by Alice Reeds
It’s also used to describe that feeling you get when you stand atop a high building or a cliff like this and consider jumping because it’s the strongest choice you could make in that situation.
Looking out of that window, I felt it, part of me yearning to break the glass regardless, to jump, take the coward’s way out. My father would laugh if he knew, say that this was why he wanted to get rid of me, because I was an embarrassment to our family.
Instead I pulled Fiona closer. There was something about her that managed to calm my nerves and balance me out without even trying, especially in moments like this when my thoughts and feelings were all over the place. I couldn’t recall anyone but her ever doing that, and she probably wasn’t even aware of it. Then again, it wasn’t anything in particular that she did that caused such an effect, rather it was her as a whole, who she was. It was intriguing, fascinating, and beautiful in a way. Just like her.
For a little while we stood there hugging, her eyes on the window, mine on her, the quiet around us strangely comforting. I knew we should go and continue exploring, possibly return to the Villa to avoid someone noticing that we had disappeared, but I couldn’t make myself move. A stupid part of me hoped that if I ignored everything around us long enough, it would simply disappear. It was childish wishful thinking, naive, but I couldn’t help myself. Could anyone blame me?
I wasn’t a fighter, wasn’t made for these things—standing up against kidnappers ready to kill me for acting out of line, getting shot while trying to protect the girl I was in love with, or figuring out how to break out of a rich man’s prison.
“At least we have something telling us where we are,” Fiona said quietly, her voice pulling me out of my thoughts. “Then again, there are countless places with beaches like this. It reminds me of home, no matter how dumb that might sound.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, my chin resting on top of her head. “Do you miss it?”
“No. Yes. No. Maybe? Parts of it, yes, others, no.”
“Well shit, would you look at that,” said a voice somewhere behind us.
Fiona and I whipped around so fast she hit her forehead against my chest and I staggered back a little. My heart dropped to my feet, every kind of panicked alarm going off in my mind. This was it; we were done for. They’d found us, our second time acting out up. Punishment was sure to follow, and my arm ached at the reminder of what happened last time.
“Ivy?” Fiona said as the voice came closer, two figures instead of one.
“Sorry to crash your make-out session,” she said with a shrug, and Wakaba gave her a sideways glance. Neither of them seemed too fazed by the fact that we were here. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Were we still screwed even if it wasn’t a guard who found us, the two of them able to go and rat us out? Or was this a sign we weren’t the only ones still sane enough to break the rules and try to find a way out of this hell?
“Kind of a bad situation we have here. Your word against ours,” I said, making my voice sound as unbothered as possible.
“If we rat you out, we’d be ratting ourselves out, too, and really, that’s not what I want to do,” Wakaba said calmly. “What even are you doing here?”
“Could ask you just the same,” I said, unsure what to make of this scene. It could truly go either way, but she was right, we were all in a place we weren’t supposed to be.
“Great view, good place to make out, no surveillance,” Ivy explained. “If there were, they’d have found us a long time ago, and we’re still here.” Next to her Wakaba lightly blushed while Fiona quirked one brow at them. “Though there’s a time limit. They will catch on if you stay here longer than, like, thirty minutes. They once noticed our absence after forty-five but never after thirty or less.”
“You said not to trust them,” Fiona began, and Ivy and Wakaba nodded. “Was that your clever way of trying to communicate that you’re trustworthy or you want to be friends?”
“I would’ve sent a friend request or clicked follow before DMing, but I seem to have lost my phone.”
And just like that, the air turned a little bit lighter, the tension eased, the four of us chuckling at her words. In this place, social media felt so far away. My phone would have previously been glued to my hand, but now it was nothing but a memory, my pockets strangely empty, that familiar weight and feeling against my leg missing.
“Now that we’ve established that,” Fiona started, “and believe me, I will fuck the both of you up if this is some kind of trick, mark my words—”
“Now if that doesn’t sound like a great way to start a friendship,” Wakaba interjected.
Fiona smiled, then asked, “Do you know where we are?”
“Polska,” Wakaba said, her accent switching for just a moment. “Poland.”
“And you know that how?”
“The license plates on all the cars, PL stands for Poland, the circle of stars on a blue background for the European Union.”
Wow. How did I get that A in geography again? Especially since I’ve been to Europe before, should’ve made that connection.
“My family is half Polish, and we’ve been here a few times over the years. Well, not here specifically, but in the country. I’ve never been on the coast, though, so none of the names of the towns and villages I saw on the way here from the airport told me anything.”
How and why would a U.S. company, and our military, own and function through a Villa like this in Poland? Didn’t that violate at least one international law, something about buying humans being illegal and all, maybe? But then again, perhaps how they got away with it wasn’t that important, or even why. Instead the most pressing question was how would we get out of here?
“It’s definitely a funny plus to have Wakaba around, since she understands all the staff members who speak Polish with one another,” Ivy said with a laugh in her voice. “They obviously know, but that doesn’t stop them from gossiping about one another when they think we can’t hear them.”
