considering. But you were hurt. You’d done something to make me happy, and I yelled at you for it.”
I still had that bike. It was in my condo storage unit. It was one of those things you simply couldn’t look at, yet couldn’t throw away.
“Did you ride it that way?”
Surprised, I laughed. “Um . . . yeah, I did. For a while.”
I’d forgotten about that. We’d lived in an actual neighborhood at that time, with sidewalks and huge houses on postage stamp-sized lots. I’d tooled up and down our street on that clown cycle to universal howls of laughter. Mom had been alive then and she’d gently coerced me into it, saying it was the only way to cheer up Lukas. “It was pretty humiliating, but I guess I don’t have any right to complain.” As understatements went, it was a goddamn doozy, but Michael didn’t challenge it. Why would he? As far as he was concerned, it had nothing to do with him. If he didn’t accept that he was my brother, then he could hardly blame me for his life with Jericho.
“I never had a bike.” There was a bag of pretzels beside him and he dug for a handful. “But I prefer cars anyway. Purple, yellow—the color’s not important as long as they’re fast.”
“A potential speed demon—that’s all I need,” I remarked with a roll of my eyes, accepting the snack bag he passed me. He was joking, I was fairly sure. The times he’d driven, he’d been very careful to stay within the speed limit even before I’d explained that the last thing we wanted was to be pulled over by a cop. “Hey, it seems I’m always the one doing the talking, telling the tall tales. Let’s hear some from you.” I didn’t know if he was ready for that, but I wanted to give him the opportunity. He’d already told me about the classes, the training, the experiments, but he had been careful to keep it impersonal and at arm’s length as if it had happened to someone else. If he had expended even an ounce of emotion in the telling, I’d missed it.
“You don’t want to hear my stories.” He leaned forward to deposit a pretzel by the sleeping ferret’s head. “Boring, all of them. Eat, sleep, go to class—not much entertainment value there.”
“I’m not a demanding audience,” I prompted. “So lay it on me.” At his continued silence, I nudged him with my shoulder. “I know they won’t be happy stories, kid, but don’t pull any punches. I want to know what you went through at that hellhole.”
“At the Institute.” His head dipped and fingers wrapped around a strand of hair over his eyes. Tapping those knuckles against his forehead, he exhaled. “It’s been only days. I can’t believe it. When I wake up in the morning it takes me a minute to remember that I’m not still there, but the rest of the day”—he shook his head—“the rest of the day it seems forever that you showed up in my room dressed up like a Hollywood ninja.”
That had been last night’s cheesy movie. That was one thing Michael hadn’t gotten his fill of at the Institute. He would watch a movie on any subject—good, bad, or just plain freaky. I let the ninja remark, damaging though it was to my ego, sail past and I waited for him to go on.
“I didn’t think you were there for me. Not for one minute, not for one second. You were just another test, one I couldn’t pass. Jericho had made it clear I wasn’t doing too well. Graduation was coming up for me, but I wasn’t living up to my potential.”
I could hear the quotes around the last word. “How many graduated before you?”
“A few. I’m the oldest now, but it doesn’t go by age.” He released his hair and dropped his hands onto his knees. Lifting his shoulders slightly, he let them fall in a small shrug so precise, so controlled that any casual element was lost. “But I wasn’t going to make it. I’m not as obedient as the other students, and I don’t like to kill. I’m good at it, but I don’t like it.” Pitch-black humor came and went in his face. “Your Wendy will probably graduate before she turns eight.”
Not my Wendy, thank God. That was a thought I didn’t want to contemplate, and it led me to others of a similar nature. What if I’d opened Michael’s door to find that he was like that little girl, his brain as twisted as his genes? What if taking him into an unsuspecting world hadn’t been feasible? As I’d said, they were thoughts not worth thinking.
“You? Disobedient? The hell you say.”
With a jaundiced air at my mockery, he revised. “Maybe it would be better to say unenthused.”
There was the crunch of teeth against rock-hard bread and I swiveled my head to see the drowsy ferret clutching the pretzel in its peculiarly adept paws as it nibbled. The sight reminded me of my earlier curiosity. “Jericho, do you know how he lost his hand?” Since he healed at the same breakneck pace as Michael, I would’ve thought, short of chopping the appendage off, any normal damage would heal.
“John.” He frowned and got to his feet. “It was John.” Moving over to the window, he fiddled with the blinds. Fidgeting was uncustomary behavior for Michael. He was so routinely sanguine, in his way as unflappable as our father was—or as Konstantin had been. Like both of them, he lived deep inside himself. But whereas my father and former boss came by the trait through the slow erosion of their finer human emotions, Michael had developed his out of a sense of survival. It made sense, that inner retreat; for him it had always been far safer there.
“John?”
Opening and closing the slats, he let in the dim yellow illumination of the security lights that bathed the parking lot. “He was the only one older than me. He was my first roommate, the first person I can actually remember in my life.” He kept his back to me as he talked, still gazing out of the window. “Aside from Jericho.”
I remembered how he said they numbered the children, identified them as the experiments they were considered to be. Wendy had been Wendy Three, and Michael had said he was the first with no number necessary. “The first John then.”
“The first one,” he affirmed. “And the only one. There were no Johns after him. Jericho retired the name, I guess you’d say.”
“He retired John too, didn’t he?” I asked quietly when he fell silent, lost in the golden haze drifting through the glass.
He didn’t answer and that in itself was answer enough. “He was like Jericho in a lot of ways, same features, same hair and skin. The eyes were a different color, of course, but the same shape. They looked as if they could’ve been”—he struggled for a moment and then settled on a word—“related.” The concept of family, of father and son, brother to brother, was almost a myth to him. It was something to be read about in books and watched in the endless stream of movies, but not something that he’d seen close up in the walled-off microcosm that had been his world. No wonder he was having such a difficult time with it, and me, now.
“A miniature Jericho? Now there’s a scary thought,” I commented with utter sincerity.
“No. On the outside they were similar, but on the inside John was nothing like Jericho. Nothing like me either.” There was self-recrimination there, a thin brittle layer under a glittering frost of calm. “John wanted to be free. He always wanted to be free. I can’t remember how many times he tried to escape. He wanted me to go with him, but I never would. Not the first time. Not the last time.” The blinds were closed with a savage snap. “He kept asking me why. Time after time. When the lights were out for the night, he would whisper it so they wouldn’t hear. Why? Why won’t you come?”
“And what did you say?”
“Where would we go?” he responded evenly.
It was the question of a prisoner serving a life sentence. Only this prisoner had been a child, one with no memory of anything but the cage he lived in and the monster that ruled it. Where could we go that Jericho wouldn’t find us? Where would we ever fit in? How could we survive in an outside world as inexplicably alien as a distant star? I wasn’t sure that I would’ve been any different if the situation had been reversed. John must have been unique in that respect, with a will that was as superhuman as the rest of him. Poor damn kid.
“How old was John?” I let the rest of the question hang in the air, implied. How old was he when he made the last futile attempt?
“About twelve.”
Only twelve. Jesus Christ.
Michael gave up on the window. What he wanted to see wasn’t there; wouldn’t ever be there. “He slipped out of bed one night and just . . . never came back. I didn’t think he had made it, though. I never thought that. And when I saw Jericho two days later with his hand missing, I knew for sure. We can heal fast, but we can destroy even faster. John didn’t make it.” He swallowed, but his voice remained calm. “But at least he took part of that son of a bitch with him. It was afterward that Jericho wouldn’t let any of us get close enough to touch him or the teachers anymore. They carried stun guns in case any of us tried.”
“What about Wendy?”
