Basilisk

I exhaled and reached around him to type in the most informative news site. “Was that a joke?” I asked uncertainly. I didn’t always get jokes, especially dark or grim ones. And just when I would think I was getting better at playing human if not actually getting back to being human, I fell flat on my face. Stefan reached over and took my arm and pulled me down into the chair next to his. The table was round and covered with scratches. I wished I could’ve looked at them instead of Stefan. He didn’t look twenty-seven now. He looked fifteen years older and as tired as if he’d been up for days. If I’d not jumped to conclusions, if I’d figured things out, and told him better, told him right, he wouldn’t look like this. He would look better and feel better, because I would’ve done better.

For a brief second I wished I’d done more to that asshole of a tourist, because then I might have felt better, stronger, more able to cope. But that was wrong, more than wrong, and I knew it. It didn’t change the feeling, however. It did manage to add to the guilt, though. Wonderful.

“It was a joke,” he said, squeezing my arm lightly. “A very bad gallows humor joke, and I’m sorry I made it. In my former line of business, it was the only humor we had. Not-so-good humor for not-so-good people. Smack me if I do it again.” He squeezed again, then let go to start typing and then to read, eyes staring unblinking at the screen.

As he did, Godzilla came slinking across the living room floor and climbed my leg to perch in my lap and rest his chin on the table. All those scratches on the wood were from him, but there was no food there now, which meant he had no interest. I stroked his back with one finger; he made a contented mrrrp sound and casually gnawed the edge of the table with his sharp teeth. Stefan pretended to only tolerate the ferret. Hmm, that wasn’t quite right. Stefan did only tolerate Godzilla, calling him a stinky psychopathic carpet shark, but he did tolerate him for my sake and that said more than if he’d genuinely liked him.

Godzilla, naturally, didn’t care if Stefan liked him or not. Neither did Mothra, the blue jay with the broken wing, or Gamera the snapping turtle that was so old he might have been here before the town itself had been founded. Mothra pecked Stefan’s head if he went too close to the storeroom, which Mothra had claimed as his own, and Gamera, who I would have thought was too ancient to be aware of people or his surroundings, slept in Stefan’s closet and snapped at him every day when he reached for his shoes.

Stefan would glare at me, mutter, but finally nurse his sore finger and say, “Maybe you’ll be a vet.” He thought I was trying to make up for the lab animals I’d been ordered to kill in the Institute to hone the skills they’d forced on us, and I was . . . in the only way I could. Fixing up strays right and left, saving lives to make up for the ones I’d been compelled to take. As if you could ever make up for even a single life you’d snatched away . . . but I tried, knowing it wasn’t good enough. It wouldn’t ever be good enough; yet it was all I could do.

But that wasn’t my only reason for the animals . . . for playing doctor. No, not by a long shot.

Sometimes being smart wasn’t enough. You had to be smarter.

You had to be better.

You had to evolve.

Sometimes you had to be the very best or your days on the run would be short. My time with Stefan was the only real life I’d known, but I wanted more, and to get that, I would do what I had to. The animals were part of that—a huge part.

Maybe later, if I had a chance, I would be a vet. Animals had ulterior motives, same as people, but theirs were much easier to understand. “Misha? You might want to go to your room or outside while I read this.” Stefan’s grin was long gone and his face . . . I didn’t want to say what I saw on his face, so I was a coward and I went outside with Godzilla draped around my neck. I’d watched the news piece on Anatoly. He hadn’t died quickly or painlessly, from what the autopsy had said. The saw marks on his bone had been made before he died. That said more than enough. The time we’d spent in South Carolina—the few months I’d known him while Stefan and I recovered from gunshot wounds—he’d looked so much like Stefan. Bad father, bad human being; it didn’t matter. He had saved us both by shooting Jericho. More important, he had saved my brother. I didn’t want to see his fate when it was reflected in Stefan’s face—a younger mirror of Anatoly—so I left.

