“I’m fine, Misha,” he reiterated. “I’m a muscle-bound human. You’re a skinny chimera who lies like a dog.” He gave me a napkin to wipe his blood from my hand. Some of it, along with dirt and dust, had ended up on the sandwiches, but I was too ravenous and too set on feeding the healing process to care. “Of the two of us, who do you think is going to walk away?”
I wanted to snort, but I knew what my ribs would think of that. “I’m athletic, like a runner.”
I had the self-esteem to know that was true. The six and a half times I’d had sex, no one had any complaints about my body. In fact, they’d enjoyed the look of it and definitely enjoyed what I could do with it. I had read up on the subject beforehand. I wanted to do it right and from the reactions, I thought I had . . . excepting the half time, which had been my first. The books said that was normal too. “So what if I’m not a walking triangle of steroids,” I added. That, however, was completely untrue, but if I couldn’t have endorphins, I could sting my brother . . . and distract him. He was joking with me, but there was no humor in it. In less than twenty-four hours I’d been kidnapped, in a car wreck, hit by a truck, and had a building fall on me. As brothers went, I was high maintenance.
As an apology, when I asked for a candy bar, I broke off half and gave it to him. With my obsession with food, there was no higher gesture. He accepted it with all the gravity it deserved. Or he was mocking me. Either way, the graveyard shadows in his eyes receded and that was enough for me.
Godzilla, curled on my stomach, had been chirping nervously. As I was giving the ferret a peanut from the PayDay bar, Saul put down the visor against the searing Tucson light that sunglasses couldn’t handle and said, “I don’t get it. You said they killed all those gangbangers in there. That punk-ass teenage Jim Jones said this wasn’t about Michael’s being good enough to join up with their Sesame Street serial killer family after all. Why weren’t the rest of them there? Besides the one driving the truck?” Who had gotten away so quickly Saul hadn’t seen whether it was a girl or a boy. He hadn’t seen anyone period. “Why didn’t they stay put and try to kill us or, for God’s sake, give us a chance to do the same to them?”
“Because they’re not done playing yet.” My muscles tightened. The moment was coming. I’d put it off as long as I could—too long. This came from a combination of Institute-ingrained secrecy and something else. Once I was free, I’d picked up quickly the practice of denial. Inside Institute walls, it was impossible. Outside them, it was a drug—mental heroin. The more you did, the more you’d do. I was headed straight into cold turkey rehab now.
“Peter didn’t say play. He said punish,” Stefan said quietly, but without yielding. He’d been patient with my evasions these past few days, giving me the chance to prove I was the man I said I was. That patience was over. “Why do they want to punish you? What did all Peter’s bullshit mean?”
The moment was closer, its consequence-laden breath on the back of my neck.
I sat up slowly, Stefan’s hand bracing me. Godzilla slithered to the floorboards in search of more peanuts. I settled against the seat, giving my ribs a chance to get used to the change of position and increased pain. It was all done slowly, but not as slowly as I answered Stefan. “It means Peter knows more than he’s saying.”
“He’s not the only one, is he?”
The moment was here.
“No,” I said, “he’s not.”
It was time for the truth and I told it—the majority of it. There was one thing I held back. Among other things, I told them Peter knew about the cure. What I didn’t tell was the truth of the cure itself. I had to. If I hadn’t, the only cure for the chimeras would be a bullet to their brains. Killing thirteen teenagers and children, murderous or not, would be on Stefan’s and Saul’s consciences for the rest of their lives. I wasn’t going to let them carry that with them, especially when I couldn’t take part of that weight myself.
I wasn’t a killer; it was a vow to myself—not one that I wouldn’t break, but one that I couldn’t.
Not a killer, never again.
I was a liar, though.
And a manipulator.
A deceiver.
A hypocrite.
What good is a conscience if it lets you commit every evil under the sun save one?
No damn good at all.
Chapter 12
After the two-hour drive to Phoenix, we stayed at the first nice motel—hotel—I’d been in. Saul checked the three of us in while Stefan and I made our way cautiously along the shadowy recesses of the lobby. There were potted trees, fresh flowers, and furniture—the kind you could sit in without catching a venereal disease. An art deco–style chandelier of brightly colored blue and purple glass gave the large room an underwater feel. If a dolphin had gone swimming by, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Or a girl with a mermaid tattoo.
Keeping our heads down, we waited for Saul by the elevators. We’d changed clothes in the car and cleaned the blood and grime from our hands and faces as best we could with napkins and bottled water. We couldn’t do anything about the hair, though. Pouring bottles of water over our heads at a rest stop had the mess going from dusty mop to matted, clumped hair that made the homeless on the streets the salon poster children for great hair care in comparison.
Saul met us and handed us a key card. “You don’t have to go through with this, Skoczinsky.” Stefan was carrying his duffel bag as well as mine, my backpack, and my laptop. The ribs would be better than new in a few hours, but the pain, dull and insistent, hadn’t left. That was why we’d stopped, although there was plenty of daylight left to keep going. The chip, which hopefully remained around Peter’s neck, was headed west toward Los Angeles. Stefan had said if they went on a wild, crazed murdering spree there, it wasn’t as if anyone would notice. LA, after all, was crazy central. We couldn’t do anything about it anyway. We needed time to stop and recuperate.
By “we,” he meant me. Here, I could sleep in a real bed and not in the back of an SUV bumping over every pothole in existence. I could shower in hot water, lie flat, sleep, eat more. The hunger had faded, but it would be back. I hadn’t forced myself to heal this fast before. But I’d never had anything close to these injuries since I’d learned to speed the healing process. When I was seventeen, I couldn’t control my healing very much at all. No chimera could. Your body healed at its own automatic, albeit, accelerated rate.
But as I’d gotten older, my body matured, and that, combined with relentless exercises in healing myself of self-inflicted cuts and burns, turned me into an athlete of healing—the best in the world. I wasn’t invulnerable, but I was harder to kill. Or that was what I’d thought before I’d been run down by a semi and had a house dropped on me. It was a wonder that passing Munchkins hadn’t sung a song and stolen my shoes before running for it up the Yellow Brick Road.
I wondered if I could genetically engineer a flying monkey.
I jerked back to the subject at hand. This time the mental meandering was from exhaustion, and with not too many endorphins. “I wouldn’t blame you,” I said. “Thanks to me, you didn’t come into this with open eyes.”
He considered Stefan first. “Having a friend is a pain in the ass. But you’re easier, Smirnoff. You pay me big bucks for the really entertaining illegal work. The rest of what I do—find someone, lose someone, suggest a reputable hit man, break a kneecap on a slow day, obtain and deliver rolls of plastic, duct tape, and three identical khaki green shirts when all the stores are closed during a Miami hurricane; the usual crap—it gets boring and before you know it I’m watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to see whose skin is stretched the tightest. But you? Lots of money, a yearly Hanukkah card, and occasionally crazy, wild shit that Spielberg would find unbelievable. You keep me on my toes.”