Basilisk

Chapter 10

Ariel leaped over fallen stone tree trunks with as much grace and style as if it were an event in the Olympics and she were being judged. All tens. She also didn’t stumble a single time. Considering we were away from the highway lights and going by the limited light of the moon, that was impressive. I didn’t stumble either, but chimeras had excellent night vision and mine had only become better as I matured, the same as everything else.

“You have great night vision,” I said as we ran, neither of us winded so far.

“You have no idea. My brother, not the hacker, but my other brother, is a pilot. His vision is twenty-ten. My whole family is freakishly talented, apart from my sister. She’s four and tells everyone she’s an alien or a visitor from an alternate dimension, depending on her mood. She collects toy horses, then covers them up with little blankets for bedtime, except she covers them all up—including their heads. Her room looks like a fluffy pink horse morgue. She also wants to design shoes made out of human hair. She doesn’t say where she’s going to get the human hair, though, so when I go home to visit, I tend to lock the door. By the way, I was going to ask if that was a ferret in your pocket or were you just happy to see me, but I already saw the hard-on, so I’ll just go with nice ferret.”

I grinned. With Ariel, there was no point in being embarrassed or you’d spend every minute of the day bright red. “Thanks. His name’s Godzilla.”

“The ferret or your penis?”

“I’ll let you guess.” I stopped to get my bearings. Looking up at the position of the stars, I started running again, bearing to the right.

“With my night vision and the ability to visually measure to within approximately one centimeter, do you really want me to?” She was laughing again. Not many people laughed after being kidnapped, being involved in a car wreck, and having to use yoga skills to choke out an evil son of a bitch.

Godzilla poked his head farther out of my jacket pocket and chirped curiously. “I think I’d rather you didn’t. Godzilla, meet Ariel. Ariel, meet Godzilla. He bites pretty much every chance he gets. I think the Visitor Center is this way. We can call for help.”

I didn’t say call my brother. I’d been careful not to give out any details about Stefan or to mention that he even existed when e-mailing or talking to Ariel. I’d been taking a risk with her from the beginning by investigating the genetics issue, and growing to know each other hadn’t made the risk any less. I hadn’t been willing to add Stefan into that mix. When she asked about family, I told her my parents were dead and my sister had been in the Peace Corps but died in a plane crash in Africa. That tended to limit questions and made me as sympathetic an orphan as a grown man could possibly be.

“It is? How do you know? Have you been here before? You know, when you weren’t running from a crazed psychopath with deep, dark, and mysterious designs on you that you haven’t bothered to explain yet?”

Since I’d met Ariel online, I’d noticed she never used one word when five hundred would do. Just as she never wore one color when there were at least seven right at hand. “Yes, I’ve been here before.” I picked the question that could get me in the least amount of trouble. And saying, no, but I had memorized the maps of every state we’d passed through so far in case escape routes were needed wasn’t something I was willing to offer. It wasn’t as if I could pass it off as an interesting hobby.

“So, if we find the Visitor Center”—she sailed over another petrified tree—“and we break in to use their phone, who are we going to call? That guy’s government, the kind of government that the government itself barely knows exists. He can eat police for breakfast and make prisoners disappear forever. The police can’t help us with whatever bizarre thing you’re involved in. Oh, hey, my little sister would kill me if I didn’t ask: Are you an alien? This is just like all the movies where peaceful aliens come to Earth and the evil government tries to dissect them. Although I highly doubt any alien would come here. I believe in aliens. Trillions upon trillions of galaxies; we can’t be the only intelligent life out there. But with all our fighting, wars, disease, poverty, and reality TV, we’re like the meth–central, white-trash trailer park of our corner of the Milky Way. No alien would stop here to gas up. And who could blame them?”

There’d been a question in there somewhere. Now, what had it been again? Right. Whom were we going to call. “I have a friend who lives close to here. I’ll call him.”

It turned out I didn’t have to call Stefan. He pulled into the Visitor Center at the same time we made it in. He didn’t look pleased. He didn’t look pleased in the way Rabid Zombie Werewolves from Mutant Hell—it was a real movie; I’d seen it—weren’t pleased. He opened the door of the SUV and stepped out. There was the subtle motion of him putting his gun in the back of his jeans that no ordinary person would notice, twenty-ten vision or not. “What the fuck happened?” he demanded. He could’ve said more, considerably more. Out of nowhere it was my Internet friend from New York. I was in the middle of a park instead of asleep in my motel bed. I’d left everything behind, including my phone . . . everything except Godzilla. He had a bubbling volcano full of questions and he couldn’t ask any of them in front of Ariel.

I had some too, the main one being how he had found me.

