The Hunt

24

Ariane

I DIDN’T REMEMBER WAKING UP. There was a blank space, as if the tether of my memories had been severed and I was floating, unaware and free. And then I was blinking up at a ceiling and realizing, slowly, that it was a ceiling.

A ceiling with a skylight that had a view of a fake night sky, including fake stars. The constellations were wrong.

That seemed like it should mean something. Like I should recognize it. But my head felt so heavy and full. I tried to reach up to touch it, to find out if it was actually swaddled in bandages or only felt like it, but something clanked and my arm wouldn’t move.

Glancing down, I discovered my wrists were cuffed to the metal bars on either side of the bed where I was lying. It was a hospital bed. An IV was inserted in the back of my right hand, a clear line leading up to two plastic bags of fluid secured to a hook on the wall.

I reached for those bags with my mind, a half-formed idea of reading the labels or possibly ripping them open, but nothing happened. It was like running into a wall.

And slowly I started to put the pieces together. The dull thickness coating my brain probably meant whatever was in those IVs had tamped down my ability.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” a familiar voice said with some relief.

With an effort, I turned my head to the left. An observation window dominated that wall. Behind the glass was Dr. Jacobs, his hair sticking up in all directions and his lab coat torn. I’d never seen him look so out of sorts.

I frowned, trying to understand what was going on. This room wasn’t familiar, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t part of GTX. Had I been at GTX? I struggled to pull up my last memory.

“You gave us quite a scare,” Dr. Jacobs said jovially, but his smile didn’t extend to his eyes.

“Where am I?” I asked, my tongue unwieldy and less than cooperative. “What happened?”

“You had an adverse reaction to the additional sedatives. Your heart slowed, almost stopped. Dr. Laughlin offered his facility, as it was closer. You would have died if we’d tried to wait.” He grimaced, as if my near demise had been such an inconvenience. Which, to him, it probably had been. Only the imminent prospect of my death, and therefore his automatic disqualification from the trials, would have forced him to accept his competitor’s hospitality. And Laughlin was, no doubt, gloating about it already.

The memories I’d been searching for suddenly flooded into place. The parking lot. Ford. The exchange. Nixon dying. A second shot. Blood.

I sat up, or tried; the metal restraints screeched against the bars on the side of the bed. “Zane?”

Dr. Jacobs’s mouth tightened, and the silence that ensued was answer enough.

My mouth opened in a silent cry of anguish before I could stop it. “What happened? Did you just leave him there?” My imagination supplied an image of Zane lying on the ground, dying alone with no one to at least hold his hand, as black SUVs and vans rushed past.

“I tried to warn you,” Dr. Jacobs said sadly. “You aren’t meant for life outside.”

I wanted to hate him, to seethe and scream at him. But when I looked down at myself, still dressed in my filthy clothes and Zane’s blood coating my hands, how could I argue?

I had Zane’s blood on my hands, literally and figuratively. Even if it was Dr. Jacobs’s fault, I was the one who’d led Zane into it, who hadn’t sent him home when I should have, who kept him for myself when I knew what that would likely mean for him.

Dr. Jacobs was still talking in that mournful tone that also managed to be condescending, but I tuned him out, lifting my hand to stare at the blood dried in the lines of my palm and in the edges of my fingernails. It was as if the blood had tried to find a way into a living body and failed, instead pressing itself against my skin as closely possible.

Above that, several dingy square bandages covered the inside of my arm. Laughlin’s sample sites. I hadn’t noticed them before, at the meet up. But he wouldn’t have missed that opportunity. I lamented that none of them were close enough to where Zane’s blood might have found entry. Where he might live on in me, in some small way.

I turned away from the observation window as best as I could, hot tears rolling down my cheeks and onto the pillow, dampening it beneath my face. A huge emptiness swelled inside me and I just wanted it to swallow me whole. To take me in so I could get lost inside of it. Just be gone, so I wouldn’t have to feel anymore.

But, of course, that didn’t happen. I was still stuck here, trapped in this facility, in this bed, in this life that I didn’t choose for myself.

“How is our patient?” I recognized Dr. Laughlin’s voice. He must have joined Dr. Jacobs behind the observation window.

“She’s awake, responsive,” Dr. Jacobs said grudgingly.

“Excellent! So happy we could be of service to you,” Laughlin said.

“It wouldn’t have been necessary if your man hadn’t overreacted and given her too much—”

“He was responding to a threat with nonlethal force, as you requested. Clearly, your system of control is less than reliable. Then again, if you had more than one product to rely upon—”

They sniped back and forth, taking swipes at each other’s methodology and “products,” and then it got personal.

“You were always a poor student,” Dr. Jacobs snapped. “Too eager to advance, never taking the time to think things through.”

“Says the jealous old man,” Laughlin retorted. “Left behind the times with his old ideas and his backward philosophies.”

I closed my hands into fists, feeling Zane’s blood sticky between my fingers. This was a game to them. A competition. One-upmanship. This had nothing to do with me. Or Ford. Or Zane.

They just wanted to win. To beat the other guy. And neither one of them cared what they did to us in the process.

Something inside me shifted, and a hard, cold piece that had formerly bumped and rubbed, never quite fitting in, clicked into place.

End them. That cool inhuman voice inside of me spoke up, and the pain in my heart eased slightly. Fury and hurt converting to something icy, clinical, and more manageable than all these feelings. All this overwhelming humanness.

You can do it, the voice said, getting stronger. My alien side was taking over, and I welcomed it. But first you have to win.

I’d been so focused on escaping the trials, I’d never considered another option. They’d taken escape away from me, killed my hope. But that didn’t mean they’d beaten me. Far from it.

If I cooperated now, if I worked to win the trials, I would gain some measure of trust. Perhaps even a portion of freedom, having proven myself. And then I would use that freedom to destroy them all. Dr. Jacobs, Dr. Laughlin, Ford, Carter, myself. The entire program.

That was the only way to end this, the only way any of us would ever truly be free. They’d never let us go. Ever. And if we could never truly have lives, if we were only ever to be symbols of their ego, pawns on their board, then what was the point of pretending? Pretending only brought more pain.

A quick flash of Zane’s smile, his gray-blue eyes regarding me with warmth, slipped across my mind.

Pretending had brought me to Zane, and my pretending that we could be together in any real way had taken him away from me.

No. I shook my head, the pillow crinkling beneath me. I was done with pretending.

I’d failed Zane, but I wouldn’t fail in this. And I wouldn’t die trying, either.

A slow smile spread across my face, autonomic almost, painless and joy free. I would die succeeding, in this one thing at least.