Project Paper Doll (29 page)

“Not all the time,” he said, as if I’d asked something absurd. “It would be far too overwhelming for her human side.”

There it was again: that strange emphasis on the word “human.” If she wasn’t human, what was she?

“But strong thoughts or emotions come through clearly.” Dr. Jacobs cocked his head to one side, frowning at me. “Exactly how close are you to my girl?”

Just the way he said that was skeevy,
too
interested, and I shuddered. Ariane…how bad was it for her to be trapped here with him?

“Enough talking,” Rachel snapped. “Let’s get this freak show on the road.”

Before anyone could say anything, she pushed forward and punched the button Dr. Jacobs had indicated earlier.

I sucked in a breath, not sure what would happen, and the wall in front of us shifted from white to translucent.

And there was Ariane, on the other side of the glass, staring back at us.

Z
ANE WAS
HERE
. A
ND HE WASN’T ALONE
. I barely had time to accept that jarring bit of reality before the glass wall flickered and went translucent.

Zane was standing next to Dr. Jacobs, staring down at me, his mouth open slightly as if startled by the sight of me. He appeared unharmed, thankfully, except for a distinct pallor to his skin, like the kind that came with receiving a major shock.

Oh God.
I closed my eyes, my face burning with humiliation. Being a freak is one thing. Being a freak in a cage is so much worse. And if Dr. Jacobs told him about my nonhuman heritage…

Most people didn’t even think aliens really existed. And among those who did believe, “my” relatives had a bad rep. Little, gray, and creepy. Known for cattle mutilations, abductions, and an extreme fascination with probing of all kinds. Not that any of those rumors were true, as far as I knew. Except for the being little and gray—that bit was accurate, as far as I could tell, based on my own physiology and the Internet, of course.

“Zane,” I whispered, not sure what to say, afraid of making things worse. I didn’t want to see him look at me with disgust; that fear would transform me from Ariane, a girl he knew, to a
thing
. An alien freak.

And yet, that was pretty much unavoidable at this point.

It wasn’t that I expected anything from him in the future. Obviously. But I guess…I wanted Zane to think of me somewhat fondly, without the memories being completely tainted. How very human of me.

It’s not what it looks like. I can explain. I wasn’t lying to you, not exactly. I’m sorry.
None of those options seemed to fit the situation.

“See? I told you,” Rachel said with a smirk.

Up until now I’d ignored her and her loud thoughts in favor of focusing on Zane. But now I realized she was the one in front of the wall control. She’d brought Zane here and then pulled the cover off my cage, so to speak. I didn’t know whether it had been at her grandfather’s request or out of her own desire to torture me. But either way, she was still a bitch.

I stared her down, and she didn’t move, just watched me, her eyebrows raised in challenge. And never in my life did I more fully hate the wall keeping me in here.

The air bowed and flexed around me, and from the corner of my eye I saw Dr. Jacobs move swiftly to check a monitor a split second before a wooden chessboard from the shelf of toys and games smashed into the wall.

Rachel shrieked and jumped back, her hands flying up unnecessarily to protect her face.

I smiled, filled with gritty satisfaction at that small victory, and followed up by sending the chess pieces into the wall in front of her like a hail of bullets.

Which wasn’t particularly smart because they broke apart the second they hit the glass, sending the splintered remains ricocheting at high speed back toward me. Plus, Rachel barely even flinched, having figured out that nothing could get through the wall.

I redirected most of the shrapnel, but I missed one or two and felt a sharp jagged edge snag my cheek as it passed, opening a cut in a bright spot of pain.

In the room above, Dr. Jacobs ignored everyone and everything, grabbing a fresh printout and comparing it against something in a bright orange folder. Zane was shouting at Rachel, pointing at me, and she shouted right back, jabbing an accusing finger at him. The intercom was off, so I couldn’t hear what either of them was saying.

I couldn’t resist one more swipe at Rachel and sent the Risk board at the wall with a loud smack.

Distracted by Zane, Rachel jumped in surprise, and then glared at me.

Dr. Jacobs looked up, half dazed, and stepped between Rachel and Zane to adjust something on the control panel, and the intercom popped to life. He backed away and gestured toward Zane with a “go ahead” motion before returning to his folder and papers with a frown.

“Ariane,” Zane said. “Are you okay?” He sounded worried, which simultaneously warmed and broke my heart. I could hear Rachel’s strident voice in the background as she talked to her grandfather, but not what she was saying. She was too far from the mic. Thankfully.

I raised my sleeve to wipe at my cheek. The blood looked so red on the white, but not red enough, probably. Not human enough. “I’m fine. You shouldn’t be here.”

Zane looked around the observation room and then at my little white room with a frown. “I don’t think anyone should be here.”

For some reason, this show of faith, even after all he’d seen, brought tears to my eyes.

