actually had some, went up at the answer.
She scooped up Sookie-Sue. âTeenagers these days. Donât know a thing. A gewgaw, knickknack, bit of froufrou.â
Stefanâs hand landed on my shoulder and he said with the friendly handymanâs persona heâd perfected, âUseless dust collector, Park. Donât you start collectingâem.â
âAh.â I handed it back to her with as much care as I would for something not nearly as hideous and worthless and corrected my mental file of Adelaide Thomasina Sloot from mostly harmless with three unpaid parking tickets to bizarre, dusty, possible automotive maniac, with the âharmlessâ designation to definitely be reevaluated at a later date.
Background checks were useless if you didnât update them frequently.
âLetâs go home and get that mess cleaned up.â Stefan steered me toward the door.
My mess. It wasnât all over the bathroom floor, but it was all over just the same. All that training . . . I wonder if the Institute knew how unreliable it was. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didnât, and you never were quite sure which would be which. The Instituteâs students didnât fit in, no matter how many classes they gave us. We couldnât always act like normal people. We could manipulate them, but not act like them . . . not be normal people. Of all the training theyâd given us, in the end we were good for only one thing; we could excel at only one thing over those normal people.
Killing them.
Chapter 2
âM ichael.â
The classroom was gray. Everything was gray at the Institute. There were no windows in the room. There were thirteen students, including two more MichaelsâMichael Two and Michael Four. But I was the first Michael. I didnât need a numbered designation. Our creator, Jerichoâthat was what he called himselfâour creator, had thought it humorous to name us after the lost children of Peter Pan. In the story, Michael, Peter, Lily, and Wendy hadnât been among the lost. In the Institute they were. Every child here was as lost as he could possibly be.
âYes, Instructor,â I said promptly. You were always quick and you always performed above average or you wouldnât be around much longer to fail at both of those things.
âName the proper technique for avoiding suspicion in scenario twenty-seven.â
Scenario twenty-seven was smiling wide and shaking the hand of the president like a good Boy Scout, essay-writer, or boy whoâd saved the lives of a burning preschool full of babies. Whatever story it took to get you within touching distance of a man someone, it didnât matter who, wanted to die. âAfter inducing a fatal heart attack or aneurysm, he falls, and I cry and ask for my mother.â
âMommy. At your age, you ask for your mommy,â the Instructor corrected me.
I nodded. âYes, Instructor. I ask for my mommy.â
My hands were folded and the desk was cool under my skin. I was eight or close to eight. I didnât know for sure. Iâd say young, but there was no such thing as young at the Institute. I had no idea what an eight-year-old in the outside world would do after killing a head of state, but the Instructors told us what to do, how to emotionally manipulate, how to imitate the real thingâa genuine person. Imitationâit was what the best predators did. The biology Instructor told us that.
It would turn out that nothing theyâd taught us had been as effective as theyâd thought. Killing they hadnât had to teach us. Killing had been stamped on our genes. Killing was as easy as breathing.
Being human was a hundred times harder.
âMisha?â
Misha, the Russian nickname for Michael, was my real-life name, no matter how much I sucked at real life today. Actually, Lukas was my birth name, but I didnât remember it. Since I had lived with the name Michael for all the
Learning to Kill: Stories