And there she was. . . . Wendy Five, but like Peter and me, no one called her anything but Wendy. Not because she was the first, but because all the other Wendys were only shadows of her. There were only twenty students left now, the rest shot by the guards. I could hear Peter’s voice, determined, but pleased too—and too damn happy for what was coming. “Wendy.” It was all he said. It was all that needed to be said.
Seven students dropped instantly and simultaneously, the angel wings of blood I’d seen earlier erupting from their eyes, their ears, noses, mouths . . . and from every pore. Ten-year-old Wendy moved closer to the bodies, putting a fingertip in her mouth and tilting her head to better judge her work. She smiled. The video was crisp and clear. I could see the healthy whiteness of her teeth, the pink of her lips, the faint outline of freckles across her nose. Her hair was as silver blond as it had been three years ago and fell like a mist of cool spring rain to her shoulders. She was a beautiful little girl; beautiful and happy. “Am I a good girl, Peter? I am, aren’t I? Like a little sister should be. I’m so good.” She tilted her head the other way. “They look like birds, don’t they? Birds with bright red wings. Fly away birds. Fly away no more.”
“You did well, Wendy, and you are a good girl. Like I always say. The best we have.” Peter bent to give her a brotherly kiss on top of her head. After that, he looked up directly into the camera in the media room, speaking to me across two weeks’ time. “Hello, Michael. We’ve missed you. Mr. Raynor told Bellucci that he’d found you in someplace called Cascade Falls.” Bellucci would’ve shared that information all too quickly if asked in the right way, and every student left standing knew how to ask. “It sounds intriguing, but then everything on the outside sounds intriguing. He also said he’d be bringing you back soon, but we couldn’t wait. We have too much to do.” He smiled and his smile was almost as cheerful as Wendy’s. “But I think we’ll be seeing you anyway. Family should stay in touch.”
Family? We had never been taught to think that way. It was highly discouraged. Bonding with fellow students could lead to . . . well . . . something like this. I hadn’t thought of it once during my time there. Since I was barely obedient and unenthusiastic, it had taken Stefan to teach me something I thought a fantasy of the outer world. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, family—all were a daydream even out there. Something like that? It couldn’t be real.
Somehow Peter had outstripped me easily and done what I couldn’t. He’d seen the value in the concept, taught it to himself, realized what I couldn’t without Stefan’s help, and learned it well enough to spread it to the other students. Some might have embraced it and some might have seen him as only better than being sold to the highest bidder by the new Jericho, Marcus Bellucci. Whichever it had been, Peter had shown intelligence beyond my own and an overwhelming charisma with the other students that he must have kept hidden from the Instructors. And he had used all that to make himself a leader. He’d taught; they’d listened. Every student had transferred his submission to him and not to his new maker.
Peter was obviously smarter than I was, and Wendy, his “little sister,” could kill in ways I didn’t want to think about. We were in serious shit. And I hadn’t thought it could get more difficult than only trying to rescue them.
My skills at seeing all the possibilities, every potential outcome had faded since I’d left the Institute— badly.
The video continued to show the rest. In an instant they filed out of the room. We could watch their progress as they went down the hall, upstairs, and out to the exercise yard. We had always had one bus, for field trips—to malls usually—to see if we could function, although heavily drugged just in case, in the real world among real people. Peter put his lost boys and girls on that bus and the last video shot was of it disappearing down a dirt road toward Barstow. I thought I saw Wendy waving enthusiastically from the back window.
“That was the little girl I saw when I rescued you, isn’t it?” Stefan said. He’d seen Wendy face-to-face then and was more than lucky he was around to tell that story. Wendy must have been just curious enough to let him live, to see what would happen.
Wendy became bored easily. Many graves could attest to that.
I nodded and rubbed my eyes with two fingers. “Wendy. Jericho’s pride and joy. Although sometimes I think he was afraid of her as well.”
“Why did he do it?” Stefan asked quietly. “Why did that guy—Peter?—why did he have her kill the other kids? They were in on it. Not that I blame them. Getting out of this hellhole, I’d have done anything too. But why did that one, Peter, the kid in charge, have Wendy kill the other ones?”
