Basilisk

Chapter 3

“You be kind to Stefan. He deserves that.”

“Kind” was an odd word to come from a man who may have killed as many as the man who’d kidnapped his son, but he’d meant it. It was the only thing he’d meant as he’d talked to me the time when both Stefan and I had been shot by Jericho and his men. I was different then . . . and now. . . . I’d healed much faster than Stefan, although I’d been shot in the chest and he’d been shot in the leg. The bullet had broken his thighbone, which caused him to limp in cold weather. Me? Who they’d thought would die long before the AMA-booted doctor would show up? I barely had a scar.

It had been when I’d been closer to healthy and whole and Stefan knocked out on pain meds in that South Carolina safe house that Anatoly had said that to me.

“Be kind to Stefan. He deserves that.”

He’d been right and I hadn’t had to hear it from him. Stefan did deserve it. Stefan hadn’t given up on his brother—he had saved me, and he didn’t lie to me. Anatoly had done none of those things. He never even said my name, either of them, not Lukas or the “Michael” the Institute had given me. He’d been polite, for a killer, but weren’t we all killers in that beach house/ makeshift hospital? Stefan had said that Anatoly was my father, but I hadn’t trusted the older man for a second.

Now, though, looking at what was left of him on my computer screen, I wished I’d tried to find out more of who’d been behind the killer. Was there more to him? I’d had the skills at reading people, same as now, but I hadn’t used them. Everything, the entire world, was so damn new then that Stefan was all I needed and all I could handle. I didn’t want or need a father, I’d thought at the time, especially one who’d given up on me.

“Be kind to Stefan.” I remembered those words.

I looked at the bones and chunks of decomposed flesh on the screen. He’d been in a lake. Lake Michigan. Floaters aren’t pretty and I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d learned that at the Institute or on one of the thousand TV cop shows since. Wherever I’d heard it, it was right. He was roadkill marinated in a swampy Everglades ditch. He was in pieces and the pieces didn’t fit together to make anything that looked human. They’d identified him by dental records. I clicked on the next picture. These weren’t the kind available to your average Internet surfer, but I wasn’t your average anything. If there was a place that cybertendrils didn’t extend into, I hadn’t found it yet. Chimeras were trained to fool people. I’d found that fooling machines was far easier. If there was a data stream, I rode it; a path of pixels, I walked it. I saw it all, saw through everything as if it were made of glass.

Not like Anatoly.

“Be kind to Stefan,” he had said. He hadn’t been much of a human before or after he died, I’d thought, but he’d loved his son. He hadn’t loved me; I could tell. I didn’t read him, but I didn’t have to search his face or catalog his movements and words to know that. Love is easy to see; no effort required. Other emotions took effort, but love was simple. I didn’t know why he hadn’t accepted me like Stefan had. Maybe I’d been gone too long. Maybe he’d wiped me out of his heart and mind. The reason didn’t matter.

I did know it now, but it didn’t matter. Anatoly had ceased to matter to existence itself.

I couldn’t read him emotionally any better today than then—it was hard to read pieces. But I could read what had been done to him. Brutal, vicious, and messy, but effective. I could’ve done it more quickly and neatly, but there weren’t many of my kind around. Others had to make do with chain saws. This hadn’t been done for punishment or fun. It would’ve taken too long. Psychopaths, such as the Mafiya, as much as they liked chain saws, were generally into immediate gratification. This had been done methodically by someone looking for information.

I searched the screen. I’d seen Anatoly and what had been done to him. It was what was behind his tangible, rotting memory that I’d noticed: a man. He was in all the pictures. In the ones where they’d pulled Anatoly’s remains from the lake, loading him into the coroner’s van, in the autopsy room—he was always there. The suit, short fringe of dark hair, opaque sunglasses, and inscrutable expression said government, but his dedication in following the body from place to place implied more dedication than FBI or IRS, the major bloodhounds on Anatoly’s tail according to Stefan.

I clicked on the next picture and zoomed in on those deep-set black eyes in the one picture where he’d removed the glasses. Not entirely inscrutable. There was interest there, a deep and passionate desire. But for what? Anatoly was beyond indictment and prison. What was left that could be that fascinating?

