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He said bitch as lazily as if that were the only thing he ever called women. Stefan, who painted houses for free for needy landladies and undercharged Mrs. Sloot to paint her gingerbread; Stefan, who treated women with the utmost respect—he even hadn't hurt the one who'd robbed us at gunpoint years ago at a time when we could least afford it. Yet if I hadn't known him, I'd have believed every word, and I knew I couldn't have carried that off. He was right. I should stick to being myself—the myself where my outside reflected what my inner biology wished it was.

But was it fair that Stefan had to be the mean one all the time, no matter his past?

No. No, it wasn't, especially as much as he wanted to leave that part of him behind. Being a drug dealer was much easier online. The reality of being one or pretending to be one . . . I saw now why Stefan had been so upset earlier. Or pissed off—highly pissed off. Maybe there was a reason all Jericho's children were like me . . . and looked somewhat younger and guiltless at first glance. We were trained to plan if we had to, trained every day of our lives, but we were made to not need to. Our faces were our alibis. Touch, kill, and who would ever suspect a nineteen-year-old who would probably look like a nineteen-year-old until he was thirty?

On the other hand, one look at Stefan and you'd know what he might do. One look at me and no one knew what I could do and that it was much worse than anything Stefan had in him. It was the perfect disguise. Nature would've applauded.

It only made me feel like a freak—as if it were only right I should be labeled “Caution,” “Dangerous,” “Biohazard.” That was as far as my thought process went before starting to spiral bleakly downward until Stefan pinched my shoulder hard—he knew; how did he always know?—and went straight for the Cloud-horse siblings the second they walked through the door.

They had rifles, attitude, and sneers, all of which went limp under Stefan flashing his Steyr in their faces before they had time to move. The muzzle set gently over the eye of one of them—that of Jacob, the brother. “Playtime is over, kiddies.” They were barely younger than he was, by two years at the most, but, in experience, I guess kids they were. If they'd used those rifles for anything but shooting rabbits, I'd be surprised. “This is why you look at porn on the Internet, not how to hook up with dealers, because you are not ready, assholes. You're worlds away from swimming in this ocean but damn close to being six feet under that dirt outside. Now, take us to the plane. And if your girlfriend calls the cops, you'll just be lying on top of that dirt in a pool of your own guts and blood.”

Stefan didn't want me to be like him, but thanks to him, we had our stuff and were on the plane in fifteen minutes. The Cloud-horses had built a big barnlike building behind a line of pine trees to hide it. I didn't know where they were hiding the drugs and Stefan didn't mention it. The two Cloud-horses thought themselves pretty clever, I'm sure, in not bringing it up themselves. They weren't. What kind of drug dealers show up and don't want their drugs? But if they were smart, we wouldn't be standing here in the first place. Smart people don't grow marijuana and hide planes for strangers on the Internet, no matter how much they have been paid.

“Now.” Stefan stood in the large outbuilding concealing the plane and tapped one of them—Jacob—on top of the head with his gun. It was a friendly tap, if you didn't count the pain that twisted the lean, brown face. “Which of you is going to take a ride with us? You or your sister?” His sister looked tougher by half, but she stood back with her hands up at shoulder level. When it came down to the bottom line, she came way before her brother apparently. Their rifles had been left outside at Stefan's order.

Jason stumbled over his words. “What? What the fuck? We did what you said. What Sebastian said.” He pointed at me. I'd given up looking tough and just looked like what I was: bored. I was bored. Stupidity bored me and there was a massive amount of stupid here. Oddly, this expression seemed more intimidating than the one I'd tried at the store. I was being me now and that, despite Institute training, could be the most frightening thing of all in a person.

I remembered what Wendy at the Institute did when she was bored. It wasn't a good time to be a rabbit or a guinea pig in the animal lab on those days.

“Be yourself,” Stefan had said.

Let that Frankenstein child you were shine through, I thought.

Shit.

