I stared at him. “What?” This was not the captor-captive dynamic I’d been expecting.
“I am not her friend,” Rachel said sharply at the same time.
Dr. Jacobs smiled at me. “She’s not a prisoner here. It’s for her own good.”
Except, how many bad, bad things had happened to people under the label of “for your own good”? I knew of a few in my life alone.
“We tried introducing her to fully human society,” Dr. Jacobs added, “but you saw how well that turned out.”
Fully human…The words echoed in my head. Meaning what? Ariane wasn’t?
“Come on. This way,” he said cheerfully, leading us out into the hall.
I hung back a bit as Dr. Jacobs called the elevator. Something was wrong here. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was, other than that he seemed blissfully unconcerned with our presence at GTX and our interest in something that had to be classified.
“This isn’t right,” I whispered to Rachel. It shouldn’t have been this easy. We hadn’t signed any papers or even promised to stay quiet. I mean, maybe Dr. Jacobs was counting on Rachel’s family loyalty, but what about me?
He must have had something in mind. I had no idea what that might be, and I did not like the feeling.
“No kidding,” Rachel said bitterly. “Did you hear the way he talks about her? He’s never that interested in me.”
Not exactly where I’d been going with that, but okay.
The elevator doors opened, and Dr. Jacobs stepped in, Rachel on his heels with her arms sullenly crossed. After a moment, I followed. I was just getting this sudden overwhelming premonition that I didn’t want to go where this elevator would take me. And that maybe, somehow, nothing would be the same when I came back up. I wasn’t stupid; being an inconvenient witness who asked too many questions might prove to be a fatal condition. I probably wasn’t the easiest person to dispose of quietly, given my dad’s job, but I wasn’t sure enough of that to completely rule out the possibility.
I swallowed hard as Dr. Jacobs inserted a key into the elevator panel and the doors closed.
Too late to worry now.
It seemed to take forever before we slowed in our descent and then stopped. The elevator doors opened onto a blindingly white hallway, as sterile as the one upstairs had been plush.
Without another word, Dr. Jacobs stepped off the elevator and exited into the too-bright hall. I could see a large opaque glass door with a couple of steps leading down to it. Closer to the elevator, an open doorway loomed on the right, with the low sounds of conversation and a rhythmic beeping coming from within.
“Come along.” Dr. Jacobs headed toward the open doorway.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see inside the room. Some kind of prison cell with Ariane behind metal bars, maybe. Instead, this room resembled a high-tech lab. It was filled with equipment, computers, monitors, printers—a dozen or more things beeping and humming all at once.
Two harried-looking lab techs in white coats looked up, startled.
“Sir—” one of them began, frowning at Rachel and me.
Jacobs waved the tech’s concern away. “Go. Now,” he ordered. “Close the door after you.”
After a second of hesitation, both techs pushed away from their computers and left the room.
Once the door closed after them, Dr. Jacobs turned to us with an eager smile. “Do you want to see her?” His hand hovered over a panel at the front of the room. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the wall seemed to be made of glass painted white. Or something… It had a glossy sheen to it.
“I know she’ll want to see you,” he continued.
“Yes,” Rachel snapped.
“No,” I said at the same time, my attention caught by a set of monitors to Dr. Jacobs’s right. I stepped closer for a better look.
The bottommost flat screen showed a small white room with a cage containing a small animal—a mouse or a hamster maybe—on a little running wheel, and a cot on the right-hand side. A girl sat on the cot, her back against the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest. It took me a second to recognize her as Ariane. She seemed so much smaller due to the overhead angle of the camera and the white prison-type uniform she wore. If she’d been easy to miss at school, she was damn near invisible here. Her pale blond hair looked darker, damp maybe, and stuck to the sides of her face. It made the point of her chin and angles of her cheeks strikingly prominent and distinctly strange.
“Fascinating,” Dr. Jacobs said near my ear, making me jump in surprise. I hadn’t heard him approach.
