That had been last night’s cheesy movie. That was one thing Michael hadn’t gotten his fill of at the Institute. He would watch a movie on any subject—good, bad, or just plain freaky. I let the ninja remark, damaging though it was to my ego, sail past and I waited for him to go on.
“I didn’t think you were there for me. Not for one minute, not for one second. You were just another test, one I couldn’t pass. Jericho had made it clear I wasn’t doing too well. Graduation was coming up for me, but I wasn’t living up to my potential.”
I could hear the quotes around the last word. “How many graduated before you?”
“A few. I’m the oldest now, but it doesn’t go by age.” He released his hair and dropped his hands onto his knees. Lifting his shoulders slightly, he let them fall in a small shrug so precise, so controlled that any casual element was lost. “But I wasn’t going to make it. I’m not as obedient as the other students, and I don’t like to kill. I’m good at it, but I don’t like it.” Pitch-black humor came and went in his face. “Your Wendy will probably graduate before she turns eight.”
Not my Wendy, thank God. That was a thought I didn’t want to contemplate, and it led me to others of a similar nature. What if I’d opened Michael’s door to find that he was like that little girl, his brain as twisted as his genes? What if taking him into an unsuspecting world hadn’t been feasible? As I’d said, they were thoughts not worth thinking.
“You? Disobedient? The hell you say.”
With a jaundiced air at my mockery, he revised. “Maybe it would be better to say unenthused.”
There was the crunch of teeth against rock-hard bread and I swiveled my head to see the drowsy ferret clutching the pretzel in its peculiarly adept paws as it nibbled. The sight reminded me of my earlier curiosity. “Jericho, do you know how he lost his hand?” Since he healed at the same breakneck pace as Michael, I would’ve thought, short of chopping the appendage off, any normal damage would heal.
“John.” He frowned and got to his feet. “It was John.” Moving over to the window, he fiddled with the blinds. Fidgeting was uncustomary behavior for Michael. He was so routinely sanguine, in his way as unflappable as our father was—or as Konstantin had been. Like both of them, he lived deep inside himself. But whereas my father and former boss came by the trait through the slow erosion of their finer human emotions, Michael had developed his out of a sense of survival. It made sense, that inner retreat; for him it had always been far safer there.
“John?”
Opening and closing the slats, he let in the dim yellow illumination of the security lights that bathed the parking lot. “He was the only one older than me. He was my first roommate, the first person I can actually remember in my life.” He kept his back to me as he talked, still gazing out of the window. “Aside from Jericho.”
I remembered how he said they numbered the children, identified them as the experiments they were considered to be. Wendy had been Wendy Three, and Michael had said he was the first with no number necessary. “The first John then.”
“The first one,” he affirmed. “And the only one. There were no Johns after him. Jericho retired the name, I guess you’d say.”
“He retired John too, didn’t he?” I asked quietly when he fell silent, lost in the golden haze drifting through the glass.
He didn’t answer and that in itself was answer enough. “He was like Jericho in a lot of ways, same features, same hair and skin. The eyes were a different color, of course, but the same shape. They looked as if they could’ve been”—he struggled for a moment and then settled on a word—“related.” The concept of family, of father and son, brother to brother, was almost a myth to him. It was something to be read about in books and watched in the endless stream of movies, but not something that he’d seen close up in the walled-off microcosm that had been his world. No wonder he was having such a difficult time with it, and me, now.
“A miniature Jericho? Now there’s a scary thought,” I commented with utter sincerity.
“No. On the outside they were similar, but on the inside John was nothing like Jericho. Nothing like me either.” There was self-recrimination there, a thin brittle layer under a glittering frost of calm. “John wanted to be free. He always wanted to be free. I can’t remember how many times he tried to escape. He wanted me to go with him, but I never would. Not the first time. Not the last time.” The blinds were closed with a savage snap. “He kept asking me why. Time after time. When the lights were out for the night, he would whisper it so they wouldn’t hear. Why? Why won’t you come?”
“And what did you say?”