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But what we saw as we flew over changed all that. It was almost seven p.m. and light enough to see easily. In the courtyard—nice name for a huge square of dirt where we were able to go out to see the sun once a day and exercise—pale, flabby assassins might stand out. We had to look normal. Jericho had never been able to fix the assassin gene that resulted in the different colored eyes, but in every other way we were to look normal.

There hadn't been any exercising in the yard when I'd flown the Cessna over it. There'd been ten dead guards, and that was a plan-changer if ever there was one. I'd landed—
landed
, not crashed—the Cessna while Stefan held on to his M249 machine gun with his free hand. It was surprising what people smuggled back from Afghanistan and more surprising how easy those things were to buy . . . if you knew the right people. When it came to weapons, Stefan knew all the right people. He had Saul make the purchase instead of making it himself, to keep us hidden, but it was surprising, all in all. It wasn't surprising, though, that he thought he might need it here.

The numbness I felt walking toward the Alpha station wasn't that unexpected either. I should've been experiencing a number of emotions, all of them bad, because I already knew what this meant, but at times, too much is too much. And I wasn't talking about the massacre here. Understanding that was simple enough. It was a rebellion, as Stefan had said. I never would've imagined it, but it was plain that was what had happened. But the rest of it . . .

They had killed the ones who didn't wholeheartedly embrace what they were. Although they would've done what they were told, obedient to the end, they'd killed them anyway. What did the army rangers say? The best of the best?

The worst of the worst had walked out of here and they were loose in the world. They were out there, able to do whatever they pleased. What pleased them most? Freedom? No.

Death.

T
he station was empty. All the guards would've seen what had been unfolding on their monitors and had likely run out with guns and Tasers in hand, for all the good it had done them. I sat down in one of the three chairs and started typing on the computer. I needed the feed from approximately two weeks ago. It should be flagged. The guards would've hit the alarm when it all started to fall apart.

Or come together. It depended which side you were on.

“We'll be able to actually see what happened?” Stefan leaned over my shoulder as I sat in the chair before the console. “I'm not sure that's convenient; it's going to be pretty damn fucking horrifying.”

I nodded at Stefan's question. “We're obedient. I mean,
they
were obedient.” Being a genius could suck. Being a genius meant you couldn't fool yourself as often as you wanted to. But I was different now. I'd not been as obedient as was required while at the Institute, but I'd been too obedient in my eyes. I wasn't obedient at all now; Stefan would be the first to tell me that. “They wouldn't have done anything like this without someone telling them, pushing them. Someone only pretending to be submissive, which I would've said was impossible,” I told him as I found the logs from when the alert had gone out. I was about to pull it all up when I heard a door slam against a wall. Stefan hit me hard, knocking me out of the chair to land on the floor on my back.

Of all those movies I'd watched, and horror movies were the best, zombie stories had never been my favorite. In my opinion, if you get eaten by something whose brain has decomposed, you sort of deserve it. Fast or slow, they remained the closest thing to brain-dead you could come up with. If you couldn't outrun or outthink them, it was hard to have sympathy when one started gnawing on your skull.

Now, in the position of all those victims I'd had little respect for, I changed my mind. When something that should be dead but isn't dead looms over you, the skin slipping from its muscle, pieces of it falling on you, its eyes blinded with a thick film, there were so many psychological reactions to have. Fight or flight. Catatonia. Reversion to screaming for a mommy you didn't remember. There were also the physiological responses . . . the least embarrassing being urinating in your pants. My body that was as frozen as my brain tried to pick one. I hoped it wasn't the urinating one.

A hand, darkened and squirming with maggots, reached down for me. “Go . . . back . . . to . . . your . . . room.”

The voice was garbled, thick, and almost impossible to understand. Two weeks without water would do that to you. Some people thought you could last only three days without fluids. It wasn't true. Although I knew this bastard would've wished it were true if he had a brain cell functional enough to make a wish. It depended on your environment, temperature, exertion level, and general health. Two weeks was at the end of the scale, but it could be done. It was one of those “don't-try-this-at-home” situations. It was a horrific way to go.

