I froze. God, how was I supposed to respond to that?
I took a deep breath and worked through my choices. Could I force him out of the van? Yes. Would he be safer without me? Probably. Maybe. I wouldn’t be there if someone came after him, which was its own trouble. And he did, through my own foolishness, know my new identity. Which was a vulnerability that could be exploited, even against his will.
I had only the truth to give at this point. “I can’t…I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you because of me,” I admitted.
He turned toward me. “Yeah? How are you going to stop it? Especially if you’re not around?” His tone was gentler than his words.
“You’d be safer without me,” I blurted out in an approximation of my worst fear. Better off. He’d be better off without you.
Zane seemed undisturbed. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think you can know that,” he said. “I don’t think anyone can. Besides, even if that’s true, even if it’s more dangerous for me to stick it out with you, don’t I get to choose?” He leaned closer, bracing one hand on the dashboard, forcing me to meet his gaze. “Isn’t that why you hate GTX? Because they took away your choices? You want the opportunity to make decisions for yourself. Why do you get that freedom and I don’t?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again without saying a word. I didn’t have an argument for that.
You don’t need one. Just remove him from the vehicle.
No. I tried the other way. Maybe he’s right.
I sighed and shoved the arguing parts of myself to the back of my mind. There would never be agreement on this matter, I knew that much already. “What do you want to do?” I asked Zane.
To Zane’s credit, he didn’t react as though this was the capitulation he’d been seeking. He just sat back in his seat. “I want to go to my mom’s and make sure she’s okay.”
I opened my mouth to protest.
He shot me a look. “If they’re willing to kill people to get to you, she might be in danger because of me. And I need to warn her at least. You owe me that much.”
He was right. I’d wreaked enough havoc on his life. I could do this one thing for him to try to set things right.
“Okay, but then what?” I asked. “I need to get out of the country and—”
“Run for the rest of your life? Find an abandoned cabin in the woods somewhere and hope for the best?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
“You’re willing to fight for everybody else but not yourself,” he said, more to himself than me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded, bristling.
“I mean, all of this started because you couldn’t stand to see Jenna suffering and then you were willing to do whatever it took to keep them from hurting me. You saved Rachel even after everything she did to you.” He shook his head in wonder. “But you won’t give yourself the same consideration.”
I didn’t like the direction of this conversation. Hearing the names of my former best friend, my only friend, and my high school nemesis only reminded me of the wreckage trailing behind me, a past I couldn’t escape. “Do you have any better options?” I asked tightly.
Zane shrugged. “I don’t know. What about going public?”
My jaw dropped. “Oh, yeah, that’ll end well,” I said. “Zane, in case it’s escaped your notice, there’s just one of me. Up against three very powerful companies with unlimited resources and, I don’t know, eventually the United States government maybe. I’m not human. I may not even have rights. They could classify me as an enemy of the state or a terrorist or something.”
“I think an argument could be that you’re as much human as anything else,” he said.
I tried not to wince. Is that how he thought of me? Is that the only reason he was okay with me? Because I was “as much human as anything else”? It was and was not true. Part of me was human, most definitely, but I would never be human “enough.” There would always be something other about me. It was just part of who I was, who I would be forever, the struggle between human and not.
“But fine,” Zane continued, completely unaware of my inner turmoil. “Even if that’s not the right answer, my point is that there are other possibilities. You just haven’t given yourself a chance to figure them out.” He paused. “You deserve more, Ariane. You deserve a life of your own.” His fierceness was unmistakable. He meant it.
Hope flared in me and stubbornly refused to go out. Was Zane right? I wanted so badly to believe him. Wanted to believe in the idea that there might be something to my future other than hiding. But I’d had this same feeling twenty-four hours ago, when fleeing GTX, and trusting in that little bit of hope again was more than I could do right now.
Through the window, I watched the employees moving around in the doughnut shop, giving myself time to think. “I’ll go with you to your mom’s house to make sure she’s okay,” I said finally. Beyond that, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—commit to anything. And if I could find a way to convince him to go back to some semblance of a regular life in the process, I’d take it. This kind of half-life, always running or hiding, wouldn’t be good for him, even if he couldn’t see that right now.
Zane gave me a curt nod and pulled his seat belt into place.
The difference between us now and an hour or so ago was marked and chilly. I tried not to let that hurt. It’s not as if I expected him to want to kiss me again. He’d fought to stay with me. That was enough, wasn’t it? I guess that didn’t keep me from wanting him to want to kiss me, foolish as it was.
“One more thing,” he said as I turned out of the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot onto the street.
“Yeah?” I asked cautiously.
“I get that you were leaving me to protect me,” he said. “But what you’re missing is that it’s too late. I’m already in, with both feet. I don’t need you to shelter me like I’m too weak to handle it. So stop it.”
The thing was, I wasn’t sure I could. Especially when I looked down and realized that those feet he’d referenced metaphorically were literally bare—well, socks only.
He’d left his shoes in the room when he’d chased after me, leaving himself vulnerable. And I had to wonder if that was the real metaphor to be worried about.
“Is that it?” Zane asked.
The sun was slowly coming up behind us, painting the street and the plain brick duplex ahead of us in pale blue light.
“Yeah,” I said. “1701B.” I put the van in park and checked the back of the grease-spotted receipt where I’d scrawled the address, just to be sure. We’d gotten lucky that his mother was listed in the phone book. I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d become on my phone until I didn’t have it. The third gas station I’d tried in Gurnee had had both breakfast sandwiches and a relatively recent phone book.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Zane said, which brought the total words he’d spoken in the last half hour up to about twenty. And six of those had been his breakfast order.
He’d gotten progressively quieter the closer we got to his mother’s house. But his leg was jouncing up and down with an excess of nervous energy.
He might still be a mad at me for trying to protect him instead of including him. He thought I counted him as someone lesser just because he wasn’t like me. That was, I suspected, thanks to his dad drilling that concept into his head for years. But now that we were here, any residual anger with me was taking a backseat to a growing uncertainty about seeing his mom.
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting at her home. Signs of a better life, the one his mother had felt it necessary to leave him for, maybe?