Paper Tigers

by Meg Collett

  “I have the urge to clean,” Luke said as he locked the door. The admin wing was empty; all the professors who kept offices up here were long gone. The few teachers who remained were the younger ones like Mr. Clint. They’d only left the war because they’d suffered injuries that kept them from fighting.

  “Try to contain yourself.” I sat in Dean’s chair. It was the first time I’d found myself on the other side of his massive desk. “We don’t want him to know we were here.”

  Luke snorted as he crossed to the bookshelves. “You really think he won’t assume you took the opportunity to snoop around his office?”

  “Maybe not.” I started with the drawers, not brave enough to comb through the mess on top of his desk.

  “For all of Dean’s faults—and there are many—he’s not stupid.”

  I closed the first drawer and started on the next: Student Records. “I could argue that point,” I muttered, my focus on the files. My fingers walked atop the file folder tabs as I scanned the names. I stopped when I found mine. “Looky here.”

  Luke glanced up as I opened the file. “You’re old news. We need to focus on Zero.”

  “Call me vain.” I flipped through the folder’s contents, but Luke was right. Dean had nothing on me that I didn’t already know. I put the file back and kept searching.

  “What you said to Hatter, did you mean it?”

  I glanced up at Luke. He was watching me, a book in his hands. “What did I say?”

  “That love means nothing right now.”

  I toed the drawer shut. Zero wouldn’t be in Student Records; she hadn’t been old enough to attend the university anyway.

  “I meant it,” I said and moved on to the next drawer. “The world is too messy for love right now. Look what love got the Bautista family. Once we fix this, the world will be a better place. Love will matter then.”

  His silence settled heavily between us, but I kept my eyes on the drawer’s contents. It was full of old maps, known breeding grounds—like Barrow—and city contacts. Nothing useful. I slammed it closed, still not looking at Luke, rolled over to the other side of the desk, and started with the bottom drawer.

  In the silence, Luke heard my unspoken words: Once everything was better and love mattered, I would untangle my feelings about love and let him back into my heart. Until then, it seemed sort of a moot point considering I could barely handle his touch.

  It took me a moment to realize what I was staring at in the drawer: stacks of misaligned and haphazardly stacked composition notebooks coated with dust. Then a group of hanging folders. I pulled those forward and found heaps of cassette tapes.

  Dean’s research.

  “Jackpot.” I pulled the folders out and set them in my lap. Luke came over to stand beside me.

  “That’s his fear switch work?”

  I nodded, my lip caught between my teeth as I opened folder after folder, scanning the contents. Since coming back to Fear University with the understanding of my mother’s role in the school’s mission, I’d thought I’d made Dean tell me everything about his research on evolving a hunter’s brain to adapt to the pain stimulus emitted by aswangs. It spanned from the attempt to breed halflings—me being the only successful attempt—to lobotomizing live aswangs. And after Zero’s attack, I learned he’d conducted those gruesome surgeries on young children volunteered by their families.

  My hatred for Dean welled, and I had to lean away from the toxic content of the folders and take a deep breath to stop myself from stomping down to the ward and cracking open his skull to feed him bits of his twisted brain.

  I’d always thought of him as a mad scientist, but looking at the decades of research his fear switch experiments spanned, I realized just how mad he was. After all this time, I didn’t know what drove him. An aswang had killed his wife, but everyone here had lost someone. It was the status quo, the norm. Something else had fueled his plummet into a frenzied search for a way to evolve hunters into killing machines, and I doubted his morality was motivating him to save the world.

  “It looks like he ruined a lot of children back in the eighties,” Luke said. He was reading over my shoulder at the files opened in my lap. “They were basically vegetables when he turned them back over to their parents.”

  “He was trying to recreate Zero’s results.” I flipped to the next page and the next. “What made her so different? Why couldn’t he figure out how to adjust his procedures to keep a mind from creating a backdoor to the switch? And how in the hell did he create a halfling?”

