I didn’t know which was more annoying: that he whispered for his pet but stomped around like a drunken lumberjack in the morning when I tried to sleep, or that he wanted to take time out of fleeing for our lives to get a how-to book on his carpet shark. “Yeah,” I said with blatant insincerity. “I’ll put it right at the top of my to-do list.” Securing my weapon against thieving paws, I zipped up the duffel bag and jerked my chin at his book. “You find out anything interesting yet?”
He scooped the ferret into his hands and sat up to place it carefully on a pillow. Stretching, he then traced his fingers across the glossy pages and said, “Everything in here is interesting . . . in its way.” As if the thought unsettled him, he closed the book firmly and pushed it away.
“A little too close to home?”
“Maybe,” he admitted reluctantly only after I started to reach for the book. “No, it’s all right.” The volume was swiftly retrieved before I could get a grip on it. “This is me. This is my history. I want to do this.” That he embraced, but my part in it he refused point-blank.
“I’m a chunk of that history too, Misha, believe it or not.”
Before he could deny or give me a sympathy that was unwanted and unneeded, I sat down beside him and pulled off my sock to examine the puncture wounds in my toe. “You used to drive me crazy, you know? Typical little-brother stuff.” I brushed a thumb across my skin and wiped the drop of blood away. “You stuck to me as if I had Velcro on my ass. When I first kissed a girl, you were there, hiding in the bushes. I think your exact words were ‘Eww, cooties.’ Funny, how thirteen-year-old girls don’t appreciate that. Or thirteen-year-old big brothers for that matter.” Balling up the stained material, I tossed it over onto my bed. “Then there was the time you thought my bike wasn’t snazzy enough, boring navy blue not being your favorite color. So you painted it purple . . . with a couple of yellow stripes. And I yelled at you.” I sent my other sock the way of the first. “Not much of a surprise, considering. But you were hurt. You’d done something to make me happy, and I yelled at you for it.”
I still had that bike. It was in my condo storage unit. It was one of those things you simply couldn’t look at, yet couldn’t throw away.
“Did you ride it that way?”
Surprised, I laughed. “Um . . . yeah, I did. For a while.”
I’d forgotten about that. We’d lived in an actual neighborhood at that time, with sidewalks and huge houses on postage stamp-sized lots. I’d tooled up and down our street on that clown cycle to universal howls of laughter. Mom had been alive then and she’d gently coerced me into it, saying it was the only way to cheer up Lukas. “It was pretty humiliating, but I guess I don’t have any right to complain.” As understatements went, it was a goddamn doozy, but Michael didn’t challenge it. Why would he? As far as he was concerned, it had nothing to do with him. If he didn’t accept that he was my brother, then he could hardly blame me for his life with Jericho.
“I never had a bike.” There was a bag of pretzels beside him and he dug for a handful. “But I prefer cars anyway. Purple, yellow—the color’s not important as long as they’re fast.”
“A potential speed demon—that’s all I need,” I remarked with a roll of my eyes, accepting the snack bag he passed me. He was joking, I was fairly sure. The times he’d driven, he’d been very careful to stay within the speed limit even before I’d explained that the last thing we wanted was to be pulled over by a cop. “Hey, it seems I’m always the one doing the talking, telling the tall tales. Let’s hear some from you.” I didn’t know if he was ready for that, but I wanted to give him the opportunity. He’d already told me about the classes, the training, the experiments, but he had been careful to keep it impersonal and at arm’s length as if it had happened to someone else. If he had expended even an ounce of emotion in the telling, I’d missed it.
“You don’t want to hear my stories.” He leaned forward to deposit a pretzel by the sleeping ferret’s head. “Boring, all of them. Eat, sleep, go to class—not much entertainment value there.”
“I’m not a demanding audience,” I prompted. “So lay it on me.” At his continued silence, I nudged him with my shoulder. “I know they won’t be happy stories, kid, but don’t pull any punches. I want to know what you went through at that hellhole.”
“At the Institute.” His head dipped and fingers wrapped around a strand of hair over his eyes. Tapping those knuckles against his forehead, he exhaled. “It’s been only days. I can’t believe it. When I wake up in the morning it takes me a minute to remember that I’m not still there, but the rest of the day”—he shook his head—“the rest of the day it seems forever that you showed up in my room dressed up like a Hollywood ninja.”