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  Someone places another slice onto my plate.

  “If there are leftovers,” I mumble, digging my spoon into the A of my name, “I’m having this again for breakfast.”

  Someone forces a laugh, and I force another piece of sickeningly sweet birthday cake into my lying mouth.

  Because today is my seventeenth birthday.

  Today is the day we agreed on.

  The girl with the short dark hair watches the clock over the table.

  One hour and twelve minutes to go.

  And then I will escape.

  Chapter 2

  There are things that must happen first. I know this. I look at the clock and imagine the spot on the underside of my third rib, under the scar where my mother dug out the tracker the first time, under the scar where they replaced it and stitched me back up. It must come out. I wonder, not for the first time, if I’m supposed to do this myself.

  I’ve been waiting seven months for today. I’ve been waiting seven years for today, if I’m being honest. Since I first understood that escape was a thing that was possible. I was ten when it happened, when Genevieve, my longtime guard, tried to sneak me out in the back of a supply van, crammed in a compartment underneath the trash. The entire memory reeks of decay. We didn’t even make it over the bridge, and all that attempt got me was a change in protocol—a steady stream of changing faces, so no one would see me as anything other than their one-month assignment.

  Well, it got me that, a gash in my forehead, and a fire continually burning in the pit of my stomach: the possibility of escape, filling my head and my heart and my bones for the last seven years. Escape. The word taking meaning, gathering context, becoming more than letters on a page but a promise, whispering in my ear.

  Sometimes I imagine it’s June speaking to me. Go, she says in the voice I have heard in five different documentaries and countless news programs. Go. I hear it at night, when I wake up and the island is still. I feel it stirring under my ribs, restless and wanting.

  And now, it’s really happening. This time, I’m ready. It’s been seven months since I deciphered the first message—hidden inside a strand of DNA code in my schoolwork. A simple and boring assignment: to decode the nucleotides of a DNA strand into the corresponding chain of proteins. The C-A-T was a histidine, designated by an H. Next: A-T-C, coding for isoleucine, written as I. On and on, until I stared at the protein strand on my page: H-I-A-C-I-S-E-E

  Hi, A.C., I see.

  Hi, Alina Chase. I see.

  I must’ve stared at it for an hour, doing nothing but hoping, which is a very dangerous thing. It could’ve been a message or maybe just a random combination of letters that I was stringing my hope on.

  But I don’t get a lot of chances here.

  So at the next problem, when I was supposed to do the entire procedure in reverse, translating a random string of letters back into its original DNA strand, I ignored the letters assigned to me and substituted them with: HELP. And I sent back the corresponding DNA strand.

  Someone responded in my assignment the next week. READY, it said, when I decoded it. Like a statement, or a question. For what? I wanted to respond, but there’s no codon designation for the letter O, and while I was thinking of how to rephrase that, I changed my mind. YES, I sent back.

  But that was seven months ago, and there was only so much information we could exchange during the few weeks when I studied DNA. This is the grand summation of what I know of the plan:

  DEATH DAY

  GIRL IN FRAYED PANTS

  DETACH TRACKER

  DISTRACT

  ESCAPE

  Seven months of waiting. Seven months of anticipation.

  And now I’m faced with the reality of the tracker lodged under my skin, under my muscle, and what exactly DETACH TRACKER will entail. There are no sharp objects in the house. It’s a subtle thing, though. Something I didn’t realize for a long time. Not until I went looking for something I could use.

  It’s for my own protection, I’ve been told.

  No knives. No pieces of furniture that can be unscrewed and fashioned into anything. Food is cooked and brought in on supply vehicles that get screened on the other side of the bridge. We use battery-powered razors. The guards don’t even carry weapons. The only sharp item that I’m aware of is the point of the needle they use to administer drugs on the rare occasion when I become unmanageable.