“Peter’s not a kid. He’s about my age,” I said, thinking to myself that meant he was all the more deadly for it. “And there’s a difference between obedience and enthusiasm,” I said grimly, slumping in the chair. “The birds with the red wings,” as Wendy called them, “were the difference. They did what they were told, but they didn’t like it or dislike it. It was just something they had to do, like brushing their teeth. Apparently obedience isn’t enough for Peter. He wants the varsity team.” I used a sports term. Stefan had taught me a lot of those. Now I had to teach him. He thought he knew it all, what had been done to me, the life I’d come from, but I’d painted him a blurry picture. It was time to sharpen it. It was time for what I’d hoped I wouldn’t ever have to do.
It was time to tell him about the Basement.
I was leading Stefan down the hall when he asked, “Where are we going? It stinks to holy hell in here and I’d think you’d have had your fill of seeing dead bodies today. I know I have.”
“I’ve seen dead bodies all my life,” I replied, then added for him, “All of my life I can remember, I mean.”
I moved around one as I said that and opened the door that led to a set of stairs. Stefan balked. “This doesn’t go to another medical lab, does it?” He remembered the layout of the old Institute almost as well as I did. There would be nothing like the memory of getting your ten-year-lost brother back to etch a floor plan into a person’s mind. “Because I’ve seen only one of those and I don’t want to see another. I don’t want you to see another either.” Stefan had seen where they took samples of our blood and tissue, scanned us, where they implanted the tracking chips over the base of our spines, and where they took apart their failures—failures with names and lives, storing their organs in a large medical refrigerator. Luckily they kept that locked and Stefan hadn’t seen the contents. The Basement was enough. I was glad he hadn’t seen where I would’ve ended up—not obedient enough, not enthusiastic enough. It was common knowledge among the students what that refrigerator held.
Why wouldn’t it be? Jericho told us.
It didn’t mean I wanted Stefan to know, which made me the overprotective one this time. Taking turns was what we did. It was what real family did and what Peter’s “family” had no interest in at all.
“No, it’s not the med lab,” I answered as I started down the stairs. “It’s a lab, though, and I think you need to see it. The researchers called it the Basement. Some students”—Wendy, first and foremost, I thought to myself —“called it the Playground.”
Stefan followed me, but the trudge of his feet on the stairs told me he wasn’t happy about it. “I don’t have a whole lot of desire to see someplace that girl called the Playground.”
“You aren’t . . . weren’t the only one who thought that.” I reached the bottom and opened the door. It was already unlocked and bore the thumbprint of a guard’s hand, which was now lying on the floor. The guard was superfluous, heavy, and unnecessary. Only the hand had been needed. I stepped around it and into the lab to turn on the lights inside. Two weeks—that one guard upstairs had been an exception. I didn’t think we’d find any pseudo zombies down here.
I ignored the room. I remembered its double in Florida, although I’d seen it only once. Large with five cells, the room held video cameras to record the “play” and computers to type in reports for Jericho—or for Bellucci after Jericho’s death. Bellucci was here now, right here. I couldn’t recognize his face through the rot, not from the other four researchers dead on the floor, but his once-starched and immaculate lab coat had his name stitched over his chest. It was easily readable through the stains. He had less confidence or more false pride than Jericho. Jericho wore a suit. He didn’t need his name out there like a billboard. We knew who he was—the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega of our lives. That didn’t need a name tag. It would be the same as marking the Apocalypse on a puppies and kittens wall calendar.
Pointless.
I took what I was searching for from the flop and stink of Marcus Bellucci’s hand. An eight-by-ten rectangle —I could picture him holding it between him and Wendy or Peter as the most useless of shields. It was only a clipboard, made to hang on a hook beside the door. It wasn’t high-tech like most things in the Institute, but it was as informative.
Stefan, I saw from the corner of my eye, had walked forward to examine the cells. They were the same as
