Project Paper Doll: The Trials (5 page)

He released me, shaking his hand as if touching me had in some way contaminated his skin. I’d never seen him this agitated. Normally, the angrier he was, the more pleasant he got. When the
man smiled, it was absolutely terrifying.

But this…this reaction was something else.

As the guards exited the elevator and fanned out in what proved to be another service corridor, I studied Jacobs, rubbing my forearm. He wore an outdated suit (that still screamed money) beneath
his pristine, white lab coat, his cheeks were flushed, and his forehead was damp with perspiration.

Either he was coming down with a deadly disease (fingers crossed!) or this was Dr. Jacobs being nervous. I wanted to enjoy his misery, but if he was worried, I wasn’t sure what that meant
for me. His thoughts were too jumbled and buzzy with adrenaline for me to read.

He reached into a white plastic bag resting on an abandoned room service cart behind him, pulled out a bundle of bright red fabric, and thrust it at me.

I took it reluctantly. Unfolded, it proved to be a sweatshirt with
UW
–
MADISON
in big white letters across the front. The letters were soft
around the edges from wear, and the cuffs were ragged. This was definitely not new.

I glanced at him in question, and he held up an equally battered backpack. Not mine. This one was dark blue with a tiny, yellow Minion figure dangling from a keychain attached to the hook strap
at the top. From the shape of the bag, it appeared to be full of books or something equally weighty. That was…strange.

“It’s not ideal, I realize,” Dr. Jacobs said. “But it will have to do. We had a fully detailed and tailored navy uniform all ready for you, but the location was
not—” He cut himself off.

Ah, the venue change from this morning. Evidently Jacobs had assumed we’d be at a military base of some kind. That, or he’d gotten bad intel. Either way, that explained his foul mood
and the delay while he scrambled for a Plan B.

“Just put it all on.” Jacobs dropped the bag at my feet, where it landed with a solid thud. “These, too.” He fished a small, familiar-looking package from his lab coat
pocket: tinted contact lenses, the same brand I’d worn every day for years.

He tossed them at me, and I caught them automatically.

But when I hesitated, still trying to piece together what was going on here, Jacobs waved a hand at me, as if that would cause some kind of magical transformation, instant wardrobe shift, and I
felt a flash of anger.

I’d crossed a lot of lines in pursuit of my goal, and I’d given up a lot of things; rather, I’d had them taken from me. Freedom, individuality, basic human rights (assuming I
was entitled to them). Changing my appearance on command was a relatively small straw by comparison, but it felt like the last one. I was not a toy, not a lab monkey to be dressed up and paraded
around for the mockery and pleasure of others.

But I was so close to the end, just minutes away from the meeting that would change everything. What was one more violation if it got me closer to my objective?

Gritting my teeth, I turned my back on Jacobs and the guards. I pulled the sweatshirt over my head first. It smelled faintly of bonfire smoke and spicy deodorant, but not unpleasantly so. And it
was about three sizes too big; my arms swam in the armholes, and the hem dropped halfway down to my knees.

I ignored the backpack at my feet for the moment and concentrated next on carefully tearing open the packaging on the contact lenses. I was used to doing this at the bathroom counter with a
mirror in front of me, so it took me an extra few seconds to figure out how to juggle the packages and then get the lenses in my eyes without a guide.

Eyes watering fiercely, I bent down and scooped the backpack off the floor and jammed the empty lens packaging in a front pocket that was empty but for what appeared to be a half-eaten granola
bar. Lovely.

I turned and faced my audience.

Dr. Jacobs looked me up and down in evaluation. His lips pursed in displeasure.

“Pull your hair up.” He fished around in his pocket and pulled out a dirty green rubber band that looked as though it had recently been wrapped around mail or something.

“What exactly is the point of this?” I asked, hoisting the backpack onto my shoulder and then gathering my heavy hair into a rough ponytail. Were we going to be judged by our ability
to assemble a ridiculous ensemble from items from the lost and found?

“No,” he snapped. “Braid it.”

“I don’t know how,” I said through clenched teeth. I hated him so much, sometimes it felt as if it were burning a hole outward through my chest.

He paused, seemingly mystified by this gap in my education.

“Not a lot of slumber parties in my recent past, remember?” I asked.

He heaved an impatient sigh. “I don’t care what you do with it. Just make it look normal.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. As if I hadn’t been trying to do that for most of my life, with little success. “Is this a costume party?” I asked, wrenching my hair up
into the barely contained ponytail I’d worn to school every day back in my “real” life. “I’m going to look like a little kid playing dress-up.”

He pursed his lips. “It doesn’t matter, 107. The point is simply for them not to recognize you for what you are.”

I raised my eyebrows. Wasn’t the whole point of this to show us off?

With some impatience and more than a little pride, he explained, “We’re emphasizing our strengths.”

“By dressing me in someone else’s clothes?” I asked slowly.

When that wasn’t enough, he elaborated impatiently. “We want to give them a chance to see what they’re getting, 107. First impressions are everything, and we want to win them
over as close to the start as possible by demonstrating our advantage.”

And Jacobs’s big advantage in me? That I already knew: I played human far better than Ford.

I stared at Dr. Jacobs. That was his magical plan? I was going to walk in and…out-human her? By what? Looking normal and harmless, I suppose. It was either the most brilliant or
ridiculously stupid scheme in the history of such things. And in other circumstances, where I didn’t intend to strike first, it might well have gotten me killed by giving off “easy
target” vibes.

“Sounds great,” I said in response to his questioning look. Whatever. I wasn’t here to see him succeed in selling me.

I managed to get my hair somewhat under control, though the individual strands would continue to frizz and wave without the addition of product.

