“What about your overview?” I asked.
She waved a hand dismissively. “I assure you, you’d find it quite innocuous. We’d assign an agent to act as your guardian until you are of age. And you’d be required to check in on a regular basis with your findings. Other than that?” She shrugged. “Your life is your own. We have no interest in holding you prisoner.” She gave me a tight-lipped smile. “That hasn’t worked well for us in the past.”
A reference perhaps to Guantanamo Bay? Interesting that she would class me with potential terror suspects.
“Here.” Justine reached down into a briefcase I hadn’t noticed before and slid a blue file folder across the table to me.
Pages from a color printer spilled out. The first page was a real estate listing for a beach cottage, a rental with a for sale option, some place called The Outer Banks in North Carolina. The second was a printout from a school website, featuring a low-slung brick building with a smiling bulldog as a mascot on the sign out front. The other pages appeared to be information about the town.
“And Zane?” I asked, tracing my finger against the water in the picture of the adorable cottage. I’d never seen the ocean. But with this place, I could walk out onto a porch and watch the waves roll in every morning. If there was a place on Earth the exact opposite of my tiny cell at GTX, this was it. Wide open, no restriction. Hell, there wasn’t even any land on one side of it. Just blue, blue water.
“If you wish,” Justine said with that open-handed gesture again. “We can’t pull him right now without creating a connection between your disappearance and Emerson St. John. But we’ll protect him, and once the trials are finished we can have him relocated to join you.”
Zane flashed a grin at me. This was what he’d been hiding, his reason for entering the trials.
I tried to return the smile, but it felt sick and crooked, hanging there like a broken mirror. So this Justine was offering me a new life, a new house, a new identity. Almost everything I’d ever wanted, the only exception being that it came from someone else, rather than something I’d created for myself, which meant it could always be taken away.
Still, here was the easy exit I’d been hoping for my whole life. All I had to do was walk away. Dr. Jacobs surely wouldn’t hurt the surrogate who’d given birth to me if I weren’t around to witness it. There would be no point in that.
But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that saying yes would be like stepping out onto a lake that wasn’t quite frozen through. Everything would seem fine, until the cracks sounded, loud and sharp.
Then it would be too late.
ALTHOUGH I’D TECHNICALLY ONLY KNOWN Ariane for a month—on speaking terms, at least—I’d been in school with her for years. And from that, I could tell she was quiet, thoughtful, deeply internal. Still waters, that’s what my mom would have said about someone like her (ironically enough, my mom being the one who would know exactly why that was the case).
But I always got the sense that so much more went on inside Ariane’s head than you could ever read on the surface. And when I’d woken up in Emerson’s lab and realized that the occasional pops of static and random words in my head were from other people thinking and feeling, my first thought had been of Ariane, that maybe now I’d get a chance to really understand her.
But as it turned out, even reading minds, poorly as I did, didn’t help. Ariane was as much a mystery to me as ever, whether that was because I wasn’t good enough at hearing her or she was just better at keeping her thoughts to herself.
At the moment, she was studying Justine as if the mysteries to the universe were written in the fine lines by her eyes or the long-faded freckles across the bridge of her nose.
Justine shifted uneasily under Ariane’s gaze. “I need a decision quickly,” she said. “We don’t have much time to get this arranged.”
Ariane remained silent, still just watching, and worry flickered to life in me.
“It’s a chance,” I whispered to her. “The best chance we’re going to get. You have to take it.”
Ariane turned to look at me then, sorrow and regret etched in her face. Then she straightened her shoulders, steeling herself, and returned her attention to Justine. “What do you really want?” she asked Justine, her voice cold and calm.
Crap. “Ariane,” I began.