Soulprint Read online

  Casey hears it first. It’s completely dark, no lights anywhere nearby, and we should probably be trying to sleep, but we’re listening for everything, for anything. She turns onto her hands and knees, crouched low, face pressed between wooden beams, and then I hear the slow sound of tires over gravel. Casey has one foot pressed onto the ground, as if she’s at the starting line of a race, waiting for the sound of the gun. And I understand. If this is not Cameron, we run. Run for the highway, and he will find us.

  If he’s okay.

  There are no headlights. But a dark van turns the corner and pulls directly in front of this house, the engine still idling. There are no windows in the back, and the ones up front are still dark. A window rolls down, and I hold my breath. “Is there some secret code word?” Cameron calls.

  I’m smiling so big as Casey and I run for the back doors and pull them open. The overhead light turns on, and I see that the van is a dark shade of blue, and inside, there are old blankets and no seats and it smells like smoke in here, too. Like something burning, something changing.

  Casey smacks him lightly on the arm from the back of the van. “Took you long enough.”

  He grins at her, then catches my eye in the rearview mirror, and says, “Told you.”

  The windows up front are tinted. And I think, He has found us the perfect car, because he is perfect. And I wonder if people do this all the time: fall for people because of their ability to pick getaway cars; or fall for people because of the way they look when they think nobody is watching; or fall for people because of the things they say, or the way they look at them, or the things they give up, or the things they cannot do.

  I thought it was because of hair and eyes and a sense of humor, or similar personalities and common interests—but it’s not. It’s the ability to pick getaway cars. To weigh crimes. To take the risk on someone again, even when he’s been betrayed once before. To have faith in himself and in me. To see me.

  He pulls a knit hat down over his ears, his hair curling out the bottom, and he turns to us for a second as he shifts the van into gear. “Full tank. Tinted windows. No complaining.”

  “Good job, little brother,” Casey says.

  He looks at me, to check my reaction, and I say, “Blue is my favorite color.”

  He smiles.

  I smile.

  We are not even faking it.

  Cameron pauses at the end of the road. “Which way?” he asks, but I know what he’s really asking. Are we going to disappear? Or are we going to take the risk and track down this lead?

  Casey is silent, which means that for some reason they’re waiting for me. “If someone’s in the database, and that someone isn’t me,” I say, “then maybe it wasn’t June back then, either.”

  Casey stares at Cameron. “I told her about Ava,” she says, and he nods.

  I pause, thinking of how to put into words what I’m just barely understanding. “The study. I think it’s wrong.”

  “What study? What are you talking about?” Casey asks.

  “The big one. The only one that matters! The one June and Liam used. I think, once June got into the database, she saw something. Something that didn’t match. The souls are tagged, but I don’t know how they’re tagged.” I close my eyes, because I know what I’m about to sound like. “I need to get into the database. I need to prove it.”

  “That’s … that’s something bigger than us. That’s huge.”

  It’s bigger than us, but it’s everything. It’s the force behind all of this. “I can clear June’s name,” I say. And then I think, And yours. And mine.

  “Okay,” Cameron says. “Okay. We keep going.”

  Dawn is approaching when we make it back onto the highway, me and Casey in the back, no seat belts and viewless, Cameron up front, hoping the tinted windows do their job. I get nauseated, but I don’t get sick. Maybe I’m getting used to it. Maybe motion is just another thing I was deprived of, that I wasn’t accustomed to, and now I’m part of this world, always moving.

  Casey hands him the directions. “We should get there before noon,” she says.

  “Oh, there’s food under the gray blanket,” he says, and I pull it back to find real food. Fruit in a plastic container and packets of sliced cheese and bottles of water.

  “Clothes!” Casey says, grabbing the stash from beside the food. She pulls out two T-shirts and shorts that probably won’t fit right, but at least the shirts cover the uniform. Then I notice that Cameron has changed as well. Khaki shorts, a black T-shirt, like he could fit in anywhere.

  “How did you get this?” I ask.

  “You don’t want to know,” he says. And then I see the key dangling from the ignition, and I realize he must’ve broken into a home, taken their food, their clothes, and then their car. Maybe while they slept nearby. I feel a twinge of regret, but I still can’t think of a better option.

  Casey digs in while looking at some of the figures on the articles. “Was Ava good at computers, too?” I ask.

  The van is silent, except for the periodic grooves in the highway that we drive over. Eventually Casey says, “She wasn’t bad at computers, but it wasn’t really her thing. She’d help me if I asked, but she didn’t love it. Not enough to get to my level.” She smiles at me. “People were always surprised by that—that just because we’re twins doesn’t mean we like the same thing. We’re not the same person.”

  “Not the same soul,” I add.

  “Art,” Cameron says. “She likes art.” His face changes as he thinks about it. “You should’ve seen what she managed to do to the side of our old school with just a few bottles of spray paint,” he says with pride.

  “So,” I say, “she was more like you?”

  “Ouch,” says Casey.

  My face burns, because I didn’t mean it as an insult. “I just meant …”

  “I know what you meant. Yes, Alina. Same friends. Same neighborhood. I don’t even have a reason for doing the things I did, I really don’t.”

