by Rob Thurman
I ran fingers through my bed hair and made it worse by ruthlessly scrubbing my scalp. “Keeping you up to date every day on my progress at becoming more different and less human wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m not like everyone else. I’m not like you, but I wanted to pretend I was. I wanted you to, hell, forget that I’m not. I want to forget I’m not.”
“So we’re both idiots.” He pushed my plate back in front of me. “No, you’re not like me. You’re better. A better person, a better goddamn everything. Now, eat your breakfast. And if you open your mouth to say you aren’t everything I know you are, I’ll stuff a bagel in it. Plain. Without cream cheese.” Healthy food—the ultimate threat.
“We are idiots, aren’t we?” I took a bite of the blackberry pancakes covered in syrup and butter. “In the future, if I do sort of accidentally keep some things to myself, will you know it has nothing to do with trust? That it’s not you; it’s me.”
““It’s not you; it’s me.’ Jesus. You’re something else.” The grin was quick. “We’re not breaking up, Misha. And, yeah, I’ll know. Eat.”
Now that my secrets were out, it was time to work on Stefan’s. I had another bite of my pancakes before moving on to the bacon as I sidled into the subject slowly. I’d made bombs. Stefan’s secret was one I was going to have to defuse.
I’d worked on finding a cure for years, the second I managed to get a computer and a stack of books on genetics. That was where the cure had to be. Jericho had genetically altered us to add the ability to make human bodies our psychokinetic playgrounds, and that meant genetics would be the only reasonable assumption to reversing it. I read and I researched. I learned, and I didn’t like what I found out.
It was impossible to take a person, a natural human chimera already born with no supercharged healing or killing abilities, and change his genetics to become what Institute chimeras were. My kind of chimera had to be built from the ground up. The process had to start at the very beginning. Once one cell became two, the work started. There was no other way.
I hadn’t mentioned it then, when I discovered the truth, but as we might not survive Peter and the others, I wanted . . . I wasn’t sure what I wanted—a different type of truth, maybe, the only kind that mattered, that one being the one between Stefan and me. I’d once asked Stefan how he thought Jericho knew I was a chimera ripe for scooping up for the Institute. He’d said probably through a pediatrician’s office or the hospital where I’d been born. I’d been fresh out of the Institute then. I hadn’t known much about the real world. Now I did. They didn’t do DNA tests on healthy children born in hospitals surrounded by Mylar balloons and blue teddy bears. DNA tests were rare, unless you were sick, and many times a DNA test wouldn’t show a chimera—not a human one. It took several tests, testing several different sites in the body.
It was time to ask again. “You know, I’ve wondered for a while how Jericho found me. They don’t do DNA tests on babies at hospitals unless they think there’s something wrong with them.”
Stefan went with the abrupt change of subject so smoothly that I knew he’d been doing some thinking about it himself—for a while; almost three years I would guess. Picking up his toast again, he said, “It was a long time ago, but I think I remember Anatoly and Mom having trouble getting pregnant with you. They probably had fertility treatments done. You know, in case I had to be replaced.”
“Replaced?” I frowned.
He shrugged. “The Mafiya needs sons to run it and life expectancy on those sons isn’t the best. No father would want all his eggs in one basket, so to speak.”
That was good, about the Mafiya. Extremely good. I could fact check it on the Internet, and it was aimed at distracting me by pissing me off that Anatoly didn’t think Stefan was enough. The fertility clinic was better than good. It was brilliant, a place where DNA testing was as common as dirt. He’d done his research. As I’d learned from Stefan, he’d learned from me. But almost three years of psychological training compared to nineteen of the same plus interrogation classes? He didn’t have a hope in hell.
“What kind of treatments?” That was me, intrigued by any kind of science. Nothing suspicious at all. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; the Great and Powerful Oz examining his brother’s psyche.
In the midst of all this—chimeras, Raynor, and digging at the inherent nature of family—I made time to miss my wall of movies. Why not? Another form of denial.
