I ALMOST KILLED RACHEL JACOBS.
My face hot with tears, I lurched through the gate into the darkened side yard, forcing myself to breathe through the urge to gag. Now was not the time for crying or throwing up. I needed to think.
The barrier dropped and I almost killed her. In front of everyone. In front of Zane.
She didn’t give you a choice! She was hurting people. She was hurting Zane.
The all-too-clear image of Zane with blood running down the side of his face, his expression dulled with shock, floated in front of my eyes. And right behind him, Rachel had been preparing to hurt him further. And no one was doing anything about it. No one was stopping her.
Just like her grandfather. Just like GTX.
The bubble of fury, resentment, and fear that I’d been suppressing for days, no, years, had burst forth and something inside me had clicked. Like the combination lock my father referenced last night.
When I’d lifted my hand, it was as if there was no barrier in my head, as if there never had been one. I wanted Rachel to stop, so she did.
I didn’t have to struggle or force it into being. No sense of a wall coming down or a door opening up. It was like reaching out for something that had once been impossible to get and having it fall into my hand.
Natural. Simple. Easy.
If only I’d stopped there. But I hadn’t.
I’d wanted Rachel to hurt, to be afraid, and that urge had consumed me, blocking everything else out. Her face had turned red and purplish and the vein in her forehead protruded, her heart struggling to keep beating against my will.
And then Zane had called my name. The way he’d looked at me, his face pale beneath the blood, it had just cut straight through me. I’d heard the bitter clanging of fear in his head, like one of those old-fashioned alarm bells that wouldn’t shut off.
Then he wouldn’t look at me at all. He’d been scared or horrified or disgusted or maybe all three.
And some part of me—soft, hopeful, human—had died in that moment.
Even though I knew better, I’d allowed myself to believe that, with Zane, who I was outweighed what I was. And that only made things so much worse now.
The force of his rejection slammed into me all over again, stealing my breath, and I had to fight the urge to curl up into a ball in the middle of Rachel’s lawn.
I forced myself forward, toward the street, folding my arms across my chest in a vain attempt to stop the tremors shaking my whole body.
It had been a mistake to come here. A mistake I’d added to by not walking out the second I’d realized that Rachel was out of control. Even if it meant leaving Zane behind. That’s what the Rules dictated.
It’s a little late to be worrying about the Rules now, isn’t it? my logical side pointed out. You have bigger concerns.
I was whole again, what I’d once been, with all the inherent flaws and dangers. It wouldn’t take much to turn me into the weapon Dr. Jacobs had wanted from the beginning. And I’d just done the alien/human hybrid equivalent of skywriting, COME AND GET ME. I’M RIGHT HERE!
It wouldn’t take long for word to spread about what had happened. Even if none of the people at the party understood what they’d witnessed, the inevitable cell phone videos would be out floating on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and God only knew where else in a matter of minutes.
I had to be smart. Make this time count. It was a head start, nothing more.
Following the protocols my father had established, I pulled my cell from my pocket and chucked it into the grass, trying not to feel as if I’d thrown away my life preserver in the middle of drowning. But it was too risky, too easy for GTX to track.
Now all I had to do was get to the half-empty Wygreen shopping center on the other side of town. The Dumpster behind the abandoned Linens-N-Things would have a duffel bag of emergency supplies and cash duct-taped beneath it.
I never should have kissed him. None of this would be happening now if I’d just kept my distance.
Except I couldn’t quite bring myself to wish it all away, even after tonight.
Going to the activities fair, pretending to be a regular girl, and forgetting the truth for a while, that had been worth it. And last night, the feel of Zane’s hands on me, moving without hesitation…
I crossed the street, cursing my stupid too-human heart. This was so not the time to be getting distracted by—
Headlights flashed suddenly, trapping me in their glare. Blinded, I threw my hands up to block the light.
Engines revved, and I heard rolling doors slide open. I blinked furiously, willing my eyes to adjust. But when they did, I saw what I expected, what I feared: men dressed in black with the bright red GTX logo on their shoulders pouring out of vans parked on the street—black vans with the florist logo that I’d seen earlier today. Retrieval teams.
My heartbeat exploded in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. My legs went weak and shaky, caught between the urge to flee and the primal instinct to freeze. But a tiny part of me remained calm, unsurprised. Of course GTX was here. They’d always been somewhere around, lurking in the shadows; the only question had been when they would catch up with me, when they would figure out I’d been right here in Wingate the whole time.
But how had they found me so quickly? How had they known I was here? Those were questions I’d have to leave for later.
The first wave of men, plastic restraints in hand, approached in a standard five-formation but without nearly enough caution.
Because no matter how life-destroying tonight’s encounter with Rachel had been, it had given me one advantage: the frustrating combination lock on the wall in my head no longer existed. It didn’t need to.
The wall was gone. The second I saw the retrieval teams coming toward me I felt the bubbly tingle of power race along my skin, and my head began to ache like a muscle longing to stretch. It was an overwhelming sensation, and it took everything I had not to give in to it.
“Stay away,” I said in a choked voice. The warning came from deep inside me. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I knew I could.
The foremost man on the retrieval team held a hand up. “It’s okay. We don’t mean you any harm.” A trickle of sweat ran down his face beneath his helmet.
I didn’t believe him. I wasn’t sure if he even believed him.
But it didn’t matter. That was all it took.
Something half forgotten welled up inside me and took over, running attack scenarios.
Holding the men in place was a possibility, but it would take a great deal more effort, and it would be hard to contain so many of them. Three teams of five. Fifteen men. Or I could go full-on Darth Vader—
No, there was a much simpler option.
Hit center mass. Force to injure and incapacitate. No kill.
That formerly lost part of me calculated angles, speed, and force in a blink. And then I shoved at the closest team. Not with my hands—that would have ended in disaster—but with all that lovely power dancing along my skin.