  I turn the spoon over now, feeling along the dull end. I’m wondering if I’ll have to use a fork, if the ends will bend before they pierce my skin—and I don’t think it’s the cake that’s making me suddenly nauseated—when the girl with the shoulder-length hair hands me a napkin.

  “To wash the cake off,” she whispers.

  I push back from the table and announce to no one, to everyone, “I’m going to get ready.”

  The older woman who inspected the cake looks at the clock, ticking closer to sunset. “One hour,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. Oh, I know.

  I wonder if the girl managed to sneak something inside. Something she has whittled into a point and left in my bathroom. It’s the only place, in addition to my room, with no surveillance. The cameras, too, are for my own protection, I am assured.

  There are no locks, so I slide my dresser in front of the door when I shut it behind me. Then I step into my bathroom. There’s a man. No, a boy. No, a man. Whatever he is, he’s standing beside the sink. He must be stationed on the grounds or in the basement or in security, because men or boys or this in-between variety are no longer allowed in my house. Definitely not in my room. Not since the fiasco with Ellis. At least, I think that’s his name. The other guards called him Mark, but he said his real name was Ellis. I’m still embarrassed by the whole thing, that I trusted him so quickly, so readily.

  But he was looking for someone else, someone other than me. He was looking for June—for her information, like everyone else. I’m not sure why I was surprised. I’m not sure why I was upset. I blame it on hope.

  I don’t know what happened to him afterward, exactly. After they dragged him out of my room, shaken and only partially conscious. I assume he got in a lot of trouble. I didn’t. I am already in trouble.

  Women only from then on. A core group of guards. Precise and watchful. I was hoping my birthday would be an exception.

  It is.

  I shut the door to the bathroom behind me now and waste no time. I know what he’s here for. I pull my shirt over my head. His gaze doesn’t linger too long. He doesn’t look surprised. He opens his mouth and looks away as his fingers unscrew his eyetooth, pulling out a small metallic blade where the root should be. I wonder absently whether it hurt.

  It occurs to me in that moment that this is about to hurt me.

  He flips the blade, and it is now twice the length. He turns on the shower, but I’m not sure why. Then he takes a washcloth and balls it up, and I’m not sure why. He grips my chin and holds it to my mouth. I understand, biting down on the towel. But I still don’t understand the shower. If he needs water, the sink is right beside him.

  He lowers me onto the cold tile, and I lie back. My head is on the hard floor. He’s leaning over me, his breath on my chest. Dangerously close. I feel his fingers trace the ribs as he counts them, then he takes a breath and the metal slides into my flesh. It stings in a shocking, sudden way, and I have this moment where I realize that, though this place has kept everything from me, it has also kept pain from me.

  The blade slides under the bone and I feel it scraping at something, at the inside of me, and then I understand the need for the shower. For the sound of it.

  I’m crying.

  I grit my teeth into the towel, trying, trying, trying not to make this sobbing sound that seems to come from the deepest place inside me. Trying not to make any noise at all. But the pain builds, and it will smother me if I don’t let it out. If I don’t scream it out. “It will be worse if I take a break,” he says, I guess as an apology.

  But he doesn’
t stop. And I feel the pain, and I bite back the scream until it tastes like vomit, and it chokes me from the inside until everything turns gray.

  I wake up under the lukewarm water on the floor of the shower. “No time for stitches,” he says from the other side of the glass. He turns away as I examine the damage to my rib.

  “I’m still bleeding,” I say, almost in surprise. And it still hurts. Burns. Throbs. I hold my fingers to the skin around it.

  “You’ll keep bleeding until it’s stitched.”

  I start to panic. The blood keeps coming. It’s not a big cut, but any cut here is quickly tended to and treated. I needed stitches across my forehead when I was ten, after the failed escape. But someone gave me a shot and I slept through the stitches and my forehead was kept numb for days. I also sprained my ankle once when I fell from the tree outside my bedroom window, but the leg was braced and I was medicated before I could even explain what happened.

  “Are you going to pass out again?” he whispers as he glances at the black watch on his wrist.