His tongue was curled, black and dry as fire-scorched suede. The hand was closer now, the palm a disintegrating nightmare, and nearly at my neck, when the butt of an M249 slammed against the guard's head and he flew across the room to hit the wall. He slid to the base of it and didn't move again. “He came out of the storeroom. Someone got sloppy.”

Stefan's words penetrated my last late-night movie fest and I sat up, his hand pulling me the rest of the way back to my feet. “Or they're making zombies now?” he continued. “Misha, I can handle an assassin factory, but an assassin slash zombie factory? Forget it. We are headed for the mountains and we are never coming down. I've seen the movies. The zombies always fucking win.”

“No. You were right. Someone was simply sloppy.” The guard was still alive. I didn't want to touch him, but the Institute had prepared me for that too. I'd seen human bodies in worse condition. To cause death, Jericho thought we needed to be acquainted with all aspects of death—from freshly killed to the next best thing to King Tut. I ignored Stefan's “Misha, don't you fucking dare,” and touched the unconscious guard's face with three fingertips. There wasn't anything that wasn't wrong with him, nothing that wasn't dying in him . . . every single cell. It was difficult to trace back to where it all started. I closed my eyes and mentally sludged my way through a swamp of putrid decay.

There.

There it was.

I opened my eyes and wiped my fingers on my jeans. “Aneurysm in his brain, but they didn't quite finish the job. Shoddy work or in a hurry. He's been alive this whole time, but too brain damaged to do anything about it. Dying by inches. Then, without the ability to know he needed food or water and with his brain slowly disintegrating, he went into multiorgan failure. His body went into crisis mode and started feeding blood only to the organs that keep it alive—brain, heart, kidneys and liver. Muscles and skin didn't get their share anymore. Then the kidneys and liver failed.” I stood from where I'd been kneeling beside him. “Which is why he's like this. Living people can rot too and it looks just the same as a corpse.” I righted, then sat back in the chair Stefan had tackled me from. “I suppose . . .” I trailed off, hesitating, then pushed on. “I guess maybe you should shoot him to put him out of his misery.” Because he was in misery—profound, agonizing misery.

And that had me asking my brother to do what I refused to do myself. Possibly I wasn't good, like Stefan said. Possibly I was only a hypocrite.

“After what this asshole has done?” Stefan shook his head. “He deserves every ounce of misery he can get and then some. Let him rot until his last damn breath. Nothing but justice in my book.” My genetic code had been manipulated to allow me to kill as easily as breathing, but my brother knew a real monster when he saw one—a destroyer of children's lives. For him, the subject was over. “Now bring up the video.”

I did. There were banks of video monitors and each one split into four pictures. In every one, all looked normal: students in the classrooms, hands locked before them on their desks; students in the cafeteria; students in the media room watching carefully selected movies and TV shows or reading books that would help them fit in with the outside world if they were ever called on to enter a conversation before assassinating their target. Thirty seconds later, the time stamp at the bottom of the screen hit three p.m. On the video you could hear the low-toned ring that meant time to change classes or report to one. Classes lasted until seven every day.

Every day except this one.

This time, at the very first ring, school was out.

On every monitor, students lunged at the nearest instructor, guard, screaming cafeteria server, and people began to die. Guards tried to shoot and some students they did hit, as they were trained—a bullet in the head. It was the only way to be sure, as quickly as we healed. According to legend, zombies were here after all. They were us. But the guards hadn't faced anything remotely like this before. One student going berserk, the mind shattering under the stress, was one thing. All the students in a coordinated attack—it had not been conceived. That meant the guards died. The instructors died, too, much more quickly. They were armed with Tasers and had one guard in each room, but they were complacent. Years of utterly obedient killer human robots had made them that way. They were slow to fumble for their weapons. Jericho's children, however, weren't. They were never slow, never unsure.

No weakness. No limitations. No mercy.

