Soulprint Page 5

  So I move my hands to his back, and I hear a giggle from the mouth of the alley, but the muscles in his back do not relax.

  “You’re nervous,” I whisper back. He’s not supposed to be nervous. He made it seem like this was the easy part.

  “Not about this,” he says.

  I know he’s thinking of Casey, even as he runs his fingers down my arm and takes my hand as he backs away.

  “You don’t like Dom,” I say, not as a question.

  He pauses. “I don’t trust him.” Neither do I.

  “Then let’s go back. I can help.”

  He looks at me quickly and then away again as he snakes an arm around my waist and pulls me even closer as we exit the alley. “I don’t trust you either.”

  It should hurt when he says it, but it doesn’t. I understand. The feeling is mutual. And somehow, his harsh honesty makes me trust him just a little, just enough to keep going.

  We step onto the street, and there are tons of people—laughing, yelling, weaving in and around us. We blend in, and my heart races. We walk, and nobody sees me. Just a girl who maybe drank too much and can’t walk straight, like I’ve seen in movies. Just a boy taking a girl home after a night out. I lean into him. We reek like the stagnant water from the sewer, and our hair is still wet, and our fingers are wrinkled, and I still can’t shake the chill. But I look up at him, and this sound escapes my throat—I think it’s laughter.

  He smiles.

  I smile.

  I am not even faking it.

  This street goes on forever in a straight line, like that mile-long bridge connecting my island to the rest of the world. The rest of the world. I’m finally here. Walking through it. Watching things change just by walking. Where there had been restaurants and bars, now there are houses and convenience stores. The crowd has thinned out, but a few people walk this way still, following signs for a bus stop. I can finally hear the thoughts swirling through my head. We are through it. We are through it all.

  Moss hangs from the trees along the sides of the roads, looking black now that the lights have faded. Even the houses are dark here. Children tucked into bed by someone who cares for them. Not lights that have been automated, like on my island, after they realized I was flashing my lamp in Morse code like a beacon.

  I see the shadow of a child in an upstairs window, and I lower my head, as if she might recognize me. But she seems to find the moon more interesting than me. For a moment, I picture the window I will never look through again, with the perfect angle past the tree to the sky. I spent hours last night watching the moon, unable to sleep. Just imagining … and now I’m here. The adrenaline has worn off, and though I tell myself we have made it through the danger—I have survived—I can’t shake the lingering fear lodged in the center of my chest.

  I am thinking of the fact that, even though it took a long time, law enforcement still eventually found June and Liam. I realize, then, how traceable I am. Cameras in the streetlights to catch traffic violators, catching the angles of my face, like a fingerprint. My prints on the ladder rungs in the sewer. My DNA in the blood I’ve been leaving in my wake.

  My soul that can be screened from the base of my spine.

  I wonder how soon they will find me.

  I wonder if I will be safer on my own. Without Casey’s face, and Cameron’s face—without a group of people hiding, but one person moving.

  But most of all, I wonder why Dominic has come back for me. If this is the most dangerous element of all.

  “He’s going to leave her,” I tell Cameron.

  His body tenses, but he keeps walking. There’s another alley up ahead, past a sign and between two dark and silent houses. I bet it cuts into more alleys, more homes. I can see them, stacked up behind one another. I could lose him right here. I could make it. But instead my words make his arm tighten around me, his steps speed up.

  “No,” he whispers, and then his fingers dig into my hip. “You’re trying to distract me, and then you’re going to run. I know because it’s exactly what I would do. Right up there.” He jerks his head toward the alley I had spotted.

  “Maybe,” I say, because I want him to believe me. “But it’s true. I know you’re not supposed to listen to me, but I know him. He’s going to leave her. I swear it.” I know I sound convincing, because I mean it. He would. I understand him now. Not like I thought when he was the guard with the crooked smile and the secret notes. He is selfish, and he was using me then, and so he must be using them now. If, as science claims, the nature of a person doesn’t change from life to life, then it definitely doesn’t change within the same one.

  “No,” he says, never once faltering. “You don’t understand. If I don’t bring you directly there, then she’s screwed. We’re both screwed.”

  “She’s screwed anyway,” I say. I’m not trying to win anymore, just trying on the truth. Her face will be plastered on every news station by tomorrow morning. “Why are you doing this for him, then? If you don’t trust him?”

  “I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for her.” Of course. Love. People always do stupid things for love.

  My parents were sent to jail.

  Liam White is dead.

  June Calahan is dead.

  “Well if you love her—” I start.

  “Stop talking now. Dom told us how you work. You take information, and then you use it.”

  It’s such an absurd statement, I have no idea how on earth to respond. Isn’t that exactly what you’re supposed to do with information? Do people just collect it and store it, spouting out facts when prompted like a computer?

  I can’t argue the point, so I don’t.

  Instead I stop walking. Someone bumps into my back, mutters an apology, and continues past. He looks behind him as he walks past, as if I’m a memory he can’t quite grasp.

  “What are you doing?” Cameron asks through his teeth, but it doesn’t look like he expects me to answer. In fact, it looks like he knows exactly what I’m doing. He grabs my arm and tilts his head back toward the sky, like he’s aggravated at the big expanse of blackness instead of me. “Listen, he’s not going to leave her. It would not go well for him if he did.”

