Project Paper Doll: The Trials

by Stacey Kade

  The pressure of her hand on my arm lessened as she loosed her grip and tried to pull away. But she wasn’t going anywhere.

  I turned to face her, holding her frozen.

  The tips of her fingers twitched against my forearm as she struggled to free herself. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she whispered, her eyes wide as she stared at her hand and then at me.

  “No,” I agreed. “You’re not.”

  The college student guy at the table in front of us turned to glance back with a frown, evidently sensing the tension.

  “Leave,” I said, making sure he heard the threat implied in my tone.

  His eyes bugged, but he didn’t move.

  I stared him down. It didn’t take much effort to make full-blooded humans recognize that something wasn’t quite right and that they should listen to the tiny voices in their brains screaming at them to run away.

  College guy scrambled up out of his seat, grabbing his bag and his iPad, leaving his half-finished bagel behind.

  There. That was better. One less witness for whatever I did next.

  “Ariane!” I heard Zane’s voice, breathless, behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him move around the bakery racks toward me.

  “What are you doing?” He approached, his hands out as if to keep me from making a sudden move.

  “She grabbed my arm,” I said flatly, in the same tone I would have said, “I don’t like her.” The two were equivalent in my mind.

  “I see that.” Zane sounded wary. I glanced at him, his face even more flushed, his eyes still oddly dilated. He looked…ill. That’s what had bothered me before. He and Adam, they both looked like they were on the third day of a virus. That had to be a side effect of their alteration. I wondered if it was permanent. Would he always be on the verge of being sick?

  How could that possibly be good for him? Would it eventually work its way through his system?

  The woman grimaced, trying to shift within the field of my power, drawing my attention to her again. I squeezed a little tighter as a reminder that she was not the master of her own destiny at the moment.

  She gasped. “I wasn’t…I just wanted to stop her from leaving.”

  “Ariane doesn’t like to be touched,” Zane said, edging closer with caution, as if I might suddenly lash out at him as well.

  “Noted,” Justine said through clenched teeth. She watched the two of us, her mouth set in grim lines.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, inching toward me, and despite the fact that I still didn’t know what was going on, part of me trembled in anticipation of his nearness.

  “Yeah,” I said. His dilated eyes were alarming at this proximity, just a sliver of the blue-gray left around the edges, and the knuckles on his left hand were bruised and bloodied. “Are you?” I asked.

  He waved his hand dismissively. “I’m fine.”

  I didn’t quite believe him, but for the moment there were greater worries. “What about the trackers? Did you—”

  “It’s taken care of,” he said, waving my words away. “I gave my phone and tag to Adam.”

  I frowned. “Adam? How—”

  The woman cleared her throat loudly, calling our attention to her. “Excuse me. Now that we’ve established that you’re both well and full of cozy puppy feelings, do you think we can move on to releasing me from this lovely little bear trap you’ve created?” Her smiling eagerness had subsided to a general crankiness that pleased me.

  Zane shifted uncomfortably. “Can you let her go?” he asked me.

  Can I? Yes. Would I? Not yet. “Why? Who is she?” I asked.

  A look of exasperation crossed the woman’s face. She didn’t like that we were discussing her as if she weren’t here. But, wisely, she said nothing.

  “This is Justine,” Zane said, raking a hand through his hair. “She’s who I brought you here to meet.”

  I stared at him and took a step back, all my fears returning and my stomach sinking with dread. “You planned this?” I asked, working to keep my voice level. I’d worried that Zane had been changed by whatever St. John had done; I’d never considered that they’d somehow convinced him to switch sides.

  He nodded, and my heart fell.

  “She’s government like the others,” I spat. It was stamped all over her, now that I knew to look for it. The hardness in her expression that suggested she was used to getting what she wanted. I’d seen it at times even in my father, who was accustomed to giving orders to teams beneath him both at GTX and in his former military life.

