Dull Boy (28 page)

“I’ll show you a tigress,” Catherine mutters, straining against her wrist straps. I whack the gurney to settle her down.

“I want it,” Nicholas says. “Can you do it now?”

“Administer the formula?” Cherchette asks. “Of course. The results won’t be immediate—the incubation process takes time. But we can begin almost at once. I only need to prepare a few things.”

“As soon as you can do it,” Nicholas says, “I’m ready.” He’s shaking a little, his hands clenched around a thermos.

He has no idea what he’s doing.

First of all, we don’t even
know
if this formula is legit. I mean, our origins are a mystery; maybe we were born this way. Pumping us full of chemicals isn’t going to bring about some miraculous change that supes us up to the nth power.

“Have a drink,” Cherchette says, stroking his hair on her way out. “Be sure you don’t get too excited.”

Nicholas nods bashfully, twists the cap off the thermos, and sips from it slowly. Almost instantaneously, his shaking stops and his breathing slows. Huh? Did she give him some kind of sedative?

Once the door shuts, I count to twenty, figuring that gives Cherchette ample time to come back if she forgot something. Through the windows in the observation room I see her pass the surveillance desk. Leilani’s sitting there with her feet on the desk, blowing pink bubble-gum bubbles; she bolts up when Cherchette gets there, nods obediently for a while, then darts off toward one of the research labs.

“You’re not doing it,” I tell Nicholas.

He sips from his thermos—I know that’s not chamomile tea. Already his eyes are getting this glazed look.

“People can overdose on
prescription
drugs, okay? And those are regulated. You have no idea what kind of toxin she’ll put in your body. You could
die,
Nicholas.”

“I don’t care. Better me than someone else.”

I almost want to smack some sense into him. Maybe I would, if I didn’t think I’d take his head off.

“You really want to die?” Jacques says. “Maybe you’ll get your wish.”

“Shut up, Jacques,” I snap.

Words are failing me. I want to break something, but I don’t want to alert Cherchette to the mutiny raging in my heart. How do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?

C
herchette’s busy preparing the Stage Two formula, measuring doses of the thick, phosphorescent liquid while Nicholas watches from a paper-lined exam table, the sleeve of his trench coat rolled up to his elbow.

He’s sucking in deep breaths. “I don’t like needles.”

“It will be over in an instant,” Cherchette says. “You’ll barely feel it.” She swabs his hand with something and Nicholas averts his eyes, grimaces as she slides the thick IV needle into his vein. A shiver runs through his body. “If you want to lie down,” she begins—but then Jacques interrupts her.

“Stage Two isn’t foolproof, you know. Not even close.”

My body tenses as the air grows colder. What is he doing?

“That’s enough,” Cherchette says, securing the plastic tube to Nicholas’s hand with tape.

Jacques flips a quarter into the air, slaps one hand on top of the other to catch it. “Call it—heads or tails? Success or failure? So far there is a fifty percent chance it will fulfill all your dreams. The other fifty percent says it ruins you.” His eyes are blazing blue fury—I’ve never seen him like this: angry, almost righteous. It’s not the simmering contempt I first saw at Sophie’s. It’s wild, reckless.

“If your mouth doesn’t close on its own, I can do it for you,” Cherchette says. She snaps her fingers and a crust of ice freezes Jacques’s lips shut. Snow dust falls to the ground as he claws it away.

“What’s he talking about?” I ask. Jacques doesn’t give her a chance to answer.

“You’re full of enthusiasm until something goes wrong,” he says. “And then it’s
my
fault. My fault that I didn’t live up to your hopes, and you can just explain it away with ‘survival of the fittest,’ as if—” He stops to catch his breath, watching his mother warily, uncertain. Like maybe he’s already said too much. “As if it was meant to be this way.”

“It is your fault,” Cherchette says coolly. “No one forced you to undergo the procedure—you believed you were ready. And I’ve learned from your mistake. I’ve become more selective; I see now who is ready to develop and who is not. Blaming me isn’t going to change anything.”

“I was a child. You promised me greatness! What was I supposed to think?”

The empty IV tube still hangs limply from Nicholas’s hand. Cherchette sighs. “This is growing tiresome, Jacques. Please get your emotions under control so we can move on.”

Nicholas lies down on the exam table, his chest heaving with short, shallow breaths. “What does he mean, it could ‘ruin me’?”

“Jacques’s experience was anomalous, dear. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Stage Two has only been given to two people,” Jacques says. “My mother and myself. I was a child when she first attempted it. She was ill for weeks; she was barely mobile and I feared she would die. But when she pulled through, she was ten times stronger. And so when I reached adolescence, when I felt I had begun to peak—”

“This isn’t about you, Jacques,” Cherchette says. “Stop interfering.”

“She convinced me I could go much, much further. I was more powerful than she had been at my age—that’s what she told me. But when my new powers failed to manifest—when, in fact, I escaped death only to emerge from the experience weaker, with a whole host of defects, a heart that beats as though it’s been ravaged by disease—”

Jacques breaks down. The temperature in the room is spiking and falling dramatically. My body’s acting as a thermometer, bordering on paralyzed every time the temperature plunges.

“You think she wants to help you?” Jacques shouts. “She’s the one who did this to you! Who gave you these powers in the first place!”