The force of the effort took my breath away for a second, but the results were immediate. The five men closest to me flew backward as if a giant arm had come along and swept them away. They collided with the cars parked along the side of the road, cracking windows, denting doors, and making car alarms shriek.
The grim determination to grind my competitors into nothing, to win not by a little but by utter annihilation, was something I kept buried. An inheritance of uncertain origin. Perhaps it came from beings who’d set out to conquer this tiny blue-and-brown ball of dirt—there were those rumors, too, that the single ship in 1947 had been a scout for a larger invasion—or maybe it was from my human side, a primal instinct left over from the caveman days of few people and even fewer resources.
Either way, tonight, when I called on that legacy, it answered, rising up inside me with hot fury. I smiled fiercely, daring my challengers to come closer.
The remaining retrieval teams slowed their approach, reevaluating, and at a command I couldn’t hear, they pulled guns from holsters on their backs. Loaded with tranquilizers probably. I would have preferred to confirm that from their thoughts, but I couldn’t afford to lose focus.
I only needed one small break here, a chance to slip away into the shadows…
A strangled noise came from behind me, and I turned to see Zane at the corner of Rachel’s house, staring at the scene playing out before him, a stack of napkins pressed against his bloodied cheek.
The GTX teams reshuffled suddenly, drawing my attention back to them. One of the teams broke off, giving me a wide berth and heading in Zane’s direction. I didn’t know if that was because they knew who he was or if they just wanted to suppress the possibility of a witness.
Either way, I wouldn’t let GTX have him.
No. With a thought, I shoved the team approaching Zane. They flew sideways, landing on the sidewalk with satisfying thuds and grunts of pain.
Behind me, I sensed movement rather than heard it, and turned in time to see darts coming at me. I knocked them down, sending them clattering to the pavement.
That had been close—the retrieval teams had used Zane as a distraction. Obviously GTX was not going to give up easily.
No matter. I would simply have to try harder. I could beat them. They were only human.
I started toward Zane; consolidating our position would make it much easier to defend us both.
“Ariane.”
I stopped dead, startled. The voice was familiar. Too familiar. One I would recognize anywhere. It was the voice that had called me out of the darkness and smoke so many years ago.
“Father?” The word caught in my throat, escaping only as a whisper, and this time, my concentration was shattered beyond repair. How did he know where I was? He shouldn’t be here. GTX would find him, kill him.
Panicking, I spun around and squinted into the shadows, where his voice had come from. And that was the only opening the team behind me needed. I didn’t hear the gunfire, just felt the dart enter my back with a tight pinch, right below the GTX tattoo on my shoulder.
Icy fear washed over me, and I stumbled forward, trying to run.
But the drug was powerful…and fast. My legs wouldn’t obey. I tried to reach up and remove the dart, but my hand felt heavy, as if it had been baked into the middle of a concrete block.
My knees wobbled, and I went down hard on the asphalt, unable to stop my fall. My head struck the road, igniting a sharp blast of pain, and my vision swirled.
I struggled to keep my eyes open and focused. Get up, get up! Come on! MOVE!
I needed to reach my father and get us both out of here.
But I couldn’t. I managed to stay alert long enough to see Zane retreating, slipping back toward the party; and then, on the other side of me, a gray-haired man in a GTX security uniform emerged from the street shadows.… My father.
My father, in his black security uniform with the bright red GTX logo on the sleeve, loomed over me. “I told you, Ariane,” he said, his voice bent and weirdly distorted by the drug shutting my body down. “Rule number one: Never trust anyone.”
“START FROM THE BEGINNING,” my dad said under his breath, keeping an eye on the gap in the privacy curtains for the approach of a doctor or nurse. “What exactly did you see?”
“I told you, I don’t know,” I said wearily. My head was throbbing, and my newly acquired stitches were itching and stinging; but worse than either of those things was a weird feeling of disorientation, dislocation. Like I’d somehow stumbled into a movie. “It didn’t make any sense.”
It was almost one in the morning, and we were still in the emergency room, waiting for someone to take me for X-rays. Somewhere, on one of the floors above me, Cassi Andrews had already been checked in. She’d been conscious but out of it by the time the ambulance arrived. When the 911 calls came in with the Jacobs’s house as the address, my dad had gone out with his guys, unsurprised and yet less than pleased to find me there.
But his displeasure at discovering me among the partiers had been quickly replaced by intense interest when he started hearing the panicked stories about Ariane. How she’d stopped that beer bottle in midair. How she’d somehow made Rachel choke without touching her (or how Rachel choked and Ariane did nothing to help—the story varied). How I was the one who’d brought her to the party.
“I was leaving, going home.” Or going to try to talk to Ariane. I wasn’t sure if I’d even made up my mind before I’d left. “And they shot darts at her. I watched it happen right in front of me.” I shifted the bag of ice on my left knee, which had swollen to twice its normal size, thanks to Rachel’s attack. Between that, the stitches, and the possible concussion, I was kind of a wreck.
But nowhere near as bad as Ariane. I’d watched her take that dart and seen her fall with nothing to cushion the impact. The sound her head made hitting the road…I swallowed hard to keep my stomach from revolting.
She’d saved me. Those GTX guys had been coming at me—I don’t know why, maybe just because I was there?—and she’d swept them away. Looked at them, waved her hand, and they’d flown through the air like they were being pulled on cords.
I shook my head, feeling dazed. I didn’t understand any of this.
“Start from the beginning,” my dad prompted again, awkwardly laying a heavy hand on my shoulder in what was meant to be an attempt at comfort.
I tried not to cringe. The gesture felt so unnatural coming from him. “Okay,” I said.
Making serious effort to keep my good leg from jouncing with the edgy, fractured-feeling energy coursing through me, I started over, beginning with our arrival at Rachel’s party. I’d already been through this story several times with my dad, and each time it came out a little less jumbled, which was probably why he kept asking me to repeat it.