  “No, not like the others,” Justine said quickly.

  Zane shook his head. “She’s not. She’s been working with Emerson—Dr. St. John—to try to reach you and get you out.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Right.” As if there could be a fairy-tale ending to this one, a winged godmother—albeit a seemingly grumpy one—appearing out of nowhere to grant my fondest wish.

  “Just hear her out,” Zane said. “Okay?” His strangely dilated eyes met mine, pleading with me. Then he held his hand out, palm up, a gesture of peace…or a reminder of our first “date.” When I’d first trusted him and taken his hand. I wanted to have that same sense of trust again.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to let go of my suspicions and take his hand. Not yet.

  Listening, however, felt manageable. “Fine.” I released the field around Justine, and her hand dropped off my arm, but with no force to counterbalance her weight, she toppled forward.

  She caught herself and straightened up, glaring at me as she rubbed her wrist like the blood circulation had been impeded. Oh, please.

  Zane lowered his hand without looking at me. I couldn’t feel his hurt, not anymore, but I could see it in the new stiffness in his posture.

  “I’d ask you to sit,” Justine said to me mockingly, “but I wouldn’t want you to take it as a threat.”

  “You spend your life in a cage with people poking and prodding at you,” I snapped. “Then let’s see how you interpret someone making a grab for you.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, picking up her coffee cup and setting it upright. “But it seems as though maybe you’ve gotten used to some kinds of poking,” she added darkly, eyeing the two of us.

  It took a second for the double-meaning to click.

  My mouth fell open. Had she seriously just said that?

  “Jesus,” Zane muttered, his cheeks flushing a deeper shade of red.

  She waved one hand dismissively as she wiped up the puddle of coffee with a stack of napkins. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. It was a joke.” She shoved the soggy napkins aside and leaned forward in an all-business manner, her hands folded neatly on the table.

  “Here’s what you need to know in brief,” she said, “since we’re all on borrowed time here. Zane is correct. I’ve been working with Dr. St. John for the last seven years.”

  That matched what Dr. Jacobs had hinted at, that perhaps Emerson St. John had colored outside the lines. Interesting. But whatever had compelled him to break the bounds of confidentiality to enlist this woman’s aid, it had clearly not been an objection to the morality of the program. He had, after all, “created” Adam and saved Zane with his invention.

  “The contract that St. John and the others are all hoping to win is being offered by a division within the Department of Defense, to greatly simplify a complicated history,” Justine continued. “I’m part of a…competing organization.”

  Zane glanced at me. “Department of Homeland Security.”

  Justine glared. “I can’t say much about the particular situation,” she said to me, choosing her words with care. “But I’m sure the concept of limited funds, overlapping responsibilities, and competing priorities is one you understand.”

  I eyed her speculatively. “A turf war would be the vernacular, I believe.”

  She gave me a tight smile. “We prefer to think of it as two strong organizations vying for the opportunity to protect the people of this country in whatever way nec
essary.”

  I shrugged. Either way, it meant the same thing. She was in this because whomever she worked for wanted to screw over the other guys. Maybe it was about protecting people; more likely it was about money or credit or a tweaked ego.

  And the Department of Homeland Security, if Zane was right about that, was indeed a separate entity from the Department of Defense, and it didn’t require a stretch of the imagination to believe that they might not always be, what was the saying, two peas in a pod.

  It sounded good. Whether it was true remained to be seen.

  “They’re interested in using you for strategic military strikes, high-profile targets where anonymity and death by natural causes might be a benefit to them.” She shrugged. “Ordinarily, we would agree. But we think you might have more value as a resource, a tool of sorts instead of a weapon.”

  “They have documents, tech—” Zane began.

  Justine shot him a dark look for the interruption. “Zane is correct. We have inherited from various other agencies a cache of documents and a warehouse of evidence gathered from a variety of ‘incidents.’” She paused, giving me a significant look. “Particularly the one taking place in a desert around seventy years ago, give or take.”

