The Hunt

8

Zane

I’D NEVER SLEPT WITH A girl before. Not actual sleeping, anyway. So I didn’t have anything to compare it to, but waking up and finding Ariane still next me was one of the best moments of my life.

The van was hotter than hell. Ariane was curled up against my side, making her seem even smaller than she was, which was a feat.

Her pale cheeks were flushed with heat, and her whitish-blond hair appeared darker, sticking to her skin in funny ringlets and waves. It probably wasn’t good for her—for either of us—to be so warm. We needed to get out of here. To where, I wasn’t sure. But not here was a start.

I sat up and shook her shoulder gently. “Hey,” I whispered to her. “Ari.”

She blinked at me, the blue tinted lenses in her eyes slipping a little with the motion.

“Hey,” she said, the word raspy with sleep.

“Don’t you need to take those out?” I asked, frowning.

Ariane stared up at me befuddled, as if she wasn’t quite awake.

“Your contact lenses,” I said with a laugh. Evidently she wasn’t a morning person either. “Aren’t you supposed to—”

She reached up and touched my face, her fingertips tracing the outline of my mouth lightly, and I stopped talking. Stopped breathing.

Then she pulled away, her eyes wide as if her action had taken her by surprise as well. But she didn’t retreat completely, her hand hovering between us, as if she wasn’t sure what to do.

I didn’t move. We were on the edge of something. She hadn’t let me kiss her at the motel. I didn’t know if she wanted me to now; we hadn’t since before GTX, since before that awful party at Rachel’s when Ariane had stepped up to help me and revealed herself.

And I wanted her to choose. She was a mind reader. She knew what I wanted, but it was up to her. Things were infinitely more complicated than they’d been before, when we were pretending to date to fool Rachel, and I wouldn’t hold the precedent over her head. We were, in effect, starting over.

Ariane sat up slowly, her pale and heavy hair loose and sliding around her shoulders. I could hear my breath rushing in and out as she moved closer, and I could see the pulse throbbing in her throat.

She curled her fingers hesitantly in the collar of my shirt, and keeping her gaze fixed on me, she leaned in.

Her lips brushed lightly over mine. So light, in fact, it felt more like one of those accidental mouth brushes when you go to kiss someone on the cheek and miss.

It was still electrifying, oddly enough, ramping up the tension and anticipation I could feel building between us, but I didn’t understand it.

She did it again, watching me carefully, her expression serious, cautious.

And it finally clicked with me. She was afraid. Afraid I’d pull back or run away. Afraid I’d panic. She was giving me an out.

I didn’t need one.

I slid my hand to the back of her head, my fingers tangling in her hair, and angled my mouth against hers, tasting her deeply, showing no hesitation, no fear. It was easy. I didn’t feel any.

Ariane clutched at my shoulders, her breath escaping in a quiet gasp, sending a gratifying thrill through me.

Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled herself into my lap.

Blood rushing away from my head, I promptly forgot about pretty much everything except for her tongue in my mouth and her body against mine. I’d seen those slight curves before, in the motel, but feeling them pressed up against me was an entirely different sensation.

Framing her face with my free hand, I could feel the delicate bones of her cheeks and jaw under my questing fingertips. When she tipped her head back, I pulled my mouth from hers and pressed my lips against the pulse fluttering frantically at her throat, beneath damp skin.

Then she shifted her legs, moving them to either side of my hips, which shot the intensity level up from about ten to a thousand, and I swallowed a groan, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her closer.

God, it was so hot. In every sense of the word.

We were wearing too many clothes. But I could fix that.

I slid my hands beneath the hem of her shirt and started inching it up.

“Zane?” she whispered against my throat.

I was having a little trouble focusing on words. The bra that I’d seen earlier was now beneath my fingertips. “Yeah?” I managed.

“I want to find Ford and the other hybrids,” she said breathlessly.

“Wait. What?” I stopped, with one hand caught in the fabric of her shirt, the other searching for a fastener of some kind at the back of that undergarment that would probably play a starring role in my future fantasies.

