My face burst into flames just hearing her saying the words third base. Because apparently I hadn’t progressed past the age of twelve. “I, um…” I said, fumbling for words.
But then I caught the faint upturn at the corner of her mouth. She was teasing.
I shook my head. “You’re hilarious, you know that?”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. An elbow, really?” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“It was the weirdest body part I could think of off the top of my head, okay?” I said, exasperated. “I was trying to be sensitive.”
“Like my elbow.”
“Yes. No! Damn it, Ariane.…” I sighed.
Shaking with laughter, she held her hands up. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Her eyes were shining with tears of mirth, something I’d never seen from her before. I loved it.
I held my hand out and with only split second of hesitation—nothing like when we’d first started talking, just days ago—she took it, intertwining her fingers with mine.
A few moments passed in silence, just the rumble of the van engine and the echoes of her laughter in my head. “I wish all of this was easier, safer,” she said quietly. “More normal.”
I shrugged. “If it were any of those things, we probably wouldn’t be here together.” Extreme circumstances had pushed us toward each other to begin with; it seemed unlikely that would change anytime soon. Plus, what was so great about normal? If we’d stuck with that, she might have still been trapped inside the cell at GTX.
“This will work,” she said with renewed determination. “We’ll find Ford and the others, and we’ll get a chance to turn things around. Then we’ll get to decide our future.”
I nodded. “Yeah, absolutely,” I said, and hoped she couldn’t hear my false certainty. She was worried about failing, which I understood, but a part of me was equally worried about what would happen if she succeeded. We were in this together for now, but would that be true if she managed to convince the other hybrids to come to our side? Her side, actually.
I was only human. And all too aware of it.
The trip to my mom’s went much faster than the first time. We were closer, of course, but it was also probably because all the anticipation and anxiety was gone, replaced solidly with dread. We knew what we were walking into this time.
Then as I started to make the last turn, Ariane sat up sharply. “Wait. Stop.”
Or, not.
I braked immediately, stopping halfway through an intersection. “What’s wrong?”
She had the alert posture—back ramrod straight, gaze sharp, concentration almost palpable—that I recognized as belonging to Ariane the soldier. Something had triggered her instincts and/or her training.
“Something’s wrong. Different,” she said, her fingers turning white where she clutched the armrest.
I fought against a pulse of panic. “My mom?” I asked. I still didn’t know how I felt about what she’d done—really, who she was—but the worry about her safety was instinctive and unstoppable.
“I don’t know. It’s…there’s a new thread.” Ariane cocked her head to one side, listening.
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. “What does that mean?” I asked finally.
She made a frustrated noise. “It’s hard to explain. It’s as if…something has changed. There was a certain feel to the area before, and now it’s altered.” She looked over at me. “Have you ever walked into a room right after an argument?”
Uh, yeah. I’d lived with my parents for years, after all.
“You can tell that something is wrong, that something’s happened even if no one is saying anything, right?” she continued.
She seemed to actually be asking—maybe she wasn’t sure what I could sense as a regular, nonspecial human—so I nodded.
“It’s like that. The tension is up. But I can’t hear anything specific. We’re too far away.” She frowned, her mouth tight. “And it’s not safe to go closer without knowing what’s going on.”
A car pulled up short behind me with an impatient squawk of tires. “Uh, Ariane? We’re about two seconds from getting honked at.”
“Keep going,” she said distantly, her attention focused once more on nothing I could see.
I straightened out of the turn and continued on slowly.
“Left here,” she directed, a block later. Not that she was even looking at the road. She’d moved to the edge of her seat and twisted to stare in the direction of my mom’s house. It was as if she’d tapped into something near my mom’s house and she was still connected, a cord stretching out between her and some distant point.
I took the turn as instructed and found we were on a large cul-de-sac of small houses and utilitarian brick duplexes just like my mom’s. A half dozen of them had real estate signs in front—for sale or rent—or they appeared dilapidated enough to perhaps be abandoned.
This was definitely not the best neighborhood. The good news, though, was that even at noon, not many people seemed to be out and about to notice us. Or, maybe that wasn’t so good—nobody watching meant that anything could happen. Lack of credible eyewitnesses was never something I’d thought much about before this week, and now it seemed an essential variable to consider in every situation.
Ariane was frowning out the window, her gaze searching the sky, first one direction and then another, as if she was calculating something.
“That one,” she said, pointing to a house with a REDUCED PRICE banner slapped across the real estate sign planted in the front yard. It was a two-story house, not particularly large, but taller than the others surrounding it.
“Okay, what about it?” I asked slowly.
She blinked, breaking her trance of concentration. “Park in the driveway. And then act like we belong.”
Oh. That sounded ominous. And possibly illegal.
I pulled in and put the van in park. Before I’d even shut the engine off, though, Ariane had pushed open her door and slid out.
I followed her hurriedly, taking an extra second to lock the van. Nothing like leaving thousands of dollars lying around, unattended.
“What are you doing?” I whispered when I caught up to Ariane on the front walk. She was heading to the door like she owned the place.
Ariane smiled at me, big and false, and then looped her arm through mine. “We’re very excited to see this house. Now smile at me in case the neighbors are watching.”
What? “We’re going in?” I asked through my own version of a fake smile, but I could feel the tension pulling at the corners of my mouth. I wasn’t as good at it as she was.
“Yes.” She tugged me forward and onto the sagging wooden porch. Then she pretended to fumble with the metal keybox hanging from the handle for a moment, as if she had to open it to get at the key.
Then she angled herself so that her body blocked the view of anyone who might be watching and lifted her hand. Inside, the dead bolt slid back with a solid thunk, and I watched as the doorknob, inches away from her outstretched fingertips, twisted slowly, as if it was being operated by an unseen presence.
The door popped free and swung open, revealing a dim and empty entryway. Cool air rushed out to greet us. The air-conditioning was on. I struggled momentarily between conflicting feelings: relief that it wasn’t sweltering inside and fear about what that might mean in terms of the occupants.
“You sure no one is home?” I asked.
She waved my words away. “Not here.” Then she stepped inside.
“As in, they’re not here right now or as in, people live in this area but not in this particular house?” I asked, shifting my weight uneasily at the threshold. Or, as in, Don’t ask me that here. There were any number of ways her statement could be interpreted, some of which might not exclude the possibility of some dude in his boxers, rounding the corner unexpectedly and catching us.