  Wait, was she telling me they had the remains of the ship from Roswell? I felt light-headed suddenly. That was where I’d come from. Well, that was where the DNA donor that Jacobs had used to create me had come from. Supposedly. That ship, or whatever was left of it, might tell me more than I’d ever known about that part of my heritage. Even if it didn’t, just touching it, being in the same room with it, would be more of a connection to those beings than I’d ever had before. It was a gray area, no pun intended, in my life that I’d never thought would be further defined.

  And here it was, being offered up with zero fight. Mine for the asking.

  I needed to sit. I pulled the seat out across from Justine and collapsed into it.

  Zane reached over and grabbed a chair from the table behind us and sat next to me.

  “Why?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  Justine smiled, a gleam of excitement in her eyes. “We recognize that whatever information can be gleaned from what was left behind might be valuable in the event our…visitors return, not to mention in the further advancement of our own sciences. But the technology appears keyed to their genetic code, a portion St. John wasn’t able to successfully implement with his virus.”

  “So Zane and Adam don’t have it,” I said slowly, “but you’re hoping I do.”

  “Yes,” Justine said, turning her hands palms up, as if to say, “It’s that simple.” “All you have to do is say yes.”

  But looking down at her empty hands, I couldn’t help remembering, from my early “learn to be human” studies, that the handshake had originated as a way of proving that you weren’t holding a weapon. Which only meant that people had to find other ways to hide their intent to harm.

  “So, you want to, what, take me away from all of this and stash me in a basement somewhere, surrounding me with stacks of paper and a broken-down spaceship?”

  “No,” Justine said. “In exchange for your willing assistance, we’re prepared to offer you a life, free from their overview. You’d be able to live on your own, go to school, if you wish. You’d have a new identity, of course, and a protective detail.”

  I fought to keep the shock from showing on my face, the faint pinging of alarm in the back of my head growing louder. Another of my father’s lessons—be careful of someone offering too much and not asking for enough in return. There’s generosity and then there’s sleight of hand. Look at this over here, so you don’t notice what we’re doing over there.

  “What about your overview?” I asked.

  She waved a hand dismissively. “I assure you, you’d find it quite innocuous. We’d assign an agent to act as your guardian until you are of age. And you’d be required to check in on a regular basis with your findings. Other than that?” She shrugged. “Your life is your own. We have no interest in holding you prisoner.” She gave me a tight-lipped smile. “That hasn’t worked well for us in the past.”

  A reference perhaps to Guantanamo Bay? Interesting that she would class me with potential terror suspects.

  “Here.” Justine reached down into a briefcase I hadn’t noticed before and slid a blue file folder across the table to me.

  Pages from a color printer spilled out. The first page was a real estate listing for a beach cottage, a rental with a for sale option, some place called The Outer Banks in North Carolina. The second was a printout from a school website, featuring a low-slung brick building with a smiling bulldog as a mascot on the sign out front. The other pages appeared to be information about the town.

  “And Zane?” I asked, tracing my finger against the water in the picture of the adorable cottage. I’d never seen the ocean. But with this place, I could walk out onto a porch and watch the waves roll in every morning. If there was a place on Earth the exact opposite of my tiny cell at GTX, this was it. Wide open, no restriction. Hell, there wasn’t even any land on one side of it. Just blue, blue water.

  “If you wish,” Justine said with that open-handed gesture again. “We can’t pull him right now without creating a connection between your disappearance and Emerson St. John. But we’ll protect him, and once the trials are finished we can have him relocated to join you.”

  Zane flashed a grin at me. This was what he’d been hiding, his reason for entering the trials.

  I tried to return the smile, but it felt sick and crooked, hanging there like a broken mirror. So this Justine was offering me a new life, a new house, a new identity. Almost everything I’d ever wanted, the only exception being that it came from someone else, rather than something I’d created for myself, which meant it could always be taken away.