“She must care for you a great deal.” He looked at me with renewed interest. “She changed her clothes,” he explained with some excitement, as if that should mean something to me. Then he squinted at the screen again. “But,” he said with a sigh, “it appears the mouse is still alive.”
I gaped at him, having absolutely no idea what to do with that nonsensical statement.
“She knows we’re here,” Jacobs whispered, sounding delighted.
Glancing back at the monitor, I found Ariane standing up and staring directly into the camera. My heart stuttered in my chest. The wide darkness of her eyes shocked me. I was used to seeing them as the murky blue of her contacts. There didn’t appear to be any difference between the irises and the pupils—all dark.
“She must be quite tuned in to your thoughts,” Dr. Jacobs said.
I didn’t know what to say. “She can hear what I’m thinking?” I immediately tried to reconstruct everything I’d been thinking in her presence over the last few days. Oh God. My face burned in embarrassment, thinking about what she might have “overheard.”
“Not all the time,” he said, as if I’d asked something absurd. “It would be far too overwhelming for her human side.”
There it was again: that strange emphasis on the word “human.” If she wasn’t human, what was she?
“But strong thoughts or emotions come through clearly.” Dr. Jacobs cocked his head to one side, frowning at me. “Exactly how close are you to my girl?”
Just the way he said that was skeevy, too interested, and I shuddered. Ariane…how bad was it for her to be trapped here with him?
“Enough talking,” Rachel snapped. “Let’s get this freak show on the road.”
Before anyone could say anything, she pushed forward and punched the button Dr. Jacobs had indicated earlier.
I sucked in a breath, not sure what would happen, and the wall in front of us shifted from white to translucent.
And there was Ariane, on the other side of the glass, staring back at us.
ZANE WAS HERE. AND HE WASN’T ALONE. I barely had time to accept that jarring bit of reality before the glass wall flickered and went translucent.
Zane was standing next to Dr. Jacobs, staring down at me, his mouth open slightly as if startled by the sight of me. He appeared unharmed, thankfully, except for a distinct pallor to his skin, like the kind that came with receiving a major shock.
Oh God. I closed my eyes, my face burning with humiliation. Being a freak is one thing. Being a freak in a cage is so much worse. And if Dr. Jacobs told him about my nonhuman heritage…
Most people didn’t even think aliens really existed. And among those who did believe, “my” relatives had a bad rep. Little, gray, and creepy. Known for cattle mutilations, abductions, and an extreme fascination with probing of all kinds. Not that any of those rumors were true, as far as I knew. Except for the being little and gray—that bit was accurate, as far as I could tell, based on my own physiology and the Internet, of course.
“Zane,” I whispered, not sure what to say, afraid of making things worse. I didn’t want to see him look at me with disgust; that fear would transform me from Ariane, a girl he knew, to a thing. An alien freak.
And yet, that was pretty much unavoidable at this point.
It wasn’t that I expected anything from him in the future. Obviously. But I guess…I wanted Zane to think of me somewhat fondly, without
the memories being completely tainted. How very human of me.
It’s not what it looks like. I can explain. I wasn’t lying to you, not exactly. I’m sorry. None of those options seemed to fit the situation.
“See? I told you,” Rachel said with a smirk.
Up until now I’d ignored her and her loud thoughts in favor of focusing on Zane. But now I realized she was the one in front of the wall control. She’d brought Zane here and then pulled the cover off my cage, so to speak. I didn’t know whether it had been at her grandfather’s request or out of her own desire to torture me. But either way, she was still a bitch.
I stared her down, and she didn’t move, just watched me, her eyebrows raised in challenge. And never in my life did I more fully hate the wall keeping me in here.
The air bowed and flexed around me, and from the corner of my eye I saw Dr. Jacobs move swiftly to check a monitor a split second before a wooden chessboard from the shelf of toys and games smashed into the wall.
Rachel shrieked and jumped back, her hands flying up unnecessarily to protect her face.
