I was the same as a gun. I had my safety on, but that didn’t mean I didn’t deserve to be treated with caution and respect by those who knew me for what I was. I should be given the consideration of any other weapon. Not by my brother, but certainly by a tantric-practicing, horny old criminal who from the neon bright blue, purple, and green of his shirt was color-blind. Forty-five if he was a day. Definitely old. Practically in senility territory. He might be a vegan, Stefan had said, but there were so many things in the body that could go wrong with only the slightest push. You were never as healthy as you thought, especially with a chimera around. And worst of all, he had called me Mikey. I growled low in my throat and followed Stefan to our room.
When the door shut behind us, I tossed my bags onto the bed farthest from the door. Old habit—before we’d settled in Cascade Falls with rooms of our own, Stefan always slept on the bed between me and the door. “I can make him impotent, you know. Or all his hair fall out. I wonder how he’d like that.” Saul had a thick head of hair . . . for his advanced age. That would destroy him. Bald and impotent—no more tantric sex camp; his life as he knew it would be over. I gave it consideration. Close or casual—whichever it was, I wasn’t going to admit to it.
“Getting cranky, are we?” Stefan dumped his own bags. “And Saul likes you.”
“He called me
“He’s just yanking your chain. That’s what he does to people he likes. People he doesn’t like . . .”—Stefan shrugged—“he hits in the throat and crushes their larynx. It’s a distinction I think you can make. Besides, you’re not a woman and yet he can actually still see you. For Skoczinsky, that’s huge.”
“He looks like an orange-haired peacock,” I grumbled. “I think his shirt destroyed my retinas.”
“I remember your first shopping trip. Trust me, your taste wasn’t any better than his then.” Stefan locked the door and jammed the chair under the handle. It was done as automatically as it had been years ago. We were both falling into the old ways.
I couldn’t deny his claim. I’d gone from barely seventeen with shirts portraying Einstein, Freud, Marilyn Monroe, and Marvin the Martian to simple, gray long-sleeved T-shirts, jeans, and a dark brown leather jacket. At first it had been to not stand out. Then it had become routine, and finally it had become me—as buying planes and playing a drug dealer had become me.
I’d kept the Einstein magnets on the refrigerator, though, a memory of my first days free. But they were gone now too—burned to a crisp. Except for . . . I opened up my backpack, pulled out a wad of soft, faded material, and saw one of Marvin’s eyes winking at me from the folds. I laid it beside the pillow and Godzilla hopped from my shoulder with a satisfied chirp to curl up in it.
Stefan sat on his bed after stripping off his jacket and pulling the Steyr out of his shoulder holster to lay it on the bedside table. “Michael . . .”
“Misha,” I reminded him. I wasn’t Michael. I wasn’t one of them anymore.
“Misha,” he repeated, aggrieved—only mildly, but. . . .
Aggravation was one of the easier emotions to identify and use. Simple irritability could be escalated to an attention-drawing rage with the few right words. Then, while chaos ensued, you could slip away and be within touching reach of your target within seconds. A chimera didn’t need seconds. We needed only the most fleeting of touches.
I blinked and shook my head slightly. Other old habits, pre-Stefan ones, were coming back as well. Not habits, lessons. And I could forget them if I tried hard enough . . . not today or tomorrow. I still needed them, but someday, when freedom was permanent.
“That’s three names now, four if you count Parker. One more and I’m just getting it over with and calling you Cher. So, Misha,” he said, emphasizing it carefully, sarcasm in every letter, “what do you think they’ll do now that they’re out? Peter and his Dickensian gang of would-be criminals? What would they want?”
Dickens, Charles. Born 1812; died 1870. I shuffled through my memory. Fiction, boring, gray, and grim . . . unless the orphans were singing about starvation on stage. That might rev it up some, but I had never watched it and didn’t plan to, so that was a theory unproved. “Dickensian? I guess they are Dickensian, if Oliver Twist ever made anyone vomit up their own intestines.”
