He’d said that last night too. He’d said and done quite a few things. At one point he’d touched a single fingertip to my arm. I’d felt a numbness, then a brief sharp pain as blood cells ruptured beneath my skin. It was then that the story he’d told me seemed as if it could be true—true in the way that violence and disease are true . . . in the way that death and murder are true. And suddenly I wasn’t a big fan of the truth as everything I’d known and believed exploded as thoroughly as my blood had.
“You’re good, Michael,” I said fiercely. “It’s not what you can do that decides that. It’s what you choose to do.” It was a lesson that had taken me too damn long to learn. I didn’t have a single doubt that he would learn it more quickly than I had, if he didn’t know it already. Of course it could be I wasn’t the best one to advise him on choices, because if one day we saw Jericho again, it was a good bet I would choose to make that his last day.
“I hope you find him.” He saw the question on my face and elaborated pensively. “Lukas. You’re a good big brother to him.”
“I’m a good big brother to you,” I corrected firmly. He wanted to believe, I knew he did, but he just couldn’t make that leap of faith. Not yet. Considering what I now knew of his life at the Institute, the fact that he trusted me at all, even if only in the tiniest measure, was a miracle. That he was alive and sane was an even bigger one. One more and the pope would have him up for sainthood.
I, on the other hand, would never be mistaken for a saint. And with what I had boiling in me now after hearing Michael’s tale, the chances of that happening dropped drastically. He’d said Jericho had made them special, and the son of a bitch had. He’d made them so special that most could kill with a mere touch. Some could do worse. Bodies had been warped from nature’s plan. A little girl . . . a very special little girl . . . had nearly destroyed the flesh of my hand without laying a finger on me. If her hand had actually touched mine, I’d be missing that appendage now or I would be dead.
This same little girl had chosen to stay with the man who’d done this to her. The mental had been twisted along with the physical. And why not? That was much easier to do. Hadn’t I convinced myself that my blue fingernails had nothing to do with a small girl with long blond hair? Hadn’t I dismissed it as nothing at all?
I had told Michael about her. Her name was Wendy, he’d said, and Wendy was scary. What had felt like freezing cold was actually blood vessels constricting, cutting off the warming flow of blood. And she hadn’t done it because she was afraid of me; Wendy wasn’t afraid of anything. She simply enjoyed inflicting pain. She was one of the thirty children or so the Institute held. The number fluctuated. New children, usually around the age of three, were brought in when the numbers decreased due to graduations . . . or other reasons. The kids who weren’t working out, who didn’t have a talent sufficiently powerful or destructive, were the ones who disappeared in the middle of the night.
Like Peter.
He wasn’t the first of Michael’s roommates to be spirited away not to be seen again. Peter couldn’t do what Michael and Wendy could—not on a scale large enough to matter. No bruises; no blood; no, the most he could muster was a mildly painful tingle barely worse than a tickle. When it became apparent that was not going to change, Peter’s time was up.
The names had triggered something in my mind—Michael, Wendy, Peter—and then it hit me. Michael verified it. All the kids were named Michael, Wendy, Peter, and John; lost children from the land of Pan. Jericho had quite the sense of whimsy—for a malignant cancer.
My Wendy, the angel carved from the ice of a grave, was actually Wendy Three. Peter had been Peter Two. Michael . . . Michael was simply Michael. He was the first, no number needed, and he remembered no other name; no other identity. His first memory was of classes, meals in the tomblike silence of the cafeteria, and cradling white mice in his hand only to watch them die. White fur was stained with red as blood spurted from tiny mouths. “I cried,” he’d said, so matter-of-factly. He had been so goddamn, heartbreakingly matter-of-fact. He cried . . . the first time, but never again. Jericho didn’t like tears and Jericho didn’t like weakness. The mice progressed to rabbits to cats and then to pigs. Michael wore their blood blankly and without any outer emotion. That it shredded him like glass in places that couldn’t be seen was something he didn’t have to spell out to me.
It was some time before Michael learned to control the darkness that coiled and struck blindly within him. It was even longer before he was allowed to have physical contact with another human.
After Jericho forced him to kill a man, he didn’t care if he touched another person as long as he lived.