Basilisk

Chapter 4

“We need to take the 84. We’re heading southeast toward the Burns Paiute Indian Reservation,” I told Stefan. I had the route memorized, but I handed him the map from the glove compartment. Stefan didn’t like GPS. He thought all the voices were annoying, and when I programmed in HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey , he tossed it out the window and drove over it. I’d known Stefan wasn’t technically . . . adept. That was the best and politest way to put it, but I didn’t know he was afraid of killer computers.

I thought they were rather entertaining myself. There was no explaining taste.

He snatched the map. “Burns? Why the hell are we going to . . . wait. What the fuck. How did Anatoly and I give away our location? How the hell did you come up with that?”

Burns was one of my nine—technically, ten—backup plans if Canada didn’t work out, but Stefan didn’t seem in the mood to appreciate that right now, and I couldn’t blame him. “Raynor must’ve found Anatoly,” I said. “And as smart as he appears to be, Anatoly was smart too. It must have taken Raynor about”—I calculated—“up until four weeks ago to find him. Almost three years.”

“But I told you, kiddo, I made sure Anatoly never knew where we were. Never knew where our money was, didn’t know our account numbers in the Caymans. Raynor couldn’t have found us through him.” The car bumped again and I thought I heard something else fall off. I let Stefan’s “kiddo” go. He was running on autopilot, but that would have to change in the future.

“But he did know one thing . . . all the properties he owned and used to hide in. He knew about the beach house where we were shot. Raynor must have gone to every one of them once Anatoly told.” And anyone would tell eventually, no matter how Mafiya tough, when a saw was cutting through their bone. I cleared my throat. “Raynor would’ve gone to every single one and dusted for prints, then entered them in AFIS.” This was a collection of fingerprints from a number of criminals and certain occupational workers.

How he became fixated on Anatoly to begin with was a mystery, unless he hung around Miami at the time of my rescue. While Jericho chased us, he’d investigated how the Institute had been discovered to begin with. With his clearance, he could’ve gone from the police to the FBI to see if anything peculiar had happened at the same time Stefan had taken me. He could’ve heard about a certain mob assassination, a missing mobster named Stefan Korsak. Stefan hadn’t killed his boss, but everyone thought he had. There would be boards covered with pictures, family connections, and maybe the mention and photo of another Korsak brother, long gone—a little boy with bicolored eyes.

Blue and green, like all of Jericho’s children.

If Raynor was as smart as I thought he was, he might have taken a chance on a wild-card hunch like that. “He would’ve kept them classified,” I went on about the fingerprints. “He’s Homeland. He can do that. But he would’ve had them, just waiting for one to pop up.”

“Ah, shit.” Stefan pounded his head once against the steering wheel. “And my stupid ass fucks up trying to blend in and be Harry-the-Handyman, good guy, up for a bar fight, who gets arrested and printed. Two weeks. Two goddamn weeks and he’s probably been here watching us at least half that time. Brought along a buddy, not Homeland, but trained. That shithead was trained to fight and kill. He sends him in to annoy you day after day to see what you’ll do. Make sure he has the right kid.” I had changed a lot in the past three years—I had my contact that changed the color of my one blue eye to match the green. I was taller, my hair darker, enough for there to be some initial doubt, although with my living with Harry/Stefan as my brother, not more than a molecule of it. “He did it to see if he could trigger you.”

“And he did,” I said quietly. “That means I fucked up too and maybe worse than you.”

“I don’t think so”—he gave my shoulder a light push—“but if you want to share, let’s say we both screwed up and you tell me why the hell we’re going to the Burns Indian Reservation. Assuming the car holds together to make it to the interstate. The pipe bombs we will talk about later—I haven’t forgotten. But why the reservation?”

“Oh, the reservation?” Actually, he probably was going to forget about the pipe bombs. “That’s where the plane is. Didn’t I mention that before?”

“Plane? What plane?” he demanded.

“Our plane.”

“Our plane? Since when do we have a plane?” His fingers were slowly beginning to whiten as his grip tightened on the steering wheel.

“Since I bought one,” I replied as if it were the most obvious of answers.

