The flush that had filled his face with color before he went to the bathroom reappeared. “I thought you wanted to hear about Jericho,” he snapped defensively.
He wasn’t used to being teased, that was easy to see. Hopefully, that would change, along with so many other things he’d been denied. “Yeah, I do.” Pouring him a glass of the breakfast elixir of the gods. “But drink your juice first. I don’t want a swat with the Delgado dish towel.”
Lifting the glass, he gave the contents a doubtful sniff before taking an experimental swallow. “It’s good.” He sounded surprised, no doubt thrown off by the lack of chocolate syrup.
“Si, perrito, and it’s good for you.” Bustling up to the table, she slid two heavy white plates overloaded with food in front of us. Scrambled eggs mixed with peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes, fried potatoes coated with cheese and onions, thick slices of ham and even thicker toast slathered with butter and jam. I felt my heart stagger in midbeat just at the sight. Serve it to a man over fifty and Mrs. Delgado would be considered an accomplice to murder. Pulling a bottle of ketchup and a jar of salsa out of her apron, she placed them on the table, smoothed a stray hair on the crown of Michael’s head, and rushed back off. The woman was a whirlwind in a muumuu, a whirlwind with a black belt in cholesterol.
Michael looked down at his plate, then back up at me with round eyes. “Holy shit.”
“Hey, watch it,” I laughed. “Where’d you pick up language like that?”
“Movies.” He picked up his fork and started on the eggs. “And you.”
He had me there. I’d tried to keep it clean once we made it out of the compound, but how foolish was that? Michael had faced much worse in his life than a few dirty words. Besides, when I was seventeen I was playing football, smoking behind the gym, and my mouth had been anything but pristine. And I’d been a fairly good kid. Given that I had a father like mine, the little rebellions of a normal teenager had seemed innocently na?ve . . . even to me. How could you be tempted to worse things when your father ordered men killed between dinner courses? Cheating, graffiti, vandalism—what the hell would be the point to those?
They were old thoughts and I shrugged them off to dig into my own breakfast. I ran out of steam about halfway through, my stomach uncomfortably full. Michael kept going to finish every bite on his plate and then eyed mine. The kid could eat and that was no lie. I thought about giving him my leftovers, but the image of his spewing eggs and ham in a manner not even Dr. Seuss would approve of stopped me.
“About Jericho,” I prodded as I leaned back in my chair, hoping against hope for a quick digestion.
“Oh.” He stalled by helping himself to another glass of juice. That the subject of Jericho was harder to face than the Institute didn’t give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. “Jericho.” He took a swallow, his throat convulsing as if the juice were much thicker than it looked. “Jericho . . . He oversees the Institute. The students, the classes, everything.”
“Even that room in the basement?” That ghastly room. “Does he oversee that too?”
Hand clenched tightly around the glass, he lowered his gaze into the icy red liquid. “Jericho has been at the Institute as long as I can remember. He’s a scientist. All of the instructors called him Doctor.” The curl of his lips was brutally bitter. “Or stuttered and wet their pants.”
The memory of the shadowy figure from the back of the van was all too clear. The man had no fear or a surreal belief in his own immortality. Either one made him a dangerous man, not to mention a demented lunatic. But . . . he hadn’t looked like a loony. He’d looked cold, hard, and completely in control.
“A scientist, huh?” I commented with the image of that rotating DNA helix I’d seen on the compound computers flashing through my mind. I had no difficulty picturing this Jericho involved in medical experiments on children. Of all the violent shit I’d seen in my life, nothing had turned my stomach as that thought did. “And what kind of science did the son of a bitch practice? What’d he do?” Something with a genetic flavor to it, I was presuming, but the two biology classes I’d taken in college hadn’t exactly prepared me for any educated guesses.
He pushed the glass back and forth. The squeak of that and the sloshing juice were the only immediate sounds. There was the murmur of the other diners and Testimony Delgado’s humming “Amazing Grace” in the background, but at our table there was silence. “Misha,” I started, trying my best not to pressure him. “I’m trying to help. . . .”
The slamming of the glass on the surface of the table shut me up as it was intended to do. “Trying to help me. Trying to save me. I know.” His voice was raw. “You keep saying so.” From his tone it wasn’t easy to tell whether he possessed any confidence in my ability to pull it off. “But you don’t know. You can’t know.”