Rogue Read Online Free

scabs, the fingers bent and twisted like broken twigs. Will reached out and took it. Dry and scaly to the touch, it felt more like a claw.
    Will quickly calculated:
    This is my grandfather’s mentor. My grandfather’s at least ninety-five. So somehow Dr. Joseph Abelson—a man who was a contemporary and colleague of Adolf Hitler’s—can’t be a day less than a hundred and fifteen…and maybe even a whole lot older than that.
    As Abelson stared at him, a long, dry rasp escaped the man’s throat, an attempt at speech that didn’t sound like words.
    “He says you look like your father,” said Franklin with a little chuckle.
    And you look like a mummy,
thought Will.
    “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” said Will, raising his voice to match his grandfather’s level and drawing his hand back.
    “As I believe you know, none of the first class of Paladins perished on that ‘plane crash’ we arranged in ’38,” said Franklin, then patted Abelson on the arm. “And neither did our teacher. He came back to supervise the program, in the hospital the Knights built for us down below, which you’ve also seen.”
    Will couldn’t take his eyes off Abelson, who continued to gaze at him with that one unsettling red-rimmed eye. No sense of what he was thinking or feeling registered; that eye looked dead, and his slack face seemed incapable of forming any expression at all.
    You’re not the only one who can mask his feelings,
thought Will as he turned back to his grandfather.
    “You weren’t even on the plane,” said Will.
    “No, my father had seen to that—after the interference of his meddlesome friend Henry Wallace. He packed me off to Europe for a few months, and so I missed being part of the program.”
    “Lucky for you,” said Will.
    The memory of those pathetic, malformed creatures writhing around, wasting away in the copper tanks down below came to mind.
For the last seventy-five years.
    Will closed his eyes and shuddered.
    “Yes, well, we all knew the risks,” said Franklin, untroubled. “Those boys all volunteered with open hearts, and not one of them has said they ever regretted it.”
    Not according to Happy Nepsted,
thought Will.
    “And although my father had prevented me from participating initially, when I returned to school, the Knights still found a crucial role for me. Can you guess what it was?”
    “You were the control group,” said Will.
    “Precisely, Will. Every worthwhile scientific inquiry requires a baseline to chart any changes in the study group against, and that assignment fell to me.”
    “But wasn’t your father watching you like a hawk, afraid you’d fall back in with them?”
    Abelson gave out a small, wheezy gasp and Will realized it might have been a laugh. That’s how Franklin seemed to interpret it, and he smiled in response.
    “Not during the war years,” said Franklin. “Father was far too preoccupied, like the rest of the country. Fighting Fascism, Nazis. Making America ‘safe.’ Not to mention Father really did believe he’d already expunged the Knights from the Center for good.”
    “I’m guessing you didn’t give him any reason to think otherwise.”
    “Exactly. I played the perfect choirboy. The next challenge we faced was of our own making. By the time the war was over, as a number of unfortunate issues with the health of our first group began to surface, we’d realized the protocols for the Paladin program would require extensive…fine-tuning.”
    Abelson raised a finger and his tongue rolled around as he issued a few more unintelligible rattles and hisses in Franklin’s direction.
    Franklin leaned down to listen. “That’s right, Dr. Joe,” he said, then, interpreting again for Will, “Back to the drawing board
indeed.
”
    Franklin moved to an opaque curtain covering a space on the wall the size of a medium window.
    “But this time we’d found a whole new level of inspiration. You see, by then we’d established stronger and more reliable