I smiled, filled with gritty satisfaction at that small victory, and followed up by sending the chess pieces into the wall in front of her like a hail of bullets.
Which wasn’t particularly smart because they broke apart the second they hit the glass, sending the splintered remains ricocheting at high speed back toward me. Plus, Rachel barely even flinched, having figured out that nothing could get through the wall.
I redirected most of the shrapnel, but I missed one or two and felt a sharp jagged edge snag my cheek as it passed, opening a cut in a bright spot of pain.
In the room above, Dr. Jacobs ignored everyone and everything, grabbing a fresh printout and comparing it against something in a bright orange folder. Zane was shouting at Rachel, pointing at me, and she shouted right back, jabbing an accusing finger at him. The intercom was off, so I couldn’t hear what either of them was saying.
I couldn’t resist one more swipe at Rachel and sent the Risk board at the wall with a loud smack.
Distracted by Zane, Rachel jumped in surprise, and then glared at me.
Dr. Jacobs looked up, half dazed, and stepped between Rachel and Zane to adjust something on the control panel, and the intercom popped to life. He backed away and gestured toward Zane with a “go ahead” motion before returning to his folder and papers with a frown.
“Ariane,” Zane said. “Are you okay?” He sounded worried, which simultaneously warmed and broke my heart. I could hear Rachel’s strident voice in the background as she talked to her grandfather, but not what she was saying. She was too far from the mic. Thankfully.
I raised my sleeve to wipe at my cheek. The blood looked so red on the white, but not red enough, probably. Not human enough. “I’m fine. You shouldn’t be here.”
Zane looked around the observation room and then at my little white room with a frown. “I don’t think anyone should be here.”
For some reason, this show of faith, even after all he’d seen, brought tears to my eyes.
I looked away. “I’m dangerous.” The words slipped out before I could stop them, my worst fear spoken aloud.
“Yeah?” He shrugged. The gesture was a little stiff, but he was trying. “I bet you’re hell on checkers, too.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed, though it came out resembling a sob.
“Listen,” he said more quietly. “Is there someone I can call? Someone who can help you or—”
“No. You need to leave right now,” I said. If Dr. Jacobs would even let him. As I watched, the doctor stepped around his granddaughter and picked up the phone on the wall, pressing a quick succession of buttons before hanging up. Something bad was coming, I could feel it. “Zane, I’m serious. You need to contact your father.” He might not be much help, but something was better than nothing. “Do you have your phone?”
His mouth tightened. “I’m not going to leave you here.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
He pulled his cell from his pocket and looked at it. “No bars,” he said after a second.
Of course. “Does anyone know you’re here?” I asked, hearing the desperate edge in my voice.
Zane frowned. “What are you not telling me?”
Behind him, two men in the black GTX uniforms I knew all too well stepped in.
No. I rushed at the wall and pounded on it. Zane stepped back, startled.
“You don’t have to do this,” I shouted at Dr. Jacobs. “He didn’t do anything. Please!”
Jacobs didn’t spare me a glance; he simply nodded at the security team.
“I’ll do it!” I said in a panic. “I’ll do anything you want. Leave him alone.” I couldn’t watch them drag him away to whatever fate Dr. Jacobs had devised for him. It would be clever and cruel, I knew that much.
Zane looked from me to the security guys. “Ariane, what’s going on?” he asked, tension in his voice.
“Don’t,” I pleaded with Dr. Jacobs.
Then I watched in shock as they clamped their hands on Rachel, not Zane, and pulled her from the room. She was too startled even to scream.
Dr. Jacobs, his expression grim, followed.
“Run,” I urged Zane in a low whisper. I had no idea what was going on, but an opportunity like this would not happen again. “Go before he gets back.”
“I can’t,” he whispered. “The elevator is locked.”
“What about a place to hide? Did you see anything?”
“What is going on?” he demanded.
“He’s going to try to use you to make me cooperate, to make me kill,” I said flatly.
Zane’s eyes widened. “What?”