The knock on my bedroom door had me automatically switching to another computer window. Stefan stuck his head in. He looked at the computer screen and groaned, appearing more than a little worried. “Again? Seriously, kiddo, you’ve got that live girl at the coffee shop made of mostly human parts, you’ve got porn at your fingertips, and you’re wasting your time on that?”

I glanced at the Lolcats site. “There has to be a logic to it. It’s idiotic, but people say it’s funny. Unless all people are idiots, I’m missing something. I’m going to figure it out.” It wasn’t strictly a lie. It was not volunteering information and . . . waiting. And waiting wasn’t wrong, not if you thought of it in the correct way. My mind was an Olympic gymnast at twisting and bending to see things in the manner that benefited me the most.

“Cats are intelligent.” It was a diversion, but it was also true. “If they could talk, then I’m quite sure they could spell.” My eyes were drawn back to the screen and the idiotic U haz hareball on fut under the picture of an evidently highly annoyed cat biting someone’s ankle. There had to be something to it . . . but what in God’s name it was, I couldn’t figure out. “Maybe their owners can’t spell, but they could.”

“Misha.” His lips quirked. He was tired and darkness was in him, shadows filling up a flesh and blood pitcher. “Thanks for taking one of the more crappy days and making it better.”

“By making a tourist vomit and giving you a chance to take out your frustrations by kicking him in the stomach?” I asked curiously, tearing my eyes away from the screen before it burned my retinas with its idiocy.

The grin was quick and fleeting, but it was there. “Don’t do it again, but, yeah, I enjoyed it. I shouldn’t have—a few of my old ways creeping back. But sometimes you need a distraction, and you, little brother, are always that. I needed it today. Now, get your ass off the computer and go to bed. It’s past midnight and we both have to go back to work tomorrow as if nothing happened.” Because as far as anyone knew, nothing had, but it didn’t stop the darkness in him from beginning to overflow. He needed time to remember, time to put those memories in all those tiny boxes we have inside us. To put them away for another day—a day when they would be bearable again.

“Go.” He pointed at my bed where Godzilla was curled up on my pillow. “And . . . thanks.”

He closed my door. I didn’t sleep, though Godzilla snored through a tiny deviated septum. I was nineteen and far beyond curfews and bedtimes, but Stefan’s trying to take care of me made him feel better about Anatoly, so I didn’t argue. I simply didn’t obey, and by the morning I had more than enough reasons for Stefan to take back that thanks he’d given me.

I iz up shit crick, haz no paddle.

I now liked all animals except cats, which, if they’d allowed this travesty to go on, weren’t as smart as I had thought they were. Kind of like me, I thought grimly before correcting myself. Self-blame, so sayeth Jericho, was destructive to the mission, any mission, including staying free and alive. I should’ve seen it sooner. I hadn’t. It was time to move on to more constructive thoughts.

Stretching, I yawned, but only lightly. We healed faster, and as I got older, I started sleeping less too. Four hours were as good as eight to me. Less downtime, double the assassinations—Jericho had Walmart beat hands down for sales efficiency. I hadn’t told Stefan yet about the change in my sleep patterns. I wanted to be as normal as possible in his eyes and with all the other genetic baggage I had, that was not easy. I got out the chair, showered, fed Godzilla, Gamera, and Mothra, and was waiting for Stefan in the kitchen with breakfast and a stack of pictures I’d printed off my computer.

He stopped in the doorway, which was also freshly painted—the mobster who’d traded his gun in for a paintbrush, or had switched hands with them anyway. Paint with the right, keep a weapon in your left. He didn’t look much better than yesterday, especially with the addition of dark stubble that his scar ran through like a road to nowhere. “You cooked?” He rubbed the sleep crust from his eyes and took another look. “And it’s healthy. That can’t be good.”

Cheese omelet with butter-fried potatoes, sausage, toast, coffee, and orange juice. Compared to my usual chocolate chip pancakes or cinnamon-banana waffles, it was healthy. He sat down and started digging in, every fork stroke a testament to massively overacted resignation. “I’m rebuilding the garage, you know,” he mumbled around a mouthful of food. “Poison ivy. Splinters. You couldn’t have waited until winter to blow it up? When all the poison ivy, oak, and whatever else was dead?”

