Basilisk

Chapter 14

It shouldn’t have felt like coming home with Peter and the others waiting to punish me, and if “punish” wasn’t to kill slowly and painfully, then my imagination wasn’t all that I knew it was. It did though—it felt like coming home. We’d been gone only a few days, but I’d missed it. It didn’t stretch my mind, make me learn faster, soak up more knowledge, instinctively fit in better as the adrenaline rush of being on the run did, but it was a nice place all the same. It felt the same as when I watched one of my favorite movies for the fifth or tenth time. I knew every line of dialogue, every explosion, every wave that crashed against a sinking ship, every gunshot, but it was as good as the very first time I watched it . . . better almost. It was warm, familiar, and safe. I’d not had a moment of that in the Institute. I learned the value of it when I’d escaped.

The Bridge to the Heavens was blocked off on Cascade’s end by the sheriff’s car. Sheriff Simmons was dead on the road beside it, and I saw Jess Quillino, his deputy, her legs showing beyond the bumper from the other side of the car. Other than that, there were no other people around—none alive. The bridge over the dam didn’t go anywhere too important, definitely not to an infinity of heavens. If you crossed it and drove about forty miles on a single-lane road, you’d get to a town small enough that it made Cascade seem like New York City. Hardly anyone made the trip from this direction and if they were coming from the other direction, that end of the bridge was blocked by the Institute bus, long GPS disabled; I was certain.

I passed out the tranq guns, tightened my lips, and went with one hope—that I didn’t get us all killed. “Stoipah, Saul, just remember one thing. They’re not kids. They never were. If something goes wrong, they’ll kill you and they’ll laugh while they do it. If it goes bad, use your guns, not the tranq ones. And be sure to shoot them in the head. So—” I inhaled, exhaled hard, and opened the car door. “Let’s go.”

We walked around the sheriff’s car and I didn’t look at the body too closely. He’d been a nice enough man. He’d given me a break with the fake tourist. He’d played pool with Stefan. He had a wife and a little boy. If we’d never come to his town, he’d still be alive. Those thoughts weren’t helpful at the moment and I shoved them down as we headed onto the bridge.

They were waiting halfway across. We stopped forty feet short. The thirteen of them were waiting in various poses. Some stood, some sat cross-legged on the road, Wendy—my eyes locked on Wendy—sat on the threefoot-tall concrete wall that kept cars from plummeting into the river boiling at the base of the dam. Dressed in a small blue sweat suit with a spray of rhinestone flowers across the top, she was kicking her feet idly against the concrete, her fair hair lifted in the wind. She waved at me. “Hi, Michael. Hi, hi, hi. Did you see the birds? They fell like they were a part of the sky at night. Black, black everywhere. I did that. That was me.”

“I know.” Keeping her in view, I turned my attention to Peter who stood in front of them all. Peter who’d led us on this chase, had tried to kill my brother and my friend over and over, who had taken down the Institute from the inside practically on his own. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater. Peter, the Pied Piper of death. “I’m here, Peter. Now what? How are you going to punish me?” I was tense on the inside, tense enough I could feel the sharp ache of it . . . of waiting for Wendy to try anything aimed at Stefan, Saul, or me.

Peter smiled at me, that same charismatic, smug smile I was sick to death of. He said nothing. “All of this and you’re going to stare at me like an idiot? This is it, Peter. You said I had to pay. I had to be punished. Where’s your big punishment?” I wasn’t waiting. This was a perfect chance and I was taking it. Without their leader, they’d be confused if only for a fraction of a second. It would have to be enough. While I was still talking, I shot Peter in the chest with the tranquilizer cartridge at the new dosage. He had the speed—my speed—to avoid it, and I was ready to keep shooting until I hit him.

But he didn’t move—not before the shot, during, or after. He simply stood and the smile slowly fell off his face.

He looked down at the dart, puzzled, and said, the words already slurring, “What do I say, Wendy? What do . . . I . . . say . . . now?” He dropped bonelessly to the concrete, unconscious.

