“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 . . .
“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
