Project Paper Doll: The Trials

by Stacey Kade

  Ariane avoided my gaze. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Are you serious?” I raked my hands through my hair. “Look, I know this isn’t easy for you, that maybe you feel like you don’t deserve something more than whatever half-life you’ve been able to cobble together, but you do. You deserve this.”

  That seemed to light a fire in her. She stiffened. “Do you think I don’t want to say yes? Do you think I’m eager to turn her down?” Her eyes were bright with anger and unshed tears.

  “I don’t know, maybe!” I said, frustrated and working hard not to shout. I could feel the attention of the crowd a few feet behind us. Even if it’s conducted in whispers, a fight is a fight, and everyone recognizes the universal body language.

  Ariane’s expression softened, and something in her seemed to shift from questioning to acceptance. “We can argue about what I deserve or don’t deserve endlessly. You don’t know everything that I’ve done, Zane.” She dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “If this is about the entry qualification for the trials,” I said in a quieter voice, “you know that doesn’t count. Just because Jacobs forced you to—”

  She looked up sharply. “He didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I…needed to be here to end this, so I did what I had to do to get in.” Shame and regret colored her features, but she met my eyes, daring me to argue.

  I eyed her skeptically. “You killed someone. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Dead. Permanently.” It wasn’t that I doubted her ability to do exactly that—she could, easily—but I knew her.

  She hesitated. “He…is alive now,” she allowed, her jaw tight. “But that might not have been the case if my attempts at CPR had failed or—”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said with no small amount of satisfaction. “You would never—”

  She held up her hand, cutting me off. “It doesn’t matter. The truth is, even if her offer is on the level, it will last only as long as they want it to. I have no leverage, no power,” she said slowly, calmly, as if speaking to a toddler in a tantrum. “The second they’re done with me or when someone new takes charge of their organization, I’ll be turned over to Jacobs or sold off to the highest bidder. Or worse.”

  I wanted to protest, but I could feel the truth of her words hanging heavy in the air between us. And yet, none of that mattered. “But, Ari, if you go along with it, even just for a while, it’s safer than what you have right now. It’ll get you out of the trials. And it’ll give us time to come up with a more permanent solution. Please.” I could feel her slipping away from me even as she stood there.

  I edged closer and grabbed her hand, feeling her cool fingers in mine. But she didn’t respond. She didn’t pull away, but neither did she fold her hand into mine.

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a shaky exhale. “I can’t. Ford and Carter—”

  “Ford is more than capable of taking care of herself. I have the scars to prove it,” I said.

  “It’s not just them,” she said. “You haven’t seen what I have.”

  She glanced at Justine, who was unabashedly watching and likely doing her best to eavesdrop. “At Laughlin’s, he has a hallway. He calls it his ‘gallery.’” She swallowed convulsively. “Glass boxes embedded in the wall, holding the bodies of all the hybrids who died before Ford and Carter. They’re just floating there, all their suffering on display.” I felt ill. How close had Ariane come to being in one of those display cases? I imagined her pale hair swirling around her face, her eyes open and unseeing.

  The image was so real, felt so possible, it sent a shudder through me, and I couldn’t stop myself from pulling Ariane toward me. She came willingly, wrapping her arms tight around my back, her fists clutching at my shirt. The warmth of her body reminded me that she was here, that she was okay. But it all felt so tenuous.

  “If I don’t end this now, that’s what will keep happening,” she said, her words muffled against me. “How many more of those will Laughlin fill?”

  She pulled away from me, her hands releasing my shirt. “Winning will give me an opportunity to catch them with their guard down,” she said. “Then I’m going to do whatever it takes to end it. All of it. There won’t be any more hybrids after us. No more Project Paper Doll. No more experiments.”

  The cold determination in her voice took me aback. She’d made her decision already.

  “And no more running,” she added, with a weary smile that looked something like relief.

  With a sudden bolt of clarity, I understood what she was saying. She didn’t intend to survive. She’d decided. She would die in the process of destroying Jacobs and Laughlin, maybe even Ford and Carter, if they got in the way. And she’d accepted that as her fate, as payment for the chance to finish what others had started.

  “No,” I said, my voice breaking. “No,” I tried again. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to…sacrifice yourself.” I couldn’t look at her right then, so I shifted my gaze to stare at the scarred and dented wall instead.

  “Hey.” She gave me a sad smile and reached up to turn my chin toward her. “Do you really think Ford’s going to do it?”

  “Screw her,” I snapped. But the invective lost some of its sharpness with my voice thick with unshed tears.

  “Besides, do you think you’re really one to lecture me about sacrifice?” she asked with a knowing look.

  “I told you I’m fine,” I said with as much certainty as I could manage. “Better than fine, actually.”

  The doubt and worry in her eyes made my stomach hurt.

  “What did they do to you?” she whispered.

  “They saved me, made me better,” I said.

  Her mouth tightened. “You’re putting yourself at risk again.”

