Everything I hated was part of me. No matter how far I ran or long I lived, I would never, ever escape it. I would question every decision, every act, looking for signs of that self-righteous arrogance and inhumanity in me.
I wanted to scream. To cry. To end it.
“Ariane,” Ford said softly, catching my attention. Her gaze locked with mine, staring at her mirror image of my own face.
We were the same. And that, somehow, was reassuring in this mess. I wasn’t alone. She didn’t have the memories I had of Dr. Jacobs in the lab and what he’d done, but she understood, better than anyone, what it meant. Why the thought of it made me want to crawl out of my own skin.
“Hold the others for me?” she asked, and understanding passed between us. She couldn’t do everything at once, but with me here…we could finish it. End everything right here and now. I’d hold Jacobs and Emerson St. John and Rachel while she killed Laughlin. Then we’d complete the work together. The deserving would be punished.
“Ariane,” Zane said, sounding alarmed. “If you do this, if you kill him, you won’t be able to come back from it.”
But did that matter? Coming back…to what? What was there left for me?
I nodded slowly at Ford, my neck creaking with the effort.
“Even if you make it out of this building somehow, you can’t survive without the Quorosene, Ford. You’ll die tomorrow. The next day, perhaps, at the latest,” Laughlin said, realizing his efforts to direct our attention to Jacobs instead had failed. His gun arm was starting to shake. Fatigue, or perhaps his first taste of genuine fear?
The thought of the latter gave me a greasy feeling of pleasure and satisfaction. I wanted him to be afraid. And the depth of that desire terrified me. All along I’d been attributing my darkest impulses to the alien side of myself. And instead, it could just as easily be my humanity.
I felt like a person with no country to claim, no safe space for home. I had no place to stand with the water rising and no ability to swim. I was nothing but equal parts unknown and despised. I’d never realized how much I’d counted on the human side of myself to be something not…awful.
“Yes,” Ford said to Laughlin, lifting her right shoulder in a shrug that looked painful. “But you’re overestimating our desire to survive against our eagerness to repay what was given to us.”
I found myself nodding again. Not in agreement but in understanding of the inevitability of this moment. Of course it would end this way. We were the created rising against the creators. How else but in blood, pain, and fear? It was our legacy.
But the worst part, the bit that made me feel smaller and more lost to myself than ever before, was I couldn’t think of a single reason why it shouldn’t end this way.
ARIANE HAD GONE SO STILL, she might as well have been in Ford’s grip like the others, except for the faint trembling over her entire body.
She was teetering on the edge. I could sense it. She wanted to listen to Ford. She wanted to give in.
If she did, it would destroy her. I understood the urge to kill Jacobs, more so now than ever. But the kind of person Ariane was, it would break something in her. She was a defender of the weak, the innocent. This girl had been so guilt-stricken over the death of a mouse, it had blocked out a portion of her mind for years. Stopping that guy’s heart temporarily, just to get entry to the trials, had pushed her toward self-sacrifice at every opportunity, made her believe she wasn’t worthy of breathing anymore. Murdering someone in cold blood, even a person she hated, would end her. She wouldn’t be able to live without punishing herself. Ariane, the girl I loved, would disappear beneath waves of misery and self-loathing.
Running on nothing but adrenaline and panic, I straightened up, keeping ahold of the wall until I was sure I was steady, and then I reached out for Ariane.
As soon as my fingers touched hers, she pulled away, staring down at her hand as if she didn’t recognize it, as if it were coated in some kind of filth that she didn’t want to spread to me.
“Stop,” I said, my voice hoarse and my throat dry. “It isn’t too late. You haven’t done anything irrevocable.”
“What I am is irrevocable,” she said softly. “That won’t change.”
I raked a hand through my hair in frustration. “You’re the same person you were fifteen minutes ago, five days, a month. It doesn’t matter. Please listen to me.”
But she gave no sign of hearing me.
I grabbed her hand again, and this time I didn’t give her the chance to pull away. “We aren’t where we come from. We make our own choices, remember?” I squeezed her fingers. “That’s what you told me. Unless you were lying to me,” I said, pushing the words into a challenge.
Her gaze finally shifted to mine, emotion flashing briefly in the dark hollows of her eyes. “I wasn’t lying.”
“Then why are you any different from me and my messed-up family?” I asked, trying to sound logical even when all I wanted to do was grab her and run out of the room, assuming either of us had the strength for it.