Project Paper Doll: The Trials

by Stacey Kade

  The room was torn apart, tables tossed aside, broken glass, laptops shattered and spread across the ground. Power cords and wires still snapped and hissed from where they’d been torn apart.

  And in the center of the room, Dr. Jacobs knelt on the ground, a GTX guard at his feet. Jacobs’s hands were bloodied, pressed as they were to the guard’s leg wound in an attempt at first aid, but my creator appeared otherwise unharmed.

  Disappointment spiraled through me, followed immediately by a hot rush of fury. He was alive. So many others were dead because of him, even if not directly by his hand. I’d been so hoping to find him under one of those sheets in the hall. The loss of that possibility, along with the discovery of him in here pretending to be a human being with feelings as he attended to the guard, opened up a well of despair and desperate hatred so deep I could feel it coring out the center of me, obliterating some essential piece of myself.

  “107,” Dr. Jacobs said with relief, as if I were one to be greeted with such calmness, such lack of fear. As if I were such a knowable, controllable quantity that he didn’t have to worry.

  The lights overhead flashed and jumped in response to the power growing in and around me, but I clamped down on it, much to the howling rage of my human side. I couldn’t afford to lose control here. We were all balanced on a line thinner than a human hair. No, a line thinner and finer than my own hair.

  Because not two feet away from Dr. Jacobs was Dr. Laughlin, blood spattered across the pristine white of his lab coat. The last Laughlin Integrated guard was dead at his feet, and Laughlin was holding one of the guard’s sidearms, aiming directly at Ford’s head.

  I wasn’t surprised to find her here; I’d gotten that much from the first policeman’s thoughts, the one guarding the elevator. He couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten out of the conference room without anyone noticing.

  But I hadn’t expected to find her in this state.

  Ford stood perfectly still, swaying perhaps a little but making no move to run away or duck. Her left arm hung useless at her side, her white shirt dark with blood.

  But her right hand was raised against Laughlin.

  I could see the tendons in Laughlin’s hand and neck standing out with his efforts to pull the trigger, but there was no movement and certainly no bullet being fired.

  Ford had him tight. Which did not explain why she hadn’t pulled the gun away from him already or simply stopped his heart. I could try to take the gun from him, but I didn’t want to upset whatever delicate balance she had established. If we slipped up for even a microsecond, the gun would go off, and Ford was standing far too close.

  The air in the room was thick with anticipation, like the moments before a big thunderstorm.

  “Ford?” I asked cautiously, trying to concentrate without losing my temper or my hold on the seven full-grown angry men in the hallway outside. Otherwise they’d be barging in here within seconds, and that seemed like a very, very bad idea.

  “The humans,” Ford said, her voice strained. “The ones outside.”

  “They’re still out there,” I said. “I’m holding them.”

  “Let go of them and take the doors,” she said, a fine tremor running through her whole body.

  “Oh, think very carefully who you want to take direction from, 107,” Laughlin said, his smile all teeth.

  “She’s not yours to command,” Dr. Jacobs said indignantly from his position on the floor. It seemed as though he would raise a hand to gesture at Laughlin, but the abortive move of his shoulder muscles indicated that he’d thought better and decided to stay still. Or maybe he had no choice.

  All the better.

  A light burst overhead, raining down glass and sparks, and he hunched his shoulders against it. “I’m not yours to command either,” I said, pushing hate into the words.

  “Ariane?” Zane asked, his voice shaking. His skin was clammy beneath my hand on his wrist. I still had ahold of him, and a glance back revealed blood running freely from his nose and past his mouth to drip off his chin. I realized, then, he was still holding on to the one officer out in the hall, the one he’d stopped for me.

  “Do it,” I said to him. I let go of Zane’s arm and released the men in the hallway, shifting my attention to the doors. Not just the handle, but the entire surface. I didn’t want anyone getting the creative idea to remove the hinges or bash through the wood with a fire ax. Holding the doors shut and protected against any form of interference was easier than keeping all those people motionless. It was like dropping a boulder to pick up a single piece of paper; it felt like almost no effort at all.