  “No,” I say, pushing myself to standing. He goes to leave, and I notice he’s not wearing the same uniform as the guards. He’s got a media badge, but his clothes look close enough to blend in anywhere on the island. He puts a big wad of gauze on the sink counter, and a roll of tape. The tracker sits beside them both. I’m not sure how he plans on sneaking out, but he can’t. Not yet. “I don’t know what to do next,” I say.

  “Just press down on the wound. And get ready,” he says, and his fingers grip the side of the doorway on his way out. READY, someone wrote.

  YES, I responded.

  “Wait,” I say, before I can stop myself from sounding desperate. “I …” He doesn’t turn around at first. A boy. He’s still a boy. And the girl out there, she’s still a girl. And they are terrified.

  “What’s your name?” I ask. I’m not good at putting people at ease. It takes practice. It takes me doing the opposite of everything instinct tells me to do. Right now, I want to beg him to stay with me. Right now, I want to cry that this is not a prank, or a dare, or an assignment. That this is my goddamn life. I want to tell him that I’m terrified, too.

  “Cameron,” he says. He’s still standing in the doorway, and I notice that one of the muscles in his upper arm is twitching. I notice that his dark hair is starting to curl at the nape of his neck from the moisture in the room. I notice that he’s gripping the wall so hard that his knuckles blanch white.

  “Cameron.” People always respond better when you use their name. Which is probably why nobody here uses their real names. I take another breath, to steady my words. “Cameron,” I repeat, “I need you to help me.” I look back down again, at the watery blood running down my stomach. At my shaking hand covering the wound. I grab a towel and swallow my panic and relax my face into calm and brave before he turns back around.

  He keeps checking his watch, and he keeps moving, moving me, as fast as he can.

  “What’s the girl’s name?” I ask as Cameron tears the tape with his teeth. He’s not much taller than I am, and I notice the eyetooth is back in place. I wonder what it feels like inside his mouth. If he screamed when they dug into his flesh, like I did. Or whether he was already unconscious.

  He pauses, the tape an inch from my stomach, before he says, “Casey.” She means something to him. I can tell by the way he looks down and mumbles her name, like he doesn’t want me to know. Like her name belongs to him alone.

  “Which one of you have I been communicating with?” I hold a dress out to him, asking him to help me with it. In truth, this is not what I need help with. I need help with finding out what the hell is going on, but I’d rather have him think it’s the dress.

  He tugs it over my head, helps me snake my arms through without loosening the bandage. “Neither,” he says. He clears his throat, whispers even lower than he has been. “You’ve been in touch with Dom. He’s the one who will pull you from the water.”

  I suck in a breath, and Cameron apologizes, trying a different angle of my arm. I don’t tell him that I have no idea what happens under the broad heading of escape. I don’t tell him I have no idea what to do when he leaves this room, only that there will be a girl with frayed pants, that there will be a distraction and we will escape. I’ve only received words, or short phrases, in the code. I don’t tell him that I don’t really know the plan at all. That I’ve only been guessing. That I lie on my bed and stare out the window, with the perfect angle—past the tree—to the sky, imagining racing across the bridge or being snuck out in the back of one of the media vans. But the bridge is a mile long, and the media vans are left on the other side of the bridge before each person is screened for potential weapons. Once, I imagined a helicopter, but I knew it would be nearly impossible to sneak one through restricted airspace.

  “I have to go,” he says, as he zips up the back of my dress.

  “Thanks,” I whisper. My heart races as I imagine the ocean—the calm blue that stretches straight to freedom. It races no matter how I picture being pulled from its depths: an arm reaching under the surface to grab me; a man throwing a rope as I strain to keep my head above water. You can do it, I tell myself as Cameron walks away.

  I don’t tell him I’ll see him later, because I’m not sure if I will. I don’t tell him good luck, because luck has never been on my side.

  And I sure as hell don’t tell him that I don’t know how to swim.

