Project Paper Doll

by Stacey Kade

  “This girl has been running around in our community for years,” he continued, working himself up into his speech-to-the-public mode. “We have no idea what kind of danger she presents to us, to the children she’s been in contact with.”

  This time I did roll my eyes. “She’s not a danger. She’s just a girl.” Except even as I said it, I remembered Rachel’s face turning purplish red, and I realized I wasn’t so sure. I was having trouble reconciling Ariane, the girl in my truck, the one with the shy smile and a kiss that screamed of desperate loneliness, with the one who tossed full-grown men around like chess pieces.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  My dad tapped his fingers on his chin. “Have to play this one carefully. GTX won’t want to let me in on it, but if we—”

  “I mean, about Ariane,” I said quickly.

  He sighed in exasperation. “Zane, what do you want me to do? She’s a minor in the custody of her father, her legal guardian. And if what you told me about tonight is true—”

  I looked at him in disbelief. As if I’d make any of that up.

  “—then she’s probably better off contained, where she can’t hurt anyone.”

  “She didn’t hurt anyone,” I protested. “Not until they tried to hurt her or someone else.” And I’d seen every one of those GTX guys get up and limp off, albeit with help from their comrades. Rachel had also recovered just fine. She’d been spitting mad and screeching when I’d seen her last, getting loaded into the back of a squad car.

  “Why are you so concerned about this girl?” he asked. “I’ve never heard you mention her before.”

  I exhaled loudly. “She’s a friend, okay?”

  His eyes lit up with sudden interest. “How much time have you been spending with her?”

  For some reason, his new enthusiasm made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like where it was leading. “I don’t know. A lot, the last few days.”

  He nodded rapidly. “Starting when?”

  I had to think. So much had happened recently. “Wednesday.”

  “The day after the incident with the lights exploding at the school?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Were you there when that happened?”

  Where was this going? “Yeah.” I’d been there all the other times, too, when the lights had acted weird. In the cafeteria and the activities fair and…

  Oh, God. It had been Ariane all those times as well.

  The belated realization struck like a slap.

  My dad didn’t seem to notice. He nodded with a tight smile, distracted. “Good. Good.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder, heedless of my grimace. “Stay here. I need to make some calls.”

  “Dad, I don’t understand—”

  “They’re going to want you,” he said impatiently. “Want you to stay quiet. Want to talk to you. Something. That gives us leverage.”

  I stared at him dumbly, still not getting it.

  “You’re a witness. That’s our ticket in. We can force their hand with this, make them involve our department,” he said with a grin.

  And then I got it. GTX would probably deny that anything had happened tonight, and that was if anyone bothered to ask them. No one else at the party had even seen the GTX guys take Ariane, so there was no connection between what she’d done and the company. And even if someone did put the two together, who would believe jumbled and outrageous-sounding stories from a bunch of drunken kids over the word of Wingate’s largest employer? Never going to happen.

  But if my dad, the well-known and respected police chief, threatened to get involved and make a fuss over what I’d seen, GTX would have to, at the very least, acknowledge his existence, if only to keep him/us quiet.

  My dad was going to use this—use me—to break into the GTX circle of trust, something he’d been after for years. He wanted to be number one on Dr. Jacobs’s speed dial when there was trouble, and he thought this was the way in.

  I felt sick.

  “Be right back,” he said, pushing aside the curtains and stepping out.

  I sat there and listened as my dad ignored hospital cell phone rules, calling in favors, checking in with his various cronies, and generally making it known to the rumor mill that he had a valuable source in the form of me, his son.

  He was probably right. Based on what I’d seen tonight, GTX would want to shut that down, and they’d probably humor him…temporarily. And my dad would be happy with me, with the situation for a while.

  And Ariane? What about her? She’d probably end up stuck in a small room somewhere in the bowels of the GTX complex, with people poking and prodding at her.

  I remembered how she’d first flinched away from being touched. God, no wonder.

