“What is your favorite color?”
The Institute wasn’t a school, not the kind most people knew about, and Dr. John Jericho Hooker wasn’t an instructor. I hadn’t doubted then that he was our creator. Now maybe I thought he was part creator of some, corrupter of others—like me—but in the end it didn’t matter. He’d been the most frightening son of a bitch on the face of the earth. Cursing was automatic at that memory. When Jericho asked you to do something, you did it. When he asked you a question, you answered it. Years ago in that prison, Jericho had asked me my favorite color.
I’d thought carefully. This was a year or so after the question of the Instructor on what to do when I killed a president. I couldn’t see how giving my true feelings could hurt in this one case. “Blue.” The blue of sky, the blue of ocean. The blue of my dreams.
Jericho’s ebony eyes stared unblinking at me. His prosthetic hand, replacing the one taken by one of his students—one of his creations who was much braver than I’d been in those days—rested on his desk. “What is your favorite color?”
I’d shown no fear. Those who showed fear were weak, and the weak did not often “graduate” from the Institute, although they did graduate from life . . . early. I thought again. I’d seen the movies, the books. I’d seen the trees and the grass on the screen and in the pictures. “Green.”
Those frozen artificial fingers clicked against the top of the desk and the eyes narrowed. “Michael, what is your favorite color?”
Third time was the charm. I’d read that before in those same books. But third time was never the charm here. That I was offered a third time was beyond the best I could’ve hoped for. Yet here it was, my third and last chance.
It was so simple. I couldn’t believe I’d been fooled twice before. I knew the answer—the right one this time. I knew what he wanted to hear. “I don’t have a favorite color.”
“Good. You’re learning. You have no thoughts but the ones I give you. Do not forget that.” His lips curved, the creator pleased that his experiment had performed adequately. That was what I was—an experiment; less than human, different from human, but made to be a reaper of them.
I was glad he was dead. If Stefan’s father had ever done anything right, it was in killing Jericho. Frankenstein had died on a beach like the one where I had been ripped from the real world. It didn’t get any more fitting than that.
It was a story I hadn’t made Stefan repeat time and time again, as much as I wanted to in an effort to get back those vanished memories. He told it once, and once was enough. He’d . . . fractured when he’d told me, like winter ice cracked and shattered by the first warm spring day. It was days before he was back to his usual self. How could I ask again? I’d memorized what he’d said, though, the whole thing and the bits and pieces added throughout the next few years, of what my life had been before the Institute. Anatoly had been big in the Mafiya. He and his wife, Anya, had emigrated from Russia and we were born here. Anatoly had brought the mob with him or the mob had brought him, but whichever, their children had lived a privileged life. When Lukas—I could think of that long-ago child only as Lukas, not me—was seven and Stefan was fourteen, they’d lived in a big house on a private beach near Miami. They’d been given horses for their Christmas presents and when the adult all-day Christmas party started, they’d taken those horses and gone to that beach to race the wind.
He said it was his idea . . . as if that made it his fault. A fourteen-year-old kid wanting to ride horses on the beach with his brother and he said it as if it were a capital crime. Whatever he’d said, it had probably been my—Lukas’s—idea—a big adventure to a seven-year-old. It didn’t make it my fault either. It was only Jericho’s fault. He made killers out of chimeras and that was what I was—a chimera.