Basilisk

and if “punish” wasn’t to kill slowly and painfully, then my imagination wasn’t all that I knew it was. It did though— it felt like coming home. We’d been gone only a few days, but I’d missed it. It didn’t stretch my mind, make me learn faster, soak up more knowledge, instinctively fit in better as the adrenaline rush of being on the run did, but it was a nice place all the same. It felt the same as when I watched one of my favorite movies for the fifth or tenth time. I knew every line of dialogue, every explosion, every wave that crashed against a sinking ship, every gunshot, but it was as good as the very first time I watched it . . . better almost. It was warm, familiar, and safe. I’d not had a moment of that in the Institute. I learned the value of it when I’d escaped.

The Bridge to the Heavens was blocked off on Cascade’s end by the sheriff’s car. Sheriff Simmons was dead on the road beside it, and I saw Jess Quillino, his deputy, her legs showing beyond the bumper from the other side of the car. Other than that, there were no other people around—none alive. The bridge over the dam didn’t go anywhere too important, definitely not to an infinity of heavens. If you crossed it and drove about forty miles on a single-lane road, you’d get to a town small enough that it made Cascade seem like New York City. Hardly anyone made the trip from this direction and if they were coming from the other direction, that end of the bridge was blocked by the Institute bus, long GPS disabled; I was certain.

I passed out the tranq guns, tightened my lips, and went with one hope—that I didn’t get us all killed. “Stoipah, Saul, just remember one thing. They’re not kids. They never were. If something goes wrong, they’ll kill you and they’ll laugh while they do it. If it goes bad, use your guns, not the tranq ones. And be sure to shoot them in the head. So—” I inhaled, exhaled hard, and opened the car door. “Let’s go.”

We walked around the sheriff’s car and I didn’t look at the body too closely. He’d been a nice enough man. He’d given me a break with the fake tourist. He’d played pool with Stefan. He had a wife and a little boy. If we’d never come to his town, he’d still be alive. Those thoughts weren’t helpful at the moment and I shoved them down as we headed onto the bridge.

They were waiting halfway across. We stopped forty feet short. The thirteen of them were waiting in various poses. Some stood, some sat cross-legged on the road, Wendy—my eyes locked on Wendy—sat on the threefoot- tall concrete wall that kept cars from plummeting into the river boiling at the base of the dam. Dressed in a small blue sweat suit with a spray of rhinestone flowers across the top, she was kicking her feet idly against the concrete, her fair hair lifted in the wind. She waved at me. “Hi, Michael. Hi, hi, hi. Did you see the birds? They fell like they were a part of the sky at night. Black, black everywhere. I did that. That was me.”

“I know.” Keeping her in view, I turned my attention to Peter who stood in front of them all. Peter who’d led us on this chase, had tried to kill my brother and my friend over and over, who had taken down the Institute from the inside practically on his own. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater. Peter, the Pied Piper of death. “I’m here, Peter. Now what? How are you going to punish me?” I was tense on the inside, tense enough I could feel the sharp ache of it . . . of waiting for Wendy to try anything aimed at Stefan, Saul, or me.

Peter smiled at me, that same charismatic, smug smile I was sick to death of. He said nothing. “All of this and you’re going to stare at me like an idiot? This is it, Peter. You said I had to pay. I had to be punished. Where’s your big punishment?” I wasn’t waiting. This was a perfect chance and I was taking it. Without their leader, they’d be confused if only for a fraction of a second. It would have to be enough. While I was still talking, I shot Peter in the chest with the tranquilizer cartridge at the new dosage. He had the speed—my speed—to avoid it, and I was ready to keep shooting until I hit him.

But he didn’t move—not before the shot, during, or after. He simply stood and the smile slowly fell off his face.

He looked down at the dart, puzzled, and said, the words already slurring, “What do I say, Wendy? What do . . . I . . . say . . . now?” He dropped bonelessly to the concrete, unconscious.

“Poor Peter,” Wendy chirped before her voice hardened to stone. “He was always so hopelessly stupid.”

She stopped the kicking and leaned a little as if to study me more closely. “The same as you, Michael. You reek of stupidity. You always did. You’re soft and worthless as a human, even worse than one actually because you have the gift. Not much of one, but enough. You never had the will, though.”

