She held up her hand, cutting me off. “It doesn’t matter. The truth is, even if her offer is on the level, it will last only as long as they want it to. I have no leverage, no power,” she said slowly, calmly, as if speaking to a toddler in a tantrum. “The second they’re done with me or when someone new takes charge of their organization, I’ll be turned over to Jacobs or sold off to the highest bidder. Or worse.”
I wanted to protest, but I could feel the truth of her words hanging heavy in the air between us. And yet, none of that mattered. “But, Ari, if you go along with it, even just for a while, it’s safer than what you have right now. It’ll get you out of the trials. And it’ll give us time to come up with a more permanent solution. Please.” I could feel her slipping away from me even as she stood there.
I edged closer and grabbed her hand, feeling her cool fingers in mine. But she didn’t respond. She didn’t pull away, but neither did she fold her hand into mine.
She took a deep breath and let it out in a shaky exhale. “I can’t. Ford and Carter—”
“Ford is more than capable of taking care of herself. I have the scars to prove it,” I said.
“It’s not just them,” she said. “You haven’t seen what I have.”
She glanced at Justine, who was unabashedly watching and likely doing her best to eavesdrop. “At Laughlin’s, he has a hallway. He calls it his ‘gallery.’” She swallowed convulsively. “Glass boxes embedded in the wall, holding the bodies of all the hybrids who died before Ford and Carter. They’re just floating there, all their suffering on display.” I felt ill. How close had Ariane come to being in one of those display cases? I imagined her pale hair swirling around her face, her eyes open and unseeing.
The image was so real, felt so possible, it sent a shudder through me, and I couldn’t stop myself from pulling Ariane toward me. She came willingly, wrapping her arms tight around my back, her fists clutching at my shirt. The warmth of her body reminded me that she was here, that she was okay. But it all felt so tenuous.
“If I don’t end this now, that’s what will keep happening,” she said, her words muffled against me. “How many more of those will Laughlin fill?”
She pulled away from me, her hands releasing my shirt. “Winning will give me an opportunity to catch them with their guard down,” she said. “Then I’m going to do whatever it takes to end it. All of it. There won’t be any more hybrids after us. No more Project Paper Doll. No more experiments.”
The cold determination in her voice took me aback. She’d made her decision already.
“And no more running,” she added, with a weary smile that looked something like relief.
With a sudden bolt of clarity, I understood what she was saying. She didn’t intend to survive. She’d decided. She would die in the process of destroying Jacobs and Laughlin, maybe even Ford and Carter, if they got in the way. And she’d accepted that as her fate, as payment for the chance to finish what others had started.
“No,” I said, my voice breaking. “No,” I tried again. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to…sacrifice yourself.” I couldn’t look at her right then, so I shifted my gaze to stare at the scarred and dented wall instead.
“Hey.” She gave me a sad smile and reached up to turn my chin toward her. “Do you really think Ford’s going to do it?”
“Screw her,” I snapped. But the invective lost some of its sharpness with my voice thick with unshed tears.
“Besides, do you think you’re really one to lecture me about sacrifice?” she asked with a knowing look.
“I told you I’m fine,” I said with as much certainty as I could manage. “Better than fine, actually.”
The doubt and worry in her eyes made my stomach hurt.
“What did they do to you?” she whispered.
“They saved me, made me better,” I said.
Her mouth tightened. “You’re putting yourself at risk again.”
I clenched my fists, wanting to hit something, anything. “Because it’s my fault.” The words spilled out of me, like an infection in a long-standing wound. “I did this. Jacobs would never have gotten ahold of you if I—”
“No,” she said fiercely, grabbing the front of my shirt and shaking me. Or trying, anyway. Powerful as she was, I was still taller. “Listen to me: this is not your fault. It was always going to be this way.” She shook her head. “I just didn’t want to see it. We might have had a few minutes of peace here and there, but we would have always been afraid, running or hiding. It just took me a while to understand that.”
“Is everything okay here?”
The interruption startled me, and I turned to see a guy in a dark suit hovering nearby, outside the boundaries of the waiting line.
Ariane leaned around me to stare at him in that unnerving way she had. “We are fine,” she said, leaving no room for questions with her crisply enunciated words. It was just short of telling him to go screw himself.
He backed off immediately and returned to the line, his hands up in surrender. I felt a flash of pride. That was my girl.
“You can’t just give up. You have to fight,” I said, closing my hands over hers, trapping her close to me.