Zane frowned. “Yeah.”
Zane’s dad gave one last inarticulate shout of disgust and hurtled something thin and flat at Mara. It landed on the small porch, narrowly missing her legs, but she didn’t move, either to avoid it or pick it up.
Then he turned and stalked off toward his SUV without looking back. A few seconds later, the engine revved and his tires screeched as he whipped around in an impressive 180-degree turn before accelerating down the street in clear defiance of the posted speed limit.
The chief’s car hadn’t even reached the corner before the unmarked black SUV, Laughlin’s spy vehicle, pulled smoothly away from the curb in pursuit.
Great. Although the absence of surveillance was a benefit for now, I wondered what it meant. I reached over and pulled the window closed. How much of that fight had Laughlin’s guy overheard and/or understood? If Laughlin learned we were here and in contact with Mara, that would not be good. Clearly, they were now following the chief for a reason. I didn’t know what it was, but I kind of doubted it was general curiosity. Maybe they were hoping he’d lead them to us.
Already buttoning his shirt, Zane looked over at me. “If you’re determined to talk to her, this is probably our best chance, right?” he asked, his forehead wrinkled with concern.
He was right about this being our best chance…except what we were walking into? I didn’t know and couldn’t predict it, which made me very uncomfortable. Mara had no way of reaching us, so she didn’t know where we were. We could have fled town, gone into hiding, or, heck, been killed by Laughlin’s hybrids, for that matter. Would Mara insist on calling the chief once she realized we were here? I had no idea what kind of ties remained between them. They didn’t like each other—that much was obvious—but the joint goal of keeping their son safe and/or away from me might yet be a common bond.
I hesitated and then nodded, with a sigh. No matter what else was going on, Mara was our best and only source of information.
Zane reached over and touched the bottom of my lip. “Stop,” he said gently.
I knew he was talking about my biting my lip, but it felt like he was talking about everything. The whole situation. Everything from the moment since I’d exposed what I really was by lashing out at Rachel Jacobs at that party. It had been only a few days ago, but it seemed like years. And I really, really wished we could—stop, that is. Just end all of this and find some kind of peaceful space, preferably together, without worrying that someone would find us. But that was just not an option right now.
Maybe ever.
The trip across the backyards for the second time wasn’t nearly as perilous or adrenaline filled, but I felt strangely exposed. Watched.
I wasn’t picking up on anybody noticing our presence, no lonely older person or bored soccer mom staring out a window, so it was likely my own self-consciousness, but still. I didn’t care for it and pushed for a faster pace to reach the back door of Mara’s condo as swiftly as possible.
The security bar across the sliding door still dangled loose against the glass. In fact, the little metal lock lever was still up, indicating that the door itself wasn’t even locked. So Mara hadn’t been home very long, or else she’d been too distracted to resecure her home after our interruption this morning. Either way, it didn’t bode particularly well for us. After all, she shouldn’t have been home at all, and if something was big enough to keep her from obsessively locking her doors…well, if you asked me to guess, I’d have said that nothing was of the magnitude to cause that kind of disruption in her routine.
Through the glass, I could see that the kitchen was empty. A plate with crumbs was on the counter next to the toaster, and a chair was turned on its side next to the table.
I raised a questioning eyebrow at Zane, and he shook his head. It hadn’t been like that when he’d last seen it.
I tugged at the splintery wooden handle on the door, using my ability to keep the security bar from making noise against the glass. I couldn’t hear anyone other than Mara inside—her emotional and chaotic thoughts a roaring ocean of noise—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t drowning out someone else’s much quieter thoughts. Plus, given her wobbly mental state, I thought it might not be a good idea to scare her into thinking someone was breaking in. Which, okay, we technically were. Although it was more of a walking in, but still.
Zane crossed the threshold first, before I could stop him. I glared at him, which he ignored, searching the room for signs of his mother’s whereabouts.
When he finally looked to me, I gestured toward the doorway that led to the hall. Going to the left would lead us to the front door, but the noise of Mara’s thoughts felt more like it was coming from the right.
Zane nodded, his expression grim, and started in that direction without waiting for me to take the lead.
I followed, gritting my teeth against the urge to call out for him to stop. Hadn’t we had enough nasty surprises in the last few days? Did he really need to charge ahead as if he were the one with superpowers, so to speak?
I could have stopped him, against his will, but I suspected that no matter how much that option appealed to me from a practical standpoint, he wouldn’t appreciate it.
As I passed the kitchen table, I noticed a tablet computer placed with care in the center, on a dish towel. It gleamed dully under the fluorescent lights. The corners were battered and cracked, and the glass screen bore an ugly set of parallel scratches as if someone had skimmed it across a gravel parking lot. A very expensive Frisbee.
I frowned. Wait, was this what the chief had thrown at Mara? It was about the same size and shape. She must have picked it up before coming inside.
But what the hell had driven him to throw something so pricey at her? The Bradshaws weren’t poor, but they weren’t the “toss crystal goblets into the fireplace in a toast” type either.
