Project Paper Doll (4 page)

I was tired of these games Rachel played, but it was too late to strike out on my own. I only had two years left here. It wasn’t worth the effort. Not to mention, being friends with a member of the illustrious Jacobs family was pretty much the only thing I’d managed not to screw up, in my father’s opinion.

Rachel cocked her head to one side, giving me a considering look. Then she stood up in the hot tub and stepped out. The ends of her dark hair were wet, and goose bumps covered the skin that was not covered by her red bikini.

I braced myself, expecting her to begin firing off questions, her suspicions aroused.

But instead she leaned down, smelling of chlorine and that heavy musky perfume she favored, and said, “Welcome back, Zaney.” Then she brushed her mouth over mine, which shocked the hell out of me.

She strolled off toward the house, leaving me to deal with Trey, who was glaring at me like he wanted to set me on fire.

Great.

That was Rachel for you—always looking for the two-for-one when it came to causing chaos.

M
Y FATHER WAITED
until my second bite of breakfast on Wednesday (four scrambled eggs for my higher protein needs) for the ambush.

He slid a newspaper across the table. “Were you planning on telling me about this?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.

The edge in his voice took me aback, as did the faint smell of alcohol on his breath. It wasn’t really morning for him, as he’d yet to go to bed, but still. I hadn’t seen him drink—at all—since the first few months of my life Outside, when he was mourning the loss of his daughter. I’d only been living with him for a couple weeks when he received word that she’d died. Back then, I would slip out of my room—which I wasn’t supposed to do—and find him in the living room drinking scotch and staring at photos of his Ariane, which he normally kept hidden in the basement. He had not expected her to recover; I’d known that much when he’d given me her name. But that knowledge had not helped him in any way. If anything, it had only made his grief worse. He’d gone through a period where he always had a bottle in hand. But that was a long time ago.

So I knew even before looking at the newspaper, something was very wrong.

The article was in the middle of the paper and tucked beneath a gigantic ad for the local tire store, Rubber Mike’s. I didn’t read the whole thing; didn’t have to.

Lights Out at Ashe High

An unexplained power surge yesterday morning shattered lightbulbs in an upper hallway of Ashe High School, raining glass shards down upon students
.…

Crap.
I sucked in a breath and choked on my eggs.

I’d stayed up late last night to watch the news and run a few Internet searches—not too many, in case GTX was monitoring—to see if the incident had caught media attention. But what wasn’t big enough for TV or showy enough for the Internet (had to leave room for imploding celebrities and cute cats stuck in boxes) was just right for the Wingate local paper.

God, why did yesterday have to be the one day free of the small-town idiocy that normally dominated the paper, the day that someone
hadn’t
stolen an entire neighborhood’s worth of garden gnomes and arranged them in various sexual positions on the front lawn of the Methodist church?

(Actually, I’d found that pretty funny at the time. You can’t get better examples of hypocrisy than people confronted with blatant—albeit gnomish—displays of sexuality. They get red-faced and blustery all the while intensely wishing they could get their significant other to try what the red gnome was doing to the blue garden fairy. You can’t hide thoughts like that from me, people, not without a lot of training and practice. Genius advancement or design flaw, take your pick.)

Coughing, I spit the eggs into my napkin. “How bad is it?”

“Bad enough.” My father looked grim and tired, but he wasn’t shoving me toward the back door with an urgent whisper to flee, so I wasn’t, it seemed, in immediate danger of being recaptured. I relaxed a fraction.

“Were you going to tell me?” he asked again, tapping his finger against the paper. He looked every inch the imposing head of security that he was. He was still wearing his uniform, and his shirt bore the impressions of his shoulder harness, though it and his gun were probably already locked in the safe in his bedroom. His jacket, emblazoned with the GTX logo, hung from the back of his chair. Normally he would have put it out of sight already, knowing how much I hated it.