“Poor Peter,” Wendy chirped before her voice hardened to stone. “He was always so hopelessly stupid.”

She stopped the kicking and leaned a little as if to study me more closely. “The same as you, Michael. You reek of stupidity. You always did. You’re soft and worthless as a human, even worse than one actually because you have the gift. Not much of one, but enough. You never had the will, though.”

“You. God, I should’ve known. Peter was nothing special other than loving to kill, but you—you were always special.” She’d fed him every line, every word, all along. Every action that had been taken, the entire plan, the rebellion, it had all been her. I’d grown. I’d become a man. Wendy had grown and I had no idea what she had become.

As Saul would’ve said, we were well and truly screwed now.

“As special as they came, that I am. And that was a problem. A very large fucking problem.” Her voice had gone from little girl to adult and now it went to as rich with hate as a death row inmate. “I was bored. I’d been bored forever and they kept running out of people for me to kill at the Institute. They also started thinking,” she said, her smile coldly vicious, “and they should have. What would happen when I was bored and the Basement and animal labs were empty? I couldn’t let them think about that too long, could I? Because they knew what would happen. I wasn’t Jericho’s favorite anymore. He was gone and Bellucci—he was always afraid, from the first day he took Jericho’s place. But even if they hadn’t been starting to think I was more than they could handle, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was bored, bored, bored, and there weren’t enough people in the Institute to entertain me. The world, though, the whole, entire world—how much fun would that be?”

I saw something I hadn’t guessed at when Wendy and I shared a prison. “You were never obedient, were you? Of all of us, some more than others, you never were at all.” I thought she had been. Their goal and hers were the same—death. She had appeared perfectly happy and content. But I’d been blind. The likes of Wendy wouldn’t bow to anyone—not even to her own creator, if he’d lived.

“When I was young, I pretended. Now that I’m not . . . I stopped pretending.” She was ten years old and she thought—she knew she wasn’t young anymore. Her face, rosy pink from the wind, hardened. “They should’ve graduated me when I was three, because even then I was the best of all of you in every way.” She kicked again. It was to be shocking in its cuteness, to entertain herself by making our brain rebel at the incongruity of what she was, the inner and the outer mismatched enough to make your stomach churn. “Bellucci wasn’t Jericho of course. Security became lax. Lax, lax, lax. I like that word.” She smiled, pretty as a picture. “Until one day there was a new researcher—an older woman with a deeply buried maternal instinct that would’ve had Jericho screening her out simply by looking at her. It took a while, but I am sweet and adorable and she, like you, Michael, was stupid. I asked one day if she’d show me how to play a game on her computer. After I popped a few cells in the decision-making part of her tiny brain, she could see no harm in that.” Chimeras were never allowed on or near a computer that could access the Internet—with good reason. “That was that.”

All it took for her to learn a way to reach the outside world was one woman who wasn’t quite as soulless as the rest of the faculty. She’d have obtained her password. Gotten access to “play games” now and again, but now and again was all Wendy would need.

“I learned how much more lay outside the Institute than they ever told us. How many more people. Endless numbers of playthings. I also found a friend.” From her lips, “friend” was a word in an incomprehensible alien language. “I found one of us who’d taken care of their owner, brutally I hope, and found freedom. It made me think. What would I do if I were free?” Her smile was hideous. “What wouldn’t I do?” She looked past us. “Lily One, come say hi, hi, hi to your boyfriend.”

Stefan and Saul shifted their stance enough to see whose footsteps were coming up behind us . . . although they already knew. I’d told them. When I’d told them about everything else, I’d told them this too—that she was a chimera. It had been one reason I hadn’t worried when she’d disappeared at McDonald’s. No one could take care of themselves as she could. She stepped into sight, her smile more natural and familiar than Wendy’s. Her eyes, now chimera blue and green instead of just blue, were clear and happy. She was as she’d always been: glorious.

