Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(80)

She stopped the kicking and leaned a little as if to study me more closely. “The same as you, Michael. You reek of stupidity. You always did. You’re soft and worthless as a human, even worse than one actually because you have the gift. Not much of one, but enough. You never had the will, though.”

“You. God, I should’ve known. Peter was nothing special other than loving to kill, but you—you were always special.” She’d fed him every line, every word, all along. Every action that had been taken, the entire plan, the rebellion, it had all been her. I’d grown. I’d become a man. Wendy had grown and I had no idea what she had become.

As Saul would’ve said, we were well and truly screwed now.

“As special as they came, that I am. And that was a problem. A very large f*cking problem.” Her voice had gone from little girl to adult and now it went to as rich with hate as a death row inmate. “I was bored. I’d been bored forever and they kept running out of people for me to kill at the Institute. They also started thinking,” she said, her smile coldly vicious, “and they should have. What would happen when I was bored and the Basement and animal labs were empty? I couldn’t let them think about that too long, could I? Because they knew what would happen. I wasn’t Jericho’s favorite anymore. He was gone and Bellucci—he was always afraid, from the first day he took Jericho’s place. But even if they hadn’t been starting to think I was more than they could handle, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was bored, bored, bored, and there weren’t enough people in the Institute to entertain me. The world, though, the whole, entire world—how much fun would that be?”

I saw something I hadn’t guessed at when Wendy and I shared a prison. “You were never obedient, were you? Of all of us, some more than others, you never were at all.” I thought she had been. Their goal and hers were the same—death. She had appeared perfectly happy and content. But I’d been blind. The likes of Wendy wouldn’t bow to anyone—not even to her own creator, if he’d lived.

“When I was young, I pretended. Now that I’m not . . . I stopped pretending.” She was ten years old and she thought—she knew she wasn’t young anymore. Her face, rosy pink from the wind, hardened. “They should’ve graduated me when I was three, because even then I was the best of all of you in every way.” She kicked again. It was to be shocking in its cuteness, to entertain herself by making our brain rebel at the incongruity of what she was, the inner and the outer mismatched enough to make your stomach churn. “Bellucci wasn’t Jericho of course. Security became lax. Lax, lax, lax. I like that word.” She smiled, pretty as a picture. “Until one day there was a new researcher—an older woman with a deeply buried maternal instinct that would’ve had Jericho screening her out simply by looking at her. It took a while, but I am sweet and adorable and she, like you, Michael, was stupid. I asked one day if she’d show me how to play a game on her computer. After I popped a few cells in the decision-making part of her tiny brain, she could see no harm in that.” Chimeras were never allowed on or near a computer that could access the Internet—with good reason. “That was that.”

All it took for her to learn a way to reach the outside world was one woman who wasn’t quite as soulless as the rest of the faculty. She’d have obtained her password. Gotten access to “play games” now and again, but now and again was all Wendy would need.

“I learned how much more lay outside the Institute than they ever told us. How many more people. Endless numbers of playthings. I also found a friend.” From her lips, “friend” was a word in an incomprehensible alien language. “I found one of us who’d taken care of their owner, brutally I hope, and found freedom. It made me think. What would I do if I were free?” Her smile was hideous. “What wouldn’t I do?” She looked past us. “Lily One, come say hi, hi, hi to your boyfriend.”

Stefan and Saul shifted their stance enough to see whose footsteps were coming up behind us . . . although they already knew. I’d told them. When I’d told them about everything else, I’d told them this too—that she was a chimera. It had been one reason I hadn’t worried when she’d disappeared at McDonald’s. No one could take care of themselves as she could. She stepped into sight, her smile more natural and familiar than Wendy’s. Her eyes, now chimera blue and green instead of just blue, were clear and happy. She was as she’d always been: glorious.

“Ariel.” I nodded. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”

“Misha,” she scolded, her pink hair mixing with the blue of the sky and the green of the trees like an Easter egg. “Way to turn a girl’s smile upside down. I wanted to surprise you. You’re no fun at all.” In one hand she held a metal cylinder about seven inches long and three inches in diameter.

Wendy didn’t like not being the center of attention. “Bellucci told us you were in Cascade, Michael. We could’ve killed you much sooner for your presumption without all this running around, barely playing at all, but we were waiting for Lily to finish up with her work and make her way out here. Did you plant it, Lily? Is it done?” Wendy asked.

Ariel nodded. “In the Portland International Airport.” She gave the “international” portion of the title a roll of the eyes, the same as I had, although my eye roll had been internal. “It’s barely international, but good enough for a test run, to see if the theory works.”