“You are such a drama queen,” I said drily.

His eyebrows shot up and he almost choked on his eggs. “Sara at the coffee shop taught me that one,” I explained. “It seems to fit.”

“Glad you’re picking up all the slang, but cut me some slack and at least give me drama king.” He put down the fork and reached for the coffee. “Go on, spill. Let’s get whatever it is out of the way. What could be worse than the garage, because I have houses to paint and you have tourists to not piss off today.”

“Eat first,” I ordered. He wouldn’t feel like eating after, not for a while.

“Misha . . .”

“Eat.” I folded my arms.

“Michael, I’m serious.”

I looked up at the ceiling. There were cracks there. Three formed a completely perfect equilateral triangle. I’d measured it one day just to be sure. If there was a God, the bipolar one who was wrathful and vengeful in the Old Testament and raining fluffy kittens of love in the New Testament, it wouldn’t be in the sky or the sea or the inexplicable saving of a life. It would be in a perfect, equal-sided triangle. God would be the universe; the universe is physics; physics is science. Therefore God would be science. I wondered if I could cut it out of the ceiling and sell it on eBay. People did that with tortillas all the time and you couldn’t measure the Madonna, Mother of God. I had proof. Surely that would get me a higher price.

“Fine. Jesus. You are such a brat,” he grumbled. I lowered my gaze and narrowed my eyes. “Okay, okay.” He threw up his hands. “You’ve got me. You’re not a brat; you’re not a kid; you’re an adult. And one who pushes me around as if I were a toy car and half the time I don’t realize it.” He snorted and started finishing off the breakfast.

“I am the puppet master,” I said with appropriate darkness and doom in my voice. It should’ve been a joke, but unfortunately it was appropriate in real life this morning as well.

“You’re Darth Vader without the asthma and black cape,” he countered, scraping up the last forkful of potatoes.

“That too.” I didn’t mind. I liked Darth before he became a whiny mama’s boy. The whole choking people without having to touch them hit a little close to home, but it was a big pop culture thing I’d missed at the Institute and it was entertaining. I had all the Star Wars movies—the good three and the blasphemy-against-nature three. I’d watched the first three at least twice each. At least I’d stopped before I bought a light-saber to hide in the closet, although I still firmly stood behind the view that Han had shot first. The man wasn’t an idiot. Of course he shot first. I’d been younger then, by two years, and I had missed the excitement of everything being new and engaging. Things had popped up now that were new, but not engaging.

Not in a good way at least.

Stefan got up, dumped his empty plate into the sink, and said, “Okay, you’ve made sure I’m fed and watered just like your little monsters, so tell already.”

Tell I did. As he braced his hands on the back of my chair and looked down over my shoulder, I brought out the pictures I’d had hidden under my plate and laid them out. “I went back to look at the news on Anatoly.” I didn’t wait for a reaction, rushing on. “I thought something had seemed peculiar.”

“Weird,” Stefan substituted absently. He tried to help me get the language right for someone my age and my pretense of a lifelong coffeehouse career ambition.

“Weird. Something seemed weird.” I pointed at each photo. “This man. He’s in every one of them. Where they found Anatoly, when they put him into the coroner’s van, at the autopsy.” Stefan knew better than to ask where I’d gotten the autopsy photos. I could tell you who killed JFK if you wanted to know, but you really didn’t.

“I was curious,” I said. “There’s nothing Anatoly can do for the FBI or IRS now, but he looks like government. Then I ran him through my facial recognition program.”

That one did get to him. “You have a facial recognition program? You’ve got to be shitting me. Like the government and the TSA?”

“No, nothing like theirs. Mine is ninety-nine point nine percent accurate. They wish they had my program.” I pointed at the last picture. “This is him coming through the Miami airport the day after you broke into the Institute, grabbed me, and they moved. I hacked into the rental car place he used—video cameras are everywhere in airports—it’s great—found the car he rented under his own name, which definitely makes him government. Overconfident. I downloaded that car’s GPS information and guess where he went.”

Stefan didn’t have to guess. There was only one place that would have me going to this much trouble. He had gone to the Institute. “Who is he? Who is the son of a bitch?”