I could see his jaw tightening now as he tried to hold on to his temper. In the beginning, when he’d rescued me, taught me how to live in the real world, taught me . . . hell . . . everything (even cursing), he was nothing but patient. He was the most patient, protective ex-mobster you could find, because he knew how damaged I was, which I think might have been only marginally more damaged than he was from guilt and despair. Not once in almost two years did he ever snap or lose his temper with me, even if I deserved it—especially if I deserved it. But after two years, he went from treating me as a phantom brother who would disappear at any moment and started treating me like a real brother.

It turned out that I liked that. After two years, I wanted to be given a verbal ass kicking when I deserved it, I wanted to pay off the half-blown-up garage with my paycheck from the coffeehouse, despite our having money in offshore accounts, I wanted all of that. Why? Because that meant no matter how annoying I was and how quickly Stefan would make sure I paid the price, he always had my back. He protected me from anyone and anything.

Blood is thicker than delinquent behavior.

And while that wasn’t one hundred percent correct, I took it. Good, bad, and all that came between, Stefan would always be my brother, my family, and that was something. . . . That was really something.

“Since you bought one? Why did you buy a plane? How did you buy a plane? Who’s going to fly the plane if we need a plane?” Stefan demanded. Now I could hear his teeth grinding at the end of the last question. I tried not to smile, but it was entertaining . . . just a little. That didn’t make me a bad person. I simply found amusement where I could. That made me emotionally healthy and I could write a two-hundred-thousand-word paper to prove it.

“I bought one in case some of our other backup plans didn’t work, and Raynor cancels out at least three of them. I bought it with the money from the Caymans. Who does our banking, remember? You’re horrible with numbers. That was why that old lady hit you with her cane when you were in the ten-items-only line with sixteen items.” I crossed my arms and Godzilla came slithering out from under the seat to paw at the glove compartment. He knew where the goodies were. “Besides, it’s only a Cessna.”

“Only a Cessna? Damn it, Michael, Misha, whatever. The government tracks that sort of thing, especially since 9/11.”

“No problem. It was a totally illegal and untraceable purchase. I have quite a few friends of that sort on the Internet, but that time I went to your friend Saul. I told him not to tell you, that it was a surprise. He thought that was pretty hilarious.” “Goddamn fucking hilarious” was what he’d actually said. “Then I found one of my friends from the Net who said there were a few people with flexible morals at the Burns Indian Reservation who would hide it for us in case we needed it.” Like now. With Raynor, we definitely needed a plane, because he was going to the same place we were: the Institute. Not that he’d think we’d go there. I imagined he thought that was the very last place we’d go. A man like him wouldn’t understand trying to save what you could own instead. No, he knew it was the best place to get his own fresh-fromthe-oven baked assassin, a special one, because he’d seen what I could do when merely annoyed by a fake tourist. He wanted to be prepared. He didn’t know I wouldn’t use what I had in me to kill . . . that I wasn’t like him or Jericho.

I hoped.

“What? They’re hiding a plane? Jesus, they’ll think we’re terrorists, and hauling around pipe bombs isn’t going to help with that impression.” His knuckles were bone white now, and he was going to get hoarse soon if his voice became any louder.

“No, don’t be ridiculous. I thought about that, so I told them we’re drug dealers,” I said with the complacent certainty I had in any of the plans I’d thought up. The Institute had taken my life, but they had taught me to plan like a son of a bitch. More cursing. It seemed I only needed adrenaline to bring it out in me. I probably shouldn’t have been pleased by that accomplishment, but I was.

“Drug dealers? And they believed you?” Now he was looking at me, not at the road, which wasn’t the best way to drive, and that amber I’d never seen directed at me was beginning to glint in his eyes.

“Why wouldn’t they?” I reassured him. He no doubt thought I’d made a mistake. Big brothers were like that . . . always questioning the younger ones and never letting them grow up. “I pay them to grow marijuana. It took them a while to get . . . the hang of it? Right, the hang of it, but last month they finally said they’d figured out the correct temperature, hydration, where to get better grow lights, and they said they have a great crop now.”

He blinked, his darker skin turning nearly as red as a sunburn. Pulling the car over into the emergency lane, he turned back and rested his forehead on the steering wheel and said nothing. I waited about five minutes. It was just a plane and some barely illegal drugs, which I thought should be legal. It was no worse than beer. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to drink beer yet as I wasn’t twenty-one and Stefan was as strict as a TV grandmother with things like that. Plane, drugs, only just illegal . . . and if I could’ve gotten a doctor involved, maybe not illegal at all—surely five minutes was enough to recover from my “surprise.”

