The Hunt

by Stacey Kade

  I shook my head. “No, I’ll do it.” He was right. If there was something in here about the car, we needed to know. With GTX nipping at our heels, getting a vehicle had to be our top priority. Besides, avoiding the letter was foolish, emotional—my human side holding sway over the rest of me. Because the fact was, even if the letter was years old, it might yet contain useful information mixed in among all the eviscerating details I’d learned in the last day.

  I handed Zane the keys and then, steeling myself, I slipped my finger beneath the flap on the envelope and tore it open, the ripping noise sounding absurdly loud in the postmidnight air.

  “Your dad is kind of a badass. You know that, right?” Zane said, repacking the bag carefully.

  I didn’t respond, my attention caught by my name in my father’s painfully familiar handwriting.

  Ariane—

  I have to assume that, if you’re reading this, our situation has been compromised and I’m either dead or unable to help you. I don’t know how much I had a chance to tell you, and I’m sorry for the abruptness of what you’re about to read.

  I was surprised to find tears stinging my eyes. His weariness and regret permeated the page.

  First, you are not free. You never were. GTX and Dr. Jacobs have known where you were the entire time. You’ll never know how sorry I am for my role in this deception. Please know that I did it for reasons that seemed honorable at the time.

  His daughter. The original Ariane. Jacobs had promised the latest experimental treatment for her cancer in exchange for my father taking on the job of looking after me. She’d died anyway, but Mark had stayed on, hoping the research they were doing with my “amazing” immune system would save other children from the same fate.

  I wanted to hate my father for it. He’d loved his daughter more than he’d loved me. But then again, he wasn’t supposed to care about me at all. I was a job. And yet, this bag was full of proof that I was more than that to him. I was caught between gratitude and the bitter pinch of self-pity. It’s hard to know you’ll never be enough just because you’re not someone else.

  “You okay?” Zane asked.

  “Yeah.” I wiped under my eyes. “I just—” I stopped, my attention caught by a chilling phrase that leapt out from the next paragraph.

  Second, there’s a tracking chip embedded on the right side of your T4 vertebrae.

  My head whirled, trying to rearrange the squiggles into other words with a different meaning. But the sentence remained.

  It’s an older model, with very short range. But don’t take the risk; disable it. According to my research, demagnetizing it should work. You’ll find what you need in the bag.

  “Ariane?” Zane sounded alarmed. “What’s wrong? You look—”

  “Is there a magnet in there?” I asked in a strangled voice. A tracking chip. It made a sort of sick and horrible sense—if my father had lost control over me during my years of “freedom” and I’d bolted, GTX and Dr. Jacobs would have needed a way to find me and bring me in. I hadn’t even attempted to run, though. I’d believed their ruse.

  “A what?” Zane frowned up at me.

  I swallowed hard, trying to keep my panic under control. “A magnet, probably a big one.” My father had never mentioned, never even hinted at such a thing, not even during our good-bye, which would have seemed like an opportune time to mention something like GTX spyware in my spine. Had it been active this whole time? Or was it something they could turn on and off at will? Were they on their way here right now?

  I felt ill.

  Zane rummaged deeper in the bag, beneath the clothes. “This?” He produced a flat metal circle about the size my palm.

  I nodded, feeling my neck creak with tension.

  “What’s going on?” Zane asked warily.

  “I have…there’s a tracking device,” I said.

  He dropped the magnet and yanked his hands away from the bag.

  “No.” I gave a harsh, humorless laugh. “Not in the bag. In me.”

  His eyes widened, but he nodded. “What do we do?”

  We. What had I done to deserve him? He should have been home right now, reviewing lacrosse plays and studying for chemistry.

  “I can do it myself,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure how without some significant contortions or lying on the ground, neither of which seemed like a good idea when time was of the essence.

  But Zane rallied, standing up with a determined expression and the magnet in hand.

  I turned away so he wouldn’t see the deeply pathetic amount of gratitude I was feeling.