Now, hours later, I wasn’t any clearer on what had really happened, except that Ariane had done something, and men in GTX uniforms had freaking kidnapped her in the middle of the street.
When I got to the part about the silver-haired guy calling to Ariane and how she seemed to know him, my dad slapped his palm against the table. “Son of a bitch. I should have known Mark Tucker was involved. That guy was squirrelly from the start.”
Mark Tucker. Ariane’s father?
I gaped at my dad. “You think he stole drugs and gave them to Ariane?” How could somebody do that to their kid, turn them into an experiment? It made me feel sick. Had she even known what was happening to her?
I frowned, thinking back on it. She hadn’t seemed scared, not right away. In fact, facing off with Rachel, she’d been anything but scared. Calm, collected, and pissed. But that was about it.
With the GTX guys, though, it had been different. I’d had a clear view of her, caught in the vans’ headlights, and I’d recognized the tension in her shoulders, the carefully blank expression on her face. It was just how she’d looked when I’d first approached her with my idea about Rachel—angry, afraid.
My dad frowned. “It doesn’t make sense. If Tucker stole from GTX, why would he use GTX personnel to capture her? Why would he need to capture her at all?” He shook his head. “This stinks of some kind of conspiracy. Exactly what I was afraid of when GTX refused to liaise with the police department.” He pointed at me as if I’d had something to do with it.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. This was what he’d been afraid of ? Really? I never could have dreamed up this scenario in my worst nightmare. But trust my dad to relate everything back to his disappointed GTX ambitions.
“This girl has been running around in our community for years,” he continued, working himself up into his speech-to-the-public mode. “We have no idea what kind of danger she presents to us, to the children she’s been in contact with.”
This time I did roll my eyes. “She’s not a danger. She’s just a girl.” Except even as I said it, I remembered Rachel’s face turning purplish red, and I realized I wasn’t so sure. I was having trouble reconciling Ariane, the girl in my truck, the one with the shy smile and a kiss that screamed of desperate loneliness, with the one who tossed full-grown men around like chess pieces.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
My dad tapped his fingers on his chin. “Have to play this one carefully. GTX won’t want to let me in on it, but if we—”
“I mean, about Ariane,” I said quickly.
He sighed in exasperation. “Zane, what do you want me to do? She’s a minor in the custody of her father, her legal guardian. And if what you told me about tonight is true—”
I looked at him in disbelief. As if I’d make any of that up.
“—then she’s probably better off contained, where she can’t hurt anyone.”
“She didn’t hurt anyone,” I protested. “Not until they tried to hurt her or someone else.” And I’d seen every one of those GTX guys get up and limp off, albeit with help from their comrades. Rachel had also recovered just fine. She’d been spitting mad and screeching when I’d seen her last, getting loaded into the back of a squad car.
“Why are you so concerned about this girl?” he asked. “I’ve never heard you mention her before.”
I exhaled loudly. “She’s a friend, okay?”
His eyes lit up with sudden interest. “How much time have you been spending with her?”
For some reason, his new enthusiasm made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like where it was leading. “I don’t know. A lot, the last few days.”
He nodded rapidly. “Starting when?”
I had to think. So much had happened recently. “Wednesday.”
“The day after the incident with the lights exploding at the school?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Were you there when that happened?”
Where was this going? “Yeah.” I’d been there all the other times, too, when the lights had acted weird. In the cafeteria and the activities fair and…
Oh, God. It had been Ariane all those times as well.
The belated realization struck like a slap.
My dad didn’t seem to notice. He nodded with a tight smile, distracted. “Good. Good.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder, heedless of my grimace. “Stay here. I need to make some calls.”
“Dad, I don’t understand—”
“They’re going to want you,” he said impatiently. “Want you to stay quiet. Want to talk to you. Something. That gives us leverage.”
I stared at him dumbly, still not getting it.
“You’re a witness. That’s our ticket in. We can force their hand with this, make them involve our department,” he said with a grin.
And then I got it. GTX would probably deny that anything had happened tonight, and that was if anyone bothered to ask them. No one else at the party had even seen the GTX guys take Ariane, so there was no connection between what she’d done and the company. And even if someone did put the two together, who would believe jumbled and outrageous-sounding stories from a bunch of drunken kids over the word of Wingate’s largest employer? Never going to happen.
But if my dad, the well-known and respected police chief, threatened to get involved and make a fuss over what I’d seen, GTX would have to, at the very least, acknowledge his existence, if only to keep him/us quiet.
My dad was going to use this—use me—to break into the GTX circle of trust, something he’d been after for years. He wanted to be number one on Dr. Jacobs’s speed dial when there was trouble, and he thought this was the way in.
I felt sick.
“Be right back,” he said, pushing aside the curtains and stepping out.
I sat there and listened as my dad ignored hospital cell phone rules, calling in favors, checking in with his various cronies, and generally making it known to the rumor mill that he had a valuable source in the form of me, his son.
He was probably right. Based on what I’d seen tonight, GTX would want to shut that down, and they’d probably humor him…temporarily. And my dad would be happy with me, with the situation for a while.
And Ariane? What about her? She’d probably end up stuck in a small room somewhere in the bowels of the GTX complex, with people poking and prodding at her.
I remembered how she’d first flinched away from being touched. God, no wonder.
I rubbed my hand over my face. She’d probably had people all over her for years, in a scientific capacity. And yet she’d rallied. She’d trusted me. She’d taken my hand even though she’d been leery.
My eyes burned at the memory of last night. Her determination to walk away. And her tears. If only I’d known. When I’d joked about the Witness Protection Program, she’d tried to tell me, in her own way, that she was hiding.
I shook my head. She didn’t deserve the fate she was likely headed for.
