Project Paper Doll: The Trials by Stacey Kade Page A

immediately, with desperation and fury in his voice. “My product is perfectly stable. She was reacting only to this
ridiculous stunt.” He threw Dr. St. John a glare that would have melted glass. St. John didn’t seem to care; if anything, he was amused.
    But when Morpheus nodded at the GTX guards holding me, they dragged me toward the door.
    Somewhere inside me, I was dimly aware that I was losing my chance, my opportunity to end Project Paper Doll in one fell swoop, but I didn’t care in that moment. How could I when I
didn’t know if Zane was okay, if that person standing there wearing his face could even still be considered—
    TOMORROW MORNING. WEST ENTRANCE.
    The words boomed and echoed in my head as my guard entourage and I reached the doors. I flinched at the volume, costing me the extra second I needed to realize that I knew that voice.
    Zane.
He wanted to meet.
    Except as the guards opened the door and pulled me over the threshold, Zane gave no sign of attempting to communicate with me. No look in my direction, no wink or smile, no further attempt to
think words at me loudly enough for me to hear them. Actually, I could get nothing from his mind, which had never been the case before. And certainly shouldn’t have been the case now, if he
really wanted to “talk” to me.
    That’s when I realized that the message I’d received could just as easily be interpreted as a challenge: St. John’s special model calling out Dr. Jacobs’s product for a
one-on-one elimination.
    My heart collapsed in on itself, extinguishing the tiny flicker of hope.
    A challenge was logical, far more so than any other explanation that I would have preferred. And recognizing that was like living through Zane’s death all over again. Only so much
worse.
    Because, this time, as the conference room doors closed after us, he was standing right there, just a few feet away and completely unreachable all at the same time.

T HE SCAR ON MY STOMACH still burned and itched sometimes. But the fact that it was a scar and not a gaping wound with the accompanying destroyed muscles
and organs—or worse, a stitched-up hole on my very uncaring corpse—was enough to keep my mouth shut with gratitude. Most of the time.
    But it always got worse when I was stressed. Like now.
    “He should have been back already,” I said, resisting the urge to dig at the raised edge of the scar as I paced the plush hotel room that had been assigned to me, twenty stories
above the conference room where my fate as a trials competitor was being decided. I swore I could detect the tingling of little foreign cells zooming around beneath my skin, dodging my slower human
ones. Emerson said it was my imagination, or possibly nerve damage that was still healing. I wasn’t so sure about either of those explanations.
    I
felt
different. And it wasn’t just the itchy/tingling scar or even the occasional unintelligible buzz of other people’s thoughts in my head. For the first time in my life, I
wasn’t struggling to keep up, to be better. I just was. The abilities, the powers I’d gained, made me see the world from a new perspective, one in which I had more control than
I’d ever dreamed.
    I could do things no other human on the planet—except Adam—could do.
    But that only made helpless moments like these, where I had zero control, that much harder to bear.
    Lifting my hand to direct my power, I took my frustration out on the room drapes, using my newly acquired abilities to jerk them back along the track set in the ceiling and let in the last of
the daylight. But the tiny burst of satisfaction that came along with every demonstration of skill vanished almost immediately.
    “It’s only been fifteen minutes, bro,” Adam said from where he leaned against the opposite wall. He sounded, even looked, bored, but it was an act. He had almost as much at
stake as me, and if you knew him well enough—as I now unfortunately did from living in close quarters with