“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 stumb
led 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 go
ing 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.