I slapped him on the back and went on to be, admittedly, an utter ass. “Are you okay? Was the healthy breakfast too healthy? Did it upset your normal intestinal workings? Do you want a Three Musketeers to counteract the health?”

“Tui nemnogaya dermo,” he said without lifting his head.

I frowned. “You little shit? You called me a little shit. I am as tall as you now. I am not little.”

“But you are a shit. What happened to that agreeable kid who used to be afraid of grocery stores? Who only scared me when he wanted the sex talk? Where did the pipe bomb–building drug lord come from?” He leaned his head back against the headrest and covered his eyes. “Where did I go wrong?”

I wasn’t offended. In fact, if I’d known it would be this entertaining, I’d have told Stefan about all my plans—although some of the others might give him a heart attack—at least a year ago. I grinned, though he couldn’t see it, and punched him hard on the shoulder. “I grew up. I’m a genius, I was raised to be an assassin, and I’m trying to figure out a way to bring down an entire Institute of assassin-makers while curing the assassins they made. What did you think I did in my spare time? At least I didn’t build a nuclear bomb in the garage, which, by the way, is so beyond easy you wouldn’t believe it. . . .”

Stefan sat up and clapped his hand over my mouth. “Michael . . . Misha, you’re my brother and I love the hell out of you, but I think right now it would be a good thing if you didn’t talk. For a while. A couple of hours at least.”

I scowled at him, but this was brother stuff and I got it. I did. Stefan, despite killing a few people—a lot of people—to save me and being an ex-mobster on top of it, was delicate, apparently. I’d have to dole out the information in smaller bits so his brain wouldn’t explode. He knew emotion; I knew everything else—together we were unstoppable. Again, I hoped.

He took his hand away from my mouth. “I have only one more question and then silence. Okay? Silence, so I can escape having a stroke and not take that damn stinky-ass ferret and beat you with it. One question.”

I raised my eyebrows and looked interested. I genuinely was. What could he think I possibly left out of the plan?

“Do you know how to fly this plane? They taught you that at the Institute?”

Please. As if I would forget about that. I restrained myself from an annoyed snort. “No. I taught myself. There are classes for everything online. You can also order instructional videos, although of course they say those are only supplementary study materials and you can’t learn to fly a plane just from watching one.” Those who said this were nongeniuses. I had absolutely no doubt about that. “So yes, I can fly. Plus it’s a Cessna. It’s barely an airplane. More like a roller skate with wings.” I gave Godzilla, who did not stink . . . not too much anyway, a PayDay candy bar, and he crawled back under the seat.

Stefan was starting to turn redder. I needed to check his blood pressure. He wasn’t old enough to be worrying about that yet, but some of these things are genetic. “You really think you can fly a plane by watching something on the damn Internet?”

I grinned again. “Theoretically.”

He didn’t hit me with Godzilla, but he did seem intent on not speaking to me again for the conceivable future. I used the time on the computer, when I could get a connection . . . and when you hack into a satellite to control its orientation, you’d be amazed at how much your Internet connection can be improved. Others might suffer, but they could go to their local coffee shops. That wasn’t an option for me right now. I contacted Ariel in New York. We’d been in contact for two years now. She was twenty-two and went to the Weill Cornell Medical College. Well, she didn’t go; she was like me, a genius. She already had her MD and had started college at fourteen. She was a researcher at the college and after much surfing and looking and the thorough checking out of people at medical research sites, she was the one I thought who could help me the most. She had access to all the equipment that the money Stefan and I had couldn’t buy. She could do the experiments on the genetic material I provided. She could help me look for a cure, though she thought she was only helping another researcher at a facility with far lesser equipment write a paper on one of the wilder theories she’d heard.

She was pretty too. Not that that had anything to do with anything. She wasn’t blatantly sexy like Sara at the coffeehouse. More . . . cute. And I could talk to her because she was smart enough to understand me; sometimes I thought she might be smarter than I was. And that was hot. She had sleek pink hair that fell to her jaw, pale skin, and the tattoo of a tiny mermaid beside one of her blue eyes. When I asked her about it when we talked over webcam, she’d laughed and said being smart meant you had to try extra hard to see the fantasy in the world—the magic. And what was a world without those things?