I looked away. “I’m dangerous.” The words slipped out before I could stop them, my worst fear spoken aloud.

“Yeah?” He shrugged. The gesture was a little stiff, but he was trying. “I bet you’re hell on checkers, too.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed, though it came out resembling a sob.

“Listen,” he said more quietly. “Is there someone I can call? Someone who can help you or—”

“No. You need to leave right now,” I said. If Dr. Jacobs would even let him. As I watched, the doctor stepped around his granddaughter and picked up the phone on the wall, pressing a quick succession of buttons before hanging up. Something bad was coming, I could feel it. “Zane, I’m serious. You need to contact your father.” He might not be much help, but something was better than nothing. “Do you have your phone?”

His mouth tightened. “I’m not going to leave you here.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

He pulled his cell from his pocket and looked at it. “No bars,” he said after a second.

Of course.
“Does anyone know you’re here?” I asked, hearing the desperate edge in my voice.

Zane frowned. “What are you not telling me?”

Behind him, two men in the black GTX uniforms I knew all too well stepped in.

No.
I rushed at the wall and pounded on it. Zane stepped back, startled.

“You don’t have to do this,” I shouted at Dr. Jacobs. “He didn’t do anything. Please!”

Jacobs didn’t spare me a glance; he simply nodded at the security team.

“I’ll do it!” I said in a panic. “I’ll do anything you want. Leave him alone.” I couldn’t watch them drag him away to whatever fate Dr. Jacobs had devised for him. It would be clever and cruel, I knew that much.

Zane looked from me to the security guys. “Ariane, what’s going on?” he asked, tension in his voice.

“Don’t,” I pleaded with Dr. Jacobs.

Then I watched in shock as they clamped their hands on Rachel, not Zane, and pulled her from the room. She was too startled even to scream.

Dr. Jacobs, his expression grim, followed.

“Run,” I urged Zane in a low whisper. I had no idea what was going on, but an opportunity like this would not happen again. “Go before he gets back.”

“I can’t,” he whispered. “The elevator is locked.”

“What about a place to hide? Did you see anything?”

“What is going on?” he demanded.

“He’s going to try to use you to make me cooperate, to make me kill,” I said flatly.

Zane’s eyes widened. “What?”

The door to my little prison opened, and Rachel tumbled in, a blur of dark hair, red shirt, and gold scarf. She landed on her knees as the door snapped shut.

I couldn’t have said which of us was more surprised.

Rachel scrambled to her feet, her ankles wobbling in her too-tall heels. “You do not touch me, you little freak. You stay away.”

Somewhere along the way, Rachel had failed to notice that I didn’t need to touch her to cause harm.

She backed up toward the door and turned to pound on it. “Let me out!” she shrieked.

Dr. Jacobs appeared in the observation room again, his face drawn. If I didn’t know better, I would have said he was upset. But then again, that would have required a soul.

“What is this?” Already, my room felt smaller with Rachel yelling. I seriously hoped this was not Dr. Jacobs’s attempt to motivate through negative reinforcement. As in, Rachel would stay in here with me until I cooperated. That might actually work.

Dr. Jacobs approached the microphone. “The GTX reputation is at stake. The trials are in less than a month, and we don’t have time to waste. I’ve tried to appeal to your logical side, but perhaps I’ve been going about this all wrong.” He held up the orange folder in one hand and the new printouts in the other. “It seems your emotional response is the key.”

Zane looked at me in confusion. “Trials?” he mouthed at me.

I ignored him, focusing on Dr. Jacobs. What did any of this have to do with Rachel being in here?

“I can’t haul young Mr. Bradshaw around with us everywhere, jabbing at him like some kind of oversized voodoo doll to get you to behave. You’ll never
win
that way,” he said, his disappointment clear. “I need you to remember who you are. You are not human, no matter how successfully you may masquerade as one.”

I winced.

Zane edged closer to the microphone. “You keep saying that about her,” he said, his gaze bouncing between Dr. Jacobs and me. “Why?”

He doesn’t know?

Jacobs looked startled, as though the answer should have been obvious.

“Don’t,” I said quickly. “Please.”

But he didn’t hear me, or pretended not to. “She is, quite simply, a masterpiece,” he said to Zane. “My crowning achievement, a seamless blend of human and foreign DNA—”

“Stop!” I protested. “He doesn’t need to—”

“In layman’s terms, a hybrid. Human and extraterrestrial,” Dr. Jacobs finished.

My shoulders slumped.

“Extraterrestrial. You mean…alien?” Zane gaped at him. “Like, little green men?”

“What?” Rachel stopped her pounding on the door to stare at her grandfather and then me.

“Gray, actually,” Jacobs said to Zane. “But you’ve got the right idea.”

Zane paled.

Crap.
I closed my eyes for a second, opening them just in time to see Rachel bend down and pick up some of the scattered chess pieces from the floor and throw them at me.