“Hugo Raynor. He’s been with the CIA, NSA, and now Homeland Security. He’s forty-two, five foot ten, best marksman at the Farm.” This was where CIA applicants trained when they were young and relatively untarnished. Raynor was far beyond the Farm and as blackened with tarnish as fifty-year-old tin. I’d bet he was still a good marksman, though. You’re never that good at something unless you love it, and if you love it, you don’t give it up.

“He speaks five languages,” I continued, “amateur” running through my mind, “and repeated a course in advanced psychological and physical interrogation. He got the top score both times. I guess it was like a good book; once isn’t enough.” I leaned back in the chair and said what had to be said, although Stefan probably already knew it by now. “The mob would’ve been quicker with Anatoly. The autopsy report says what was done to him was slow. Someone wanted to know something. The mob wants to find you too. King Anatoly is dead. . . . Long live King Stefan.” The man who’d taken Anatoly’s place in the mob would want to make sure Stefan wasn’t coming back to stir up old loyalties. “But they’re not patient, not like this.”

“Raynor. Goddamn it.” He sat back down. “We knew the Institute had to have some sort of government contact to get away with what they did, but that he tracked down Anatoly when even I couldn’t have.” He shook his head. “That makes him one dangerous son of a bitch. Pack your shit. We’re going. If this bastard is involved with the Institute, and he obviously is, what he wanted from Anatoly is you. Anatoly didn’t know where we are, but it’s too close. This mother-fucker is too close.” He stood. “Go on. Get your stuff. You know the drill. Hell, you wrote the drill because mine wasn’t efficient enough. Fifteen minutes and we’re in the car. Go.”

I had mildly tweaked the drill, but that wasn’t the point. He was right, but . . . I didn’t want to leave. This was home. The first I’d had. “But—”

“Fifteen minutes,” he said, cutting me off, “and I toss you and your smelly, evil pets in the trunk of the car and drive until dark. If you don’t want to live in those clothes for the next week, I suggest you start packing. Don’t bother with the pictures of Raynor. Keep one; I’ll take care of the rest.” True to his word, fifteen minutes later, Stefan did take care of the rest.

He burned down the house.

Burning down the house had not been in my emergency drill. It should’ve been as it was the most efficient way of eliminating evidence and wayward genetic material such as hair or skin particles. I turned to watch out the back window as the Bumble—as my home—burned a cheerful red-orange against the green of the trees. Stefan had already called 911. They would get there in time for the house to burn to the ground but not for the fire to spread, which was good. I’d turned Mothra loose. He’d pecked me on the head and flown to freedom, wing as good as new. Gamera I’d put in the woods where he crawled off with a speed twice that of when I’d found him and eyes bright and open to the world. He was still old; he’d die sooner or later, but now it would be later.

You do what you can to make up for what you’ve done in the past.

We followed the bend in the road and there was only smoke to see then, a black fist hanging in the gray sky. No more rusty water out of creaking taps. No more raccoons squabbling in the attic every night. No more crickets or fireflies, the smell of free coffee from work soaking the air every day, no more wall of shelf after sagging shelf that held close to five hundred of my movies and old TV shows. Bottom line. . . .

No more home.

And no more “Harry,” the friendly but not overly friendly in a pedophile kind of way handyman. Harry was gone and while Stefan was always himself when Harry was officially out of sight of the townspeople and off duty, now Stefan was back all the way and then some, full-time. Almost three years had done a lot for me. I’d learned more things than I’d imagined existed; I’d developed social skills—of a sort; I became whole. Not normal, but as whole as I could hope to be, and that was good enough for right now.

That same amount of time had done something for Stefan too. I’d progressed and he’d regressed, but that wasn’t a bad thing for him. He’d lost some of the guilt he’d been drowning in. When I remembered Stefan first coming for me, it wasn’t a man in a black mask or a crazy guy shoving Three Musketeers bars at me as he tried to convince me that I was his brother. I remembered an ocean, dark as a universe without stars—black with guilt, despair, rage, violence, self-loathing. All I could see was his hand reaching out of the water; the rest of him was buried in a liquid Hell he couldn’t escape.