I folded my arms, but didn't look away from the brother and sister team. Stefan wouldn't need back up with these two, but better safe than sorry. Now he was saying, “My cousin is learning the business. I want him to know drug dealers can't be trusted. Too bad that's a lesson you don't already know, huh? But don't worry. It won't be a long ride and just until we get far enough off the ground to make sure you didn't screw with the engine. Then we'll boot you right back out. Fifteen, thirty feet. You'll be fine . . .
if
we're fine. You might break your legs or your spine, but I hear great things about wheelchairs these days.” Jacob moaned and his sister gave it up.

“We screwed with the engine some,” she grunted. “Jake, stop being such a whiny bitch. They'll fix it. They'll go and you can go back to knocking up sixteen-year-olds.”

That was my cue. I went over to the Cessna 350 and opened the cowling to peer at the engine. You can't learn to fly a plane via instructional video if you don't know what parts go where . . . at least not safely. Luckily, my partners in crime didn't know anything about planes of any kind. They'd only yanked whatever to them seemed yankable—idiots indeed. Twenty minutes later and after a run-through of the electronic checklist, we were in the air. And, yes, I might have hit the top of one of the pine trees, but that was why I said theoretically so often. It left room for the tiny errors, the learning curve. None of that mattered when I looked at where we were. We were flying in a blue sky, the world and its dangers gone beneath us. It was . . . freedom. It was glory. It was a wonder I'd never seen, although it was an unsteady wonder.

Things are never as easy as they appear on the Net or in instructional videos. I blamed an imperfect world for that. I was a genius—I wasn't blaming myself, because it obviously was not my fault. Stefan didn't throw up as I gradually turned theoretical into a reality. I had to give him credit. He turned green, he closed his eyes, he cursed nonstop, but he didn't vomit, and it was an extremely bumpy ride for at least fifteen minutes. Godzilla did throw up, down Stefan's shirt as he wrapped himself tightly around my brother's neck and shivered. He wasn't a fan of theoretical flying either. I was surrounded by critics.

That didn't improve five hours later when I landed at the new Institute. Stefan, who hadn't been at all interested in the details of maximum cruising speed, fuel capacity, maximum climb rate, called it crashing, but I think that was an exaggeration. Considering his lack of curiosity about all things plane related—except for the copilot's three-point restraint system, or as he referred to it, “Where's the goddamn seat belt?”—I didn't think he had much room to judge.

The ground's rapidly approaching brown dirt, the unforeseen difficulty in getting the nose up, the speed down, but not too far down, and the bouncing off a jutting rock camouflaged the same color as the dirt—it did get the adrenaline pumping. There was no doubt about that, but it didn't change matters.

“Gravity, genius,” Stefan groaned, holding on to his seat so tightly with one of his hands that it would probably cramp for days. The other hand held something else. “Gravity leads to crashes.”

Despite the bump on my head and the blood dripping down Stefan's forehead, it definitely wasn't a full-on, complete crash. It was at least a controlled crash and that was the next best thing to a legitimate landing. That was my opinion and I was sticking with it. Besides, it was not my fault. I didn't create the often-inconvenient laws of physics. “Gravity”—I waved a dismissive and slightly shaking hand at Stefan's bitching—“schmavity. It's all relative.”

“I thought that was time, Einstein,” he pointed out, wiping blood onto the dried ferret vomit already on his shirt, “not schmavity.” Why did he have to be smart at the least timely moment? It was close enough to a landing, considering I'd taken off and flown the entire way via Internet instruction. A slight hiccup in the landing did not a catastrophe make. But what we had seen at the Institute with a bird's-eye view, what we found there at a closer—God, too close—look, wasn't a catastrophe. It was worse.

It was a nightmare—the entire, oblivious world's worst nightmare.

 

The bodies were everywhere.

The stench of rot made the air almost unbreathable.

This Institute had been set up about seventy-five miles out in the desert from Barstow, California. The first one had been in the Everglades outside Miami. Isolation was important when you were setting up a facility that looked like a prison—that was a prison.

Inside it was identical to the one where I'd grown up. Cheap tile, battleship gray walls, fluorescent lights, no windows—home, sweet home. Even the bodies were the same, in a way, only there were more—many more. I'd seen a few at my Institute. Sometimes a “student” would lose it, go flat-out psychotic, and break in a second. The crazed individual would usually kill a few instructors before the guards shot him—and the guards were everywhere. Two or three bodies a year was about average. You got used to it. You can get used to anything if you want to survive. But I hadn't seen anything like this before.