“Ariel.” I nodded. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”

“Misha,” she scolded, her pink hair mixing with the blue of the sky and the green of the trees like an Easter egg. “Way to turn a girl’s smile upside down. I wanted to surprise you. You’re no fun at all.” In one hand she held a metal cylinder about seven inches long and three inches in diameter.

Wendy didn’t like not being the center of attention. “Bellucci told us you were in Cascade, Michael. We could’ve killed you much sooner for your presumption without all this running around, barely playing at all, but we were waiting for Lily to finish up with her work and make her way out here. Did you plant it, Lily? Is it done?” Wendy asked.

Ariel nodded. “In the Portland International Airport.” She gave the “international” portion of the title a roll of the eyes, the same as I had, although my eye roll had been internal. “It’s barely international, but good enough for a test run, to see if the theory works.”

“A theory is useless without proof,” the twelve other chimeras all murmured. I caught myself before I did the same—another Institute rule; another Institute lesson.

“What did you do, Ariel?” I demanded.

Her smile was dreamy this time. “Remember SARS, the bird flu, swine flu? They all had people in a panic, didn’t they?” She tapped a pink fingernail against the metal cylinder. “This will have them too dead to worry about panicking. I whipped it up in my lab. It’s airborne, has a seven-day incubation time so people can travel far and spread it wide, and a thirty percent mortality rate. I could’ve made it higher, but then who would we have to play with? You can’t break all your toys. That wouldn’t be very bright of us, would it? The one in the Portland airport will go off at eleven a.m. tomorrow morning. There are quite a few travelers at that time. I wonder how far it will go. How much of the world we’ll touch.”

“They’ll shut down the rest of the airports,” Stefan said.

“If they find the mechanism, but they won’t. I didn’t even go through security before I planted it. And if they did find it, did discover it was a man-made virus and not a new, natural version, which they won’t with the work I’ve done, they can’t shut them all down forever, can they? I thought it was a little much, so many people. I play, but on a smaller scale, but Wendy insisted. And when she said she’d free the rest of us, I thought it was worth it.” She frowned, only now seeing how few chimeras there were. “This is all that survived the rebellion?”

“This is all that survived Wendy,” I said quietly.

“These were the worthy,” Wendy snapped. “The rest would do as they were told, but they didn’t have the heart or the hunger to be what we were born to be. We are the birth of a new race and only the best will be part of that birth. Only the best shall have the world as their new Playground.”

“But why?” It was Saul this time; Saul who’d seen war and worse, and this was beyond him. “What’s the point to all of this? Just killing for killing’s sake? And soon you’ll get bored of that too and kill the entire world?”

Wendy didn’t answer him. Wendy didn’t talk to humans. “As for why I came after you, Michael, you have to be curious. You know you’re not important enough for my attention . . . except . . .” She did her little-girl repetition again. I didn’t know whether she was aware she was doing it or doing it for the same reason of making us psychologically ill watching and hearing her. “Except, except, except, that when I found Lily One, she told me what you were up to. She knew you for what you were from the beginning.” She hadn’t been the only one. “You’ve gotten as negligent as Bellucci’s security and have forgotten your training. I wanted you, Michael, for one reason only. You dared think you could cure us. You dared,” she said, her face crimson with fury now, “when the only cure needed is for the weak and pathetic previous stage of evolution that covers this world now to die. It’s our turn now and you thought somehow you could stop your betters. That you should stop them. You’re broken, Michael. Perverse. Traitorous. Sick. And the sick need to be put to rest, especially the sick with egos bigger than their abilities.”

I shook my head at Ariel. “You shouldn’t have told her about the cure.” She shrugged. It was a pretty shrug and the smile was dazzling, but there was more unease in her eyes as she glanced again at Wendy, then at the small number of chimeras, and then at me.

“Misha,” she said, “you know there is no cure.”

