Ariane paused and glanced over her shoulder at me.
“You’re nervous,” she said with a curious lilt.
“Breaking and entering is kind of a new experience for me,” I said tightly. And yeah, okay, given the scope of everything we’d gone through in the last few days, it was nothing, but it was the first actual crime we’d committed. And I guess, after years of my dad lecturing me on all the dumb-ass things I could do that would jeopardize his good name and my future, some of it had actually sunk in, despite my best efforts.
Ariane crossed back to the door. “No one is here, I promise. It’s safe.” She paused, considering. “As safe as it is anywhere for us,” she added. “For now.”
Wow. That was reassuring.
She held out her hand, but I stepped inside of my own free will. If I was going to do it, then I would do it.
The dark interior left me half blind after the brightness outside; it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust. The door swung shut as soon as I cleared it, courtesy of Ariane’s power, snapping closed with a loud click that echoed and made me jump.
“Come on, this way,” she said, heading deeper into the house.
The entryway, with its battered wooden floor, was empty except for a few dust bunnies. To the left, it opened up to a room with dingy carpeting—and cleaner spaces where the furniture had been—and nothing else.
No one was living here. I let out a breath of relief. Ariane could have told me that.
“I didn’t know for sure,” she said. “Not until now.”
“Stop making me feel better,” I muttered.
Following the sound of her voice, I turned the corner out of the entryway and into an actual hall with stairs on the right, leading up. Ariane was already halfway to the next floor.
She moved without hesitation to the second floor and then straight to a partially closed door on the landing, as if she were on the trail of something I couldn’t see.
The door led to a bathroom, small and kind of rank, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She went immediately for the window, which was set high up in the rear wall. She stepped up on the closed lid of the toilet and pulled at the closed metal blinds, which gave with a twanging sound, to look out.
“There,” she said with an air of satisfaction.
Moving to stand next to her—I didn’t need the assistance of the toilet to see out—I peered out to find a view of the dead backyard with a rusted swing set and the rear side of an equally despondent-looking house. “What…”
Ariane reached up and gently turned my chin to the right slightly, and I realized if I looked between the neighboring houses at an angle, I could see my mom’s place.
And the large black SUVs parked on the street out front.
I pulled back instinctively, as though they could see us up here. “Laughlin?” I asked.
“Probably,” Ariane said.
“Did she call him on us?” I struggled with a rush of anger at the idea.
“I don’t think so,” Ariane said thoughtfully, her tone one of someone contemplating an academic problem. “If they were here for us, it would look different.”
I shook my head. “Meaning?”
“Either there would be a lot more of them, or we wouldn’t see them at all,” she said.
Great. I really needed to stop asking questions. The answers only made things worse. Problem was, I didn’t have anything but questions.
“And that wouldn’t explain him,” she added.
“Who?” I leaned closer, and she pointed to the house directly behind us. In an upstairs window, bare of curtains or blinds, I could see a silhouette of a man standing at the front of the house. He held what appeared to be binoculars, watching the goings-on at my mom’s house. Or maybe even inside her house, depending on how powerful those binoculars were.
“One of Laughlin’s guys?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Why would he be hiding?”
Good point. But he definitely wasn’t just a neighbor, not with the binoculars and what appeared to be a complete lack of furniture inside the house. It was evidently another empty one for sale.
“Then who?”
She shrugged. “Someone from GTX maybe? Or Emerson St. John? Just because Laughlin and Jacobs aren’t interested in what he’s doing doesn’t mean he’s not interested in them.”
God, when did these people have time to actually accomplish scientific breakthroughs with all the time they allotted for espionage? Or maybe that’s how they accomplished those scientific breakthroughs. I wasn’t sure.
“Okay, so now what?” I backed away from the window to lean against the sink. The sight of the dude spying and the SUVs had shaken me. Ariane had sounded casual, unconcerned, during our discussion, but I was beginning to think that flat, unaffected tone was how she reacted to unexpected stress.
She hesitated. “I don’t know. Mara is our best lead on the hybrids.”
But we couldn’t wait here forever. Our van was parked in the driveway. The owners of this house might not live here, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t come by and check on the place. Plus, the neighbors would eventually get curious, wouldn’t they? In Wingate, someone would have already been knocking at the door.
“We could come back later,” I offered, though oddly that idea made me uneasy. We couldn’t do anything from here, but it felt, somehow, like everything would escalate even further out of control if we weren’t watching.
She shook her head, her gaze fixed on the view outside. “That’ll just attract more attention.”
She was the expert at being just this side of invisible, I suppose.
“We could try to track down another Laughlin employee,” I said, but even before the words were out, the sheer impossibility of that idea washed over me. Because it wasn’t just finding any employee that would do; we needed one who had knowledge of a top secret project and access to details. We, at the moment, didn’t even have a connection to the Internet. The basic Laughlin Integrated Web site was out of our reach, let alone a confidential employee directory of some kind, assuming one existed.
“Do you think they’re hurting her?” The question popped out before I could stop it. I grimaced. “Sorry…I’m sorry.”
Ariane looked away from the window to me, startled. “Why are you apologizing?”
I couldn’t meet her eyes. “She worked in the lab. She…hurt you.” And she lied to me about it. It wasn’t that I felt she should have told me, as a kid, about her work on a secret project, but more that her work on that project irrevocably changed who I thought she was. And I didn’t like this new version of my mom.
“It was her job. And I told you she was kinder to me than any of the others,” Ariane said evenly.
“Yeah, but that’s not saying much,” I pointed out. I paused, trying to figure out how to say what was churning inside me. “My dad spent years telling me I was just like my mom, and I hated him for that.”
“And now you’re afraid he’s right?”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. “Yeah,” I admitted, more of an exhale than a word. I mean, I’d always thought he was right, but about stuff like lacking in ambition, being soft, or lazy (by his definition). Not like this, though. Nothing like this. When my understanding of my mom changed, so did my view of myself. And yeah, now I was scared as hell that my dad was still right. Would I do what she’d done? Would I somehow find myself in a situation where I’d ignore my conscience because I thought I had no choice or because it somehow felt like the right thing to do, the tiny space between the proverbial rock and a hard place?
Ariane stepped down from her perch on the toilet and grabbed my hands. “First of all, no. I don’t think they’re hurting her. I’m not sensing anything like that.” She nodded in the direction of my mom’s house. “Fear, anxiety, yes, but not pain. If anything, she’s angry. And that’s a good thing.” Her mouth twitched. “Most likely someone was dispatched to follow up on her call this morning. She’s not making it easy for them, and she definitely hasn’t said anything to them about us.”