Cut back on them enough to be lucid, would you?”
The sirens behind us were louder and closer. Who needed to be lucid to know that wasn’t good? “Shit.” Stefan twisted his head. “I made it through the mob years without having to shoot at a cop once. Doesn’t it goddamn figure? Think I can hit the tires of three police cars?”
“Gun.” My tongue felt thick, but I could do the little words. Cake of piece. Or something like that. “Micro. Wave. Gun.”
“Okay, that I approve of. Beats pipe bombs by a mile. Where the hell is it?” He leaned over me, careful not to rest any weight on my chest, and dug around in my duffel bag. “Damn it!” I saved my sympathy. He’d packed the bags when they’d come after Raynor, Ariel, and me.
“Forget? Old. Senile. We need a drugstore . . . adult diapers.”
“Misha, seriously. Dial down the damn endorphins. Jesus, finally.” He yanked the microwave gun out of my backpack, rolled down the window, and, holding me against him with one hand as we rose up off the seat, he leaned out and fired. “Christ, it worked.” As if anything I built wouldn’t work. He fired two more times and there were no more sirens. Easing back inside, he dropped the gun in the floorboards.
“Way to save our ass, kid,” Saul said from the front. “You done good.”
“Always do good. I’m brilliant. The most brilliant genius to. . . .” I lost my train of thought and then caught a more important one. “Still hungry.”
“Saul, emergency kit.” Stefan lifted his hand from my chest and caught the bag that sailed back. Stefan didn’t go anywhere with me, on the run or living our once peacefully mundane lives in Cascade, without food. I didn’t know if chimeras in general required more calories than humans or if it was merely me, but I outate Stefan three times over.
Outate.
Which reminded me again.
Food.
Now.
Stefan had a ham sandwich half—unwrapped. I snatched it clumsily from his hand and took huge bites, swallowing without chewing. While I ate, I did what Stefan suggested and eased back on the endorphins, although I hated to see the rainbows in the streamers of sun disappear. They were nice. They reminded me of home. There they arched over the river and the dam almost every week. It was the reason the bridge that topped the dam was called the Bridge of the Heavens. It made more sense than a golden ladder.
But I wasn’t dead yet, so no Paradise for me.
As I finished the sandwich and eased back on the production of the endorphins, I began to notice things. The pain that stabbed my ribs was gone. A point against lucidity. Stefan was the other thing I noticed. When I’d woken up, I’d seen him covered in dirt, dust, and blood. He hadn’t been hit or clipped by a semi, but a building had fallen on him as it had on me. “Are you. . . . ?” I grimaced and braced my ribs with my hand. “Are you all right?” My body wasn’t close to full capacity yet. I couldn’t feel if he was hurt or not. My lingering damage took precedence and I couldn’t change that. The body’s self-preservation overrode what my mind ordered it to do. I raised my other hand and swiped at the blood-dust paste on his face to see the damage. There were several cuts and scrapes, but they weren’t bad. The blood was from them and his nose. It didn’t look broken, though. It was all superficial, but that was nothing compared to what could be going on inside him.
“I’m all right,” he assured me. “Sore and getting less and less male-model material all the time, but I’ll live.”
I wouldn’t be satisfied until I knew for myself. Lucid and determined, both made me inescapable. “More food,” I demanded grimly, opening my eyes. I went through three more sandwiches and two Gatorades in five minutes. It helped. My ribs were healing, but not instantly. Bone was slower to repair than anything else. After eating, I lay quietly, Stefan’s legs remaining my pillow. With my eyes shut, I concentrated on stretching my limits further. Damn stubborn bone. “Does your back or neck hurt? Your abdomen, chest, head?”
Stefan had explained while I was eating how part of the ceiling had dropped, one end resting on top of the semi and the other landing on top of him where he’d been flung to the floor. It had been what had shielded us from chunks of the second floor and saved our lives. There’d been barely enough room for him to grab and drag me with him as he tunneled through tangled cots and debris to crawl under the semi and out the hole it had knocked in the front wall. He also was filling Saul in on what had happened with Peter when I’d interrupted with my woefully inadequate attempt at a diagnostic.
“I’m fine, Misha,” he reiterated. “I’m a muscle-bound human. You’re a skinny chimera who lies like a dog.” He gave me a napkin to wipe his blood from my hand. Some of it, along with dirt and dust, had ended up on the sandwiches, but I was too ravenous and too set on feeding the healing process to care. “Of the two of us, who do you think is going to walk away?”
I wanted to snort, but I knew what my ribs would think of that. “I’m athletic, like a runner.”
I had the self-esteem to know that was true. The six and a half times I’d had sex, no one had any complaints about my body. In fact, they’d enjoyed the look of it and definitely enjoyed what I could do with it. I had read up on the subject beforehand. I wanted to do it right and from the reactions, I thought I had . . . excepting the half time, which had been my first. The books said that was normal too. “So what if I’m not a walking triangle of steroids,” I added. That, however, was completely untrue, but if I couldn’t have endorphins, I could sting my brother . . . and distract him. He was joking with me, but there was no humor in it. In less than twenty-four hours I’d been kidnapped, in a car wreck, hit by a truck, and had a building fall on me. As brothers went, I was high maintenance.
As an apology, when I asked for a candy bar, I broke off half and gave it to him. With my obsession with food, there was no higher gesture. He accepted it with all the gravity it deserved. Or he was mocking me. Either way, the graveyard shadows in his eyes receded and that was enough for me.
Godzilla, curled on my stomach, had been chirping nervously. As I was giving the ferret a peanut from the PayDay bar, Saul put down the visor against the searing Tucson light that sunglasses couldn’t handle and said, “I don’t get it. You said they killed all those gangbangers in there. That punk-ass teenage Jim Jones said this wasn’t about Michael’s being good enough to join up with their
“Because they’re not done playing yet.” My muscles tightened. The moment was coming. I’d put it off as long as I could—too long. This came from a combination of Institute-ingrained secrecy and something else. Once I was free, I’d picked up quickly the practice of denial. Inside Institute walls, it was impossible. Outside them, it was a drug—mental heroin. The more you did, the more you’d do. I was headed straight into cold turkey rehab now.
“Peter didn’t say play. He said punish,” Stefan said quietly, but without yielding. He’d been patient with my evasions these past few days, giving me the chance to prove I was the man I said I was. That patience was over. “Why do they want to punish you? What did all Peter’s bullshit mean?”
The moment was closer, its consequence-laden breath on the back of my neck.
I sat up slowly, Stefan’s hand bracing me. Godzilla slithered to the floorboards in search of more peanuts. I settled against the seat, giving my ribs a chance to get used to the change of position and increased pain. It was all done slowly, but not as slowly as I answered Stefan. “It means Peter knows more than he’s saying.”
“He’s not the only one, is he?”
The moment was here.
“No,” I said, “he’s not.”
It was time for the truth and I told it—the majority of it. There was one thing I held back. Among other things, I told them Peter knew about the cure. What I didn’t tell was the truth of the cure itself. I had to. If I hadn’t, the only cure for the chimeras would be a bullet to their brains. Killing thirteen teenagers and children, murderous or not, would be on Stefan’s and Saul’s consciences for the rest of their lives. I wasn’t going to let them carry that with them, especially when I couldn’t take part of that weight myself.
I wasn’t a killer; it was a vow to myself—not one that I wouldn’t break, but one that I couldn’t.
Not a killer, never again.
I was a liar, though.