  “By tricking evolution.”

  I glanced up at Luke. “What?”

  “Remember when you first came here and I showed you the rats in the lab?” I nodded, my ribs constricting my lungs as I held my breath. “We’ve always known fear was an ancient stimulus in human brains, but everything eventually adapts. Professors on the evolutionary side of the argument have always said aswangs were a counterbalance to humans. It occurs all the time in nature between predator and prey.”

  “What does that have to do with brains?”

  “Evolution always starts with one advanced specimen that breeds with something else and passes on the trait that helps them survive best. Maybe Zero had that trait and Dean didn’t know it. Maybe we all do, but Zero adapted best when he altered her brain. But the point is, he triggered that evolutionary response in her. If aswangs are just counterbalances, then he forced Zero’s human brain to level up.”

  “The fear switch isn’t natural, so her body adapted to the next best thing—an aswang’s mind.”

  “It was her body’s only way of protecting her.”

  I cursed under my breath. It was a good, but terrifying theory. What would it mean to the war if either side used the information I held in my hands to create a small army of evolved soldiers? Luke had once warned me if we lost the weaknesses that made us human—fear and pain—we would lose the war despite beating the aswangs. Back then, he’d thought the worst thing that could happen was Dean creating an army of Ollies. But that wasn’t true anymore.

  The worst thing would be Zeros.

  “Do you think,” I murmured, “that Sunny’s reaction to saliva is a step forward in human evolution against aswangs? Is her brain ensuring her survival by taking away her fear?”

  Luke’s gaze was steady on mine as he answered, “If so, she’s the best naturally evolved hunter we have.”

  “Fearlessness outweighs not feeling pain?”

  “But you’re a halfling. Sunny is the best human hunter on our side.”

  I gritted my teeth. “She’s not a hunter. She shouldn’t have to fight just because her body made her into a weapon.”

  Luke’s gaze burned into me. I wanted to leave the room just to put distance between us, but I hadn’t looked through all the files yet. When he spoke, I flinched, knowing what he would say. “Does she feel the same way? If you grew up in this life and lost a brother to the war, would you stand by and not fight if you knew you were our best hope?”

  “You’re trying to make this about Hatter,” I accused, “and why he won’t stop fighting.”

  Luke shrugged. “It’s the same thing. Sunny just can’t see the parallels between them.”

  “She can’t see it,” I growled, “because she’s not a fighter. She’s a nurse. She’s more important to this war than as a body in the field. She’s why we’re fighting.”

  Luke crouched in front of me, his hand on the chair’s armrest to keep me from spinning away and escaping. My breath caught in my chest. His arm was almost touching mine. His knees brushed against my boots, and his chest was one large inhalation away from my legs. I stared down at him, begging him to stop with my eyes.

  Not Sunny.

  “It’s not your call to stop her, Ollie. Just like it isn’t hers to keep Hatter from the fight. She’ll see it eventually, and when she does, she’ll fight alongside him.”

  “Stop,” I whispered. I pawed at my eyes, refusing to let the tears welling there fall.

>   “You can’t stop her from being what she needs to be.”

  He lifted his hand from the armrest and reached for me. He made certain I saw it coming and gave me the chance to escape. My breath hitched as I considered doing just that. The fucking tears slid down my cheeks. And then his hand was there, his fingers wiping them away, his eyes showing how much his heart ached for me. He cupped my cheek. His thumb brushed across my cheekbone, back and forth.

  “You felt this way about Hatter hunting?” I whispered, only moving my lips, the rest of my body frozen beneath his hand. My vision darkened around the edges.

  “Years ago. After we realized his manic states were worsening and lasting longer. I thought I could stop him.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “Ever since we were teenagers in Barrow, we’ve hunted together. But once we realized what was happening to him, we started fighting. I wanted him to stop before it broke him. By the time we enrolled here, the fights had gotten to the point where we couldn’t be in the same room. We found other hunting partners. One evening, Hatter came across a den. He was torn to shreds, and his partner was killed.” I sucked in a breath. “He nearly died. After that”—Luke shrugged—“I knew I had to be out there with him to keep him safe. I won’t be able to save him, but I can save him in all the little ways until his mania takes him.”

