Project Paper Doll: The Trials

by Stacey Kade

  Copyright © 2015 by Stacey Kade

  Cover photography © 2015 by Michael Frost

  Cover design by Tyler Nevins

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-1940-4

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Ariane Tucker

  Chapter 1: Ariane Tucker

  Chapter 2: Ariane

  Chapter 3: Ariane

  Chapter 4: Zane Bradshaw

  Chapter 5: Ariane

  Chapter 6: Zane

  Chapter 7: Ariane

  Chapter 8: Zane

  Chapter 9: Ariane

  Chapter 10: Zane

  Chapter 11: Ariane

  Chapter 12: Zane

  Chapter 13: Ariane

  Chapter 14: Zane

  Chapter 15: Ariane

  Chapter 16: Zane

  Chapter 17: Ariane

  Chapter 18: Zane

  Chapter 19: Ariane

  Chapter 20: Zane

  Chapter 21: Zane

  Chapter 22: Ariane

  Epilogue: Ariane

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to you.

  Yes, you, standing (or sitting) right there.

  I love telling stories. Thank you for letting me.

  Thank you for reading.

  PRIVATE JOSEPH “JOE” ZADOWSKI WAS young, maybe only four or five years older than me. His reddish blond hair was cut short, buzzed on the sides. He was about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than me, though his green fatigues bagged loosely around him, like he was playing dress-up. Freckles stood out as dark splotches against the pale skin of his nose and cheeks.

  He swallowed hard and shifted beneath my gaze. Extended eye contact made most full-blooded humans uncomfortable. Extended eye contact with an unknown quantity (me) while locked in a small cell in a secret lab made them downright jumpy, it seemed.

  But if I was going to do this, I owed it to Joe to remember his face. It would haunt me for the rest of my life. Fortunately I didn’t expect the rest of my life to be all that long. The trials were just weeks away. I’d survive long enough to see my personal mission through, but that was it.

  “They told me you’re dangerous,” Joe blurted, surprising me.

  Interesting. The techs or Dr. Jacobs? Likely the former. I had a hard time imagining Jacobs deigning to meet and greet the human being he’d brought in to serve as a guinea pig.

  “What else did they tell you?” I asked Joe.

  He shifted his weight from foot to foot, his fingers tapping against his leg. I didn’t see a weapon on him, but I suspected that nervous twitch was him wishing he had one. He hadn’t come in farther than was necessary for the door to close behind him. “That, uh, I’m supposed to subdue you by any means necessary.” He produced a pair of clear zip ties from his pocket, a prop provided by Jacobs or the techs. There was no way he’d actually get close enough to use them, even if he didn’t know that.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “107.” Dr. Jacobs’s voice sounded over the intercom in warning.

  Joe jumped. I ignored it. Dr. Jacobs was, I was sure, watching on the monitors in the observation room. The glass wall was opaque at the moment, preventing me from seeing him. But his impatience and eagerness crawled over my skin like a thousand biting ants.

  “And?” I said again to Joe, drawing his attention back to me.

  His expression flashed irritation mixed with fear. “You’ll fight me the whole time, supposedly.” Already he was making assumptions about me, based on my size and gender. Not smart, but inevitable.

  I had just a couple more questions. “You’re a volunteer?” I asked, confirming what I’d been told.

  “Yesss,” he said, drawing out the word, not understanding at all why this was relevant.

  “And they told you you’d be risking your life?” I pressed. More than “risking,” actually, but that wording was the only compromise Dr. Jacobs and I had been able to reach.

  Joe lifted a shoulder in a shrug. Even with the strangeness of the situation and all the unknowns I could hear circulating through his head (What is this place? There’s definitely something wrong with her. Why is she so calm?), he wasn’t nearly as concerned as he should have been.

  “I like my odds,” he said, staring back at me for the first time, his ego rising up against that quiet voice of doubt, the niggling sense that something was “off.” After all, I was just a girl, and a small one at that.

  Oh, Joe.

  “107, time is wasting,” Jacobs snapped over the intercom.