  Chapter 3

  Cameron leaves through my window. I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not difficult, once you get the hang of the tree. I’ve done it myself before. But I am surprised that there’s nobody there to see him do it. The guards stationed outside always make sure that I know they see me, and I pretend not to notice. Not that there’s anywhere for me to go, but I like to see how far I can push them. What I can get away with, what they report back on later, and what they approach me about right then.

  So I expect them to be there watching, but they’re not. The press must be waiting out front already. The guards must be restationed. It must be almost time.

  The press come every year, because the public likes to see that I’m treated well. Kept safe. Proof that this is not a punishment but a humanitarian effort. My parents cannot care for me, so the state must watch over me. This is their mistake, after all—that everyone knows who I am—and now they are responsible. The pictures from when I was younger, eating my cake and laughing, hugging a stranger, kept the public content. Except now that I’m older, I no longer smile and laugh and hug strangers. I have seen the headlines. Now I make them nervous.

  It’s not my fault that I am what I am, and so, like the mentally ill, they like to see that I am both contained and cared for. Like if you cross your eyes and look through the blurry filter, maybe I am even free. And so the guards will look like people who keep me company today. They will watch the press very closely. They will watch me, probably following my blip on the computer screen from somewhere in the basement. They will not watch my window, or see the guy jumping from it, or the trees he disappears into.

  I consider doing it myself. I can see straight to the section of woods. I could hide there for a bit, now that the tracker is out. Create some chaos as the media sets up their cameras. Make a scene. Make that speech I’ve been saving since last year. Wait for people to rise up in support, to lobby for my cause, to fight for me. But I’m not June. I’m not good at the same things that she was, despite what science claims about the elements fully bound to a soul: left- or right-handedness; the results of standardized personality tests; areas of extreme giftedness.

  Whatever. All the charisma in the world couldn’t save her. She couldn’t persuade her way out of death. There was no equation to be solved that would extend her life, no pattern she could find that would keep everyone from turning on her.

  And my father has tried. He had appealed to the masses from behind the bars of his cell. And when he was released five years ago, he came a step too close to me—a viola
tion of his parole—and ended up back in jail.

  There’s a plan. There’s a plan, there’s a plan, and I’ll stick to it. READY. YES.

  There’s a knock on the door just as Cameron disappears into the distance. He runs like he’s been training for it, like someone taught him how to move his arms and the perfect length of a stride. He doesn’t look back.

  I’ve been training, too. But nobody teaches me how to run faster. All I can do is imagine someone after me, someone who trains every moment I’m thinking of taking a rest. I always outrun them. My muscles twitch with adrenaline just thinking of it.

  “Just a sec,” I say as I move the dresser away from the door.

  The girl—Casey—is there. She looks at my dress, at the spot where my third rib sits underneath, and she says, “All set?”

  “Yes,” I say, even though it’s an effort not to hunch over, to hold my hand against my rib cage.

  She touches my hand, and I flinch. Then I feel her fingers spreading, and something cold and hard that she presses into my palm. “Under your desk,” she whispers. “And I need the tracker.”

  She shifts her weight from foot to foot and casts a quick glance over her shoulder. I want to tell her to calm down, to not draw attention to herself, but I realize I’m doing the same thing. My fingers tremble as I place the small cylinder under my desk. I wonder how she got this inside. It looks like a candle, all waxy on the outside, but without the top. And then I realize: the cake. No wonder she was nervous when she brought it in.

  I guess this is what they meant by DISTRACT.

  I told them no casualties, and at this point I have to trust that this is just that—a distraction. That it won’t destroy everything. Just this. My computer. My journal. My life.

  Everything I’ve been for seventeen years will be gone. Everything I’ve known for seventeen years …

  I open the bottom drawer and grab the picture buried near the bottom. The newspaper clipping with my mother’s photo that I printed off years ago, and I fold it up and shove it into the sleeve of my dress.