Stefan shrugged and slathered up part of his egg with the toast. “I would’ve been six. I was more into watching The Transformers than wondering where babies came from. As far as I knew, they found me under a cabbage leaf in the backyard. Your cabbage leaf was apparently at some clinic somewhere. That reminds me, I used to tell you babies came from sitting on dirty toilet seats. And boys could get pregnant too. It took them four extra months to potty train you because of that.”
The last wasn’t a distraction. It was a memory and a knife to the heart all in one.
“That’s most likely what happened.” I accepted it and gave him a few slices of bacon. The man was a fool for bacon, and that knife . . . it was in his heart. “Jericho might’ve wanted to see how one of his chimeras, engineered with our parents’ respective egg and sperm, would behave in the outside world for a short while. All good experiments need a random blind study. I could’ve been that study—chimera on the loose. And, P.S., you suck ass on the potty-training thing.”
There hadn’t been a fertility clinic, no blind studies. Before I’d come to the conclusion that all of Jericho’s children were born in a petri dish, I’d already sent my DNA to Ariel. Natural chimeras had the two different types of DNA scattered throughout their bodies for the most part. Jericho’s chimeras had the two in every cell. That was impossible for a human chimera. It was the last nail in the coffin. It wasn’t long after, to double-check my suspicion, I’d done my own DNA testing. Every drugstore had them now. Whozurdaddy? Who-zurmama? I took one of Stefan’s hairs from his brush and proved what I’d already come to know.
I’d seen the pictures. I looked like Stefan’s brother, Lukas. I had the eyes—the universe being ironic again as all Jericho’s chimeras had those eyes—I was about the same age and I’d been within a hundred miles of where he’d been kidnapped. Another irony or my salvation. Stefan’s too.
He knew I wasn’t Lukas now. He hadn’t always. When he’d rescued me, he didn’t second-guess it once. I was his brother. He believed it so deeply that I believed it too. In the face of his pure faith, I’d finally had faith myself. I’d accepted my lack of memories being some form of traumatic amnesia or caused by the fall on the rocks during the original kidnapping on the beach.
Some time after that, though, he’d found out Lukas was dead. It had to be from Anatoly. Looking back, I’d first noticed the difference at the beach house with his father. The difference wasn’t that he’d treated me as less than a brother, but that he’d insisted on it even more fiercely. That and he would do anything, once he’d been able to get out of bed after being shot by Jericho, to keep me from being alone with Anatoly. I’d thought the change had been because we’d both almost died. He’d nearly lost me again. And keeping me away from Anatoly . . . once I knew what Anatoly was, made sense. Another monster, another killer in our lives, but a useful one. But Anatoly hadn’t told me anything . . . other than to be kind to Stefan, that he deserved it.
And Stefan did, because for all his searching. . . .
Lukas was dead.
If he wasn’t, Stefan and I would be scouring the earth for his other brother. Not his real brother. I was as real as Lukas had been. I knew that. Almost three years with Stefan—there wasn’t a doubt in me about that. But if Lukas were still alive, we’d have searched until we found him and Stefan would’ve had two brothers. I thought I would’ve liked another brother. From all the stories Stefan had once told me before he knew the truth, trying to prod my memories—memories that weren’t mine—Lukas sounded as if he’d have made a great brot
her. Stefan didn’t tell those stories much anymore, now that he knew Lukas was gone. I’d start asking again once in a while. I wasn’t Lukas, but telling the stories would bring a part of him back to Stefan, if only for minutes or an hour.
I’d finally found that different kind of truth—a lie that wasn’t a lie at all. Stefan knew I wasn’t Lukas, but he knew I was his brother, the same as I knew that he was mine, that being brothers had nothing to do with sharing the same blood. He wouldn’t ever tell me about Lukas and he would hope I’d never find out. He wouldn’t risk that I’d again feel those doubts that I had following my rescue or that I would think he considered me any less of the brother he’d been born with.
That was Stefan.
And that was fine. That was better than fine. Some things didn’t have to be said aloud.