All of Jericho’s children could see, because we’d all been trained to look. I’d seen every one of Stefan’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities—I’d seen him as a target long before I’d seen him as a person.

But the past years had taken his hand and pulled him up, pulled him out. He hadn’t been on the shore, but he’d been in the breakers, close to being free. If he laughed, he meant it. If he was happy or at least content, he didn’t have to fake it. Now he had to step farther back into the water, if only for the violence. I watched the smoke disappear behind us, because I didn’t want to watch Stefan. He was a good man and when good men have to do bad things, that ocean will never let them go.

Be kind to Stefan, Anatoly whispered . . . because life hadn’t been.

“Where’s Raynor now?”

I didn’t turn, the road unspooling behind—the same road to nowhere as Stefan’s scar. “Gone. He lives in Washington, D.C., a house, so I was able to get into the utility companies there and take a look. His electricity and water use has been pretty much nil for the past two weeks, which means he left one light on and has a dripping faucet. I used Google Earth and his car is parked in the driveway, no airline has his name for that time, so either he had a nasty bathroom accident, statistics rank those very high on the scale, or he bought another car—a used one, with cash, because it hasn’t been registered yet.”

“He’s smart. Fuck.”

“I know. I think he might be as smart as me.” I did turn this time, offended as they came at the notion. No, offended as . . . hell. Right. Offended as hell. “Do you think that’s actually possible?”

“That he might know you’re keeping an eye on your back trail to see if he might come following? Yeah, I think he’s that smart. But as smart as you? Come on. Where’s that ego I know and put up with?” He shoved my shoulder with one hand. “Although the earplugs really help with that last part.”

We’d passed through town—there wasn’t much to pass through; blink and it was gone—and we were headed for the Bridge of the Heavens. Kicked out of Paradise and I didn’t even like apples that much.

Didn’t that suck?

The plan called for driving through Washington, crossing the border into Canada and then we would keep going until we were lost in Banff National Park. Our fake IDs would pass border patrol; I knew that. I’d made them, but camping in the wilds of Canada wasn’t going to help me continue my research to help save the rest of Jericho’s children, all of them—to take away their power to kill. Saul had found their location two years ago and I’d been working on a way to fix them since then. I hadn’t needed to be fixed. I didn’t like to kill, but I knew the same wasn’t true of all the rest. Some might be like me—it was a possibility—but some loved to kill. Where we were going there wasn’t even the most hideous of creations—dial-up—much less WiFi. I’d never be able to continue talking with Ariel about my fake “paper,” about the cure. And I needed to keep in contact with her—even if that was my business and no one else’s at the moment. Maybe “suck” wasn’t a strong enough word for this. “Bites”? “Blows”? “Sucks balls”?

I had to get a dictionary for these sorts of situations.

“Holy shit!” Stefan spat, and slammed on the brakes.

I automatically braced myself with one hand on the dashboard and with the other tossed Godzilla into the backseat. He hissed and I felt him crawl under my seat. He’d been through this type of thing before. He had his own drill plan.

As we three-sixtied off the road onto the grass and dirt side, I saw an unfamiliar car and an annoyingly familiar face through our windshield. The tourist—Mitchell, the sheriff had called him—was sitting on the hood of a car, gape-mouthed with a half-eaten sand-wich dropping from his hand.

There is no such thing as coincidence in the known universe. This blobby ass didn’t come close to the failing end of that grading curve. If nothing else, it was nice to know that stress improved my cursing abilities.

Stefan was out of the car with a fistful of the guy’s shirt and slamming him repeatedly into the windshield of the man’s car before I managed to get my seat belt unbuckled and get out myself. I was quicker, stronger, had trained for this for all of my life that I could remember, but Stefan hadn’t only been trained. He’d lived it in the Mafiya every day, and that made him better than me. I wasn’t envious of his skills. I was only sorry it had turned out that way.

“What are you doing here, asshole?” Stefan snarled, and banged him against the glass again, this time cracking it. It formed a spiderweb pattern around Mitchell. He was a tourist—a fake tourist—caught in a web of violence and rage that I didn’t think he’d escape. “When I give people the kind of beating I gave you, they don’t tend to stick around. They damn sure don’t park by one of the two ways out of town and eat goddamn sandwiches. Who are you?”