  “Here.” I shed my father’s jacket and reached up to the back of my neck to point to where the last cervical vertebrae jutted out slightly. “Start here and count down about four. T4 should be between my shoulder blades.”

  The air shifted slightly as Zane moved closer, and I shivered.

  “How do you know that?” he asked. “About T4. I wouldn’t have the faintest clue.”

  I smiled tightly. “Years of studying human anatomy, remember?” He was already getting a front-row seat to my freak show, why not remind him once again that I was created to be a killer?

  His fingertip lightly touched my neck at the point I’d showed him and moved down my spine, tripping over the fabric of my tunic.

  “Ariane,” he began. “I’m not sure which—”

  I understood his hesitation and—well, at this point, was it really a good idea to let modesty stand in my way?—grabbed the back of my shirt and yanked it up past my shoulders, exposing my skin to the night air. That would make counting vertebrae a lot easier.

  Zane sucked in a breath.

  “What, can you see it?” I twisted around, trying to look, cursing my years of naiveté. I should have known GTX—Jacobs, specifically—would do something like this. If I’d searched myself, maybe I would have seen the chip before. A little bubble under the skin near my spine, like a malignant tumor just waiting to cause chaos later.

  “They did this to you.” It was a statement, but I could hear the question in it.

  I thought he was talking about the tracker, until his finger touched my shoulder blade, tracing the letters and numbers emblazoned on my skin. The GTX logo and my project designation: GTX-F-107.

  I flinched, humiliation setting my face afire. This was getting better and better by the second. In my panic about the chip, I’d forgotten about the tattoo. Normally it was covered by a bandage, but I’d taken that off before the party a couple nights ago and never had a chance to put another one on.

  Now Zane knew I was marked like cattle. I was a possession. A thing.

  “Yeah. They did.” I bit the words off and waited, my shoulders tense. Any second now, I’d hear his uncomfortable laugh, echoing against the building, and the sound of his retreating footsteps. This would be the final straw, the piece that pushed him over the edge into seeing me for what I was instead of who.

  But, somehow, miraculously, it wasn’t. “This is probably going to be cold,” he warned a second before applying the magnet to my back between my shoulder blades.

  He was right. The sudden shock of metal against my skin made me gasp.

  I started to shiver for real, then, and Zane stepped closer, looping his free arm around my shoulders in the front, a backward sort of hug, while his other hand kept the magnet pressed in place between us.

  “Better?” he asked.

  I could feel the rise and fall of his chest against me, the softness of his shirt on my skin, and, faintly, the solid and reassuring beat of his heart.

  I wanted to cry, to turn around and bury my head against him. To cling to him, to crawl inside. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “Yes.”

  “Is it supposed to beep or something?” Zane asked a moment later.

  “I don’t know.” I looked again to the letter, now crumpled in my hand. There were only a couple paragraphs remaining.

  Third, and this is the most important part: you know about Arthur Jacobs, but he is the least
of your concerns. He wants you alive so you can win the trials for him. But David Laughlin (Laughlin Integrated Enterprises, Chicago, IL) and Emerson St. John (Emerson Technology, Incorporated, Rochester, NY) would rather you were dead. One less competitor for the trials they have planned.

  The trials. That’s what they were calling a fight to the death between the various “products” created by the three companies vying for a lucrative government contract to make supersoldiers/assassins/spies. (“Products” was the sanitized word for beings like me, lab-created hybrids of human and alien DNA.)

  So now, as if the possibility of death in a formal competitive setting weren’t enough, I apparently had to worry about plain old murder. That was new.

  A full body shudder ran through me, and Zane pulled me closer against him.

  They’ve had informants keeping tabs on one another’s progress for years. Your escape won’t go unnoticed for long. And once you leave the state—GTX’s “territory” as designated by the rules they established to prevent sabotage—you’ll have all of them after you. Laughlin, in particular, will not hesitate at the thought of collateral damage if it means eliminating a threat to his success.

