Free Basilisk by Rob Thurman Page B

Who they’d thought would die long before the AMA-booted doctor would show up? I barely had a scar.
    It had been when I’d been closer to healthy and whole and Stefan knocked out on pain meds in that South Carolina safe house that Anatoly had said that to me.
    â€œBe kind to Stefan. He deserves that.”
    He’d been right and I hadn’t had to hear it from him. Stefan did deserve it. Stefan hadn’t given up on his brother—he had saved me, and he didn’t lie to me. Anatoly had done none of those things. He never even said my name, either of them, not Lukas or the “Michael” the Institute had given me. He’d been polite, for a killer, but weren’t we all killers in that beach house/ makeshift hospital? Stefan had said that Anatoly was my father, but I hadn’t trusted the older man for a second.
    Now, though, looking at what was left of him on my computer screen, I wished I’d tried to find out more of who’d been behind the killer. Was there more to him? I’d had the skills at reading people, same as now, but I hadn’t used them. Everything, the entire world, was so damn new then that Stefan was all I needed and all I could handle. I didn’t want or need a father, I’d thought at the time, especially one who’d given up on me.
    â€œBe kind to Stefan.” I remembered those words.
    I looked at the bones and chunks of decomposed flesh on the screen. He’d been in a lake. Lake Michigan. Floaters aren’t pretty and I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d learned that at the Institute or on one of the thousand TV cop shows since. Wherever I’d heard it, it was right. He was roadkill marinated in a swampy Everglades ditch. He was in pieces and the pieces didn’t fit together to make anything that looked human. They’d identified him by dental records. I clicked on the next picture. These weren’t the kind available to your average Internet surfer, but I wasn’t your average anything. If there was a place that cybertendrils didn’t extend into, I hadn’t found it yet. Chimeras were trained to fool people. I’d found that fooling machines was far easier. If there was a data stream, I rode it; a path of pixels, I walked it. I saw it all, saw through everything as if it were made of glass.
    Not like Anatoly.
    â€œBe kind to Stefan,” he had said. He hadn’t been much of a human before or after he died, I’d thought, but he’d loved his son. He hadn’t loved me; I could tell. I didn’t read him, but I didn’t have to search his face or catalog his movements and words to know that. Love is easy to see; no effort required. Other emotions took effort, but love was simple. I didn’t know why he hadn’t accepted me like Stefan had. Maybe I’d been gone too long. Maybe he’d wiped me out of his heart and mind. The reason didn’t matter.
    I did know it now, but it didn’t matter. Anatoly had ceased to matter to existence itself.
    I couldn’t read him emotionally any better today than then—it was hard to read pieces. But I could read what had been done to him. Brutal, vicious, and messy, but effective. I could’ve done it more quickly and neatly, but there weren’t many of my kind around. Others had to make do with chain saws. This hadn’t been done for punishment or fun. It would’ve taken too long. Psychopaths, such as the Mafiya , as much as they liked chain saws, were generally into immediate gratification. This had been done methodically by someone looking for information.
    I searched the screen. I’d seen Anatoly and what had been done to him. It was what was behind his tangible, rotting memory that I’d noticed: a man. He was in all the pictures. In the ones where they’d pulled Anatoly’s remains from the lake, loading him into the coroner’s van, in the autopsy room—he was always there. The suit, short