  Almost immediately, the blood flow from Ford’s arm slowed, and she seemed steadier on her feet.

  Because…Ford had been holding the doors shut, keeping Laughlin from firing (and likely holding Jacobs still as well), and stanching her wound. Holy crap.

  I checked on Zane, who had leaned against the wall, his face gray with bright fever patches of pink, his arm smeared with red where he’d wiped his face.

  He nodded at me.

  “Where’s the Committee?” I asked, mostly to Ford, but really to anyone who would answer. In the hallway, I could hear shouting and running steps. The door handle rattled, and then someone tugged, trying to open the door. But they would not get in. I could hold it all day and against all of them, if need be.

  “They were gone before I arrived,” she said. She let out slow breath that sounded ragged and fluid filled. Where was she wounded? I couldn’t tell from behind. If she’d been shot, the most likely scenario, the bullet might have nicked a lung.

  Ford and I didn’t always see eye to eye, but she was…We were all we had left. We were the only ones. I didn’t want her to die.

  “They killed him, Ariane,” she said, her voice flat. “They killed Carter. They sent him out as a target. I figured it out, what they’d done, and I was trying to find him….” She shook her head. “I felt it when he died. He knew for a moment. He felt pain, sorrow, and aloneness because I wasn’t there.” Her voice rose with anguish and hatred and grief. “I. Wasn’t. There! They did this. They planned this.”

  My eyes stung with tears, and I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood and regret. “I know, I’m sorry. I was trying to find you both, but I wasn’t fast enough….”

  “That is true,” she said. “But it is not your fault. It is theirs.” That single word contained a universe of raw rage, untempered and destructive.

  There wouldn’t be anything left of Laughlin by the time someone outside this room reached him. He would be unrecognizable, not just as himself but anything human. She would take him apart piece by piece.

  And I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but relief, and perhaps a little glee, at the prospect. Inhuman? Perhaps, but so was I.

  “Ford, where is your target?” I asked. Before this went any further or devolved into chaos, I needed to know. I had no particular fondness for Rachel, but if she was dead…

  “Ari,” Zane said.

  I glanced at him, and he nodded to the back left corner of the room. A corner you should have checked, the imitation of father’s voice scolded in my head. You left yourself vulnerable to attack. What else was new?

  Emerson St. John sat, wide-eyed, with his back against the wall. He was well out of the line of fire for the moment.

  And behind him, almost hidden by his body…Rachel Jacobs, her fist pressed against her mouth as if she were afraid of what words might escape against her will, but seemingly unharmed.

  At least there was that. One life saved. Or one more at stake in this room.

  “I knew you were involved in this,” Rachel hissed as soon as our eyes met, her voice shaking with anger and fear. “I was minding my own business in the lip gloss section, and she comes out of nowhere.” She glanced at Ford and shuddered, making no move to leave the corner where she was huddled. Whether that was the effect of Ford’s presence or because Rachel had just watched people get shot right in front of her, I wasn’t sure.<
br />
  “Are you all right?” It had to be asked.

  Rachel shook her head, a jerky, uneven motion. “She dragged me through the city all the way to the park,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “And then…and then she pushed that guy off a building.” Rachel swallowed hard, pale beneath her tan.

  It took me a second to put Rachel’s words in context. The suicidal jumper mentioned on the news.

  “The man with the gun,” Ford said tightly. “The one who killed Adam before I could.”

  The assassin the Committee had sent after us. Ford must have arrived in the park just a little before we did. In time to see Adam get shot but not soon enough to save Carter. Then she’d tracked the shooter with Rachel in tow, as leverage most likely, and took her revenge.

  That made a strange kind of sense.

  “This is your fault. You just can’t stand to see me happy. It’s like your mission to destroy my life,” Rachel said, her face a mess of tears, mascara, and sweat.