Outside, I sat on the small front porch, cracked as it was and tilting, and looked at the trees across the road. They were soothing. Green green green. Nothing but green. Green was my second-favorite color.

Years ago I’d been asked that question.

“What is your favorite color?”

The Institute wasn’t a school, not the kind most people knew about, and Dr. John Jericho Hooker wasn’t an instructor. I hadn’t doubted then that he was our creator. Now maybe I thought he was part creator of some, corrupter of others—like me—but in the end it didn’t matter. He’d been the most frightening son of a bitch on the face of the earth. Cursing was automatic at that memory. When Jericho asked you to do something, you did it. When he asked you a question, you answered it. Years ago in that prison, Jericho had asked me my favorite color.

I’d thought carefully. This was a year or so after the question of the Instructor on what to do when I killed a president. I couldn’t see how giving my true feelings could hurt in this one case. “Blue.” The blue of sky, the blue of ocean. The blue of my dreams.

Jericho’s ebony eyes stared unblinking at me. His prosthetic hand, replacing the one taken by one of his students—one of his creations who was much braver than I’d been in those days—rested on his desk. “What is your favorite color?”

I’d shown no fear. Those who showed fear were weak, and the weak did not often “graduate” from the Institute, although they did graduate from life . . . early. I thought again. I’d seen the movies, the books. I’d seen the trees and the grass on the screen and in the pictures. “Green.”

Those frozen artificial fingers clicked against the top of the desk and the eyes narrowed. “Michael, what is your favorite color?”

Third time was the charm. I’d read that before in those same books. But third time was never the charm here. That I was offered a third time was beyond the best I could’ve hoped for. Yet here it was, my third and last chance.

It was so simple. I couldn’t believe I’d been fooled twice before. I knew the answer—the right one this time. I knew what he wanted to hear. “I don’t have a favorite color.”

“Good. You’re learning. You have no thoughts but the ones I give you. Do not forget that.” His lips curved, the creator pleased that his experiment had performed adequately. That was what I was—an experiment; less than human, different from human, but made to be a reaper of them.

I was glad he was dead. If Stefan’s father had ever done anything right, it was in killing Jericho. Frankenstein had died on a beach like the one where I had been ripped from the real world. It didn’t get any more fitting than that.

It was a story I hadn’t made Stefan repeat time and time again, as much as I wanted to in an effort to get back those vanished memories. He told it once, and once was enough. He’d . . . fractured when he’d told me, like winter ice cracked and shattered by the first warm spring day. It was days before he was back to his usual self. How could I ask again? I’d memorized what he’d said, though, the whole thing and the bits and pieces added throughout the next few years, of what my life had been before the Institute. Anatoly had been big in the Mafiya. He and his wife, Anya, had emigrated from Russia and we were born here. Anatoly had brought the mob with him or the mob had brought him, but whichever, their children had lived a privileged life. When Lukas—I could think of that long-ago child only as Lukas, not me—was seven and Stefan was fourteen, they’d lived in a big house on a private beach near Miami. They’d been given horses for their Christmas presents and when the adult all-day Christmas party started, they’d taken those horses and gone to that beach to race the wind.

He said it was his idea . . . as if that made it his fault. A fourteen-year-old kid wanting to ride horses on the beach with his brother and he said it as if it were a capital crime. Whatever he’d said, it had probably been my— Lukas’s—idea—a big adventure to a seven-year-old. It didn’t make it my fault either. It was only Jericho’s fault. He made killers out of chimeras and that was what I was—a chimera.

Chimeras started out as twins in utero, but then something would go wrong and one embryo would absorb the other. If you were fraternal twins, you could end up with two sets of separate DNA. Human squared. It didn’t mean anything, normally; you just had two sets of DNA, not comic book superpowers. That was true until Jericho came along and made a difference that nature had never intended.

Stefan said he didn’t know how he found out about Lukas—through hospital records most likely; blood tests from his birth—but he had found out and he’d come for his chimera. The surprising part, unbelievable in a way, was