My dad let loose with his interview laugh on the phone, the big booming one that said Everything’s okay as long as I’m around. Then he stuck his head back in my room and winked at me.
The shock of it took my breath away. My dad saw me as worth something for the first time, I realized. The younger son, the other Bradshaw boy finally had value. After all those years of trying to make my dad proud, trying to make him see me, I’d actually succeeded.
But there was no rush of relief or joy or even just satisfaction at the accomplishment. I was empty. Hollowed out.
I looked down at my hands, remembering the sensation of Ariane’s hand in mine. Light, tentative but trusting.
And suddenly I felt smaller and less important than ever.
YOU KNOW THOSE FIRST FEW MOMENTS after waking from a bad dream, when you’re convinced that your nightmare is real, and there’s an impossibly large coil of dread in your stomach? But then slowly, details from the dream slip away and reality slides into place. You didn’t miss your bio final, you didn’t walk into school naked, the evil corporation that created you didn’t recapture you.…
Oh, wait.
I felt an all-too-familiar rough cotton sheet pressed against my cheek. Then the overwhelming smell of antiseptic mixed with cedar chips.
No. I opened my eyes to see the edge of a cot draped in a white sheet, and a spotless white tile floor stretching out underneath me.
No, no, no! I couldn’t be here. I couldn’t be back in this place. My stomach lurched, and I struggled to push myself up, but my arms and legs felt floppy and awkward, as if they belonged to someone else. Hot tears flooded my eyes, unsticking the contact lenses that had dried out during my unconsciousness.
“Careful now. Go slowly, my dear.” Dr. Jacobs’s voice, echoing a little through the overhead intercom, was as gentle as ever.
I froze, breaking into a cold sweat at the sound of it.
“You’re still under the effects of the sedation. Don’t want you falling and hurting yourself. You’ve already got a nasty bump to the head.”
Once he mentioned it, I became aware of a dull throbbing at the back of my head. A souvenir from my adventures with the tranq dart in the street. It was real. It was all real.
A surge of panic gave me the strength to flop over onto my back and roll into a semi-upright position, using the wall for support. The room looked as I’d left it, as if there’d never been an explosion the night I escaped. In the far right corner, the toilet, the shower, and a sink, behind a curtain that could be pulled for privacy. Directly across from me, white plastic shelves of teaching toys and games, books, and videos for the flat screen embedded in the wall above the shelf. In the far left corner, a rolling tray with a glass cage on top. Inside, a little white mouse ran on a metal wheel, pausing every few seconds to lift his nose up and sniff the air, as if he knew something was wrong.
I couldn’t breathe. I pulled at the neck of my shirt, struggling to suck air into my lungs, which felt more like two shredded plastic bags for all the oxygen they were capable of holding at the moment.
White sparkly spots flitted through my vision, signaling the approach of unconsciousness. I flopped forward, bringing my head down to my knees, on the command of some distant voice in the back of my brain that remembered the protocol to prevent fainting. Being passed out and vulnerable right now is a bad, bad idea, that same voice whispered.
But I was beyond appreciating that bit of wisdom.
I can’t be here. I can’t. I can’t. The refrain, once started, wouldn’t stop, growing louder and louder and blocking out everything but a dull buzzing in my ears.
“It’s just a panic attack. Breathe through it. You’ll be fine.”
The sound of my father’s voice over the intercom, calm and comfortingly familiar, broke through the static in my mind and triggered my last firm memory—the one of him standing over me in his black GTX uniform, reciting Rule #1: Never trust anyone.
My head snapped up. My father. He was here. And he…he’d betrayed me.
The little bit of air that I’d managed to take in caught in my throat, and my brain refused to process, stuck in a loop of disparate facts. He’d saved me, protected me. And he’d called GTX down on me? It didn’t make sense. Why now? Why at all? There had to be another explanation.
Except…what other scenario, besides betrayal, would end with me back in this room?
Unfortunately, I already knew the answer with a sickening certainty—there wasn’t one.
As though a switch had been flipped inside my brain, my panic converted to fury, hot and reassuring, eating away all my fear and confusion.
I turned my head carefully, my neck wobbly, toward the wall on my left. It held both the sheen of glass and the illusion of opaqueness.
“Show me. I want to see you.” My voice came out cold and tight with a fine tremor running through it.
The white wall went translucent in a blink of an eye, and the observation room came into view. The room itself was several feet higher, like my quarters had been dug deeper into the ground. The better to see you with, my dear. The line from a book of fairy tales, one I’d read in this very place, ran through my head, and I shuddered. Monitors, machines, computers, printers—diagnostic equipment of all kinds lined the left and right side of the room. Several lab-coated professionals sat in front of them, their heads down, studying the data being spat out.
Dr. Jacobs stood dead center in the window-wall, less than ten feet from me. Picture the kindest, most grandfatherly-looking man you can imagine. Curly gray hair, plump apple cheeks, twinkling dark eyes that seemed to find the amusement in everything. That is, unless I chose to tell him no. I knew from experience those laughing eyes could change to hard little marbles, cold and uncaring, in the space of a single word.
My father stood immediately to the left of Jacobs. His GTX uniform was pristine, as if the events of tonight had left him untouched, and his gaze was fixed at a point well over my head.
At the sight of him, contradictory impulses screamed within me—the first to run to him and seek comfort, and the second to back as far away as I could from this stranger who’d shared a home and a breakfast table with me for ten years.
“You turned me in?” I asked him. “Why? Because I broke your Rules? Because I went to a party?” In spite of my best efforts, I could hear the pleading in my voice along with a cracking that mimicked the pain in my chest.
The muscles in his jaw tightened, but he kept his gaze fixed on the wall above my head.
“You’re not even going to look at me?” I demanded, knowing I sounded hysterical. “I think I deserve at least that.”
