“Yes, exactly!” Rachel rallied, nodding rapidly. “That.”
“I doubt that’s true,” Laughlin said easily. “You, Jacobs girl. When is your birthday?”
Rachel glared at him but answered through clenched teeth. “December twenty-sixth.”
“Ariane?” Zane asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know, they never said. Sometime in August, I think, is what my father—”
“See?” Zane demanded, triumph and relief coloring his voice. “They’re not twins, and there wasn’t enough time for both of them.”
Laughlin laughed again.
And this time, I knew why. Staring down Dr. Jacobs—my father, oh my God—as he avoided looking in my direction, I heard his words about my “surrogate” echoing in my head. “Six months,” I managed, my voice a hoarse whisper.
“What?” Zane asked.
I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t move, feeling rooted to the spot. “It’s only six months from implantation to full term for hybrids,” I said, forcing myself to speak louder. “He told me that.” Even though he’d lied about everything else, including the identity of my surrogate.
So, Rachel’s mother had given birth to her in December of the year before I was born. Then, evidently, either she’d volunteered, or Jacobs had talked her into another pregnancy. If she’d gotten pregnant in February, that would have been more than enough time for…more than enough time for me.
I lifted my gaze to meet Rachel’s, and she read the truth in my expression, her face paling further.
“No,” she said, shaking her head fiercely. “No. I am not…my mother is not…”
Laughlin smirked at her. “I heard Jacobs had to have her committed, eventually,” he continued in a faux whisper. “She never recovered from the loss of her second child. Rumor has it, she didn’t believe him about the late-term ‘miscarriage’ and went a little crazy. All because he thought it would be better, more natural for 107 to be carried in the womb of her genetic mother.”
Rachel looked poison at me. “New Harbors in Malibu. Off and on since I was eight.”
Ford turned just enough to see me. It was hard to tell, but even she looked shaken by this revelation.
My eyes burned with unshed tears. My mother. Her mother. Rachel’s mother. The same woman. Alive. Locked away in a facility in California. But before that, had I passed her on the street? In the hallways at school? I had no memory of ever seeing Rachel with her mother. But she’d been there, at least for a while, within reach.
“It was completely unnecessary, of course, because as you can see, Ford turned out just fine after gestation in a surrogate,” Laughlin said dismissively.
The fact that Laughlin could describe Ford as “fine” with even a reasonably straight face was yet another sign of his complete detachment from reality.
But the overwhelming punch of realization was reserved for that one big piece of news. Dr. Jacobs had used his own DNA to create me. We were related. I was even more closely related to him than Rachel was. I was his daughter.
I stared at him. Those dark, soulless eyes in his face, the ones that had shone with eagerness and scientific curiosity during my most horrible moments in the lab, they were mine.
I’d always hated looking at myself in the mirror without my tinted contacts, seeing the alien-ness in the almost-black color of my eyes and the nearly indistinguishable iris.
But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Or not entirely. Was it possible I’d recognized that similarity on a level without even realizing it?
My stomach lurched, and I gagged, cold rushing over me, turning my skin damp with sweat.
“Ariane,” Zane breathed behind me. But I couldn’t look at him. How could I?
“107,” Jacobs said with an attempt at regaining authority. “There’s no need to overreact. Our early specimens were failing to thrive. I did just what was necessary to—”
“That’s all you care about, isn’t it?” Rachel demanded, her voice choked with tears and hatred.
I turned to see her rising to her feet unsteadily.
“What your project needs.” The bitterness and despair behind her words curdled the air. And as much as I despised her at times, I didn’t blame her one bit. He’d used his family, destroyed their lives, and left them with nothing but lies.
Rachel lurched from her corner in Dr. Jacobs’s direction, her hands stretched out in claws as if she might strangle him or tear at his throat, but a look from Ford froze her in place, made her cower.
I, however, was under no such restriction. The urge to kill Dr. Jacobs thrummed beneath my skin. He wasn’t just a stain on humanity. He was a stain on me. In me. Between the cells. In places I could never scrub clean.
All the emotion rioting within me bled away with a single epiphany: I would never be free of this man. Of GTX. Of what I was.