“You’ve more than earned your punishment.” Wendy was done batting around the mouse. Now it was time for the kill. “And what could be a better one than for you to watch this town, its miserable people, and your unnatural attachment die from Lily’s concoction. Then, naturally, I kill you, the cherry on top of my sundae. I love sundaes.” The tip of a pink tongue touched her upper lip. “They’re almost as good as this.”

I had an attachment to this town, but I had a stronger one and she knew it. Raynor had told Bellucci, and Bellucci had spilled his guts literally and metaphorically all in one. She knew Stefan had rescued me, that I’d lived with him since my escape from the Institute, that he was my family—a word she’d put in Peter’s mouth and in the other chimeras’ brains, but that she’d never understand herself. Understanding didn’t matter, though. She knew where she could hurt me the most.

I felt the shimmer of power hit him. Wendy, the first chimera who didn’t need to touch to kill—Wendy who had only to see or know you existed; Wendy who was trying to kill my brother right now. Trying to rip him apart from the inside out.

She failed.

He fell to his knees from the pain of cells frozen for the smallest measurement of time until I set them free again. There was a trace of blood dripping from his nose over his mouth, but he was alive. He was fine. That was until Wendy tried again. This time Saul and I fell to join him. I held her off, held her back, but I was losing ground and the other chimeras were moving forward, except for Ariel.

I thought I could do it. I genuinely believed I could. But I’d been wrong. Wendy was death incarnate. I could try until the end of my days and I would never be what she was now . . . at ten years old. I had seconds, maybe less, left before she overwhelmed the healing protection I had thrown up over the three of us. The pain was agonizing. I couldn’t lift the tranquilizer gun. I couldn’t move at all, and Saul and Stefan . . . I could feel how much worse it was for them. They couldn’t lift a finger, much less a hand with a gun in it.

Yet a shot cracked clear and loud all the same.

As the material over Wendy’s chest blackened, then turned red, her eyes widened—the cat suddenly finding out what it is to be the mouse—and she tumbled backward over the edge, lost to the lethal churn of water at the base of the dam. But not before I heard screams in the hills beside the river, fainter than the rifle shot but as fatal. Wendy had taken her killer and his waiting comrades with her.

I staggered to my feet, yanking at Stefan with one hand, then at Saul, and started firing my tranquilizer gun at the chimeras who had halted at Wendy’s fall, milling about, momentarily lost. But as I thought at the Institute, they were the varsity team. They were the ones who lived and breathed to kill and they didn’t need a Wendy to do that.

With all three of us firing, several fell, but they were quick . . . like me. Smart . . . I didn’t think so much of that about myself anymore. They were predators from the moment one cell split to become two. This was what they were born to do and no one on Earth was better at it than they were. I tried to keep between them and Stefan and Saul. They couldn’t hurt me. But, as I’d thought, they were smart. One tackled me to the road, taking me and my gun out of commission for a few seconds until I touched him and he fell at my side. I didn’t have to touch now, except Wendy had drained me, and touching was much easier and faster until I recovered. He didn’t move again. I’d done what no chimera before Wendy had been capable of—I manipulated the cells of my own kind.

I wasn’t Wendy, but I wasn’t Michael either, not anymore.

Back up on my feet, I fired at another chimera, another Peter . . . Peter Three. He stumbled and collapsed and I turned. . . .

Too late, I turned. Stefan had turned too. It was only a tranq gun, and the boy was nine at best. He could’ve walked right out of The Brady Bunch, one of those old TV shows that had been on cheap hotel TVs as early-morning reruns when we’d been trying to escape the Institute the first time. The same curls, freckles, happy smile, but with a hand that struck faster than a cobra. It hit in the center of Stefan’s chest and I felt it. I felt Stefan’s heart stutter, I felt it stop, and then I felt it tear in half. I felt him die. I’d worked so hard on blocking Wendy’s type of deadly ability, I hadn’t had the resources to block the usual chimera kind as well.