The fact that Wakaba spoke the language made them even more valuable allies. If we really made it out of here somehow, having someone who understood those around us would put us at an advantage. They’ve obviously been here longer, too, so perhaps they knew things about the Villa that we could use.
“Have you recently been on an island?” I asked Ivy, a frown pulling her brows together almost immediately. “Or left the Villa any time in the last two weeks?”
It was unlikely that they’d ship her out onto our island just to have her pose as a dead body, especially since they couldn’t have possibly foreseen when and if we’d even find the pit at all. Besides, it wasn’t like it would’ve made a difference to us; a bare minimum of a resemblance or the right clothes and similar necklace were enough.
“No,” she said, unsurprisingly. “Haven’t left this place in a while. To be honest, I’ve lost track of time at some point. Not like shit matters anyway.” There was something in her voice, a shade of hopelessness mixed with anger and sarcasm.
“Why are you asking?”
“Fifteen more minutes,” Wakaba interjected quietly.
“We were on an island before we came here, and I could’ve sworn I saw you there, or at least your father did.”
“How, exactly, do you know my father?” Ivy asked, suspicion and confusion clear in her voice.
Fiona and I exchanged a look, mine unsure and hers searching. At this point, the answer to that question wasn’t as easy as it was just days ago. Ivy was alive, so chances were, even if Fiona refused to consider it, that somehow Joe’s entire story and death weren’t as real as we thought. But how can you explain any of that in a situation like this? Especially to the man’s daughter.
Still, Fiona quickly told her about how Joe, a former FBI agent, had pretended to be a homeless man who kept watch over her, how he was the one who found us on the island and helped us escap
e, even though it all felt like it was just part of a much bigger thing. After all, his rescue of us only led us straight back into Briola’s hands. Agent McCarty had been nothing but an actress in this play as well.
“I’m here only because of him,” Ivy said, quietly. Wakaba touched her arm with a gentle smile on her face, the connection between them so clear, an understanding that didn’t need words.
“Same,” I said, even quieter.
“I wasn’t bought by Briola, though.”
Now that was interesting.
“They’re keeping me here as a way to put pressure on my father, make him do…whatever it is they’re making him do.”
Perhaps the body hadn’t been a sign for us, a way to scare us, but instead a warning to Ivy’s father? A way to remind him what was on the line, that they weren’t above killing innocent people to get what they wanted, so he’d behave.
“What happened to him?” The question—four simple words arranged into a sentence—hung heavy in the air between us. Fiona looked away, her eyes cast toward the floor, while I remained silent, conflicted. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said.
“Your father was an honorable man,” I began, words I’d heard before from Leon’s comrade as he told my father about his death. They seemed just as pointless now as they did five years ago, didn’t help you accept the loss of someone you loved in any way. Death didn’t care about honor.
I couldn’t tell her that Leon was the one who possibly killed him, too afraid of how she would react, or that it would potentially turn them against us, or at least me. Then again, I’d never cared who caused Leon’s death—when I’d been made to believe he was dead—only about the fact that it happened, that he would never come home or call me again.
The silence that arose felt too big for the room to hold, an ice-cold blanket wrapping itself around my body. How would I react if our roles were reversed? I didn’t know. As much as I detested my father, did I want him dead? Would his death be a relief to me, give me some kind of satisfaction because he would’ve gotten what he deserved?
No.
Neither of us moved for what felt like hours, until Ivy turned to Wakaba, who pulled her into a tight hug and whispered something to her. They weren’t words meant for us, weren’t any we should’ve heard. Instead they were words spoken from one lover to another in an attempt to console and comfort. Part of me expected Ivy to cry, loud and tragic, big tears and a face that screamed heartbreak, but she didn’t.
“Five more minutes,” Wakaba said as though wanting to also ask for a change of topics. Our time was quickly running out, and we’d still not acquired anything too useful.
“Are Kellie and Oscar real?” I asked, my voice slicing through the silence, the faint sound of the ocean beyond the window returning all at once. From one hard topic to another. Best to get it over with.
Part of me wanted to tell them to forget the question, and this entire meeting, a certain kind of fear and worry washing over me, but I pushed it away. We’d come so far, exposed ourselves to one another, crossed the line of no return a good twenty minutes ago. This question wouldn’t change any of that.
Ivy pulled away from Wakaba, who just stood there and looked at her for a little longer, as though gauging her emotions. Whatever she saw, it must’ve been okay, since she looked at us and said, “Before you arrived they gave all of us those names for you, Kellie Jackson and Oscar Lyel, along with instructions on how they expected us to act and speak. Regardless of who you’d approach, everyone would act the same based off of the same set of information we were given. What a genius plan.” She rolled her eyes.
“A foolproof story,” Ivy added, “at least in theory.”
Could we believe that? I wasn’t sure, but then again, they’d also believed us even though they had as much reason to question us as I did them. Doc Bowie already knew we didn’t remember being Kellie and Oscar, so our knowing this wouldn’t really change anything. We’d just continue pretending like we had before.