Instructors, researchers, guards littered the halls, the labs, the empty classrooms. Some were flat on the floor with blood that had dried around their heads after it had exploded out of their ears, noses, and mouths. Some were curled up, appearing as peaceful as if they were asleep . . . if they hadn't been in their second week of decomposition. They were bloated with green and brown stains showing through their clothes. That didn't bring “peaceful” to mind.

There were students too, about fifteen. About half were shot in the head and half were spread-eagled, surrounded by the stain of every cell of blood in their body. If it hadn't been dark brown and flaking on the tile, it almost would've looked like wings spread around them—as if they were angels. Only one student could do that to another: Wendy. Some students were more powerful than others, but to be good assassins, a good product, we all had to be fairly equal in power to be useful, to bring a good price, and not be competitive to the bidders.

That equality meant that if a student tried to hurt another student, it didn't work. We could protect ourselves. If one started to cut off the blood to my brain, I could keep those vessels open. If one tried to stop my heart, I could reverse it before it had time to take effect. Students could not hurt other students. One was an immovable object; one was an irresistible force, like Stefan and I emotionally. It was a waste of time.

But then Wendy had come along and no one else was half as powerful as Wendy. She was the exception to the rule when I'd been kept prisoner years ago. No one had been able to protect themselves from her then. It had been lucky for her maker that Wendy liked the Institute in those days. . . . Top of her class in every way, she couldn't wait to get out into the real world and do what she'd been created to do. She'd never caused any problems. The better she was, the faster she “graduated” and she knew it. If they gave out gold stars for being a good little assassin, she'd have had a wall full of them—a galaxy of the dead.

Things change.

People, made in a lab or the old-fashioned way, change too.

I couldn't take my eyes off the dead students. It was too bad those left behind hadn't thought of that.

“This is a rebellion. Looks like some kids finally got pissed off at their keepers and showed them exactly what they'd learned.” Stefan's hand was on my shoulder, squeezing tightly as I stared down at two brown and broken angels. It was two girls, both with red hair. That was the only way to recognize them, the red hair. Lily and Belle. Tiger Lily and Tinkerbell. They'd needed enough girl names to balance out the Michaels and Peters. No one was good at the Institute. We couldn't be, I'd told myself long ago in my own sterile prison room. The best we could hope for was indifference to our fate if we refused to kill. But was that good? Truly good? I didn't know. Then Stefan came along and told me I was good. Too good, he emphasized from the self-defense point. It drove him nuts that I wouldn't kill to save my own life.

Except for the one time, when I was fourteen, when I was surprised and attacked in that Institute test. I woke up some nights with the sharp sensation of his knife against my throat, the ephemeral feel of his heart turning to a useless sack of blood under my hand where it rested against his chest. I saw his eyes go vacant again and again. It was a memory that wouldn't let me take another life, not for any reason.

There had been others like me, although not as stubborn. They would've done what they were told, only without any particular enthusiasm. Not that that made a difference. Enthusiastic or no, their targets would've ended up just as dead. Obedience always trumped eagerness here. They wouldn't have rebelled against Marcus Bellucci, the second Jericho. There were plenty of other students who did have a genetic and psychological passion for spilling blood, unlike Lily and Belle, but they wouldn't have revolted either; they were too indoctrinated not to do as they were told.

Unless they had a leader.

Someone else to tell them what to do.

“We need to look at the video,” I said abruptly, and headed down the hall to the stairs. The Alpha guard station would be located in the same place here as in the first Institute. Everything was. The walls were the same, the razor wire—I'd seen the Institute's mirror image when I'd flown over. Waiting for the arrival of Saul and our makeshift army at a safe distance, that had been the plan—that and a slight addendum: Stefan would shoot Raynor if we saw him approaching the Institute, because he was not taking a student, even Wendy—a victim herself, as lethal as she was—out of there. Everyone was going to have a chance at my cure and when it came to Raynor himself, as they said down South, he just flat-out needed killing. The last had been Stefan's addition, but it was hard to disagree with it.