“Good enough,” Jacobs said in a tone that suggested anything but. He took my elbow, pulling me along down the hall, toward a door I hadn’t noticed until now.

“Just remember,” he said to me as the guards fell in behind us. “You’re a regular human.” A vein in his forehead, throbbing and blue, pulsed with intensity behind
his words, as if it might burst at any second.

This from the man who’d done everything he could to take that “regular” humanity away from me, to remind me that I had no right to it?

The urge to help that vein on its way to an embolism
right now
seized me, but I resisted. Barely. The idea, though, made me smile, twisting my mouth into something ugly. And I found I
didn’t care anymore.

I wanted to defeat Dr. Jacobs, to stand over him in triumph.

Or, okay, at the very least, see him howling in immense pain and possibly—no, definitely, bleeding.

See? Compromise. That really is the key to success.

T
HE DOOR
D
R
. J
ACOBS PULLED
me through led to, what else, another hallway. This one, though, was in the
hotel proper. Music played faintly in the distance, and my feet, which were still in my old Chucks, sank into plush carpet. Dim, soothing lighting, a harsh contrast to the brightly lit service
corridor, made it difficult for me to see more than a few feet ahead.

Fortunately, we weren’t going far. Dr. Jacobs headed toward the first door on the left, marked
THE MEADOWLANDS
. It was a glossy wooden door, not the banged-up,
overpainted versions I’d seen in the service portions of the hotel, and it was closed, with another pair of black-clad guards in front of it.

But as we approached, they didn’t move away or defer to Dr. Jacobs as I would have expected.

“Let us pass,” Jacobs said through clenched teeth.

It was only then that I noticed the bright blue logo of Laughlin Integrated on their sleeves. Oh, now it was a party. BYOST. Bring Your Own Security Team.

They backed up a step reluctantly, so much so that I wondered if Laughlin had given them specific instructions to give Jacobs a hard time.

“Wait out here,” he said to the four GTX sentinels behind us. Then he barged between Laughlin’s men, pulling me after him by the arm.

The handle turned easily, not locked, and I held my breath, not sure what to expect, as Jacobs yanked the door back and crossed the threshold, letting go of me as soon as I was in the room.

I resisted the urge to rub my arm as my eyes adjusted to the much brighter fluorescent light inside. Whatever I’d been anticipating, it wasn’t this.

Three long tables covered in white tablecloths were arranged in a U-shape, with a fourth table at the front of the room. The tablecloth on the fourth table was black, though, which made it seem
more important.

Each table held a pyramid of shining drinking glasses and a sweating pitcher of water. A whiteboard, housed in a large wooden cabinet with the doors partially open, dominated the far wall,
behind the head table. Glass decanters of juice, a tray of muffins, and a bowl of fruit held prominent position on a built-in counter to my right.

All absurdly normal. Almost insultingly so, considering why we were there.

That is, until you lingered long enough to pick up on the massive waves of tension rolling through the space.

The man closest to us was at the bottom table in the U by himself. He looked over his shoulder at us briefly and then resumed studying the phone in front of him, as if urgently awaiting a call
or text or the summons to raid in
Book of Heroes
. He was younger than both Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Laughlin, who was what my friend Jenna’s mother would have called “well
preserved.” This guy was probably in his late thirties. His dark hair was rumpled, and his leg was jouncing with anxiety, making the glasses on his table wobble and clink in their
formation.

I frowned. This must be Emerson St. John. Something about him seemed familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why or how I would know him. Dr. Jacobs would certainly never have let him in the
GTX lab. But where was his “product”? Was St. John already disqualified in some way?

On the right side of the U, several faces I knew stared back at me. One I knew
very
well. Ford, my clone for lack of a better term, stood on the inside of the semicircle created by the
furniture arrangement, next to Carter. They were wearing their school uniforms: white shirts beneath blue blazers with a plaid skirt for Ford and khakis for Carter. Laughlin’s attempt, no
doubt, to make them seem relatable and human. If anything, it emphasized how human they were not. The dark blue of the coats only made their hair look whiter and their skin more gray. The
preternatural stillness they…we have was so much more noticeable in isolation.

Full-blooded humans twitch, sigh, bite their nails, expressing their anxiety in motion. We are the opposite. It had taken many years for me to adapt to that particular quirk, to create one of my
own. Now I bite my lip out of habit, rather than imitation, but it hadn’t started that way.

Ford glanced over her shoulder at me, her expression flat. She looked harder or sharper somehow, as if the last weeks had compressed her from raw material into something more deadly. Grayish
blue circles marred the skin beneath her eyes, and a new hash mark decorated her cheek.

It hurt to see those marks on her face, a reminder of what had been lost. One for Johnson, the hybrid who’d been eliminated when she couldn’t blend in at school, and the other for
Nixon.

Nixon.
He’d never had a chance. To survive or actually live. I wondered if they’d preserved his body in the gallery with all the others, leaving him permanently staring out at
the quarters where he’d once lived.

Ford gave no acknowledgement of our previous acquaintance. Angry at me, perhaps, for our failed attempt at rebellion, the one that had cost her Nixon. Carter, though, greeted me with the corner
of his mouth lifting in the tiniest of smiles.

He, too, looked weary and paler than usual. Whatever he and Ford had been through since I’d seen them last had taken its toll. The fact that he was still capable of smiling made me hate
everyone else in the room just that much more. He deserved better than this. We all did.

At the table, Dr. Laughlin cleared his throat, glaring at Ford and Carter and jerking his head in an indication that they should both face forward. His two assistants, dark haired, beautiful,
and strikingly similar, sat up straighter, their tablets at the ready for any words of wisdom he might drop.