If that was the case, he was out of luck. The two-story duplex had all the depressing charm of a brick box. Square, dumpy, with black metal bars on the lower windows. The grass was dried out and crispy yellow, a sharp contrast to the miles of green lawn we’d left behind in Wingate.
The only sign of life was a small planter near the front door on her side. Red flowers of some kind flourished and spilled over the edge of the faux-cement plastic container.
I couldn’t help but think about how that must look from Zane’s perspective. She’d taken the time to plant flowers and care for them but not to make contact with her youngest son? The one she’d left the night before his fifteenth birthday?
I kind of hated her on principle for that.
“Do you feel anything?” he asked. “Is someone…waiting for us?” He meant GTX or one of the other companies.
I closed my eyes to focus. Zane, next to me, was the loudest source, due to proximity and his tangled-up emotions. I did my best to tune him out, pushing past to “hear” the others nearby.
Most of the time, I did my best to ignore the constant low-level buzz of thoughts in the back of my brain. I was a radio picking up dozens of stations at once, all of them chattering over one another. It gave me a headache if I paid attention to it for too long.
Fortunately, at just after six in the morning on a Sunday, almost everyone in the immediate vicinity was sleeping. The muted feelings and thoughts of dreaming humans had a distinctly hazy feel to them, making them pretty easy to distinguish.
A few people were up and moving already.
…out of coffee.
If I don’t wake Julie now, we’ll never make Mass.…
…just one more. If I can get one more, I’ll be okay. Just one more…
I grimaced at that last one, someone jonesing for another hit of something. This might not be the best neighborhood.
But I didn’t pick up any of the sustained tension and adrenaline that would inevitably accompany a GTX retrieval team lying in wait for me.
Which was a little weird.
I frowned. Surely someone had reported the encounter we’d had with Zane’s dad by now. I’d pulled the city name out of his thoughts. That’s how we’d known to head here. And surely GTX, with far more resources than a tattered phone book, would have easily been able to locate Zane’s mom’s address.
Then again, maybe that was why GTX wasn’t here. They knew I’d be on my guard, listening for them. So Dr. Jacobs would be forced to find another, sneakier option, something I wouldn’t see coming.
My stomach ached at the thought. I’d have to be so, so careful from now on, trying to outthink them outthinking me. And that sounded exhausting, impossible, and filled with pitfalls.
“No retrieval teams here,” I told Zane.
“What about my mom? Is she in there?” he asked, tilting his head toward the duplex.
“Someone’s in there. Just one person, I think.” My ability didn’t make distinctions between buildings.
“You don’t know if it’s her?”
I shook my head. “Most people don’t walk around thinking their names. Especially not when they’re asleep,” I said.
He made a noncommittal noise in response.
“What time does she normally get up?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation up and running.
His jaw tightened and he kept his gaze focused on the building. “I don’t know.”
Surprised, I looked at over at him before I could stop myself.
He dropped his gaze down to his hands in his lap. “She was always up before I was.”
The waves of guilt coming off him now were almost overwhelming. It broke my heart.
“Zane—” I said.
“Look, I know you didn’t have anything resembling normal when you lived in the lab,” he began.
I braced myself for whatever was coming next.
“But was there someone who took care of you, someone you didn’t want to let down?” He fidgeted with the cap from his orange juice bottle. “Besides your dad.”
Who had, after all, betrayed me, therefore nullifying any disappointment I might have caused him, I suppose.
I thought of the parade of technicians, scientists, and doctors, some of them far worse than others, traipsing through my little cell and the observation room above it. When I was very young, I’d had caregivers, all of them affectionate and loving and just the tiniest bit distant. With good reason, they were traded out on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on my level of attachment. Apparently, Dr. Jacobs had wanted to make sure I was capable of forming emotional bonds—a sociopath with my abilities was a frightening thought, even for me—but not to the point of actually enjoying the warmth and security of said bonds.
“No, not really,” I said quietly. The only exception might have been Mara, my favorite lab tech. She’d been kind to me, treating me like a person instead of an inanimate object, as the other doctors and technicians did. She’d even tried once to stand up for me against Dr. Jacobs, when he’d wanted me to kill Jerry, a lab mouse, and I’d refused.
But in the end, Jacobs had won that round. I’d killed Jerry, and Mara had disappeared. I’d always hoped it was because she quit and went on to some happier life, rather than a more drastic alternative deemed necessary for maintaining project security. Just another day in my childhood as a science experiment—worrying about murders committed simply because of my existence.
Zane sagged in his seat, flicking his OJ cap into the bag of garbage at his feet. He now had shoes, at least. Knock-off Adidas. Another of my purchases, that one at an all-night Walmart.
I leaned over closer to him, careful to keep my hands to myself. I wasn’t sure how receptive he’d be to my touching him right now. “No matter what life experiences I have or haven’t had, I can guarantee you one thing. It’s not your fault she left.”
“You can’t even tell me if that’s her in there, but that you’re sure of?” He snorted. “Right.”
“I am,” I said. “Because nothing you could have done or not done would justify cutting contact with you.”
“You don’t know that. I was pretty awful to her.” He paused, as if he couldn’t quite make himself say the words. “My dad thought I was too much like her, so I did everything I could to keep her away.”
I straightened up. “Yeah, okay, so you’re oblivious sometimes and prone to choosing the path of least resistance—”
“Thanks.” He glared at me.
I ignored him. “My point is, you’re human. You may have made mistakes, but those aren’t who you are in here.” I risked reaching across the gap between us to tap his chest. “You fought for me when no one else would, not even the man who raised me. As far as I’m concerned, that makes you a pretty spectacular person. My very favorite full-blooded human, in fact,” I said with a wobbly smile.
He exhaled slowly, and his blue-gray gaze fixed on my face, as if searching for answers he desperately needed.
I wanted to reach out to touch him, to reassure him, to impart my certainty that he was worth so much more than he thought, more than he’d ever been shown.
But then the moment broke, and he looked away.
“Let’s just go,” he said unbuckling his seat belt. “Get this over with. If she wonders why we’re here so early, we can tell her we’re on our way somewhere else and just stopped by to say hi.”
I wasn’t sure anyone ever stopped by this early in the morning just to say hello, but whatever. Sitting here on the street for another hour or two, like a couple of easy targets, didn’t seem a particularly great option either.
“Okay,” I said slowly, freeing myself from my seat belt.
He shoved open the door and climbed out, not waiting for me.