Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater . . . It was a nursery rhyme, we were told. Targets and those between you and your target told them to their children. It was a fact we needed to know to appear ordinary and we were given three examples to memorize, which we did in one reading as required, before moving on to the next subject—how to mimic the neurotoxic effects of blowfish poisoning if you happened to have a target in Japan.
I’d been around twelve then—two years older than Wendy was now. Peter had been close to the same. It was hard to tell in the Institute. There were no birthday parties. The Playground, yes, but no parties . . . not the kind of parties, at least, that anyone outside the Institute would recognize as a celebration. I hadn’t told Stefan that the Basement wasn’t the only place where we were “rewarded” for exceptional work. The Institute knew it was important in raising genetic assassins to equate death with reward. Death equaled reward equaled incentive equaled eager students—a simple psychological loop.
On the nursery rhyme day, Peter had asked the Instructor if it wouldn’t be better to kill several other people in the target’s entourage along with the target by using imitative blowfish poisoning to increase the authenticity of the diagnosis. I had thought the same myself. I couldn’t help it. It was a logical and effective way to throw off any signs of foul play. But I hadn’t said it; I’d only thought it. Peter wasn’t like me, however. Peter was a good, enthusiastic student, and he said it loud and proud. That brought him a reward and the rest of us a chance to watch and see what we were missing by not trying as hard as Peter.
In the exercise yard our class gathered to watch Peter enjoy his prize. It was a homeless girl, a runaway—a teenage prostitute I’d guessed, then. Targets were frequently with prostitutes. It was a fact we needed to know.
She was fifteen at most, this girl, but to a chimera, whether it was man, woman, or child made no difference. Age and sex didn’t matter when all you saw was an objective. That was all Peter saw. I knew, because I remembered his smile. He had perfect white teeth—we all did. The attractive were less suspicious than the unattractive. Jericho had made that clear. Targets were all prejudiced in one way or another whether they knew it or not, and a negative reaction to the unsightly was a universal one.
As ugly on the inside as he was attractive on the outside, Peter, with his perfect smile and bright, happy eyes, didn’t look like a threat, not to a runaway snatched off the streets by silent men, shoved in a van, and brought to a place that looked worse than any prison. None of us would look sinister to her as we stood in a wide, loose circle around her under a hot Florida sun. She’d cowered on the dirt, crying. I remembered the trails of clean pure skin under the trails of her tears. The rest of her face was covered with thick makeup, her hair bleached blond with black roots, and her eyes . . . They kept animals in the Institute labs, starter projects for the extremely young. Some of them were dogs. I remembered their eyes. Hers were the same: soft, brown, and dumb with terror. When she saw Peter leave the circle and walk toward her, she lunged at him and shoved him behind her; both fell on their knees. She hadn’t been attacking him. She’d been trying to save him.
“Little boy.” She’d been sobbing so hard, I’d barely been able to understand her. “They took me, those bastards.” She meant the guards who stood farther outside the circle, passive and watching. “They took me just as they took you. What do they want? Did they hurt you? Did they. . . .” She had swallowed. “Did they touch you? All of you? Oh God, will they rape me? Will they hurt me?”
Peter’s smile had never faded. “No,” he’d said, running a fascinated hand through her hair. Then he’d kissed her cheek, the same way as we’d seen in movies. That was all we knew of affection, what we’d been taught to fake. “They won’t hurt you.
“But I will.”