I’d heard that wrong. Had to have. I’d caught the “I want” part, but nothing after that had made any sense.

“I figured out another option when you were sleeping,” she said. “Ford and the other hybrids. I want to find them.” She pulled away from me slightly, her cheeks flushed pink and her eyes hazy but slowly regaining focus.

Reluctantly, I let go of her shirt and scrubbed my hands over my face, not entirely sure I was awake. If I wasn’t, I was kind of disappointed at the left turn this sex dream had taken. “Right now?”

She blushed, color spreading up from her neck. “Not this second, no.”

I struggled to focus, when my whole body was screaming at me to close the distance and kiss her again, to get us both down on the floor of the van. “Why do you want to find them?” Avoiding Laughlin’s hybrids entirely seemed like a much better goal to me. Healthier.

Ariane frowned, sharp intellect replacing all the softness in her expression. “So far, we’ve just been reacting to what everyone else does. GTX, my father, your mother. An alliance with Ford and the others could give us leverage, an advantage.” She shrugged and, I noted with regret, pulled her shirt into place. “If we all refuse to cooperate, they can’t have their competition.” Her voice held a note of grim satisfaction.

I sighed, shifting her weight in my lap slightly to make it more comfortable and less distracting. Clearly the make-out portion of this conversation was over. “We’ve seen how ‘persuasive’ GTX can be. I doubt Laughlin’s any different. These hybrids probably spend half the day throwing knives at your picture on the wall,” I pointed out.

She rolled her eyes. “You watch too many movies.”

“Really? You’re saying that to me?” Based on what she’d told me, most of her early education about the outside world—in other words, anything beyond the ten-by-ten-foot space of GTX cell—had come exclusively from movies and TV they’d shown her. And it seemed, given the number of pop culture references she used, those films and shows had had a lasting effect on how she viewed things, a filter over her real-life experiences.

“Fine,” she said with an impatient exhale before pushing herself from my lap and resettling on the van floor across from me, adding distance between us. “You watch too many bad movies. That’s a cliché.”

“And this isn’t?” I asked in disbelief. “You want to approach the bad guys, hoping they’ll want to talk when it’s far more likely they’ll just try to kill you.”

Her gaze skittered away from me. “They’re not the bad guys,” she said, staring at a point somewhere to my left, her shoulders tight suddenly.

Smooth, Zane. Way to insult her. “I’m sorry,” I said with a wince. “I didn’t mean they were bad because they were hybrids. I just meant—”

“They were raised by Laughlin, just as I was raised by Dr. Jacobs,” she said. “That gives us more in common than it divides us.”

Hearing her talk about “us” and mean herself and the hybrids instead of the two of us sent a twinge of worry through me.

“How do you know that they haven’t spent the last fifteen or twenty years just waiting for the chance to prove themselves?” I argued. “What if he’s promised them freedom if they win the trials? What if they don’t even want to be free?”

“Then why would they hate the humans so much?”

Her use of the word “humans” and the cool distance in her tone—as if we were some simple inanimate object, like grapefruits or something—made me shiver despite the heat. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was more than just Ariane Tucker, the quiet girl who’d been in my math class. She blended in, just as they’d intended. But other times, like now, she seemed foreign, unknowable. Like all those Earth-like planets you hear about in the news; we can see them but we’ll never be able to get there.

Perhaps sensing what I was thinking, she reached out and touched my knee. “There’s a chance that you’re right—”

“Just a chance,” I muttered.

She ignored me. “But we have to try. It’s our best option for getting out of this”—she gestured to the van but, no doubt, meant the entire running-for-our-lives situation—“with a chance for any kind of a real future.” She wasn’t pleading, but I could feel her intensity pulling at me. She truly believed this was the best choice.

And technically, she could be correct; we didn’t have enough information about the hybrids to know one way or another. They might, in fact, welcome her with open arms. Just not me.

I swallowed a sigh and rubbed at the headache beginning to throb behind my forehead, whether from the heat or this conversation. “You’re the strategy expert,” I said with a shrug that hurt. “How do you plan on finding our new best friends?”

“She said they’re in public at times,” Ariane said. “In school, even.”