I also knew that while Lukas was gone, he’d given me a gift, although he’d never known me . . . or rather had never met me. He’d given me the memories of sun, wind, and horses to warm me in a place as cold as death itself. It was his best memory. Galloping up and down the beach, the ocean’s roar loud in his ears, the wind in his face—it was his best memory and mine too, although I hadn’t actually experienced it. Yet Lukas made me feel as if I had. Tangible and real as any other memory I had had in the Institute, that memory had kept me sane.
More than that, Lukas had given me a brother to pull me from that frozen sterile prison and set me free. Lukas had died, but he’d given me life. And as logical and scientifically minded as I was, I didn’t question the mysterious nature of that. It was as true and real as the sun and the sky above.
“How does it feel?” I asked, taking from his plate a jam-loaded biscuit to replace the bacon I’d given him.
“How does what feel?” he asked with a trace of caution hidden behind the words—hidden to anyone but a genius like me.
I grinned. “To be a free, off-the-shelf baby when they spent big bucks making me? I was the Cadillac of infants. You were barely a Volkswagen.”
He let me have another one of his biscuits, this time fired directly at my head. I caught it. I wasn’t going to duck and waste a perfectly good biscuit. “You’re an ass.”
“Thanks for the lessons in that. They’ve been invaluable.” I continued to grin as I took a bite of the biscuit.
The moment that had descended on my yesterday hadn’t been the best of my life—not the worst, thanks to the Institute—but not the best either. This one was—this was the best moment I’d had. At peace with my family . . . where I belonged.
And then Peter called and turned the moment into a memory. Memories are good too, but they’re only shadows of moments—a sepia photograph of what you saw, heard, felt. Once a moment is gone, you don’t get it back.
Peter’s cell phone rang again.
I was really beginning to hate that son of a bitch.
Chapter 13
“You’re alive, Michael. Good. It’s difficult to keep punishing you if you let a simple building falling on your traitorous head take you out of the game.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and wished Peter were there so I could shove the cheap phone down his throat. As for his calling me traitorous, I didn’t ask him what he meant. I knew—as did Stefan and Saul now that I’d come clean. Peter wanted to punish me because he’d learned of the cure. “It’s even harder to punish me, Peter, when you keep running away. You wouldn’t be afraid of me, would you?”
“In the outside world for three years and you haven’t learned how to play a game yet. It’s rather sad how you’ve wasted your freedom. I feel sad for you, Michael. I honestly do.”
Peter hadn’t felt sad in his life and while he knew the meaning of honesty, he was incapable of it. “What do you want, Peter? I’m done with following you around. I don’t have to. There are other people out there who want to catch up with you more than I do. I’ll let Raynor do what he does best and maybe I’ll go on vacation. Hawaii. I’ve always wanted to see a volcano.”
He laughed. “Raynor. The Institute’s invisible pet pit bull. None of us knew he existed until you escaped, and suddenly he was at the new one we were moved to all the time. Checking up on Bellucci, who, as it turned out, did rather need some checking up on, didn’t he? Too bad, so sad, but Bellucci didn’t learn what Raynor constantly told him about lax security.” His voice hardened. “But that’s all over now. Turn on your TV or your laptop. Find a cable news channel. You might see my bright smiling face. Do it now, Michael. The games are over. Next time I see you, it’ll be in Heaven.”
The phone clicked and went silent in my ear. I tossed it onto the bed and took the remote from the bedside table that not only turned on the TV but also slid back the entertainment center doors. I was not going back to a thirty-eight-dollar-a-night motel as long as I lived.
“What’d the bastard want now?” Stefan growled, joining me in front of the TV.
“I think to tell me it’s time to meet at the OK Corral. He’s ready for the showdown.” I cycled through several news stations until I found what Peter had wanted me to see. In Eugene, Oregon, more than a thousand blackbirds had fallen from the sky, stone dead. The screen showed people milling about and looking in confusion at the carpet of iridescent black that covered their streets and yards. Only one person didn’t seem puzzled. There was only a short glimpse of him before the camera panned elsewhere, but it was Peter. He was waving before pointing at the sky with his finger and pulling an imaginary trigger. It was Wendy’s work. Fly away, birds. Fly away no more.