  Dizzy suddenly, I felt myself swaying. I knew where this was going even before I read my father’s final words.

  Cut ties to Wingate and anyone you care about, immediately. You’ll want to protect those who’ve been kind to you, but you’re a danger to anyone in your presence. Find somewhere isolated, preferably outside the country (the U.S. government is complicit in all of this, remember). Stay there.

  Be good; follow the Rules I gave you. Take care of yourself. Again, I am sorry for my role in all of this.

  Mark

  “Are we good?” Zane whispered near my ear, his breath tickling my cheek. “Is it off?”

  It took me a second to process what he was asking about. The chip. Was the chip deactivated?

  I nodded numbly, even though I had no way of knowing if that was the case. Surely my father had not intended for me to walk around with a magnet permanently affixed to my back. And even if he had, there were now larger concerns.

  With a quick exhale of relief, Zane removed the magnet and bent to tuck it inside the bag.

  I tugged my tunic into place and put my jacket on, my head spinning with too many thoughts.

  Cut ties to Wingate and anyone you care about, immediately. When my father had written that, he’d probably been thinking of my former friend Jenna or maybe even himself. But Zane…Oh God, he was most definitely included in that category, which meant I knew what my father would have wanted me to do.

  My stomach ached. Here, at last, was the boot I’d been expecting, dropping to clobber me from a totally unanticipated angle.

  The selfish part of me was shrieking “No!” at the top of her lungs. I couldn’t just abandon Zane, especially not here. GTX would snap him up in a second. Not to mention, I didn’t want to leave him at all.

  I blinked back tears. But logically, reasonably, his safety had to come first. If I cared so much about him, I couldn’t be a party to his death or endangerment. Which left me with what?

  Take him with you, my emotional side pleaded. He’s come this far. He’ll go.

  Maybe. Maybe not. Going to his mother’s was one thing; going on the run for the rest of his life? I shook my head. I couldn’t ask that of him.

  Walk away now, the cooler, calmer voice in my head advised. It’s the best choice for both of you. Jacobs will find him, but Jacobs is the lesser evil compared to the others. He will want to keep Zane alive to use as incentive.

  I rocked back and forth on my heels, caught on twin prongs of misery and indecision. It was impossible to know what parts of my personality came from which side. What was human? What was other? All I knew was that when it came to big choices like this one, I was torn between emotions that raged inside and the logic that tried to snuff them out—to the point where it felt like the fight between them might spill out into the physical world. Me arguing with myself, with no peace in sight. It felt like more proof that maybe someone like me wasn’t meant to exist.

  “Are you all right?” Zane asked, startling me.

  I turned to see him frowning at me. Then he grimaced. “I mean, I know you’re not, not after everything…but was the letter…” He trailed off awkwardly.

  The absolute end of everything I was hoping for? “It’s fine.” I forced the lie out, hearing it thud in the space between us.

  Zane squinted at me, reading something on my face that I didn’t want him to see. “Ariane—”

  Tires crunched over loose pebbles on concrete on the other side of the building.

  We froze.

  Zane stood, lifting the bag with him. “Is that GTX?” he asked, barely audible.

  At this point, I had to hope so. The alternative, that Laughlin or St. John had found me already, was even worse. It was laughable—a crazy person’s hysterical cackle—that GTX had become the best of all possible options.

  “Probably,” I said, adrenaline kicking into overdrive, bringing details into hyperfocus. “Only one car, though, so far, by the sound of it. A scout, checking out the situation.” Like someone who’d caught the blip of my tracking chip’s signal before we’d disabled it. Or maybe it was simply someone making a U-turn in a convenient parking lot, but I couldn’t take that chance. My luck was just not that good.

  “Then I guess we better run like hell, ‘Talia,’” Zane said. He tipped his head toward the trees and held out his free hand with a grin that hurt my heart.

  I faltered, unable to move. How was I supposed to do this? How was I supposed to say good-bye to the one person in the world who knew the real me and had stuck around anyway?