I noticed her avoidance of “your mom” or “Mara.” My mom had managed to wound her with what she’d said, I realized. Not that that was surprising, because my mom had been awful. But Ariane, most of the time, gave the appearance of being pretty impervious to the stupid shit people said about her. Rachel had only managed to goad her into reacting by attacking others. Jenna. Me.

It made me wonder if Ariane was more vulnerable than she let on and better at hiding it. And that made me want to pull her close again, as if that could shelter her from whatever people had said to or about her.

I cleared my throat. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of public here to go around,” I said, gesturing to the mall and the now-busy parking lot, visible through the windshield.

She glanced away from me. “We do have a source.”

I gaped at her. “You’re kidding. You want to go back to my mom?” There were so many things wrong with that idea, it almost distracted me from the complete insanity of chasing after Laughlin’s hybrids. “She’s a little off her rocker at the moment. You get that, right?”

“She’s not crazy,” Ariane said with a certainty I didn’t feel. “She’s reacting to stress.”

“No,” I said. “Mainlining Swiss cake rolls while watching junk TV is reacting to stress. Putting six extra locks on your door and imagining that you’re being followed is something else entirely. Besides, I don’t think she’d be too excited to help us.” Us being anyone and anything related to Ariane.

Ariane met my gaze directly, reading through my weak subterfuge. “You’re right. She wouldn’t…what’s the phrase? Spit on me if I was on fire.”

I winced. True enough, it seemed. My mom’s guilt over working for Jacobs at GTX was enough to push her into apologizing, but that was likely the extent of it.

“But she’s not going to do it to help me. She’s going to do it to help you,” Ariane said.

I raised my eyebrows. “I assume you have a plan to convince her of that.”

“Of course,” she said easily.

I shook my head. “All right,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “In absence of another, better plan, I guess we can give it a try. But we’re going to need to stop for Swiss cake rolls.”

She laughed.

I got up, keeping my head down to avoid the roof, and climbed into the driver’s seat. She followed and settled herself on the passenger side.

“I also wanted to say that I…I’m sorry about earlier,” she said quietly, clicking her seat belt into place as I started the van and cranked up the AC.

I frowned. “What are you talking about?” I asked, backing out of the parking place.

She stared down at her hands, folding them and unfolding them in her lap. “I woke up and you were there, looking so worried about me…my contacts. It was nice. You caring. And I was just…I was just glad.” She grimaced.

Oh. She’d had so few people care about her that she felt she had to apologize for responding to affection? She’d kissed me; I’d wanted her to. End of story, as far as I was concerned. But evidently not for Ariane. And I thought my life was messed up.

“Nothing to apologize for,” I said, doing my best to keep my tone even. I didn’t want to make her self-conscious. “Anytime you want to be glad like that again, just let me know.” I grinned at her.

She nodded without looking at me, color creeping into her cheeks again.

I shifted into drive and headed for the parking lot exit.

“Is that, um, something you’d want?” she asked after a few seconds of silence. “I mean, not what we did, but what we could do.…”

I glanced over at her sharply. Sex. Was she asking about sex? My mouth worked without words coming out. I didn’t know how to answer that.

“I guess what I’m asking is”—she squirmed in her seat—“it doesn’t bother you, what I am? Some people wouldn’t even want to share a straw with me, if they knew.…”

Ah, now I was getting it. But that didn’t really help me with an answer. She was worried about being pushed away, now or sometime in the near future, whether there was some invisible line that I wouldn’t cross with her because of who or what she was. I could address that, but I didn’t want to inadvertently add pressure to an already crazy situation.

“You know I’m not expecting anything like that, right?” I asked carefully.

“That wasn’t my question,” she said.

“No, it doesn’t bother me. Obviously.” I jerked my head toward the sleeping bag.

She nodded, but she didn’t seem reassured. “But you have. Before, I mean.”

I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t planned on this conversation. If things had gotten this intense and so quickly under normal circumstances, then yeah, I’d have been expecting it. But this was a bizarre moment of reality intruding on a pretty surreal landscape. But then again, Ariane, in addition to being a half-alien soldier/spy/whatever, was just somebody trying to figure out how to navigate the world, just like the rest of us. “Yeah,” I admitted.