  “Like you ever had a choice,” Casey says. “Come on, your friends practically roped you into it. Guilt by association. You never stood a chance. If I lived there full time, I’d be right there with you both.”

  Cameron grimaces. “Nah, I doubt it. The thing is, it was just … effortless. It’s so easy to take the path of least resistance,” he says. “To be exactly who people think you are. To not fight it.” He looks at me then, and says, “And then you’re so deep in it, you figure, this is who I am. And then your girlfriend strikes a deal to save her own ass,” he mumbles.

  “Ella?” I ask, and he nods, just the slightest. Then I imagine him with a girlfriend, and I don’t like the way it makes my stomach churn, and I realize I am jealous of even that. Nice, Alina.

  “And then,” he says, “because seventeen is considered an adult, and it’s on your record, your name is worthless.”

  And maybe you are, too. I can imagine him thinking it, believing it. But he is not.

  “It’s just a name,” I say, knowing Casey can make us new identities with time, and maybe money. Not that I’d be able to show my face now. Not that any of us could now. But he could have. Before.

  “Do you want to pick a new one?” he asks, one eyebrow raised.

  Alina Chase. It comes with a lifetime full of baggage. And yet, here’s the thing: I do not.

  Some people believe in karma—that what you do in one life affects the next. But it’s too hard to study, to quantify. Too many variables. What makes one life better than another? Nobody really agrees. Maybe I was terrible in a past life, and that’s why I’m stuck in a prison this time around. But then I look at the people sharing this journey with me and I think, How lucky I am. Does hope count for something?

  Maybe there will be a consequence for my choices in the next life. But right now, this is the only one that matters.

  I know we’re close when we begin stopping more frequently, turning every few minutes. We’ve moved from the highway into a city, the horns blarin
g as soon as the lights turn from red to green. I’ve been reading the science articles again, after Casey looked at them sideways, upside down, and backward. “The only thing in common is her name,” she says. Ivory Street. She’s the only thing that stands out.

  I think of June’s math, and these papers, and the math in these papers. The formulas are similar. The answers are different.

  “Stop,” I say.

  Cameron stops. In the middle of the street. A car honks and weaves around us.

  “Go,” I say. “Sorry. Just listen. June died. She knew she was going to die. She was scared of it. We need to remember that.”

  The mood changes inside the van as we remember. We’re running not only from the people who would punish us but from those who would stop us.

  “It’s the three of us,” Cameron says, and I’m not sure what he means. “That’s it. That’s the only people we trust. The three of us.”

  I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’m included in this. What have I done to earn it? I’m not sure. But now that I have his trust, I don’t want to break it. I want to use it for something right. I want to save us all.

  We park in front of a long building, curving in on itself in something between a U and a straight line, three stories high, with an artificial green area in the middle. There’s a fountain beside the sign.

  “Here’s what I could dig up on Ivory Street,” Casey says. “Her lab received several grants based on proposals from the NSF—a government-run agency that funds proposed projects—and those papers are the result of that research. She published a lot of papers over a span of five years, and then it mostly stopped. There was an announcement about her stepping down from her position about eighteen years ago, which fits in with the time frame—that June managed to break her somehow. Her picture shows up at a lot of political fund-raisers, but she disappears from science journals until this recent one—as the contact for the grant foundation.”

  “So what’s she doing here?”

  “She’s got an office here, as part of the grant decision-making process. But she doesn’t conduct her own research anymore.”

  “So this is a government agency?” Cameron asks, shrinking in his seat. “No way we’re getting close. No way.”

  “No, we call and lure her out,” Casey says.

  “With what phone?” I ask.

  “Any phone,” Cameron whispers, and I know this is yet another crime that will be added to our list. I think how hard it is to disappear with no money: no car, no food, no phone, no place to sleep.

  Where the hell did June keep that money? What happened to it? We could use it. We really could. How else are we going to disappear?

  And then I think how easy it is to disappear with no money. It’s doable. We’ve been doing it. We’ve made it this far. It doesn’t take money to cease to exist. The world is big. We just need to leave.

  One more day, I think. I hope. We meet Ivory Street, we figure out how to access the information in the database, we see what June knew, and we find what Ava saw. After that, we can leave. I have to hope that will be enough.

  But right now, we need to borrow a phone.

  Cameron looks for a phone in a crowded park nearby. Kids are on swings, with fathers or mothers pushing them, and I picture my own. I wonder if she imagined doing this when I was growing inside her. If she pictured what I would look like, what I would sound like—my high-pitched squeal as I tipped my head back toward the sun at the apex of the swing’s arc. It’s a thought that suddenly feels like a memory. Her laughter a shadow of my own. And I am overcome with a wave of grief that the memory isn’t real. That it doesn’t exist.

  Cameron’s hand slides into a purse left abandoned on a bench. He doesn’t take the wallet. Just the phone. Casey and I watch from the van. I look at Casey, but she’s staring at the same scene, seeing something in her own memory. “What?” I ask.

  “When we were little,” she whispers, “we had a park in our neighborhood. And Cameron couldn’t pump yet. Me and Ava used to take turns pushing him, because he used to bitch and complain until we did. I pushed him so hard once, he fell off the swing and dislocated his elbow. I was going to get in so much trouble.”