  I rubbed my hand over my face. She’d probably had people all over her for years, in a scientific capacity. And yet she’d rallied. She’d trusted me. She’d taken my hand even though she’d been leery.

  My eyes burned at the memory of last night. Her determination to walk away. And her tears. If only I’d known. When I’d joked about the Witness Protection Program, she’d tried to tell me, in her own way, that she was hiding.

  I shook my head. She didn’t deserve the fate she was likely headed for.

  My dad let loose with his interview laugh on the phone, the big booming one that said Everything’s okay as long as I’m around. Then he stuck his head back in my room and winked at me.

  The shock of it took my breath away. My dad saw me as worth something for the first time, I realized. The younger son, the other Bradshaw boy finally had value. After all those years of trying to make my dad proud, trying to make him see me, I’d actually succeeded.

  But there was no rush of relief or joy or even just satisfaction at the accomplishment. I was empty. Hollowed out.

  I looked down at my hands, remembering the sensation of Ariane’s hand in mine. Light, tentative but trusting.

  And suddenly I felt smaller and less important than ever.

  YOU KNOW THOSE FIRST FEW MOMENTS after waking from a bad dream, when you’re convinced that your nightmare is real, and there’s an impossibly large coil of dread in your stomach? But then slowly, details from the dream slip away and reality slides into place. You didn’t miss your bio final, you didn’t walk into school naked, the evil corporation that created you didn’t recapture you.…

  Oh, wait.

  I felt an all-too-familiar rough cotton sheet pressed against my cheek. Then the overwhelming smell of antiseptic mixed with cedar chips.

  No. I opened my eyes to see the edge of a cot draped in a white sheet, and a spotless white tile floor stretching out underneath me.

  No, no, no! I couldn’t be here. I couldn’t be back in this place. My stomach lurched, and I struggled to push myself up, but my arms and legs felt floppy and awkward, as if they belonged to someone else. Hot tears flooded my eyes, unsticking the contact lenses that had dried out during my unconsciousness.

  “Careful now. Go slowly, my dear.” Dr. Jacobs’s voice, echoing a little through the overhead intercom, was as gentle as ever.

  I froze, breaking into a cold sweat at the sound of it.

  “You’re still under the effects of the sedation. Don’t want you falling and hurting yourself. You’ve already got a nasty bump to the head.”

  Once he mentioned it, I became aware of a dull throbbing at the back of my head. A souvenir from my adventures with the tranq dart in the street. It was real. It was all real.

  A surge of panic gave me the strength to flop over onto my back and roll into a semi-upright position, using the wall for support. The room looked as I’d left it, as if there’d never been an explosion the night I escaped. In the far right corner, the toilet, the shower, and a sink, behind a curtain that could be pulled for privacy. Directly across from me, white plastic shelves of teaching toys and games, books, and videos for the flat screen embedded in the wall above the shelf. In the far left corner, a rolling tray with a glass cage on top. Inside, a little white m
ouse ran on a metal wheel, pausing every few seconds to lift his nose up and sniff the air, as if he knew something was wrong.

  I couldn’t breathe. I pulled at the neck of my shirt, struggling to suck air into my lungs, which felt more like two shredded plastic bags for all the oxygen they were capable of holding at the moment.

  White sparkly spots flitted through my vision, signaling the approach of unconsciousness. I flopped forward, bringing my head down to my knees, on the command of some distant voice in the back of my brain that remembered the protocol to prevent fainting. Being passed out and vulnerable right now is a bad, bad idea, that same voice whispered.

  But I was beyond appreciating that bit of wisdom.

  I can’t be here. I can’t. I can’t. The refrain, once started, wouldn’t stop, growing louder and louder and blocking out everything but a dull buzzing in my ears.

  “It’s just a panic attack. Breathe through it. You’ll be fine.”

