by Alice Reeds
His expression faltered, his eyes going a little wider. Good, maybe now he felt at least a fraction of what I’d felt for years.
“It’s a dangerous game you two are playing,” he said, his face turning just a bit softer. A clear warning but said with kindness. Maybe he thought it would make his words sound genuine or it’d make me care. It didn’t.
“You’ve lost your right to big-brotherly advice, you traitor.”
I ripped my arm out of his hold, and he went slack, staring at me with an expression I didn’t want to decipher. Instead I turned around and left. After everything he’d done, what right did he think he had to pick and choose when he wanted to be my brother and when to treat me like dirt?
Screw him.
And screw Briola for taking him from me.
Whoever that person was, he may have looked like my brother, but he wasn’t. The brother I knew was dead.
Barely registering any of it, I made my way back to our room, my shoulder bumping into someone else’s, but I continued walking, too much of a mess to even think. Everything around me blurred, my legs like jelly, anger, resentment, and sadness growing within me like a tree that would become too big to fit inside my body.
I realized I was there only when my hand was already pushing down the handle, the door opening. Fiona sat across the room at our table, with some kind of book in hand, and her head turned toward me. Her shoulders visibly relaxed, though she tilted her head as she assessed me. I schooled my facial expression into something more neutral, pushed the conversation with Leon into a far corner of my mind. The door fell closed behind me.
“What’d he want?” she asked, setting her book aside.
It was a perfect chance to tell her, spill everything. But there was so much going on, and while I didn’t trust Leon, he hadn’t told anyone about our medical bunker adventures. There was no need for Fiona to know, even though I knew, to a degree, that keeping this to myself wasn’t good. But I was used to keeping secrets, even if that began to change somewhat since the island.
Was it because of her, or that project we were part of? I didn’t know, and the implications it carried scared me.
“Nothing important,” I said with a shrug, “just asking if our memory is returning, how we are, you know, that kind of stuff.”
Fiona searched my face, surely in an attempt to figure out if there was more to what I said. What conclusion she arrived at, I didn’t know, since she didn’t share it with me.
That night I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, the darkness not nearly dark enough, my mind too all over the place to allow me to slip away. Restless, I counted pointless things, tried to convince my body I was tired, but finally settled on watching Fiona instead. She’d fallen asleep moments after we’d gone to bed, her back turned to me, one of her hands curled up at her face, her hair everywhere, and the only sign that she was alive the way her shoulder moved with her breathing.
She was so close, yet I could feel a distance between us, one I didn’t know how to fix or stop. The comfort I hoped to find was missing, and slowly my focus faded even more, the voices in my mind growing too loud for me to ignore.
I cannot let you leave, Leon said, his voice detached, cold, I’m trying to stop but I can’t. They won’t let me, words spoken as though struggling yet nothing but an act to convince us of his false loyalty to me. The way he looked as he pulled out a knife he’d intended to kill me with, my father’s distraught face as he begged Briola to take me instead of Leon, the resentment in his voice as he told me what a waste of time and space I was.
I will always be on your side, Miles, Leon used to say, reminding me of it whenever I was sad or had a fight with our father. Nothing will ever change the fact that I’m your brother and will protect you, words I’d believed down to my core and never doubted, and yet in five years he’d revealed himself as nothing but a fraud, not a smidge better than our father.
The urge to wake up Fiona and just tell her was nearly overwhelming. Maybe she’d be able to quiet my mind, chase the voices and memories away. But I couldn’t. Everything was off. Besides, this wasn’t something she could fix, wasn’t something I wanted her to. The only one who could fix it was me, even if I didn’t know if I was strong enough to do it. I had to be. It wasn’t something I could ignore or run away from, like so many things in the past.
Giving up on sleep, I carefully slid out of bed. Thankfully the floor made no noise, my footsteps silenced by the carpet, and Fiona was in a deep sleep. She moved, but only to pull the cover higher, over her shoulder and almost enough to hide her face, the smallest smile dancing across her lips as she dreamed of something far better than this reality.
The bathroom tiles were ice-cold against my bare feet, the light too bright and stinging my eyes. I couldn’t close the door, at least not fully, because the noise it’d make was too loud, so I left it open just enough to allow a tiny sliver of light to show through.
“Is this what you meant when you said you’d protect me,” I whispered, or maybe I just mouthed the words as I said them in my head. I stared into my eyes, my face that of a stranger, my hair an awful mess, half of it standing up and the other flattened against my head. There were tired shadows beneath my eyes, my cheeks a bit hollower than they used to be, and my skin a bit paler.
I used to love how much I looked like Leon, our eyes nearly the same color, an identical shape, our hair so similar, and even if my jaw wasn’t as angular and strong as his, my cheekbones not quite as defined, it was easy for anyone to see that we were brothers. But now the only thing I felt was revulsion and the desire to rip my own face off and scratch my eyes out. Anything to sever this last connection between us. Names could be changed easily, Miles, Oscar, Leon, Brandon, Echo, Lyel—who really gave a shit—but changing one’s appearance was a challenge.