“Eugene.” Stefan started to rub his hand over his jaw and stopped, remembering in time the lacework of cuts and scrapes that crossed his face.
“Wait.” I studied him, concentrated, and then said, “Okay, you’re good now. You can even shave if you want.”
He ran his hand lightly across his face, then harder before moving into the bathroom to check the mirror. “They’re gone. I can’t tell they were there at all. That’s . . . Damn, Misha. Unbelievable.”
I had done it. I’d healed without touching . . . as Wendy killed without touching. That made our chances of survival better, and made me feel more like her, a hundred times the freak I had been seconds ago. But I could deal with being a freak if it meant I was able to live through this.
“If I can heal a blind, evil-tempered hundred-year-old turtle, a few scrapes are no problem. How’d it feel?” I asked. I was curious. I knew what it felt like when I healed myself with my new accelerated ability, but I didn’t know what it was like for someone else.
“It tingled some, and weirdly enough, I knew it was you. I could feel the, I don’t know, the Misha of you. It was better than a tetanus shot in the ass, that’s for sure.” He turned away from the mirror.
“I can fix your leg too. Bone takes forever to work with, but give me a few days and you won’t limp in the winter anymore.”
“Hell, kid, I never cared about that.” And because he was who he was and it had been for me, he hadn’t, but I did. It would be a Jericho memory I could bury forever: the one of him shooting my brother to take me back to Hell.
“We’ll see. And don’t call me kid.” I turned off the TV. “They’re in Eugene, or they were.”
“They’re going to Cascade Falls. They’d know that was where you were living. Raynor would’ve told Bellucci and God knows Bellucci would’ve told them anything they wanted before he died. And if Peter wants to punish you. . . .”
Wiping out a place I’d considered home would be one of the harsher punishments I could think of. “He said he’d meet me in Heaven.”
“The Bridge of the Heavens. On top of the dam. That scenario has nothing but nasty and suicidal written all over it. Too bad we can’t really let Raynor handle it. I know you have the cure, but even cured, give these kids guns and knives and they’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Raynor’s smart and he did manage to capture me, but I’m only one. He doesn’t know it, but he’s out of his league. They’ll roll over him like a tank.” I plan
ned on being there to see it too. No one deserved it more.
“Yeah, I know, but it’s nice to dream once in a while. Pack and get us tickets to Portland. I’ll go wake up Saul and make sure he has one of his guys meet us with some weapons and a car at the airport. Damn, what about your tranq guns? There’s not much sense in going if we can’t take the cure with us.”
“They’re plastic and disassemble in three minutes. Then I reassemble them into a larger gun that is nothing more than a toy. I also have stickers that say TOY, MADE IN CHINA, and SUPER-DUPER MEGA-MACHINE that go on the side. The tranq cartridges we can drop in a bottle of shampoo. We’ll have to check one bag, but no problem. Don’t tell Saul that, though. Tell him we have to smuggle them the only way God and the TSA have left to us.” I grinned. “Tell him it’ll expand his sexual horizons and he should try not to walk funny through the scanner.”
He snorted. “You are pure evil.”
I shrugged. I had no problem telling the truth when I couldn’t get around it and that meant I didn’t have a right to be offended when I heard it. “Somebody has to be.”
Jokes aside, by the end of it all, that could be more true than Stefan imagined. Someone had to do the only thing left to do. I hoped he could live with that.
I hoped I could too.
The flight was long. I’d commented that if they let me do the flying, it would be much shorter. Stefan accepted the statement with all the forgiveness and love one brother had for another. He popped me one in the shoulder, hard. Considering I’d learned to fly using the Internet and a few DVDs and the crash was minor, in my opinion, I’d think that he’d let it go, but no. I had a feeling I was grounded, quite literally, for a very long time.