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Peter was obviously smarter than I was, and Wendy, his “little sister,” could kill in ways I didn't want to think about. We were in serious shit. And I hadn't thought it could get more difficult than only trying to rescue them.

My skills at seeing all the possibilities, every potential outcome had faded since I'd left the Institute—badly.

The video continued to show the rest. In an instant they filed out of the room. We could watch their progress as they went down the hall, upstairs, and out to the exercise yard. We had always had one bus, for field trips—to malls usually—to see if we could function, although heavily drugged just in case, in the real world among real people. Peter put his lost boys and girls on that bus and the last video shot was of it disappearing down a dirt road toward Barstow. I thought I saw Wendy waving enthusiastically from the back window.

“That was the little girl I saw when I rescued you, isn't it?” Stefan said. He'd seen Wendy face-to-face then and was more than lucky he was around to tell that story. Wendy must have been just curious enough to let him live, to see what would happen.

Wendy became bored easily. Many graves could attest to that.

I nodded and rubbed my eyes with two fingers. “Wendy. Jericho's pride and joy. Although sometimes I think he was afraid of her as well.”

“Why did he do it?” Stefan asked quietly. “Why did that guy—Peter?—why did he have her kill the other kids? They were in on it. Not that I blame them. Getting out of this hellhole, I'd have done anything too. But why did that one, Peter, the kid in charge, have Wendy kill the other ones?”

“Peter's not a kid. He's about my age,” I said, thinking to myself that meant he was all the more deadly for it. “And there's a difference between obedience and enthusiasm,” I said grimly, slumping in the chair. “The birds with the red wings,” as Wendy called them, “were the difference. They did what they were told, but they didn't like it or dislike it. It was just something they had to do, like brushing their teeth. Apparently obedience isn't enough for Peter. He wants the varsity team.” I used a sports term. Stefan had taught me a lot of those. Now I had to teach him. He thought he knew it all, what had been done to me, the life I'd come from, but I'd painted him a blurry picture. It was time to sharpen it. It was time for what I'd hoped I wouldn't ever have to do.

It was time to tell him about the Basement.

 

I was leading Stefan down the hall when he asked, “Where are we going? It stinks to holy hell in here and I'd think you'd have had your fill of seeing dead bodies today. I know I have.”

“I've seen dead bodies all my life,” I replied, then added for him, “All of my life I can remember, I mean.”

I moved around one as I said that and opened the door that led to a set of stairs. Stefan balked. “This doesn't go to another medical lab, does it?” He remembered the layout of the old Institute almost as well as I did. There would be nothing like the memory of getting your ten-year-lost brother back to etch a floor plan into a person's mind. “Because I've seen only one of those and I don't want to see another. I don't want you to see another either.” Stefan had seen where they took samples of our blood and tissue, scanned us, where they implanted the tracking chips over the base of our spines, and where they took apart their failures—failures with names and lives, storing their organs in a large medical refrigerator. Luckily they kept that locked and Stefan hadn't seen the contents. The Basement was enough. I was glad he hadn't seen where I would've ended up—not obedient enough, not enthusiastic enough. It was common knowledge among the students what that refrigerator held.

Why wouldn't it be? Jericho told us.

It didn't mean I wanted Stefan to know, which made me the overprotective one this time. Taking turns was what we did. It was what real family did and what Peter's “family” had no interest in at all.

“No, it's not the med lab,” I answered as I started down the stairs. “It's a lab, though, and I think you need to see it. The researchers called it the Basement. Some students”—Wendy, first and foremost, I thought to myself—“called it the Playground.”

Stefan followed me, but the trudge of his feet on the stairs told me he wasn't happy about it. “I don't have a whole lot of desire to see someplace that girl called the Playground.”