“This is your friend? Is he psychic or what? How’d he know where we’d be? And why’s he so angry? What a temper. I don’t know that I’d be friends with someone with that kind of temper.” That was a good one with the way she’d done her best to break my ribs in Raynor’s car. “And could someone kick in the door to the Visitor Center? I have to use the ladies’ room, and I don’t want to go around back and get my ass stung by a scorpion.”

Saul stepped out of the other side of the vehicle. I pointed at him. “He’ll kick it down for you. That’s Bubba, my other friend.”

It was almost worth Raynor’s being left alive to kidnap and plot to see the contortions Saul’s face went through when he was labeled with the fake “Bubba.”

“Yeah, sure, chiquita,” he said dubiously. “I’ll kick it down for you.” It took him a few tries, but once they were inside and I heard the bathroom door slam, both Stefan and I went at it.

“Raynor’s alive. I was out putting money in the vending machine,” I started to explain—I supposed we’d have to leave money to pay for the Visitor Center door too; being a good citizen was frequently frustrating—“and he shot me in the head with a rubber bullet. I woke up, chained, in a car going north. He’s building a new Institute in Montana and was taking me there. One of his goons stumbled across Ariel in Cascade. She was worried about me and had tracked my IPS, although I bounced it around the globe a few hundred times. She’s apparently as smart or smarter than I am.” Which everyone lately appeared to be. “He thought she’d be insurance on my good behavior. She figured out he’s government of some kind. She thought my name was Bernie, but she heard him call me Michael. We escaped when she choked him out with her legs—she takes yoga—while he was driving. The car flipped and we escaped. She doesn’t know I have a brother. I said I’d call a friend from the Visitor Center for help. That’s it.” My short time in person with Ariel had taught me how to spit out a lot of information in very little time. It was useful.

I pointed at him. “You. Go. How’d you find me?”

He stared at me. I remembered when he used to have to look down to meet my eyes. Now that we were the same height, the stare was somehow more intense and as ferociously amber as one of those Rabid Zombie Werewolves.

Shit. I’d been so busy explaining what had happened that I’d forgotten how it had happened.

“We’re on the run and you were shot in the head when you went outside without me,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm for what I knew of my brother.

“A rubber bullet. He might as well have hit me with a Tic Tac.” That wasn’t quite true, but downplaying it was my best hope.

“When you went outside without me.”

“You were asleep. You needed the rest,” I pointed out.

“Without me.”

I opened my mouth, found nothing and no words that were going to turn this around, and closed it.

Stefan apparently approved of the move and answered my question. “I found you because I woke up when your friend Peter the Pied Piper of killer kids called on that phone he left you.” I’d kept it in case he did. It was too cheap to be GPS enabled and he wanted us to find him anyway. “When that happened and I discovered you were gone, I used my own tracker.” He bared his teeth in a savage smile. “They’re like iPhones, right? Everyone has to have one.”

“Your own tracker?” Despite the smile he’d used only against people he was about to beat up or shoot, I was curious—guilty as hell too, but curious. “What’d you track? I know you didn’t plant anything in me when I wasn’t looking.”

“Your rat. One day when you were at work, I took him to the vet and had him chipped. I know it’d break your damn heart if he ran off.” His smile was no less pissed off.

No, what he knew was that at least fifty percent of the time Godzilla was with me and if we ever had to run again, it would be one hundred percent of the time. He’d outthought me when I hadn’t had a clue he was thinking about having to run at all. “That is devious as hell. That is Institute devious,” I said with reluctant admiration.

“You bet your ass it is.” This time the smile disappeared. Lines bracketed the side of his mouth and I could tell he was more tired now than when I’d “helped” him sleep. “What did you do, Michael?” There was no Misha now. He knew what I’d done. I’d used my genetic abilities on him, though I was doing it for him. It was a violation, a huge one. That deserved my Institute name. “I would’ve woken up when you opened the door. After the mob, after what you and I lived through before, I would’ve woken up and we both know it.”

I was an ass. I hadn’t meant to be. I’d tried to do a good thing, but we were in a situation where there were no good things, only the right things. I hadn’t done the right thing. I’d been careless. “You were tired. I was only going to be out there two minutes. I wanted you to be able to sleep. I thought I was helping, but clearly I fucked up.”

He stared at me for another second. “Fucked up doesn’t begin to cover it.” He headed back to the SUV. “Let’s go. We have to get rid of your girlfriend somehow and get back to finding Peter and his goddamn posse. And we have Raynor back on our asses. I assume he’s not as dead as we’d hoped or you would’ve told me.”

I’d disappointed him. There hadn’t been a time Stefan had been disappointed in me—until now. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach, a kick much worse than the ones Ariel doled out. I would’ve rather he went back to being angry with me. “Stefan,” I said quietly, “I’m sorry. I’m. . . .” I was what? What else was there to say? He’d thought he’d lost a brother again and if my healing abilities hadn’t quadrupled since I was seventeen and if he hadn’t chipped Godzilla, he might have. He was right. Fucked up didn’t cover it and neither did “sorry.” Nothing did.

