Project Paper Doll: The Trials (2 page)

Here’s the funny thing, though: once the worst has actually happened—well, what you thought was the worst, anyway—you learn that that line was only a low watermark, an
indicator of your own naiveté. The idea that there is a cap to the horribleness that can happen to you is ridiculous.

It can always get worse. A lot worse. I know that now. Back in that parking lot by the Illinois border, when I was caught between Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Laughlin with Zane looking on, I’d have
leaped into the black unmarked van with the retrieval team to come here—hell, I’d have driven myself—if I’d known what was going to happen instead. There is no maximum
threshold for the worst that can happen to you. To believe otherwise is just daring someone to prove you wrong.

Those who would want to show you the opposite, that life can be better than you’d ever imagined, were few and far between.

One fewer now.

At the thought of Zane, a horrible pang of longing and sadness struck my heart with unerring accuracy. But I pushed it away, trying to refocus on the cool, emotion-deadened spot inside me, the
one that had opened up shortly after I’d awakened in Laughlin’s facility with an IV in my arm and Zane’s blood all over my hands.

Ford, my counterpart at Laughlin’s company (and probably my clone, if such a thing were possible), made it look so easy—just stop caring. Do what needs doing. Shut off the
consequences and the fear and the guilt.

I’d managed to do exactly that for a while, but the relief of that emptiness wasn’t to be found today, not with anxiety and anticipation warring within me, my body tired and my
concentration stretched too thin.

Not to mention the all-too-familiar high-pitched nattering filling my ears.

“—and then Cami told me what Trey said. Too high maintenance to be worth it? Seriously? What does that even mean?”

My eyes snapped open against my will on the down motion of a sit-up, showing me Rachel Jacobs perched, as usual, on a swivel chair just outside the glass door to my room. With her ankle wrapped
around one of the casters to control her movement, she spun a few inches back and forth, like a child.

She’d been here every day after school for hours, for almost two weeks now. Dr. Jacobs’s master plan. Forget waterboarding, spikes under my fingernails, or strategic electrocution;
Rachel’s presence was worse punishment than any of those. She was a constant reminder of my old life, what I’d had and lost, what I’d deluded myself into thinking could be mine
forever. It was a finger poking into a still bloody wound, making it impossible to ignore.

I hated it. I hated her.

Which was exactly what I suspected Dr. Jacobs wanted. I just wasn’t sure why.

“Someone to keep you company,” he’d announced cheerily before her first visit, and damn him and my stupid broken heart that wouldn’t stop hoping for miracles, I’d
thought for a second that maybe it was my father or somehow…Zane. Even though I’d left him bleeding out on the pavement in a Wisconsin park.

But then Rachel had entered the hallway beyond my cell in a swirl of her trademark red. Dr. Jacobs set her up in the chair outside my door and left before I could pin down his thoughts beyond
the noise of Rachel’s. My telepathy was spotty at best, even worse around a broadcaster like her. She was so loud; she drowned out everyone else.

Rachel had glared after him, still pissed, but she sat down, anyway. He was, after all, paying her to be there, according to her thoughts. All she had to do was talk. And she hadn’t shut
up since.

“Just because I know what I want,” Rachel continued huffily. “What’s wrong with that?”

Rachel shook her head as though I’d responded, her shiny dark hair tumbling forward over her shoulder as she tapped away at her phone. I didn’t know what she was doing; it
wasn’t as if she could get any kind of signal down here.

I imagined the flood of waiting texts that would soar from her phone, like evil flying monkeys released from the holding pen of her outbox, the second she ascended to a point where phone service
kicked back in.

“And then Trey wouldn’t even apologize! He acted like I was the one with the problem. He’s never done that before.” She sounded almost hurt, if she were capable of such
emotion.

In the beginning, Rachel had done exactly as I’d expected, taunted me, said every mean thing she could think of, even repeated a few that she was particularly proud of. All trying to
provoke a reaction, just because she could. She thought she was safe on the other side of the door. She wasn’t, but I had zero interest in diverting my focus just to scare her. (Okay, the
thought did cross my mind, but only for a moment. I didn’t want to give Dr. Jacobs the satisfaction.)