See? Smart.

I found my fantasy in movies and she found it in mermaids, but we both knew you needed something. The smarter you were, the more you saw the world for what it was, people for who they truly were, those inside-out people, and if that was all you saw . . . you’d be in therapy 24/7. You needed to make your own reality because the real version could make you doubt humanity, except for your brother and someone you could’ve maybe thought of as a . . . ah . . . friend you’d made online. Just a friend. Either way it would be nice to think that there were people in the world worth anything at all—not just Jerichos.

It would be nice.

She wasn’t there the first time I tried. But the second time, four hours later, she was. There was no video this time, too risky, so I didn’t know if she was wearing her favorite freshwater pearl choker dyed in blues and golds and purples—the same as a mermaid would wear. She’d changed her name, she’d said, to the Disney mermaid to remind her to not only believe in fantasy but to always stay a child when she could. She wouldn’t tell me what her name had been before. She said she was saving that for our honeymoon.

Now I could feel my face getting hot and maybe not as red as Stefan’s had been, but definitely not my normal color. Luckily he was concentrating on driving or meditating on not killing me and didn’t notice.

I typed in Hey, so what did you think of the theoretical overriding of the genetic code on the extra DNA strand for my paper? I’d discovered, with Ariel’s help, that the gene connected to the psychic ability to kill—not that that was what I told her its function was—was on only one of the DNA strands, while chimeras like me possessed two. It might be why all the assassins were chimeras. If a person had only one type of DNA as was customary, Jericho’s manipulation could very well not work or could destroy the subject altogether. But to know that, I’d have to create a chimera embryo to see exactly what could happen. I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t the Frankenstein that Jericho had been.

She sent back her response in a flash; she was one fast typer. I think theoretically that a viral explosion with some type of injection would lyse the target genes and inactivate them. I tried it on a few of those gene samples you sent and it definitely did something to them. If not complete disintegration, then close. If you’re talking about doing it to a live person, there’d definitely be bruising at the injection area and no sure guarantee that it would work, much less immediately, but in the realm of theory, it’s conceivable.

She called me Dr. Theoretical for as often as I used the word. She said it was my superpower, but I was being accurate. There was nothing wrong with accuracy. More letters appeared before I could reply. Bone marrow transplant would work much better. I highly doubted I’d be able to pull off a bone marrow transplant on thirty genetic assassins. Any cure would have to be almost instantaneous. Her typing continued. But it’s your paper. Hey, why no webcam this time, cutie? Get a bad haircut? Or did you finally break down and get that tattoo I’ve been trying to talk you into? She kept telling me to get a Cheshire cat tattoo from Alice in Wonderland as I was so theoretical I was practically nothing but a floating smile in midair.

Living life on the run was exactly what I was doing, and I thought best not to advertise it. No, I typed back. I dyed my hair pink to be half the genius you are.

“Tell her that her hair is the color of a rose,” came the suggestion from beside me.

“It’s not,” I said absently. “It’s more the color of cotton candy.”

“A chick probably isn’t going to find that romantic. Go with rose.”

“Why would I want to be romant—Hey!” I glared at Stefan as I slammed the computer closed. “How about eyes on the road and your own business? And I thought you weren’t speaking to me.”

“Revenge is worth it.” His grin was far more wolfish than any I’d managed so far—mirrors and practice don’t lie. “And get ready to play a nineteen-year-old drug lord, jefe, because we’re almost at the reservation. Maybe if you tried some dark sunglasses and stroked your stinky carpet shark like a James Bond villain, they would go for it.”

“You don’t think I can pull off pretending to be a drug dealer?” I knew I was hampered by my face. The Institute made or chose their assassins with faces that were attractive to both sexes but also not so much that we stood out to every eye. We were made to appeal but also to blend in. But we were also taught by them to pull on any mask and play any part or suffer the consequences. “Learn a little faith, Stefan.” I did grab his spare set of sunglasses in the floorboards when we arrived and put them on before climbing out of the car. Stefan brought it to a stop by the first and one of the few buildings on the reservation—a store/tourist spot. The rest of the area was dotted with small wooden houses and the occasional trailer. “I’ll be back.”

