The Hunt

by Stacey Kade

  Ford, throwing me around again. That’s what I thought at first.

  I tried to sit up and found it hurt more than it should have. A white-hot pain shot up my middle. Ford had probably broken something, damn her.

  Then I looked down.

  Oh.

  It seemed like there should have been more to say or think in that moment, a rush of curses, a wave of panic and pleading and prayer. But that was it: Oh. A single word in silence, like a drop of water into ocean.

  There was just so much blood, more than I’d ever seen in real life, bright, slippery, and spilling warm across my hand, where I’d pressed it instinctively against my stomach. A loud buzzing started in my ears, and my lips went numb.

  Whether that guard had intended to shoot Ford or not, I didn’t know. Maybe when she’d used her power to shove his arm away, she’d squeezed too hard and he’d pulled the trigger inadvertently.

  Or maybe Ford had done it deliberately, shifting his weapon to aim at me. The one she blamed for all of this. I couldn’t argue with that. I blamed myself too.

  Regardless, one thing was inescapable: all bullets, even ones released accidentally, have to go somewhere, and this one had found its final destination.

  I coughed, choking on a sudden flood of liquid warmth that I suspected was more blood, more life pouring away. I’d been so worried about Ariane’s survival, it had honestly never occurred to me to consider my own.

  Too late now.

  ARIANE. It started off small, a distant whisper in the back of my brain, a tiny flare of fear and regret. I barely registered it over the buzz and warmth of the power building up inside me and fighting against the drugs they’d pumped into me at Laughlin’s facility.

  But it remained, distracting me, pulling me out of the zone and the work I had yet to do.

  Ariane, I’m sorry. I almost caught a rifle butt to the face that time, my attention pulled by that soft, distant voice.

  So I removed the weapons from as many grasping hands as I could, snapping them together like twigs in a firewood bundle and hurling them into the water.

  Next to me, Ford sent one of the Laughlin guards crashing into the remaining SUV, denting the entire side with the impact of his body. That man would not be walking away from that injury. Perhaps not ever walking again.

  I felt a primitive rush of satisfaction that surprised me with its force.

  Ariane…

  This time, the voice penetrated, and it sounded odd, strained, frightened.

  Zane. I turned to where I’d last seen him, expecting to find him watching wide-eyed and perhaps horrified by our actions. Instead, he was on the ground, a bright red stain spreading rapidly over the white of his shirt.

  The sight sent a jolt through me, and I couldn’t move for a second, my brain trying to piece it together, trying to make it make sense.

  The second shot. The one from Ford fighting with the guard. Zane. He’d been close. But not that close. Close enough, though, apparently.

  The quiet place of power inside my head devolved into a gibbering mess of panic and fear.

  He’s dying. Zane’s dying. No one loses that much blood and survives. MOVE.

  I bolted, leaving Ford to handle those who were left. Too many, I knew.

  I half stumbled, half fell at Zane’s side, my still-bound hands flying up to brace against the ground, his spilled blood sliding over my fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning his head to look at me. He was so pale. His lips looked like gray shadows. “For calling Dr. Jacobs. I thought…I thought Ford…I saw her leaving with your bag. I thought she was betraying you.” His mouth clamped shut suddenly, his teeth chattering. “You should go. Run while Ford has them distracted.”

  “Shut up. Just…don’t talk.” I shoved my hair out of the way so I could see, feeling the rapidly cooling blood smear across my cheek. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay,” I said firmly, as if it was an order that he would be required to obey.

  I bit down on the inside of my cheek but couldn’t stop a muted whimper from escaping as I pressed on the left side of his stomach.

  He gasped, his whole body tensing before releasing. “It doesn’t hurt that much. So it can’t be that bad, right?” He mustered a weak and wet-sounding laugh, then moaned. His eyes closed and a shudder racked him from head to toe.

  “Right,” I lied, blinking back tears that blurred my vision. It would be better if it hurt. His body was in shock, protecting him from the pain. And there was so much blood, my hands and wrists were already warm with it. “You’re going to be fine.”