  “I can imagine,” I say. Cameron heads back toward us. There’s a man in uniform at the other end of the park, and my heart beats wildly. But Cameron is perfect. He pretends not to notice. Not to care.

  “We were all kind of terrified of our father, not that he ever did anything to make us fear him. He was mostly all talk, but the talk …,” she says. “Anyway, he said he fell off by himself. I don’t know why. He was just a kid. We were all just kids. Even then he was protecting me, when it should’ve been the other way around.”

  Cameron opens the door just then and hands the borrowed phone to Casey as he climbs in beside us. “Did you see the cop?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I saw,” he says.

  Casey dials information, asks to be connected to the NSF headquarters, and after a moment, she speaks into the receiver. “Ivory Street’s extension, please,” she says in a very official and bossy tone of voice.

  Her face lights up when someone who must be Ivory Street picks up the line. “There’s been a break-in at your residence,” she says. “Someone out walking their dog called it in. We’ll need you to see what’s missing in order to make a statement.” A pause. “Sure. 555-4439.” Then she hangs up.

  “Is that the phone number?” I ask.

  “I have no idea.”

  We watch the front double doors beside the fountain and the sign, and a few people trickle out, but they are too young, or too old, to be her. Casey has the printout of her photo spread between us. And then we see her. A woman in her midfifties, a blouse tucked into a narrow skirt that hits below her knees, moving quickly and deliberately toward a black car across the street.

  “Bingo,” Cameron says. He climbs into the front seat, tosses the phone out the window in the general direction of the park, and eases into traffic behind one Ivory Street.

  Chapter 21

  We follow ivory’s black, expensive-looking car through all of downtown. Eventually, we hit a tunnel, and we’re going to have to pay a toll. Or not pay a toll, as it were. “Get down,” Cameron says, because there are cameras, and we’re going to be reported for failing to pay a toll, and they’re going to see our faces, along with the license plates. He lowers his head, but he’s probably captured. They will be able to trace our route, in reverse, like I am tracing June’s. But we also know, at this point, we’re so close.

  We just have to stay a day ahead. We are almost there, I can taste it. I know they can feel it, too, with the way we’re not talking, but the air seems almost charged, and I can feel it humming against my skin.

  We don’t even listen to the radio at first, but then Cameron says we need to, to make sure there’s not something we’re missing. And so we do. We listen to other people talk about us. Casey shrinks into herself when she hears her name—I guess she’s not used to hearing others report on her, make things up, twist her life into a two-dimensional, ten-second sound bite.

  These are the things being reported: three teens, last spotted in a school, taking shelter. Eating from the vending machine, using the school computers. Last seen wearing school uniforms.

  These are the things left behind: evidence of June’s crimes. Evidence that I’m looking to repeat them, or complete them.

  This is the trail they’re on: the first car, reported missing from around the school. They have not found where we ditched it. They have not pinned us to the second, to this perfect van. But it won’t be long. They will find the first missing car abandoned somewhere, they will look for the second, and they will see us in the tunnel. They will know our general direction. I don’t know whether they’ve seen the printouts, whether they know we’ve gone to see Ivory Street.

  We have to stay a step ahead.

  Casey and I rise back up after we’re through the tunnel. Ivory Street is driving recklessly, in a hur
ry, and my guess is she’s not checking her rearview mirror that often. If she were, I’d imagine she could see the blue van, still behind her, turning off the highway, down the ramp, left at the light, into the more residential areas. She’d see us just a block behind her as she turns into a subdivision with a waterfall at the front, and ancient, gorgeous trees that seem to belie the age of the homes. She’d see us follow her to the end of the road, see us stop at the corner as she continued into the cul-de-sac and pulled into the driveway of the first house on the right. She’d see us before Cameron puts the car in reverse and parks at the edge of a perfectly manicured lawn in front of a house that we aren’t here to visit.

  Cameron turns off the car, cracks the front window, and climbs across the console into the windowless back with us. Casey is tying and retying her shoes, and Cameron sits extra close to her, taking a deep breath.

  “We’re here,” he says.

  His legs are bent, and he looks too young for this. I imagine we all do. “Ready?” he asks. And I laugh, because none of us look ready. None of us look as if we want to leave the back of this van ever again. They both looked so self-confident when we were on the island, so sure of themselves. But then I remember the way Casey’s hand trembled as she placed the dish on the table, how the muscles in Cameron’s arm twitched as he gripped the edge of the doorway. And the way I contorted my face to look calm and brave, when inside I was full of fear and panic.

  We were all faking.

  And now, we are letting each other see.

  We’re all scared. We’ve made it, and we’re about to come face to face with some sort of truth. And nothing I do will change that truth. Whatever June was leading me toward, we’re here. And now I don’t want to know what she wanted with Ivory Street. Whether she bribed or tricked or bullied her into giving her access to the database. Whether she offered something in return. Whether Ivory Street was a willing participant. Or if Ivory can give me the answers I want: Who else was in the database? And if June found out there was a mistake in the study, did she have the chance to tell her?