After a few days of insults and taunts, though, something changed. It was as if Rachel had forgotten I was there or she didn’t care. She’d turned the threshold of my cell into a
confessional, treating these afternoons like one long series of free therapy sessions. Either way, for some reason, her monologues were harder for me to ignore.

Maybe because they showed she was human, much to my dismay. (I was half human, after all, and frankly that was already too much in common with her.) Or maybe because, as usual, Rachel had no
idea that what she bitterly complained about were things others would be overjoyed to have.

Like the guy who loved her still being alive but shunning her (rightly so) for being too demanding.

“I mean, whatever. It’s not like I care or anything,” she continued in that tone that screamed anything but. She was a child who wanted sympathy over a toy she’d broken
herself.

Rage welled in me, breaking past the barriers I’d erected so carefully over the last few weeks, and spilling into the empty, emotion-free zone.

Zane was
dead
. He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was there because he’d cared about me. And Rachel was bitching because she couldn’t manipulate Trey
into playing one of her popularity games? The injustice of it made me want to scream until I was hoarse.

“His loss, you know?” she continued, blithely unaware. “I can do better.”

As if love was disposable, easily discarded and forgotten, just as easily replaced.

Maybe for
her
. My one chance was gone.

My control splintered. Overhead, one end of the cot dipped alarmingly. I yanked my legs out of the way a bare second before the cot clattered to the floor in front of me. In the corner, books
thumped to the floor, pages making a ruffling noise. Then I whipped around to face Rachel.

“Trey’s worshipped you for years and you treat him like crap, like he’s yours to do with you as you please,” I snapped, frustrated with myself for responding and yet
unable to stop it. “What did you expect?”

Rachel froze, her fingers still poised over her phone. Then she raised her eyebrows. “It speaks,” she said, with a sniff of disdain. “Guess you’re not brain damaged, just
a freak still.”

I flopped back on the floor, cursing myself for breaking. “Go away.”

She gave a harsh laugh. “Believe me, I’d love to. You don’t think I have better things to do with my time?”

“No,” I said flatly. Rachel, for all her willingness to express her opinion and dictate to others what theirs should be, seemed to be lacking a sympathetic (or unresponsive) ear to
listen to her discuss all the endless trouble in her life. She gave me a hostile look. “I’m not getting paid enough for this,” she announced to no one in particular and everyone
within hearing range before returning her attention to her phone.

But once I’d opened up the barrier—burst through the waxen layers of resistance and determination that had distanced me from Rachel—I couldn’t reseal it.

I sat up. “Does of any of this even register with you?” I asked, sweeping my hand in a gesture that encompassed my cell, the observation window above, and pretty much the entirety of
the corporation, levels above me. “People are going to die because your grandfather and Dr. Laughlin are determined to one-up each other.”

The trials, in theory, were a competition to determine who had the best product, a term they used to describe genetically engineered alien/human hybrids like me. The prize: a lucrative
government contract to create a whole line of soldier/assassins of the not-quite-human variety, according to Dr. Jacobs. The losing products would not survive. They would either die in the
competition or be destroyed afterward. No reason to keep them around.

There were three companies competing. I didn’t know who Dr. St. John would send, if anyone. (Jacobs didn’t seem concerned about him.) But I knew it was me from GTX and likely Ford
from Laughlin Integrated. Laughlin and Jacobs had a history, hating each other for past sins and slights and using us to act in their stead in this grudge match.

It was more than a contract at stake here; it was pride and ego. And those were far worse.

Ford and I, sisters of a sort, would end up at each other’s throats, perhaps literally, vying to win. Ford, because she would fight until the end to save the only other hybrid we knew of,
Carter. And I would kill to end this program, to destroy us all and the ones who’d made us. In fact, I’d
already
killed for that cause, as much as my mind tried to shy away from
that memory.

The only question was which of us—Ford or me—would succeed. And it had to be me. If I was going to die—and that was a certainty, only the timing was in doubt—then it
needed to count for something.