  Still, here was the easy exit I’d been hoping for my whole life. All I had to do was walk away. Dr. Jacobs surely wouldn’t hurt the surrogate who’d given birth to me if I weren’t around to witness it. There would be no point in that.

  But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that saying yes would be like stepping out onto a lake that wasn’t quite frozen through. Everything would seem fine, until the cracks sounded, loud and sharp.

  Then it would be too late.

  ALTHOUGH I’D TECHNICALLY ONLY KNOWN Ariane for a month—on speaking terms, at least—I’d been in school with her for years. And from that, I could tell she was quiet, thoughtful, deeply internal. Still waters, that’s what my mom would have said about someone like her (ironically enough, my mom being the one who would know exactly why that was the case).

  But I always got the sense that so much more went on inside Ariane’s head than you could ever read on the surface. And when I’d woken up in Emerson’s lab and realized that the occasional pops of static and random words in my head were from other people thinking and feeling, my first thought had been of Ariane, that maybe now I’d get a chance to really understand her.

  But as it turned out, even reading minds, poorly as I did, didn’t help. Ariane was as much a mystery to me as ever, whether that was because I wasn’t good enough at hearing her or she was just better at keeping her thoughts to herself.

  At the moment, she was studying Justine as if the mysteries to the universe were written in the fine lines by her eyes or the long-faded freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  Justine shifted uneasily under Ariane’s gaze. “I need a decision quickly,” she said. “We don’t have much time to get this arranged.”

  Ariane remained silent, still just watching, and worry flickered to life in me.

  “It’s a chance,” I whispered to her. “The best chance we’re going to get. You have to take it.”

  Ariane turned to look at me then, sorrow and regret etched in her face. Then she straightened her shoulders, steeling herself, and returned her attention to Justine. “What do you really want?” she asked Justine, her voice cold and calm.

  Crap. “Ariane,”
I began.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Justine said flatly.

  Ariane raised her eyebrows. “No? I think you do. My heritage might mean I could have some connection to the technology, but that’s assuming whatever you’ve managed to save isn’t broken beyond repair. I might not be completely human, but that doesn’t mean I was born with an advanced degree in alien engineering.” She turned to me. “And as for any documents they might have found, I don’t speak the language. I was born here, remember? And that’s if they even have a written language. Why would an advanced society rely on such rudimentary methods?”

  “You don’t know that,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. I needed her to see that while it might not be a perfect choice, it was, in fact, a choice.

  “There’s more to it,” Ariane said with complete confidence and more than a hint of fire in her tone. “They’re offering too much for too little gain.” She turned her attention back to Justine. “And what about Ford and Carter? What about the trials?”

  Justine’s mouth tightened into an unhappy line. “They will continue as they are now. So will the trials.”

  “You’re not going to do anything to stop what Laughlin and Jacobs have been doing,” Ariane said, folding her arms across her chest.

  “That is not our primary concern,” Justine acknowledged, after a pause.

  Disgust twisted Ariane’s expression. “I bet.”

  Frustration flashed across Justine’s face, and she looked to me with a raised eyebrow, as if to say, “What are you waiting for?”

  I stood quickly, my chair shrieking across the tile floor. “Can we have a minute?” I asked Justine, but I was already moving away before she nodded.

  Ariane followed me without protest to the edge of the seating area, near where the line of waiting customers coiled.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, as soon as we were far away enough to be out of Justine’s earshot.

  She regarded me solemnly, her expression giving me nothing. “She’s offering too much for—”

  “For too little, yeah, I know.” I waved the words away impatiently. “So what? I doubt they’re going to pit you against another alien/human hybrid and recommend killing off the competition.” Okay, mainly because there weren’t any other alien/human hybrids, as far as we know, but the point still held. And there was always the frying pan into the fire concern, but at a certain level of heat, it didn’t really matter, did it? Taking the chance was better.