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  And me?

  I wanted to live.

  The hell with the Institute and their lies about what I was and what I could never be.

  I wanted to live.

  Chapter 4

  “We need to take the 84. We’re heading southeast toward the Burns Paiute Indian Reservation,” I told Stefan. I had the route memorized, but I handed him the map from the glove compartment. Stefan didn’t like GPS. He thought all the voices were annoying, and when I programmed in HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey , he tossed it out the window and drove over it. I’d known Stefan wasn’t technically . . . adept. That was the best and politest way to put it, but I didn’t know he was afraid of killer computers.

  I thought they were rather entertaining myself. There was no explaining taste.

  He snatched the map. “Burns? Why the hell are we going to . . . wait. What the fuck. How did Anatoly and I give away our location? How the hell did you come up with that?”

  Burns was one of my nine—technically, ten—backup plans if Canada didn’t work out, but Stefan didn’t seem in the mood to appreciate that right now, and I couldn’t blame him. “Raynor must’ve found Anatoly,” I said. “And as smart as he appears to be, Anatoly was smart too. It must have taken Raynor about”—I calculated—“up until four weeks ago to find him. Almost three years.”

  “But I told you, kiddo, I made sure Anatoly never knew where we were. Never knew where our money was, didn’t know our account numbers in the Caymans. Raynor couldn’t have found us through him.” The car bumped again and I thought I heard something else fall off. I let Stefan’s “kiddo” go. He was running on autopilot, but that would have to change in the future.

  “But he did know one thing . . . all the properties he owned and used to hide in. He knew about the beach house where we were shot. Raynor must have gone to every one of them once Anatoly told.” And anyone would tell eventually, no matter how Mafiya tough, when a saw was cutting through their bone. I cleared my throat. “Raynor would’ve gone to every single one and dusted for prints, then entered them in AFIS.” This was a collection of fingerprints from a number of criminals and certain occupational workers.

  How he became fixated on Anatoly to begin with was a mystery, unless he hung around Miami at the time of my rescue. While Jericho chased us, he’d investigated how the Institute had been discovered to begin with. With his clearance, he could’ve gone from the police to the FBI to see if anything peculiar had happened at the same time Stefan had taken me. He could’ve heard about a certain mob assassination, a missing mobster named Stefan Korsak. Stefan hadn’t killed his boss, but everyone thought he had. There would be boards covered with pictures, family connections, and maybe the mention and photo of another Korsak brother, long gone—a little boy with bicolored eyes.

  Blue and green, like all of Jericho’s children.

  If Raynor was as smart as I thought he was, he might have taken a chance on a wild-card hunch like that. “He would’ve kept them classified,” I went on about the fingerprints. “He’s Homeland. He can do that. But he would’ve had them, just waiting for one to pop up.”

  “Ah, shit.” Stefan pounded his head once against the steering wheel. “And my stupid ass fucks up trying to blend in and be Harry-the-Handyman, good guy, up for a bar fight, who gets arrested and printed. Two weeks. Two goddamn weeks and he’s probably been here watching us at least half that time. Brought along a buddy, not Homeland, but trained. That shithead was trained to fight and kill. He sends him in to annoy you day after day to see what you’ll do. Make sure he has the right kid.” I had changed a lot in the past three years—I had my contact that changed the color of my one blue eye to match the green. I was taller, my hair darker, enough for there to be some initial doubt, although with my living with Harry/Stefan as my brother, not more than a molecule of it. “He did it to see if he could trigger you.”

  “And he did,” I said quietly. “That means I fucked up too and maybe worse than you.”

  “I don’t think so”—he gave my shoulder a light push—“but if you want to share, let’s say we both screwed up and you tell me why the hell we’re going to the Burns Indian Reservation. Assuming the car holds together to make it to the interstate. The pipe bombs we will talk about later—I haven’t forgotten. But why the reservation?”

  “Oh, the reservation?” Actually, he probably was going to forget about the pipe bombs. “That’s where the plane is. Didn’t I mention that before?”

