Basilisk

given the chance?

All right, that was completely psychologically healthy. Not fucked-up in the slightest. Stefan gave me encouraging pushes toward other people, and I yanked him back with my background checks and my occasional infliction of gastric reflux on his rare dates. I was a genius and an idiot wrapped into one, but most of all . . . I was a dick. And unlike other things in my life, there was nothing theoretical about that.

“Sorry, Saul,” I grumbled. “I won’t turn your body and its ability to process Viagra against you.” At his elderly fortysomething, he was bound to require it. “Just, seriously, don’t call me Mikey, all right?”

A hard smack hit my back and Saul’s gloating grin didn’t have to be seen—only imagined, clear as a bell. “Sure thing . . . Mikey.”

I really did hate him.

The body, a man in his seventies, was sprawled in the tall weeds by a detached concrete building—too big to be a shed, too small to be a garage. The decomposition was more advanced than that of those in the Institute, but Wyoming had had some rare rain over the past week and the coyotes hadn’t let some fast food of their own pass by. Both Stefan and Saul leaned in for a closer look and then stepped back a few paces when the smell truly hit them. To me it wasn’t any worse than the smell of cooking cabbage coming from the Institute cafeteria—different but no worse, and in some ways, not as bad. Cabbage was disgusting.

“They came straight here from the Institute.” I straightened from my crouch. “He was about a month away from a massive stroke. A dead man walking, isn’t that what they say? No challenge, no fun. They didn’t bother to play with him. One of them simply blew out his aorta and down he went.”

“I’d say that’s something at least, but I’m not sure it is.” Stefan was slowly picking up on these chimeras being nothing like me. That was good. It would make him more careful. “Let’s take a look in the outbuilding, then get the hell out of here while you explain how we’re going to track down this pack of rabid human wolves and fix them.”

“Kids did this,” Saul mused. “I know what you guys have said, but it’s weird to see.”

“This?” I shook my head and tossed him my own phone. “This is nothing. If they had it in them, you could almost call it a mercy killing. Here. I transferred some of the Institute video onto it. Take a look. You might want to see for yourself what all of this really is.”

Stefan tried the handle on the metal door. It was locked. He tried kicking it down as he had the front door of the house, but he only ended up cursing. “I think that poor bastard thought Y2K was the end times and planned on riding it out here. You can pick the lock or I can shoot it out.”

“How do you know I can pick locks?” I asked suspiciously.

“Assassin, drug lord, bomber, hacker, man of a million identities. Now that you’ve come out of the closet as a master criminal and not the little brother who can’t understand Lolcats, I’m pretty sure there’s not much out there illegal that you can’t do.” He didn’t appear pleased at that, only tired. “You grew up to be me. It’s not what I wanted, Misha.”

“It’s not real,” I said quietly. “It’s not forever. It’s only until we’re safe for good. And I don’t make any money off any of it. I’m a pro bono criminal.” I tried to smile. It didn’t feel real either. “We’re the only ones who benefit from it and that benefit is staying alive. It’s not the same as what you had to do.” I didn’t want to disappoint Stefan, but I didn’t want him dead either. I’d do what I had to, just as he had.

I fished inside my jeans pocket for a tiny packet of metal tools rolled up in a piece of felt. As I went to work on the lock, I heard Saul make a sound. If there was a word for it, that particular mixture of horror and disbelief, I didn’t know what it was. I could hear the tinny screams from my phone and then Peter’s and Wendy’s voices. But the time I had the door unlocked, Saul gave the phone back to me. “Okay,” he said, brusque and pale under that leathery Miami tan. “I’ve seen it. I get it now. Let’s go.” I noticed he’d dropped the phone into my hand without touching my fingers. I had a feeling there would be no more “Mikey’s” from now on. I’d wanted respect. I had it. I hadn’t wanted fear, but I had that too.

If wishes were horses, they’d kick you in the gut and, when you were down, dump a steaming load of manure on your head. Why didn’t useless homilies ever tell it to you straight?

“We’re in.” I put away the picks and my phone.

