Zane stiffened at the pain and near accusation in her voice and then nodded slowly. “He’s just angry because of Dr. Jacobs. He missed his chance to get in good with GTX.” But he didn’t sound quite as convinced of that as usual, which was evidenced by his next words. “I’m fine. He doesn’t have to worry about me.” His voice held a note of wonder, amazement that his father would worry about him. Which made my chest ache for him. Zane deserved so much better than that.
Plus, it wasn’t exactly true, what Zane had said. There were still plenty of reasons to worry about him, despite my best efforts. But Mara already knew about those, even if the chief didn’t. Which meant we were still missing something.
“Mara,” I began, and her eyes focused on me for the first time for more than a second.
Her face paled the second she saw the tablet pinned between my arm and my chest. She darted forward and snatched it away, clutching it to her body as if it were an infant I was somehow threatening.
2 P.M. Tuesday. I can make a trade…the information is valuable…not enough, not enough…has to be enough. She has to come with. MY FAULT. I can’t save him…
The stream of panicked chatter was accompanied by equally nonsensical images. A castle, a flag with a cartoon representation of an orange cheese wheel, a parking lot, a blond baby sitting up unsteadily on a patchwork blanket.
I shook my head in frustration. Enough already. “What’s going on, Mara?” I asked.
“They took him.” She turned her back on us and continued trying to zip her suitcase one-handed.
“Who?” Zane asked, bewildered.
Then the pieces clicked. The blond baby, Mara’s new determination to return to Wingate, Chief Bradshaw’s sudden and unusually intense distress over his son’s well-being.
When I lived in the lab and in the years after with my father, I’d suffered through any number of lectures and lessons about questioning your assumptions and how making the wrong leap could cost you the mission or your life.
Although no one would admit it, war was a guessing game, all about trying to know your opponent better than he knew himself.
And sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, one or two of the blanks got filled in incorrectly. You just had to hope it wasn’t one of the vital pieces that would alter your entire understanding of the situation.
In this case? It was.
I kicked myself mentally for not catching it sooner: We’d been focused on the wrong son.
“It’s your brother,” I said to Zane quietly. “They took Quinn.”
Zane paled. “What?”
“He goes to school in Wisconsin, right?” I asked.
He shook his head as if trying to wrap his brain around this development. “Madison, yeah. Why?”
This had Dr. Jacobs written all over it. He couldn’t get to me or Zane (thereby getting to me through Zane), so he’d gone for the next best thing. Except it was so much worse. Quinn had not elected to get involved in this mess, unlike the rest of us. He’d been drafted. Which probably meant he had no idea what was going on and was likely terrified.
At best.
At worst…I remembered the determined, almost fanatic gleam in Dr. Jacobs’s gaze when he’d sent his own granddaughter in to me to be killed, all for the sake of this project. So it might very well be much, much worse.
“That’s why Dad was so upset,” Zane muttered to himself with a bitter smile. “Of course.” His shoulders slumped. After all of this, he still cared what his father thought, and his father never seemed to miss an opportunity to crush him, even when it wasn’t intentional.
I wanted to reach out and comfort him, but I was too worried about what we didn’t know. “What’s on the tablet?” I asked Mara. I could feel the tension building in my arms and my nails digging into my palms. Dr. Jacobs could have hardly chosen better, which almost made it worse. He did know me.
I’d never met Quinn before and felt no great love for him based on all that I’d heard from Zane. But this scenario, an innocent caught up in something much larger than he realized and against someone with all the power, was my weak spot. The injustice of it, the helplessness it created in the victim, the disregard for the individual as anything more than a pawn in a bigger game—it sent this huge, roaring fury through me. One that screamed at me to charge in and destroy.
I felt the heat soaring through my veins, warming my face and my hands until I felt I was glowing with it.
At times like this, the cool stir of my alien abilities felt like an entity unto itself. It whispered to be set free, to address the issue, to eliminate the emotional confusion and chaos that upset our normally harmonious system. It wanted to restore the balance in a very logical, efficacious manner. If X is the problem, then we simply eliminate X.
And in the meantime, my human side was screaming with the urge to crush, kill, avenge. If Dr. Jacobs wanted my attention, he would certainly have it. In blood, broken bones, and destruction.
I was the two worst halves of my disparate heritage. Clinical, dispassionate logic—no compassion or sympathy—triggered by overwhelming emotion. A hammer driven by intense strength and feeling.
With an effort, I clamped down against the emotional response, my human side reacting before all the facts were known, and breathed slowly, in and out, until the power quieted to a more manageable tingle rather than the state of near overflow.
“The tablet,” I repeated.
“You’ll come with me?” Mara asked, turning the computer outward so the screen faced us but making no move to turn it on. She wanted a guarantee first.
This can’t be good, a panicked voice inside me cried. “Just show me,” I said firmly.
Next to me, Zane closed the distance between us, his hand wrapping around my wrist for reassurance when my fingers wouldn’t unclench to take his.
Mara pressed the wake button on the tablet and the screen lit up, revealing a single icon—a movie clapboard—floating in an ocean of serene, and artificial, blue.
She took a deep breath and, with a shaking finger, tapped on the icon.
The screen shifted immediately to a much dimmer image, a view of a much darker room with white walls. In the center, under a spotlight, one person sat alone in a chair, his blond head bent down, hiding his face, and his body a blur of frozen motion.
“Quinn,” Zane confirmed in a whisper.
Before he could say more, the video kicked on.
“Oh God, I told you, you have the wrong guy,” he screamed from his bent-over position, obviously in agony. The side of his face, visible only as he tried to curl into himself, was red, the tendons in his neck popping out like cords beneath his skin.
Next to me, Zane inhaled sharply, his hand tightening on my wrist.
On the screen, Quinn lifted his head with a struggle, staring at someone or something past the camera, and with a jolt I realized I recognized him. Yes, in that vague way as someone who’d been a senior when I was a freshman.
But it was more than that. It was the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, albeit currently from pain rather than laughter. It was the exact manner in which his mouth turned down, carving those precise lines in his face, the right not as deep as the left. It was how he set his jaw when he was obviously determined.
My heart gave an uneven thump.
He looked like Zane. Not in his lighter coloring or stocky build—he was a younger version of the chief in that way—but in those flashes of expression. That brotherly resemblance tore at me. It wasn’t Zane, thank God, but it could have been, and I could see him in Quinn.
Quinn managed to reach an almost upright position, revealing for the first time his arm strapped to his chest in a makeshift sling. “It’s not…I’m not…My parents don’t have any money to pay you,” he panted through clenched teeth, directing his words to someone off-camera. Even with the awkward angle, you could see something wasn’t right with his arm. It was bent in strange places, like he’d developed new joints between his wrist and elbow. One of them appeared to have broken through the skin, leaving a bloody gash and a flash of white bone.