  “It’s not, actually.” I could not understand why everyone kept assuming that this girl, the closest thing I had to an archnemesis, quite frankly, meant anything significant to me.

  I’d have been more upset over the death of any number of other people, as cruel as that sounded. Using Rachel had been a risk, an unnecessary one as far as I could see, but maybe the Committee had been aiming to hurt Jacobs as well. Who knew? It didn’t matter now, with more pressing matters at hand.

  I turned my attention back to Ford. “What’s your exit—”

  Laughlin laughed suddenly, a loud sound that echoed in the almost-empty room, drowning out the sound of activity in the hallway beyond.

  I looked over, startled. I didn’t see anything particularly amusing about this situation.

  “You don’t know, do you?” he asked me. His gaze bounced from me to Rachel and then back to Ford. “None of you do.”

  Ford tensed.

  Jacobs glared at Laughlin, his face red and the veins in his forehead an alarming shade of blue. “Don’t,” he said, staring down his former mentee. He sounded almost frightened.

  But Laughlin ignored him. “Such a supposedly superior specimen and it’s taken you this long?”

  Unformed instinct told me to shy away, to duck my head and cover my ears to stop his words from reaching me. Some might describe it as seeing a wave and knowing it will pull you under and yet being unable to do anything to escape. I wouldn’t. I still hadn’t managed to see the ocean.

  “I’d have thought you’d piece this together on your own, even subconsciously,” Laughlin continued, and dread swelled in me, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop him, to stop whatever was coming next.

  “That girl”—he tipped his head at Rachel—“is your niece,” he said, cracking my world open with his carefully enunciated words. “Or your half sister, depending on how you look at it. You are quite the twisted family.”

  “What?” Rachel shrieked from her corner.

  I didn’t move, couldn’t speak. Dizziness washed over me, and a high-pitched buzzing started in my ears.

  “Shut up,” Zane snapped at Laughlin. “He’s lying. Ariane, don’t listen—”

  Laughlin tsked at him. “I don’t need to lie, young man. Three DNA sources are required for this kind of work. The extraterrestrial source and a fertilized human egg. It doesn’t work any other way,” Laughlin said, shaking his head with a mock sorrowful look. “And Arthur here didn’t want to take any chances. He wanted to make sure he was using top-notch genetic material. What better than his own?” He laughed. “And it would have been a waste not to use the perfectly good daughter-in-law of childbearing age at his fingertips, wouldn’t it? Especially one with fertility issues who was eager to have another child right away, one who was already used to medical assistance and invasive procedures.”

  My stomach churned. The blond woman in the photo, the one Jacobs had shown me. She’d looked familiar…because she looked like me? Or because she looked like Rachel? Like both of us?

  “He used the harvested eggs she’d preserved as part of her previous fertility efforts in his experiment. When the most promising one split into twins, we…obtained the other half for implantation,” Laughlin said with a lurch of his shoulders that might have been a shrug had he been capable of such mobility.

  I summoned the image from the photo in my memory. Her fair complexion and hair were nothing like Rachel’s, but those fine eyebrows, high cheekbones, and that smile, the way the lines broke between her mouth and cheeks, in the shape of perfect sevens, forward and backward…I sucked in a deep breath, struggling to get air circulating in my lungs again.

  Rachel’s version of that smile was tighter, pissier, but it was the same. My own resemblance was murkier, harder to see beneath the alien influences, but still possible. I’d never had cause to look for it before.

  But more than any potential resemblances, what made me believe what Laughlin was saying was that I could so easily see Dr. Jacobs doing exactly just that. Using his daughter-in-law because it suited his needs. His project. His pursuit of fame. He’d done it before.

  My knees wobbled underneath my weight, as if the realization carried physical mass. Ford and I were twins; that was not news to anyone who looked at us. The fact that we were actual sisters—rather than clones—was new but within reason. The connection to Rachel, to Dr. Jacobs, though…my brain could not seem to adjust to that idea, finding it all sharp edges and slippery sides.