“Who?”

I sighed. She wasn’t going to like this answer. “You wouldn’t know her. She was a senior when we were freshman.”

Caught by surprise, Ariane actually looked at me. “Really?”

I let out a slow breath, trying to figure out how to word this. “It was complicated. She wanted Quinn, but he was…occupied.” Not that I’d known that at the time. I was stupid and half drunk at my first high school party; I’d taken Tara’s interest at face value. A senior cheerleader asking me if I wanted to go somewhere where we could “talk”? Uh, hell, yeah.

It was only afterward, stumbling out of a darkened bedroom at her stepfather’s house, when I heard her taunting Quinn about it, that I’d figured it out. I wasn’t sure whether she’d done it to get back at him for choosing someone else or to just make him jealous. Either way, fail.

Quinn had glanced from her to me and back again and got pissed. Just not in the way Tara had intended.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded of her. “He’s not even fifteen. That’s messed up.”

Before I could protest that I’d participated voluntarily, Tara lost her shit and starting screaming at Quinn and punching his shoulder.

By then, we were attracting a crowd with our little drama: Tara, red-faced and shrieking; my brother looking disgusted, shaking the beer off his hand where Tara had caused it to slop out of his cup; and me, a foot taller but years younger than everyone else, standing there awkwardly, like a complete tool.

Eventually, Tara’s friends showed up and dragged her off, holding her arms down and whispering to her in the tone used by sane people coaxing a jumper off a ledge.

Yeah, that was the girl who’d slept with me.

And then Quinn, who normally ignored me at parties, at school, hell, even at home when he could, frowned at me, concerned. “You okay?”

Somehow that made it all the worse. Bad enough to be used as a revenge fuck, but to be pitied for it by the emotional target of said revenge fuck, who also happened to be my perfect, universally loved, older brother? God.

Pinned by the stares of those lingering to just gawk, I’d forced myself to nod. “Yeah, whatever.” I’d been terrified that my brother was going to keep talking about it when all I wanted to do was die or become invisible.

But he didn’t. Quinn had just nodded, almost absentmindedly as the incident was already fading from his mind. “All right.” Then he’d turned away from me to face the crowd. “What are all you pussies looking at? Let’s get our drink on!”

They’d followed him to the kitchen, leaving me alone. And I’d found the first door out and sneaked away. It was all anybody would talk about at school the next Monday, but among most of my friends, it became about “bagging a senior chick” instead of blinding stupidity and degradation. A small favor, I guess.

Remembering it even now, after almost two years of better experiences, still made my stomach churn and my face hot.

Ariane touched my arm. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said fiercely. Clearly, she’d picked up on at least some of my thoughts about that night.

I tried to smile. “Thanks.” I flipped the signal on to indicate our turn from the mall parking lot onto the main road. “So, in answer to your question, do I want to with you? Yeah.” I made sure to look at her so she knew I wasn’t just telling her what she wanted to hear. “But it should mean something, you know?” I shifted a little in my seat, feeling as though I were straying from the agreed-upon code of sex anytime, anywhere is good. But she’d asked, so I was answering honestly. I’d learned that lesson the hard way the first time, and I had no desire to revisit it. “And right now, we’re a little busy with just trying to stay alive,” I said.

Ariane nodded, a hint of a frown crossing her face.

“So there’s no rush,” I said firmly, as much to myself as to her. I wasn’t the type to push. Not my style. But I already felt more for her than I had for anyone else. Ever. That made it a lot harder to keep moments like the one a few minutes ago from spinning out of control.

“So, as long as you’re comfortable with everything so far…” I paused, a new thought occurring to me. I tapped my fingers nervously on the steering wheel. “Uh, I mean, assuming everything works the same way.”

She laughed, a bright, unexpected sound. “As far as I know, yeah.”

I let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Okay, good. Because if there’s something special about your elbow or whatever, you need to tell me.”

