The text messages from Dr. Jacobs, which had shifted from berating to glowing encouragement once we’d actually started trying to find Elise, had stopped.
That couldn’t be good, but I was, at least, pretty sure that Jacobs wouldn’t have been able to resist screaming at Ariane if Ford or Adam had succeeded in eliminating their targets ahead of her. Which likely meant they were having as much trouble, or more, finding their people. I doubted Carter had any kind of social media presence for Adam to use against him, and I was pretty sure Ford wouldn’t know what to do with Twitter if it bit her (and biting Ford wouldn’t end well for anyone or anything).
We’d lost a lot of time at the beginning, but we now had more up-to-date information on Elise’s movements than the others would for their targets. We were okay, maybe even ahead of the game.
But when I’d mentioned that, Ariane had not seemed all that reassured.
Or maybe she was still recovering from the exhibit we’d stumbled across upstairs. I was.
The Pre-Natal Development exhibit consisted of twenty-four fetuses and embryos, at various stages of development, in glass display cases. It was kind of creepy and weird and a little sad, especially considering that, if they’d lived, some of those babies would have already died from old age. They’d been at the museum since the 1930s, according to the signs, but they were still perfectly preserved. You could see their eyelashes, even. It was like they might open their eyes at any second and start crying to be freed from their glass boxes.
It had chilled me.
But Ariane’s reaction had been more severe. She’d frozen in place, oblivious to everyone around us. “It’s like this at Laughlin’s. He has displays of all the previous models.…” Her voice had broken, as if she might start crying. And I’d never seen her so pale, the color draining from her face until she really was gray.
I’d pulled her out of there, her hand, thin and so cold, in mine. She’d been much too quiet ever since.
Now, at the start of our second hour at the museum, we were sitting on benches near the main entrance. Perhaps Ariane was following the principle that you were more likely to be found by someone—or to find someone—by staying in one place. Or maybe she was taking pity on me. I hadn’t asked for that, but I was definitely grateful. The trials had only officially started five hours ago (nineteen hours to go), and my whole body ached, and I had chills, off and on. The virus battling my still-adapting immune system. No nosebleeds in the last couple of hours, but I hadn’t tried to use any of my new abilities recently, either.
I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did. If I’d been at the hotel, I bet that Emerson would have been hovering nearby with a worried frown and a thermometer in hand.
Unwilling to think about that too much, I shifted uneasily. “I still think we should consider paging Elise,” I said. “We can always walk away as soon as we see her coming. Then at least we’ll have a visual on her. A chance to identify her in the crowd.” That was something else I was worried about. People in real life, three dimensions, could look very different from flat photographs. If Elise’s hair was shorter or pulled back or something, I wasn’t sure that I would have picked her out of the crowd.
Before Ariane could respond, her phone chimed. She’d set it to alert her whenever Elise updated her feed. She clicked on the notification. “‘Heading to Millennium Park. Gotta see the Bean. So excited!’ They’ve left. But they’re not there yet. Let’s go.” She bolted up as if the floor were spring-loaded beneath her.
I followed her outside to the cab stand, and when a yellow taxi stopped in front of us, Ariane lurched for the door, yanking it open.
“Take us to the park as you would take tourists,” she commanded as I pulled the door shut.
She sounded so stilted. I kind of doubted the driver saw either of us as natives, especially now.
“You kids are new to the city, eh?” he asked, glancing at us in the rearview mirror.
Ariane stared out the side window, studying the traffic and the taxis around us, leaving it to me to answer.
“Something like that, yeah,” I said. The TV screen embedded in the seatback in front of me flickered and sputtered, spitting out the occasional words “missing,” “bioethics violation,” “Chicago,” “scandal.” Must have been the local news, though it was kind of early for that at just after two in the afternoon.
“Uh-huh.” The cabbie’s gaze flicked from me to Ariane, lingering longer on her than it should have.
I couldn’t blame him. Her knitted hat had slipped back, revealing more of her pale hair, but more than that, it was her posture that spoke of something other. Her back straight and formal, she was rigid with tension, sitting forward in the cracked and worn leather seat as though she might be ejected from it at any second and have to scramble to regain her footing.