“Right, Arnold. I’m sure you will,” he drawled, sliding down in the seat as I slammed my door behind me. Inside the store, I went straight to the cash register, automatically reached for a Milky Way, and said, “I’m looking for Jacob and Johanna Cloud-horse.”

The girl there looked me over before flashing her teeth in a white, happy smile. “Which makes you a troublemaker. Deep shit and all that. I should call the law on you, but since Jacob is my baby’s daddy, I guess I won’t.” I had many names. Sebastian was the drug dealer one. Sebastian had money out the ass, a plane to go with it, and he was here to get it.

I hardened my face and tried for that killer twist of Stefan’s lips I’d seen a time or two, and by killer, I meant the authentic definition. “I know you won’t. Now get them over here. Tell them Sebastian’s here, and I don’t like waiting.”

She looked me up and down more thoroughly this time, her black ponytail swishing over her shoulder. Then with eyes turned to impenetrable onyx, she went for the phone, turning her back so I couldn’t hear her speak. “Look at you. You scared a teen mom, probably all of sixteen. Good for you. Are you proud, ‘Sebastian’?”

I snatched a quick glance over my shoulder to see Stefan standing behind me with arms folded and without any dark glasses because, face it, he didn’t need any. It was practice versus the real thing again. Stefan didn’t have to pretend or put on a mask to scare people—Stefan had to put one on not to scare people. That was what “Harry” had been all about. The real Stefan had only to show his true self, what he’d done, and what he’d still do if necessary; it was all in his face if he let it be. Reality was always more convincing than a mask.

I wasn’t the one who’d pushed the girl into making that call. It was one glimpse of what stood behind me. “You don’t want to be like me, Misha,” he whispered low enough that only I could hear. “I don’t want to be like me either, but that’s my bad luck there. If the means justify the end, let me be the means. It’s nothing new for me. You be yourself, got it?”

That the “myself” he was talking about was an assassin taught and trained was something he never remembered or never believed—the same as I tried not to believe. He moved up beside me and laid a casual arm over my shoulder, making sure his gun showed as his jacket gaped open. “Brother, cousin, or bodyguard?” he murmured.

Oh, damn, the story. What had I told the Cloud-horses . . . ? “Bodyguard,” I replied.

“We’ll go with cousin bodyguard. Gives me more reason to look out for your skinny ass.” I barely heard the words before he said aloud to the girl on the phone, “We don’t have all fucking day. Are they hauling their shit or not? We have a lot of money invested in their asses, and if they don’t give as they have received, like the Good Book says, we’ll take that money out of their asses and anyone else’s we can find, including you. Hell, conveniently located as you are, we’ll start with you, little bitch.”

He said bitch as lazily as if that were the only thing he ever called women. Stefan, who painted houses for free for needy landladies and undercharged Mrs. Sloot to paint her gingerbread; Stefan, who treated women with the utmost respect—he even hadn’t hurt the one who’d robbed us at gunpoint years ago at a time when we could least afford it. Yet if I hadn’t known him, I’d have believed every word, and I knew I couldn’t have carried that off. He was right. I should stick to being myself—the myself where my outside reflected what my inner biology wished it was.

But was it fair that Stefan had to be the mean one all the time, no matter his past?

No. No, it wasn’t, especially as much as he wanted to leave that part of him behind. Being a drug dealer was much easier online. The reality of being one or pretending to be one . . . I saw now why Stefan had been so upset earlier. Or pissed off—highly pissed off. Maybe there was a reason all Jericho’s children were like me . . . and looked somewhat younger and guiltless at first glance. We were trained to plan if we had to, trained every day of our lives, but we were made to not need to. Our faces were our alibis. Touch, kill, and who would ever suspect a nineteen-year-old who would probably look like a nineteen-year-old until he was thirty?

On the other hand, one look at Stefan and you’d know what he might do. One look at me and no one knew what I could do and that it was much worse than anything Stefan had in him. It was the perfect disguise. Nature would’ve applauded.