  Against my will, diagrams of human anatomy—the position of major blood vessels and organs—memorized years before, flashed in my already woozy mind.

  Arterial damage likely, the cool voice in my head recited. Possibly liver and lung as well, depending on the path of the bullet once it entered his body. If it ricocheted off a rib, spraying bits of bone—

  “Help! I need some help here,” I screamed over my shoulder, losing my balance as I did. “Please, someone call an ambulance.” The words felt thick and woolly leaving my mouth, and I wasn’t sure anyone would understand.

  Not that it mattered. No one was listening. As I watched, Ford went down beneath the remaining security personnel taking advantage of her still-weakened state from the drugs and the loss of Nixon.

  Dr. Laughlin and Dr. Jacobs were shouting at each other, not seemingly aware of anything else.

  Mara, the lone person who seemed to recognize there was a problem, struggled against the chief, who was pulling her into his SUV, where Quinn already sat in the front passenger seat, his eyes wide with terror and confusion. “Zane’s hurt!” Her panicked words were loud enough to be heard across the lot. “You have to let me go!” She shoved at her ex-husband.

  But the chief didn’t stop until she was in the vehicle and he climbed in after her, forcing her into the middle, while he got behind the wheel. Seconds later, the SUV roared past, the wheels chewing up the grass, as the chief drove up the park embankment to reach the road. Mara’s fists against the glass were pale flashes of movement inside.

  “Mom?” Zane’s voice drew my attention back to him. His eyes were closed, but a faint frown creased his forehead. He must have heard her voice.

  “Yep,” I said. “She’s coming.” I choked on the lie and the lump in my throat.

  Zane’s eyes opened, his gaze focusing on me momentarily. He smiled at me. “Hey. You’re still here.” Then his face crumpled as pain struck somewhere. A tear slipped free from his eye and ran toward his hair.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, leaning forward to press my mouth against his temple. If I could take this from him, I would, oh God, I would. “This is my fault.” If I’d been less selfish, if I’d sent him home, if I’d listened to Mara and Dr. Jacobs, Zane would be safe right now. Home and bored and perfectly fine.

  A faint frown creased his forehead. “No…” he struggled. “Not your fault. My choice.” He swallowed with an effort, coughed, and then went quiet.

  I lifted my hands to Zane’s chest in a panic, smearing blood all over what remained of his white shirt. I was reassured to feel his chest was rising and falling, though the space between each breath was irregular and getting worse.

  But even more alarming than that, when I tried to focus in on his thoughts, I couldn’t hear him. Just scraps of words, random scattered images. A quick flash of a purple stuffed rabbit. The smell of a Christmas tree and the crinkle of wrapping paper. His mother, much younger than I’d ever seen her, smiling at him.

  He was leaving. His body was giving up, his brain deprived of blood and oxygen, neurons giving off one last spark before they died.

  And behind me, Jacobs and Laughlin continued to squabble as if nothing else was going on.

  “Please!” I shouted, choking on my sobs. “Help me!” They were doctors, for God’s sake—not ones I trusted, but they had to be able to do something.

  Then, suddenly, as if someone had heard
my entreaty and responded, a siren rose in the distance.

  I sagged forward in relief, leaning closer to Zane’s ear. My tears dripped onto his face, but he didn’t react. “Someone’s coming. Just hang in there.” I’d never felt more helpless in my life.

  Behind me, I sensed the sudden change in activity. Footsteps scrambling, engines revving, and doors being yanked open.

  Good. I nodded to myself, trying not to see the new stillness settling over Zane, as if all the tension was draining from him. Laughlin and Jacobs were leaving, gathering up their security personnel along with Ford and Carter and Nixon’s body, before the local authorities arrived. Let them go. I would wait here until help came for Zane.

  “Just a few more minutes,” I said to him, ignoring the slowing blood flow from his side. If they started a transfusion right away—

  Hands clasped around my shoulders, and without looking I shoved with my mind, the effort draining what little strength I had left. But the satisfying thud of a body hitting the ground, followed by a grunt of pain, made it worth it.