(At some point in my very early life at GTX, maybe right after I was born, they’d marked me like livestock. My right shoulder blade held a tattoo of the GTX logo, a big stylized G, and my project designation, GTX-F-107, just beneath it in crude lettering. I wore a bandage over it to keep anyone from seeing it, but I still had to look at it in the mirror every day when I applied a new bandage. And the sight never failed to make me feel sick and so very angry.)

“I can’t protect you if you’re going to hide things from me,” he added with a deep frown.

The censure in his voice made my stomach ache. I hated disappointing him, this man who’d risked everything for me. “I wasn’t hiding it.” I swallowed hard, avoiding his gaze. “It was just…nothing.”

He didn’t say anything, but his dark expression told me how “nothing” he thought it was.

“It was over as soon as it started,” I added quickly. Like every other similar incident since my departure from GTX, though admittedly it had been almost a year since the last one (in which I might have turned a page in my English lit book without touching it) and this one was slightly higher profile. “Mr. Kohler made an announcement about it being a bad transformer, and no one thought anything about it.”

“Were you in control?” my father asked.

I hesitated and then said, “No.” Just like always, the barrier in my mind—the one that cut me off from the most powerful of my abilities—had fallen and then gone back up with no direction from me.

“Are you sure?” he persisted. Clearly we’d reached the interrogation portion of this conversation.

Yes, I’m sure, because if I’d had my way, there would have been a Rachel Jacobs–shaped hole in the wall instead of just a few broken lights.
Not a good answer. “Pretty sure,” I said instead. “And I tried again when I was alone, a few minutes later. No luck.”

Technically, I hadn’t been alone. Not completely. Jenna, the sole other occupant of the bathroom, had been in the handicap stall, sobbing too hard to let me in. The metal latch on a stall door is as simple a mechanism as they come. But with every bit of focus I could summon, to the point of making my head throb with the effort, I hadn’t been able to make that little metal bar rise up and drop away.

Eventually I’d given up and simply knocked. Some super-secret weapon I am. Behold my ability to knock. Sometimes I wondered why GTX would even want me in my current condition. The mental wall that my six-year-old self had erected around my telekinesis as a self-protective measure was incredibly effective. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t
make
that wall drop. I could still hear people’s thoughts and sense their emotions—those functions remained intact. But everything else? Gone.

The ability to manipulate objects without touching them—throw, bend, deflect, speed up, slow down, summon from across the room, all of that—had once been as easy and simple for me as breathing. It hadn’t seemed magical or special, any more than a human would have been astounded by their brain translating electrical impulses into sight. It was just something I could do. A seeing person among the blind.

Toward the end of my stay in the lab I’d progressed beyond controlling inanimate objects and moved on to bigger and better things. With enough concentration I’d been able to target specific muscles within the body, stop them from moving. I was that good…or bad, depending on how you wanted to look at it. I could keep the muscles in your legs from working, and hold you quiet and still while I did whatever I’d been commanded to do.

I’m not sure anyone should ever have that kind of power.

And now I didn’t. Not in a readily accessible or controlled manner, anyway.

My father leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “You created the block, you should be able to bring it down,” he reminded me for the millionth time.

“I know,” I said tightly. But knowing that didn’t seem to make a difference.

After what had happened in the lab all those years ago, after what I’d done…it was as if that part of me had been lopped off or shut away behind an impenetrable wall. My father told me it wasn’t uncommon for human children to block memories of a traumatic event. He suspected my sudden inability to access that part of myself was a more severe form of this same phenomenon.

He thought that with time, patience, and practice, what I’d lost would return to me. But it had been ten years of all three now with little or—let’s face it—no progress. Except, apparently, when Rachel Jacobs was on a rampage.

On rare occasions, like yesterday, the block would sort of thin out for a few seconds, and my telekinesis would break through, like a buried memory floating to the surface. Usually with disastrous results, because I wasn’t in control of the flood of power. And then, before I could even
try
to get control, the block would close me out again.

Honestly, most days I didn’t care that my ability was gone. I wasn’t really sure I wanted it back—it had only brought me fear and pain. But I couldn’t tell my father that.