And why had Mara then taken it inside and treated it not just as item to be returned or thrown away, but with a certain respect or reverence? I wasn’t familiar with her relationship with her ex, but I had trouble with the idea that she’d take something hurled at her in anger and idolize it simply because it belonged to him. After all, she’d had the courage to leave him in the first place.
I shook my head. Something wasn’t making sense.
Acting on an impulse that I didn’t completely understand, I scooped up the tablet from the table and tucked it under my arm before scurrying out to follow Zane around the corner into the hall.
The staircase that I’d noticed earlier curved in a tight right angle, making it impossible to see upstairs or even beyond the first five steps.
But of course that didn’t stop Zane. He took the first three steps as one.
I sighed inside. When this was all done…
Don’t you mean if? If you survive. If he survives. If he is still speaking to you. A melancholy voice whispered in my head.
I ignored it.
When this was all over, I was going to have to teach Zane some very basic sneaking-around skills. And not charging ahead into a blind corner would be Lesson 1.
Fortunately, this time, the curve on the staircase was empty of anyone lying in wait. As was the tiny landing at the top.
Peering around Zane’s back, I could see four cheap, wooden doors, the flimsy kind that cave in at the slightest pressure. More a suggestion of a barrier than the real thing. Two were closed, and two were open.
Zane paused a second on the landing and then headed for the second door on the right, one of the open ones. Mara was up here somewhere, but in this small of a space, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. When I stopped to listen with my ears instead of telepathy, then I could hear the rustling movement of quick steps on the carpet coming from that room.
Moving swiftly on his heels, I reached the doorway only a second after him.
Leaning to the side of him—he really made a better door than the actual doors—I could see an open suitcase in the center of a bed with rumpled covers, overflowing with clothing
hastily tossed inside.
Clearly Mara had had enough, and she was headed out. But where? To meet someone? Or was she just fleeing town, her resistance worn to the breaking point from the events of the last day?
And where was she now? The room, other than the bed and a tiny TV on a stack of plastic milk crates, was empty.
Then, before I could voice the question or tap Zane on the arm, the click-clack noise of hangers being shoved aside came from an open doorway parallel to the one we were standing in. A closet. A second later, Mara bustled in with an armload of clothing.
“What are you doing?” Zane asked in what felt like an outrageously loud voice but was probably only slightly above normal.
I winced.
She spun around, dropping the clothes on the floor and revealing a large butcher’s knife clutched in her right hand.
Lesson 2 for Zane: never startle jumpy—and potentially armed—people.
I lunged around him, elbowing him out of the way, and raised my hand to direct the power already tingling in my fingertips. I didn’t know if she’d try to throw it or simply lurch at us, but either way I had it covered by clamping down on her wrist and fingers. That knife wasn’t getting anywhere near us.
As soon as she saw it was her son, though, Mara released the blade without a fight. With a little direction from me, it landed point down in the thin carpeting, where it promptly listed to one side under its own weight.
“You’re okay,” she breathed, eyes only for Zane.
Then her gaze fell on me.
“You.”
I flinched and then steeled myself for whatever stream of invective would follow.
“You have to come with me,” she said.
I blinked. That was not what I’d been expecting. “Go with you where?”
“Back to Wingate.” Then she bent down to scoop up the clothes she’d dropped and hastily piled them onto the mound already in her suitcase before slamming the lid closed. Or trying to, anyway. Sleeves in a variety of colors oozed out the edges, like invisible hands raised in protest at their treatment.
Zane gave me a worried frown, and I lifted a shoulder in a shrug, my mouth tight. It was the same song from before. Go back, you don’t belong here, you’ll never have a normal life, etc., etc. The only thing new was this overwhelming sense of urgency radiating from her. And I had no idea what might have triggered that.
“Mom, listen, I don’t know what Dad told you, but I’m fine. We’re fine,” Zane said, emphasizing the “we” of that statement by gesturing back and forth between us.
Mara paused in her frantic attempts to zip her suitcase. “You saw that? You were that close?”
Zane stiffened at the pain and near accusation in her voice and then nodded slowly. “He’s just angry because of Dr. Jacobs. He missed his chance to get in good with GTX.” But he didn’t sound quite as convinced of that as usual, which was evidenced by his next words. “I’m fine. He doesn’t have to worry about me.” His voice held a note of wonder, amazement that his father would worry about him. Which made my chest ache for him. Zane deserved so much better than that.
Plus, it wasn’t exactly true, what Zane had said. There were still plenty of reasons to worry about him, despite my best efforts. But Mara already knew about those, even if the chief didn’t. Which meant we were still missing something.
“Mara,” I began, and her eyes focused on me for the first time for more than a second.
Her face paled the second she saw the tablet pinned between my arm and my chest. She darted forward and snatched it away, clutching it to her body as if it were an infant I was somehow threatening.
2 P.M. Tuesday. I can make a trade…the information is valuable…not enough, not enough…has to be enough. She has to come with. MY FAULT. I can’t save him…
The stream of panicked chatter was accompanied by equally nonsensical images. A castle, a flag with a cartoon representation of an orange cheese wheel, a parking lot, a blond baby sitting up unsteadily on a patchwork blanket.