It only made me feel like a freak—as if it were only right I should be labeled “Caution,” “Dangerous,” “Biohazard.” That was as far as my thought process went before starting to spiral bleakly downward until Stefan pinched my shoulder hard—he knew; how did he always know?—and went straight for the Cloud-horse siblings the second they walked through the door.

They had rifles, attitude, and sneers, all of which went limp under Stefan flashing his Steyr in their faces before they had time to move. The muzzle set gently over the eye of one of them—that of Jacob, the brother. “Playtime is over, kiddies.” They were barely younger than he was, by two years at the most, but, in experience, I guess kids they were. If they’d used those rifles for anything but shooting rabbits, I’d be surprised. “This is why you look at porn on the Internet, not how to hook up with dealers, because you are not ready, assholes. You’re worlds away from swimming in this ocean but damn close to being six feet under that dirt outside. Now, take us to the plane. And if your girlfriend calls the cops, you’ll just be lying on top of that dirt in a pool of your own guts and blood.”

Stefan didn’t want me to be like him, but thanks to him, we had our stuff and were on the plane in fifteen minutes. The Cloud-horses had built a big barnlike building behind a line of pine trees to hide it. I didn’t know where they were hiding the drugs and Stefan didn’t mention it. The two Cloud-horses thought themselves pretty clever, I’m sure, in not bringing it up themselves. They weren’t. What kind of drug dealers show up and don’t want their drugs? But if they were smart, we wouldn’t be standing here in the first place. Smart people don’t grow marijuana and hide planes for strangers on the Internet, no matter how much they have been paid.

“Now.” Stefan stood in the large outbuilding concealing the plane and tapped one of them—Jacob—on top of the head with his gun. It was a friendly tap, if you didn’t count the pain that twisted the lean, brown face. “Which of you is going to take a ride with us? You or your sister?” His sister looked tougher by half, but she stood back with her hands up at shoulder level. When it came down to the bottom line, she came way before her brother apparently. Their rifles had been left outside at Stefan’s order.

Jason stumbled over his words. “What? What the fuck? We did what you said. What Sebastian said.” He pointed at me. I’d given up looking tough and just looked like what I was: bored. I was bored. Stupidity bored me and there was a massive amount of stupid here. Oddly, this expression seemed more intimidating than the one I’d tried at the store. I was being me now and that, despite Institute training, could be the most frightening thing of all in a person.

I remembered what Wendy at the Institute did when she was bored. It wasn’t a good time to be a rabbit or a guinea pig in the animal lab on those days.

“Be yourself,” Stefan had said.

Let that Frankenstein child you were shine through, I thought.

Shit.

I folded my arms, but didn’t look away from the brother and sister team. Stefan wouldn’t need back up with these two, but better safe than sorry. Now he was saying, “My cousin is learning the business. I want him to know drug dealers can’t be trusted. Too bad that’s a lesson you don’t already know, huh? But don’t worry. It won’t be a long ride and just until we get far enough off the ground to make sure you didn’t screw with the engine. Then we’ll boot you right back out. Fifteen, thirty feet. You’ll be fine . . . if we’re fine. You might break your legs or your spine, but I hear great things about wheelchairs these days.” Jacob moaned and his sister gave it up.

“We screwed with the engine some,” she grunted. “Jake, stop being such a whiny bitch. They’ll fix it. They’ll go and you can go back to knocking up sixteen-year-olds.”

That was my cue. I went over to the Cessna 350 and opened the cowling to peer at the engine. You can’t learn to fly a plane via instructional video if you don’t know what parts go where . . . at least not safely. Luckily, my partners in crime didn’t know anything about planes of any kind. They’d only yanked whatever to them seemed yankable—idiots indeed. Twenty minutes later and after a run-through of the electronic checklist, we were in the air. And, yes, I might have hit the top of one of the pine trees, but that was why I said theoretically so often. It left room for the tiny errors, the learning curve. None of that mattered when I looked at where we were. We were flying in a blue sky, the world and its dangers gone beneath us. It was . . . freedom. It was glory. It was a wonder I’d never seen, although it was an unsteady wonder.