I walked in silence behind him. I had issues. Anyone raised at the Institute would, but I hadn’t felt this worthless and guilty in my life. Each step I took felt mired in quicksand. He was the sole family I had and I’d let him down.

Where was my genius now?

Stefan exhaled, stopped, turned; then he hooked an arm around my neck and squeezed. “Still your brother, Misha. I love the hell out of you, jackass. We’ll write this off as lesson learned, all right? Now, get your girlfriend. Apparently she has a black belt in yoga but takes as long as a ninety-year-old woman to pee.”

My shoulders slumped in relief at his willingness to forgive. “Why is it men piss and women pee?”

“Okay, loving you a little less,” he snorted. “Go.”

I started to, but paused. “Wait. You said Peter called. When you answered instead of me, what did he say to you?”

He shook his head. “You don’t need to know. You tried to do something for my own good. I know this is for your own good. So go get the girlfriend.” He checked his gun, replaced it, and covered it with his shirt. He didn’t know he’d done it. The move was completely automatic, caused by the memory of what Peter had told him. Peter said he was curious about me. Peter was not curious about Stefan in the slightest except in how many varied ways he could dispose of him.

That wasn’t going to happen.

“Go without you? What happened to lesson learned?” I leaned against the SUV beside him. “I think I’ll stick around. ‘Bubba’ can hurry her up.”

Stefan’s lips twitched. “What if he flirts with her?”

“First, he’s in his forties. That’s disgusting. Second, if she did take him up on it, she’d kill him. His heart would give out before the Viagra kicked in.”

“There’s something to be said for dying a happy man,” he commented, eyebrows raised.

“No, there’s not.” My mood at being forgiven abruptly deflated.

“No?” The eyebrows went a fraction higher and his lips twitched again.

“No,” I said darkly, moving to the hood to see inside the Visitor Center.

Seriously, how long did it take someone to go to the bathroom?

I worried about how we were going to explain to Ariel how Stefan and Saul were waiting for us before we had a chance to call them. Despite her comment, she wasn’t going to buy psychic. Her four-year-old sister with the horse morgue and human hair shoes might buy it, but not a woman who was, I couldn’t deny any longer, more intelligent than I was. But it turned out not to be a problem. I was given a humbling example of how experience in duplicity edged out genius without trying.

They said nothing.

In the back with me, Ariel, Dr. Ariel Annabelle Mac-Leod, verbally poked and prodded Saul and Stefan relentlessly for two hours on how they’d known where we were. Neither of them said one word. The louder and more persistent she was, the denser the silence became. At one point, Stefan dozed off while Saul drove, which was the equivalent of sleeping through a tornado siren two feet from your ear. That was when Ariel turned her frustrated attention back to me, but it was too late. I’d learned by example. Everything she asked about Raynor, the Institute, if the two up front were indeed “fucking psychic Men in Black,” if the sky was blue and the grass was green, I smiled, shrugged, and kept my mouth shut. I half expected another attack with purple footwear, but it didn’t happen. She finally gave up, folded her arms, and started reciting Pi. If we were going to ignore her, she could do the same, but she was also Ariel. She could ignore us and annoy us, except for a snoring Stefan, by assaulting our eardrums all at the same time. She was up to the eight-hundred and seventy-fifth decimal—I wasn’t intimidated as I could go up to a thousand—when Saul decided he needed a bathroom break of his own.

How did I know since he wasn’t talking? I could feel, literally, his bladder aching. When little kids read their comics and wished for superpowers, I couldn’t imagine any of them wishing for that one. Wolverine, Magneto’s distracted. He needs to piss like a racehorse. Make your move! It wasn’t as if I could feel every ache and creak of a person’s body, and I had to be extremely close to them to feel anything at all, but if it was painful enough and the proximity was there, I could often feel more than I wanted.

Like now. Thank God he didn’t have prostate problems yet.

He picked an off-ramp on the trail back to Tucson, and Peter, and stopped at a McDonald’s packed with the breakfast rush. We looped the building twice before finding someone pulling out and taking their parking spot. The second we stopped, Ariel opened her door and said the first thing since she’d started on Pi. “I have to go to the bathroom and I’m starving. That government asshole took my purse. So one of you as-yet-indefinable assholes hand over some cash.”

Saul grunted but handed her a five. She flipped him off with a perfectly appropriate doctorly finger and said, “Thanks, big spender. That might buy me a sausage and biscuit but no OJ. I’ll be sure to name my scurvy after you.” Then out of nowhere, she turned and kissed me. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was warm and firm with the sweet taste of tongue, and abruptly she was gone, flouncing her way into the restaurant. I wasn’t being sexist when I said flouncing. Ariel didn’t flounce. She walked with a strong and determined gait, but her skirt flounced. It couldn’t help it. It looked made of filmy scarves. If you’re a scarf, you don’t have much choice: flutter or flounce. Between the kiss and the flounce, I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.

