Project Paper Doll: The Trials (7 page)

“Zane?” I asked, my voice hoarse and scared sounding.

He didn’t move, but his gaze flicked to mine for the barest of seconds. Any farther from him and I probably wouldn’t have seen it.

He knew his name, at least. But that appeared to be it. The look he’d given me had held no recognition or significance.

Knock, knock, knock, but nobody’s home.

My knees wobbled, weak suddenly, as a huge, wrenching sob rolled out of me, catching me by surprise before I could stop it.

Not that it mattered. The GTX guards were on me seconds later, pulling at my arms and shoulders, tugging me away.

No. I fought out of instinct, breathing hard and fast through my mouth, like an animal in attack mode. I pushed back against every hand on me, throwing them off me.

One of the men flew into Laughlin’s table, colliding with it hard and setting off a chain reaction. The glass pitcher and glasses hit the floor, and Laughlin scrambled out of the way, his
assistants following with a shriek as the table collapsed.

Then, without moving from where he stood, Zane reached out and righted the man without touching him, pulling him away from the table and the glass shards with telekinesis as naturally and easily
as if he’d been born to do it.

I froze, adrenaline thundering in my veins and air trapped in my chest.

Oh. Oh no. What had they done to him?

The GTX guards grabbed me again, but I didn’t fight this time, my mind reeling from the possible implications. Zane shouldn’t have been able to do that. What did it mean that he
could? Was the Zane I knew still in there somewhere? Or was this some new version? Someone molded and fashioned to be like me, just to prove St. John’s point?

“I think perhaps it’s best if we postpone the remainder of this meeting until it can be held without disruption,” Morpheus said with obvious disapproval.

“Wait! That’s not necessary,” Dr. Jacobs protested immediately, with desperation and fury in his voice. “My product is perfectly stable. She was reacting only to this
ridiculous stunt.” He threw Dr. St. John a glare that would have melted glass. St. John didn’t seem to care; if anything, he was amused.

But when Morpheus nodded at the GTX guards holding me, they dragged me toward the door.

Somewhere inside me, I was dimly aware that I was losing my chance, my opportunity to end Project Paper Doll in one fell swoop, but I didn’t care in that moment. How could I when I
didn’t know if Zane was okay, if that person standing there wearing his face could even still be considered—

TOMORROW MORNING. WEST ENTRANCE.

The words boomed and echoed in my head as my guard entourage and I reached the doors. I flinched at the volume, costing me the extra second I needed to realize that I knew that voice.

Zane.
He wanted to meet.

Except as the guards opened the door and pulled me over the threshold, Zane gave no sign of attempting to communicate with me. No look in my direction, no wink or smile, no further attempt to
think words at me loudly enough for me to hear them. Actually, I could get nothing from his mind, which had never been the case before. And certainly shouldn’t have been the case now, if he
really wanted to “talk” to me.

That’s when I realized that the message I’d received could just as easily be interpreted as a challenge: St. John’s special model calling out Dr. Jacobs’s product for a
one-on-one elimination.

My heart collapsed in on itself, extinguishing the tiny flicker of hope.

A challenge was logical, far more so than any other explanation that I would have preferred. And recognizing that was like living through Zane’s death all over again. Only so much
worse.

Because, this time, as the conference room doors closed after us, he was standing right there, just a few feet away and completely unreachable all at the same time.

T
HE SCAR ON MY STOMACH
still burned and itched sometimes. But the fact that it was a scar and not a gaping wound with the accompanying destroyed muscles
and organs—or worse, a stitched-up hole on my very uncaring corpse—was enough to keep my mouth shut with gratitude. Most of the time.

But it always got worse when I was stressed. Like now.

“He should have been back already,” I said, resisting the urge to dig at the raised edge of the scar as I paced the plush hotel room that had been assigned to me, twenty stories
above the conference room where my fate as a trials competitor was being decided. I swore I could detect the tingling of little foreign cells zooming around beneath my skin, dodging my slower human
ones. Emerson said it was my imagination, or possibly nerve damage that was still healing. I wasn’t so sure about either of those explanations.

I
felt
different. And it wasn’t just the itchy/tingling scar or even the occasional unintelligible buzz of other people’s thoughts in my head. For the first time in my life, I
wasn’t struggling to keep up, to be better. I just was. The abilities, the powers I’d gained, made me see the world from a new perspective, one in which I had more control than
I’d ever dreamed.

I could do things no other human on the planet—except Adam—could do.

But that only made helpless moments like these, where I had zero control, that much harder to bear.

Lifting my hand to direct my power, I took my frustration out on the room drapes, using my newly acquired abilities to jerk them back along the track set in the ceiling and let in the last of
the daylight. But the tiny burst of satisfaction that came along with every demonstration of skill vanished almost immediately.

“It’s only been fifteen minutes, bro,” Adam said from where he leaned against the opposite wall. He sounded, even looked, bored, but it was an act. He had almost as much at
stake as me, and if you knew him well enough—as I now unfortunately did from living in close quarters with him at St. John’s lab in Rochester, New York—the forced nature of his
relaxed position was screamingly obvious. Mainly in the way he kept flexing his fists and cracking his knuckles.

“Dude has to justify
you
to everyone,” Adam continued with a smirk. “That’s going to take some time.”

“Shut up,” I snapped, even though he was exactly right. Adam was the more obvious candidate to represent Emerson Technology, Incorporated in the trials in just about every way
possible. He’d been recruited from the army. He’d had years to train and practice for these trials, not to mention the deliberate and gradual introduction of RSTS47—Emerson St.
John’s DNA-altering virus—to his body over the course of many months.