Suddenly, the hand that had held the sandwich now held a gun, the dazed and stupid eyes sharpened, and what had seemed like fat now looked like something much more solid. The muzzle of the gun didn’t have far to go to end up jammed under Stefan’s chin to blow a hole through it, his brain, and out the top of his skull. Stefan stiffened before falling on the grass and road, a spray of blood and brain matter fanning the pale worn asphalt widely behind him. Eyes, neither brother brown nor aggressive amber, instead mirrored the gray of the sky.

Life changes just that fast.

People . . . they die faster.

And your desire to live can change from fierce to absent in that instant.

But that wasn’t what happened.

It was what I saw in a split second of dark imagination, a calculation of the odds, the preparation for every possible outcome, and the Institute-honed, razor-sharp logic of predator prediction. We all had it, inherent, and were trained to see the deadliest of potentials on top of that, but Stefan proved it wrong. The man’s gun was not far, but not far was too far. Harry used a paintbrush—his alter ego, Stefan, used a Steyr 9mm. A bullet from that could destroy a man’s heart as easily as I could. And it did.

“Shit.” Stefan stepped back from the body that sprawled on the hood of the car. He had blood on his shirt from the blowback of being so close when he’d pulled the trigger. “Shitshitshitshit.”

I echoed the sentiment mentally, because right then I was as verbal as a goddamn rock.

Hey, more cursing. Look at me.

I dropped onto the hood of our own car, which was slick—Stefan waxed it as if practicing to represent his country in waterproofing in the Olympics. It was slick enough that I slid and went down over the bumper without feeling it—wax, wax, wax—and hit the ground, which was considerate enough to be gritty and solid. No car fanatics had gotten it yet, and there I sat. I would’ve thought my mouth was hanging open like the dead guy’s, gaping in eternal surprise, but I tasted blood, so it was more likely that my teeth were buried in my lower lip.

It was the Institute all over again. The escape. The blood.

Once you thought you were out, they pulled you back in. Stefan should be saying that, though—it was from a mob movie.

Funny. Wasn’t I funny?

But this wasn’t the Institute repeated. This was almost three years later. And I wasn’t obedient Michael trained thoroughly enough to sit on his single bed smelling of industrial bleach, unmotivated to move until they came to take me for graduation or downstairs where they took the failures and dissected them to see where they’d gone wrong. I wasn’t that Michael anymore. I was Misha, claimed son of a dead Russian mobster and brother of a live one, and Misha wasn’t going back to Jericho-land fucking ever. Stefan had encouraged me to live the life of a teenager, a kid, to catch up on all I’d missed out on. But that time was over. Just as that logic-defying, contradictory book said: It was time to leave childish things behind. I was not a victim any longer. I was a man. I’d been saying it for a while now, and it was time to start acting like it.

“Michael?”

“Misha,” I corrected him as I stood up, solid as a rock, inside and out. “You touched the hood of the car with your left hand. Wipe off the prints, finger and palm,” I ordered.

He gave me a skeptical look but did so, using the long sleeve of his shirt. “You’re sure you’re okay? Because I don’t feel too goddamn great.” He jacked in another round and put the gun back in his shoulder holster—one thing the fifteen-minute-escape plan had allowed him to grab. “At the end, when we finally finished Jericho, I know I killed his homicidal thugs, but not this close up.” And with that, his eyes went a little colder. “I guess if they’re going to up the stakes, so will we.” He rested his foot against the bumper for a second and said, “All right. Help me push the car and our lying-ass tourist into the river.”

“What about his ID?”

“It’ll be as fake as he is. He’s not a tourist and he’s not a civilian, and he fooled us both, which made him smart, tough, and highly trained.” Stefan was already pushing the car, the sleeves of his shirt pulled over the heels of his hands to keep it print free, as the dead man’s slack legs scraped the ground.

“I know they’ll be fake, but who made them will tell me something. Different methods, different materials.” I moved past him as he stopped pushing the car, rolled the dead body to its side with no sympathy for the bastard who’d almost killed my brother, and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “All right. Now we push.” I followed Stefan’s lead and in less than a minute the car plunged down a nearly straight embankment into the river below.

