Maybe for her. My one chance was gone.
My control splintered. Overhead, one end of the cot dipped alarmingly. I yanked my legs out of the way a bare second before the cot clattered to the floor in front of me. In the corner, books thumped to the floor, pages making a ruffling noise. Then I whipped around to face Rachel.
“Trey’s worshipped you for years and you treat him like crap, like he’s yours to do with you as you please,” I snapped, frustrated with myself for responding and yet unable to stop it. “What did you expect?”
Rachel froze, her fingers still poised over her phone. Then she raised her eyebrows. “It speaks,” she said, with a sniff of disdain. “Guess you’re not brain damaged, just a freak still.”
I flopped back on the floor, cursing myself for breaking. “Go away.”
She gave a harsh laugh. “Believe me, I’d love to. You don’t think I have better things to do with my time?”
“No,” I said flatly. Rachel, for all her willingness to express her opinion and dictate to others what theirs should be, seemed to be lacking a sympathetic (or unresponsive) ear to listen to her discuss all the endless trouble in her life. She gave me a hostile look. “I’m not getting paid enough for this,” she announced to no one in particular and everyone within hearing range before returning her attention to her phone.
But once I’d opened up the barrier—burst through the waxen layers of resistance and determination that had distanced me from Rachel—I couldn’t reseal it.
I sat up. “Does of any of this even register with you?” I asked, sweeping my hand in a gesture that encompassed my cell, the observation window above, and pretty much the entirety of the corporation, levels above me. “People are going to die because your grandfather and Dr. Laughlin are determined to one-up each other.”
The trials, in theory, were a competition to determine who had the best product, a term they used to describe genetically engineered alien/human hybrids like me. The prize: a lucrative government contract to create a whole line of soldier/assassins of the not-quite-human variety, according to Dr. Jacobs. The losing products would not survive. They would either die in the competition or be destroyed afterward. No reason to keep them around.
There were three companies competing. I didn’t know who Dr. St. John would send, if anyone. (Jacobs didn’t seem concerned about him.) But I knew it was me from GTX and likely Ford from Laughlin Integrated. Laughlin and Jacobs had a history, hating each other for past sins and slights and using us to act in their stead in this grudge match.
It was more than a contract at stake here; it was pride and ego. And those were far worse.
Ford and I, sisters of a sort, would end up at each other’s throats, perhaps literally, vying to win. Ford, because she would fight until the end to save the only other hybrid we knew of, Carter. And I would kill to end this program, to destroy us all and the ones who’d made us. In fact, I’d already killed for that cause, as much as my mind tried to shy away from that memory.
The only question was which of us—Ford or me—would succeed. And it had to be me. If I was going to die—and that was a certainty, only the timing was in doubt—then it needed to count for something.
I pictured Ford on the ground, her face, identical to mine, turning red and then shades of purple, veins bulging as she struggled to breathe while I held her heart still in my mental grasp. Now that I’d actually done it—stopped a beating human heart—it was all too easy for me to picture.
A wave of sadness washed over me. Even in trying to do the right thing, Ford and I would both end up hurting each other instead of the people who deserved it.
I definitely didn’t wish Ford dead. She and Carter were the closest thing I had to family. I didn’t like Ford, exactly—she was difficult and strange—but I admired her. She hadn’t had it any easier than me, living in Laughlin’s facility and forced to attend school as part of a humanizing effort, all the while trying to protect her “siblings.” She’d never had a chance at true freedom, either. But the photo of a gorgeous lake surrounded by mountains—somewhere in Utah, maybe?—that she’d hidden away in the cubby where she slept told me that she’d dreamed about it, at least.
“Not real people,” Rachel muttered defiantly, meeting my gaze with a challenge in her eyes.
It took me a second, lost in my thoughts as I was, to put Rachel’s words in context.
I stiffened. People were going to die, but they weren’t real people to Rachel. I wasn’t a real person.
It wasn’t exactly a surprise she held that opinion. A lot of people involved in Project Paper Doll, including Zane’s mother, Mara, shared it. And yet hearing those words from Rachel sliced at me. I’d been in classes with her. She’d known me as Ariane Tucker before she knew I was GTX-F-107.