She cocked her head to one side with a frown. “Wait, so the elbow isn’t special? What’s third base, then?”

My face burst into flames just hearing her saying the words third base. Because apparently I hadn’t progressed past the age of twelve. “I, um…” I said, fumbling for words.

But then I caught the faint upturn at the corner of her mouth. She was teasing.

I shook my head. “You’re hilarious, you know that?”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. An elbow, really?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“It was the weirdest body part I could think of off the top of my head, okay?” I said, exasperated. “I was trying to be sensitive.”

“Like my elbow.”

“Yes. No! Damn it, Ariane.…” I sighed.

Shaking with laughter, she held her hands up. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Her eyes were shining with tears of mirth, something I’d never seen from her before. I loved it.

I held my hand out and with only split second of hesitation—nothing like when we’d first started talking, just days ago—she took it, intertwining her fingers with mine.

A few moments passed in silence, just the rumble of the van engine and the echoes of her laughter in my head. “I wish all of this was easier, safer,” she said quietly. “More normal.”

I shrugged. “If it were any of those things, we probably wouldn’t be here together.” Extreme circumstances had pushed us toward each other to begin with; it seemed unlikely that would change anytime soon. Plus, what was so great about normal? If we’d stuck with that, she might have still been trapped inside the cell at GTX.

“This will work,” she said with renewed determination. “We’ll find Ford and the others, and we’ll get a chance to turn things around. Then we’ll get to decide our future.”

I nodded. “Yeah, absolutely,” I said, and hoped she couldn’t hear my false certainty. She was worried about failing, which I understood, but a part of me was equally worried about what would happen if she succeeded. We were in this together for now, but would that be true if she managed to convince the other hybrids to come to our side? Her side, actually.

I was only human. And all too aware of it.

The trip to my mom’s went much faster than the first time. We were closer, of course, but it was also probably because all the anticipation and anxiety was gone, replaced solidly with dread. We knew what we were walking into this time.

Then as I started to make the last turn, Ariane sat up sharply. “Wait. Stop.”

Or, not.

I braked immediately, stopping halfway through an intersection. “What’s wrong?”

She had the alert posture—back ramrod straight, gaze sharp, concentration almost palpable—that I recognized as belonging to Ariane the soldier. Something had triggered her instincts and/or her training.

“Something’s wrong. Different,” she said, her fingers turning white where she clutched the armrest.

I fought against a pulse of panic. “My mom?” I asked. I still didn’t know how I felt about what she’d done—really, who she was—but the worry about her safety was instinctive and unstoppable.

“I don’t know. It’s…there’s a new thread.” Ariane cocked her head to one side, listening.

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. “What does that mean?” I asked finally.

She made a frustrated noise. “It’s hard to explain. It’s as if…something has changed. There was a certain feel to the area before, and now it’s altered.” She looked over at me. “Have you ever walked into a room right after an argument?”

Uh, yeah. I’d lived with my parents for years, after all.

“You can tell that something is wrong, that something’s happened even if no one is saying anything, right?” she continued.

She seemed to actually be asking—maybe she wasn’t sure what I could sense as a regular, nonspecial human—so I nodded.

“It’s like that. The tension is up. But I can’t hear anything specific. We’re too far away.” She frowned, her mouth tight. “And it’s not safe to go closer without knowing what’s going on.”

A car pulled up short behind me with an impatient squawk of tires. “Uh, Ariane? We’re about two seconds from getting honked at.”

“Keep going,” she said distantly, her attention focused once more on nothing I could see.

I straightened out of the turn and continued on slowly.

“Left here,” she directed, a block later. Not that she was even looking at the road. She’d moved to the edge of her seat and twisted to stare in the direction of my mom’s house. It was as if she’d tapped into something near my mom’s house and she was still connected, a cord stretching out between her and some distant point.

I took the turn as instructed and found we were on a large cul-de-sac of small houses and utilitarian brick duplexes just like my mom’s. A half dozen of them had real estate signs in front—for sale or rent—or they appeared dilapidated enough to perhaps be abandoned.