“Good job, vors.” Vors—it meant boss in the Mafiya. This time the comment was said with an exasperated light swat to my jaw and a reluctant pride to the compliment. “Sorry I came down on you, kid. You’re doing the best you can, which is better than I did.” Then the sugary sweet, birthday-cake-frosting moment was over—one of the moments guys aren’t supposed to acknowledge—and Stefan was pushing open the door cautiously. It was dark inside, darker than the house had been. Here there was only one tiny window set up high in the back wall. I could make out the shape of a riding lawn mower, some tools against the right wall—a rake and shovel were most likely. I could see the cables running up the walls. This place was wired for electricity. So where was the switch? I had just spotted it, halfway back on the left wall—a stupid and inconvenient place to put it—when I saw something else almost at the same time. Less than half a second separated the discoveries.

It was a girl. She looked four or maybe five; it was impossible to tell in murk this thick. She was standing in a back far corner, facing into it—a bad girl who was sent for a time-out, nose to the wall. She had bright blond hair, but not as blond as Wendy’s. It was tied back in two ponytails. There might have been ribbons . . . I narrowed my eyes, and the gloom and shadows lightened. Ribbons, blue ribbons. Her dress was blue as well, her socks pale, probably white, her shoes gone. She didn’t move, didn’t say a word. She was a child left to die alone in a locked building, too afraid to turn and ask for help, too terrified to know we were better than the ones who left her there.

Except. . . .

She wasn’t crying for help because she wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t turning toward us and freedom because her heart wasn’t beating. I couldn’t hear it or sense it. I couldn’t feel the life in her because there was no life. There hadn’t been any life in her, not for a moment. I knew life. You couldn’t steal it if you didn’t recognize it and any chimera would know what she was—a fake; a life-sized doll.

A trap.

But Stefan wasn’t a chimera. He was a man and a good one. He had been taught by his bodyguard days to be cautious and suspicious, but this was a little girl and not one he’d seen on the Institute video. To him, all he would see was that she wasn’t a chimera. To human eyes it was too dark to recognize she wasn’t anything at all. Before I could open my mouth to tell him to stop, he was there, turning the toy around. It didn’t matter that he felt the plastic under his hand and backed up immediately. It was too late. The wire was tripped and the cloud that billowed was as thick as a summer storm.

Chlorine gas—it was easy enough to make. Rob your kitchen or bathroom of ammonia and bleach and Mr. Charles Darwin stepped in. You could scrub your toilet and die with a brush in one hand and People magazine in the other, or you could be a chimera, smarter than you had any natural right to be, and use it. You could gather enough, put it in a container, seal it, connect it to a trip wire that was attached to a doll cute enough to pass for the real thing, and you had a way to kill two men almost instantly . . . or however many men happened to be with the Institute escapee trailing you. It wasn’t a good way to go, the gas. Your lungs scarred nearly immediately from the corrosive fumes, then filled with fluid, drowning you. If mixed right, it was fatal.

If you were a chimera yourself, it was mildly inconvenient. We were made to be predators, not victims.

I didn’t bother to yell Stefan’s name. It would be time wasted. I ran for him, grabbed his arm as he started to stagger, then raced back toward the door. Along the way, Saul was starting to drop to his knees. I used my other hand to grab his shirt, another brain-bleed-colored monstrosity, and yanked him along too. The rectangle of light we’d entered through wasn’t far, but in a cage of poison gas, far is relative and time is not your friend. I managed to get them outside, each step seemingly mired in mud as thick and cloying as molasses and quicksand, before dropping them in the grass as I slammed the door shut behind us. Then I grabbed each by the shirt collar and dragged them farther away. Little gas would escape that sturdy metal door, but I wasn’t much for playing odds, especially when it came to the lives of my brother and my friend.

I sat between them in the scratchy, high-arching weeds and laid a hand on each of their chests. “It’s okay. Chlorine gas is easy to make, but Peter hasn’t been out of the Institute long enough to know the Internet is usually wrong. He didn’t get the mixture right. The ratios were incorrect for a lethal blend. It’s nasty, but no worse than pepper spray. Take some deep breaths. You’ll be all right.”