“You aren't . . . weren't the only one who thought that.” I reached the bottom and opened the door. It was already unlocked and bore the thumbprint of a guard's hand, which was now lying on the floor. The guard was superfluous, heavy, and unnecessary. Only the hand had been needed. I stepped around it and into the lab to turn on the lights inside. Two weeks—that one guard upstairs had been an exception. I didn't think we'd find any pseudo zombies down here.

I ignored the room. I remembered its double in Florida, although I'd seen it only once. Large with five cells, the room held video cameras to record the “play” and computers to type in reports for Jericho—or for Bellucci after Jericho's death. Bellucci was here now, right here. I couldn't recognize his face through the rot, not from the other four researchers dead on the floor, but his once-starched and immaculate lab coat had his name stitched over his chest. It was easily readable through the stains. He had less confidence or more false pride than Jericho. Jericho wore a suit. He didn't need his name out there like a billboard. We knew who he was—the beginning and the end; the alpha and the omega of our lives. That didn't need a name tag. It would be the same as marking the Apocalypse on a puppies and kittens wall calendar.

Pointless.

I took what I was searching for from the flop and stink of Marcus Bellucci's hand. An eight-by-ten rectangle—I could picture him holding it between him and Wendy or Peter as the most useless of shields. It was only a clipboard, made to hang on a hook beside the door. It wasn't high-tech like most things in the Institute, but it was as informative.

Stefan, I saw from the corner of my eye, had walked forward to examine the cells. They were the same as jail cells basically: a toilet and a bunk. You couldn't be sure how long it was until someone earned their playtime. You had to keep the prisoners from stinking up the place. For hygiene, there was a hose and a floor that slanted down to a drain to let the soapy water pour away.

“What the hell is this?” Stefan moved from cell to cell and finally I let myself see. Two cells were empty and three others had a dead man in each. Unlike the “red birds” upstairs, they weren't ready to fly, fly away; they had virtually exploded. Torn apart, they covered the floor of the six-by-six cells in pieces. Did you ever wonder what would happen should every vessel in your body burst under enormous pressure, each one, down to the tiniest vein? Probably not. Why would you wonder something like that?

But if you did . . . Wendy was the answer, and now Peter, unfathomably, had her on a false familial leash.

I looked away from the human version of raw hamburger. “In the Everglades, they brought us the homeless from Miami. Here, I'm guessing they went all the way to Las Vegas. Barstow is too small. The disappearances would be noticed.” I handed Stefan the clipboard. He read it aloud.

“Wendy, Peter, Peter, Peter, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, Michael Three, Wendy, Wendy, Lily Four, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter, Belle Three, Peter. What is this?” He dropped it on the floor. I didn't blame him. The paper was as stained as what was left of Marcus Bellucci.

“This is the Playground. This is where you got to go if you'd done especially well, scored very high on a particular test,” most often of the killing sort, “and deserved to be rewarded. You were brought down here to pick a prisoner and play as long or as quickly as you wanted. As messy or neat. Down here was the only free-for-all in the Institute. And there should be two names that stood out on the list. Every time you saw their name, someone down here died.” I bent down and picked the clipboard up to hand it back to Stefan. “Maybe you should count.” I'd scanned the date at the top of the page, which looked to be the first of about fifteen pages in all. “And the clipboard covers only three months. You need to know, Stefan, who spent most of their time down here. I said some of the students wouldn't want to be cured. Peter and Wendy would sooner die than be cured.”

“But they'd much rather we die than try to cure them,” he said as he shuffled through the pages, either counting or seeing what he'd rather not know the exact numbers on. “Did they ever bring you down here, Misha?” His eyes were on mine. “Not because you were the killer they wanted you to be, but for accidentally doing too well at some other test.”

Everyone was brought down here. Ninety percent of the time it was a reward; ten percent of the time it was a test in itself. “I never killed anyone down here,” I replied. And I hadn't. I'd been brought down in the evening of the same day Stefan had rescued me, four hours before he'd shown up in the doorway of my room.

