Project Paper Doll: The Trials (30 page)

“Stop!”

“Don’t move!”

“Raise your hands and get on your knees!”

Contradictory orders, and Ariane, of course, ignored them, focusing her attention on holding the men in place.

Only the change in their expressions, from harsh and commanding to alarmed, revealed that she’d succeeded.

Several strained curses followed.

“Please stay calm. I won’t hurt anyone,” she said, removing the weapons from their hands with a gesture, neatly and easily, without so much as a stray shot. With the guns
floating in the air ahead of her, she simply stepped between the men, easing through the narrow gap between them.

Jesus. I followed—a much trickier move for someone of my size—and I could feel the force they were exerting against her hold. If sheer muscle and determination (and pissed-offness)
could break them loose, they would have done it.

Unfortunately, that was no match for what Ariane had working against them. She could stop a freaking heart. Arms and legs were just no contest for her.

As soon as we were clear of them, though, three more came charging toward us with more of the same. Guns. Threats.

Ariane neatly brushed them aside, but one of them recovered faster, breaking loose as we passed them.

I was closest, so he made a grab for me first.

With a strained expression, Ariane swiped at the air in front of him, a gesture that should have sent him reeling, or at least knocked him back a step or two, but it seemed only to slow him
down, and barely.

She was exerting too much of her energy holding the others in place, I realized. That telekinetic ability, however amazing it might be, was a finite resource. It could only be used to do so many
things at once. Emerson had treated us to many lectures on that topic at the lab.

I focused on the officer and concentrated on where I wanted him to be, just as Adam had condescendingly instructed during our sessions in the lab.

The officer slammed into the wall, his head hitting with a disturbing thunk that sent a shudder through me. His eyes snapped closed, but his chest still rose and fell. Unconscious, or maybe just
stunned. Either way, I hadn’t meant to push quite that hard.

“Shit. Sorry,” I muttered to him.

Ariane stared at me.

“I got it,” I said tightly. Yeah, for the moment.

With a surprised arch of her eyebrows, Ariane nodded, not bothering to argue with me. Which could only be a further sign that I was right. She was tapped out or close to it.

She moved on down the hall—good God, how long was this hallway? It felt much longer when people kept trying to attack us—and I turned, pressing my back against hers to keep an eye on
them.

Always cover your six.
That was basic Call of Duty strategy. Just never thought I’d actually use it in real life.

I could feel a dull throb starting in the center of my brain, and blood trickled out of my nose and into my mouth at a rate that was unprecedented. Damn it. We needed to hurry up, or I was going
to bleed to death before someone got a chance to shoot me.

Ariane stopped abruptly, and I glanced over my shoulder to see what the issue was.

Outside the first conference room, dubbed Sherwood Forest, according to the metal plaque on the wall, five, no, six bodies were laid out on the floor, head to toe, and three on each side of the
hall. Oversized sheets, which had obviously been appropriated from a hotel supply closet somewhere, covered them.

Oh God.

Ariane inched forward and bent down to grab the corner of one sheet. I turned to watch.

A pair of EMTs leaned out from a room down the hall, and Ariane froze.

But they looked at her, at the police behind us, and then abruptly retreated, shutting the door after themselves. Smart move.

Ariane returned her attention to the sheet and the body it covered.

I held my breath, not sure if it was out of anticipation or dread at seeing a familiar face. If it was Jacobs under there, I’d celebrate as surely as Ariane. Though that would also
drastically raise the odds that Emerson was beneath one of the other sheets.

But when Ariane flipped the cover back, the man was a stranger, dressed in the security team uniform. The bright red GTX logo on his sleeve identified him as one of Jacobs’s men.

She dropped the sheet in place and repeated the same process for the corpse across the hall. Another GTX guard. So was the one after that.

But the next three were Laughlin’s guys.

Six security guards dead, three from GTX and three from Laughlin.

Weirdly, though, only two of the sheets had blood on them, the men having been shot. The other guys were just…dead.

What had happened here?

Ariane frowned and left the last of the bodies to step toward the door to the Meadowlands room door.

“Get in, get in now,” I said, panting. I had no idea what her endurance was, but I knew mine, what little I had, was fading fast. A quick glance back showed movement at the far end
of the hall, someone working his way loose from the hold one of us had put on him.

She paused long enough to wave her hand at the guns, still floating in the air a few feet from us, directing them into a tall green can with a recycling symbol on the other side of hall. They
landed inside with a cascade of echoing clangs and thumps. Then she tugged on the silver doorknob with a finger, but it didn’t so much as budge. To my complete and utter shock, she then
lifted her hand, made a fist and…

…knocked. “It’s Ariane,” she said.

“What the hell?” I spluttered.

But the door silently popped open a few inches and stayed that way, even though there was no sign of a hand.

Ariane pulled the door back just far enough to squeeze through, locking her hand around my wrist and pulling me through after her.

As if I’d want to be left behind in the hall.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t me she was worried about making that decision.

The door closed behind me with a decisive snap, leaving no alternative for escape, even if I would have wanted to.

I hadn’t actually considered what we might find inside the room. Some combination of Jacobs, Laughlin, and St. John, in states ranging from alive to dead and somewhere in between. I
suspected the Committee would be long gone.

In that one aspect, I was right. There was no sign of the Committee. But everything else was pretty much beyond anything I could have imagined.

The table that had been Emerson’s this morning was flung across the room, leaning against the one that had been Jacobs’s, and broken glass and the shattered remains of laptops
sprayed across the floor.

In the far right corner, I found Emerson, sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up to his chest like a kid sent to the naughty corner in kindergarten, only in this case it looked far more like a
refuge than a punishment.

He saw me watching him and gave a tiny shake of his head, as if to tell me to get out or vehemently disagreeing with this version of reality.

Yeah, right there with you.

The table that had been Laughlin’s, on the right side of the room, had been upended, the legs sticking up in the air now, with more of the same kind of destruction and debris around it. It
looked like a small, very specific tornado had torn through the room.

Which, from one perspective, wasn’t all that far from the truth.

In the center of the room, in what had been the open space between the tables and was just now empty space in general, Dr. Jacobs knelt on the floor, his hands bloodied as he applied pressure to
a leg wound on one of his guards. The only living one left, actually.

The last Laughlin Integrated guard was dead at his employer’s feet, merely a foot away.

But no one was paying any attention to any of this.

Because Dr. Laughlin, his face a mask of effort, his hair rumpled, and blood splattered across the front his white lab coat, held a gun trained on someone else.

There in the middle of the room, her back angled to the corner so she could see anyone approaching, stood a very familiar figure.

Her white shirt was bloodied on the left side, and that arm hung slack at her side, as though it were barely connected to her body. More like something she’d picked up by brushing too
close, a dead leaf or a piece of lint.

Blood dripped down her left hand, plinking into a growing puddle on the floor where the carpeting had already absorbed as much as it could hold. But her right hand was raised against Laughlin,
clearly the reason for his preternatural stillness and the only thing keeping him from firing.

The room crackled with an electric tension between them, as if lightning might still strike.

“It took you long enough,” Ford said to us through gritted teeth.

A
SSESS THE SITUATION
.

Even in the hardest, most surprising situations, that combination of training and instincts always surfaced, whispering like a ghost in the back of my mind.

You’re not human. Don’t react like one.
That was my father, or rather a perfect reproduction of his voice in my head, lecturing me.
Don’t freeze up, don’t
hesitate. Use what makes you different. Analyze, weigh the odds against your objective, and take action.

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.