The door to my little prison opened, and Rachel tumbled in, a blur of dark hair, red shirt, and gold scarf. She landed on her knees as the door snapped shut.
I couldn’t have said which of us was more surprised.
Rachel scrambled to her feet, her ankles wobbling in her too-tall heels. “You do not touch me, you little freak. You stay away.”
Somewhere along the way, Rachel had failed to notice that I didn’t need to touch her to cause harm.
She backed up toward the door and turned to pound on it. “Let me out!” she shrieked.
Dr. Jacobs appeared in the observation room again, his face drawn. If I didn’t know better, I would have said he was upset. But then again, that would have required a soul.
“What is this?” Already, my room felt smaller with Rachel yelling. I seriously hoped this was not Dr. Jacobs’s attempt to motivate through negative reinforcement. As in, Rachel would stay in here with me until I cooperated. That might actually work.
Dr. Jacobs approached the microphone. “The GTX reputation is at stake. The trials are in less than a month, and we don’t have time to waste. I’ve tried to appeal to your logical side, but perhaps I’ve been going about this all wrong.” He held up the orange folder in one hand and the new printouts in the other. “It seems your emotional response is the key.”
Zane looked at me in confusion. “Trials?” he mouthed at me.
I ignored him, focusing on Dr. Jacobs. What did any of this have to do with Rachel being in here?
“I can’t haul young Mr. Bradshaw around with us everywhere, jabbing at him like some kind of oversized voodoo doll to get you to behave. You’ll never win that way,” he said, his disappointment clear. “I need you to remember who you are. You are not human, no matter how successfully you may masquerade as one.”
I winced.
Zane edged closer to the microphone. “You keep saying that about her,” he said, his gaze bouncing between Dr. Jacobs and me. “Why?”
He doesn’t know?
Jacobs looked startled, as though the answer should have been obvious.
“Don’t,” I said quickly. “Please.”
But he didn’t hear me, or pretended not to. “She is, quite simply, a masterpiece,” he said to Zane. “My crowning achievement, a seamless blend of human a
nd foreign DNA—”
“Stop!” I protested. “He doesn’t need to—”
“In layman’s terms, a hybrid. Human and extraterrestrial,” Dr. Jacobs finished.
My shoulders slumped.
“Extraterrestrial. You mean…alien?” Zane gaped at him. “Like, little green men?”
“What?” Rachel stopped her pounding on the door to stare at her grandfather and then me.
“Gray, actually,” Jacobs said to Zane. “But you’ve got the right idea.”
Zane paled.
Crap. I closed my eyes for a second, opening them just in time to see Rachel bend down and pick up some of the scattered chess pieces from the floor and throw them at me.
They bounced off me harmlessly. “I cannot be in here with this…thing,” she shouted at her grandfather, and bent down to scoop up more game pieces.
Pushed well past the point of patience, I reached out mentally and held her still. “Enough already.”
Rachel struggled to move, but got nowhere for her efforts. “Let me go!”
“No,” I snapped.
“Excellent,” Dr. Jacobs murmured, watching us intently.
I froze, a very bad idea occurring to me in the form of a question I should have asked from the beginning. “What are the requirements for the trials?” I asked, feeling a slow swell of dread. “What do I have to do to qualify?”
“There’s just one,” Dr. Jacobs said in that clipped, clinical tone I’d learned to hate. “End the life of an enemy combatant with documented proof of such.”
“What?” Rachel looked at me, her face pasty white.
Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of.
ALIEN. THE WORD ECHOED IN MY HEAD, blocking out everything else. The idea was ridiculous, laughable even.
Except…Ariane was short and thin, so breakably fragile. Her pale skin was not that of a redhead; it was more of a pure white, maybe what would come from blending human skin color with that whitish gray of an alien. And all the things she could do—that wasn’t normal.
I took a step back. One of the flat-screen monitors caught my attention. It was flashing data, numbers, and charts I couldn’t make much sense of. At first.