As opposed to dumping a whole bunch of it in at once and hoping for the best.

That was what had happened to me, and Emerson’s impulsive actions had saved me. The bullet wound and the resulting internal injuries had been healed within days.

The virus hadn’t been created for healing purposes, though; rather, transformative ones. So there were consequences. The least of which was simply that I hadn’t had a chance to
master the new skills I’d acquired. (My show downstairs, pulling the guard to his feet, had been to demonstrate that I possessed the abilities, that I had the right to be present. That was
it, which was good, because that was about all I was capable of. For the moment.)

But Justine, Emerson, and I were hoping that the Committee—as Emerson called them—would be intrigued enough to allow my candidacy, even with the creative answer Emerson had come up
with for my entrance qualifier.

If not, Adam would be sent instead, and while I had no doubt about his ability to win the trials—or at least make a good show of it—I was significantly less sure of his capacity to
accomplish our true mission here. Ariane didn’t trust easily. Or at all, really.

And evidently, Emerson and Justine agreed with me. For now.

“No news is good news at this point,” Justine said without looking up from her phone. “Jacobs is bound to strenuously object to your presence for the effect it will have on
Ariane.”

Her tone was flat, factual without a hint of empathy. But that was just Justine.

Hers was the first voice I’d heard upon waking up three weeks ago. “I don’t care. You weren’t authorized for this.” She, whoever she was, had been pissed about
something.

A doctor?
I had wondered vaguely. I hadn’t been awake, not entirely, my thoughts slipping away from me like those tiny fish in the lake up north, the ones Quinn and I had tried to
catch in our hands when we were little.

Quinn. Something about my brother. What was it? I couldn’t think. My head hurt, as if my skull had swollen to three times the normal size. More disturbingly, there was a low-level hum and
buzz inside my mind.

Then an image clicked into place behind my closed eyes. Quinn, his face pale, his arm in a makeshift sling. He’d been in the hospital? No, I’d been in the hospital. I remembered
that, sort of. The smell of antiseptic; the cool, unfamiliar sheets rough against my skin; and the pain, an unrelenting throb in my left side.

“You wanted a way to get to one of them, Justine. I’m giving it to you,” another voice, male and a little petulant, argued.

“We had people working on it. Now you’ve just compounded the problem. This boy will have people searching for him.” A weird tug at my left arm suggested that by “this
boy” the woman meant me.

“The hospital records have been modified. They’ll think he’s dead,” the man, who’d turned out to be Emerson St. John, had protested.

“Not without a body,” Justine had said, sounding like maybe she intended to make that happen.

I’d opened my eyes right then.

Justine looked like someone’s mom—a little soft through the middle, a rounded face, with dark red hair pulled back into a tight ponytail—and today, at the hotel, she was
dressed like it. A sweatshirt that shouted
GO LIONS
in black and gold lettering, jeans that were too short at the ankles, and bright white Keds, their brilliance suggesting
they were fresh out of the box.

But that outfit, like her appearance, was pure camouflage. Justine “You Don’t Need to Know My Last Name” was a hard-ass connected to DHS. Department of Homeland Security. She
had a badge and everything. Whether it was hers or legit, I had no idea. But motherly looks aside, she was about as comforting as a steel beam, and equally communicative.

“And?” I prompted her. “Or…so?”

She looked up from her phone, her mouth pursed at my willingness to question her. “
So
,” she said, emphasizing my word with clear displeasure, “if St. John isn’t
back yet, that means they’re hearing him out, at least. The argument is still going on.
And
that works to our advantage.”

The Committee had cleared the conference room of all candidates after the GTX guards had hauled Ariane away. Dr. Jacobs had been shouting about my presence being a stunt and insisting that I
could
not
be considered a qualified competitor, all while Laughlin sat back and laughed.

And now Adam and I were stuck waiting to hear the verdict. And not just us. Somewhere in this hotel, Ariane, Ford, and Carter waited too.

Ariane had looked small and tired, like she hadn’t slept since I’d seen her last. She’d been trapped at GTX, forced to do God knows what.…

Pushing that thought away, I stepped up my pacing.

“Hey, if this is all too much for you, I’m ready,” Adam said with a shrug.

I glared at him.

“I’m just saying, any time you want to trade places, assuming you actually end up getting a place, that is…” He trailed off.

“Gentlemen,” Justine said with mild annoyance, barely even looking up from her phone. Of course, she could afford to be calm about this. Regardless of which of us was sent in to the
trials, she still had a chance of getting what she wanted: Ariane.

The funding and the contract behind Project Paper Doll came from the Department of Defense, but the good people at Homeland Security, a separate department entirely, had other plans.

Justine had made promises about Ariane’s future, talked of using her as an expert resource rather than a test subject. She’d hinted that Ariane was needed to help them with some
equipment or documents recovered from the New Mexico desert.

This was my chance to prove myself and make a difference. I wasn’t going to let it go without a fight.

“I still say I can be pretty convincing when I need to be,” Adam said with a leer.

He was trying to get under my skin, provoke a reaction. I knew that, and I still couldn’t stop myself. The buzz of power was like static electricity dancing over my skin. The room lights
flickered in response. That was me, losing control.

But then blood gushed down from my nose to my mouth, and the gathering power dissipated.

Damn it.
I fumbled in my pocket for a tissue. The process had been designed as a gradual one, intended to be administered over weeks instead of hours, as I’d experienced it. So my
head ached now, almost constantly, with frequent nosebleeds when I accessed new parts of my brain that the DNA embedded in the virus had opened pathways to. (I’d spent a decent chunk of each
week staring up at the inside of various diagnostic devices—CT scanners, MRI machines, and others I didn’t even recognize.)