Saul shot the boy in the back and he probably shot more. I didn’t notice and I didn’t care. I ran, dropping my gun and falling on my knees by Stefan’s side. When this had all begun days ago, I’d imagined Raynor’s fake tourist shooting Stefan, I’d seen the image of his eyes, turning from the brown I knew to the gray of the clouded sky. I’d imagined wrong. They stayed brown, the brown I saw over a breakfast table, that laughed when I did something idiotic or clever or pretty much anything at all, the brown of a brother who hadn’t taken one day of our years together for granted. It was the brown of a brother who wasn’t going to leave me, no matter what he or God or reality thought.

I wasn’t going to let that happen.

I put my hand over his chest in the same spot the other chimera had snatched his life away and closed my eyes. If he’d just stopped Stefan’s heart, it would’ve been simple. But he’d torn it apart and that wasn’t simple at all. Ragged edges—I couldn’t see, but I could feel. They had been viciously torn. How could I join those back together again? God, how?

No. No. I had to remember what I’d learned.

It was flesh, not bone. Bone was difficult; flesh was easy. Wasn’t it? Hadn’t I said so? Hadn’t I proved so? And a heart, that was merely—shit, Stoipah, don’t—that was only the engine that kept the entire body running. You could do without one of those for a good four or five minutes without brain damage; if the body was cold, hypothermic, then longer. I dropped his body temperature like a rock as I carefully put his heart back together, bit by bit. It had to be right, had to be perfect or it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t. . . .

I stopped thinking and healed—that and nothing more. I poured every ounce of my ability from me into him. I did the impossible. I made his heart whole again but it didn’t beat.

I raised his temperature back to normal but it didn’t beat.

I was terrified, desperate, desolate, and fucking pissed off, and I gave it the biggest bio-electrical jolt I could manage. I gave him everything I had and felt the blackness creeping around the edges of my vision as I slumped across his unmoving chest.

You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down.

Until you do.

The darkness was complete. I didn’t know for how long, but when I opened my eyes, I felt a hand patting my back and saw breakfast brown eyes smiling at me. “You’re a miracle, kid. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Don’t call me kid.” I swiped at my eyes, which weren’t wet; I didn’t care what anyone said. “Ah, Jesus. Call me kid whenever the fuck you want.”

If I let my big brother hug me, I wasn’t going to admit to that either.

Theoretically.

Saul helped us both up. Stefan was steadier than I was, but that was from all the energy I’d expended. Big boys don’t cry and all that manly crap. Around us all the chimeras save one were down and unconscious. Saul shrugged. “She didn’t try to attack us. She didn’t do anything at all. I thought you might want to talk to her before whacking her with the cure.” Both he and Stefan stepped back, not too far, but enough to give us the illusion of privacy.

“You really weren’t surprised?” Ariel tilted her pink head, curious. “You knew?” Her gaze, the lifelong familiarity of blue and green—there was a brilliant, almost explosive shine of life behind those eyes. She had a love of life—her own. It was too bad there was no love for humanity.

“I gave you a clue, you know.” I gave a rueful smile. “My fake name. Bernie. Short for Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli.” I wouldn’t admit to myself I’d hoped she would pick up on that and leave this all alone, disappear, and save herself. Stefan wondered when his father died if someone could love a cold-blooded killer.

Now I knew.

“Oh, that was clever. Clever, rotten, and sneaky. I love it.” She gave me an admiring salute with three fingers, all bearing brightly colored rhinestone rings. “But tell me, Misha, what did I do? How’s a girl going to learn if she doesn’t know where she went wrong? What made you suspicious?” Beneath us, the river roared as it hurtled over the dam, a monster of nature ready to gobble whatever fell into its maw as it had gobbled up Wendy. With so many monsters gathered in one spot, the natural and the unnatural, it was enough to make a skeptic like me believe in fate.

“Nearly everything. You were too good, Ariel. You’re smart, far too smart. You would’ve come to the same conclusion that I did with the information I gave you and the genetic samples themselves. There’s no way to synthesize a drug to cure a chimera, but you lied. You agreed with me, questioning a few things once or twice to make it more believable, but then you ‘helped’ me find the nonexistent solution.” This was how Wendy had found out I’d tried to make a cure and why she was so intent on punishing me. Ariel had told her.