  The sound of my father’s voice over the intercom, calm and comfortingly familiar, broke through the static in my mind and triggered my last firm memory—the one of him standing over me in his black GTX uniform, reciting Rule #1: Never trust anyone.

  My head snapped up. My father. He was here. And he…he’d betrayed me.

  The little bit of air that I’d managed to take in caught in my throat, and my brain refused to process, stuck in a loop of disparate facts. He’d saved me, protected me. And he’d called GTX down on me? It didn’t make sense. Why now? Why at all? There had to be another explanation.

  Except…what other scenario, besides betrayal, would end with me back in this room?

  Unfortunately, I already knew the answer with a sickening certainty—there wasn’t one.

  As though a switch had been flipped inside my brain, my panic converted to fury, hot and reassuring, eating away all my fear and confusion.

  I turned my head carefully, my neck wobbly, toward the wall on my left. It held both the sheen of glass and the illusion of opaqueness.

  “Show me. I want to see you.” My voice came out cold and tight with a fine tremor running through it.

  The white wall went translucent in a blink of an eye, and the observation room came into view. The room itself was several feet higher, like my quarters had been dug deeper into the ground. The better to see you with, my dear. The line from a book of fairy tales, one I’d read in this very place, ran through my head, and I shuddered. Monitors, machines, computers, printers—diagnostic equipment of all kinds lined the left and right side of the room. Several lab-coated professionals sat in front of them, their heads down, studying the data being spat out.

  Dr. Jacobs stood dead center in the window-wall, less than ten feet from me. Picture the kindest, most grandfatherly-looking man you can imagine. Curly gray hair, plump apple cheeks, twinkling dark eyes that seemed to find the amusement in everything. That is, unless I chose to tell him no. I knew from experience those laughing eyes could change to hard little marbles, cold and uncaring, in the space of a single word.

  My father stood immediately to the left of Jacobs. His GTX uniform was pristine, as if the events of tonight had left him untouched, and his gaze was fixed at a point well over my head.

  At the sight of him, contradictory impulses screamed within me—the first to run to him and seek comfort, and the second to back as far away as I could from this stranger who’d shared a home and a breakfast table with me for ten years.

  “You turned me in?” I asked him. “Why? Because I broke your Rules? Because I went to a party?” In spite of my best efforts, I could hear the pleading in my voice along with a cracking that mimicked the pain in my chest.

  The muscles in his jaw tightened, but he kept his gaze fixed on the wall above my head.

  “You’re not even going to look at me?” I demanded, knowing I sounded hysterical. “I think I deserve at least that.”

  “Oh, don’t fuss,” Jacobs said impatiently. “He didn’t betray you. For that, he would have to have been on your side to begin with.”

  Those words hit with a virtual thunderstrike in my head. What did that mean?

  My father turned to glare at Dr. Jacobs, who waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not like she wouldn’t have figured it out eventually.”

  I stared at them both; the gaping hole in my life I’d just discovered had turned out to be a bottomless pit. “What are you saying?”

  Dr. Jacobs shrugged at me. “You didn’t leave us much choice. You were refusing to cooperate, and you’re far too valuable to destroy.” He smiled and tilted his head closer to the glass as if preparing to tell me a secret. “Do you know you are the only one at this facility to have survived and thrived for this long?”

  GTX-F-107. 106 before me. I’d suspected as much, but having it confirmed made me feel ill. How many of my kind—some mix of human and other—had lived and died in this little room?

  Jacobs nodded, pleased with himself. “I think the illusion of freedom was good for you.”

  It sounded like… Was he saying my whole life on the outside had been a lie?

  No. That couldn’t be. I shook my head, wincing at the resulting pain. But my brain, slowly pushing off the last effects of the drug, worked through the logic, against my will.

  The attack on GTX the night I’d escaped could have been real, or the whole thing could have been engineered to create a solid story.

  I hadn’t been stupid, even at that age. If they’d opened the door and let me walk free, I would have been suspicious. Maybe not right away, but eventually.