  “Plane? What plane?” he demanded.

  “Our plane.”

  “Our plane? Since when do we have a plane?” His fingers were slowly beginning to whiten as his grip tightened on the steering wheel.

  “Since I bought one,” I replied as if it were the most obvious of answers.

  I could see his jaw tightening now as he tried to hold on to his temper. In the beginning, when he’d rescued me, taught me how to live in the real world, taught me . . . hell . . . everything (even cursing), he was nothing but patient. He was the most patient, protective ex-mobster you could find, because he knew how damaged I was, which I think might have been only marginally more damaged than he was from guilt and despair. Not once in almost two years did he ever snap or lose his temper with me, even if I deserved it—especially if I deserved it. But after two years, he went from treating me as a phantom brother who would disappear at any moment and started treating me like a real brother.

  It turned out that I liked that. After two years, I wanted to be given a verbal ass kicking when I deserved it, I wanted to pay off the half-blown-up garage with my paycheck from the coffeehouse, despite our having money in offshore accounts, I wanted all of that. Why? Because that meant no matter how annoying I was and how quickly Stefan would make sure I paid the price, he always had my back. He protected me from anyone and anything.

  Blood is thicker than delinquent behavior.

  And while that wasn’t one hundred percent correct, I took it. Good, bad, and all that came between, Stefan would always be my brother, my family, and that was something. . . . That was really something.

  “Since you bought one? Why did you buy a plane? How did you buy a plane? Who’s going to fly the plane if we need a plane?” Stefan demanded. Now I could hear his teeth grinding at the end of the last question. I tried not to smile, but it was entertaining . . . just a little. That didn’t make me a bad person. I simply found amusement where I could. That made me emotionally healthy and I could write a two-hundred-thousand-word paper to prove it.

  “I bought one in case some of our other backup plans didn’t work, and Raynor cancels out at least three of them. I bought it with the money from the Caymans. Who does our banking, remember? You’re horrible with numbers. That was why that old lady hit you with her cane when you were in the ten-items-only line with sixteen items.” I crossed my arms and Godzilla came slithering out from under the seat to paw at the glove compartment. He knew where the goodies were. “Besides, it’s only a Cessna.”

  “Only a Cessna? Damn it, Michael, Misha, whatever. The government tracks that sort of thing, especially since 9/11.”

  “No problem. It was a totally illegal and untraceable purchase. I have quite a few friends of that sort on the Internet, but that time I went to your friend Saul. I told him not to tell you, that it was a surprise. He thought that was pretty hilarious.” “Goddamn fucking hilarious” was what he’d actually said. “Then I found one of my friends from the Net who said there were a few people with flexible morals at the Burns Indian Reservation who would hide it for us in case we needed it.” Like now. With Raynor, we definitely needed a plane, because he was going to the same place we were: the Institute. Not that he’d think we’d go there. I imagined he thought that was the very last place we’d go. A man like him wouldn’t understand trying to save what you could own instead. No, he knew it was the best place to get his own fresh-fromthe-oven baked assassin, a special one, because he’d seen what I could do when merely annoyed by a fake tourist. He wanted to be prepare
d. He didn’t know I wouldn’t use what I had in me to kill . . . that I wasn’t like him or Jericho.

  I hoped.

  “What? They’re hiding a plane? Jesus, they’ll think we’re terrorists, and hauling around pipe bombs isn’t going to help with that impression.” His knuckles were bone white now, and he was going to get hoarse soon if his voice became any louder.

  “No, don’t be ridiculous. I thought about that, so I told them we’re drug dealers,” I said with the complacent certainty I had in any of the plans I’d thought up. The Institute had taken my life, but they had taught me to plan like a son of a bitch. More cursing. It seemed I only needed adrenaline to bring it out in me. I probably shouldn’t have been pleased by that accomplishment, but I was.

  “Drug dealers? And they believed you?” Now he was looking at me, not at the road, which wasn’t the best way to drive, and that amber I’d never seen directed at me was beginning to glint in his eyes.