“Anyone as intelligent as you would’ve known there wasn’t one. You’re also too psychologically adept,” I said. She preened as if it were a compliment. Hell, it was. “You asked questions that seemed innocent on the surface but actually tunneled deep beneath it.” She did it better than I could and I’d been a star pupil in the Institute’s psychological interrogation class.

“You used verbal and physical cues to make me automatically trust you. . . . That was why you were so insistent on the video feed. When I talked, you looked at me as if I were the only other person in the world and as if every word I said were the most fascinating thing you’d heard or would hear.” All the best con men could do that, and con men were nothing compared to a chimera. “You dilated your pupils to indicate arousal.” We hadn’t been taught to follow through with seduction; we weren’t taught why seduction was seduction; we were only taught it was bait and a way to get a wary target close enough to touch and kill. That was all the Institute needed us to know—enough for that one touch. More than that was a waste of time and profit. “You did lead into it a little early, though.”

“It couldn’t have been real? Dr. Theoretical, I think you underestimate me.” Her pale pink lips curved playfully.

“It could’ve been.” On my part I knew. On hers I could only guess. “But you were too good at it. Not off by a single note, not once. And then there was this.” I pointed a finger beside my eye to indicate where her mermaid tattoo was. Temporary or permanent; that didn’t matter. It was Disney, and that did. She apparently had fonder memories of those cartoons from Institute days gone by than I did.

“Too good.” She laughed as I’d heard her do many times before, but this time I was positive it wasn’t an act. “Undone by my own brilliance. I do like you, Misha. I really do. It took being with you in person to find that out. Which is why I let Raynor ‘catch’ your girlfriend. I wanted to meet you, know you in real life, not just as pixels. Before that, I honestly didn’t know I could like someone. I didn’t know how. None of us do, do we?”

“No weakness. No limitations. No mercy,” I said.

She nodded, her hair swinging at her jaw with the motion. “Jericho would be so disappointed.” She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her wide mouth. “The bastard, which makes liking you more fun. I was his first; did you know? That probably confused you, that you didn’t recognize me from the Institute. I’m not twenty-two; I’m twenty-nine and his very first success. He had a run of bad luck after me, batch after bad batch, before he finally had production going smoothly. Assembly-line assassins. I graduated when I was seventeen and you were this tall.” She held down a hand to indicate. “I killed my owner when I was seventeen and a half and walked away. I liked being free.

“Speaking of like, did you like me back? Though you knew I was lying to you? And especially now you know that I’m an older woman.” She smiled again. Happy. Always happy. Happy to watch movies and chat online; happy to kill. She didn’t see the difference between the two. Not yet . . . even with her doubts now regarding Wendy. Not yet and maybe not ever.

“At first. Then I sort of loved you. I still do.” Unlike her, I didn’t sound happy. I wasn’t. Loving Ariel wasn’t a love to savor or cherish. Loving her meant I might not love again. She was a sociopath and as she’d said, she liked me, but that didn’t mean she would or could learn to like anyone else. A friend? A neighbor? Fun was fun, and toys, like her engineered superflu, were hard to give up. Like Wendy, Ariel wouldn’t tolerate tedium. Loving her didn’t mean I didn’t know what she was. It was why I kept e-mailing her, kept in touch, kept her thinking I was on her hook, because all chimeras had to be cured—even Ariel.

“How many people have you killed since you dropped your owner and ran? How many people did you kill when you weren’t ordered to or forced to? How many people, Ariel, did you kill because you liked doing so? How many people, not counting the ones you’d kill with what you made in your lab, will you kill in the future if I don’t cure you?” I asked.

