Ariane, or a very vivid hallucination of her, stood in the middle of the snow-filled parking lot. She wore a puffy blue coat, shades lighter than anything I’d ever seen her in before, as if she didn’t mind if someone noticed it or her. Her hair was pulled back, snow dusting the top of her head, and her cheeks and ears were pink. She wasn’t wearing her contacts, her dark eyes a stark contrast to her skin.
“Sorry. I always wondered what that would feel like.” She made a face at me and held up her bare hand. Her fingers were red with cold and dripping with melted snow. “It’s cold, messy, and provides too much opportunity for retaliation and escalation.” She paused with a contemplative tilt of her head. “An arms race, I suppose.”
And that was what sold me. This was not a hallucination. Only the real Ariane would say something ridiculous and weird and perfect, just like that.
I stumbled and clomped toward her in the snow, hurrying as fast as I could, which wasn’t very, while she did the same.
“This looks a lot easier in the movies,” she observed with a frown at her feet.
“Yeah, they’re not usually slogging through six inches of snow,” I said breathlessly when I finally reached her. “Are you okay? How did you get here?” I didn’t wait for her to answer before grabbing her in a tight hug, bending down to bury my face against her neck. Her puffy coat released a burst of warm air scented like lemons, like Ariane. The familiarity of it, and the reminder that, until this moment, I’d thought I might never experience it again, made me eyes burn with more than the cold.
She pulled back to smile at me and touched my face. Her fingers were like ice, but I didn’t care. “I’m all right.” But the tightness around her eyes and her mouth told me that maybe that hadn’t always been the case. “You look better than the last time I saw you.”
“Four weeks at St. John’s lab in Rochester, letting him try to undo everything he’d done,” I said, making a face.
She raised her eyebrows. “Really?”
It had not been an easy decision. But the vision of Adam lying on the ground, shot and dead despite all of his acquired skills, had stuck with me. Not to mention the bloodbath in the conference room at the hotel.
There were no guarantees in life. What NuStasis had given back to me—the chance to live—could just as easily be taken away again, perhaps even by NuStasis itself.
“My body still wasn’t adjusting well, not stabilizing,” I admitted. “More nosebleeds, headaches, dizziness, passing out.” I shook my head. I could have kept fighting, trying to hold on to those abilities, but at what cost? I’d seen firsthand how pricey that kind of shortsightedness could be. And I hadn’t liked who I was becoming. Confidence was one thing; perpetually spoiling for a fight was another.
Plus, if NuStasis killed me—or kept me in a lab under permanent observation—I wouldn’t have been able to search for her.
“And?” Ariane searched my face anxiously, as if the answers were written there, and they sort of were, in that I didn’t look permanently ill anymore. I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten until I looked in the mirror one day and was startled not to see dark circles embedded under my eyes.
“Most everything is back to normal,” I said. “It was mostly keeping my immune system from overreacting and killing me, I guess. Lots of IVs, and antibiotics I’d never even heard of. Sometimes my ears ring still, and I pick up a word or two out of nowhere. And if I really concentrate, I can make the TV remote kind of wobble a little. Unless that’s just Quinn messing with me, which is definitely possible.” But I didn’t want to talk about any of that.
“Did they let you go?” I asked. “Did Justine…” I paused and glanced over my shoulder instinctively, half expecting to see a black van barreling toward us. “Does Justine know you’re here?”
“Justine knows I’m here. She’ll know wherever I am.” Ariane pulled out a slim phone from her pocket, almost as thin as a credit card. “I have to keep it on me at all times. A compromise for no embedded tracking device. I made them remove the one under my skin from before.”
I nodded but had to wonder what would have stopped them from inserting another at the same time.
She smiled tightly, obviously following my train of thought or just plain hearing it. “Because I wouldn’t let them use any anesthesia or numbing agents, and they had to show me the removed chip afterward.”
Jesus. Yes, confirmed once more: Ariane Tucker was a badass.
I shook my head in wonder, my thoughts trying to catch up with everything she was telling me. “Do you want to go inside? I don’t have a car, and it’s freezing out here.” I clamped down to keep my teeth from chattering.
She shook her head. “I can’t stay long. I just wanted to see if I could catch you here before you went home.”
“Oh.” The word escaped before I could stop it, more like exhaling than actually speaking. So that was what it felt like to have your heart crushed. It wasn’t just a sinking feeling, the way everyone described it. It was more like someone had reached in my chest and removed said heart with a clenched fist.