“And Ford holds you responsible for Johnson’s death,” Ariane said with the air of someone confirming something she already suspected.
“She does, yes. That’s why you need to go home. Please,” my mom begged. “Wingate is GTX territory, and that offers you some protection. Dr. Jacobs is a flawed man, but he, at least, let me go when he realized that the work was not for me. Laughlin is not nearly as generous. He’s not above…extreme methods to induce cooperation. Hurting people.” She swallowed hard and looked up to the ceiling, blinking rapidly against tears, making me wonder exactly what she’d seen during her tenure with Laughlin.
“I’m stuck here until the trials, working for him,” she said. “In exchange, he’s promised to leave my family alone.” She stuffed her trembling hands into her bathrobe pockets. “But if he discovers you’re here, he’ll send Ford and the others after you. You need to go home,” she pleaded.
Which meant, much as I hated to admit it, my mom was in some ways as much a hostage as the hybrids she’d been hired to work with.
I glanced at Ariane, who gave me a weary nod.
“Wingate is not an option anymore,” I said.
“I understand that your father is not the easiest man to—” my mom began.
“It’s not him. Or, not just him.” I sighed. “GTX wants us.”
“You mean Ariane,” my mom said.
“No, both of us,” I responded.
“I don’t understand,” she said slowly.
Apparently, in the confusion and chaos of our arrival here and her misidentification of Ariane, my mom hadn’t had time to put it all together. That GTX wouldn’t just let Ariane leave town, especially not without her “father” in charge. That I’d been freaked out by my mom’s strange behavior, but not at the discussion of alien/human hybrids and experimentation or Ariane getting in through a door with seven locks. That we were comfortable with each other in a way that suggested more than a casual school acquaintance.
I saw it the moment the ball dropped, and she figured it out.
She paled. “Oh no,” she whispered, staring at me and then at Ariane. “What did you do?”
I felt Ariane cringe next to me, hearing the inherent accusation in my mom’s words.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said as calmly as I could. “It started out as a stupid prank, something Rachel Jacobs cooked up. Ariane and I were working together against her, and everything just sort of developed from there.” In spite of myself and the situation, I felt a sudden lightness inside at the memories of happier days, the activities fair, the Star Wars conversation, breakfast in the truck. She was the first person who’d really seemed to like me for who I was, not for who I could be or should have been.
“The Rules,” my mom said desperately, as if she could just find the right thing to say, all of this would go away. “Mark Tucker had a list of rules you were supposed to follow to keep this exact thing from happening.”
That was the first I’d heard of it, but when Ariane was nodding, her face set in grim lines.
“Don’t get involved, don’t trust anyone, don’t fall in love.” My mom shook her head. “I can’t remember all of them, but a lot of thought went into them for this reason.”
That’s what Ariane had been battling inside herself the whole time we’d been playing against Rachel and getting to know each other? No wonder she’d had a panic attack getting into my truck that first time. Warmth and pride filled my chest. She’d had to fight hard to carry through with our plan, defying not only her adoptive father but also rules that had probably been drilled into her head for literally years—and she’d done it. That kind of strength of character only made me admire her more. I wasn’t sure I would have been able to do it if I’d been in that situation.
“And you thought chaining her down with those rules was a good idea?” I demanded of my mom. “Who can live like that?”
“The point was to protect everyone else,” she said, then turned on Ariane. “I cut off all contact with my son for eighteen months to keep him out of this mess, and you drag him back in? How could you do that?”
“Mom.” I held up my hand, angling to keep her from moving closer. “She didn’t drag me into anything—”
“I wasn’t dealing with a full set of facts, as you well know,” Ariane said hotly, finally goaded into defending herself.
“—I am capable of making my own decisions,” I said.
“You may not have known everything, but you certainly knew what you were,” my mom said to Ariane, as if I hadn’t spoken.
The air went out of the room.
Ariane stiffened, and I stared at my mom, unable to believe what had come out of her mouth.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked, trying again to see the person I’d once thought her to be in the stranger before me. Where was the mother who’d scolded me for teasing Quinn when he’d gotten that huge zit on his forehead? I’d called it an alien horn. I’d gone on a whole riff with it, called him Xenar, asked him when he was going back to his home planet, when did he expect the horn to make a full appearance. Typical annoying little brother stuff. And if it had been a few years later, he’d have beaten the hell out of me for it, but at that point we were fairly close in size. So when it got out of hand, with Quinn screaming at me and his eyes all shiny with tears, my mom intervened with a lecture about treating people the way I wanted to be treated. I’d rolled my eyes during the entire speech, but it stuck with me. Mainly because I’d never actually expected to upset Quinn.
Granted, that was just a temporary complexion problem (probably the last time Quinn would be less than perfect in anyone’s eyes) and this was something far more complicated, but didn’t that mean the lesson would be even more applicable in this situation? Unless, of course, my mom had meant to imply limits that I hadn’t even known about then by using the word people. It gave me an additional shock to realize that at the time of that conversation, my mom had already come and gone as a GTX employee, that she knew about Ariane and had left her to Dr. Jacobs’s schemes and devices.
“Sweetie.” My mom approached me with her hands out as if she would touch my face, and I backed up, taking Ariane with me. “I’m sure you think this is a grand and romantic gesture, but there is no way this can end well, do you understand that? She doesn’t deserve what’s happened to her, but she’s not human.”
I struggled to formulate a response that wasn’t just inarticulate yelling, but my mom moved on before I could.
“What was your plan?” she asked Ariane. “Run for Canada and hope for the best?” If it was possible, I could feel Ariane getting smaller by the second, shredded by her words.
“Do you think they won’t have thought of that?” my mom continued. “Do you think there’s a border crossing out there that doesn’t have your picture posted? You have no idea what you’re up against.” She threw her hands up. “If you’re lucky, you’ll end up back in the lab at GTX.”
At the idea of Ariane being trapped in that tiny white room again—and that my mom would think that a best-case scenario—something in me snapped. “Okay, we’re done here.” I grabbed Ariane’s hand and tugged her out of the room with me.
“Where are you going? Zane?” My mom followed us to the front door. “Wingate is your only—”
“No.” I led the way out onto the porch, then reached back and slammed the door once Ariane cleared the threshold.
“Come on,” I said, pulling her down the steps and across the grass to the van. She didn’t protest the pace, even though she had to take two strides for my one. “Keys.”
Ariane handed them over without argument, and I knew I was in trouble, then. No questions about where we were going or what we were doing. This wasn’t good.