Nicholas stiffens like he’s been slapped. I wonder if we all look like that—not sure what to believe. A hush descends on the room, leaving only the steady hum of electronics.

“Are you finished?” Cherchette says. “If you’re not through behaving hysterically, perhaps you should leave.”

Jacques meets my eyes, his stare ghostly. “I don’t care anymore, what telling you the truth is going to mean for me. You have to know that it’s a mistake.”

“Please,” Nicholas says. He lifts his hand carefully, two fingers pressed to the tape. “Can we stop delaying this? I’m ready; I don’t care if I end up weaker. Or anything worse. It would make things a lot easier.” He’s swallowing again and again, and I don’t believe him for a second—he’s terrified. He has to be.

“Nick, you’re not strong enough,” I say.

“Of course he is,” Cherchette says tartly, catching me with a warning glare. “No more outbursts please. Have some respect for the transformation Nicholas is about to undergo. All your problems will soon be over,” she assures him.

“Wait!” I grab Cherchette’s arm before she can inject the first dose of the formula into Nicholas’s waiting bloodstream. “It isn’t fair that Nicholas gets to be first. I’m your favorite, right? It should be me.”

I puff out my chest, try to look stronger, more formidable. To make myself believe it. Because this is it. No turning back. It’s me or Nicholas—and I know which one of us has a better chance of surviving.

Cherchette’s watching me curiously, her eyes sparkling. She caresses my wounded throat with one gloved hand.

“Of course you’re my favorite.” She says it like I’m the only one in the room.

“Okay then.” I take a deep breath. “Don’t you want to see what I’ll become?”

 

I SWEAR TO GOD
I’m going to cry,” Catherine says. “And then I’m going to kill someone.”

I’m sitting on a gurney with IVs in both my hands. Waves of heat spread throughout my body as the formula pumps slowly into my veins. My heart burns like an ember in my chest.

In my mind, a coin keeps flipping back and forth. Heads, I come out of this a force to be reckoned with. Amazing, spectacular, more powerful than ever. Tails, and I’m ruined. I lose everything that makes me unique. Or maybe there’s a third option. Jacques isn’t exactly a weakling. Maybe he isn’t as strong as he once was—but what if he used to be stronger than I am now? What if there’s something special in the Morozov bloodline that allowed Jacques to even
survive
Stage Two?

Option three means that the coin crumbles in midair. Total body shutdown.

Nicholas hasn’t said a word to me since I demanded his spot and Cherchette bumped him to the waiting list. But now that she’s gone—off to check on some things, or deal with Leilani or maybe hunt down someone else—he finds his voice.

“You shouldn’t have done that. It’s not going to stop me. As soon as she’s finished with you, I’m going next. And I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about what happens to you.” His Adam’s apple bobs painfully. “I feel guilty about enough already.”

“I’m buying us time, Nicholas,” I say. “And you’re not going next because I’m getting you out of here before—”

A surge of heat floods my head and I swoon forward. My vision goes gray and sweat pours down my face: the floodgates have opened. Cold hands seize my shoulders and prop me back up. “This is the worst thing you could have done,” Jacques says.

“Can’t we just rip the IV out?” Catherine asks.

A blurry Jacques shakes his head. “I don’t know what would happen if we interfered with it. It might make things worse.”

God. My head is spinning so violently I literally don’t know which way is up, down, sideways . . .

“He looks awful,” Catherine says. “There has to be something we can do!”

I’m lying flat but I feel like I’m falling, falling . . . I don’t stay conscious long enough to hear Jacques’s answer.

D
rifting in and out. Fever dreams drip with reality. I roll over, hyperaware of the damp shirt clinging to my neck and chest, the sensation of vinyl slick against my cheek.

“Perhaps he’ll make it through—there’s no real precedent. He’s the first of the second generation, if you don’t count . . . but my origin is different.”

“Did your mother really create us?” a male voice asks. “What does that even mean?”

An exhalation like a whistle. “There was an earlier formula. And the specifics—”

Someone touches my face. My eyelids spasm and light filters in, dims again.

“I think he’s awake. Maybe . . .”

“—various children in cities all over the country. Administered in place of the polio vaccine.”

“Nice,” a girl says sarcastically. “So we’re not even immune to polio.”

“I think that’s the least of our problems . . .”

A gray hand descends like a shroud and smothers me, blocks out the sound. I jerk away from it, panting—but I can’t move. Flickers appear. Snaps and pops of light. Vein-colored flares against a night sky.

“So there are others? How many?”

“Many did not survive. We have recorded deaths throughout infancy and beyond . . . Although typically after age seven, the survival rate is very high. Some of her subjects gained no powers, but suffered disfigurements.”

“Like . . .” Deep breath. Mine or someone else’s. Swollen in my ears. “My brother.”

A golden glow attacks my retinas, when all they want is darkness. Something soothing to get lost in. The orb expands, pounces on my brain, relentlessly . . .

“It’s almost midnight. That means . . .”

“How long until he’s, you know, lucid?”

“I really can’t say. My mother was weak but coherent, for the most part. Of course, she was an adult by then. For me, Stage Two was mainly a time of nightmares.”

Nightmares.
I roll the taste of the word around on my tongue. The flavor is bitter, too hot. I get up and leave the room, flee through the steel door, and escape . . . and then I find myself back on the gurney, going through the motions all over again. Mechanically. Effortlessly. But I’m always in the same place.