  The little ways being his friendship. Their brotherhood. Partners in a war they’d been abused for.

  When I came to Fear University, and all the years before when I was running from Max and living the life of a murdering fugitive, I’d seen myself as strong. Strong because my inability to feel pain had hardened me to life’s jabs. But after Barrow and Anchorage and the attack on my university—my mother’s university—I knew better. I was weak.

  “I can’t do that,” I whispered. Luke’s face fell. He’d hoped to help me by making me understand why I needed to step aside and let Sunny fight. I turned away from his touch. “I can’t ever do that for her.”

  He dropped his hand. “Then you’ll lose her, Ollie.”

  “I—”

  The phone blasted a shrill ring, and we both yelped in surprise. As Luke jumped to his feet, I rolled back toward the desk and pushed papers aside until I found the device. On the caller ID, “Ward” flashed on the screen. I glanced at Luke. “It’s the ward. Should I answer?”

  “It might be important.”

  I picked up the phone. “Sunny?”

  “No,” Dean said, “but if you’re done tossing my office, I have news. The military facility that held Zero finally got back to me. You’ll want to hear this.”

  Luke’s eyebrows rose; he’d heard Dean’s voice. I looked at him and said, “I’ll be down in a second.”

  “And Ollie?”

  “What?” I snapped.

  “The file you’re looking for is underneath the cassette tapes. Try not to disrupt anything. I have a system.”

  “Yeah, it’s called you need a maid.”

  I slammed the phone back onto its cradle.

  “Fuck that guy,” I hissed, but I returned the folders to their spot and carefully lifted the tapes. Beneath them was a thin folder, yellowed with age. I kicked the drawer shut and opened the file. On the first page was a picture of Zero when she was four. Someone out of frame was holding her hand. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was trying to pull into a smile as if she thought she was just saying “cheese.”

  I flipped it closed and stood.

  Luke followed me out of the office without a word.

  F O U R T E E N

  Sunny

  “There’s no name in this file for Zero’s family.”

  I glanced up as Ollie charged into Dean’s room with a yellowed file folder in hand; she flipped back and forth through the pages. Luke followed at her heels. Dean waited for me to finish sitting him upright in his bed before he responded. “They asked us not to name them in any of the records.”

  Ollie snorted. “They asked, did they? Good for them. Now tell me who they are, or I’ll rip those sutures from your motherfu—”

  “I’m not moving on this, Olesya. They deserve their privacy.”

  I stepped back from Dean, my gaze darting between him and Ollie. Luke went still except for the slow tap of his fingers against each other. A smile twitched at the corner of Ollie’s mouth. She cocked her head at Dean, her lips pulling wider across her white teeth, her ice-blue eyes flaring with so much hatred that goose bumps spread along my arms.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “With Zero loose, their names won’t matter anyway. She won’t let them live after what they did to her. I know I wouldn’t.”

  “We’ve already established your tendency to kill. You don’t need to remind us.”

  Smile in place, Ollie leaned forward and rested her hands on the metal bars at the end of Dean’s bed. With her face level to his, she said, “I don’t need to remind you, and if you ever call me Olesya again, your time will come sooner than it already is.”

  “That sounds like a threat.”

  Ollie straightened and shrugged.

  Quietly, like I might ignite a wildfire, I said, “Dean has information on the lab Zero came from. Maybe we should focus on that?”

  “I think that’s a good idea, if someone can settle down long enough to listen.” Dean’s mustache trembled above his mouth. His color was returning, and he looked stronger, more like his imposing self.

  “I listen to every word you say.”

  I shot Ollie a look, telling her to cool her jets. “What did they say?” I asked Dean.