  I clenched my fists, wanting to hit something, anything. “Because it’s my fault.” The words spilled out of me, like an infection in a long-standing wound. “I did this. Jacobs would never have gotten ahold of you if I—”

  “No,” she said fiercely, grabbing the front of my shirt and shaking me. Or trying, anyway. Powerful as she was, I was still taller. “Listen to me: this is not your fault. It was always going to be this way.” She shook her head. “I just didn’t want to see it. We might have had a few minutes of peace here and there, but we would have always been afraid, running or hiding. It just took me a while to understand that.”

  “Is everything okay here?”

  The interruption startled me, and I turned to see a guy in a dark suit hovering nearby, outside the boundaries of the waiting line.

  Ariane leaned around me to stare at him in that unnerving way she had. “We are fine,” she said, leaving no room for questions with her crisply enunciated words. It was just short of telling him to go screw himself.

  He backed off immediately and returned to the line, his hands up in surrender. I felt a flash of pride. That was my girl.

  “You can’t just give up. You have to fight,” I said, closing my hands over hers, trapping her close to me.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” she asked. She pulled her hands out from under mine and slid them up to my neck, raising up to her tiptoes.

  I bent down to meet her, wrapping my arms around her back, resisting the urge to pick her up and carry her away somewhere safer. I wanted to shift time and space until we were back in my truck that first night, after the activities fair, when it was just us and so much simpler.

  The familiar smell of her, lemons and the outdoors mixed with hotel soap and shampoo that I recognized from my own shower that morning, made my chest ache.

  She brushed her lips across my cheek, near the corner of my mouth but not on it. “Please, get out of here,” she whispered. “Ford is right. I can’t split my attention.” She looked down, hesitating. “If you…if you love me, I’m asking you please to leave.”

  Ariane kissed me, her mouth hard against mine. Then, before I could respond, she slipped out of my arms and eased past me.

  I swallowe
d hard. “Ariane. Don’t, please.” But that was all I could do, words were all I had to offer. I couldn’t stop her, and she’d hate me forever even if I could.

  “Wait,” Justine said sharply, loud enough to be a shout, startling me. I’d forgotten she was there.

  Ariane froze.

  Was this where Justine signaled her entourage of henchmen to grab Ariane?

  I spun to face her and whoever was coming, ready to do whatever I could to fight them off. But I saw no sign of anyone but Justine and the now lessening crowd of coffee seekers.

  Justine reached down and produced another file folder from her briefcase, this one red. “If you’re so keen on self-sacrifice, Tucker, maybe you should look at this first before you throw yourself off the nearest available cliff,” she said, holding it up.

  Justine, who’d obviously been listening in to as much as she could hear of our conversation, certainly had a way with words.

  And yet, when I glanced over my shoulder, Ariane had stopped.

  A desperate kind of hope sprang up inside me. I wasn’t sure if it was what Justine had said or something Ariane had detected in her thoughts, but whatever it was, it worked.

  For the moment.

  Ariane turned slowly, with a frown. “What is that?” she asked, tipping her head toward the folder, suspicion written on her face.

  “Why don’t you come and see? You were convinced I was hiding something.” Justine flapped the file at Ariane.

  I glared at her. “And you were.” I wasn’t surprised, exactly—more annoyed that she’d waited until the last second to speak up.

  “Sorry,” Justine said to me offhandedly. “This is need-to-know. And you didn’t need to know.”

  Ariane edged closer, and Justine stretched across the table to hand her the folder.

  She took it with obvious caution, still watching Justine as if expecting some kind of trap.

  Looking over Ariane’s shoulder, I couldn’t see anything all that intriguing about the file. No seal, no official “top secret” stamp across the front. It looked just like a normal folder with maybe twenty sheets of paper inside. Which was, most likely, the intent. If you think about it, announcing something as top secret in inch-high letters in a screaming red font doesn’t do much for the whole “secret” part of it.

  Ariane flipped open the folder front, revealing a thin stack of pages.

  “Going old school?” I asked.

  Justine shook her head. “Digital can be…slippery. Harder to contain.”

  What they were trying to contain, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at.

  The top few sheets appeared to be transcripts from a conversation. No, a series of conversations, on different dates and in different cities. Milwaukee, Chicago, Phoenix. And a few company names I recognized. American, United, Southwest.

  “Air traffic control?” I asked with a frown.

  “Talking to pilots,” Ariane murmured. She skimmed the pages, and I caught glimpses of phrases. “Can you please confirm identity of aircraft?” “Do you have traffic for us at two o’clock?” “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” “Negative.” “Holy shit.”

  And then, blurry and indistinct images I recognized only from messing around with Google Earth. Satellite pictures. A grayish blur highlighted in each of the photos with red circle.

  “These are reports of UFO sightings over Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Chicago, Illinois; and Phoenix, Arizona,” Ariane said, sounding unimpressed. “Eyewitness accounts.”

  “Surely you’ve heard of the Phoenix Lights,” Justine said with just a hint of condescension.

  Ariane shrugged. “People have been seeing UFOs for years.” She pursed her lips in a tight smile. “Centuries, if you believe that guy with the big hair on TV.” She held the folder out to Justine.

  But Justine kept her hands neatly folded on the table. “Yeah, well, these are real,” she said, mocking Ariane’s casual tone. “Confirmed through airport radar and our own satellites. And not a weather balloon among them,” she added lightly.