  “Your criticism of my work and my methods is of little interest to anyone,” Jacobs snarled at Laughlin, but it was a weak, ineffective defense that everyone ignored, a papier-mâché dam against a tsunami.

  “It’s not true,” Zane said. “It can’t be. Rachel and Ariane are the same age.”

  “Yes, exactly!” Rachel rallied, nodding rapidly. “That.”

  “I doubt that’s true,” Laughlin said easily. “You, Jacobs girl. When is your birthday?”

  Rachel glared at him but answered through clenched teeth. “December twenty-sixth.”

  “Ariane?” Zane asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, they never said. Sometime in August, I think, is what my father—”

  “See?” Zane demanded, triumph and relief coloring his voice. “They’re not twins, and there wasn’t enough time for both of them.”

  Laughlin laughed again.

  And this time, I knew why. Staring down Dr. Jacobs—my father, oh my God—as he avoided looking in my direction, I heard his words about my “surrogate” echoing in my head. “Six months,” I managed, my voice a hoarse whisper.

  “What?” Zane asked.

  I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t move, feeling rooted to the spot. “It’s only six months from implantation to full term for hybrids,” I said, forcing myself to speak louder. “He told me that.” Even though he’d lied about everything else, including the identity of my surrogate.

  So, Rachel’s mother had given birth to her in December of the year before I was born. Then, evidently, either she’d volunteered, or Jacobs had talked her into another pregnancy. If she’d gotten pregnant in February, that would have been more than enough time for…more than enough time for me.

  I lifted my gaze to meet Rachel’s, and she read the truth in my expression, her face paling further.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head fiercely. “No. I am not…my mother is not…”

  Laughlin smirked at her. “I heard Jacobs had to have her committed, eventually,” he continued in a faux whisper. “She never recovered from the loss of her second child. Rumor has it, she didn’t believe him about the late-term ‘miscarriage’ and went a little crazy. All because he thought it would be better, more natural for 107 to be carried in the womb of her genetic mother.”

  Rachel looked poison at me. “New Harbors in Malibu. Off and on since I was eight.”

  Ford turned just enough to see me. It was hard to tell, but even she looked shaken by this revelation.

  My eyes burned with un
shed tears. My mother. Her mother. Rachel’s mother. The same woman. Alive. Locked away in a facility in California. But before that, had I passed her on the street? In the hallways at school? I had no memory of ever seeing Rachel with her mother. But she’d been there, at least for a while, within reach.

  “It was completely unnecessary, of course, because as you can see, Ford turned out just fine after gestation in a surrogate,” Laughlin said dismissively.

  The fact that Laughlin could describe Ford as “fine” with even a reasonably straight face was yet another sign of his complete detachment from reality.

  But the overwhelming punch of realization was reserved for that one big piece of news. Dr. Jacobs had used his own DNA to create me. We were related. I was even more closely related to him than Rachel was. I was his daughter.

  I stared at him. Those dark, soulless eyes in his face, the ones that had shone with eagerness and scientific curiosity during my most horrible moments in the lab, they were mine.

  I’d always hated looking at myself in the mirror without my tinted contacts, seeing the alien-ness in the almost-black color of my eyes and the nearly indistinguishable iris.

  But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Or not entirely. Was it possible I’d recognized that similarity on a level without even realizing it?

  My stomach lurched, and I gagged, cold rushing over me, turning my skin damp with sweat.

  “Ariane,” Zane breathed behind me. But I couldn’t look at him. How could I?

  “107,” Jacobs said with an attempt at regaining authority. “There’s no need to overreact. Our early specimens were failing to thrive. I did just what was necessary to—”

  “That’s all you care about, isn’t it?” Rachel demanded, her voice choked with tears and hatred.

  I turned to see her rising to her feet unsteadily.

  “What your project needs.” The bitterness and despair behind her words curdled the air. And as much as I despised her at times, I didn’t blame her one bit. He’d used his family, destroyed their lives, and left them with nothing but lies.