“Oh, don’t fuss,” Jacobs said impatiently. “He didn’t betray you. For that, he would have to have been on your side to begin with.”
Those words hit with a virtual thunderstrike in my head. What did that mean?
My father turned to glare at Dr. Jacobs, who waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not like she wouldn’t have figured it out eventually.”
I stared at them both; the gaping hole in my life I’d just discovered had turned out to be a bottomless pit. “What are you saying?”
Dr. Jacobs shrugged at me. “You didn’t leave us much choice. You were refusing to cooperate, and you’re far too valuable to destroy.” He smiled and tilted his head closer to the glass as if preparing to tell me a secret. “Do you know you are the only one at this facility to have survived and thrived for this long?”
GTX-F-107. 106 before me. I’d suspected as much, but having it confirmed made me feel ill. How many of my kind—some mix of human and other—had lived and died in this little room?
Jacobs nodded, pleased with himself. “I think the illusion of freedom was good for you.”
It sounded like… Was he saying my whole life on the outside had been a lie?
No. That couldn’t be. I shook my head, wincing at the resulting pain. But my brain, slowly pushing off the last effects of the drug, worked through the logic, against my will.
The attack on GTX the night I’d escaped could have been real, or the whole thing could have been engineered to create a solid story.
I hadn’t been stupid, even at that age. If they’d opened the door and let me walk free, I would have been suspicious. Maybe not right away, but eventually.
Instead I’d been spirited away…from the scene of a major crime at a highly security-conscious company, hidden in an oversized gym bag that, somehow, no one had even questioned or bothered to check.
I felt dizzy suddenly. My escape had been too easy. Way too easy.
“Our psychological expert suggested that the block in your abilities might be unconscious and that the only way to ‘undo it,’ so to speak, was for you to feel safe again. You also needed practice in pretending to be human and blending in.” He frowned. “You always were an odd little thing.” He brightened. “So we just moved to Phase Two—cultural indoctrination—of the project a little sooner than planned. We couldn’t have you wandering around on assignment, saying and doing things that would call attention to yourself. Now you can pass through a crowd unnoticed.”
I’d fallen right into their plan, I realized. Walked in step with it as if I’d known what they were intending all along.
“But the Rules,” I protested weakly.
“We had to do something to keep you from getting too involved, too close to the good citizens of Wingate,” Dr. Jacobs said. “Letting you wander with some autonomy was quite the risk for us, even with Tucker supervising. Our entire project could have been shut down if you’d decided to tell someone the truth.”
The Rules hadn’t been about protecting me. They’d been covering their asses. All the time, effort, and worry I’d devoted to those Rules…I’d just been helping them, aiding in my own captivity.
Hot acid rose from my stomach into the back of my throat, and I made it to the toilet, barely, before vomiting.
My life as I knew it was over. No, worse than that—my life as I knew it had never existed. My head was throbbing, a tight band of pain around my forehead and through the back of my neck. Every part of me was screaming to shut down. To close my eyes and simply pretend I was somewhere else.
In the background, I could hear Dr. Jacobs yammering on, as though he hadn’t noticed my distress. More likely, though, he simply did not care. “…it’s taken us far longer to get to this point than I’d initially hoped. We’d anticipated it would only take a few months for you to break through the block, not ten years.” He laughed. “So we’re running short on time. Laughlin has set up trials for next month in Chicago. But I know you will soundly defeat the hybrids from his lab,” he said with pride in his voice. “I’ve heard rumors that they can barely speak.”
Hybrids. That caught my attention, and I turned my head carefully in his direction. Did he mean others like me? There were others like me, still alive? And defeat them how?
The name, Laughlin. It sounded vaguely familiar, as though I’d heard it before, years ago.
“First things first, though.” Dr. Jacobs clapped his hands briskly, the sound delayed a millisecond over the intercom from the action I saw through the window. “You must change your clothes and take out those contact lenses. You look ridiculous. Like a monkey wearing a suit and glasses.”
I looked down at myself. I was still wearing my pink shirt, though it was torn at the shoulder and streaked with dirt and grease from the road. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror, but I could feel the lenses, gritty in my eyes. In any other situation I’d have been glad to get into something clean and take out the contacts, which I hated anyway. But to do so at Dr. Jacobs’s command?
I didn’t move.
Dr. Jacobs sighed. “You’re not going to start this again, are you? Not even here a few hours and already you’re forcing me to resort to threats. Young lady, I don’t like to threaten.”
No, he loved to threaten. I ignored him, turning my attention to the man I’d once trusted with my life.
“Was your daughter even real?” I asked, swallowing hard over the lump in my throat. “Or was that just another manipulation? Something to make me feel like I could trust you?”
Mark Tucker’s gaze darted toward me for a second, and I saw that his eyes were rimmed with red. Stress, lack of sleep, or did he actually care?
“I took a photo, did you know that? From the box in the basement,” I continued.
He looked at me, startled.
“I think it’s a school picture,” I said. “Probably her last one.”
He winced.
“Was that something I was meant to find, a GTX tech’s weekend adventure with Photoshop?” I persisted. I needed to know what was real, needed to see something from him, some kind of reaction. “I mean, it was a hell of a bargain, two made-up daughters, one to fool the other—”
“Ariane—”
Jacobs intervened. “Enough of this. Mark, thank you for your service. Finish your rounds and wait for me in my office.” He waved him off—it was so odd to think of him as “Mark,” but I would not think of him as my father. Never again.
Mark waited a beat, staring Jacobs down before turning abruptly and leaving the room.
“You’ve really got him quite conflicted. I believe he’s grown quite attached to you.” Far from sounding disturbed by this, Jacobs seemed almost pleased, like I’d performed some kind of admirable trick. “We had to put the cameras up in the school when we learned your powers were returning and he hadn’t reported it.”