Ivy and Wakaba put themselves in a dangerous position with this revelation. They were the ones who should worry what we would do, what kind of damage we could cause by telling Doc Bowie or Pamela about it.
“Two minutes.”
“I have one more question,” I said, remembering what I wished we’d find down here. Ivy and Wakaba looked at me expectantly. “Do you know if this place connects with the medical bunker?”
Chapter Fifteen
Freighter
The pirates moved around, shouting at one another and pointing at different things, but no one got close to the door we’d taken. Fiona stayed by the window, and I went to the door leading into our room and closed it, just to be sure. Even if they came inside, the likelihood of them finding us was still relatively small, but why risk it?
She looked at me again and again, her eyes searching, but neither of us dared speak. The ache in my arm lessened as time went by, a fire turning into an ember—bearable. I hoped it would go away soon, turn out to be one of those odd types of pain that came and went for no real reason.
“I think they might be about to give up,” I said what felt like hours later, though it probably hadn’t even been one. The sun hadn’t moved, so it was probably just the anxiousness of potentially getting caught that morphed my perception of time. Although I knew how to hack computers and the web, no one ever taught me how to figure out the time without a watch or phone, and we had neither of those.
“We didn’t leave behind any other clues, so maybe they’ll just go away?”
“Next time we’ll know not to leave anything open that wasn’t open before. But what are the odds, we wake up on a ship that’s been used as some sort of floating storage unit by pirates? This is so out there we couldn’t have prepared.”
“Don’t know about you, but I never signed up to be part of the modern-day version of Pirates of the Caribbean.” I laughed a little hollowly, my eyes still glued to the pirates as they moved around on deck. Two of them carried empty crates and a third some kind of sack.
The captain was the last to leave our freighter, and soon they were undocking and steering away, the sound of their engine turning quieter until it disappeared completely. Relieved, I turned so that my back was against the wall and slouched down to the floor, my body deflating.
Fiona moved around as well, sat down to my right, her hand on her shoulder, her eyes on me. “You okay?” she asked, her voice quiet, worried.
“When I said that school is boring and I wanted my life to be more interesting,” I said and closed my eyes, “this certainly wasn’t what I meant.”
As glad as I was for the pirates to be gone, it didn’t really solve any of our problems or give us any answers.
Fiona rested her head on my lap and stretched her legs out. “I’d really prefer to be home right now,” she said, her eyes cast toward the ceiling. There was longing in them mixed with something sad enough to make her eyes appear a smidge darker blue than they actually were. “Though what even is home anymore?”
More images flickered behind my eyes—the two of us in some kind of room with a video playing all around us, our fathers talking about something, their voices sounding like they were underwater, and Carla leaning in her chair, looking bored. Then there were names, two of them, but I couldn’t quite get ahold of them. Neither of them rang a bell but also felt true in some twisted way, like I knew them without really knowing them.
“Do the names Kellie and Oscar, or Kassie and Omar, mean something to you?” If she had memories of that villa, perhaps she also had those names in her head. Softly, almost absentmindedly, I ran my fingers through her hair. The bun she’d put it in earlier was holding on by a few strands. Carefully I pulled out the hair tie, letting the rest of her hair fall away, and then handed it back to Fiona. She put it around her wrist.
“Have you ever heard of the presque vu phenomenon?” she asked an
d turned her head to look up at me. A tiny smile slipped onto her lips just as the familiarity of this moment hit me, the two of us at the edge of a cliff and her asking me if I knew a French term and what it meant. I couldn’t help but smile along with her, though I still wondered why she changed the topic instead of answering my question.
“It translates to ‘almost seen,’ but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it before.”
“It’s related to déjà vu, the feeling of familiarity in an unfamiliar place or context, and javais vu, the opposite of that, unfamiliarity in a familiar place. Presque vu, though, is about how you know something is familiar, like a word, person, or a memory, but you can’t quite recall it. That’s how those names make me feel, like I know them, but I don’t quite know why or how.”
Ah. So she hadn’t changed the topic, really. I wasn’t sure what to say; she managed to surprise me, time and time again, with these things she just somehow knew, these bits and pieces of her. Her mind fascinated me, how knowledgeable and witty she was, even if she didn’t show it to most people, like she couldn’t be bothered or simply didn’t care. Perhaps I wasn’t the only nerd.
“I feel the same way,” I confirmed. “Anything else?”
“When I think of those names, I get like these brief glimpses of a place, perhaps that villa again…but it’s all out of focus, just out of reach.”
Remaining quiet, I just nodded in agreement, her words echoing what was going on in my mind as well.
“How’s your arm? You never told me if you’re okay, or even what happened.”
I ran my fingers through her hair again, twirled a strand of it around my finger, the motion and feeling soothing but also grounding me. “It’s nothing, don’t worry about it, really. It’s much better now, just an ache.”
Fiona only hummed in response.
Eventually we got up, left the room, and made our way back toward the stairs. The quiet returned, and I was a little more relaxed knowing that we were alone again, just the freighter and us. It wasn’t necessarily reassuring but better than fearing for our lives.