For five, almost six long years I wished he would come back, but now that he was, it was nothing like what I hoped for. Fuck. Perhaps the Leon I remembered never existed in the first place and was merely a product of my imagination, the brother I needed and wanted instead of who he truly was.
If he really loved and cared about me as much as he always claimed, how could he do this to me?
All those remarks about how similar we were from the nurse as well as Ivy and Wakaba, words spoken as compliments or jokes, now feeling like poison.
I was done.
With him. With our family. With being and looking like him.
I could never do the things he’d done. I didn’t care if I was Miles or Oscar or Number Thirteen or the letter G. For all I cared I could be the king of England. All I knew and cared about was showing Leon that he was as dead to me as I seemed to be to him.
I didn’t even know when I’d reached for the electric razor hidden away in our bathroom cabinet, when I’d plugged it in, or when I turned it on. While I couldn’t get rid of my face, couldn’t change the color of my eyes or their shape, I could get rid of all the hair on my head. As much as I loved it, as much as I knew Fiona did, it was the one obvious thing I could change. The need to get rid of it burned beneath my skin, my entire focus zeroing in on this one task.
The buzz was so loud against the silence of our room. I stared myself dead in the eyes as I led the razor through my hair, leaving behind barely anything. Would I regret this? No, my hatred toward Leon was greater than my vanity. Seeing more and more of my hair fall away was more satisfying than I thought it would be. In the end there was nothing left but a few millimeters, a hint of black across my scalp, my eyes now more prominent than ever before.
The razor clicked against the porcelain sink as I put it aside, then silence claimed the space once again. With a sick fascination I ran my hands over my head, the hair still soft against my palms despite feeling so foreign at the same time, like I was touching someone else’s head instead of mine. But the effect I’d hoped for was there.
My eyes still gave me awa
y, but I looked far less like Leon now, a silent fuck you he would have to notice. I hoped he would understand the message, would feel the pain I felt, the hole inside my heart and soul he left behind with his betrayal. We weren’t brothers anymore.
“Miles?” Fiona called out, her voice equal parts sleepy, confused, and worried. I never considered what she’d think if she’d wake up to me being gone.
“I’m here,” I said, stepping out of the bathroom, the mirror light illuminating part of our room, enough for me to see Fiona looking up at me from our bed, her eyes squinted and faded blue hair a wild mane.
She sat up in an instant, her eyes widening in surprise, her lips parting as though she was about to ask something, but didn’t. She just looked at me, and time stood still. My breathing stopped as I waited for her true reaction, for what she’d say and think and do. I wanted to explain it but couldn’t, all words dying within me.
Finally, Fiona pushed the blanket off and crossed the short distance between us, her eyes turning soft and understanding. She smiled just a little, raised her hand, and ran her palm across my head, her touch soothing, calming, the storm inside my head dying down to something more manageable, the pain lessening.
“Come on,” she said and turned toward the bathroom, her hand taking mine, “you missed a few spots in the back.”
Without me having to explain my actions, she understood. Despite what we read, the unease taking residence within our minds and between us, she was still there for me. I’d done so much wrong in my life, but falling in love with her wasn’t one of them.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Villa
The following evening it was our time to try our best to befriend our night guard, Dawid.
Just walking up to him seemed like it would come across as too planned, so we decided to hang out and read something, make it look more casual. Fiona picked a book with “Crows” in the title, big and with black-edged paper. I’d gone for an even thicker one simply because I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce the title no matter how much I tried, and the dust jacket was sheer and red, the actual book designed like classified documents. From what I gathered it was sci-fi.
Pretending to read, I glanced in Dawid’s direction every now and then, made sure he sat in the same place he had before, just off to the side and also reading something. Just like everyone else from the staff, he, too, had a gun, its presence making all of this way scarier than it probably was, especially since Wakaba and Ivy said he was harmless. He hadn’t fought back much when Fiona had attacked him, either. And yet none of that was as reassuring as I hoped it would be. His complacency the first time around was possibly part of their plan to test us and not something that’d be true each time.
Wakaba had said he was married, but I wanted to be sure, so I looked for a wedding band on his finger. It took a little while, but finally the angle was just right and, voila, there it was, silver and thick.
Our plan of me winging it to see what kind of advantage I could get out of this seemed shit, but it was all we had. If he was even allowed to talk to us beyond telling me to move along, we didn’t know. Ivy, Wakaba, and Fiona counted on me not to fail, so I couldn’t—wouldn’t, refused to—even if my father’s words echoed in my mind.
“Showtime,” I whispered to Fiona as I set my book aside and got up. In theory nothing bad could happen, but we could gain a lot.
Trying to look casual, rather than nervous, I crossed the room.
Dawid didn’t look up from his book—Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go—as I came closer. It gave me a moment to observe him a little more, notice how his button-down hadn’t been ironed in a while, creases running up and down the front as well as his sleeves, and the small stain on his pants, toothpaste perhaps. Something certainly wasn’t right in his life for him to show up to work looking like that. Who knew, maybe he had a semblance of a conscience, and seeing all these poor imprisoned teens was eating at him after all. Unlikely.