“Please. So serious. People are like potato chips. You can’t kill just one,” she said, radiant with humor. When I didn’t comment, the dimple and smile disappeared. “Why does it matter? That’s what we do. That’s who we are. We are evolution in progress, Michael. Everyone else”—she gave a shrug as pretty as her first one and utterly dismissive—“their time is over. Our time is now. Why shouldn’t I have fun with them?”

“How many people, Ariel?” I repeated.

She stared at me. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand; she was psychologically incapable of it—at least now. And now was all we had. The water was louder now. Nature knew evolution better than we did. It knew a wrong turn and we were that. “You do have a cure, don’t you?” she asked slowly, for the first time seeing something in me that was similar to what she’d been wary of in Wendy, something to be feared.

“I do,” I said quietly.

“And you’d use it? On your own kind?”

“As Wendy had killed our own kind, I will. There’s no other way.”

“I didn’t know that about Wendy. That she would kill her own, kill one of us. I hope you believe that.” She shook her head then, denying it. “Whatever it is, you know it’s not a cure, Misha. It’s a poison, to strip us of what we are.” She took a step back from me.

“No, it is a cure, but not for you or the others. It’s a cure for the human race. We’re not right. We’re twisted. We were made that way. We’re a malignant cancer and, as with any cancer, the cure is a poison. You won’t be able to kill anymore.” I hesitated, because it was dark and ugly, but it was necessary. She’d lied to me; I’d lied to her. I’d lied to everyone for all my good intentions and promises to the contrary, but that was over.

“And you won’t be you anymore. You’ll still be intelligent, that won’t change, but Ariel will die. Someone will take her place. Someone who doesn’t care what color her hair is or that she likes mermaids and short skirts or purple sandals. She’ll be a new person—not an interesting person; brilliant but not clever; alive but she won’t care particularly if she is or not. She won’t have hopes and dreams, and fun will be only a word to her. But she won’t kill again and that’s the best I can do. We’re not the next step in evolution. We’re a mutation created by a madman and brainwashed to be monsters. Monsters belong in those movies we watched, Ariel, not in the real world.”

That was when Ariel chose to take herself out of the world. She spun on one heel, spread her arms wide, and sailed over the low concrete wall. For a moment she seemed to hover in the air, a butterfly in color and light, too much a part of the air and sky itself to fall. But fall she did, with a graceful dive that would take her into the same thrashing crush of water that had swallowed Wendy.

It was beautiful, that incredible soaring flight and inevitable plunge, and I hadn’t taken a step to stop her. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, and more rarely the cure is worse than death itself. Ariel couldn’t be anything less than she was and she made her choice. But she took the virus canister with her. Metal, it would sink to the bottom of the river and the airborne virus would never see the light of day. Ariel’s last gesture wasn’t a gift to the world or to Cascade Falls; it was a gift to me.

She wanted to surprise me. I let her.

With that surprise, that gift, she redeemed herself—in my eyes at least, and my eyes were the only ones that counted.

“She took yoga and ballet,” I said, more to myself than Stefan or Saul. “If anyone could fly, she would be the one.” I didn’t go to look over the side. It made it easier to believe.

Fly away, bird. Fly away always.

Then there was work to be done.

Energy already recharging, I knelt beside the nearest chimera. He had fallen facedown when the tranquilizer dart had hit him. I rolled him over. Dark blond hair, light-skinned; it was Michael Three. It seemed somehow right a Michael would be my first. I laid my hand on his forehead. What I was doing was almost as complex as putting Stefan’s heart back together. The physical connection helped.

“What are you doing?” Stefan squatted beside me. “You just said there was no cure.”

“Not a genetic one, no.” The cartridges we’d shot the chimeras with hadn’t held a mixture of “cure” and tranquilizer—another lie. They’d been nothing but pure tranq, because there was nothing else to mix with it. “I’m basically destroying a good deal of their amygdala and a particular portion of their frontal cortex and hypothalamus.” I felt the cells die in Michael’s brain, leaving a lesion of darkness I could’ve seen if I’d closed my eyes. I moved to the next one—a Lily. She had brown hair and dark skin—Lily Four, then. “I’m giving them highly improved lobotomies or a variation of an amygdalotomy combined with other procedures. They should retain almost all of their emotions, except aggression.”

