“Did you see the pictures yourself?” I asked.
“No, but I know what Adam said,” he insisted.
“Maybe Adam said that to confuse you, in case you decided to actually compete,” Justine said with impatience. “What difference does it make?”
Possibly a huge difference. If they’d provided us with separate targets, that changed everything. If we each had our own target, that would mean there could be multiple “winners,” which meant there was more to this test than they were saying.
I put the red folder down on the table, pulled my assigned phone out of my pocket, and tapped the screen until I had the pictures I’d taken of the hard-copy photos from the envelope. “Here. This is her.” I handed the cell to him.
Zane took it and thumbed through the images, his brows drawing together in confusion.
“This is not who was in our packet,” he said.
“If you didn’t see it—” Justine began.
“Because Adam would have said something,” Zane said sharply. He handed me my phone. “I recognize that girl,” he said to me. “I spent weeks sharing a room with Adam. She’s in a couple of the family photos he had up in our quarters at the facility. It’s his sister.”
“SEPARATE TARGETS,” ARIANE SAID TO Justine, with the air of someone confirming plane crash fatalities. She stood, shoving her phone in her pocket, a new urgency to her movements.
“I don’t understand,” I said, frustrated. Something big was going down, but I didn’t have enough of the pieces to see the whole picture. It was like being half-blind in a world of people with X-ray vision.
“You didn’t know?” Ariane asked Justine.
“Not my area of concern,” she snapped.
“Hey,” I shouted, no longer caring if I drew attention. “What is going on?”
“If each of the competitors has a separate target,” Ariane said, “then this isn’t the contest. They could each take out their target and be successful. It doesn’t eliminate anyone.”
“So, that means…” I pressed.
“There’s another stage,” Justine said.
“Likely direct confrontation between the candidates,” Ariane said.
Justine hesitated, then nodded. “That would be my guess.”
Ariane smiled bitterly. “And what better motive than vengeance?”
“Vengeance,” I repeated, still not getting it. Until, suddenly, I did. “If they pulled Adam’s sister into this as your target…” Words failed me, but the thought echoed through my head. If they’d pulled Adam’s sister into this, odds were that the other two targets fell into the same category. Family. Friend. Someone who meant something to another candidate.
I stood. “Give me your phone,” I said to Ariane, my heart pounding out a panicked rhythm. My mom. Quinn. Had they just gotten out of this mess only to get sucked back in?
Reluctantly, she shook her head. “Jacobs and the others, they’re monitoring it. If you start making calls, they’re going to know that you’re not where your tracker is and that we’re onto them. Right now, those two things are our only advantages.”
I looked to Justine.
She leaned away from me, her fingers curling around her phone protectively. “No,” she said, her mouth a tight line. “It’s an expensive piece of equipment with access to highly sensitive—”
I lifted my hand and mentally pulled the phone from her. It slipped free from her grasp easily enough, landing in my palm with a slap. But it was screen-locked, of course.
Justine’s mouth fell open in protest.
“Code?” My face felt like it was on fire, and the lights overhead flickered and sizzled, like grease in a skillet. Black spots swirled in my vision, and the room tilted, the wall falling away from me. Nope, that was me.
I scrabbled for a hold on my chair.
“Okay, it’s okay,” Ariane said with the calmness that was so much at the core of who she was. She grabbed my arm and held me steady. “We’re going to figure this out,” she said soothingly. “We don’t need any lights exploding here.” The teasing lilt to her voice was a bit forced, but I appreciated what she was attempting.
I tried to smile. “No, that’s your specialty.” But blood ran, warm and bitter, down my nose and into my mouth before I closed against it.
Her forehead pinched with worry, Ariane snagged a napkin from the holder on the table and handed it to me.
“Give him the code,” she said to Justine.
I held out the phone, and Justine, after a long pause, reached out to type in a code and then hold her index finger to the screen with a sigh of disgust.
With the napkin pressed against my nose, I punched in my home number, the phone at the house in Wingate, my fingers shaking enough that I misdialed twice. Finally, I got it right.
I didn’t have any other number for my mom. But I was hoping that if Quinn was still there recuperating, she might have stayed with him.