  He must have been running a timer along with the camera that would record what was to transpire. Yes, heaven forbid I did not break world records in speed and manner of killing.

  “You know the consequences if you don’t do as you’re told,” Jacobs continued.

  Without warning, Joe took two large steps toward me, zip ties in hand. Evidently he’d decided enough was enough.

  I let him come at me, feeling a bit of grim enjoyment for the momentary panic that caused on the other side of the observation window, and then slid out of his reach, my back to the opposite wall.

  “Don’t make this difficult,” Joe said, shaking his head with exasperation. The fact that he’d charged at me and nothing had happened—not that he was sure what to expect, exactly—had boosted his confidence.

  Guilt sprang to life in me, throbbing like an infected cut. Delaying wouldn’t change anything, and by doing so I was toying with him, giving him hope where there should be none.

  So, when he came at me again, I stopped him, lifting my hand and directing my power to wrap around him, freezing him mid-lunge. It involved little more than a thought from me, no longer the struggle it had once been.

  “I won’t make it difficult,” I promised him as his eyes bugged out in panic. His muscles tensed, fighting against me as he struggled to free himself. It was pointless, I could have told him. We were both trapped.

  Finding his heart, thumping madly in his chest, wasn’t hard. Neither was the process of stopping it. Just a squeeze of directed power around that muscle, which, though powerful and necessary for life, was no different than any other.

  It’s a necessary evil to save others.

  This is the least of all the atrocities that will be committed if I don’t do this.

  I don’t want to do this.

  But none of those thoughts helped as I watched Joseph “Joe” Zadowski, he of the freckles and the nervous fingers, recognize that something was very, very wrong. His face turned from a flushed red to a disturbing purplish blue as his heart slowed and he stopped trying to escape and worked instead to keep breathing, to keep living. His last thoughts were of his family, a flash of his mother—a woman with graying hair, round cheeks, and a perpetual but tired smile—and a younger brother sticking his hand up to block Joe on the basketball court, a triumphant grin when he succeeded.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my throat tight as Joe’s body sagged in my grip and his eyes closed.

  But I didn’t stop.

  I couldn’t. Not now.

  TWO MORE DAYS. TWO MORE DAYS. Two more days.

  I repeated that refrain in my head, over and over again, blocking the errant thoughts and memorie
s that threatened to interrupt my concentration as I pushed myself through another round of sit-ups on the shiny white floor of my cell.

  I’d kept a running countdown of days, based on the cycle of the lights in my room and the dates I’d overheard from the staff. It had been almost a month since my return to GTX.

  Almost a month since the parking lot. Almost a month since Zane’s blood on my hands, so red and wet…

  I squeezed my eyes shut, focusing harder on the burn in my stomach muscles and the dull ache in my head from the strain of pushing my abilities too far, too fast. I could no longer see my metal-framed cot swaying above me, held there by the force of my mind, but I could feel it pulling at that part of my brain, like a weight attached to a limb not quite accustomed to bearing the burden.

  In the far corner behind me, a stack of books, a much lighter target, was also levitating near the ceiling, theoretically. I’d turned my attention away once I’d lifted them off the ground, relying on my ability to keep them up without my gaze on them, a stretch for me. A second stack waited in front of me for similar treatment, though I hadn’t managed two at once (plus the cot) yet.

  I was improving but not fast enough. Time was almost up. I needed to be ready; I needed to be better. The trials would start the day after tomorrow somewhere in the Chicago area.

  I was pretty sure.

  One of the disadvantages of being a mouse in a GenTex cage is that people don’t exactly bother to keep you in the loop. They probably thought it didn’t matter. After all, I was just “the product.” It wasn’t as if I could do anything to change my situation.

  Sometimes I thought the uncertainty would kill me before anyone else had the chance.

  Until recently, I’d never thought much about dying. That sounded great, enlightened even, like a lack of concern about my own mortality was a gift of higher spiritual knowledge via my alien half. But to be honest, that had nothing to do with it.

  The truth was there were things worse than death. I’d been far more worried about ending up back in the small white room where I’d lived the first six years of my life, longing to see the world outside.

  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.