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—
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.
Chapter 5
The station was empty. All the guards would’ve seen what had been unfolding on their monitors and had likely run out with guns and Tasers in hand, for all the good it had done them. I sat down in one