  “You’re sure?” I ask. But I look at him instead of the sky. I want to see his reaction. I want to know what he’s thinking, even if he’s not saying it.

  He’s not sure. Not even close. “She’s going to make it,” he says. “Please don’t screw this up for her,” he adds. The same way he asked as we were dipping under the water. Don’t let go, he pleaded.

  He frowns at his hand, which is wrapped around my arm and pressed against my side. He holds me with his other arm, brings his fingers to his face, and rubs them together. “You need stitches,” he mumbles.

  My blood has seeped through this shirt to his fingers. “We can’t just stand here,” he says. As if the world is conspiring to prove him right, we hear the sound of a helicopter, the blades cutting through the air a few streets away. His eyes go wide, and then he tries to hide it. I start to run, but he tightens his grip again. “If you run, they’ll know. Get on my back,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Trust me,” he says, even though we’ve already established that neither of us trusts the other.

  I hop onto his back, and his hands hook under my legs, and he weaves across the street as if he’s drunk. As if he’s a carefree kid. As if we’re not afraid of making a scene, of looking like fools.

  I laugh into his ear, because I understand him, even if I am terribly afraid in that moment. I laugh because I know he’s afraid as well—I can feel it in the way he’s holding on to me, and the way his heart is pounding through his back. And now I know he’s smart. He’s not so different from me, actually.

  I’ve spent the last seven months acting like a mindless fool so nobody would notice, too.

  Chapter 6

  Cameron drops me unceremoniously after he veers off the street at the next block. I hear the helicopter circling back
around. I risk a quick glance behind us and notice them everywhere. Far away, near the island. Over the water. Over land. They’re searching, but they’re moving without purpose. Without tracking us.

  I press a hand to my rib and imagine the tracker under the water somewhere. Everyone following a piece that they’ve cut out of me instead. I put pressure on the wound, but it feels dull and far away—something that has happened in another lifetime.

  I follow Cameron as he cuts through a patch of trees without looking back, and it seems as though we’re in a real neighborhood now. The homes are large, with high, metal gates, complete with decorative spikes on the tops. Like people trying to carve a section of the world out for themselves, and only them.

  Cameron punches a set of numbers into a keypad beside a high metal gate covered with ivy, and the sound of a lock catching breaks the silence. My island is made like this. A code, an emergency switch, and everything within the house latches. My window. The locks. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out.

  They had to use it only once. After the incident with Dominic Ellis—

  “Come on,” Cameron says, pulling me through the sliver of an opening. He closes the gate behind him, and it locks automatically.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “Home, for now,” he says.

  I don’t ask whose home, and I don’t ask for how long. “Shouldn’t we go farther away?”

  Cameron looks over his shoulder at me, as if he knows something I don’t. He knows a lot of things I don’t. I hate the feeling.

  He thinks that I don’t realize that I’m still in a prison. The things used to keep people out can turn in an instant to keep people in instead. The island, my island, had once been a fort. A layer of protection, a first line of defense against the outside, many years ago. Then it was supposed to be a safe haven. A safe place for me—somewhere nobody could reach me. Where revenge and anger and hate must stay on the other side of the steel netting. But it has become my prison.

  The gates on the outside can keep people out, but they can also keep me in.

  The inside of the house is dark, and he doesn’t turn a light on. The house is colder than it was outside, as if it’s been closed up tight with no heat for ages. “Watch the couch,” he whispers as he weaves in front of me. “The table,” he says next. My hand brushes fabric, not wood, and even in the dark, I can see the outline of sheets hanging over all the furniture, softening the edges of their shadows. It’s a ghost of a house, and I can tell from just this room that there’s no other life inside.

  When we’re deep in the center of the house, he pulls me into a room and shuts the door. Only then does he flip a light switch. My eyes shut instinctively, and when I reopen them, I see that we’re in a bathroom. As far as bathrooms in abandoned houses go, it’s pretty fancy. All tile and curved metal and fancy towels. Cameron looks at my shirt, and I follow his gaze. There’s a dark stain through the black material, and it’s not from the water.

  “It doesn’t even hurt anymore,” I say, as he pulls the fabric away from my skin. I hear it pull—like something detaching—and feel a delayed sting.

  “That’s really not a good sign,” he says. He sighs to himself. “Casey is better, but I can do it.”

  My fingers are numb and trembling as I reach for the hem of my shirt, and underneath, my entire body is shivering, covered in a uniform layer of goose bumps. Cameron opens the cabinet under the counter—designed to look like shutters—and grabs all the contents. There’s a white box with a red symbol on the lid—a first-aid kit—much like the one we have on the island. He tears open a packet of pills and holds one out to me, but I shake my head. “No,” I say. No way. I will not let anyone drug me. Not again.

  “It’s for the pain,” he says.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” I say.

  He tilts his head, holds it out to me again. “This will.”

  Oh. Still. “No,” I say, maybe a little too forcefully, leaving no room for discussion. I will not be calm and malleable and content. Not again.