I pictured Ford on the ground, her face, identical to mine, turning red and then shades of purple, veins bulging as she struggled to breathe while I held her heart still in my mental grasp. Now
that I’d actually done it—stopped a beating human heart—it was all too easy for me to picture.

A wave of sadness washed over me. Even in trying to do the right thing, Ford and I would both end up hurting each other instead of the people who deserved it.

I definitely didn’t wish Ford dead. She and Carter were the closest thing I had to family. I didn’t like Ford, exactly—she was difficult and strange—but I admired her.
She hadn’t had it any easier than me, living in Laughlin’s facility and forced to attend school as part of a humanizing effort, all the while trying to protect her
“siblings.” She’d never had a chance at true freedom, either. But the photo of a gorgeous lake surrounded by mountains—somewhere in Utah, maybe?—that she’d
hidden away in the cubby where she slept told me that she’d dreamed about it, at least.

“Not
real
people,” Rachel muttered defiantly, meeting my gaze with a challenge in her eyes.

It took me a second, lost in my thoughts as I was, to put Rachel’s words in context.

I stiffened. People were going to die, but they weren’t real people to Rachel. I wasn’t a real person.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise she held that opinion. A lot of people involved in Project Paper Doll, including Zane’s mother, Mara, shared it. And yet hearing those words from Rachel
sliced at me. I’d been in classes with her. She’d known me as Ariane Tucker before she knew I was GTX-F-107.

I pushed myself up off the floor, ignoring my overworked muscles, and approached the door.

“You think this is about aliens and hybrids and creepy crawlies made in a lab?” I demanded.

Rachel pushed her chair back until it slammed into the bottom step leading from the hallway above, and then she jumped up, as if she might run. As if that would save her. “Stay
away,” she said, her hands clutched tight around her phone, her life preserver of normal in the ocean of alien strangeness around her.

I leaned against the glass door, pressing my palms flat on it, the lines on them the same as hers, as human as hers. “They’re going to use us as assassins, spies, and
mercenaries,” I said, staring her down, knowing the fear and discomfort my too-dark and almost irisless eyes provoked in people. “Who exactly do you think we’re going to be
killing and spying on, Rachel? Not other ‘freaks’ like us.”

She stumbled up the first step and glared at me, hating me for making her afraid. “God, Ariane, okay. What do you expect me to do about it?”

“I don’t know. Care about someone other than yourself. Or pretend, at least.” I turned away from the door and her beyond it, returning to my place on the shiny white floor,
near my now-overturned cot.

I waved my hand at the cot, flipping it upright easily and then lifting it up toward the ceiling again, and prepared to resume my physical training.

Push-ups, maybe. My upper body strength was definitely lacking, my bones too fragile to support much of the muscle development. But every bit would help, especially against Ford, someone who
was, in all likelihood, my exact match in strength and abilities. It would come down to some less definable element—surprise or willpower or cunning.

I couldn’t let it be Ford. This had to end. Jacobs and Laughlin, they couldn’t be allowed to keep using us, taking from us.

An image of Zane’s face, a smile pulling at his mouth as he leaned over me, flashed across my mind.

“Did you know they’re having a memorial service at school on Monday?” Rachel asked, startling me. She’d been so quiet I’d assumed she’d stormed off in a huff
to report me to her grandfather. Instead, a quick glance in her direction showed her back in her chair, albeit still pushed away from the door. “For Zane, I mean,” she added.

My heart stuttered. I’d been expecting this or something like it for weeks now, ever since Dr. Jacobs, in one of his many attempts to elicit a reaction from me, had broken the news that no
one could find Zane. But somehow the expectation hadn’t prepared me for the reality of hearing those words.

I sat back on my knees and lowered the cot to the ground quickly before it could crash again. “What?” My voice sounded rough even to my ears.

“Well, I guess it’s not really a memorial service,” she said in a considering tone. “Since they didn’t…they haven’t found his body.” She winced
visibly.

I stared at Rachel, making an effort this time to hear her emotions and thoughts as well as her words. Grief mixed with anger, cloudy and pervasive, pulsed through her. “Why are you
telling me this?” I asked.