Rob Thurman - Basilisk

“You can’t eat a pyramid.” I opened my eyes and sat up. Through the curtains, I could see the sun rising. “I slept that long?”

“Hit by a truck and a building. That sort of thing deserves a few extra hours. Give yourself a break.” He was already at the table, munching on bacon. “And if you want any food, you’d better hurry. I’ve had too much fast food lately.”

I climbed out of bed, dressed, and took a seat to rapidly fill my plate. He wasn’t serious, but food was just below sex in life’s great pleasures. I wasn’t taking any chances. “I thought about what I said last night.” He started, pouring more coffee. The scrapes and tiny cuts on his face were going to make shaving a bitch this morning. “And I was an asshole. Your badass mobster big brother got his delicate feelings hurt and I projected.”

He covered the smile, faint but there, with his cup of coffee. After he swallowed, he added, “See? I listen to all your psycho-techno babble. My eyes glaze over, yeah, but I listen.” He picked up a triangle of toast before dropping it, interest gone. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Misha. It’s that after all this time, you don’t trust me. Buying planes, recruiting drug dealers, the pipe bomb thing— Jesus , the pipe bombs—the healing and, damn, that’s the least of all the rest you told us. You didn’t tell me any of it.”

I leaned back in the chair and pushed away my plate before I took a single bite. It took one painful topic to kill both our appetites. “I didn’t keep it to myself because I don’t trust you. Well, except for the pipe bombs. You never would’ve gone for that. It was because I want to be normal, Stefan. I want to be like my big brother. Isn’t that what all younger brothers want? When they’re little, they tag along. When they’re grown, they want to be half the man their brother is.”

I ran fingers through my bed hair and made it worse by ruthlessly scrubbing my scalp. “Keeping you up to date every day on my progress at becoming more different and less human wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m not like everyone else. I’m not like you, but I wanted to pretend I was. I wanted you to, hell, forget that I’m not. I want to forget I’m not.”

“So we’re both idiots.” He pushed my plate back in front of me. “No, you’re not like me. You’re better. A better person, a better goddamn everything. Now, eat your breakfast. And if you open your mouth to say you aren’t everything I know you are, I’ll stuff a bagel in it. Plain. Without cream cheese.” Healthy food—the ultimate threat.

“We are idiots, aren’t we?” I took a bite of the blackberry pancakes covered in syrup and butter. “In the future, if I do sort of accidentally keep some things to myself, will you know it has nothing to do with trust? That it’s not you; it’s me.”

““It’s not you; it’s me.’ Jesus. You’re something else.” The grin was quick. “We’re not breaking up, Misha. And, yeah, I’ll know. Eat.”

Now that my secrets were out, it was time to work on Stefan’s. I had another bite of my pancakes before moving on to the bacon as I sidled into the subject slowly. I’d made bombs. Stefan’s secret was one I was going to have to defuse.

I’d worked on finding a cure for years, the second I managed to get a computer and a stack of books on genetics. That was where the cure had to be. Jericho had genetically altered us to add the ability to make human bodies our psychokinetic playgrounds, and that meant genetics would be the only reasonable assumption to reversing it. I read and I researched. I learned, and I didn’t like what I found out.

It was impossible to take a person, a natural human chimera already born with no supercharged healing or killing abilities, and change his genetics to become what Institute chimeras were. My kind of chimera had to be built from the ground up. The process had to start at the very beginning. Once one cell became two, the work started. There was no other way.

I hadn’t mentioned it then, when I discovered the truth, but as we might not survive Peter and the others, I wanted . . . I wasn’t sure what I wanted—a different type of truth, maybe, the only kind that mattered, that one being the one between Stefan and me. I’d once asked Stefan how he thought Jericho knew I was a chimera ripe for scooping up for the Institute. He’d said probably through a pediatrician’s office or the hospital where I’d been born. I’d been fresh out of the Institute then. I hadn’t known much about the real world. Now I did. They didn’t do DNA tests on healthy children born in hospitals surrounded by Mylar balloons and blue teddy bears. DNA tests were rare, unless you were sick, and many times a DNA test wouldn’t show a chimera—not a human one. It took several tests, testing several different sites in the body.

It was time to ask again. “You know, I’ve wondered for a while how Jericho found me. They don’t do DNA tests on babies at hospitals unless they think there’s something wrong with them.”

Stefan went with the abrupt change of subject so smoothly that I knew he’d been doing some thinking about it himself—for a while; almost three years I would guess. Picking up his toast again, he said, “It was a long time ago, but I think I remember Anatoly and Mom having trouble getting pregnant with you. They probably had fertility treatments done. You know, in case I had to be replaced.”

“Replaced?” I frowned.

He shrugged. “The Mafiya needs sons to run it and life expectancy on those sons isn’t the best. No father would want all his eggs in one basket, so to speak.”

That was good, about the Mafiya . Extremely good. I could fact check it on the Internet, and it was aimed at distracting me by pissing me off that Anatoly didn’t think Stefan was enough. The fertility clinic was better than good. It was brilliant, a place where DNA testing was as common as dirt. He’d done his research. As I’d learned from Stefan, he’d learned from me. But almost three years of psychological training compared to nineteen of the same plus interrogation classes? He didn’t have a hope in hell.

“What kind of treatments?” That was me, intrigued by any kind of science. Nothing suspicious at all. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; the Great and Powerful Oz examining his brother’s psyche.

In the midst of all this—chimeras, Raynor, and digging at the inherent nature of family—I made time to miss my wall of movies. Why not? Another form of denial.

Stefan shrugged and slathered up part of his egg with the toast. “I would’ve been six. I was more into watching The Transformers than wondering where babies came from. As far as I knew, they found me under a cabbage leaf in the backyard. Your cabbage leaf was apparently at some clinic somewhere. That reminds me, I used to tell you babies came from sitting on dirty toilet seats. And boys could get pregnant too. It took them four extra months to potty train you because of that.”

The last wasn’t a distraction. It was a memory and a knife to the heart all in one.

“That’s most likely what happened.” I accepted it and gave him a few slices of bacon. The man was a fool for bacon, and that knife . . . it was in his heart. “Jericho might’ve wanted to see how one of his chimeras, engineered with our parents’ respective egg and sperm, would behave in the outside world for a short while. All good experiments need a random blind study. I could’ve been that study—chimera on the loose. And, P.S., you suck ass on the potty-training thing.”

There hadn’t been a fertility clinic, no blind studies. Before I’d come to the conclusion that all of Jericho’s children were born in a petri dish, I’d already sent my DNA to Ariel. Natural chimeras had the two different types of DNA scattered throughout their bodies for the most part. Jericho’s chimeras had the two in every cell. That was impossible for a human chimera. It was the last nail in the coffin. It wasn’t long after, to double-check my suspicion, I’d done my own DNA testing. Every drugstore had them now. Whozurdaddy? Who-zurmama? I took one of Stefan’s hairs from his brush and proved what I’d already come to know.