Saul sighed as Stefan yawned and straightened. “Okay, Smirnoff, now that you slept through the make-out session, what are we going to do with the mouth that ate the continent? Send her home? Bury her in a shallow grave? What?”

Stefan tilted his head to look back at me at Saul’s news. I shrugged again. It had worked for me so far for the past hour. He was caught between a teasing smirk and a frown, I could tell, but settled on a frown. “Raynor took her,” he said. “He has her ID. He knows who she is, where she lives. If we send her home, there’s a chance he might snatch her again to get at Misha. We’ll have to stash her someplace. With someone we trust until this is all over. She damn sure can’t come along.” He left it unsaid that it would be more dangerous than sending her home.

He rubbed his face. I could hear the scrape of his palm over the bristle of his beard. “You know anyone out here you trust, Saul?”

Saul yawned himself, his bladder complaining more. “I have people that subcontract for me, sure. I have people like that all over the country. But someone I trust? In my business? Yeah, right. How about you? You have anyone you trust?”

Stefan groaned, low and resigned. “Besides the two guys sitting in the car with me? No. Shit.”

Saul undid his seat belt. “Well, keep thinking. Gotta shake the snake before I explode.” He got out and disappeared inside after Ariel. The difference was twofold: His clothing didn’t flounce—blinded, but no flouncing. The second difference was that he came back. Ariel didn’t.

Stefan and I went in to search for her, but she was gone. I checked out the women’s restroom myself. That was one good thing about growing up without ingrained social customs. You didn’t care when you were caught doing what traditionally you weren’t supposed to do. And naturally I was caught peering under occupied stall doors and was summarily hustled back out into the parking lot. Compared to the whole of my life, I had no problem with being called a pervert and a line cutter. I knew I was only one of the two.

Stefan stood with me on the asphalt. “She must’ve gone out the other side. Hitched a ride maybe. I don’t know, but she’s gone. I ran the perimeter. I’d have seen that pink hair if she was on foot, but nothing. She’s just . . . gone.”

I nodded. “I’m not surprised.” And I wasn’t. I’d rather expected it. “Can you go back in and get me something to eat? I’ve been banned.”

He studied me, more than baffled. “You’re not worried about her? Pretend all you want, but I know you like her. You’re not worried Raynor will catch her again?”

I more than liked her, but that wasn’t the issue. “She’s smart, Stefan. Smarter than I will ever be, and if I’m saying that, with my ego, you know it means something. If she doesn’t want to be caught, she won’t be. You think I make great fake IDs? If she wants to make any, they could blow mine out of the water.” I no longer wondered if that was the correct phrase. I knew. A few days of chasing Peter and running from Raynor and my brain was in overdrive. Cascade Falls had been good, better than good, and I missed it, but it hadn’t stretched me; it hadn’t pushed me. I was learning much more now because I had to. Necessity wasn’t the mother of invention. Desperation was. “Ariel will be fine. Probably better than we’ll be. And she’ll be safer than with anything we could do for her.”

If anything, he was more bemused than before. “You believe that?”

“No, I know that. I’ve known her for two years now. It doesn’t matter if it was on the Internet or with video cams. With my psychological and profile training, I would know her—genuinely know her, her personality, what she would do, what she wouldn’t do, everything that makes her her. I would know all of that even if we’d only written letters once a month. She will do the smart thing and that is to not be with us, near us, or anyone we might think we could trust with her. Trust me on this, Stefan. Just . . . trust me.” I gave him a light shove toward the restaurant. I’d said all I could say for now. “And I’ll see Ariel again someday. I can guarantee it. One hundred percent.” It wasn’t a lie. I believed it wholeheartedly. I knew it as I knew her.

“Pancakes and biscuits and gravy,” I ordered to get him moving. “Oh, and hash browns. Four of them. And I know they don’t make milkshakes this early, but maybe could you bribe the manager? Chocolate?”

He narrowed his eyes but started walking. He knew I wasn’t lying. I liked Ariel too much to lie about that. It was embarrassingly plain to see. But he also suspected I wasn’t sharing everything. He let it go, though, and did what I asked him. He trusted me. “You are one weird kid, Misha.”

“I’m not a kid, remember?” And for the first time since I’d been complaining about the term, I knew it was true—I knew it for an absolute fact. I wasn’t a kid, not compared to my twenty-seven-year-old ex-Mafiya bodyguard brother, not compared to the ancient Saul, not compared to anyone. I wasn’t a kid. I would never be one again. I also knew now you shouldn’t wish your youth and pseudo-innocence away.

You’d never get it back.