Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(13)

I was glad he was dead. If Stefan’s father had ever done anything right, it was in killing Jericho. Frankenstein had died on a beach like the one where I had been ripped from the real world. It didn’t get any more fitting than that.

It was a story I hadn’t made Stefan repeat time and time again, as much as I wanted to in an effort to get back those vanished memories. He told it once, and once was enough. He’d . . . fractured when he’d told me, like winter ice cracked and shattered by the first warm spring day. It was days before he was back to his usual self. How could I ask again? I’d memorized what he’d said, though, the whole thing and the bits and pieces added throughout the next few years, of what my life had been before the Institute. Anatoly had been big in the Mafiya. He and his wife, Anya, had emigrated from Russia and we were born here. Anatoly had brought the mob with him or the mob had brought him, but whichever, their children had lived a privileged life. When Lukas—I could think of that long-ago child only as Lukas, not me—was seven and Stefan was fourteen, they’d lived in a big house on a private beach near Miami. They’d been given horses for their Christmas presents and when the adult all-day Christmas party started, they’d taken those horses and gone to that beach to race the wind.

He said it was his idea . . . as if that made it his fault. A fourteen-year-old kid wanting to ride horses on the beach with his brother and he said it as if it were a capital crime. Whatever he’d said, it had probably been my—Lukas’s—idea—a big adventure to a seven-year-old. It didn’t make it my fault either. It was only Jericho’s fault. He made killers out of chimeras and that was what I was—a chimera.

Chimeras started out as twins in utero, but then something would go wrong and one embryo would absorb the other. If you were fraternal twins, you could end up with two sets of separate DNA. Human squared. It didn’t mean anything, normally; you just had two sets of DNA, not comic book superpowers. That was true until Jericho came along and made a difference that nature had never intended.

Stefan said he didn’t know how he found out about Lukas—through hospital records most likely; blood tests from his birth—but he had found out and he’d come for his chimera. The surprising part, unbelievable in a way, was he’d waited so long before adding a new one to his collection of other children, the majority of whom had been fetuses implanted in surrogate mothers for pay—drug-addicted and hopeless people no one would miss when they didn’t show up again. Marcus Bellucci, the man we’d thought was his academic rival, had told us that. He hadn’t been a rival, though, or the fountain of information we’d thought he’d been; he’d been a combination of silent partner and silent alarm. He’d warned Jericho when we’d tracked him down and shown up asking questions; then when Jericho died, he’d disappeared.

The Institute had to have a creator.

The Institute was still out there and we knew where. We hadn’t forgotten those left behind. Ten years or the seventeen it had felt like, I wouldn’t leave anyone there to be discarded if the twisting and brainwashing didn’t take hold. And the brainwashed needed to be saved as much as the potentially expendable who fought it off. Nearly three years later we hadn’t made a move to save anyone yet, because what do you do with the brainwashed?

Not all of the students were like me. I’d hated what I could do. Not all others had. What do you do with genetically manipulated killers who have been taught to enjoy killing? When they’d as soon kill you as take your hand to be rescued. . . .

What do you do?

Godzilla mrrrped again and then bit my thumb for attention. I sucked the blood away, then watched as the puncture clotted immediately. In less than a half hour it would be gone. We healed quickly, Jericho’s children—a much better talent than killing. I rubbed the ferret’s head with the fingers of my other hand. With just that touch and a thought, I could’ve shut down the vessels to his heart, his brain. Or I could’ve opened them so wide that there wouldn’t be enough blood pressure to keep his heart beating. I could’ve weakened the walls of his organs until they ripped open, or could have caused them to literally explode. Only a touch and a thought. That was what Jericho had made out of me . . . and every child in the Institute. I could kill but I couldn’t undo a lifetime of conditioning with that same touch.

So what did you do to save those who didn’t want to be saved?

It was a hard question and blind hope was not much of an answer. Neither was a leap of faith. Jericho’s children weren’t built for faith. Not that it mattered, because we were built for determination—success no matter the cost. “No weakness, no limitations, no mercy” was the credo we repeated aloud at the beginning of every single class.

No weakness. No limitations. No mercy.

That, not that it was meant to, was going to help me now, because despite those who might not want to be saved, there was a way, whether they knew it or not. Look at me.

I was saved.

I was smart.

And I was working on it.



Not a born killer, but an engineered one. Taken. Rebuilt. Changed. That was what Stefan knew had happened to me. I’d wondered what Stefan would be if his brother hadn’t been kidnapped. I didn’t wonder the same thing at all about me, because it was beyond imagination. I couldn’t picture it or fantasize about it. It was impossible, and it was for the best, I thought. If I could have dreamed up an alternative to the life that I had lived under Jericho, the memories of the Institute would’ve done what it couldn’t do now—crush me.