This was definitely not the best neighborhood. The good news, though, was that even at noon, not many people seemed to be out and about to notice us. Or, maybe that wasn’t so good—nobody watching meant that anything could happen. Lack of credible eyewitnesses was never something I’d thought much about before this week, and now it seemed an essential variable to consider in every situation.

Ariane was frowning out the window, her gaze searching the sky, first one direction and then another, as if she was calculating something.

“That one,” she said, pointing to a house with a REDUCED PRICE banner slapped across the real estate sign planted in the front yard. It was a two-story house, not particularly large, but taller than the others surrounding it.

“Okay, what about it?” I asked slowly.

She blinked, breaking her trance of concentration. “Park in the driveway. And then act like we belong.”

Oh. That sounded ominous. And possibly illegal.

I pulled in and put the van in park. Before I’d even shut the engine off, though, Ariane had pushed open her door and slid out.

I followed her hurriedly, taking an extra second to lock the van. Nothing like leaving thousands of dollars lying around, unattended.

“What are you doing?” I whispered when I caught up to Ariane on the front walk. She was heading to the door like she owned the place.

Ariane smiled at me, big and false, and then looped her arm through mine. “We’re very excited to see this house. Now smile at me in case the neighbors are watching.”

What? “We’re going in?” I asked through my own version of a fake smile, but I could feel the tension pulling at the corners of my mouth. I wasn’t as good at it as she was.

“Yes.” She tugged me forward and onto the sagging wooden porch. Then she pretended to fumble with the metal keybox hanging from the handle for a moment, as if she had to open it to get at the key.

Then she angled herself so that her body blocked the view of anyone who might be watching and lifted her hand. Inside, the dead bolt slid back with a solid thunk, and I watched as the doorknob, inches away from her outstretched fingertips, twisted slowly, as if it was being operated by an unseen presence.

The door popped free and swung open, revealing a dim and empty entryway. Cool air rushed out to greet us. The air-conditioning was on. I struggled momentarily between conflicting feelings: relief that it wasn’t sweltering inside and fear about what that might mean in terms of the occupants.

“You sure no one is home?” I asked.

She waved my words away. “Not here.” Then she stepped inside.

“As in, they’re not here right now or as in, people live in this area but not in this particular house?” I asked, shifting my weight uneasily at the threshold. Or, as in, Don’t ask me that here. There were any number of ways her statement could be interpreted, some of which might not exclude the possibility of some dude in his boxers, rounding the corner unexpectedly and catching us.

Ariane paused and glanced over her shoulder at me.

“You’re nervous,” she said with a curious lilt.

“Breaking and entering is kind of a new experience for me,” I said tightly. And yeah, okay, given the scope of everything we’d gone through in the last few days, it was nothing, but it was the first actual crime we’d committed. And I guess, after years of my dad lecturing me on all the dumb-ass things I could do that would jeopardize his good name and my future, some of it had actually sunk in, despite my best efforts.

Ariane crossed back to the door. “No one is here, I promise. It’s safe.” She paused, considering. “As safe as it is anywhere for us,” she added. “For now.”

Wow. That was reassuring.

She held out her hand, but I stepped inside of my own free will. If I was going to do it, then I would do it.

The dark interior left me half blind after the brightness outside; it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust. The door swung shut as soon as I cleared it, courtesy of Ariane’s power, snapping closed with a loud click that echoed and made me jump.

“Come on, this way,” she said, heading deeper into the house.

The entryway, with its battered wooden floor, was empty except for a few dust bunnies. To the left, it opened up to a room with dingy carpeting—and cleaner spaces where the furniture had been—and nothing else.

No one was living here. I let out a breath of relief. Ariane could have told me that.

“I didn’t know for sure,” she said. “Not until now.”

“Stop making me feel better,” I muttered.

Following the sound of her voice, I turned the corner out of the entryway and into an actual hall with stairs on the right, leading up. Ariane was already halfway to the next floor.

She moved without hesitation to the second floor and then straight to a partially closed door on the landing, as if she were on the trail of something I couldn’t see.

