The Hunt

by Stacey Kade

  But how many people here knew that? Would someone watching question my wandering the halls, especially if I didn’t try to leave the facility? The distraction had been intended to address this concern, but maybe I could do it without that.

  Laughlin was so certain of his control, so sure that Ford and the others wouldn’t challenge him because they needed what he had. Did others have the same faith in his power?

  I’d seen no signs otherwise.

  I bit my lip and immediately released it, figuring that would not be a Ford move.

  The final and largest issue was simply, was it worth the risk to try?

  No! My human side shrieked. Just stay here and hope for the best.

  But that nonhuman part of me had run the odds and gave the equivalent of a shrug. It depends on what you value more: the slim possibility of permanent freedom or the certainty of a few final days.

  You’d get a chance to find Zane to apologize, to tell him you were wrong. To spend those hours together.

  True. But what good were those hours when we both knew the end was coming and it would be ugly? Jacobs would find me, and any chance of a life would be gone. Then I would have to do anything and everything he said, just to keep him from using Zane as “motivation.”

  The certainty of that impending doom would color my last encounters with Zane, assuming he would even accept my apology and want to spend time with me. It would be misery with every breath counted, every second ticking away on a clock neither of us could see. And when fate caught up with us in the form of a GTX retrieval team, who knew what would happen? I couldn’t guarantee Zane’s safety unless I surrendered willingly, which went against every unnaturally fragile bone in my body.

  I looked to my right and the curved wall only inches from my face.

  Carter had given up trying to signal a few minutes ago, after my lack of response.

  I could only imagine what he was feeling, abandoned by Ford and ignored by me. He and Nixon had both taken a chance, and neither one of them had done anything to deserve this result.

  I turned on my side and started tapping out my new plan, quickly and quietly.

  You’d think with all the experience I’d had blending in, pretending to belong, that wandering the halls as Ford would have been easy.

  After all, I didn’t even have to pretend to be human this time.

  But my whole body was shaking, particularly as I passed through the gallery. It took every bit of self-control I had to keep from stopping to stare and mourn.

  I stuffed down the human emotions rioting in my head—Look, do you see what’s going to become of you? Why couldn’t you just wait? You would have been free tomorrow—and kept moving, the clear and analytical voice of my alien side a welcoming presence.

  According to Carter, the Quorosene was kept locked in a safe in Laughlin’s office, both of which they were strictly forbidden to approach unaccompanied. From the layout Ford had quickly described at the school, Laughlin’s office was aboveground, on the fourth floor. I had to find my way out of the maze and to an elevator that was somewhere near the doors to the parking garage.

  So the security team monitors would, most likely, be expecting me to slip outside to further torture Mara or whatever other nefarious errands Ford had devised on her various field trips before Laughlin restricted them to the facility. (Speaking of which, how exactly had she managed all of that? Had she stolen a car? Managed to get Carter and Nixon on a bus? I had no idea, and all of the possibilities seemed equally unfathomable.) They would not be expecting me to approach his office. Which, I hoped, meant it would catch them off-guard and scrambling.

  Or it might mean that they’d jump all over the panic button the second I headed for the elevator.

  The cameras above my head, scanning the hallway with a faint mechanized whir, felt like living, breathing beings, watching over my shoulder and tracking my every move.

  The good news was that, as Ford had predicted, after Laughlin’s evening visit almost everyone had left. I passed two white coats who were too busy arguing over something to even give me more than a glance. I suppose that, unlike GTX, the sight of Ford and the others moving through the halls wasn’t uncommon. The door on their room didn’t even lock.

  Still, moving quickly as I could, without looking suspicious, was imperative. I didn’t want to get caught in the middle of a security shift change or something. Ford had said this time of evening was best for the attempt to reach Laughlin’s office. With no other information to go on, I had to trust that she was right in that, at least. But the sooner I was back in the hybrid room, the better.

  Finally, dozens of bad paintings and fake trees later, I found myself at the double doors to the garage.

  I didn’t so much as pause, passing the doors and then making a sharp left when the hallway ended. To hesitate in this instance might truly mean death. Anyone watching had to believe I was acting under orders.

  The elevators were where Ford had indicated they would be.

  I pressed the button, UP my only option, my finger slippery on the plastic, and it lit up immediately.

  Watching the numbers glow above the metal doors in descending order, I was reminded of the last time I’d been waiting on an elevator and trembling with nerves.

  It had only been a few days, but it felt like years ago that Zane, Rachel, and I sneaked out of GTX. Well, sneaked out of the lab part. We’d most assuredly gotten caught before crossing the threshold outside.

  Maybe it was the memory of that moment, but when the bell chimed gently, signaling the elevator’s arrival, I stepped to one side.

  The doors rolled open, but no one burst out. No demands for me to “Hold still and do not resist” emerged.

  When I peeked around the corner, the space was empty except for a brightly colored poster on the wall advocating the necessity of a flu shot, and quiet but for the buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs overhead.

  I stepped in and pressed 4. No special key or key card required, which was good because Ford hadn’t prepped me for that.

  Then again, perhaps security would be that much tighter on the actual floor.