No longer irritated, but blank, Stefan looked over at his gun. It was the kind of emotional vacuum some people—
But he didn’t. He didn’t know. He only thought he did and he might as well jump off the Empire State Building if he couldn’t do better.
“For the last time, Stefan, they aren’t kids,” I emphasized. “ ‘Kid’ is a measure of age in the outside world. In the Institute, it has no meaning. Look at what Wendy did, and she’s ten. You wouldn’t ask a rattlesnake how old it was, would you? Age doesn’t matter. From ten to eighteen”—which covered Peter to Wendy—“any of them can and will kill you, given the slightest opportunity. And that is what they want.” I stroked Godzilla as he slept, chirring in his sleep, paws twitching. “They’re not like me, Stefan. Not these thirteen.” It was an unfortunate number, just as history claimed it to be.
“They like what they are and what they can do. They like it more than anything. They aren’t going to settle down in some little town.” I felt another pang at losing Cascade Falls, shoved it down, and pushed on. “They are going to kill people. And I doubt there will be any rhyme or reason to it. They’re out of the assassin factory and in the chocolate factory. Every day is dessert Sunday and everyone they come across is potentially . . .”—I shrugged as unease tightened my spine—“dead meat.” I’d almost said “victim,” but that made it too desperate, too gut- wrenching. When facing the Institute’s best and worst in one, we’d have to be as cold as they were or we wouldn’t have a chance of surviving. Pit emotion against a chimera and you would die.
Stefan looked at me with a more familiar expression. He didn’t get it, despite what he said. “No, they’re not like you. I get that, believe it or not.” He got up to move to the bathroom, shoving my head lightly as he passed me. “I’m glad you get it too.” He closed the door behind him, and I heard the shower start. I fell back across the bed and stared at the dingy yellow ceiling. No, he didn’t get it and he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t understand Institute- born were never kids, never children. It was the damn age thing; otherwise he would’ve gotten it and known a murderer when he saw one. I wasn’t the only one who’d spent years surrounded by killers. Stefan had done his time too. He was like me in that way.
We were two peas in a poisonous pod—or two peas who’d escaped their pod and were living the life they wanted. Hardworking, good people who wouldn’t hurt a fly if they had their way. I noticed Stefan’s gun was gone. It would be with him in the bathroom and I remembered the man he’d shot only this morning.
Okay, maybe we fell somewhere in between.
Sitting up, I reached for the laptop in my duffel bag and checked to see if Ariel was online. She kept both late and early hours, the same as I did. She’d once said there was so much to do in life that she would sleep when she was dead. I pointed out she was a Buddhist and would never be dead, only reincarnated. She said I was a smart- ass. And I was smart, but I hadn’t meant to be an ass. It was a clear supposition: You can’t sleep when you’re dead if you’re never actually dead. Then she said she was Buddhist only on Tuesdays. She practiced a different religion or philosophy every day. How else could you learn?
It was a good point. I personally thought Buddhism was too challenging. With Christianity, you said you were sorry and poof, you were forgiven. In Buddhism, it didn’t matter how sorry you were. If you did the crime, you did the time—boot camp for your soul. That was why I hadn’t picked a philosophy or religion yet. I wanted to check out all my options and find the one with the most loopholes combined with the least amount of time consumption. I had things to do. Garages weren’t going to blow themselves up, now were they?
Ariel was online. Her icon picture popped up immediately on IM. Instant messaging was a little riskier than e-mail for hacking, but I had so many fake addresses bouncing this and my many e-mail addys nearly a hundred times around the globe that you’d have to be a computer genius times ten to track my location. Institute personnel, except for Jericho, had never had the imagination for that—hacking is an art, not a science. Institute students didn’t have access to the Internet, and no World of Warcraft basement dweller-hacker wannabe knew I existed. Security was as good as I wanted it to be.
We had a standing weekly movie . . . thing. It wasn’t a date, definitely not; only a . . . thing. We watched the movies at the same time and IM’ed back and forth, either mocking it or betting we could do it better. The flux