“You need to start practicing again.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. He probably hadn’t slept since sometime yesterday; exhaustion was catching up to him. “If the block is finally starting to disappear and you don’t have control, those bursts of wild power are going to lead GTX right to us.” He looked at me, worried. “You’d be completely defenseless.”

In spite of my reservations about getting my ability back, I knew he was right. But
more
practice?

Something between a bitter laugh and a scream of frustration lodged in my chest with an ache. The truth was, “practice” was a joke. For years I’d spent several hours a day after school trying to move a red foam ball into a plastic blue cup without touching either one. It was pointless. I’d stared at those objects for so long it felt as though the afterimages were permanently burned into the backs of my eyes. And the only time that stupid ball ever moved was when I accidentally jostled the table with my knee.

How was I supposed to regain control over a power I couldn’t even access with any degree of regularity? I’d given up trying about six months ago.

“Practice won’t help.” I rubbed at the ache beneath my breastbone. “It hasn’t helped.”

“We have to do something,” he said. “We’re running out of time.”

I froze.

“One of my sources at GTX says they’re ramping up the search for you. With the changeover in the administration, new people are in key positions, and the hearing committee on DOD spending is making everyone jumpy. Someone’s going to be checking to see where all the government funds went for this research, and GTX will want to have something to show for the project,” he said. The “project” meaning me.

I shivered. That explained the phone call yesterday morning and why he’d been following the news about the hearing committee intently. “How close are they?” I asked, my throat suddenly tight with fear.

My father closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

He looked tired—the skin sagging around his eyes—and so much older. As if twenty years had passed instead of ten since the night at GTX when he’d first acknowledged my existence with a discreet wave. He was the only human ever to treat me as a
person
and mean it. For the first six years of my life, give or take, I’d thought my name was Wannoseven. It was only after I escaped—with Mark Tucker’s help—that I learned Wannoseven wasn’t a name at all but a numerical designation. 107. Pathetic. I’d answered to a number, one Jacobs and the others had assigned me.

My first few years in the lab weren’t bad. Actually, they were awful, but that’s only based on the knowledge I have now, thanks to ten years of living Outside. At the time, the lab was my home, and while I certainly hated parts of it (the constant testing—no kid likes to get shots or have her blood drawn; and let me tell you, electrodes inserted at the back of your head aren’t much fun either), I didn’t know any different. It wasn’t that I thought other children were undergoing similar experiences in their own homes; it was more that I’d never met another child. I knew they existed—I’d seen them in my cultural training sessions, but I’d also seen talking dogs (Scooby-Doo), a man who rode a brontosaurus at work (Fred Flintstone), and countless women who woke up from long hospital stays to discover they were someone else entirely (soap operas).

Consequently, my views of the “real” world were initially a little jumbled. I could find Earth in the solar system, identify the various countries on the planet, and pinpoint our location in Wingate. I could even tell you something about all of those things in any one of the five different languages I’d been taught (English, Chinese, Spanish, German, and Arabic).

But none of it
meant
anything to me. I’d lived inside the same four white walls every day. The world of Little Red Riding Hood described in the book of fairy tales I’d memorized was as real to me as any map of Earth. Knowledge without context. That was my problem.

It led to an obsession with Outside. That was how I’d thought of it then, a vast location that was as mysterious, exciting, and frightening as anything I could imagine. The logical part of my brain knew there were states and cities and countries and oceans. But the other part of me, the bit that was both fascinated and horrified when the wolf ate Grandma and
she survived
, thought of it as a wild and unruly place where anything was possible. And I wanted to experience it. I wanted to feel the grass beneath my feet, to see if it could really grow taller than I was. (I’d seen only part of
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
and misunderstood what was happening in the back half of the story.)

I wanted to see where Dr. Jacobs and all the lab techs (save one or two on the night shift) went when I slept. I think I somehow had the idea that they were all getting together and doing something fun without me.