Only because I hadn’t yet reported it to him, I thought bitterly, pushing myself to my feet slowly, my knees protesting their time on the hard tile floor.
“And he refused to bring in the Bradshaw boy last night. Did you know that?”
I looked up sharply, caught off guard. Damn it. He’d surprised me, mentioning Zane so casually. There went any chance I might have had at pretending I didn’t know or care about Zane.
“Oh yes, we know all about him,” Jacobs said.
Even though I’d expected this—my fath…Mark Tucker had warned me—I still felt the blood rush from my head at the implied threat. “You can’t touch him,” I said quickly. “He’s a minor and one of your precious humans.”
Jacobs shrugged idly. “If I have his father’s permission, I can do anything I want.”
Would Zane’s father give him over that easily? Not if he knew what Jacobs intended, but nothing was stopping the good doctor from lying. Plus, he had that whole pillarof-the-community thing going for him. I couldn’t be sure Zane’s father would check into the situation thoroughly before sending Zane over.
My shoulders sagged. And even if Zane’s father did manage to keep him away from GTX, what would be next? Would Jacobs haul in every person I’d ever spoken to? Everyone who’d been, if not kind, at least not cruel? I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let him hurt innocent people on my behalf.
“Now, we have a lot to do before the trials next month,” Jacobs said, consulting a clipboard. “The Department of Defense is such a stickler for documentation and details.”
You could kill him, my logical side offered softly. Even with the wall between us, all I had to do was direct that newly recovered power in my head to squeeze his heart until it no longer had the strength to beat—just as he’d had me do to Jerry. Just as I’d almost done to Rachel.
He’s old. It probably wouldn’t be that hard. The cool and unemotional analysis made me feel vaguely nauseous again. I didn’t want to be that person. That’s who Jacobs wanted me to be, even if he didn’t want to be the target.
A tapping on the glass wall startled me into paying attention again.
“You may think I don’t know you, but I’ve spent years reading Mark’s reports, and I’ve studied the photos and videos from our surveillance teams. I’ve seen that expression on your face before, particularly when confronted with my delightful granddaughter. So bloodthirsty,” he said with a chuckle. “Exactly what we wanted. But let me clear one thing up for you: that door”—he pointed to the transparent door set in the glass wall, through which I could see the start of a generic white hallway—“only opens to my palm print.”
And I knew from experience that nothing short of an explosion would take out the glass wall.
Which meant killing Jacobs wouldn’t do any good. He’d die on the other side of the glass and the door would still be locked. I’d be trapped in here, unable to escape, waiting for someone to find me. And I wasn’t foolish enough to believe they didn’t have a contingency plan, with or without Jacobs. If I became too violent, too uncooperative. Against my will, I looked up at the air vents in the ceiling. The room was airtight. I was sure that was not a coincidence.
“I think maybe you need some time to settle in,” Jacobs said decisively, putting his clipboard down.
The mouse in the cage, as if sensing a change in the air, abandoned his wheel and scurried to the far corner of his habitat, scattering cedar chips.
“A fresh uniform is under your pillow,” Jacobs said. “As always.”
Without meaning to, I glanced over at the cot, seeing the neatly folded pile of white fabric beneath the pillow. I’d spent years trying to disappear, to not be seen as an individual among the humans. That uniform would accomplish it in a second. The moment I put it on I would become nothing. No one. Again.
“We can work on getting you some more age-appropriate reading materials and videos. Perhaps some of the items you enjoyed during your time with Mark?” he offered.
Just the idea of my possessions—reminders of my life outside—being trapped in here with me, like a mockery of the freedom I’d thought was mine, made me want to scream.
“I want you to be comfortable here. This is your home, after all,” he said with the same gentle smile he’d given when he’d left me to go hungry in the dark, years ago.
Tears of frustration and fear burned in my eyes, and I turned away swiftly before he could see them.
“Oh, 107, do dispose of that mouse sooner rather than later, would you please? I feel as though I can smell the stench from in here.”
Then the intercom clicked off, and when I risked a glance over my shoulder, the glass wall had flashed to solid, leaving me alone in a deafening silence.
Time passed slowly in the white room, with nothing to break the monotony. I’d forgotten about that.
I sat on the edge of the cot, attempting to take up the least amount of room possible. The lights had been dimmed to the “nighttime” setting. I was tired, my head hurt, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down, close my eyes, and try to gather my fragmented thoughts. (As if having a better grasp on the situation would change anything.)
But it felt like if I allowed myself to relax, I was accepting my fate, resigning myself to whatever Jacobs had planned.
And I couldn’t do that.
So the uniform remained folded beneath the pillow. And I’d named the mouse out of sheer obstinacy. “Pinky” was alive and well, spinning furiously in his wheel, first one direction and then the other, like he wasn’t sure which way he was supposed to go.
I watched Pinky spin and tried to stay awake, a small act of rebellion and the only one available to me at the moment.
I didn’t know how much time passed—and I might have dozed off while sitting up, despite my best efforts—but suddenly the wall flashed to transparent, letting in the light from the observation room, and startling me into looking up.
On the other side of the window, my…Mark Tucker approached. And my heart lifted with hope even though I knew better. It was as though the years of habit, of trusting him, relying on him, just weren’t ready to die.
The sole lab tech in the observation room stepped in front of him, trying to stop him.
The intercom wasn’t on, so I couldn’t hear what Mark said, but I saw the tech cringe and then scurry through the door. Some kind of threat, no doubt.
A second later, Mark’s voice sounded in my little room. “Ariane.”
Hearing him say my name—was it really my name any-more?—tore at something fragile inside me.
I shifted on the cot, giving my back to the glass wall. “I don’t want to see you. Ever again,” I said, disgust thick in my voice.
“I’m not going to beg you to understand,” he said finally. “I’m not sure there’s anything I can say that would make this okay.”