I shook my head in frustration. Enough already. “What’s going on, Mara?” I asked.
“They took him.” She turned her back on us and continued trying to zip her suitcase one-handed.
“Who?” Zane asked, bewildered.
Then the pieces clicked. The blond baby, Mara’s new determination to return to Wingate, Chief Bradshaw’s sudden and unusually intense distress over his son’s well-being.
When I lived in the lab and in the years after with my father, I’d suffered through any number of lectures and lessons about questioning your assumptions and how making the wrong leap could cost you the mission or your life.
Although no one would admit it, war was a guessing game, all about trying to know your opponent better than he knew himself.
And sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, one or two of the blanks got filled in incorrectly. You just had to hope it wasn’t one of the vital pieces that would alter your entire understanding of the situation.
In this case? It was.
I kicked myself mentally for not catching it sooner: We’d been focused on the wrong son.
“It’s your brother,” I said to Zane quietly. “They took Quinn.”
Zane paled. “What?”
“He goes to school in Wisconsin, right?” I asked.
He shook his head as if trying to wrap his brain around this development. “Madison, yeah. Why?”
This had Dr. Jacobs written all over it. He couldn’t get to me or Zane (thereby getting to me through Zane), so he’d gone for the next best thing. Except it was so much worse. Quinn had not elected to get involved in this mess, unlike the rest of us. He’d been drafted. Which probably meant he had no idea what was going on and was likely terrified.
At best.
At worst…I remembered the determined, almost fanatic gleam in Dr. Jacobs’s gaze when he’d sent his own granddaughter in to me to be killed, all for the sake of this project. So it might very well be much, much worse.
“That’s why Dad was so upset,” Zane muttered to himself with a bitter smile. “Of course.” His shoulders slumped. After all of this, he still cared what his father thought, and his father never seemed to miss an opportunity to crush him, even when it wasn’t intentional.
I wanted to reach out and comfort him, but I was too worried about what we didn’t know. “What’s on the tablet?” I asked Mara. I could feel the tension building in my arms and my nails digging into my palms. Dr. Jacobs could have hardly chosen better, which almost made it worse. He did know me.
I’d never met Quinn before and felt no great love for him based on all that I’d heard from Zane. But this scenario, an innocent caught up in something much larger than he realized and against someone with all the power, was my weak spot. The injustice of it, the helplessness it created in the victim, the disregard for the individual as anything more than a pawn in a bigger game—it sent this huge, roaring fury through me. One that screamed at me to charge in and destroy.
I felt the heat soaring through my veins, warming my face and my hands until I felt I was glowing with it.
At times like this, the cool stir of my alien abilities felt like an entity unto itself. It whispered to be set free, to address the issue, to eliminate the emotional confusion and chaos that upset our normally harmonious system. It wanted to restore the balance in a very logical, efficacious manner. If X is the problem, then we simply eliminate X.
And in the meantime, my human side was screaming with the urge to crush, kill, avenge. If Dr. Jacobs wanted my attention, he would certainly have it. In blood, broken bones, and destruction.
I was the two worst halves of my disparate heritage. Clinical, dispassionate logic—no compassion or sympathy—triggered by overwhelming emotion. A hammer driven by intense strength and feeling.
With an effort, I clamped down against the emotional response, my human side reacting before all the facts were known, and breathed slowly, in and out, until the power quieted to a more manageable t
ingle rather than the state of near overflow.
“The tablet,” I repeated.
“You’ll come with me?” Mara asked, turning the computer outward so the screen faced us but making no move to turn it on. She wanted a guarantee first.
This can’t be good, a panicked voice inside me cried. “Just show me,” I said firmly.
Next to me, Zane closed the distance between us, his hand wrapping around my wrist for reassurance when my fingers wouldn’t unclench to take his.
Mara pressed the wake button on the tablet and the screen lit up, revealing a single icon—a movie clapboard—floating in an ocean of serene, and artificial, blue.
She took a deep breath and, with a shaking finger, tapped on the icon.
The screen shifted immediately to a much dimmer image, a view of a much darker room with white walls. In the center, under a spotlight, one person sat alone in a chair, his blond head bent down, hiding his face, and his body a blur of frozen motion.
“Quinn,” Zane confirmed in a whisper.
Before he could say more, the video kicked on.
“Oh God, I told you, you have the wrong guy,” he screamed from his bent-over position, obviously in agony. The side of his face, visible only as he tried to curl into himself, was red, the tendons in his neck popping out like cords beneath his skin.
Next to me, Zane inhaled sharply, his hand tightening on my wrist.
On the screen, Quinn lifted his head with a struggle, staring at someone or something past the camera, and with a jolt I realized I recognized him. Yes, in that vague way as someone who’d been a senior when I was a freshman.
But it was more than that. It was the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, albeit currently from pain rather than laughter. It was the exact manner in which his mouth turned down, carving those precise lines in his face, the right not as deep as the left. It was how he set his jaw when he was obviously determined.