Things are never as easy as they appear on the Net or in instructional videos. I blamed an imperfect world for that. I was a genius—I wasn’t blaming myself, because it obviously was not my fault. Stefan didn’t throw up as I gradually turned theoretical into a reality. I had to give him credit. He turned green, he closed his eyes, he cursed nonstop, but he didn’t vomit, and it was an extremely bumpy ride for at least fifteen minutes. Godzilla did throw up, down Stefan’s shirt as he wrapped himself tightly around my brother’s neck and shivered. He wasn’t a fan of theoretical flying either. I was surrounded by critics.

That didn’t improve five hours later when I landed at the new Institute. Stefan, who hadn’t been at all interested in the details of maximum cruising speed, fuel capacity, maximum climb rate, called it crashing, but I think that was an exaggeration. Considering his lack of curiosity about all things plane related—except for the copilot’s three-point restraint system, or as he referred to it, “Where’s the goddamn seat belt?”—I didn’t think he had much room to judge.

The ground’s rapidly approaching brown dirt, the unforeseen difficulty in getting the nose up, the speed down, but not too far down, and the bouncing off a jutting rock camouflaged the same color as the dirt—it did get the adrenaline pumping. There was no doubt about that, but it didn’t change matters.

“Gravity, genius,” Stefan groaned, holding on to his seat so tightly with one of his hands that it would probably cramp for days. The other hand held something else. “Gravity leads to crashes.”

Despite the bump on my head and the blood dripping down Stefan’s forehead, it definitely wasn’t a full-on, complete crash. It was at least a controlled crash and that was the next best thing to a legitimate landing. That was my opinion and I was sticking with it. Besides, it was not my fault. I didn’t create the often-inconvenient laws of physics. “Gravity”—I waved a dismissive and slightly shaking hand at Stefan’s bitching—“schmavity. It’s all relative.”

“I thought that was time, Einstein,” he pointed out, wiping blood onto the dried ferret vomit already on his shirt, “not schmavity.” Why did he have to be smart at the least timely moment? It was close enough to a landing, considering I’d taken off and flown the entire way via Internet instruction. A slight hiccup in the landing did not a catastrophe make. But what we had seen at the Institute with a bird’s-eye view, what we found there at a closer—God, too close—look, wasn’t a catastrophe. It was worse.

It was a nightmare—the entire, oblivious world’s worst nightmare.

The bodies were everywhere.

The stench of rot made the air almost unbreathable.

This Institute had been set up about seventy-five miles out in the desert from Barstow, California. The first one had been in the Everglades outside Miami. Isolation was important when you were setting up a facility that looked like a prison—that was a prison.

Inside it was identical to the one where I’d grown up. Cheap tile, battleship gray walls, fluorescent lights, no windows—home, sweet home. Even the bodies were the same, in a way, only there were more—many more. I’d seen a few at my Institute. Sometimes a “student” would lose it, go flat-out psychotic, and break in a second. The crazed individual would usually kill a few instructors before the guards shot him—and the guards were everywhere. Two or three bodies a year was about average. You got used to it. You can get used to anything if you want to survive. But I hadn’t seen anything like this before.

Instructors, researchers, guards littered the halls, the labs, the empty classrooms. Some were flat on the floor with blood that had dried around their heads after it had exploded out of their ears, noses, and mouths. Some were curled up, appearing as peaceful as if they were asleep . . . if they hadn’t been in their second week of decomposition. They were bloated with green and brown stains showing through their clothes. That didn’t bring “peaceful” to mind.

There were students too, about fifteen. About half were shot in the head and half were spread-eagled, surrounded by the stain of every cell of blood in their body. If it hadn’t been dark brown and flaking on the tile, it almost would’ve looked like wings spread around them—as if they were angels. Only one student could do that to another: Wendy. Some students were more powerful than others, but to be good assassins, a good product, we all had to be fairly equal in power to be useful, to bring a good price, and not be competitive to the bidders.

That equality meant that if a student tried to hurt another student, it didn’t work. We could protect ourselves. If one started to cut off the blood to my brain, I could keep those vessels open. If one tried to stop my heart, I could reverse it before it had time to take effect. Students could not hurt other students. One was an immovable object; one was an irresistible force, like Stefan and I emotionally. It was a waste of time.

But then Wendy had come along and no one else was half as powerful as Wendy. She was the exception to the rule when I’d been kept prisoner years ago. No one had been able to protect themselves from her then. It had been lucky for her maker that Wendy liked the Institute in those days. . . . Top of her class in every way, she couldn’t wait to get out into the real world and do what she’d been created to do. She’d never caused any problems. The better she was, the faster she “graduated” and she knew it. If they gave out gold stars for being a good little assassin, she’d have had a wall full of them—a galaxy of the dead.