The Institute had taught us that, and now we—
they
showed them how well they'd learned that.

They ran—everybody but the guards, who had their guns and their surety that things rarely went wrong. None of them noticed, not in any video screen, how close a student had managed to position himself to them. Yes, some students did die, but not all; nowhere near all. The teachers and researchers were the ones who ran, not the students; to the students, it was nothing but a good time—not to every student, but to some. Could you blame them when that was what they were raised, taught, created to do? Could you blame them for learning
too
well?

When all the dead were on the floor, unmoving, and the screaming was over, the students gathered in the media room. It was a small metaphorical window to the outside world . . . a world that belonged to them now. That was when I saw him, the one who'd organized it all; the one who'd risen above training and brainwashing and blind obedience to make this revolution happen.

Peter.

As I'd been called simply Michael as I was the first Michael, Peter was called simply Peter, not Peter One. He was about the same age as me, close as I could guess, since he hadn't “graduated,” so he was maybe a year or so younger. He had black hair, wavy and short, slightly darker skin, and the same bicolored eyes we all had. He looked more like Stefan's brother than I did. Funny that. Or maybe not so much. Peter was one of the eager ones. He liked to kill. Not as much as Wendy, but no one liked killing quite as much as Wendy. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Stalin; they all paled before Wendy.

And there she was. . . . Wendy Five, but like Peter and me, no one called her anything but Wendy. Not because she was the first, but because all the other Wendys were only shadows of her. There were only twenty students left now, the rest shot by the guards. I could hear Peter's voice, determined, but pleased too—and too damn happy for what was coming. “Wendy.” It was all he said. It was all that needed to be said.

Seven students dropped instantly and simultaneously, the angel wings of blood I'd seen earlier erupting from their eyes, their ears, noses, mouths . . . and from every pore. Ten-year-old Wendy moved closer to the bodies, putting a fingertip in her mouth and tilting her head to better judge her work. She smiled. The video was crisp and clear. I could see the healthy whiteness of her teeth, the pink of her lips, the faint outline of freckles across her nose. Her hair was as silver blond as it had been three years ago and fell like a mist of cool spring rain to her shoulders. She was a beautiful little girl; beautiful and happy. “Am I a good girl, Peter? I am, aren't I? Like a little sister should be. I'm so good.” She tilted her head the other way. “They look like birds, don't they? Birds with bright red wings. Fly away birds. Fly away no more.”

“You did well, Wendy, and you are a good girl. Like I always say. The best we have.” Peter bent to give her a brotherly kiss on top of her head. After that, he looked up directly into the camera in the media room, speaking to me across two weeks' time. “Hello, Michael. We've missed you. Mr. Raynor told Bellucci that he'd found you in someplace called Cascade Falls.” Bellucci would've shared that information all too quickly if asked in the right way, and every student left standing knew how to ask. “It sounds intriguing, but then everything on the outside sounds intriguing. He also said he'd be bringing you back soon, but we couldn't wait. We have too much to do.” He smiled and his smile was almost as cheerful as Wendy's. “But I think we'll be seeing you anyway. Family should stay in touch.”

Family? We had never been taught to think that way. It was highly discouraged. Bonding with fellow students could lead to . . . well . . . something like this. I hadn't thought of it once during my time there. Since I was barely obedient and unenthusiastic, it had taken Stefan to teach me something I thought a fantasy of the outer world. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, family—all were a daydream even out there. Something like that? It couldn't be real.

Somehow Peter had outstripped me easily and done what I couldn't. He'd seen the value in the concept, taught it to himself, realized what I couldn't without Stefan's help, and learned it well enough to spread it to the other students. Some might have embraced it and some might have seen him as only better than being sold to the highest bidder by the new Jericho, Marcus Bellucci. Whichever it had been, Peter had shown intelligence beyond my own and an overwhelming charisma with the other students that he must have kept hidden from the Instructors. And he had used all that to make himself a leader. He'd taught; they'd listened. Every student had transferred his submission to him and not to his new maker.