Basilisk

It was flesh, not bone. Bone was difficult; flesh was easy. Wasn’t it? Hadn’t I said so? Hadn’t I proved so? And a heart, that was merely—shit, Stoipah, don’t—that was only the engine that kept the entire body running. You could do without one of those for a good four or five minutes without brain damage; if the body was cold, hypothermic, then longer. I dropped his body temperature like a rock as I carefully put his heart back together, bit by bit. It had to be right, had to be perfect or it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t. . . .

I stopped thinking and healed—that and nothing more. I poured every ounce of my ability from me into him. I did the impossible. I made his heart whole again but it didn’t beat.

I raised his temperature back to normal but it didn’t beat.

I was terrified, desperate, desolate, and fucking pissed off, and I gave it the biggest bio-electrical jolt I could manage. I gave him everything I had and felt the blackness creeping around the edges of my vision as I slumped across his unmoving chest.

You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down.

Until you do.

The darkness was complete. I didn’t know for how long, but when I opened my eyes, I felt a hand patting my back and saw breakfast brown eyes smiling at me. “You’re a miracle, kid. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Don’t call me kid.” I swiped at my eyes, which weren’t wet; I didn’t care what anyone said. “Ah, Jesus. Call me kid whenever the fuck you want.”

If I let my big brother hug me, I wasn’t going to admit to that either.

Theoretically.

Saul helped us both up. Stefan was steadier than I was, but that was from all the energy I’d expended. Big boys don’t cry and all that manly crap. Around us all the chimeras save one were down and unconscious. Saul shrugged. “She didn’t try to attack us. She didn’t do anything at all. I thought you might want to talk to her before whacking her with the cure.” Both he and Stefan stepped back, not too far, but enough to give us the illusion of privacy.

“You really weren’t surprised?” Ariel tilted her pink head, curious. “You knew?” Her gaze, the lifelong familiarity of blue and green—there was a brilliant, almost explosive shine of life behind those eyes. She had a love of life—her own. It was too bad there was no love for humanity.

“I gave you a clue, you know.” I gave a rueful smile. “My fake name. Bernie. Short for Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli.” I wouldn’t admit to myself I’d hoped she would pick up on that and leave this all alone, disappear, and save herself. Stefan wondered when his father died if someone could love a cold-blooded killer.

Now I knew.

“Oh, that was clever. Clever, rotten, and sneaky. I love it.” She gave me an admiring salute with three fingers, all bearing brightly colored rhinestone rings. “But tell me, Misha, what did I do? How’s a girl going to learn if she doesn’t know where she went wrong? What made you suspicious?” Beneath us, the river roared as it hurtled over the dam, a monster of nature ready to gobble whatever fell into its maw as it had gobbled up Wendy. With so many monsters gathered in one spot, the natural and the unnatural, it was enough to make a skeptic like me believe in fate.

“Nearly everything. You were too good, Ariel. You’re smart, far too smart. You would’ve come to the same conclusion that I did with the information I gave you and the genetic samples themselves. There’s no way to synthesize a drug to cure a chimera, but you lied. You agreed with me, questioning a few things once or twice to make it more believable, but then you ‘helped’ me find the nonexistent solution.” This was how Wendy had found out I’d tried to make a cure and why she was so intent on punishing me. Ariel had told her.

“Anyone as intelligent as you would’ve known there wasn’t one. You’re also too psychologically adept,” I said. She preened as if it were a compliment. Hell, it was. “You asked questions that seemed innocent on the surface but actually tunneled deep beneath it.” She did it better than I could and I’d been a star pupil in the Institute’s psychological interrogation class.

“You used verbal and physical cues to make me automatically trust you. . . . That was why you were so insistent on the video feed. When I talked, you looked at me as if I were the only other person in the world and as if every word I said were the most fascinating thing you’d heard or would hear.” All the best con men could do that, and con men were nothing compared to a chimera. “You dilated your pupils to indicate arousal.” We hadn’t been taught to follow through with seduction; we weren’t taught why seduction was seduction; we were only taught it was bait and a way to get a wary target close enough to touch and kill. That was all the Institute needed us to know—enough for that one touch. More than that was a waste of time and profit. “You did lead into it a little early, though.”

“It couldn’t have been real? Dr. Theoretical, I think you underestimate me.” Her pale pink lips curved playfully.

“It could’ve been.” On my part I knew. On hers I could only guess. “But you were too good at it. Not off by a single note, not once. And then there was this.” I pointed a finger beside my eye to indicate where her mermaid tattoo was. Temporary or permanent; that didn’t matter. It was Disney, and that did. She apparently had fonder memories of those cartoons from Institute days gone by than I did.

“Too good.” She laughed as I’d heard her do many times before, but this time I was positive it wasn’t an act. “Undone by my own brilliance. I do like you, Misha. I really do. It took being with you in person to find that out. Which is why I let Raynor ‘catch’ your girlfriend. I wanted to meet you, know you in real life, not just as pixels. Before that, I honestly didn’t know I could like someone. I didn’t know how. None of us do, do we?”

“No weakness. No limitations. No mercy,” I said.

She nodded, her hair swinging at her jaw with the motion. “Jericho would be so disappointed.” She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her wide mouth. “The bastard, which makes liking you more fun. I was his first; did you know? That probably confused you, that you didn’t recognize me from the Institute. I’m not twenty-two; I’m twenty-nine and his very first success. He had a run of bad luck after me, batch after bad batch, before he finally had production going smoothly. Assembly-line assassins. I graduated when I was seventeen and you were this tall.” She held down a hand to indicate. “I killed my owner when I was seventeen and a half and walked away. I liked being free.

“Speaking of like, did you like me back? Though you knew I was lying to you? And especially now you know that I’m an older woman.” She smiled again. Happy. Always happy. Happy to watch movies and chat online; happy to kill. She didn’t see the difference between the two. Not yet . . . even with her doubts now regarding Wendy. Not yet and maybe not ever.

“At first. Then I sort of loved you. I still do.” Unlike her, I didn’t sound happy. I wasn’t. Loving Ariel wasn’t a love to savor or cherish. Loving her meant I might not love again. She was a sociopath and as she’d said, she liked me, but that didn’t mean she would or could learn to like anyone else. A friend? A neighbor? Fun was fun, and toys, like her engineered superflu, were hard to give up. Like Wendy, Ariel wouldn’t tolerate tedium. Loving her didn’t mean I didn’t know what she was. It was why I kept e-mailing her, kept in touch, kept her thinking I was on her hook, because all chimeras had to be cured—even Ariel.

“How many people have you killed since you dropped your owner and ran? How many people did you kill when you weren’t ordered to or forced to? How many people, Ariel, did you kill because you liked doing so? How many people, not counting the ones you’d kill with what you made in your lab, will you kill in the future if I don’t cure you?” I asked.

“Please. So serious. People are like potato chips. You can’t kill just one,” she said, radiant with humor. When I didn’t comment, the dimple and smile disappeared. “Why does it matter? That’s what we do. That’s who we are. We are evolution in progress, Michael. Everyone else”—she gave a shrug as pretty as her first one and utterly dismissive—“their time is over. Our time is now. Why shouldn’t I have fun with them?”

“How many people, Ariel?” I repeated.

She stared at me. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand; she was psychologically incapable of it—at least now. And now was all we had. The water was louder now. Nature knew evolution better than we did. It knew a wrong turn and we were that. “You do have a cure, don’t you?” she asked slowly, for the first time seeing something in me that was similar to what she’d been wary of in Wendy, something to be feared.

“I do,” I said quietly.

“And you’d use it? On your own kind?”