Things change.

People, made in a lab or the old-fashioned way, change too.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the dead students. It was too bad those left behind hadn’t thought of that.

“This is a rebellion. Looks like some kids finally got pissed off at their keepers and showed them exactly what they’d learned.” Stefan’s hand was on my shoulder, squeezing tightly as I stared down at two brown and broken angels. It was two girls, both with red hair. That was the only way to recognize them, the red hair. Lily and Belle. Tiger Lily and Tinkerbell. They’d needed enough girl names to balance out the Michaels and Peters. No one was good at the Institute. We couldn’t be, I’d told myself long ago in my own sterile prison room. The best we could hope for was indifference to our fate if we refused to kill. But was that good? Truly good? I didn’t know. Then Stefan came along and told me I was good. Too good, he emphasized from the self-defense point. It drove him nuts that I wouldn’t kill to save my own life.

Except for the one time, when I was fourteen, when I was surprised and attacked in that Institute test. I woke up some nights with the sharp sensation of his knife against my throat, the ephemeral feel of his heart turning to a useless sack of blood under my hand where it rested against his chest. I saw his eyes go vacant again and again. It was a memory that wouldn’t let me take another life, not for any reason.

There had been others like me, although not as stubborn. They would’ve done what they were told, only without any particular enthusiasm. Not that that made a difference. Enthusiastic or no, their targets would’ve ended up just as dead. Obedience always trumped eagerness here. They wouldn’t have rebelled against Marcus Bellucci, the second Jericho. There were plenty of other students who did have a genetic and psychological passion for spilling blood, unlike Lily and Belle, but they wouldn’t have revolted either; they were too indoctrinated not to do as they were told.

Unless they had a leader.

Someone else to tell them what to do.

“We need to look at the video,” I said abruptly, and headed down the hall to the stairs. The Alpha guard station would be located in the same place here as in the first Institute. Everything was. The walls were the same, the razor wire—I’d seen the Institute’s mirror image when I’d flown over. Waiting for the arrival of Saul and our makeshift army at a safe distance, that had been the plan—that and a slight addendum: Stefan would shoot Raynor if we saw him approaching the Institute, because he was not taking a student, even Wendy—a victim herself, as lethal as she was—out of there. Everyone was going to have a chance at my cure and when it came to Raynor himself, as they said down South, he just flat-out needed killing. The last had been Stefan’s addition, but it was hard to disagree with it.

But what we saw as we flew over changed all that. It was almost seven p.m. and light enough to see easily. In the courtyard—nice name for a huge square of dirt where we were able to go out to see the sun once a day and exercise—pale, flabby assassins might stand out. We had to look normal. Jericho had never been able to fix the assassin gene that resulted in the different colored eyes, but in every other way we were to look normal.

There hadn’t been any exercising in the yard when I’d flown the Cessna over it. There’d been ten dead guards, and that was a plan-changer if ever there was one. I’d landed—landed, not crashed—the Cessna while Stefan held on to his M249 machine gun with his free hand. It was surprising what people smuggled back from Afghanistan and more surprising how easy those things were to buy . . . if you knew the right people. When it came to weapons, Stefan knew all the right people. He had Saul make the purchase instead of making it himself, to keep us hidden, but it was surprising, all in all. It wasn’t surprising, though, that he thought he might need it here.

The numbness I felt walking toward the Alpha station wasn’t that unexpected either. I should’ve been experiencing a number of emotions, all of them bad, because I already knew what this meant, but at times, too much is too much. And I wasn’t talking about the massacre here. Understanding that was simple enough. It was a rebellion, as Stefan had said. I never would’ve imagined it, but it was plain that was what had happened. But the rest of it . . .

They had killed the ones who didn’t wholeheartedly embrace what they were. Although they would’ve done what they were told, obedient to the end, they’d killed them anyway. What did the army rangers say? The best of the best?

The worst of the worst had walked out of here and they were loose in the world. They were out there, able to do whatever they pleased. What pleased them most? Freedom? No.

Death.