At my side, Ariane slipped her phone from her pocket, dropped it to the ground, and crushed it beneath her heel, pausing just long enough to stomp a couple extra times to be sure.
I stared at her. All this time she’d been so careful to keep up the illusion of participation in the trials. But destroying the phone meant they’d immediately know something was up. “What are you doing?” I asked in a hushed voice.
She didn’t answer, just reached down the collar of her shirt and pulled the vitals monitor off her chest, the adhesive giving way with a reluctance that I could hear and taking layers of skin with it, I knew from experience.
But Ariane’s face remained impassive as she folded the plastic edges together, the middle giving with a snap before she discarded it as well.
“They’re cleaning house,” she said. “I believe that’s the expression.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“Mara called out Jacobs and Laughlin. The Committee can’t take the risk that someone will find us and tie them to the program. They waited until Adam took Carter out, and then they shot him. And we’re next.”
Instinctively, stupidly, I hunched my shoulders. As if that was any protection from a bullet.
“The trials are over. They’ll get rid of us so we can’t be evidence, and then they’ll just restart the program later,” she said.
“Isn’t that kind of a good thing?” I asked cautiously. “If we can just avoid—”
“We won’t get out of this alive,” she said.
“So what now?” I asked, fighting the urge to turn and search the rooftops.
“We need to get out of sight, reevaluate, figure out a new plan.” But the grim set to her jaw told me more than I wanted to know. She wasn’t sure there would be a new plan.
“What about Ford?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Seeing Ariane so uncertain like this was enough to make me feel as if the world were tipping and I needed to find something to grab hold of to keep myself from flying off into space.
“Will Elise and her friends be okay?” I asked.
She paused, the faintest hesitation in her response. “I don’t know. I think so. They’re fully human, and they don’t know who sent them on the trip. Carter is…They let Adam kill him because he’s like me and that saved them the trouble. Two deaths, one bullet.” Her voice was choked with justifiable bitterness.
“Ari, I’m sorry.” I wrapped my arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer.
She slipped out from under me. “Not now. They might be looking for a couple, especially if they know Adam took your place.”
I tried to tell myself that she was right, not to mention still reacting to Carter’s death and this new, incredibly messed-up situation we’d just found ourselves in.
But I still felt a flash of frustration. If she was right, she wasn’t the only one who was going to die. And maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t the only one still trying to adjust.
Dying once, technically, had not made the prospect of a second go-around any more appealing.
We joined the streams of people, moving toward the shopping on Michigan Avenue. It was relatively easy to feel sheltered by the number of people around us, but that was an illusion.
“What exactly are we looking for?” I asked, more for something to say to ease the agitation I could feel growing inside me, like my internal organs were all set to vibrate.
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe that.” She pointed to a banner in the distance. ULTA HOTEL: LUXURY SUITES. OPEN DURING RENOVATION!
“Another hotel? Are you serious?” I asked.
“We need a place to keep our heads down for more than a few minutes at a time without attracting any attention. I’d consider breaking into a condo building, but the odds of us being identified as outsiders are much higher in that case,” she said.
The elementary kids and their teachers peeled off at the next intersection, heading for the next block up while we continued down Michigan.
Ariane picked up the pace to attach us to a quartet of elderly people.
By crowd surfing in this way, never by ourselves, always on the heels of a larger group, it took us longer to reach the hotel.
I found myself imagining a cover story for us with each group, as if that helped project a cover over us. With the old folks, I was a dutiful grandson and she was my reluctant, kind of rebellious girlfriend. When we joined a group of city kids, clearly cutting through on their way to somewhere much cooler, we were cousins (from opposite sides of the family) from the hopelessly dorky suburbs. With the three nuns, in full black-and-white garb, we were two trouble-making students who couldn’t be left alone with the others on the class field trip, therefore requiring direct nun supervision. I didn’t actually know if that was how it worked in a Catholic school; I was just guessing.
Ridiculous, yeah, but it made me feel better.