Project Paper Doll: The Rules (Excerpt)

Prologue

Prologue

Ariane Tucker

I have a dead girl’s name. Technically, I suppose I have a dead girl’s life. Either way, I’ve had them both now longer than she did, so I guess they’re mine.

 The original—or maybe the real—Ariane Tucker lay dying in a hospital bed five hundred miles away even as I first tasted fresh air, saw the sky, or experienced the world outside the small white room where I’d lived for as long as I could remember.

I try not to think about that because, as horrible as it may sound, I’m grateful to Ariane for her death. I owe her my freedom.

If she’d been a happy, healthy child, I don’t think her father—now my father—would have done what he did. Plucked me out of the darkness and saved me when the walls were shaking and the air was full of smoke.

 But that Ariane Tucker was fully human.

I’m not.

So there are Rules that come along with my being Ariane. They’re simple but essential for my safety and my father’s:

1. Never trust anyone.

2. Remember they are always searching.

3. Don’t get involved.

4. Keep your head down.

5. Don’t fall in love.

I followed these Rules faithfully for ten years, once I was old enough to understand what they meant. The trou­ble with rules, though, is that you’ll always be tempted to break one—for the right reasons, due to unavoidable cir­cumstances, because it feels as if there’s no other choice. And once you break one, the rest seem like so much broken glass. The damage is already done.