I'd made my stand in the mirror of this place. Obedient, but not obedient enough. Genetically altered to be a killer, but refusing to fulfill my scientific destiny. I knew what it meant, that disobedience, but I didn't care. I just couldn't bring myself to care about surviving anymore . . . not in this life. I was taken back to my room where I knew they would come for me. They always came for the failures in the middle of the night. It was less of a disruption. We all knew what happened to those who flunked out of the Institute, but telling us and showing us were different. It led to more students losing it and killing everyone around them in a psychotic fit.

Good discipline, but in the end not profitable, Jericho had eventually decided.

That was why, when Stefan had come for me and had opened the door to my room, I'd been sitting on the bed, waiting, but not for him. I hadn't known he'd existed or that rescue was possible. I'd been ready for them to come and take me to the other lab . . . where failures were taken apart, studied, and then tucked away in specimen jars. Stefan didn't know that. He didn't know that had he been a day or a few hours later, I would've been scraps on an autopsy table.

And he wasn't going to know. That was a “what if” no brother could live with.

“I never killed anyone in the Basement,” I repeated. Unless you counted almost killing myself by breaking Institute rules.

“Never thought differently, kiddo,” Stefan assured me, tossing the clipboard forcefully across the room and slinging the M249 across his back. Putting both hands on my shoulders, he steered me back toward the door. “Now, let's get the hell out of here, call Saul, and abort the mission. It's not as if we need an army now. We have no idea where these kids are.”

I countered, “You have to stop thinking of them as kids. Whether they're nineteen or ten, Stoipah, they can kill you, and you won't be able to do a thing to stop them with that attitude. All right? Nothing. Think of them as what they are—killers. Killers who, unlike some of the others, love to kill. Live to kill. You have to be ready and never,
never
let one touch you or you'll die.” “Stoipah,” the Russian nickname for Stefan, had slipped out before I could snatch it back. But, damn it, I worried about him. The big brother, the protector . . . he'd seen the tape of the massacre, but he'd also lived with me for three years and, deep down, I knew, he saw all the students as he saw me.

Salvageable. Needing only my cure. Teenagers, kids, children.

He was dead if he continued thinking that way. I had to figure out a way to send home the fact that killers were killers, children or adults, and if seeing all he had in this place hadn't done that . . . hell. I didn't bother to marvel anymore at how easily the curse words came. “Cancel the army, but your friend Saul—he might be able to help. Have him come. And we do know where the students are, or did you forget the tracking chips?” I'd had one in my back until Stefan had had a very shady doctor remove it. All my former classmates would have the same. “I'll grab one of the Institute's GPS trackers upstairs.”

“Tell me what it looks like and I'll get it. You'll be better off down here doing your computer thing. They might have information that'll help. You keep saying your cure is almost ready or should work . . . theoretically.” He mimicked the last. “It's been almost three years. Who knows what these shitheads have come up with. They might have something to help us.”

He was right. They might, but not in the way he thought. The Institute wasn't interested in cures, but they could have come up with a way to disable chimeras for a time. Wendy's abilities to kill with only a thought had always been a worry for them, although seeing what had happened upstairs and down here, I rather doubted they'd accomplished anything. It wouldn't hurt to check, however. Before I could start toward the bank of computers, Stefan handed me a gun. It was his backup—one of his many backups, rather, a small revolver. A .38? Guns didn't much interest me. I knew the types Stefan favored above all, the same way you know someone's favorite color, but that was it. Other than when I had been shot that time, guns were pointless in my life. I had the ability to perform better than any handgun. Now, a pipe bomb . . . that was a different matter. I respected my limitations.

“It's a thirty-eight Special,” Stefan said. I'd been right as I usually was. But today wasn't a day for being proud of that. “It's light, not much recoil, no safety, and it's double action. All of that means you just have to point and pull the trigger over and over until you run out of ammo. Hopefully by that time you won't need any more ammo.”

I held it and it was heavier than it looked. “Stefan, everyone down here is dead.”