The door led to a bathroom, small and kind of rank, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She went immediately for the window, which was set high up in the rear wall. She stepped up on the closed lid of the toilet and pulled at the closed metal blinds, which gave with a twanging sound, to look out.

“There,” she said with an air of satisfaction.

Moving to stand next to her—I didn’t need the assistance of the toilet to see out—I peered out to find a view of the dead backyard with a rusted swing set and the rear side of an equally despondent-looking house. “What…”

Ariane reached up and gently turned my chin to the right slightly, and I realized if I looked between the neighboring houses at an angle, I could see my mom’s place.

And the large black SUVs parked on the street out front.

I pulled back instinctively, as though they could see us up here. “Laughlin?” I asked.

“Probably,” Ariane said.

“Did she call him on us?” I struggled with a rush of anger at the idea.

“I don’t think so,” Ariane said thoughtfully, her tone one of someone contemplating an academic problem. “If they were here for us, it would look different.”

I shook my head. “Meaning?”

“Either there would be a lot more of them, or we wouldn’t see them at all,” she said.

Great. I really needed to stop asking questions. The answers only made things worse. Problem was, I didn’t have anything but questions.

“And that wouldn’t explain him,” she added.

“Who?” I leaned closer, and she pointed to the house directly behind us. In an upstairs window, bare of curtains or blinds, I could see a silhouette of a man standing at the front of the house. He held what appeared to be binoculars, watching the goings-on at my mom’s house. Or maybe even inside her house, depending on how powerful those binoculars were.

“One of Laughlin’s guys?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Why would he be hiding?”

Good point. But he definitely wasn’t just a neighbor, not with the binoculars and what appeared to be a complete lack of furniture inside the house. It was evidently another empty one for sale.

“Then who?”

She shrugged. “Someone from GTX maybe? Or Emerson St. John? Just because Laughlin and Jacobs aren’t interested in what he’s doing doesn’t mean he’s not interested in them.”

God, when did these people have time to actually accomplish scientific breakthroughs with all the time they allotted for espionage? Or maybe that’s how they accomplished those scientific breakthroughs. I wasn’t sure.

“Okay, so now what?” I backed away from the window to lean against the sink. The sight of the dude spying and the SUVs had shaken me. Ariane had sounded casual, unconcerned, during our discussion, but I was beginning to think that flat, unaffected tone was how she reacted to unexpected stress.

She hesitated. “I don’t know. Mara is our best lead on the hybrids.”

But we couldn’t wait here forever. Our van was parked in the driveway. The owners of this house might not live here, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t come by and check on the place. Plus, the neighbors would eventually get curious, wouldn’t they? In Wingate, someone would have already been knocking at the door.

“We could come back later,” I offered, though oddly that idea made me uneasy. We couldn’t do anything from here, but it felt, somehow, like everything would escalate even further out of control if we weren’t watching.

She shook her head, her gaze fixed on the view outside. “That’ll just attract more attention.”

She was the expert at being just this side of invisible, I suppose.

“We could try to track down another Laughlin employee,” I said, but even before the words were out, the sheer impossibility of that idea washed over me. Because it wasn’t just finding any employee that would do; we needed one who had knowledge of a top secret project and access to details. We, at the moment, didn’t even have a connection to the Internet. The basic Laughlin Integrated Web site was out of our reach, let alone a confidential employee directory of some kind, assuming one existed.

“Do you think they’re hurting her?” The question popped out before I could stop it. I grimaced. “Sorry…I’m sorry.”

Ariane looked away from the window to me, startled. “Why are you apologizing?”

I couldn’t meet her eyes. “She worked in the lab. She…hurt you.” And she lied to me about it. It wasn’t that I felt she should have told me, as a kid, about her work on a secret project, but more that her work on that project irrevocably changed who I thought she was. And I didn’t like this new version of my mom.

“It was her job. And I told you she was kinder to me than any of the others,” Ariane said evenly.

“Yeah, but that’s not saying much,” I pointed out. I paused, trying to figure out how to say what was churning inside me. “My dad spent years telling me I was just like my mom, and I hated him for that.”

“And now you’re afraid he’s right?”