He had fooled me, the son of a bitch, and that took a great deal of training . . . and a shitload of laziness on my part. But hadn’t I gotten lazy in Cascade Falls? I did my background checks, and I was properly suspicious of what lay behind all the friendly faces—at first. Then I’d gotten complacent. I filed this one under asshole tourist and didn’t use anything the Institute had taught me, didn’t take a second glance, much less the third and fourth he deserved. I’d thought earlier that you could read anyone if you bothered to look . . . but I hadn’t bothered to look. I, the shamefully stupid fucking asshole, had almost gotten us killed.

“That is a lot of frigging curse words from someone who has to study up on just how to say them.” Stefan had my arm and was dragging me back to the car.

“Did I just say all that aloud?” I found my footing and ran with him.

“Yeah, it was damn impressive, but you did not almost get us killed.”

“Right. It must’ve been that other Michael. The idiot.” I slammed the car door and buckled up. “I’m guessing no Canada. We fool Raynor or whoever into thinking we went there, but head south? We’d better head for the new Institute before they get nervous with our being so close and move it. The cure is more or less done anyway.” I looked through the wallet. The ID was fake all right, and shoddy. That had government subcontracting all over it.

“I’ll call Saul and get the troops lined up then,” Stefan responded. We’d been planning this for a long time. Saul and about twenty mercenaries were on call, more or less, for when they were needed. They could meet us there. They’d be hours behind us, but that would give us a chance to check out the place close up and not just from satellite pictures.

Stefan had left the car running. He jerked the steering wheel and headed back the way we came, adding roughly, “And it’s not your fault.”

It was definitely my fault, but I’d fix it. Kids let someone else fix their mistakes. Adults fixed their own. It was time Stefan had an equal now, not a responsibility.

Time to grow up.

There were actually more than two ways out of Cascade Falls, but the third way was known only by locals or handymen the locals trusted. It also would rip out the bottom of your car by the time you made it out, but destroying—no, trashing; that was the more apt word—trashing a car was better than meeting Raynor face-to-face before we were ready. An adult, but an adult with a completely average vocabulary to go with completely average brown hair, eyes made as average by contacts—camouflage, you have to work at it. If we were ever free, then I could talk like the genius I was—if I stopped making mistakes and made it back to genius status.

I started to reach for my computer but stopped to dig a shirt out of Stefan’s bag in the backseat. “Do you want to get into something less . . . ummm . . . covered in ex-tourist?”

Anyone and everyone he’d killed he’d killed to save me, and as he’d said, I don’t think he’d ever done it literally face-to-face, mere inches away. Wearing the evidence of it probably wasn’t pleasant. Saying thanks, he let me grab the wheel as we bumped over the narrow excuse for a dirt road, and quickly took off his jacket and holster and changed the shirt. Once he was armed again and back in his jacket, he took the wheel. “Now, go e-mail your girlfriend.”

I was going to deny that I was intending to e-mail her, although I had been planning to, and certainly say that she wasn’t my girlfriend. I hadn’t met her in person yet. She lived across the country in New York, not to mention many other obstacles. I didn’t have a chance to get any of that out, however, as Stefan, instead of going with “holy shit” this time, went with “mother-fucker.” He was looking in the rearview mirror. So much for locals giving out private town info only to their good-old-boy handyman.

The SUV behind us was built for this type of road while our used, low-slung Toyota wasn’t. It gobbled up the dirt and rocks behind us. It was black and I couldn’t see more than a shadowy shape through its tinted windows. Raynor? The Institute? Raynor working for the Institute? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t do to him what I’d done to the dead tourist—make him vomit up his breakfast or cut off the blood flow to his brain for a few seconds. The latter would cause unconsciousness, and maybe he would veer off the road, and we could leave him behind. But I had to be able to touch the person to do those things. We all did, Jericho’s legacy. All but one. And she wasn’t here now, although if she had been, she would’ve gleefully had his brain melting out of his ears, blood spurting from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Then she would’ve done the same to us.

Even the Institute had been glad there had been only one Wendy. She’d be ten this year. I’d seen what she could do at seven. I didn’t want to know what she could do now.