  “Why wouldn’t they?” I reassured him. He no doubt thought I’d made a mistake. Big brothers were like that . . . always questioning the younger ones and never letting them grow up. “I pay them to grow marijuana. It took them a while to get . . . the hang of it? Right, the hang of it, but last month they finally said they’d figured out the correct temperature, hydration, where to get better grow lights, and they said they have a great crop now.”

  He blinked, his darker skin turning nearly as red as a sunburn. Pulling the car over into the emergency lane, he turned back and rested his forehead on the steering wheel and said nothing. I waited about five minutes. It was just a plane and some barely illegal drugs, which I thought should be legal. It was no worse than beer. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to drink beer yet as I wasn’t twenty-one and Stefan was as strict as a TV grandmother with things like that. Plane, drugs, only just illegal . . . and if I could’ve gotten a doctor involved, maybe not illegal at all—surely five minutes was enough to recover from my “surprise.”

  I slapped him on the back and went on to be, admittedly, an utter ass. “Are you okay? Was the healthy breakfast too healthy? Did it upset your normal intestinal workings? Do you want a Three Musketeers to counteract the health?”

  “Tui nemnogaya dermo,” he said without lifting his head.

  I frowned. “You little shit? You called me a little shit. I am as tall as you now. I am not little.”

  “But you are a shit. What happened to that agreeable kid who used to be afraid of grocery stores? Who only scared me when he wanted the sex talk? Where did the pipe bomb–building drug lord come from?” He leaned his head back against the headrest and covered his eyes. “Where did I go wrong?”

  I wasn’t offended. In fact, if I’d known it would be this entertaining, I’d have told Stefan about all my plans—although some of the others might give him a heart attack—at least a year ago. I grinned, though he couldn’t see it, and punched him hard on the shoulder. “I grew up. I’m a genius, I was raised to be an assassin, and I’m trying to figure out a way to bring down an entire Institute of assassin-makers while curing the assassins they made. What did you think I did in my spare time? At least I didn’t build a nuclear bomb in the garage, which, by the way, is so beyond easy you wouldn’t believe it. . . .”

  Stefan sat up and clapped his hand over my mouth. “Michael . . . Misha, you’re my brother and I love the hell out of you, but I think right now it would be a good thing if you didn’t talk. For a while. A couple of hours at least.”

  I scowled at him, but this was brother stuff and I got it. I did. Stefan, despite killing a few people—a lot of people—to save me and being an ex-mobster on top of it, was delicate, apparently. I’d have to dole out the information in smaller bits so his brain wouldn’t explode. He knew emotion; I knew everything else—together we were unstoppable. Again, I hoped.

  He took his hand away from my mouth. “I have only one more question and then silence. Okay? Silence, so I can escape having a stroke and not take that damn stinky-ass ferret and beat you with it. One question.”

  I raised my eyebrows and looked interested. I genuinely was. What could he think I possibly left out of the plan?

  “Do you know how to fly this plane? They taught you that at the Institute?”

  Please. As if I would forget about that. I restrained myself from an annoyed snort. “No. I taught myself. There are classes for everything online. You can also order instructional videos, although of course they say those are only supplementary study materials and you can’t learn to fly a plane just from watching one.” Those who said this were nongeniuses. I had absolutely no doubt about that. “So yes, I can fly. Plus it’s a Cessna. It’s barely an airplane. More like a roller skate with wings.” I gave Godzilla, who did not stink . . . not too much anyway, a PayDay candy bar, and he crawled back under the seat.

  Stefan was starting to turn redder. I needed to check his blood pressure. He wasn’t old enough to be worrying about that yet, but some of these things are genetic. “You really think you can fly a plane by watching something on the damn Internet?”

  I grinned again. “Theoretically.”