I scrubbed my hands over my face. “Yeah,” I admitted, more of an exhale than a word. I mean, I’d always thought he was right, but about stuff like lacking in ambition, being soft, or lazy (by his definition). Not like this, though. Nothing like this. When my understanding of my mom changed, so did my view of myself. And yeah, now I was scared as hell that my dad was still right. Would I do what she’d done? Would I somehow find myself in a situation where I’d ignore my conscience because I thought I had no choice or because it somehow felt like the right thing to do, the tiny space between the proverbial rock and a hard place?

Ariane stepped down from her perch on the toilet and grabbed my hands. “First of all, no. I don’t think they’re hurting her. I’m not sensing anything like that.” She nodded in the direction of my mom’s house. “Fear, anxiety, yes, but not pain. If anything, she’s angry. And that’s a good thing.” Her mouth twitched. “Most likely someone was dispatched to follow up on her call this morning. She’s not making it easy for them, and she definitely hasn’t said anything to them about us.”

Yet. But I nodded, feeling something tight in my chest easing slightly at Ariane’s words, even as I hated myself for it.

“Second, consider my background. One of my parents was an alien. Maybe he or she was simply the envoy of a curious race. But given the advanced technology and abilities he or she evidently possessed, the more likely scenario is that of an advance scout from a superior species, which likely would not have ended well for the humans. Domination, at best. At worst, a careless disregard for life here, like a child stepping on an anthill,” she said calmly. “On the other side, my human mother was probably bribed or blackmailed into allowing my existence, which doesn’t say a whole lot for her character.” She rolled her eyes with a sad smile. “And one has to assume a petri dish played a healthy role in all of it.”

I choked on an unexpected laugh.

“So, generally speaking, when it comes to predicting future dysfunction, I think we ought to leave the ‘you are where you come from’ theory off the table, or else I so have you beat.” She stepped up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek, her skin smooth against mine. “We make our own choices,” she whispered.

Tears stung my eyes unexpectedly, and I wrapped my arms around her, warmth and gratitude filling my chest. “I love you.” The words came out before I could stop them, riding that wave of emotion. I wasn’t even sure how I meant them, like “I love you for saying that” or “I love you.” Both, maybe. But it was too late to think more about it; the words were already out.

Ariane stiffened immediately, her whole body going tense as if under attack.

I froze. “I’m sorry.…I didn’t…” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“It’s fine,” she said, and pulled away so quickly I might as well have been on fire. So, clearly it wasn’t fine.

Stupid, Zane.

“If we’re going to stay here, we should take shifts watching,” she said, carefully avoiding my gaze. “That way we can get some rest. As soon as they leave, we’ll need to be ready to get over there to talk to Mara.” She sounded almost normal but for the faint strain in her voice, as though it took effort to maintain that front.

“Right, okay, sure,” I said, my face hot. “I’ve got first watch.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, but it was perfunctory, as if she were already itching to get away.

“Yep,” I said too brightly. It was as if we were following some entirely different script than a few moments ago. In this one we were pretending to be cordial strangers.

“Okay,” she said, and then she moved to the left at the same time I moved to my right, and we did that awkward back-and-forth dance while we tried to get out of each other’s way.

“Sorry,” we said at the same time.

Then I pulled myself against the far wall, and she took off as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

Great. I leaned my head against the yellowed wallpaper, the peeling strands rough against my forehead. Because things weren’t complicated enough already. You had to go and drop an ambiguous “I love you” into the mix. Nice, man. Very smooth.

It wasn’t that I expected her to say it back—hell, I hadn’t even expected to say it all. I mean, the last few days had been intense, and that made a big difference, but still, we’d only known each other, really known each other, for a week? Less? And maybe love wasn’t even something she wanted from me. Or from anyone. It was such a loaded and dangerous word, emotion, whatever. After all, the last person who’d claimed to love her, her adoptive father, had betrayed her completely. And with my parents, I wasn’t sure I had any better examples to follow.

I sighed, suddenly longing for my earlier worries about being arrested for breaking and entering. That seemed so much simpler.