Hmm. You think? With effort, I swallowed back the words. Engaging only made it worse, reminded me of all the conversations and moments from before, when I hadn’t yet known he was a lying, traitorous bucket of pond scum. When I’d believed he actually cared about me. It hurt to remember that time. And I hated that it hurt almost as much I hated my own stupidity and foolishness for believing to begin with.
“I just wanted you to know, my daughter is real. Was real,” he said, and I heard the pain in his voice. “Everything I told you about her was true.”
“Except?” I prompted dully without turning around. There had to be something I was missing.
“Except Dr. Jacobs promised me the best in experimental treatment for her if I took this…assignment,” he said.
And there it was. My heart fell. Of course. He would have done anything for his Ariane. “But it didn’t work,” I said, clearing my throat against the lump growing there.
“No, it didn’t,” he confirmed. “But the research they’re doing here, it’s important, so I agreed to stay on. They told me that your immune system attacks and destroys irregular cells and cell growth. If GTX can keep their funding and figure out how to recreate that in full-blood humans, do you know what that would mean? No more cancer. No more sick children spending their short lives in and out of hospitals.”
I sat back, stunned. I knew they’d taken all those tests and samples years ago for a reason; I just hadn’t known what it was. Assuming that Jacobs was telling the truth, the good of the many always outweighed the good of the few. Right? What was one not-so-human child in light of all those who would be saved? Except when that not-sohuman child is you.
“But if I’d known then what I know now. If I’d known you…” He shook his head. “I am so sorry,” he said, his eyes bright with tears. Tears for me. Not for the other Ariane.
“Then get me out of here,” I said, choked by a swell of emotion.
He swiftly wiped his eyes. “I can’t. I wish I could. Jacobs has the door set only to—”
“His palm print,” I said, disappointed. I’d hoped, foolishly, that the good doctor had been exaggerating for effect. “I know. He told me. Wanted to make sure I didn’t kill him in an escape attempt. Though, I’m still considering killing him just for the fun of it.” The brittle bitterness in my tone startled even me, and I realized I wasn’t entirely sure if I was joking.
To my further surprise, my fath…Mark didn’t seem shocked by my statement of (potentially) murderous intent.
He looked over his shoulder, anticipating the return of the frightened lab tech, no doubt. “You heard Jacobs mention the trials with Laughlin and the other hybrids.”
“What do you know about that?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.
“Not much. Jacobs expects you to win.”
I made a frustrated noise. “But what does that mean?” I had visions of arena combat, boxing matches or competitions to see who could redirect the most M&M’s.
“I’m not sure. But”—he hesitated—“I know it’s to the death.”
I froze. “What?”
Mark glanced at the door as if he’d heard a noise, before leaning closer to the intercom. “You may not believe that I care about you, but I do,” he said quietly. “And that’s why I’m telling you: commit, Ariane. Undergo the training Jacobs sets out for you. Kill the mouse. Do what he tells you, whatever you have to do in order to survive. It’s your only chance.”
Then, as the lab tech returned with several reinforcements, Mark Tucker straightened up and walked away without a backward glance.
I WASN’T SURE whether it was my possible concussion—and the medical requirement to keep me awake—or my dad’s newfound discovery of my value that prompted him to bring me to work with him.
Either way, we went straight to the station after the ER doctor pronounced me only slightly broken.
My dad left me to cool my heels in the waiting room under the vigilant eye of the desk sergeant, while he closed the door of his office to, no doubt, continue his GTX scheming.
In the hard plastic chair I was painfully aware of every bump and bruise from the night, and there was nothing except an ancient copy of Ice Fishing Quarterly to distract me from the ceaseless churning of my brain.
Was Ariane okay? Had she woken up yet? Had she woken up at all?
I’d assumed that they’d knocked her out. But who knew what was really in those darts?
My chest felt tight at the idea. The memory of the girl laughing in my truck, crawling into my lap to kiss me contrasted so sharply with my last image of her, lying so quiet and still on the pavement, like a puppet whose strings had been violently and irrevocably severed.
Thinking of her helpless like that, it made me feel ill.
I remembered what she’d said to me earlier: If you knew the truth, you wouldn’t be so quick to sign on.
And last night, when she’d tried to wish me well. To say good-bye.
She’d known this was a possibility. She’d been trying to protect herself—and me. But I’d pushed her into continuing. I’d goaded her, through Rachel, into going to the party last night.
God, I was such an a*shole.
Ariane had accepted me for who I was, without expectations or demands that I be better. And how had I repaid her? By turning my back on her. Maybe not literally, but only because I’d been too busy staring at her, just like everyone else.
And why? Because of something outside her control. If my dad’s theory about the missing growth hormone research was right, it was all Mark Tucker’s fault. I mean, I was pretty sure Ariane hadn’t asked her father to steal drugs and give them to her, or whatever it was that he’d done to her.
She probably hated me for being a coward. I couldn’t blame her. I hated myself for that too.
I’d wanted Ariane to trust me, encouraged her to take that leap, and then, at the first test, I’d been proven completely unworthy. Even worse, it was my fault she was in that situation, at the party and facing off with Rachel, in the first place.
Now Ariane was gone, and there was nothing I could do. She was with GTX. I hoped. That was the best alternative I could come up with.
And if GTX had somehow known what was going on, known what her father was doing to her, did that make the situation better or worse? Human experimentation—I was pretty sure that was illegal and something GTX wouldn’t want a lot of people knowing about.
Still trying to wrap my brain around what had happened, and my own part in it, I stared out through the heavily tinted windows of the waiting area, watching the sun come up in shades of gray.
I wasn’t the only one up—or still up—at dawn, though. To my surprise, some of my classmates were apparently still in custody from the party last night. And as I sat there waiting for my dad, other parents I recognized—including Trey’s very pissed off dad—came in to collect their wayward and hungover offspring. Trey gave me a sheepish and pained nod as he passed me.
