On which he’d want to write names (or student ID numbers, possibly) that we couldn’t give him. Crap.
“That’s why we’re going to get them right now,” Ariane said, and then, before the teacher could protest, she turned and walked off down the hall.
I followed hastily. A quick backward glance showed him standing there with a scowl, but he wasn’t, thank God, chasing after us.
“What was that all about?” I asked when we were safely around the corner and out of sight.
“No idea,” Ariane said, sounding a little breathless. “He just kept thinking, ‘I never thought I’d see the day’ and ‘I deserve better than these damn kids.’”
Fantastic. This was getting better and better.
“Let’s find someone to ask so we can hurry up and get out of here,” I said grimly. At this point, I was beyond caring whether we succeeded or not.
Ariane cast an evaluating gaze around the teeming hall. Shining metal doors, some closed and some open, punctuated the polished wood walls. Evidently, we’d walked in during class change, or maybe Ariane was as good as I suspected she was and we’d landed right in the lunch hour.
Although the hall was full of people, it seemed eerily quiet. It took me a second to identify the missing noise. No lockers slamming. In fact, I didn’t even see any lockers. Or even books. Only students with iPads in hand.
It took everything I had not to gape. Seriously? No lockers, no books. Did they fly them to France for French class too? No wonder the cranky bald dude had gotten pissed when I said I’d left my jacket in my locker. He’d probably thought I was mocking him.
“Her.” Ariane pointed to a cluster of three or four girls who’d just emerged from a bathroom.
But I knew immediately which one she meant. Tall, blond, beautiful, her uniform skirt about four inches shorter than everyone else’s, revealing a lot more leg. But the key clue to her identity came from the adoring throng around her, girls leaning forward to catch her every word, their skirts rolled up to imitate hers.
I groaned. “Oh, come on, Ariane.”
Ariane raised her eyebrows. “She’ll know.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she’ll tell us,” I pointed out. At least not without something in it for her. I knew that girl’s type. So did Ariane. Every school had a Rachel Jacobs—maybe more than one. And Ariane had unerringly zeroed in on Linwood Academy’s version.
“She’ll talk,” Ariane spoke with a grim certainty that was kind of alarming and reminded me what she could do if she put her mind to it. Literally.
“All right,” I said quickly. “How about if I try?” If this girl decided to cop an attitude with Ariane, I wasn’t entirely sure we’d make it out of this without lights exploding and windows breaking. Ariane wouldn’t hurt anyone intentionally, but I bet she wasn’t above scaring someone a little, if necessary. And we were already on thin ice. I doubted we’d get out of here unscathed if she went that route.
Ariane frowned but shrugged her assent.
I took a deep breath and crossed the hall against the flow of traffic, feeling as if a spotlight shone on my white shirt in the sea of blue blazers.
“Hey,” I said to the blond girl, eliciting a chorus of giggles from her flunkies.
She looked up from the tablet in her hand—it was flashing through a slide show of party pictures, in which she was featured prominently—and gave me a long, appraising glance.
“Hey,” she said in a warm tone, before closing the cover on her tablet with a definitive slap.
Oh, damn. Weeks ago I’d have been flattered and maybe a little tempted. Now this was just awkward. “Um, so listen, I was wondering if you could help me with something.”
“I would love to help you,” she purred. “I’m Lara, by the way.”
God, how did she manage to make that sound like she was offering much more than I was asking for? I was all too aware of Ariane behind me, silent as a ghost, across the hall, where she probably couldn’t hear what this girl was saying, but she could probably still “hear.”
“Great.” I resisted the urge to pull at my tie, which was feeling much too tight at the moment. “Thanks, Lara.”
Lara paused. “You’re new here, right?” She squinted at me with disapproval. “You’re not, like, a freshman?”
“No,” I said. A freshman, really? I would have been insulted, but I was too busy trying to keep up with the conversation so I’d have some hope of directing it. I probably should have known better.
“Okay, good.” She smiled, obviously relieved.
“I’m supposed to find someone,” I began.
Lara smiled and leaned close, obviously expecting this was the lead in to some kind of pickup line. Like, “I’m supposed to find someone, but now that I’ve met you, not just anyone will do” or some other crap. I don’t know. I’d never been particularly good at stuff like that even when I was trying to make it work.
“This girl, I think her name is Ford?” I said, blundering on.
She stiffened. “What?”
“Ford,” I repeated. Was she not going by that name here? That would be a problem. “It’s kind of a strange…”
Lara’s expression shifted from confused/annoyed to straight-up pissed in a fraction of a second. “Is this a joke?” she demanded, her gaze flicking between my face and some point behind me.
“No,” I said, confused. I turned to see who she was looking at, half expecting the cranky teacher who’d confronted us. But he wasn’t there. It was just Ariane and more Linwood students, a large majority of which now seemed to be heading in a single direction, probably to the cafeteria.
“Fuck you,” Lara snarled. “Help yourself.” Then she pushed past me to stomp off down the hall, in the opposite direction as everyone else. Her gaggle trotted after her, all wide-eyed and whispering.
What the hell? I shook my head and crossed the hall to Ariane, yanking at my tie to loosen it. Clearly looking the part was not helping as much as we’d hoped.
“She thought you were making fun of her.” Ariane’s voice held the lilt of curiosity.
“Yeah, I got that,” I said, my mouth tight. “But why?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t thinking about that part of it. More just shocked that you’d dared to do it.” Ariane sounded both bewildered and amused.
Well, that was helpful. I raked my hands through my hair. “We need to get out of here and figure out another way. This is not working.” It felt as if there were a giant timer somewhere counting down the seconds until this blew up in our faces, and we were dangerously close to zeroing out.
I was watching Ariane, expecting her to protest, so the look on her face was my first clue that something was off. Her gaze moved from me to a point off to my left, her eyes widening a fraction of an inch and her lips parting slightly.
And for Ariane, that was as close to an expression of shock as you were ever going to get. It was roughly the equivalent of a normal person shrieking in surprise and clapping a hand over her mouth.
My stomach tightening with dread, I turned to see what had caught her attention. I thought I knew what to expect—that we’d found Laughlin’s hybrids. Or rather, that they’d found us.
But I was so, so wrong.
I mean, the hybrids were there. That much I got right away. They drifted down the hallway against the flow of traffic in a perfect triangle formation, two guys in the back and a girl in the front. Ford, accompanied by Carter and Nixon, though I had no idea which was which.
They were all blond, that shade of pale white that I suspected Ariane would also have if she stopped dying in the darker streaks to look more “normal.”
These three, though, didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about normal. They moved in a creepy unison, as if they were one entity with six legs. It wasn’t human. At all. Neither were their flat expressions and utter silence.