  “Zero escaped days ago. They’ve been discreetly searching for her, but their orders are to terminate her on the spot. Search and destroy applies to all subjects.”

  “All subjects?”

  “That’s the other thing I need to talk to you about,” Dean said, speaking mostly to Ollie. “But they can’t find Zero before us. If they kill her … I need that data. It’s too priceless to lose.”

  A chuckle escaped Ollie’s lips. Luke appeared just as worried. Dean shifted on his bed, realizing his mistake.

  “Ollie, I didn’t mean that. She’s more than data. I meant—”

  Ollie held up her hand, and Dean fell silent. He didn’t look so strong now. Actually, he looked quite pale.

  “Tell me about the lab,” Ollie prompted, her voice far too steady for the roiling tension ratcheting the temperature of the room up ten degrees. I tugged at the collar of my scrubs.

  “The official in charge of the lab is a Lieutenant Milhousse. He’s R&D for the military and responsible for everything that happens in the lab. When I spoke to him, he said there was no ranking commander associated with the project, much less one in close enough contact with Zero to help her escape.”

  “Great. What else did he tell you?”

  It wasn’t a question. More of a command on Ollie’s lips.

  “He will allow you to visit the lab.” Ollie’s brows spiked at Dean’s words, and he hurried to add, “You have to realize how important this is to us. We need to know what’s happening in that lab. I had no idea they had multiple subjects. Hell, I didn’t even know Zero was still alive. This research needs to be monitored.”

  “You should have thought of that before you sold it to the government.”

  Dean grimaced. His hand fluttered up to his bandages. I checked his monitors and his IV. Everything was stable. “After seeing what Zero can do, perhaps I was wrong. It’s time to get that research back in university hands.”

  “I’m not stealing data from a government facility so you can start your own kid factory in the west wing lab. You won’t be operating on anyone here. That side of your fear switch ends, do you understand?”

  Dean nodded. I wanted him to say the words, but the silent agreement seemed good enough for Ollie. Or maybe she knew it would never come to that. Maybe she had other plans for Dean that would involve him buried too deep in the ground to have access to any research. My breakfast turned in my stomach
.

  “Where’s the lab?” Luke asked. He’d gone into hunter mode. I recognized it from Hatter.

  “Anchorage.”

  “Fantastic.” To Luke, Ollie said, “Have Hatter get a plane ready. I want to leave right away.”

  “There’s something else you should know.”

  We all held our breath.

  “What?” Ollie asked, the word dangerous.

  “I told Lieutenant Milhousse about you.”

  “You what?” Luke growled. Ollie’s arm whipped out to brace against his chest before he could surge toward Dean and rip the old man to shreds.

  Dean kept his focus on Ollie, though I saw how his hands trembled as Luke pressed against Ollie’s hold. “It’s part of our deal, Ollie. Remember? You said you would help with my research. Milhousse forced my hand. It was the only way I could get you into that lab. It’ll be a quick examination. Nothing invasive. He just wants to look.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “No,” Ollie said. She stroked her hand down Luke’s chest. “It’s okay. A deal is a deal, right?”

  Dean swallowed without answering. He didn’t know what deal Ollie was talking about.

  “But he knows she’s a halfling?” I asked Dean.

  “He does.”

  “Just in case anyone missed it, we’re walking into a government facility that conducts human research with a prime specimen.” I waved a hand at Ollie. “Aren’t we at all concerned that she might, you know, not walk back out?”

  “Something tells me,” Dean mumbled, “that won’t be a problem. Try not to murder a military official on government property, Ollie.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Ollie flung open the door and strode into the hall. Over her shoulder, she called, “Wheels up. It’s time to take a little tour.”

  * * *

  I had to fight to go. It surprised me how hard. Ollie only relented when I told her visiting the lab might be important for my antidote research, which had come to a screeching halt today.

  Any breakthroughs would have to wait until tomorrow. Today, I had to make sure my best friend left Anchorage in one piece.