They bounced off me harmlessly. “I cannot be in here with this…thing,” she shouted at her grandfather, and bent down to scoop up more game pieces.

Pushed well past the point of patience, I reached out mentally and held her still. “Enough already.”

Rachel struggled to move, but got nowhere for her efforts. “Let me go!”

“No,” I snapped.

“Excellent,” Dr. Jacobs murmured, watching us intently.

I froze, a very bad idea occurring to me in the form of a question I should have asked from the beginning. “What are the requirements for the trials?” I asked, feeling a slow swell of dread. “What do I have to do to qualify?”

“There’s just one,” Dr. Jacobs said in that clipped, clinical tone I’d learned to hate. “End the life of an enemy combatant with documented proof of such.”

“What?” Rachel looked at me, her face pasty white.

Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of.

A
LIEN
. T
HE WORD ECHOED IN MY HEAD,
blocking out everything else. The idea was ridiculous, laughable even.

Except…Ariane was short and thin, so breakably fragile. Her pale skin was not that of a redhead; it was more of a pure white, maybe what would come from blending human skin color with that whitish gray of an alien. And all the things she could do—that wasn’t normal.

I took a step back. One of the flat-screen monitors caught my attention. It was flashing data, numbers, and charts I couldn’t make much sense of. At first.

One screen was labeled
HUMAN
and seemed to be indicating norms for blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, respiration, and other measurements on a human-shaped diagram. A second later the screen flipped to a different diagram, one I recognized almost as quickly as the first, though it took my brain a second to process what I was seeing.

Under the label
FOREIGN
, the screen showed similar diagnostics scrawling across an image of small body—thin arms and legs, large head with a demonstrably pointed chin.

The only thing missing was the traditionally gray skin and the oversized dark eyes.

I swallowed hard. What Dr. Jacobs said was true. Ariane really wasn’t human. At least, not entirely.

“Her death. And verifiable proof of it?” Ariane asked, her voice thinner over the intercom than in real life.

That brought me back to the conversation at hand. I looked up sharply, unsure what was going on. It sounded like a negotiation.

Dr. Jacobs nodded.

“What will you give me if I choose to cooperate?” Ariane asked.

Definitely a negotiation. Involving death? “Wait, what?” I stepped back up to the intercom.

Rachel rushed up to the window, her face blotchy and smeared with tears. “Get me out, Zane! She’s going to try to kill me!”

“Not try,” Ariane said with a shrug.

She could do it, I knew that. She’d almost done it last night.

“Grandpa?” Rachel whispered, her gaze searching his face.

But he looked away.

Rachel gave a shriek that was equal parts terror and outrage and ran to the door to pound on it. “Let me out! Someone let me out!”

Wide-eyed, I looked to Dr. Jacobs, who sighed heavily. “We’re all called upon to make sacrifices in the name of science. We need a documented death to enter the trials. And”—he opened the orange folder in his trembling hands and held it out to me—“it seems 107 responds to Rachel as a threat, based on recent incidents.”

I shook my head. His words made sense individually, but put together they were word salad. “Trials. What are—”

“A competition between 107 and other similar, though inferior, creations from my opponents,” he said impatiently. “An important government contract is at stake.”

He was serious. The man next to me, whose face was in the paper every other day, who had a freaking permanent place on the parade stand next to my dad every summer during the Wingate Fourth of July parade, was proposing murder in order to enter some kind of
game
.

“You can’t just go around killing people as part of an experiment,” I said, aghast.

He tsked at me. “Don’t be so naïve. If you’d paid any attention at all to history, you’d know there’s a long tradition of doing exactly that. Collateral damage. Acceptable for the greater good.”

“But Rachel’s your granddaughter!” I blurted, unable to formulate a stronger argument through my shock.

“I should ask someone else’s family to make the sacrifice instead?” he asked mildly. “This is my life’s work. I bear the cost.

“What do you want in return?” he asked Ariane, resuming their discussion.

I stared at them. How in the hell had I ended up here? Then again, maybe it wasn’t so bizarre that Dr. Jacobs was suggesting killing his own flesh and blood when the girl I’d been making out with just the other night was
half alien
.

I turned my attention to Ariane, looking so small and yet so dangerous on the other side of the glass. Despite the new information I had, this was the same girl who’d sat in front of me in Algebra II last year. The one who’d seemed so lonely and vulnerable, wounded by the depictions of aliens as scary, ugly, or violent. The one who’d intervened last night to stop people—humans—from being hurt.

I leaned closer to the microphone. “Don’t,” I said to her. “You don’t have to do this. It’s crazy.”

“Crazier than my being in here? Crazier than what I am?” she asked, her dark eyes damp and shiny with tears.