“Almost”—it was a word that encompassed more than a person could imagine.

“You said chimeras naturally blocked other chimeras from damaging them? And if that’s what you’re doing, won’t they heal?” He didn’t like this. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like it either.

“All that practicing I told you about, all the healing I did on the animals and myself for almost three years every day, it increased what I can do tenfold. We weren’t taught to try to be more than what we were. I don’t think it crossed any of the researchers’ minds that we could actually increase a genetic trait by exercising it, but I did. I worked Jericho’s gene until I could make it do fucking backflips.” Lily went quicker than Michael and the third even faster. “If you can build something up, you can tear it down more easily and efficiently—even if it is a chimera.” It was a simple logic and I thought the only reason Jericho hadn’t thought of it was that healing others and building, not manipulating, wasn’t part of his mental wiring.

I looked at all the fallen chimeras around us. “They couldn’t stop Wendy and they can’t stop me now. They can’t heal what either of us does to them. They’re not strong enough.”

“There was no cure, was there? All along there never was.” Stefan stood, his hand resting on my shoulder.

This was my last omission from all that I’d told Stefan and Saul. I wasn’t going to say it was my last lie. I knew better now.

“I am the cure.” I raised my eyes to him. “There’s no way to turn off the gene Jericho gave us. It would fight off any attempted gene therapy, any bone marrow transplant. And I can’t stop the gene from functioning either, not without killing them. It’s an intrinsic part of our DNA, not an extra chromosome. Not something we can do without. I turn the gene off, I turn them off, permanently. This”—I rested my hand on the next forehead—“is the only answer.” That was one lie I hadn’t told. I had researched for a way, which was how I’d found Ariel. I’d had hope, but I was a child of Jericho and that meant reality and ruthless necessity always trumped hope. When I finally accepted the truth, I used the time to become what I was now. I found the cure inside of me, not in an outside world nowhere near ready to scientifically understand what we were, much less change that.

“Misha. . . .”

The sympathy in his voice was strong. He knew. I knew. It didn’t have to be said aloud. I’d pledged day in and day out that I wasn’t a killer, but I was a thief of souls. The twelve that remained here, they might as well have been the Four Horsemen, bringing death and despair to the world. They had to be stopped. But which is worse? To take who a person is, for good or bad, and erase his free will, or to kill him? If I’d asked them, every one of them would’ve chosen the same fate Ariel had. I didn’t give them that choice. I did what I thought was best. I played God . . . just as Jericho had.

But with him dead, someone had to.

“They can’t murder without aggression,” I said, “and they can’t have aggression if I destroy the part of the brain that births it.” It was the best I could do—a very poor best.

I rested my hand on the forehead of the last one—Peter. He’d played genius and villain well, while all the time Wendy had been pulling his strings and feeding him his lines. He was a killer too, same as the others, but he wasn’t what I thought he’d been. He was both predator and prey, because there was nothing in his mind now except silence. Wendy’s last act before falling away, besides killing the sniper who had shot her and his companions, had been to turn Peter off as if he were a toy she was done playing with. Only his brain stem worked now, keeping his lungs inflating and deflating, his heart beating, but the rest was dark and dead. He was brain dead. She’d made a true puppet of him, empty and hollow. It would’ve made her laugh, the irony, even with a bullet in her small chest. Peter was gone and I couldn’t fix that. The other chimeras wouldn’t be able to undo what I’d done and I couldn’t undo what Wendy had done. She and I were a new breed of chimera—with a new balance of power.

Ariel had been a chimera, able to survive a good deal, but the unquenchable hunger of water at the bottom of the dam? No. I had no hope there. Wendy, though . . . the Grim Reaper himself would be afraid to touch her long enough to take her life. Fine. If I saw her again, I’d do it for him.

Somehow.