  Instead I’d been spirited away…from the scene of a major crime at a highly security-conscious company, hidden in an oversized gym bag that, somehow, no one had even questioned or bothered to check.

  I felt dizzy suddenly. My escape had been too easy. Way too easy.

  “Our psychological expert suggested that the block in your abilities might be unconscious and that the only way to ‘undo it,’ so to speak, was for you to feel safe again. You also needed practice in pretending to be human and blending in.” He frowned. “You always were an odd little thing.” He brightened. “So we just moved to Phase Two—cultural indoctrination—of the project a little sooner than planned. We couldn’t have you wandering around on assignment, saying and doing things that would call attention to yourself. Now you can pass through a crowd unnoticed.”

  I’d fallen right into their plan, I realized. Walked in step with it as if I’d known what they were intending all along.

  “But the Rules,” I protested weakly.

  “We had to do something to keep you from getting too involved, too close to the good citizens of Wingate,” Dr. Jacobs said. “Letting you wander with some autonomy was quite the risk for us, even with Tucker supervising. Our entire project could have been shut down if you’d decided to tell someone the truth.”

  The Rules hadn’t been about protecting me. They’d been covering their asses. All the time, effort, and worry I’d devoted to those Rules…I’d just been helping them, aiding in my own captivity.

  Hot acid rose from my stomach into the back of my throat, and I made it to the toilet, barely, before vomiting.

  My life as I knew it was over. No, worse than that—my life as I knew it had never existed. My head was throbbing, a tight band of pain around my forehead and through the back of my neck. Every part of me was screaming to shut down. To close my eyes and simply pretend I was somewhere else.

  In the background, I could hear Dr. Jacobs yammering on, as though he hadn’t noticed my distress. More likely, though, he simply did not care. “…it’s taken us far longer to get to this point than I’d initially hoped. We’d anticipated it would only take a few months for you to break through the block, not ten years.” He laughed. “So we’re running short on time. Laughlin has set up trials for next month in Chicago. But I know you will soundly defeat the hybrids from his lab,” he said with pride in his voice. “I’ve heard rumors that they can barely speak.”

  Hybrids. That cau
ght my attention, and I turned my head carefully in his direction. Did he mean others like me? There were others like me, still alive? And defeat them how?

  The name, Laughlin. It sounded vaguely familiar, as though I’d heard it before, years ago.

  “First things first, though.” Dr. Jacobs clapped his hands briskly, the sound delayed a millisecond over the intercom from the action I saw through the window. “You must change your clothes and take out those contact lenses. You look ridiculous. Like a monkey wearing a suit and glasses.”

  I looked down at myself. I was still wearing my pink shirt, though it was torn at the shoulder and streaked with dirt and grease from the road. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror, but I could feel the lenses, gritty in my eyes. In any other situation I’d have been glad to get into something clean and take out the contacts, which I hated anyway. But to do so at Dr. Jacobs’s command?

  I didn’t move.

  Dr. Jacobs sighed. “You’re not going to start this again, are you? Not even here a few hours and already you’re forcing me to resort to threats. Young lady, I don’t like to threaten.”

  No, he loved to threaten. I ignored him, turning my attention to the man I’d once trusted with my life.

  “Was your daughter even real?” I asked, swallowing hard over the lump in my throat. “Or was that just another manipulation? Something to make me feel like I could trust you?”

  Mark Tucker’s gaze darted toward me for a second, and I saw that his eyes were rimmed with red. Stress, lack of sleep, or did he actually care?

  “I took a photo, did you know that? From the box in the basement,” I continued.

  He looked at me, startled.

  “I think it’s a school picture,” I said. “Probably her last one.”

  He winced.

  “Was that something I was meant to find, a GTX tech’s weekend adventure with Photoshop?” I persisted. I needed to know what was real, needed to see something from him, some kind of reaction. “I mean, it was a hell of a bargain, two made-up daughters, one to fool the other—”