“Hey,” I said, the single word coming across steady and confident.
“Yes, Oscar?” he asked, his eyes still on his book. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that he knew exactly who I was. He closed his book and finally looked up at me, his expression friendly mixed with light surprise. “Interesting hairstyle choice.”
As though on autopilot, I ran my hand across my hair, or the little that was left of it. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to how it felt or looked. “Thank you.”
“So, how can I help you?”
“First, I wanted to, you know, apologize again, I guess,” I began, cringing at how my voice sounded weak and the uncertainty it carried. Off to a great start, wonderful.
“It’s all good, don’t worry about it. I get it.” Dawid waved his hand dismissively. “Anything else you need, since first is usually followed by second?”
I stepped closer and tried to conjure up a sheepish expression on my face. “Well, you see, I thought you’d be able to give me some advice.”
His expression lightened with surprise. “Advice? About what?”
“Women,” I answered, and found myself struggling to even take myself seriously, but I hoped it didn’t show. “You’re married, right? So I thought you could share some insight?”
Even if it were a real conversation, I doubted he’d have an answer to How do you know if your feelings are real and not a product of something designed to happen?
Dawid chuckled hollowly, his eyes falling toward his hand and wedding band. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask, I’m afraid.”
Aha! Got you.
“Besides, you and Kellie never seemed like you’d need any kind of advice.”
“Something’s wrong?”
“Couldn’t say things are going well,” he said a little sadly. “But I wouldn’t want to waste your time with such things.”
“No, please, I insist. I’m a very good listener, you know, and it’s the least I can do after…” I sat down on the armchair next to him and forced my expression into what I hoped looked like I was actually interested and listening attentively.
Dawid chewed the inside of his cheek, his inner conflict evident in his eyes, but finally he said, “You young people, it all seems so easy and fun to you, doesn’t it?” Looking at where we were, I strongly disagreed but didn’t voice my opinion. “But once you get older, mature into your relationships, settle down and get married, that’s when things truly become complicated, not the small squabbles teen couples seem to get into that always seem like the end of the world.” At this point I could hardly even imagine myself as an adult, let alone living somewhere in a nice house with a wife, three cats, and two dogs.
I didn’t even know if I’d make it to eighteen.
“So it’s your marriage that’s giving you a hard time?” I asked, faking curiosity the way he’d want to hear it. Who knew people doing these things to me in the past would actually come in handy for me one day? The irony.
Dawid searched my face as though trying to decide if he should go on or if he’d already said too much. “It’s my wife,” he confided. “She’s been acting strange lately and things just feel off-kilter. Maybe it was something I said or did, or maybe I’ve just been working too long hours.”
Or maybe she just isn’t okay with your job? I guess the whole kidnapping and torturing teens thing isn’t for everyone.
“She’s never been fond of my night shifts.”
“Oh?” I raised a brow, a certain implication too obvious for him to miss.
“No, no, not because of that,” he said and shook his head. “Though, maybe…”
“Don’t tell me you think she’s cheating?” The way he looked at me, silently yet speaking volumes. This was it, his weakness. This was so wrong, I shouldn’t, and yet I did. For the greater good.
“I don’t have proof, of course, but she’s been acting suspiciously lately,
and she’s even changed her email password, so I wouldn’t be able to see what she’s up to.”
Wait, what? Why would she give him access to her emails in the first place? That just seemed wrong and weird, and honestly, I wasn’t surprised she finally realized that, too.
“Well,” I said with a smile and leaned back in my chair, “today may be your lucky day.”
“What do you mean?” As much as he seemed to try to keep his face neutral, his eyes were inquisitive and curious, maybe even hopeful.
“I might have just the right skills to help you answer the question of what she’s hiding in her emails, if she really is having an affair or not.”
“Are you serious?”
I smirked.
“And you could do that?”
“Well,” I began, drawing out the word. It was cruel, but so was everything these people were doing to us. “Under certain circumstances…”
“What would it take?” Hook, line, and sinker. Gotcha.
I let his question hang between us, my eyes wandering across the room, the empty stairs and a group of teens disappearing down our hallway, Fiona sitting with one leg propped up before her while she balanced her book against her thigh. Her hair was up in a ponytail, a single strand having escaped it. She was so beautiful.
“What would you be willing to give?” I finally asked, slowly turning back to look at him, my expression and tone calculated, demanding. I was gambling, but I’d always had a certain kind of luck when it came to things like this.
“I could turn a blind eye on you and Kellie? Ignore odd noises coming from your room, pay a little less attention?”
I paused, as if giving it consideration, but I already knew exactly what I wanted. “How about something more like this…”
…
One and a half hours before the night bell, Fiona and I went downstairs to meet with Dawid. He said it was the best time for him to sneak us into a room with a computer and internet access, since everyone working in IT would be gone by then. How extensive and how many levels did all of this have that they had an entire IT department? Then again, they had to store our data and run the coding for the simulations, so it made sense that they’d need such people.