“Ariane?” Zane asked again, sounding more alarmed.
The wall was another message, one more subtle than the words.
I wasn’t sure if it was a warning—you know how hard it is to break out of GTX, forget about breaking in—or a lure. Maybe I was supposed to pick up on that clue without realizing that they’d planted it deliberately and head in to save the day, thinking that I was pulling one over on them.
Either way, the result was the same. They’d be expecting me to try to get Quinn at GTX. The already impossible security would be double or tripled.
And yet, going to the designated meet and attempting to get Quinn without being captured would be even more difficult.
I’d been trained to assess situations like this and determine the best action to take, even when the best action was none. Especially when it was none.
Surrendering serves no purpose, my logical half pointed out.
Except to save Zane’s brother!
My two sides clamored back and forth, vying for dominance.
It’s bait, temptation to your weaker self. You know that. Once you give in, they will have you forever, both physically and mentally.
Which was true. If I went to GTX, I wasn’t coming back out. But even that wouldn’t be a guarantee of Quinn’s safety or Zane’s. If anything, it might only make things worse. Dr. Jacobs would turn to them every time he wanted something from me.
Once again, caring only served to hurt me and others.
But doing nothing, is that really an option?
I looked at Zane, sitting next to his mother on the bed, the strain and fear written on his handsome face. Just a couple weeks ago, he’d had a regular life, worrying about tests, lacrosse games, and college essays. I’d done this to him.
And yet when he noticed me watching him, he met my gaze with confidence and, God help me, hope.
In me.
Crap.
16
Zane
QUINN AND I HADN’T GOTTEN along in a long time. Scratch that, we’d never gotten along. We are brothers, three years apart. We would have fought over who had two more inches of room in the shared misery of the backseat on family excursions, who was getting more air, anything and everything.
But that was normal sibling stuff, as far as I could tell. It had changed, turned into something worse, only when we were older. One day, it was as if he were suddenly miles ahead of me, even when we were in the same room. He was a stranger I happened to share a house and a bathroom with.
I didn’t know when it started or why, but I remembered when I finally figured out that something was different and it wasn’t good.
We’d been in the backyard doing throwing drills with my dad. (There was no “tossing the football around” with him.) I was nine and Quinn was twelve, and for once I must have done something right, because my dad was in Quinn’s face for a change.
“Even Zane did better than that, for God’s sake,” my father shouted. Those words, and that tone of disgust, would be permanently carved on my heart after that.
I was drowning in fury and humiliation, and then Quinn…Quinn glared at me, as if I was doing something wrong.
It was in that moment when it had finally clicked for me. We weren’t on the same side anymore. When we’d bickered and beat on each other before, we’d always still teamed up against our parents. To get out of trouble, to weasel another hour of television, to find our Christmas presents in the weeks before the holiday.
But in one of those quick flashes of insight, where everything else seems to stop for a second while you struggle to absorb some screamingly obvious revelation, I’d known that Quinn and I were done. We weren’t brothers anymore, just two people fighting over the same resources.
Seeing him in that video, though, he’d looked so vulnerable, so broken.
I swallowed hard. That wasn’t the Quinn I knew. I didn’t remember the last time I’d seen him cry. Or apologize to me for anything.
He really thought he was going to die.
You okay? The memory of Quinn checking on me at that party suddenly filled my head. At the time, I’d been embarrassed and angry and just wanted to disappear, and his question had only exacerbated those feelings.
But he’d been trying to look out for me, making sure I was all right. An overture, not of peace exactly but maybe an acknowledgement of his role and responsibilities as an older brother, something I thought I’d never see again.
I should have been more grateful for the attempt.
My eyes stung suddenly. We had to save him. We couldn’t just leave him in there.
The bed beneath me shook with my mother’s sobs. I tentatively put an arm around her too-thin shoulders. She didn’t react to the contact, her hands covering her face as she curled into herself, elbows resting on her knees.
I glanced up at Ariane, who continued to stare down at the tablet, but with a blankness to her expression that suggested she wasn’t actually watching anything but thinking instead.
“Ariane?” I asked.
Her gaze flicked up to meet mine. I thought I saw a quick flash of fear and then something, sadness, maybe, before the emotion and expression drained from her face, leaving her as unreadable and unknowable as she’d ever been.
She pushed the button at the top of the tablet, putting it to sleep with an audible click; tucked it under her arm; and stepped toward my mother with a precise economy of movement.
“What’s at that exit, Mara?” Ariane asked flatly.
My mom dragged her head up from her hands to stare up at Ariane blearily. “What?”
“Exit 340 on Interstate 94. What’s there?” Ariane repeated, not exactly with patience. More like a robotic evenness. You could almost see the cogs and wheels turning in her brain as her personality and emotion and humanness, for lack of a better word, took a backseat to the military-type training and alien instincts that lived within her as well. She looked…well, she looked more like Ford than ever in that moment. It sent a chill through me.
My mom cleared her throat and straightened up, responding unconsciously to Ariane’s crisp and expectant tone. “The Cheese Palace,” she said.
I frowned. The what? It took a second longer for a few vague memories to emerge. A castlelike building, a giant cheese emporium, with a huge plastic mouse statue wearing a Packers jersey and holding a beer-scented candle just inside the door. Cheese, beer, and football. Pretty much the three major exports of Wisconsin.
Concentrating on it, I had another dim recollection of Quinn and me running around the store, going long with one of those little circles of cheese in red wax as our football. Then my dad had gotten ahold of us. I could still recall the feeling of his fingers digging into my shoulder when he caught me with the “ball,” doing that thing where he was red-faced and shouting but only with his eyes.
Clearly, I’d been inside the Palace at some point. Maybe a family vacation, like our one disastrous attempt at camping years ago. The memory of the Cheese Palace seemed to be tied to that of a campground swimming pool with a metal edge, superheated in the sun, that burned my palms when I tried to haul myself out.
To my surprise, Ariane nodded at my mom, as if she’d somehow been expecting this answer. “A tourist attraction, in a high-traffic area.”
Glad it made sense to her. It seemed insane to me. All those people watching, both at the Cheese Palace and in vehicles passing on the interstate. “Isn’t that riskier?” I asked.
“In an isolated area, I have greater freedom to take action against them. Dr. Jacobs is worried about that. He should be.” Ariane’s tone darkened with something that sounded a lot like grim pleasure.