You have nice teeth too, probably a killer smile. Try to not make me kick it in, all right? If I want to talk to the psycho, I’ll talk to the psycho. And since you won’t tell me anything, the psycho is my only other option.”
This time it was me opening and shutti
ng my mouth, and not at a shake of the head, but at the lift of a sandaled foot. “Psycho,” she said, realizing I was going to obey the Foot of Doom, “what the hell is going on? You’re government, I can tell. I’ve worked government contracts before. You’re too megalomaniacal to be a cop or a crook and too egotistical to be another country’s spy. So who exactly are you? CIA? FBI? Or my first guess—Homeland Security. That’s it, isn’t it? You have the attitude. Didn’t you asses ever bother to think Homeland sounds a lot like the Fatherland or the Motherland and none of those things worked out too well for Germany or Russia?”
If Raynor had pulled the car over and pistol-whipped her, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Fortunately, dealing with Jericho and his successor had taught him patience; either that or he was impressed. I knew I was. She was like a force of nature—a whirling pastel-colored verbal tornado cutting down anything in her path. Then there was the Basement, a worse punishment than any pistol-whipping, shooting, or roadside torture.
“I’m all of those things, little girl.” I saw the reflection of his grin in the rearview mirror. “But I’m also more. You might say I’m a government agency of one. The blackest of ops and every conspiracy nut’s worst nightmare. I’m going to take your boyfriend here, who now happens to be my personal property as everyone else who could lay claim is dead, and I’m going to torture him at great length, brainwash him, turn his mind and soul inside out until he does exactly as I say. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to put several bullets in his brain.” There was the grin again, colder and sharper with anticipation.
“Being that he’s actually worth something to me in the monetary sense and you are not worth a dime,” he continued on with Ariel, “you might want to think twice about what I could do to you. I can find an off-ramp, a deserted road, and carve the tongue right out of your smart-ass mouth. That would shut you up. Of course, once I get started, it is difficult to stop. We all have our vices.”