Damn.
I tried a different tack. “Remember how you were all over me about making my own decisions? This is the same thing.” I could hear the desperation in my voice. This was important—not just in terms of Rachel’s life, but in who Ariane was going to be. I could sense the fork in the road looming ahead. This would change her. How could it not?

But Ariane didn’t respond. She just looked from Dr. Jacobs to me, calculating in some way.

I kept pushing. “Rachel is a pain the ass, yes—”

Rachel took time out from her panicked flailing at the door to step back and glare at me.

“—but she doesn’t deserve to die. Please.”

Ariane tipped her head to one side, her strange, too-dark eyes considering. “If I do this, you release Zane,” she said to Jacobs. “Never bother him again. That’s what I want.”

“No!” I shouted.

“Of course,” he said immediately, as if it were nothing to him.

“What?” Rachel shouted, her hands clutched in fists.

“He’s lying to you!” I couldn’t be sure of that, but it only made sense. Why would he do what Ariane wanted when he wouldn’t even refer to her by name? And if he was willing to have his own granddaughter killed, he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave me alive as a witness.

Ariane nodded slowly, but I couldn’t tell if she was responding to me or Dr. Jacobs.

“Stay away!” Rachel stumbled out of the corner, trying to put more distance between herself and Ariane, a hopeless effort in such a small space. She reached the bookcase and started hurling books toward Ariane, who raised a hand and shunted them aside without even looking.

It was frightening and impressive.

Then Ariane turned to face Rachel, who went very pale and still.

“No,” she whispered, visibly trembling. Her cheeks were wet with tears and her nose was running.

My stomach twisted.

“You aren’t seriously going to let this happen, are you?” I asked Dr. Jacobs.

He reached out and snapped off the intercom. “We need the funds from winning the trial. That’s all. Are you honestly telling me that one spoiled girl’s life is more important than all those who will be saved through the medical and military advancements from this project?” He gave me a forced, polished smile, his eyes blazing with a creepy passion. It reminded me of my dad’s arguments for the greater good that were more about his own advancement.

Jacobs was slick, I’d give him that. But even if everything he said was true, it wasn’t his choice to make. To control Ariane’s life. To end Rachel’s because he needed his stupid proof. No way.

I turned away from him and focused on Ariane.
I know you can hear me. You can’t come back from this. Please!

She tensed but didn’t look at me. Instead she stepped toward Rachel, her hand out and her mouth moving quickly with words I couldn’t hear.

Rachel looked both pissed and terrified.

Oh God, Ariane was really going to do it. I turned away. “I can’t watch this.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be over quickly,” Dr. Jacobs said. “All we need to do is document her actions and confirm the death—”

I bolted for the exit, and he didn’t try to stop me. That was because the door to Ariane’s prison was not just locked but sealed. A scanner with the outline of a hand on the glass sensor was set into the wall.

I heard Rachel scream—Jacobs must have turned the intercom back on—and through the transparent door I watched Ariane back her up against the wall simply by walking toward her.

With a cold smile, Ariane leaned toward her, whispered in her ear, and Rachel screeched to bring the house down, tears dark with mascara rolling down her cheeks.

Then Rachel suddenly went quiet, the silence ringing in my ears. It was last night all over again as Rachel clutched at her chest, her face turning red.

“Ariane!” I pounded on the door. “Stop!”

Rachel dropped to her knees with a painful thump, and Ariane moved out of the way, as cool as you please.

A moment later, Rachel collapsed forward onto the floor, her whole body limp.

Ariane turned to look up at Dr. Jacobs in the observation room. “Satisfied?”

He ran into the hall and down the few steps, a stethoscope around his neck and a case marked with a heart and a lightning bolt in his hand. A portable defibrillator? I’d seen them at the police station.

“Move,” he shouted at me.

I stepped aside as he slammed his free hand against the palm scanner, and the door hissed open.

He rushed inside, and I followed. The door snapped shut behind us.

Rachel wasn’t moving, her eyes closed and hands lying slack at her sides. I’d never seen her so quiet and still. I hadn’t always liked her or agreed with what she did, but she was still one of my oldest friends. Or, she had been.

I stared at Ariane. I couldn’t believe she’d done it.

She avoided my gaze, folding her arms over her chest in a defensive posture. “You reap what you sow,” she said quietly, her attention focused on Dr. Jacobs.

“Really?” I demanded. “That’s the only thing you have to say?”

Dr. Jacobs knelt at Rachel’s side and turned her over. He put the stethoscope in his ears and cracked open the defibrillator case in preparation. At least he was going to try to save her.

He looked up at the camera in the corner of the room. “Documentation of GTX entrance qualification,” he said in a loud voice.

But only after he got what he wanted, of course.

“Time of death—” he began.

Before he could finish, Rachel sucked in a deep breath and sat up, sputtering and coughing.

I stumbled back, shocked.

Rachel glared at Ariane. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to hold your breath for that long?”