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“Good,” he said, a little breathless.
Marlowe’s brows came together. “Just good?”
Jericho laughed. “Great. I feel great! Fantastic, in fact.”
“Attaboy!” Marlowe’s grin was a match for the new, expansive joy inside Jericho. If this was the future Marlowe envisioned, Jericho could get used to it. He stumbled off the table and Marlowe caught him.
“Ho! Careful there. You might be a bit woozy at first. That’ll get better with time and more serum. Come on. Let’s start seeing what you can do.”
Marlowe put Jericho through his paces. Jericho pressed a heavy set of iron barbells above his head forty times, holding them up on the last go for a solid five minutes. Push-ups were no trouble. Jericho performed five hundred of them; it seemed like nothing. He wasn’t even winded. While Marlowe drove his protégé through a battery of endurance tests, he’d ask Jericho what he felt:
“Now?”
“Awake. Alive. God, so alive!”
Marlowe beamed. “Keep going.”
At last, they’d finished their routine for the day, three hours of intensive physical training. But Jericho’s blood still called to him: More.
“I think I need to run,” he said, chest heaving with pent-up excitement.
“All right, Übermensch. There are miles of grounds. Go run off some of that incredible energy,” Marlowe said, patting Jericho on the back.
Jericho stood on the front lawn of Hopeful Harbor. Which way to go? Another hawk circled overhead, flying toward the long line of forest. Jericho grinned. He’d give that bird a race. Jericho faced the forest and set off at a clip. Dodging trees was effortless. It was almost as if he could sense them before seeing them, and his sharpened reflexes took over, allowing him to avoid collisions easily. He chased the hawk’s path. The shrubs blurred to blobs of green as Jericho picked up more speed. Wind whined in his ears. Ahead, a towering bank of jagged rocks poked up, demanding caution. Jericho did not slow. In the next second, he was airborne. He’d leaped them without brea
king stride. It felt as if this was what he was born for. His body had never been more alive. The hawk. For one glorious still moment, Jericho and the hawk occupied the same space in the air. Their eyes locked. Bird. Man. No. Not man. Übermensch. Jericho stretched out his arms and lay back, letting himself fall back to earth. His feet disturbed the ground as he landed. Jericho stopped to admire the deep impressions of footprints. “Thus spoke Zarathustra.”
Jericho made a fist, not out of fear but of defiance. It was strong and good. Clean, pine-scented air filled his lungs. The hawk settled nearby. It cocked its head, regarding him not as a man but as an equal. Jericho could feel this. He could feel it! Sun broke through the clouds. It fuzzed the brushstroke tops of the tall pines with gold. Laughing, Jericho tipped his face toward the sky, drinking in the sun till he felt drunk on its promise.
Every day, Jericho ate breakfast and reported to the underground laboratory. They took his blood, and a little while later, they returned with an injection of the mysterious blue serum. They covered his eyes and placed him under a sunlamp and gave him radiation therapy with an X-ray machine. Then there were the endurance tests: push-ups, boxing, running, swimming. They tested him against heat and cold. Gave him complex puzzles to solve. Every day, Jericho noticed significant improvement. He’d come to look forward to it all, waiting for that exhilarating rush as the serum grabbed hold and shook him from the inside, told him who and what he could be if he was willing.
Whenever Jericho had a free moment, he made his way through the house carefully, searching for the card reader, crossing each room off his mental list. He felt a little guilty doing so. Marlowe had been nothing but nice to him; more than nice—he’d seen to Jericho’s every need. Even though he wasn’t really doing anything except looking, he couldn’t help feeling that it was a betrayal somehow. But he’d promised Evie, and Jericho kept his promises. So far, he’d explored ten of the mansion’s many rooms but had had no luck. Still, he knew the machine was there somewhere. He couldn’t explain why he knew, just that he did. It was strange, but since the experiments, Jericho’s senses had all been heightened, along with his strength and his appetite. His vision was phenomenal. He could see a spot on the road nearly a quarter mile away and make out the model of the car from up on the hill. When a squirrel or rabbit scuttled through the grass, Jericho sensed the animal by its musk before it ever made an appearance. Even his hearing had become more acute. Lying on his bed, he’d once heard the slightly muffled voices of the servants in the kitchen and could pick out whole phrases (an Irish maid named Kathleen had a bit of a crush on Jake, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Billings, upbraided her for being “a foolish girl with foolish notions” who should “remember her place.” “But anything can happen here; it’s not like back home,” Kathleen had answered. Mrs. Billings had scoffed, “Fairy tales, my girl.”)
Jericho had gotten in the habit of taking breakfast with Marlowe first thing in the morning before his physical regimen and the testing began. During these morning meetings, Marlowe was usually upbeat and friendly. Jericho had begun to look forward to their time together, talking about books and history. As much as Jericho cared about Will, he’d found him remote. Jericho and Will were both quiet and scholarly, and that made it harder for them to really talk. Their conversations were often filled with awkward silences or sentences that hung in the air. Jericho hadn’t realized till now how lonely it had made him feel. In that way, it was a relief to be with Jake, who was never short on conversation. He’d dig into his eggs with a chipper “So, Jericho, what did you think of that book I lent you?” “Jericho, who do you like better: Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton?” “Jericho, I’ve got the most brilliant idea—let’s take the Duesenberg out for a spin.” “Jericho, have you taken a gander at the art in the ballroom? There’s a Renoir I think you’d like.”
Against his better judgment, Jericho was coming to like Marlowe.
One morning, as they sat laughing over a story Jake told about meeting a bear in the woods—“The same bear Will uses to hang his hat on now?” “The very same one!”—Jericho grew bolder.
“What do you know about Project Buffalo?” he asked, biting into a square of toast.
Marlowe’s fork halted in midair. All mirth was gone. “Where did you hear that?”
“Some old letters of Will’s at the museum.”
“Project Buffalo was a mistake,” Marlowe said, and scooped up a forkful of egg.
Jericho swallowed down his toast. “I heard you invented some swell machines during that time, though,” Jericho said, still fishing. “Ghost measuring equipment. Diviner testing machines—that Metaphysickometer? Even punch code card readers.”
Marlowe’s easy demeanor shifted to something hard and cold. “I don’t talk about Project Buffalo. Is that understood?” Jericho nodded. Marlowe’s easy smile returned. “Now. Eat up. You’ll need your strength for today.”
In the afternoon, Marlowe knocked at Jericho’s door. “I’m heading to town for a few hours. Anything I can bring you?”
“No, thank you. I think I’ll take a nap, if it’s all the same,” Jericho said. He forced a yawn to back up his lie.
“Of course. Well, then. See you at dinner. We’ll resume our testing this evening.”
Jericho listened for the crunch of automobile wheels on the gravel outside, and then he slipped through the sprawling mansion, trying doors and peeking through keyholes. There were plenty of unoccupied bedrooms and old parlors, a billiards room, and a servants’ wing. The house had a lonely air to it, as if it had been emptied of joy long ago, and all that remained were the ghosts of happiness. If Evie were here, she’d most likely want to read everything. He could just imagine her mischievously grabbing some priceless object from a shelf as if it were nothing and diving right into its mysteries without fear. Now, Evie lived full out. Was that part of what attracted him to her? That she had qualities he lacked? Thinking about Evie stirred lust in Jericho. Since the serum, he’d been having more fantasies about her. He imagined taking her in his arms, slipping down her dress, his mouth moving across the curve of her neck and…