  He wrinkles his nose, and it makes him seem years younger. Now that he’s not in mission mode, with his perfect stride and his single-minded focus, he looks like a different version of himself. His brown eyes roam, and he looks a little lost. His dark hair falls across his forehead as he leans over to rifle through the white box, and his entire face takes on a look of uncertainty, despite his words. His teeth catch his lower lip as he tears open a disinfectant wipe, and he becomes someone else.

  I imagine him in the kitchen of a house, grabbing half a bagel from the toaster, holding it between his teeth as he searches for his books, tossing them into his bag, like a familiar scene I have watched on the television. I imagine him running out the front door, shouting a good-bye to his parents over his shoulder, and Casey waiting for him on the porch.

  I imagine too much, I know this.

  “Uh,” Cameron says, looking behind me at the glass shower, not unlike the one in my room. The glass here is clear but distorted, as if there’s a film obscuring it. “Hot shower. Take one. You can’t get the stitches wet after, and I want to try to prevent infection as much as possible … and, no offense, but you reek.” He wrinkles his nose again. “Also, you don’t look so good.”

  He turns on the water for me, and the pipes groan. Cameron shifts nervously on his feet as I attempt to peel the shirt over my head. “I’m sorry,” he says, turning around. “I’m not allowed to leave you alone.”

  But I don’t care at all. I want in the hot shower, and I’m already mostly undressed. “I’m used to it,” I say. He acts as if I’m not used to people watching me all the time. I barely even notice him as I step under the hot stream of water, his outline hazy on the other side of the glass.

  There’s a bar of soap, and I use it on my knotted hair, on my grimy skin, under my brittle nails. I clean around the wound as best I can, though it makes me wince. The hot water stings my scalp, and nothing has ever felt so good. I brace myself against the walls of the shower and let my entire body relax. I let myself breathe. I am out. I am out.

  I can see Cameron, blurry through the glass, still facing away. “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  I see his leg bouncing, but I don’t want to leave the water yet. “So …,” he says, “how do you know Dom?”

  I wait a moment before I speak. “How do you know Dom?” I respond.

  And I’m surprised when he answers. “I don’t. I didn’t. Casey did. I’m here to help Casey.” It’s like he needs to tell me that he is not my ally here. I appreciate the honesty, but I already understood that.

  “He was a guard,” I say, giving him a piece of information for the piece he has given me.

  “Yeah, I know. But it seems like you know him better than that,” he says, like he’s accusing me, though I can’t be sure why he is or why I care.

  It’s embarrassing, is what it is. It’s embarrassing to admit how I know him. That I was naive. That I wasn’t thinking. That I trusted so easily. “I don’t know why he’d want to rescue me,” is all I say, because it’s true.

  “Guess you made an impression,” he says, and I turn off the water.

  I laugh, and it sounds fake, like how I’d laugh back on the island. For a purpose. For a reaction. I grab a towel off the rack, wrap it around myself, and stand in front of Cameron. His head is tilted to the side, and his brown eyes are looking into mine, as if he can see through them. I close my eyes and look away.

  “He pretended to be my friend,” I say. And I decide to tell him. I’ll tell him so he knows that I will not fall for it again.

  “He used to leave me secret messages,” I say. I had my head in a book when he passed me a note on the first day, a slip of paper taped to the inside of my cup when he set it before me, so only I could see. I saw the paper before I saw him, and so I liked him even before I set eyes upon him. The paper said: I’m Ellis. I looked up at him then, and he was looking right at me, right into me, with half a smile—so unlike any
one who had ever worked there before. When everything is the same, the different can blindside you. And then another guard said to him, “Mark, take out the trash.” And it felt like a secret, a code, that he was giving just to me.

  “And?” Cameron says. He looks away again, I guess because I’m standing in nothing but a towel. “You had a fight because you found out he was pretending?”

  A fight? Oh, if only. When I don’t respond, he looks at me again. I smile at him the same way he looked at me over his shoulder when we walked into this place—like I know something more than he does.

  He notices. “How did you find out?” he asks, trying a different approach.

  “He gave himself away,” I say. The notes had continued, every day, same as his smile. They’d say things like, Where’s the junk food? And I knew he could’ve just asked anyone, but it was like a game, or a test, maybe. So I’d go to the cabinet and grab the chips, eat half the bag, and then leave them out in the middle of the table when I left the room. We were communicating in code. Establishing trust.

  I’d hide the notes in my pockets, flush them when I was back in the privacy of my bathroom, something wild and hopeful running through my veins.

  “I found out,” I say, “when I caught him in my room a few days before the end of his assignment.”

  “Aren’t there cameras?” Cameron asks.

  “How did you get in?” I ask. “Same way, I assume.”

  Ellis—no, Dominic—acted surprised when I opened the door, with his hands still hovering over the keyboard of my computer. He froze. Then he hit a few buttons, turning the monitor to black. He put his hands in his pockets, and he smiled.

  It was the same way he smiled at me the first day—crooked and personal, as if he were talking to me without making a sound. It was the way he looked at me, like I was a girl he saw walking by, not an assignment. But that was the moment I knew that he was pretending—that he had always been pretending. I guess maybe I had been pretending, too.