“Wait out here,” he said to the four GTX sentinels behind us. Then he barged between Laughlin’s men, pulling me after him by the arm.
The handle turned easily, not locked, and I held my breath, not sure what to expect, as Jacobs yanked the door back and crossed the threshold, letting go of me as soon as I was in the room.
I resisted the urge to rub my arm as my eyes adjusted to the much brighter fluorescent light inside. Whatever I’d been anticipating, it wasn’t this.
Three long tables covered in white tablecloths were arranged in a U-shape, with a fourth table at the front of the room. The tablecloth on the fourth table was black, though, which made it seem more important.
Each table held a pyramid of shining drinking glasses and a sweating pitcher of water. A whiteboard, housed in a large wooden cabinet with the doors partially open, dominated the far wall, behind the head table. Glass decanters of juice, a tray of muffins, and a bowl of fruit held prominent position on a built-in counter to my right.
All absurdly normal. Almost insultingly so, considering why we were there.
That is, until you lingered long enough to pick up on the massive waves of tension rolling through the space.
The man closest to us was at the bottom table in the U by himself. He looked over his shoulder at us briefly and then resumed studying the phone in front of him, as if urgently awaiting a call or text or the summons to raid in Book of Heroes. He was younger than both Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Laughlin, who was what my friend Jenna’s mother would have called “well preserved.” This guy was probably in his late thirties. His dark hair was rumpled, and his leg was jouncing with anxiety, making the glasses on his table wobble and clink in their formation.
I frowned. This must be Emerson St. John. Something about him seemed familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why or how I would know him. Dr. Jacobs would certainly never have let him in the GTX lab. But where was his “product”? Was St. John already disqualified in some way?
On the right side of the U, several faces I knew stared back at me. One I knew very well. Ford, my clone for lack of a better term, stood on the inside of the semicircle created by the furniture arrangement, next to Carter. They were wearing their school uniforms: white shirts beneath blue blazers with a plaid skirt for Ford and khakis for Carter. Laughlin’s attempt, no doubt, to make them seem relatable and human. If anything, it emphasized how human they were not. The dark blue of the coats only made their hair look whiter and their skin more gray. The preternatural stillness they…we have was so much more noticeable in isolation.
Full-blooded humans twitch, sigh, bite their nails, expressing their anxiety in motion. We are the opposite. It had taken many years for me to adapt to that particular quirk, to create one of my own. Now I bite my lip out of habit, rather than imitation, but it hadn’t started that way.
Ford glanced over her shoulder at me, her expression flat. She looked harder or sharper somehow, as if the last weeks had compressed her from raw material into something more deadly. Grayish blue circles marred the skin beneath her eyes, and a new hash mark decorated her cheek.
It hurt to see those marks on her face, a reminder of what had been lost. One for Johnson, the hybrid who’d been eliminated when she couldn’t blend in at school, and the other for Nixon.
Nixon. He’d never had a chance. To survive or actually live. I wondered if they’d preserved his body in the gallery with all the others, leaving him permanently staring out at the quarters where he’d once lived.
Ford gave no acknowledgement of our previous acquaintance. Angry at me, perhaps, for our failed attempt at rebellion, the one that had cost her Nixon. Carter, though, greeted me with the corner of his mouth lifting in the tiniest of smiles.
He, too, looked weary and paler than usual. Whatever he and Ford had been through since I’d seen them last had taken its toll. The fact that he was still capable of smiling made me hate everyone else in the room just that much more. He deserved better than this. We all did.
At the table, Dr. Laughlin cleared his throat, glaring at Ford and Carter and jerking his head in an indication that they should both face forward. His two assistants, dark haired, beautiful, and strikingly similar, sat up straighter, their tablets at the ready for any words of wisdom he might drop.
It wouldn’t be a hardship to kill Dr. Laughlin when the time came. I eyed him carefully, a greasy feeling of anticipation slipping through me. Perhaps that glass water pitcher to the head. The base of it looked heavy, and it only takes fifteen pounds of pressure per square inch to fracture a human skull. Your bones may be stronger than mine, but that does not make you indestructible.