“You. God, I should’ve known. Peter was nothing special other than loving to kill, but you—you were always special.” She’d fed him every line, every word, all along. Every action that had been taken, the entire plan, the rebellion, it had all been her. I’d grown. I’d become a man. Wendy had grown and I had no idea what she had become.

As Saul would’ve said, we were well and truly screwed now.

“As special as they came, that I am. And that was a problem. A very large fucking problem.” Her voice had gone from little girl to adult and now it went to as rich with hate as a death row inmate. “I was bored. I’d been bored forever and they kept running out of people for me to kill at the Institute. They also started thinking,” she said, her smile coldly vicious, “and they should have. What would happen when I was bored and the Basement and animal labs were empty? I couldn’t let them think about that too long, could I? Because they knew what would happen. I wasn’t Jericho’s favorite anymore. He was gone and Bellucci—he was always afraid, from the first day he took Jericho’s place. But even if they hadn’t been starting to think I was more than they could handle, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was bored, bored, bored, and there weren’t enough people in the Institute to entertain me. The world, though, the whole, entire world—how much fun would that be?”

I saw something I hadn’t guessed at when Wendy and I shared a prison. “You were never obedient, were you? Of all of us, some more than others, you never were at all.” I thought she had been. Their goal and hers were the same—death. She had appeared perfectly happy and content. But I’d been blind. The likes of Wendy wouldn’t bow to anyone—not even to her own creator, if he’d lived.

“When I was young, I pretended. Now that I’m not . . . I stopped pretending.” She was ten years old and she thought—she knew she wasn’t young anymore. Her face, rosy pink from the wind, hardened. “They should’ve graduated me when I was three, because even then I was the best of all of you in every way.” She kicked again. It was to be shocking in its cuteness, to entertain herself by making our brain rebel at the incongruity of what she was, the inner and the outer mismatched enough to make your stomach churn. “Bellucci wasn’t Jericho of course. Security became lax. Lax, lax, lax. I like that word.” She smiled, pretty as a picture. “Until one day there was a new researcher—an older woman with a deeply buried maternal instinct that would’ve had Jericho screening her out simply by looking at her. It took a while, but I am sweet and adorable and she, like you, Michael, was stupid. I asked one day if she’d show me how to play a game on her computer. After I popped a few cells in the decision-making part of her tiny brain, she could see no harm in that.” Chimeras were never allowed on or near a computer that could access the Internet—with good reason. “That was that.”

All it took for her to learn a way to reach the outside world was one woman who wasn’t quite as soulless as the rest of the faculty. She’d have obtained her password. Gotten access to “play games” now and again, but now and again was all Wendy would need.

“I learned how much more lay outside the Institute than they ever told us. How many more people. Endless numbers of playthings. I also found a friend.” From her lips, “friend” was a word in an incomprehensible alien language. “I found one of us who’d taken care of their owner, brutally I hope, and found freedom. It made me think. What would I do if I were free?” Her smile was hideous. “What wouldn’t I do?” She looked past us. “Lily One, come say hi, hi, hi to your boyfriend.”

Stefan and Saul shifted their stance enough to see whose footsteps were coming up behind us . . . although they already knew. I’d told them. When I’d told them about everything else, I’d told them this too—that she was a chimera. It had been one reason I hadn’t worried when she’d disappeared at McDonald’s. No one could take care of themselves as she could. She stepped into sight, her smile more natural and familiar than Wendy’s. Her eyes, now chimera blue and green instead of just blue, were clear and happy. She was as she’d always been: glorious.

“Ariel.” I nodded. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”

“Misha,” she scolded, her pink hair mixing with the blue of the sky and the green of the trees like an Easter egg. “Way to turn a girl’s smile upside down. I wanted to surprise you. You’re no fun at all.” In one hand she held a metal cylinder about seven inches long and three inches in diameter.

Wendy didn’t like not being the center of attention. “Bellucci told us you were in Cascade, Michael. We could’ve killed you much sooner for your presumption without all this running around, barely playing at all, but we were waiting for Lily to finish up with her work and make her way out here. Did you plant it, Lily? Is it done?” Wendy asked.

Ariel nodded. “In the Portland International Airport.” She gave the “international” portion of the title a roll of the eyes, the same as I had, although my eye roll had been internal. “It’s barely international, but good enough for