Stacey Kade - The Hunt

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

I took his hand, and we ran like hell.

Zane Bradshaw

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.)

The question was, how long before she realized it and dumped my ass on the side of the road? I grimaced. Or, worse, maybe she’d already put that together and her silence was just her trying to figure out how to tell me.

I shook my head, trying to push down those thoughts. “Almost there,” I said into the quiet, to distract myself and just for something to say. I tapped my thumb against the steering wheel in a nervous fidget. We were well on the Illinois side of the Wisconsin border in a small town. Fox Lake, according to the signs.

Ariane stirred reluctantly in her seat. “We should stop.”

I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right? We’re only forty-five minutes away.” Give or take, according to the map we’d picked up about twenty miles outside of Wingate at an all-night gas station. Without our phones—Ariane had abandoned hers somewhere along the way and she’d removed the battery from mine to prevent them from tracking us—we had to go the low-tech route. No GPS or turn-by-turn directions for us. But considering that we were trying to avoid the most obvious routes into the Chicago area, the map had been more help than I’d expected.

“I don’t think this is the best way to make a first impression,” Ariane said, plucking at the dirt- and blood-smeared front of her formerly white tunic.

“My mom won’t care.” At least, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t, but I hadn’t seen her in more than a year. And in that time, she hadn’t once attempted to contact me, not even over e-mail, where my dad wouldn’t have known about it. I understood why she might feel she couldn’t take me with her—my dad was the chief of police and a local hero. My mom was one of the trailer-trash McDonoughs. If he’d decided to fight her on custody, there would be no question who’d win.

But to not even call? Or send a text?

I felt another sudden flash of anxiety. Maybe this was a mistake. I didn’t know exactly why she’d left. I mean, why that particular night, literally hours before my birthday? My dad claimed that she’d wanted to take me with her, but there really wasn’t much evidence to back that up.

So, we were about to knock on the door of someone who maybe didn’t even want us—well, me—there.

“Besides, it’d be better if this looked more like a surprise visit instead of us fleeing town,” Ariane was saying. “Too many questions otherwise.” She glanced over at me, her unusually dark eyes serious. I was getting used to her natural eye color. There were colored contact lenses in the emergency bag—the same type, presumably, that she’d worn every day to school—but she hadn’t bothered to put them in. I liked that. Made me feel as though she trusted me, as though I was on the inside of this secret and she wanted me there.

I realized she was looking over at me, waiting for a response.

I nodded hastily. She had a point. Explaining everything to my mom would involve either some major eye-opening revelations about the existence of life on other planets that I wasn’t sure Ariane was ready to get into or some quick talking around the facts. Either way, we hadn’t prepped for that. And my mom, no matter how much she may have changed in the last year, was not stupid.