Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(64)
I’d forgotten about that. We’d lived in an actual neighborhood at that time, with sidewalks and huge houses on postage stamp-sized lots. I’d tooled up and down our street on that clown cycle to universal howls of laughter. Mom had been alive then and she’d gently coerced me into it, saying it was the only way to cheer up Lukas. “It was pretty humiliating, but I guess I don’t have any right to complain.” As understatements went, it was a goddamn doozy, but Michael didn’t challenge it. Why would he? As far as he was concerned, it had nothing to do with him. If he didn’t accept that he was my brother, then he could hardly blame me for his life with Jericho.
“I never had a bike.” There was a bag of pretzels beside him and he dug for a handful. “But I prefer cars anyway. Purple, yellow—the color’s not important as long as they’re fast.”
“A potential speed demon—that’s all I need,” I remarked with a roll of my eyes, accepting the snack bag he passed me. He was joking, I was fairly sure. The times he’d driven, he’d been very careful to stay within the speed limit even before I’d explained that the last thing we wanted was to be pulled over by a cop. “Hey, it seems I’m always the one doing the talking, telling the tall tales. Let’s hear some from you.” I didn’t know if he was ready for that, but I wanted to give him the opportunity. He’d already told me about the classes, the training, the experiments, but he had been careful to keep it impersonal and at arm’s length as if it had happened to someone else. If he had expended even an ounce of emotion in the telling, I’d missed it.
“You don’t want to hear my stories.” He leaned forward to deposit a pretzel by the sleeping ferret’s head. “Boring, all of them. Eat, sleep, go to class—not much entertainment value there.”
“I’m not a demanding audience,” I prompted. “So lay it on me.” At his continued silence, I nudged him with my shoulder. “I know they won’t be happy stories, kid, but don’t pull any punches. I want to know what you went through at that hellhole.”
“At the Institute.” His head dipped and fingers wrapped around a strand of hair over his eyes. Tapping those knuckles against his forehead, he exhaled. “It’s been only days. I can’t believe it. When I wake up in the morning it takes me a minute to remember that I’m not still there, but the rest of the day”—he shook his head—“the rest of the day it seems forever that you showed up in my room dressed up like a Hollywood ninja.”
That had been last night’s cheesy movie. That was one thing Michael hadn’t gotten his fill of at the Institute. He would watch a movie on any subject—good, bad, or just plain freaky. I let the ninja remark, damaging though it was to my ego, sail past and I waited for him to go on.
“I didn’t think you were there for me. Not for one minute, not for one second. You were just another test, one I couldn’t pass. Jericho had made it clear I wasn’t doing too well. Graduation was coming up for me, but I wasn’t living up to my potential.”
I could hear the quotes around the last word. “How many graduated before you?”
“A few. I’m the oldest now, but it doesn’t go by age.” He released his hair and dropped his hands onto his knees. Lifting his shoulders slightly, he let them fall in a small shrug so precise, so controlled that any casual element was lost. “But I wasn’t going to make it. I’m not as obedient as the other students, and I don’t like to kill. I’m good at it, but I don’t like it.” Pitch-black humor came and went in his face. “Your Wendy will probably graduate before she turns eight.”
Not my Wendy, thank God. That was a thought I didn’t want to contemplate, and it led me to others of a similar nature. What if I’d opened Michael’s door to find that he was like that little girl, his brain as twisted as his genes? What if taking him into an unsuspecting world hadn’t been feasible? As I’d said, they were thoughts not worth thinking.
“You? Disobedient? The hell you say.”
With a jaundiced air at my mockery, he revised. “Maybe it would be better to say unenthused.”
There was the crunch of teeth against rock-hard bread and I swiveled my head to see the drowsy ferret clutching the pretzel in its peculiarly adept paws as it nibbled. The sight reminded me of my earlier curiosity. “Jericho, do you know how he lost his hand?” Since he healed at the same breakneck pace as Michael, I would’ve thought, short of chopping the appendage off, any normal damage would heal.
“John.” He frowned and got to his feet. “It was John.” Moving over to the window, he fiddled with the blinds. Fidgeting was uncustomary behavior for Michael. He was so routinely sanguine, in his way as unflappable as our father was—or as Konstantin had been. Like both of them, he lived deep inside himself. But whereas my father and former boss came by the trait through the slow erosion of their finer human emotions, Michael had developed his out of a sense of survival. It made sense, that inner retreat; for him it had always been far safer there.
“John?”
Opening and closing the slats, he let in the dim yellow illumination of the security lights that bathed the parking lot. “He was the only one older than me. He was my first roommate, the first person I can actually remember in my life.” He kept his back to me as he talked, still gazing out of the window. “Aside from Jericho.”