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.
