I’d worked on finding a cure for years, the second I managed to get a computer and a stack of books on genetics. That was where the cure had to be. Jericho had genetically altered us to add the ability to make human bodies our psychokinetic playgrounds, and that meant genetics would be the only reasonable assumption to reversing it. I read and I researched. I learned, and I didn’t like what I found out.
It was impossible to take a person, a natural human chimera already born with no supercharged healing or killing abilities, and change his genetics to become what Institute chimeras were. My kind of chimera had to be built from the ground up. The process had to start at the very beginning. Once one cell became two, the work started. There was no other way.
I hadn’t mentioned it then, when I discovered the truth, but as we might not survive Peter and the others, I wanted . . . I wasn’t sure what I wanted—a different type of truth, maybe, the only kind that mattered, that one being the one between Stefan and me. I’d once asked Stefan how he thought Jericho knew I was a chimera ripe for scooping up for the Institute. He’d said probably through a pediatrician’s office or the hospital where I’d been born. I’d been fresh out of the Institute then. I hadn’t known much about the real world. Now I did. They didn’t do DNA tests on healthy children born in hospitals surrounded by Mylar balloons and blue teddy bears. DNA tests were rare, unless you were sick, and many times a DNA test wouldn’t show a chimera—not a human one. It took several tests, testing several different sites in the body.
It was time to ask again. “You know, I’ve wondered for a while how Jericho found me. They don’t do DNA tests on babies at hospitals unless they think there’s something wrong with them.”
Stefan went with the abrupt change of subject so smoothly that I knew he’d been doing some thinking about it himself—for a while; almost three years I would guess. Picking up his toast again, he said, “It was a long time ago, but I think I remember Anatoly and Mom having trouble getting pregnant with you. They probably had fertility treatments done. You know, in case I had to be replaced.”
“Replaced?” I frowned.
He shrugged. “The
That was good, about the
“What kind of treatments?” That was me, intrigued by any kind of science. Nothing suspicious at all. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; the Great and Powerful Oz examining his brother’s psyche.
In the midst of all this—chimeras, Raynor, and digging at the inherent nature of family—I made time to miss my wall of movies. Why not? Another form of denial.
Stefan shrugged and slathered up part of his egg with the toast. “I would’ve been six. I was more into watching
The last wasn’t a distraction. It was a memory and a knife to the heart all in one.
“That’s most likely what happened.” I accepted it and gave him a few slices of bacon. The man was a fool for bacon, and that knife . . . it was in his heart. “Jericho might’ve wanted to see how one of his chimeras, engineered with our parents’ respective egg and sperm, would behave in the outside world for a short while. All good experiments need a random blind study. I could’ve been that study—chimera on the loose. And, P.S., you suck ass on the potty-training thing.”
There hadn’t been a fertility clinic, no blind studies. Before I’d come to the conclusion that all of Jericho’s children were born in a petri dish, I’d already sent my DNA to Ariel. Natural chimeras had the two different types of DNA scattered throughout their bodies for the most part. Jericho’s chimeras had the two in every cell. That was impossible for a human chimera. It was the last nail in the coffin. It wasn’t long after, to double-check my suspicion, I’d done my own DNA testing. Every drugstore had them now. Whozurdaddy? Who-zurmama? I took one of Stefan’s hairs from his brush and proved what I’d already come to know.
I’d seen the pictures. I looked like Stefan’s brother, Lukas. I had the eyes—the universe being ironic again as all Jericho’s chimeras had those eyes—I was about the same age and I’d been within a hundred miles of where he’d been kidnapped. Another irony or my salvation. Stefan’s too.
He knew I wasn’t Lukas now. He hadn’t always. When he’d rescued me, he didn’t second-guess it once. I was his brother. He believed it so deeply that I believed it too. In the face of his pure faith, I’d finally had faith myself. I’d accepted my lack of memories being some form of traumatic amnesia or caused by the fall on the rocks during the original kidnapping on the beach.
Some time after that, though, he’d found out Lukas was dead. It had to be from Anatoly. Looking back, I’d first noticed the difference at the beach house with his father. The difference wasn’t that he’d treated me as less than a brother, but that he’d insisted on it even more fiercely. That and he would do anything, once he’d been able to get out of bed after being shot by Jericho, to keep me from being alone with Anatoly. I’d thought the change had been because we’d both almost died. He’d nearly lost me again. And keeping me away from Anatoly . . . once I knew what Anatoly was, made sense. Another monster, another killer in our lives, but a useful one. But Anatoly hadn’t told me anything . . . other than to be kind to Stefan, that he deserved it.
And Stefan did, because for all his searching. . . .
Lukas was dead.
If he wasn’t, Stefan and I would be scouring the earth for his other brother. Not his real brother. I was as real as Lukas had been. I knew that. Almost three years with Stefan—there wasn’t a doubt in me about that. But if Lukas were still alive, we’d have searched until we found him and Stefan would’ve had two brothers. I thought I would’ve liked another brother. From all the stories Stefan had once told me before he knew the truth, trying to prod my memories—memories that weren’t mine—Lukas sounded as if he’d have made a great brother. Stefan didn’t tell those stories much anymore, now that he knew Lukas was gone. I’d start asking again once in a while. I wasn’t Lukas, but telling the stories would bring a part of him back to Stefan, if only for minutes or an hour.
I’d finally found that different kind of truth—a lie that wasn’t a lie at all. Stefan knew I wasn’t Lukas, but he knew I was his brother, the same as I knew that he was mine, that being brothers had nothing to do with sharing the same blood. He wouldn’t ever tell me about Lukas and he would hope I’d never find out. He wouldn’t risk that I’d again feel those doubts that I had following my rescue or that I would think he considered me any less of the brother he’d been born with.
That was Stefan.
And that was fine. That was better than fine. Some things didn’t have to be said aloud.
I also knew that while Lukas was gone, he’d given me a gift, although he’d never known me . . . or rather had never met me. He’d given me the memories of sun, wind, and horses to warm me in a place as cold as death itself. It was his best memory. Galloping up and down the beach, the ocean’s roar loud in his ears, the wind in his face—it was his best memory and mine too, although I hadn’t actually experienced it. Yet Lukas made me feel as if I had. Tangible and real as any other memory I had had in the Institute, that memory had kept me sane.
More than that, Lukas had given me a brother to pull me from that frozen sterile prison and set me free. Lukas had died, but he’d given me life. And as logical and scientifically minded as I was, I didn’t question the mysterious nature of that. It was as true and real as the sun and the sky above.
“How does it feel?” I asked, taking from his plate a jam-loaded biscuit to replace the bacon I’d given him.
“How does what feel?” he asked with a trace of caution hidden behind the words—hidden to anyone but a genius like me.
I grinned. “To be a free, off-the-shelf baby when they spent big bucks making me? I was the Cadillac of infants. You were barely a Volkswagen.”
He let me have another one of his biscuits, this time fired directly at my head. I caught it. I wasn’t going to duck and waste a perfectly good biscuit. “You’re an ass.”
“Thanks for the lessons in that. They’ve been invaluable.” I continued to grin as I took a bite of the biscuit.
