I pushed myself up off the floor, ignoring my overworked muscles, and approached the door.
“You think this is about aliens and hybrids and creepy crawlies made in a lab?” I demanded.
Rachel pushed her chair back until it slammed into the bottom step leading from the hallway above, and then she jumped up, as if she might run. As if that would save her. “Stay away,” she said, her hands clutched tight around her phone, her life preserver of normal in the ocean of alien strangeness around her.
I leaned against the glass door, pressing my palms flat on it, the lines on them the same as hers, as human as hers. “They’re going to use us as assassins, spies, and mercenaries,” I said, staring her down, knowing the fear and discomfort my too-dark and almost irisless eyes provoked in people. “Who exactly do you think we’re going to be killing and spying on, Rachel? Not other ‘freaks’ like us.”
She stumbled up the first step and glared at me, hating me for making her afraid. “God, Ariane, okay. What do you expect me to do about it?”
“I don’t know. Care about someone other than yourself. Or pretend, at least.” I turned away from the door and her beyond it, returning to my place on the shiny white floor, near my now-overturned cot.
I waved my hand at the cot, flipping it upright easily and then lifting it up toward the ceiling again, and prepared to resume my physical training.
Push-ups, maybe. My upper body strength was definitely lacking, my bones too fragile to support much of the muscle development. But every bit would help, especially against Ford, someone who was, in all likelihood, my exact match in strength and abilities. It would come down to some less definable element—surprise or willpower or cunning.
I couldn’t let it be Ford. This had to end. Jacobs and Laughlin, they couldn’t be allowed to keep using us, taking from us.
An image of Zane’s face, a smile pulling at his mouth as he leaned over me, flashed across my mind.
“Did you know they’re having a memorial service at school on Monday?” Rachel asked, startling me. She’d been so quiet I’d assumed she’d stormed off in a huff to report me to her grandfather. Instead, a quick glance in her direction showed her back in her chair, albeit still pushed away from the door. “For Zane, I mean,” she added.
My heart stuttered. I’d been expecting this or something like it for weeks now, ever since Dr. Jacobs, in one of his many attempts to elicit a reaction from me, had broken the news that no one could find Zane. But somehow the expectation hadn’t prepared me for the reality of hearing those words.
I sat back on my knees and lowered the cot to the ground quickly before it could crash again. “What?” My voice sounded rough even to my ears.
“Well, I guess it’s not really a memorial service,” she said in a considering tone. “Since they didn’t…they haven’t found his body.” She winced visibly.
I stared at Rachel, making an effort this time to hear her emotions and thoughts as well as her words. Grief mixed with anger, cloudy and pervasive, pulsed through her. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
She ignored my question, staring holes through me instead. “His mom, she’s back in town now. I met her. She seems nice. She wants to have a funeral—Quinn, too—but they can’t do that, can they? I mean, what are they going to do, bury an empty casket? Maybe some of the blood the police scraped up from that parking lot?” She raised an eyebrow at me.
My hands clenched into fists.
“The hospital still says his body never got there. I mean, they have the record of the ambulance call and everything, but that’s it. Nobody seems to know what happened to him after that,” she said, lifting her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. Then her eyes narrowed. “But you do, don’t you?”
I looked away. “No.”
I didn’t, truly. But I had my suspicions, given the people involved. There was no way that Jacobs or Laughlin would risk police involvement, as there inevitably would be with a shooting death. No, it was better that Zane Bradshaw, an inconvenient victim/speed bump on the road to progress, just mysteriously disappear as a bureaucratic error, lost in the system. Perhaps even delivered to an accommodating funeral home and cremated “by mistake,” a discovery that would be made months or years from now. Or never.
Or maybe Laughlin or Jacobs’s lackeys, whomever they’d charged with cover-up duties, had gone old school and simply buried him in a grave that some early-morning hunter or jogger would stumble over one day.
My stomach lurched, and I rocked forward to my hands and knees, the imagined scene pictured too clearly in my head, the white of his shirt, now dull and dirtied, wrapped in tatters around bones.