  The sirens grew louder.

  “You have to come,” Dr. Jacobs said from behind me, cautious but firm.

  “No.” I didn’t bother to look at him. Dr. Jacobs wouldn’t get too close. He knew better than that.

  “Ariane—”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said, shrill, hysterical. “You don’t get to call me that.”

  “All right. 107.” His agreement in that gentle tone somehow made it all so much worse. “You can’t help him. You know that.”

  No, no, no. I turned sharply, scrambling to my feet, fury clearing my head temporarily. I would kill Dr. Jacobs for saying that, for breathing life into that reality with his words. I would stare him down and find his heart and crush it, just like he’d taught me.

  But even as I moved toward him, I felt a sharp stab in my arm and recognized it with depressing familiarity. A needle, in the hand of someone less concerned with precision and more focused on just getting it done. One of the retrieval team members had snuck up behind me.

  Dr. Jacobs’s eyes widened in alarm, and then his face melted away in a blur of colors, cartoon style. “No, that’s too much! With the other suppressant in her system already, she’ll—”

  I didn’t get a chance to hear what I would do. A soft rushing sound rose up to greet me, sounding just like the ocean as I’d imagined it.

  Everything went white, unimaginably bright, and then there was nothing.

  I DIDN’T REMEMBER WAKING UP. There was a blank space, as if the tether of my memories had been severed and I was floating, unaware and free. And then I was blinking up at a ceiling and realizing, slowly, that it was a ceiling.

  A ceiling with a skylight that had a view of a fake night sky, including fake stars. The constellations were wrong.

  That seemed like it should mean something. Like I should recognize it. But my head felt so heavy and full. I tried to reach up to touch it, to find out if it was actually swaddled in bandages or only felt like it, but something clanked and my arm wouldn’t move.

  Glancing down, I discovered my wrists were cuffed to the metal bars on either side of the bed where I was lying. It was a hospital bed. An IV was inserted in the back of my right hand, a clear line leading up to two plastic bags of fluid secured to a hook on the wall.

  I reached for those bags with my mind, a half-formed idea of reading the labels or possibly ripping them open, but nothing happened. It was like running into a wall.

  And slowly I started to put the pieces together. The dull thickness coating my brain probably meant whatever was in those IVs had tamped down my ability.

  “Oh, good, you’re awake,” a familiar voice said with some relief.

  With an effort, I turned my head to the left. An observation window dominated that wall. Behind the glass was Dr. Jacobs, his hair sticking up in all directions and his lab coat torn. I’d never seen him look so out of sorts.

  I frowned, trying to understand what was going on. This room wasn’t familiar, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t part of GTX. Had I been at GTX? I struggled to pull up my last memory.

  “You gave us quite a scare,” Dr. Jacobs said jovially, but his smile didn’t extend to his eyes.

  “Where am I?” I asked, my tongue unwieldy and less than cooperative. “What happened?”

  “You had an adverse reaction to the additional sedatives. Your heart slowed, almost stopped. Dr. Laughlin offered his facility, as it was closer. You would have died if we’d tried to wait.” He grimaced, as if my near demise had been such an inconvenience. Which, to him, it probably had been. Only the imminent prospect of my death, and therefore his automatic disqualification from the trials, would have forced him to accept his competitor’s hospitality. And Laughlin was, no doubt, gloating about it already.

  The memories I’d been searching for suddenly flooded into place. The parking lot. Ford. The exchange. Nixon dying. A second shot. Blood.

  I sat up, or tried; the metal restraints screeched against the bars on the side of the bed. “Zane?”

  Dr. Jacobs’s mouth tightened, and the silence that ensued was answer enough.

  My mouth opened in a silent cry of anguish before I could stop it. “What happened? Did you just leave him there?” My imagination supplied an image of Zane lying on the ground, dying alone with no one to at least hold his hand, as black SUVs and vans rushed past.

  “I tried to warn you,” Dr. Jacobs said sadly. “You aren’t meant for life outside.”

