Basilisk by Rob Thurman Read Free Book Online

actually had some, went up at the answer.
    She scooped up Sookie-Sue. “Teenagers these days. Don’t know a thing. A gewgaw, knickknack, bit of froufrou.”
    Stefan’s hand landed on my shoulder and he said with the friendly handyman’s persona he’d perfected, “Useless dust collector, Park. Don’t you start collecting’em.”
    â€œAh.” 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 ‘harmless’ designation to definitely be reevaluated at a later date.
    Background checks were useless if you didn’t update them frequently.
    â€œLet’s go home and get that mess cleaned up.” Stefan steered me toward the door.
    My mess. It wasn’t 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 didn’t, and you never were quite sure which would be which. The Institute’s students didn’t fit in, no matter how many classes they gave us. We couldn’t always act like normal people. We could manipulate them, but not act like them . . . not be normal people. Of all the training they’d 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
    â€œM ichael.”
    The classroom was gray. Everything was gray at the Institute. There were no windows in the room. There were thirteen students, including two more Michaels—Michael Two and Michael Four. But I was the first Michael. I didn’t need a numbered designation. Our creator, Jericho—that was what he called himself—our creator, had thought it humorous to name us after the lost children of Peter Pan. In the story, Michael, Peter, Lily, and Wendy hadn’t been among the lost. In the Institute they were. Every child here was as lost as he could possibly be.
    â€œYes, Instructor,” I said promptly. You were always quick and you always performed above average or you wouldn’t be around much longer to fail at both of those things.
    â€œName the proper technique for avoiding suspicion in scenario twenty-seven.”
    Scenario twenty-seven was smiling wide and shaking the hand of the president like a good Boy Scout, essay-writer, or boy who’d 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 didn’t matter who, wanted to die. “After inducing a fatal heart attack or aneurysm, he falls, and I cry and ask for my mother.”
    â€œMommy. At your age, you ask for your mommy,” the Instructor corrected me.
    I nodded. “Yes, Instructor. I ask for my mommy.”
    My hands were folded and the desk was cool under my skin. I was eight or close to eight. I didn’t know for sure. I’d 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 thing—a genuine person. Imitation—it was what the best predators did. The biology Instructor told us that.
    It would turn out that nothing they’d taught us had been as effective as they’d thought. Killing they hadn’t had to teach us. Killing had been stamped on our genes. Killing was as easy as breathing.
    Being human was a hundred times harder.
    â€œMisha?”
    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 didn’t remember it. Since I had lived with the name Michael for all the