  I braced myself, preparing to fight. Even if I was confronted, I might have a chance if they weren’t ready for me. Uncontrolled, unconnected me. Ford, Carter, and Nixon were so interconnected that that had to work against them in situations like this. I wanted to save Carter and Nixon, yes, but I didn’t know what it was to feel someone else die. That fear had to slow their responses. There were three of them, which made them three times as vulnerable. I was risking only myself. As much as I’d hated being alone—one of a kind, lonely and isolated—it was a saving grace in this situation. The more people to whom you were attached, the greater your exposure.

  I thought briefly of Zane and then pushed him from my head, the ache in my chest too distracting right now.

  The doors rolled back, revealing nothing more sinister than a swath of pristine white carpet. A few feet beyond that, the main part of the floor was open in the center, making it like a balcony that overlooked the floor below. A glass half wall encircled the opening to the lower level.

  I stepped out cautiously and looked down. A few people still scurried among the cubicles, not even stopping to chat. Of course, it must have felt like the boss was standing over them, watching.

  And, in effect, he was. Directly across from me was a giant glass box filled with black leather and steel furniture. Laughlin’s office. Had to be.

  And it was empty. Even the two desks in front of the door—belonging to the twin assistants who’d been following him around, probably—had been abandoned. The chairs were pushed in, the computers dark.

  Closing my eyes, I focused, listening for thoughts and emotions near me. But with all the people a level below, it was difficult to hear anything.

  The elevator doors closed behind me with a thunk that sounded horribly loud. No one appeared to be on this floor right now, but it would take only one person on the third floor looking up at ju
st the wrong moment. Ford hadn’t mentioned that part of this gig. Then again, it occurred to me right now that perhaps she’d never actually been in Laughlin’s office. That all of her information had been gleaned secondhand, from the minds of humans around her or even schematics pulled from somewhere.

  Great.

  Wishing I’d found a lab coat lying around to throw over my distinctly nonoffice clothes, I inched forward, keeping away from the glass half wall and moving as smoothly as possible.

  Running would draw attention. And so would looking sneaky.

  Head up, shoulders straight. Don’t look down. Funny that the instructions sounded pretty much like I was crossing a rope bridge over a bottomless gorge. Felt that way too. One wrong move and the end would rush up quickly.

  I’d never seen the inside of Dr. Jacobs’s office, but Laughlin’s screamed arrogant male. Everything was stark contrasts and sharp lines.

  Choking on the overwhelming scent of new leather, something I’d associated with positive things—new shoes, bags, and car interiors—until today, I pushed forward into the office.

  I was halfway into the room before I realized the obvious problem, something I should have picked up on much faster.

  Glass walls. On all four sides. No wall safe. It wasn’t possible.

  My stomach sinking, I turned in a small circle, checking for other obvious options. A floor safe was always a possibility, I supposed. Or maybe something built into the desk.

  I skirted the chrome and leather sofa that looked more like Mars landing equipment than someplace to sit, and stepped behind the desk.

  In the second drawer, I scored. The drawer was a front that pulled away revealing a safe. Digital code with thumbprint authorization.

  Uh-oh. Nobody’d mentioned that. Not that it was a problem. I could get through both of them, but it would take more time.

  Unless…if the thumbprint scanner was a redundant system, more like a secondary lock than an alarm, then maybe I could bypass it.

  I focused on the tumblers I knew had to be within the door. I hadn’t ever seen this model of safe, so I had to hope that the ones I’d practiced on during my years with my father would be close enough. (Apparently cat burglar was a backup career plan if “normal human” didn’t work out.)

  After several long sweaty moments on my part, the tumblers clicked into place.

  Success!

  I pulled the heavy safe door open hurriedly, the hinges moving without so much as a squeak.

  There was a sudden blur of motion and what felt like a bite on my skin.

  I fumbled, lifting a rapidly numbing arm, to find something sticking out of my neck. Something I recognized by feel, if nothing else.

  With shaking fingers, I pulled the dart out.

  I twisted around to look for a guard, even as my already slowing thought process reminded me the dart had come from the front.

  My center of gravity shifted abruptly, and I fell sideways with no ability to stop myself. It was like being trapped in an oversize bag of sand, my body the sand and my consciousness a speck within it.

  As I toppled, I caught a glimpse of the safe’s interior. No bottles or packets of pills. The safe was, in fact, empty but for a device similar to the tranquilizer guns I’d seen Dr. Jacobs’s security team use.

  It was a trap. Laughlin had somehow known I was coming. The desertion of this floor and no one challenging my approach had not just been luck.

  Ford. I felt a hot spark of fury and fought to hold on to it, to breathe life into it, but it slipped away from me, growing dimmer under the onslaught of the drugs.

  Seconds later—or perhaps minutes, it was hard to tell—I heard the soft shush of footsteps on the carpet.

  Laughlin stood over me. His sharply angled face, upside down, appeared an odd collection of parts, triangles, lines, and squares rather than a whole.