But I could do something too. It was more mundane and might not work as well, but if it got the SUV off our trail, that was good enough. “Hold the wheel again,” I heard Stefan say as I dived back into the backseat for one of my bags this time. “Let me take a few shots at the son of a bitch.”

With this being more of a hiking trail than a road, we were bouncing roughly up and down. Stefan was a great shot, but under these conditions, it would be hard to make a shot that would count. Luckily, I had something that took less accuracy than a bullet. “Wait,” I said as I unzipped the bag and pulled out two gray cylinders. “I have something better.” I dropped one into my lap, rolled down the window, leaned out, set the detonator, and tossed the first one. It blew up one of the back tires of the SUV. The second one took out a front one. First, the vehicle spun, sending clouds of dirt and clumps of grass into the air, before tipping over on to one side. No one got out as long as we were in sight, but the shadowy figure inside was moving. If he was Hugo Raynor, with his impressive resume, I assumed he’d have more guns and be better with them than the sandwich guy who obviously had worked for him. Without a better view of what Raynor was doing and how he was armed, we were best to leave it and be happy with one SUV dead in the water.

I smiled in satisfaction. “Guns are for boys. High explosives are for men.”

Stefan didn’t seem as satisfied.

“Bombs? You were making pipe bombs?” he demanded incredulously as he drove on.

“Garages don’t blow themselves up,” I pointed out with some exasperation at his lack of gratitude. “And they’re not pipe bombs so much as proactive explosive measures. Little pipe bombs,” I emphasized. “You know . . . just in case.” With electrical detonation devices—very simple. Military detonation cord wasn’t as quick as I might need it to be. “They’re really quite easy to make. Too easy. They should be more responsible with the information on the Internet. . . .”

“You told me that equipment was for your genetic research”—I think he hit a rock on purpose as my head smacked the inside roof of the car—“to find a cure for the rest of the kids. You lied to me, Michael Lukas Korsak.”

“I didn’t lie,” I shot back. “I said that the equipment was to help me find a cure. I didn’t say all the equipment was to help me find a cure. Some of it could be used to save our lives too.”

“And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning? You running an armory behind our house?” Stefan gritted his teeth. “I swear, when we switch cars, I’m going to take a minute to beat you like a redheaded stepchild.”

“I didn’t not mention it. It didn’t come up, that’s all.” Yes, a fine line, but it was my line and I was stubbornly walking it. “And why do people have a dislike for people with red hair? I’ve heard that saying once or twice since moving here. Why would their hair color make them the targets of violence?”

“Not the time, and you know it’s just some old saying. Don’t think I don’t recognize your version of smart-ass, Michael.”

“Misha,” I insisted again.

“And what’s with that? We’re running from who the hell knows and you’re worried about your nickname?”

“Michael is the Institute. Misha is free. I’m free and I’m staying that way. I’m a man now, a new person, and Misha will remind me of that. I don’t want their name anymore.” But I couldn’t go back to Lukas. That would be as wrong. I wasn’t ever going to get my memories of Lukas’s first seven years back, not to mention what I’d discovered in my research. I couldn’t be that person. I couldn’t be Lukas. I was Misha and only Misha now, for good. I was me, finally finished, finally recovered from the Institute, finally real. They weren’t getting me back and they could keep their damn Peter Pan name.

“Fine. Misha the Mighty.” The car bounced again and I heard the muffler hit one rock too many and it was gone behind us. “You got it. Now put that mighty brain to use and figure out how Raynor, and whoever the fuck he works for, found us.”

I didn’t have to put my brain to work. I knew. In a flash of inspiration . . . and subconscious brilliant deduction—a given—I knew. “Anatoly and you, Stefan. You both told him where we were.”

Raynor was smart all right. Too smart. And we hadn’t tried to finish him off when we had the chance. It was a thought I wouldn’t have had three years ago—when I hadn’t known what it was to have a real life. I wasn’t ashamed I had the thought now. I’d learned a lot since that time. Life and death . . . It was the cycle of the world. For someone to live, someone had to die—especially if that person was trying to take your life, be it mental or physical.

And me?

I wanted to live.

The hell with the Institute and their lies about what I was and what I could never be.

I wanted to live.