Stefan had once said Anatoly thought I’d hung the sun and the moon—that I was special. I honestly didn’t care what Anatoly had thought about long-ago Lukas. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the thought that counts. What did count was a rescue ten years later by a brother who had refused to give up.
I knocked on the door to the house and as the sign, painted in loops and whirls with tulips and roses, told me to, I went on inside. There, Mrs. Sloot—“Adelaide, sweetie. Call me Adelaide”—tried to stuff me with sugar cookies. “Such a skinny boy.” I might be almost six feet, but I didn’t look nineteen. Seventeen was the best I could hope for, but I could’ve looked fifty and still had grandmotherly women trying to shove food down me. It happened all the time.
I learned to live with it, take the cookies, and be grateful I was too old for them to pinch my cheek—although the lady in one of the tourist shops in town had, only a different cheek. I hadn’t told Stefan. He would either laugh or break her arm, and arm breaking wasn’t part of the whole lying low thing. “Yes, Miss Adelaide, water’s everywhere. Harry’s going home to fix it.”
Her poodle jumped at my feet, then nipped me on the ankle as she tsked about our bad luck and gave me another cookie. “Oh, Parker, sweetie, look at my new tchotchke. I know you like animals. Sookie-Sue loves you. You’ll think it’s cute as can be.” I did like animals and Sookie-Sue was the first one to not like me back, but. . . .
It was too late. She’d shoved a small statue into my hand. It was an armadillo, I guessed dubiously, dressed like a clown, with a happy pointy smile, soulless red eyes, and balloons held in a gloved hand. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “It’s nice,” I lied effortlessly. I hadn’t been an enthusiastic student at the Institute, but I had been a good one. Sookie-Sue nipped me again. I sighed patiently, but I did like all animals, including the ones that made it a challenge, and I didn’t nudge her away. “What is it?”
Adelaide pursed her lips, coated with bright orangered lipstick to match her hair, and her drawn-on eye-brows arched. “I told you, dear: it’s a tchotchke.”
My own eyebrows, and I actually had some, went up at the answer.
She scooped up Sookie-Sue. “Teenagers these days. Don’t know a thing. A gewgaw, knickknack, bit of froufrou.”
Stefan’s hand landed on my shoulder and he said with the friendly handyman’s persona he’d perfected, “Useless dust collector, Park. Don’t you start collecting’em.”
“Ah.” I handed it back to her with as much care as I would for something not nearly as hideous and worthless and corrected my mental file of Adelaide Thomasina Sloot from mostly harmless with three unpaid parking tickets to bizarre, dusty, possible automotive maniac, with the ‘harmless’ designation to definitely be reevaluated at a later date.
Background checks were useless if you didn’t update them frequently.
“Let’s go home and get that mess cleaned up.” Stefan steered me toward the door.
My mess. It wasn’t all over the bathroom floor, but it was all over just the same. All that training . . . I wonder if the Institute knew how unreliable it was. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, and you never were quite sure which would be which. The Institute’s students didn’t fit in, no matter how many classes they gave us. We couldn’t always act like normal people. We could manipulate them, but not act like them . . . not be normal people. Of all the training they’d given us, in the end we were good for only one thing; we could excel at only one thing over those normal people.
Killing them.
Chapter 2
“Michael.”
The classroom was gray. Everything was gray at the Institute. There were no windows in the room. There were thirteen students, including two more Michaels—Michael Two and Michael Four. But I was the first Michael. I didn’t need a numbered designation. Our creator, Jericho—that was what he called himself—our creator, had thought it humorous to name us after the lost children of Peter Pan. In the story, Michael, Peter, Lily, and Wendy hadn’t been among the lost. In the Institute they were. Every child here was as lost as he could possibly be.
“Yes, Instructor,” I said promptly. You were always quick and you always performed above average or you wouldn’t be around much longer to fail at both of those things.
“Name the proper technique for avoiding suspicion in scenario twenty-seven.”
Scenario twenty-seven was smiling wide and shaking the hand of the president like a good Boy Scout, essay-writer, or boy who’d saved the lives of a burning preschool full of babies. Whatever story it took to get you within touching distance of a man someone, it didn’t matter who, wanted to die. “After inducing a fatal heart attack or aneurysm, he falls, and I cry and ask for my mother.”
“Mommy. At your age, you ask for your mommy,” the Instructor corrected me.
I nodded. “Yes, Instructor. I ask for my mommy.”
My hands were folded and the desk was cool under my skin. I was eight or close to eight. I didn’t know for sure. I’d say young, but there was no such thing as young at the Institute. I had no idea what an eight-year-old in the outside world would do after killing a head of state, but the Instructors told us what to do, how to emotionally manipulate, how to imitate the real thing—a genuine person. Imitation—it was what the best predators did. The biology Instructor told us that.
It would turn out that nothing they’d taught us had been as effective as they’d thought. Killing they hadn’t had to teach us. Killing had been stamped on our genes. Killing was as easy as breathing.
Being human was a hundred times harder.
“Misha?”
Misha, the Russian nickname for Michael, was my real-life name, no matter how much I sucked at real life today. Actually, Lukas was my birth name, but I didn’t remember it. Since I had lived with the name Michael for all the time I did remember, Lukas was one thing too many when Stefan had shown up. I’d been rescued, dragged into a world that I didn’t know from true experience but only through books, movies, and field trips. I’d been told I had a brother . . . every second there had been something new, something strange, something frightening. And although a monster had given me the name Michael, it was the only familiar thing I’d had then—on the run as I was. I was stubborn and kept it, like a security blanket. Stefan had seen I’d needed it and had gone along. Lukas’s memories were gone. In the time since my brother had found me, I hadn’t gotten a single one of those memories back, so Lukas himself was basically gone. I did my best to make sure Michael was the next best thing.
Stefan had started his pickup truck, ladder and paint loaded in the back, but he hadn’t pulled out of the driveway yet. His hand was on my shoulder, giving me a light shake. I left the Institute and came back to the here and now, almost as emotionally lost as I’d been then. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t have seen the news. I shouldn’t have thought you’d be keeping it to yourself . . . I should’ve thought and not thought a lot of things.” I managed to shut up and dive for the glove compartment.
Since Stefan had brought me out of Willy Wonka’s Assassin Factory, as his friend Saul called it, he’d always stocked the cars and trucks we owned with Three Musketeers. He’d said they were my favorite before I’d been snatched and they were my favorite now—a seven-year hole in my memories didn’t make a difference there.