  “I thought one of them would figure out a way to try for it someday,” he mused, as if this was an academic dilemma finally resolved. “Of course, I wasn’t expecting it be you, 107. That’s what they call you, isn’t it?” He leaned down closer to me, his gaze cold and calculating.

  “When the school called earlier, I wasn’t sure. It did strike me as a large coincidence that my Ford would begin associating with humans on the same day we learned you were missing, but unlike the others, Ford can be…unpredictable. One of her finer qualities, actually. I wanted to see what she was up to.”

  He reached down and tapped the end of my nose in what would have been an affectionate gesture from almost anyone else but instead felt like a creepy signal of ownership, a dismissal of my right to exist as an independent entity. “But you, my darling, made a mistake,” he said in a gentle scolding tone. “I could, perhaps, believe that Ford had chosen this point to make her final stand against me. I might even have been willing to believe that she’d found a way to fracture the bond with the others that she seems to hold so dear. But Ford knows there’s only one way this can end. And she wouldn’t have bothered with coming here for the Quorosene in that case. She would have simply destroyed herself and the others. The ultimate power play.” He shook his head, twisted affection and reluctant admiration playing across his handsome face.

  “But don’t worry,” he added, patting my shoulder. “Operations are already under way to recover Ford from whatever hole she’s scampered into.”

  So Ford had betrayed us? Or…had I simply messed up and revealed myself? I couldn’t tell for sure from what Laughlin had said, and, frankly, at the moment I didn’t actually care.

  I wanted to scream, to choke Laughlin, to stop his heart. For the first time in my life, I was certain I could have killed without regret. But I couldn’t gather the focus; it was like falling downhill. I couldn’t stop the momentum of the drugs or their effects.

  White sparkles mixed with dark spots in my vision. I was disappearing down a long, dark tunnel.

  But I wasn’t so far gone that I missed the slow smile that slid across his face. “In the meantime, you and I will have a chance to spend some quality time together,” he said softly.

  I would have shivered if I could.

  “The pictures really don’t do you justice, you know.” He touched my cheek, smoothed my hair, and every nerve in my body shrieked in muted outrage. “I’ve wanted to do a true comparison, to really understand the differences between you and Ford. What a happy opportunity this is for me.”

  When my eyes finally shut and I drifted further down that tunnel, I could still feel his fingers against my skin.

  THE PLASTIC ZIP-TIE RESTRAINTS WERE digging into my wrists, rubbing the skin raw.

  It probably would have helped if I could have stopped pacing the tiny and overly warm motel room, but sitting still was beyond my capability at the moment. At least my hands were bound in front of me instead of behind my back. Small favors.

  I’d been stuck in here, pacing at the foot of the queen bed with its dingy flowered bedspread, for hours. But it felt like days.

  Just as Dr. Jacobs had promised, a van carrying two members of a GTX retrieval team had rolled into the Linwood Academy parking lot promptly, less than half an hour after I called. They must have already been near the border. And speeding.

  Even though I’d held my hands up and offered absolutely no resistance, the retrieval team guys had taken me down to the ground in a chest-crushing set of moves and bound my wrists together before hustling me into the van. From there, we’d gone to a cheap motel, not too different from the one Ariane and I had spent the night in. Except, of course, she wasn’t here.

  Ignoring the ache in my chest that was more than likely cracked ribs from my sudden collision with the asphalt, I counted off the ten steps to the edge of the chipped tile floor in the bathroom. And then the ten steps back to the mysterious red Tweety Bird–shaped stain near the bolted door to the outside.

  The two retrieval team agents had taken up positions on either side of the room, one near the door and the other leaning against the wall next to
the bathroom.

  They didn’t say it, but I knew they were blocking my escape routes.

  Like I was going anywhere. I was waiting for the moment when the call would come, anticipating and dreading it.

  Every time one of them so much as shifted toward the phone on his belt, my heart stopped.

  I’d given up pestering them with questions about an hour ago. The two agents—a blond guy with a mustache and another dude with a graying buzz cut—just ignored me, though the older guy seemed annoyed with my restlessness.

  Or maybe it was because moving around was only making it warmer in here, and they were wearing infinitely more layers with their bulletproof vests, heavy boots, and utility belts with every device known to mankind.

  SWAT guys on private authority. Yeah, that wasn’t terrifying. I wondered if they’d known Mark Tucker. If they knew about Ariane. If they knew what I’d done.

  My stomach churned. But I kept pacing.

  I had my back turned, heading my allowed ten paces to the bathroom, when I heard the rip of Velcro followed by a gruff “Yes?”

  I spun around so swiftly that the blond agent lurched forward at me, his hands out as if to tackle me again.

  “Understood,” the older agent said into his phone, and I couldn’t breathe for waiting.

  But he said nothing more. Just hung up and tucked the phone into the designated pocket on his belt. Avoiding my gaze, he gave a curt nod to the blond guy next to me, who immediately reached out and grabbed my shoulders.

  I had a flashback to every mob movie I’d ever seen. I did, after all, know too much. But what good would killing me do? Even if I told the world what I knew, who would believe me? I had no proof. And my story sounded plenty crazy enough to be a hoax, some kid looking for attention.