Rachel was the last one to emerge from the cells at the back of the building, at the behest of a nervous and timid-looking man with a briefcase. I didn’t recognize him; he was probably someone in the employ of Dr. Jacobs. A lawyer, maybe.
The man stayed at the desk, filling out the paperwork required, but the second Rachel saw me, she made a beeline. “This is your fault,” she hissed, jabbing an accusing finger at me, her high heels swinging in her hand. “You and your freak girlfriend.”
I was not in the mood for Rachel. “Yeah, and you had nothing to do with it,” I snapped, sitting up straight. “What the hell was that last night? You put people in the hospital. And Cassi’s going to be okay, by the way, in case you were wondering.”
She glared at me. “Did you miss the part where that Ariane girl almost killed me? I couldn’t breathe!”
“You seem to be breathing just fine now,” I said dryly. “And she was only trying to stop you.” Okay, and maybe a little more. A little vengeance had been at play, perhaps. Ariane had been angry, I knew that. But she’d shown more control and caused less damage than Rachel, who had no such excuse.
“God, she has you completely under her spell.” Rachel narrowed her eyes at me. “You know she has freaky mind powers.” She gave an exaggerated shudder. “I’m glad they’re going to be chopping her up and putting her under a microscope or whatever.”
Everything seemed to slow down in that second, leaving Rachel’s words hanging in the air like some kind of horrible cartoon speech bubble. “What are you talking about?” I managed to ask.
She didn’t hear me. “I mean, seriously. Did you know I had to spend the whole night back there? The dirt is never going to come out,” she said with fury, looking down at her dress and her filthy bare feet.
I snapped my fingers, earning her attention and another glare. “Rachel, focus. What did you just say about Ariane?”
She rolled her eyes. “Ariane, everybody always wants to know about Ariane,” she said in sneering, mimicky tone. “When I talked to my grandfather to get me out of here, that’s all he wanted to know. Nothing about how I was or the fact that I was in freaking jail,” she said bitterly. “He was all, ‘What exactly happened? Who talked to her? What did it feel like when she targeted you?’ You mean, aside from almost dying, Grandpa?” she scoffed.
“Rachel—”
“And she’s not even a person, you know? She’s a thing. An experiment.”
The thick layer of hate in her voice stunned me. “Just because her dad stole some drugs and—”
“No,” she said sharply. “Grandpa said they’ve been treating her for some kind of weirdo condition or something for years.”
I stared at her, not sure if I should believe what she was saying. “He told you about Ariane?”
“When I wouldn’t answer his stupid questions at first, yeah.”
“Did he…do you know what’s going to happen to her?”
Rachel frowned. “What difference does it make? She’s locked up, which is exactly where she belongs.” She touched her chest carefully, as though there were bruises from her ordeal, but I couldn’t see anything. “Wait,” she said, holding up a hand and cocking her head to the side in disbelief. “You don’t actually care, do you? She is a complete freak of nature, someone who should never have been walking around free. She’s dangerous.”
In the face of Rachel’s determination to make me see how wrong I was, the vague shape of an idea began to form in the back of my brain. I needed to see Ariane. I couldn’t just let her disappear, not without at least trying to find her. And Rachel loved nothing more than being right and taking the opportunity to rub it in your face.
“So you say,” I pointed out.
“You need more proof than last night?” she demanded. “I almost died.”
I shrugged.
Her mouth tightened. “You want to see her.”
“Unless you can’t get me in,” I said.
“I can get anything I want,” she fired back immediately.
“Good. Let’s go. She had me fooled, and I want to see for myself.” I stood up, my heart beating way too fast. Would Rachel really go for this? Would it be this easy?
“No,” she said, regarding me with suspicion.
Damn.
“You can’t just stroll into a secure facility, Zane,” she said with scorn. “It takes time.” She eyed me speculatively. “Tonight, maybe.”
“Fine.” I sat back down easily, as if it didn’t matter to me. Maybe it really did take time. Or maybe Rachel just wanted to see me squirm. Either way, I didn’t care. As long as she got me in.
“They’ve probably got her locked up in chains or something,” she said, testing me.
I shrugged again. “Just want to see for myself.”
“Oh, you’ll see,” she said with a dangerous smile. And I knew I had her for sure. Rachel wanted me to witness Ariane being treated like the bizarre science experiment she believed her to be. Now, whether Rachel could actually pull it off and get me inside GTX, that was a whole other issue and one I couldn’t control. I’d done my best and that would have to be enough. It had to be. I couldn’t just abandon Ariane. I’d given up and stopped fighting on far too many important things in my life already.
“Mr. Erickson,” Rachel bellowed, in the direction of the nervous-looking man, “let’s go!”
The man hastily scrawled his signature across one last piece of paper, scooped up his briefcase, and hurried after her.
Once they were out the door I slumped back in my chair, the rush of adrenaline fading and the pain in my head returning.
“What was that all about?” my dad called, startling me.
I swiveled in my seat to see him at the desk, frowning after Rachel and her lackey.
I hesitated. If I told him what I’d gotten Rachel to agree to, he’d probably be thrilled and insist on tagging along to GTX. Protecting his “in” to the company. And that would draw way more attention to us than I could afford. It might even stop the whole thing dead.
I couldn’t take that chance.
“Nothing,” I said finally. “Just Rachel being Rachel.”
He nodded slowly, clearly skeptical. “Don’t mess this up for me, Zane,” he warned, pointing a finger at me.
I nodded, maybe a little too quickly, and he turned away and went back into his office.
I let out a slow breath. If and when my dad found out that I’d gone to GTX without him, he’d be furious. As in, an all-consuming make-my-life-hell kind of fury.
So, in other words, he’d despise me only a little more than he normally did.
Totally worth it.