It felt real.
“You know what I miss about Cascade?” I asked Stefan suddenly.
“Everything,” he answered without taking a second to think about it.
“You too?” I could all but smell the paint fumes from his clothes when he’d come home from work—the gingerbread man.
“Me too.” He tapped on the window glass lightly with a raw knuckle. It was an unconscious habit of his. “Sorry I ruined things for us there, Misha. Sorry I lost us our home.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s Raynor’s.”
“There is that.” He tapped again. “And maybe we both got a little sloppy, but goddamn it, I think we were entitled to a little sloppy. That’s what having a home is all about—relaxing. Not being on guard every second of the day.”
“Not that I don’t feel for you guys, but there are thousands of shit-kicker little towns across the country to find a new home in. How about we concentrate on the pack of killer kids roaming the country?” Saul suggested. “What are we going to do when we find them in Laramie? Tranq them on the sidewalk in front of God and everyone, wait around to see if this cure of Mikey’s works, all while the police are arresting us for assaulting a bunch of children and teenagers? Dora the Explorer could locate a better plan than that up her ass.”
My jaw tightened over the “Mikey”—I should’ve taken his hair too—but he was right. We did need a plan to get them away from people and out of sight. “Leave that to me. I’m working on it,” I said.
At the same time, Stefan stated, “We’ll find them first, see exactly where they are and what they’re doing, and then figure something out.”
“I think someone just staged a coup on your ass, Korsak,” Saul commented.
Stefan folded his arms as he wedged himself more comfortably in the corner of door and seat and considered me. “Huh. I think he might be giving it a shot.” He didn’t say anything aloud about my drug-dealing plan that hadn’t gone precisely as calculated or the landing that had caused the cut on his forehead, but the quirk of one eyebrow and the corner of his mouth said it as clearly. But I also thought I saw faith there. Brothers gave you second, third . . . more chances than you deserved. I wasn’t letting Stefan down.
I rolled on my side, used a sweatshirt someone had left in the back as a pillow, and said, “Wake me up for breakfast. I’m starving.” I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, but instead I planned. Stefan was right in that my plans did need some refinement, but I thought he knew he’d be wrong in thinking any of his would work better . . . not with Peter and the rest of the chimeras. Hence the faith. We didn’t think in the same way that normal people did, because we weren’t normal people. We weren’t people at all. It made us unpredictable. In the end, only a chimera could think like another chimera. And with Peter showing every sign of being more intelligent than I was, I was going to have to work especially hard to do that. We were all brilliant—Jericho’s work had made certain of that, but I hadn’t seen signs that Peter was exceptional above the rest of us while I’d been his classmate. Somehow I’d missed it. He had fooled us all.
Peter, Peter, prisoner eater. . . .
Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater . . . It was a nursery rhyme, we were told. Targets and those between you and your target told them to their children. It was a fact we needed to know to appear ordinary and we were given three examples to memorize, which we did in one reading as required, before moving on to the next subject—how to mimic the neurotoxic effects of blowfish poisoning if you happened to have a target in Japan.
I’d been around twelve then—two years older than Wendy was now. Peter had been close to the same. It was hard to tell in the Institute. There were no birthday parties. The Playground, yes, but no parties . . . not the kind of parties, at least, that anyone outside the Institute would recognize as a celebration. I hadn’t told Stefan that the Basement wasn’t the only place where we were “rewarded” for exceptional work. The Institute knew it was important in raising genetic assassins to equate death with reward. Death equaled reward equaled incentive equaled eager students—a simple psychological loop.
On the nursery rhyme day, Peter had asked the Instructor if it wouldn’t be better to kill several other people in the target’s entourage along with the target by using imitative blowfish poisoning to increase the authenticity of the diagnosis. I had thought the same myself. I couldn’t help it. It was a logical and effective way to throw off any signs of foul play. But I hadn’t said it; I’d only thought it. Peter wasn’t like me, however. Peter was a good, enthusiastic student, and he said it loud and proud. That brought him a reward and the rest of us a chance to watch and see what we were missing by not trying as hard as Peter.
In the exercise yard our class gathered to watch Peter enjoy his prize. It was a homeless girl, a runaway—a teenage prostitute I’d guessed, then. Targets were frequently with prostitutes. It was a fact we needed to know.
She was fifteen at most, this girl, but to a chimera, whether it was man, woman, or child made no difference. Age and sex didn’t matter when all you saw was an objective. That was all Peter saw. I knew, because I remembered his smile. He had perfect white teeth—we all did. The attractive were less suspicious than the unattractive. Jericho had made that clear. Targets were all prejudiced in one way or another whether they knew it or not, and a negative reaction to the unsightly was a universal one.
As ugly on the inside as he was attractive on the outside, Peter, with his perfect smile and bright, happy eyes, didn’t look like a threat, not to a runaway snatched off the streets by silent men, shoved in a van, and brought to a place that looked worse than any prison. None of us would look sinister to her as we stood in a wide, loose circle around her under a hot Florida sun. She’d cowered on the dirt, crying. I remembered the trails of clean pure skin under the trails of her tears. The rest of her face was covered with thick makeup, her hair bleached blond with black roots, and her eyes . . . They kept animals in the Institute labs, starter projects for the extremely young. Some of them were dogs. I remembered their eyes. Hers were the same: soft, brown, and dumb with terror. When she saw Peter leave the circle and walk toward her, she lunged at him and shoved him behind her; both fell on their knees. She hadn’t been attacking him. She’d been trying to save him.
“Little boy.” She’d been sobbing so hard, I’d barely been able to understand her. “They took me, those bastards.” She meant the guards who stood farther outside the circle, passive and watching. “They took me just as they took you. What do they want? Did they hurt you? Did they. . . .” She had swallowed. “Did they touch you? All of you? Oh God, will they rape me? Will they hurt me?”
Peter’s smile had never faded. “No,” he’d said, running a fascinated hand through her hair. Then he’d kissed her cheek, the same way as we’d seen in movies. That was all we knew of affection, what we’d been taught to fake. “They won’t hurt you.
“But I will.”
And he had. He’d killed her, the lost girl with no name. He took his time too. When he was done, there wasn’t any part of her body he hadn’t toyed with . . . except two. He’d shut down her kidneys, he’d filled her lungs with blood, he’d torn her liver into pieces, he’d twisted her intestines into knots, he’d squeezed her heart with an invisible hand over and over until, after four heart attacks, she had finally died. But her brain and her vocal cords he had never touched. He’d made sure she remained conscious and aware throughout it all and he’d made sure she could scream. She had felt all the pain, all the terror, not a second wasted to oblivion, and she had screamed until her throat bled, spraying blood with every cry. The entire time she had spent dying, Peter had chanted softly over and over, “ ‘Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. . . .’ ”