“No weakness. No limitations. No mercy,” I said.
She nodded, her hair swinging at her jaw with the motion. “Jericho would be so disappointed.” She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her wide mouth. “The bastard, which makes liking you more fun. I was his first; did you know? That probably confused you, that you didn’t recognize me from the Institute. I’m not twenty-two; I’m twenty-nine and his very first success. He had a run of bad luck after me, batch after bad batch, before he finally had production going smoothly. Assembly-line assassins. I graduated when I was seventeen and you were this tall.” She held down a hand to indicate. “I killed my owner when I was seventeen and a half and walked away. I liked being free.
“Speaking of like, did you like me back? Though you knew I was lying to you? And especially now you know that I’m an older woman.” She smiled again. Happy. Always happy. Happy to watch movies and chat online; happy to kill. She didn’t see the difference between the two. Not yet . . . even with her doubts now regarding Wendy. Not yet and maybe not ever.
“At first. Then I sort of loved you. I still do.” Unlike her, I didn’t sound happy. I wasn’t. Loving Ariel wasn’t a love to savor or cherish. Loving her meant I might not love again. She was a sociopath and as she’d said, she liked me, but that didn’t mean she would or could learn to like anyone else. A friend? A neighbor? Fun was fun, and toys, like her engineered superflu, were hard to give up. Like Wendy, Ariel wouldn’t tolerate tedium. Loving her didn’t mean I didn’t know what she was. It was why I kept e-mailing her, kept in touch, kept her thinking I was on her hook, because all chimeras had to be cured—even Ariel.
“How many people have you killed since you dropped your owner and ran? How many people did you kill when you weren’t ordered to or forced to? How many people, Ariel, did you kill because you liked doing so? How many people, not counting the ones you’d kill with what you made in your lab, will you kill in the future if I don’t cure you?” I asked.
“Please. So serious. People are like potato chips. You can’t kill just one,” she said, radiant with humor. When I didn’t comment, the dimple and smile disappeared. “Why does it matter? That’s what we do. That’s who we are. We are evolution in progress, Michael. Everyone else”—she gave a shrug as pretty as her first one and utterly dismissive—“their time is over. Our time is now. Why shouldn’t I have fun with them?”
“How many people, Ariel?” I repeated.
She stared at me. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand; she was psychologically incapable of it—at least now. And now was all we had. The water was louder now. Nature knew evolution better than we did. It knew a wrong turn and we were that. “You do have a cure, don’t you?” she asked slowly, for the first time seeing something in me that was similar to what she’d been wary of in Wendy, something to be feared.
“I do,” I said quietly.
“And you’d use it? On your own kind?”
“As Wendy had killed our own kind, I will. There’s no other way.”
“I didn’t know that about Wendy. That she would kill her own, kill one of us. I hope you believe that.” She shook her head then, denying it. “Whatever it is, you know it’s not a cure, Misha. It’s a poison, to strip us of what we are.” She took a step back from me.
“No, it is a cure, but not for you or the others. It’s a cure for the human race. We’re not right. We’re twisted. We were made that way. We’re a malignant cancer and, as with any cancer, the cure is a poison. You won’t be able to kill anymore.” I hesitated, because it was dark and ugly, but it was necessary. She’d lied to me; I’d lied to her. I’d lied to everyone for all my good intentions and promises to the contrary, but that was over.
“And you won’t be you anymore. You’ll still be intelligent, that won’t change, but Ariel will die. Someone will take her place. Someone who doesn’t care what color her hair is or that she likes mermaids and short skirts or purple sandals. She’ll be a new person—not an interesting person; brilliant but not clever; alive but she won’t care particularly if she is or not. She won’t have hopes and dreams, and fun will be only a word to her. But she won’t kill again and that’s the best I can do. We’re not the next step in evolution. We’re a mutation created by a madman and brainwashed to be monsters. Monsters belong in those movies we watched, Ariel, not in the real world.”