  Ariane went still, a new alertness running through her like electricity. I could feel it from where I stood. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she said, but she didn’t sound quite as certain as she had a few moments ago.

  “And yet, don’t those locations seem significant?” Justine pressed.

  It took me a second to see it. “Milwaukee and Chicago. It’s near you, near Ford and the others,” I pointed out quietly. Phoenix was the outlier that I couldn’t make fit, but the other two were dead-on. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Justine gave me a nod. Then she looked to Ariane. “It seems, my dear,” she said, “that our visitors are looking for something very specific.” She paused. “You.”

  I STARED AT THE FOLDER in my hands until it became an unfocused red blur.

  That was the fantasy, wasn’t it? Every orphaned or abandoned or unhappy child dreamed of her “real” family showing up to claim her. Taking her away from the horror of her current life, whether that was being forced to eat her vegetables before dessert, or being bled and broken as a laboratory experiment.

  The difference being that, in this case, we weren’t talking about a previously unknown aunt from Omaha or even a minor member of royalty in some unheard-of country. (That was a key factor in most of those stories, a subgenre I’d discovered during my exploration of fiction. The rescuing relative was also usually wealthy, possibly famous, and preferably gruff with a soft heart that had been hardened by tragedy or loss.)

  No, when it came to me, we were talking about an advanced civilization from light-years away. An entirely different planet, species, everything. And they were here for me, supposedly? That made no sense. Why? How did they even know I existed? It wasn’t like I was someone they’d lost along the way.

  My fingers felt numb and thick on the file. “I don’t understand,” I managed to say.

  With a hint of weariness, Justine gestured to the chairs we’d abandoned.

  Zane slid a glance at me, and I nodded. Even if this was a trick, a joke of some kind, I wasn’t leaving now without the punch line.

  We sat again, and Justine leaned forward, her expression sharp with intensity.

  “The government has been tracking the incidents for years. Most of them, as you so astutely pointed out, are the result of witnesses mistaking experimental aircraft or a weather phenomenon as something…extraterrestrial. Occasionally with the assistance of mind-altering substances, including what they’ve cooked up in their own distillery.” She rolled her eyes. “Or worse.”

  “But…” Zane prompted with a hint of impatience. He was on the edge of his seat, as if he might try to pull the words from her faster.

  “When we inherited these files, it was one of our analysts who noticed the pattern.” Justine gave a dismissive sniff for all those who’d missed the connection, likely the FBI and possibly the CIA as well. “The only confirmable instances were those in the last fifteen years or so, in those locations. Then we received information from a knowledgeable source inside Project Paper Doll.” She said this last bit carefully.

  “Emerson St. John,” I said.

  She gave me a tight, enigmatic smile.

  Zane snorted. “It’s him. He ran out of funding faster than the others. He said as much.”

  I nodded. That was consistent with what Dr. Jacobs had suggested.

  Justine scowled at both of us. “Regardless, it became obvious that the most active locations were also those we knew to have the only living sources of extracted tissue.” She cleared her throat. “And the size and general shape of the craft at each of these sightings match that of the recovered ship from…the desert.” She gave me a significant look.

  A shiver slid over my skin, and I resisted the urge to run my hands over my arms to warm them. This had nothing to do with a physical change in the temperature.

  The recovered ship from the desert. Justine was being cautious, not using buzzwords that might catch attentio
n from even the most casual listener. But she meant Roswell.

  Justine was saying not simply that humans had evidence of recent extraterrestrial visitors but that these visitors were likely from the same place as that original ship. The ship that had carried the source of my nonhuman DNA once upon a time.

  My breath caught in my throat. My people. Whatever they were, whoever they were. The other half of my heritage. They’d been here, and not that long ago.

  “Have you had contact with…them?” Zane asked, his face paler than even his new normal. The idea made him uncomfortable, despite the extraterrestrial bits currently transforming him into this new version of himself. Or maybe because of it. It was one thing to be okay with genetic changes on a theoretical level, but it was another to be confronted with the reality of a ship full of black-eyed, gray-skinned telepaths hovering in your sky at night.

  “It’s been attempted,” Justine said, avoiding our eyes and studying her hands.

  Another cagey answer. I couldn’t get much from her thoughts, but I could put pieces together from the obvious gaps in her answers. “Meaning either you lack sufficiently advanced technology to speak to them, or they lack sufficient interest in hearing you.”

  “Us,” Justine emphasized, pointing first at herself and then at me. “Remember, you were born here. You are as much one of us.” She nodded fiercely, as if confirming the answer to an unspoken question.

  I sat back, startled. Her approach was the exact opposite of Dr. Jacobs’s, who had sought to make it very clear that even a little alien-ness invalidated my humanity, made me lesser.

  “But I’m not quite one of you, or else I wouldn’t be useful for whatever it is you need, right?” I asked. She wanted me, specifically me, for something, and whatever it was, she’d gone through a lot of trouble—and possibly a lot of money—to get to me. Another thought occurred to me belatedly. “Why didn’t you just ask Dr. Jacobs about me? I’m sure he would have been happy to sell to the highest bidder.”