  I wanted to hate him, to seethe and scream at him. But when I looked down at myself, still dressed in my filthy clothes and Zane’s blood coating my hands, how could I argue?

  I had Zane’s blood on my hands, literally and figuratively. Even if it was Dr. Jacobs’s fault, I was the one who’d led Zane into it, who hadn’t sent him home when I should have, who kept him for myself when I knew what that would likely mean for him.

  Dr. Jacobs was still talking in that mournful tone that also managed to be condescending, but I tuned him out, lifting my hand to stare at the blood dried in the lines of my palm and in the edges of my fingernails. It was as if the blood had tried to find a way into a living body and failed, instead pressing itself against my skin as closely possible.

  Above that, several dingy square bandages covered the inside of my arm. Laughlin’s sample sites. I hadn’t noticed them before, at the meet up. But he wouldn’t have missed that opportunity. I lamented that none of them were close enough to where Zane’s blood might have found entry. Where he might live on in me, in some small way.

  I turned away from the observation window as best as I could, hot tears rolling down my cheeks and onto the pillow, dampening it beneath my face. A huge emptiness swelled inside me and I just wanted it to swallow me whole. To take me in so I could get lost inside of it. Just be gone, so I wouldn’t have to feel anymore.

  But, of course, that didn’t happen. I was still stuck here, trapped in this facility, in this bed, in this life that I didn’t choose for myself.

  “How is our patient?” I recognized Dr. Laughlin’s voice. He must have joined Dr. Jacobs behind the observation window.

  “She’s awake, responsive,” Dr. Jacobs said grudgingly.

  “Excellent! So happy we could be of service to you,” Laughlin said.

  “It wouldn’t have been necessary if your man hadn’t overreacted and given her too much—”

  “He was responding to a threat with nonlethal force, as you requested. Clearly, your system of control is less than reliable. Then again, if you had more than one product to rely upon—”

  They sniped back and forth, taking swipes at each other’s methodology and “products,” and then it got personal.

  “You were always a poor student,” Dr. Jacobs snapped. “Too eager to advance, never taking the time to think things through.”

  “Says the jealous old man,” Laughlin retorted. “Left behind the times with his old ideas and his backward philosophies.”

/>   I closed my hands into fists, feeling Zane’s blood sticky between my fingers. This was a game to them. A competition. One-upmanship. This had nothing to do with me. Or Ford. Or Zane.

  They just wanted to win. To beat the other guy. And neither one of them cared what they did to us in the process.

  Something inside me shifted, and a hard, cold piece that had formerly bumped and rubbed, never quite fitting in, clicked into place.

  End them. That cool inhuman voice inside of me spoke up, and the pain in my heart eased slightly. Fury and hurt converting to something icy, clinical, and more manageable than all these feelings. All this overwhelming humanness.

  You can do it, the voice said, getting stronger. My alien side was taking over, and I welcomed it. But first you have to win.

  I’d been so focused on escaping the trials, I’d never considered another option. They’d taken escape away from me, killed my hope. But that didn’t mean they’d beaten me. Far from it.

  If I cooperated now, if I worked to win the trials, I would gain some measure of trust. Perhaps even a portion of freedom, having proven myself. And then I would use that freedom to destroy them all. Dr. Jacobs, Dr. Laughlin, Ford, Carter, myself. The entire program.

  That was the only way to end this, the only way any of us would ever truly be free. They’d never let us go. Ever. And if we could never truly have lives, if we were only ever to be symbols of their ego, pawns on their board, then what was the point of pretending? Pretending only brought more pain.

  A quick flash of Zane’s smile, his gray-blue eyes regarding me with warmth, slipped across my mind.

  Pretending had brought me to Zane, and my pretending that we could be together in any real way had taken him away from me.

  No. I shook my head, the pillow crinkling beneath me. I was done with pretending.

  I’d failed Zane, but I wouldn’t fail in this. And I wouldn’t die trying, either.

  A slow smile spread across my face, autonomic almost, painless and joy free. I would die succeeding, in this one thing at least.