  He didn’t hit me with Godzilla, but he did seem intent on not speaking to me again for the conceivable future. I used the time on the computer, when I could get a connection . . . and when you hack into a satellite to control its orientation, you’d be amazed at how much your Internet connection can be improved. Others might suffer, but they could go to their local coffee shops. That wasn’t an option for me right now. I contacted Ariel in New York. We’d been in contact for two years now. She was twenty-two and went to the Weill Cornell Medical College. Well, she didn’t go; she was like me, a genius. She already had her MD and had started college at fourteen. She was a researcher at the college and after much surfing and looking and the thorough checking out of people at medical research sites, she was the one I thought who could help me the most. She had access to all the equipment that the money Stefan and I had couldn’t buy. She could do the experiments on the genetic material I provided. She could help me look for a cure, though she thought she was only helping another researcher at a facility with far lesser equipment write a paper on one of the wilder theories she’d heard.

  She was pretty too. Not that that had anything to do with anything. She wasn’t blatantly sexy like Sara at the coffeehouse. More . . . cute. And I could talk to her because she was smart enough to understand me; sometimes I thought she might be smarter than I was. And that was hot. She had sleek pink hair that fell to her jaw, pale skin, and the tattoo of a tiny mermaid beside one of her blue eyes. When I asked her about it when we talked over webcam, she’d laughed and said being smart meant you had to try extra hard to see the fantasy in the world—the magic. And what was a world without those things?

  See? Smart.

  I found my fantasy in movies and she found it in mermaids, but we both knew you needed something. The smarter you were, the more you saw the world for what it was, people for who they truly were, those inside-out people, and if that was all you saw . . . you’d be in therapy 24/7. You needed to make your own reality because the real version could make you doubt humanity, except for your brother and someone you could’ve maybe thought of as a . . . ah . . . friend you’d made online. Just a friend. Either way it would be nice to think that there were people in the world worth anything at all—not just Jerichos.

  It would be nice.

  She wasn’t there the first time I tried. But the second time, four hours later, she was. There was no video this time, too risky, so I didn’t know if she was wearing her favorite freshwater pearl choker dyed in blues and golds and purples—the same as a mermaid would wear. She’d changed her name, she’d said, to the Disney mermaid to remind her to not only believe in fantasy but to always stay a child when she could. She wouldn’t tell me what her name had been before. She said she was saving that for our honeymoon.

  Now I could feel my face getting hot and maybe not as red as Stefan’s had been, but definitely not my normal color
. Luckily he was concentrating on driving or meditating on not killing me and didn’t notice.

  I typed in Hey, so what did you think of the theoretical overriding of the genetic code on the extra DNA strand for my paper? I’d discovered, with Ariel’s help, that the gene connected to the psychic ability to kill—not that that was what I told her its function was—was on only one of the DNA strands, while chimeras like me possessed two. It might be why all the assassins were chimeras. If a person had only one type of DNA as was customary, Jericho’s manipulation could very well not work or could destroy the subject altogether. But to know that, I’d have to create a chimera embryo to see exactly what could happen. I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t the Frankenstein that Jericho had been.

  She sent back her response in a flash; she was one fast typer. I think theoretically that a viral explosion with some type of injection would lyse the target genes and inactivate them. I tried it on a few of those gene samples you sent and it definitely did something to them. If not complete disintegration, then close. If you’re talking about doing it to a live person, there’d definitely be bruising at the injection area and no sure guarantee that it would work, much less immediately, but in the realm of theory, it’s conceivable.

  She called me Dr. Theoretical for as often as I used the word. She said it was my superpower, but I was being accurate. There was nothing wrong with accuracy. More letters appeared before I could reply. Bone marrow transplant would work much better. I highly doubted I’d be able to pull off a bone marrow transplant on thirty genetic assassins. Any cure would have to be almost instantaneous. Her typing continued. But it’s your paper. Hey, why no webcam this time, cutie? Get a bad haircut? Or did you finally break down and get that tattoo I’ve been trying to talk you into? She kept telling me to get a Cheshire cat tattoo from Alice in Wonderland as I was so theoretical I was practically nothing but a floating smile in midair.