  “Ariane?” he asked, his smile slipping a little.

  I couldn’t. Not yet.

  So I did the only thing I could do—selfish and human as it was.

  I took his hand, and we ran like hell.

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Ariane was too quiet.

  She’d never been particularly chatty—and I certainly didn’t expect her to be talking up a storm after what she’d been through in the last day or so—but this was different.

  In between paranoid checks of the rearview mirror for vehicles following us (none yet), I kept glancing over to make sure she was still there, curled up in the passenger seat, her knees tucked to her chest beneath the oversize black GTX jacket.

  Ariane hadn’t really spoken since we’d found the bag. Actually, not since she’d read the letter that was inside. She was clutching it, as if she couldn’t bear to let it go. But she hadn’t said what was in it, and I didn’t want to push her.

  It had to be harder than hell to learn your whole life is a lie. I was pretty sure the letter had been more of the same stilted apologies and explanations Mark Tucker had given her in person. I was willing to bet that it sucked as much in replay on paper as it had hearing it live. Plus, the whole tracking device thing. That was messed up.

  Still, I wished she’d talk about something, anything. It was almost three thirty in the morning, and the silence was starting to get to me. Nothing but the thoughts circling endlessly in my head and the hum of the tires on the road.

  Obviously, we’d found the vehicle that went with the key. Actually, it had sort of found us. Doing our best to keep to the shadows, we’d run from the old Linens-N-Things building and whoever was in the parking lot out front. We hadn’t gone far when Ariane had stopped suddenly and pointed up.

  A big, glowing orange sign—U-Store-It—hovered above the treeline in the distance, like a welcome beacon.

  Ariane gave a strangled laugh and led me across the street and onto the storage facility grounds, right to Unit 107—the same number tattooed on her back. The lock opened with the smaller key on the ring, and inside the storage locker we found a tarp-draped van. The outside was beat to hell, but the engine started right up with a smoothness that suggested a new engine, or at least one that had been well maintained.

 
The interior of the van contained only two seats, driver and passenger, leaving the entire cargo area echoey and empty, except for a scrap of carpet covering the metal floor.

  Or so I thought, until Ariane climbed back there and started poking around. After just a few minutes, she found a hidden compartment in the floor that was the size of a person.

  “A smuggling compartment?” I asked, stunned.

  “‘I use them for smuggling. I never thought I’d be smuggling myself in them,’” she murmured, knowing I’d catch the Star Wars reference.

  It was more than appropriate for the situation. GTX was an evil empire of sorts, I supposed.

  Inside the compartment we discovered more rolls of cash, sleeping bags, baby wipes, a first-aid kit, bottles of water, and protein bars. Mark Tucker really was a badass. He’d thought of everything.

  “How did you know to look for that?” I asked Ariane.

  She shrugged. “Why else would the back be empty?”

  Kind of a good point, just not the way I was used to thinking. For as familiar as Ariane had become to me in the last few days, there were still moments when the differences between us seemed vast and uncrossable. As if we were from two different planets. Which, I guess, we were.

  Alien. The word echoed loudly in my head, and I struggled to shut it out before Ariane could hear. I wasn’t freaked out by it so much as shell-shocked. It was one thing to learn that life on other planets existed; I’d kind of suspected as much when I’d bothered to think about it, which wasn’t often. But it was entirely something else to discover that that distant and ambiguous “life” wasn’t a collection of molecules or bacteria visible only beneath a special microscope but was part of the girl who’d sat in front of me in math class. And the things she could do, the things they’d taught her, were both terrifying and amazing.

  That queued up a strange sense of panic in me. Not because of what she was but who. I mean, who was I in comparison? How was this going to work with us, whatever we were? People had spent millions of dollars and years of their time just to make sure she’d exist. My own father thought I was a waste of space. Ariane was special—maybe not the kind of special she would choose, but still. I was just a garden-variety human, not even the best one in my family. (That would be Quinn, my older and perfect brother.)