Sanctuary Bay

by Laura Burns

  She gulped.

  Remember what Ethan said, she thought. Wind in the caves. It’s a completely logical explanation.

  That sound, though. It seemed filled with sadness and longing and pain. It was hard not to believe it was something more, something unearthly. This was definitely not going to make getting to sleep any easier. Sarah pulled back and shut the window all the way, but she could still faintly hear the ocean, the cries. Not cries, she told herself again. Wind in the caves.

  She was about to turn away from the window again when she saw shadows racing across the lawn. Sarah pressed her hands on the cool glass, staring hard. People, the shadows were people. Maybe twenty of them.

  As one, they all dropped to the grass, still moving, but now crawling on their bellies. “What the fuck?” Sarah whispered. About half a minute later, they were up again, running. Moving like they had a single brain. She couldn’t look away, watching until they circled around the edge of the building and out of sight.

  Away from the window, Sarah ordered herself. She couldn’t take any more creepiness. She rushed back to bed, squeezed her eyes shut, and wished Karina and Izzy were here.

  But she was all alone.

  * * *

  Sarah found her steps quickening as she happily headed to chemistry class on Monday. It was her favorite subject, and she rocked it. She could recall all the facts she needed to ace most subjects as long as she’d done one pass through the textbook, but chemistry she actually loved. It was precise. Complex, but if you understood the rules and formulas, predictable in a way most things weren’t.

  Like her roommates.

  When Karina and Izzy took off in the middle of the night without bothering to tell her why, Sarah figured it meant they were done being tour guides for the new girl. They were friends with each other, and she was just their roommate. Which was fine—Sarah liked to know where she stood with people, and bad or good didn’t matter.

  But when she woke up Sunday morning, they were both back in the room and acting like nothing had happened. She’d slept late, something she hadn’t expected to do, and Karina and Izzy had waited to have breakfast with her. After that they’d walked her around the campus, showing her the lacrosse and soccer fields and the track. The outdoor track. There was also an indoor one, in what they called the sports center. The center also had a rock-climbing wall, two basketball courts, a bowling alley, a coffee place with a billion designer coffee drinks and juices and snacks, and an Olympic-sized pool, not much use to Sarah, who had only mastered the dog paddle. She could deal with the Jacuzzis in the locker room, though, very easily deal with those. There were saunas too, but her hair didn’t appreciate steam.

  Her roommates had even shown her where her classrooms were, including the little studio where she and her piano tutor would be meeting first thing in the morning. Dean Farrell had insisted she get some kind of “musical instruction.” All Sarah had ever had was two days with a plastic recorder in third grade.

  Then Karina and Izzy had taken her over to the theater where the drama types put on two plays a year. There was a huge screening room in the building’s basement—with a popcorn popper and actual real butter. By the end of the tour, Sarah understood exactly why even the most privileged kids didn’t have a problem spending years on the island. Well, except Ethan. She hadn’t forgotten the “prepare to embrace the suck” warning he’d given her.

  The entire day, Izzy and Karina had acted as if Sarah was their new bestie. She’d gone along with it, and she hadn’t asked about where they went the night before. But the fact that they didn’t mention it, either, made it clear they didn’t want Sarah to know.

  They didn’t trust Sarah. So she couldn’t trust them.

  The teacher and two boys were already in the chemistry room when she arrived. “You must be Sarah,” the teacher—Hispanic, built like a wrestler, longish brown hair curling around his collar—said, then grinned. “Have I impressed you with my deductive abilities?”

  “Absolutely,” Sarah answered, unsure what else to say.

  “Diaz doesn’t have much to brag about,” one of the guys—black, older than Sarah, with a beard—commented.

  “Only my deductive abilities, my muscled physique, my full head of hair, and—”

  Beard kid laughed. “What’d I tell you?” he asked Sarah, clearly not worried about interrupting. “Number three, and he’s already at possession of hair.”

  “Dr. Diaz does have good hair,” an Asian girl, pretty with dangly earrings almost down to her shoulders, said as she walked over to one of the four lab stations and sat down.

  “A for the day to Eliza!” Dr. Diaz called out.

  The other guy spoke up. “Paying for compliments.” He shook his head, sending his longish red hair swinging. “Sad. By the way, nice shirt, Dr. D!” His voice was bright with faux enthusiasm. The shirt was a basic one-pocket tee, navy blue.

  “A for the day, Bryce,” Dr. Diaz announced. “Anything you’d like to say, Sarah? While I have the grade book open.” Not that he did.

  “Um, are there assigned seats?” she asked as a few more kids wandered in, including Logan from her English class that morning.

  “Take this one.” Dr. Diaz pointed to a seat at one of the front two stations. “Your lab partner will be Ethan Steere.”

  “Lucky girl,” someone murmured from behind her, the two words infused with sarcasm.

  “If he shows,” Beard guy said.

  “No need to go to class when you’re a member,” Eliza said under her breath. “Which is guaranteed if you’re a Steere.”

  “And we’re back to that secret society shit. You’re obsessed.” Logan rolled his eyes.

  Sarah had no idea what they were talking about. She was stuck on the name Steere. As in Steere? Could Ethan really be part of that family? Her see-it-remember-it memory supplied her with an abundance of info all at once: Grace Steere, leader of the World Health Organization. Winston Steere, her brother, CEO of LJ Martin Levitt. Sam Steere, their cousin, who had his own show on MSNBC. Michael Steere, another cousin, cofounder of Space Station Technologies. She’d seen three of those four names in one place. The Forbes list of the most powerful people of 2014. Most powerful in the world. And there had been three more Steeres in the top fifty. Was Ethan part of that family?

  The overhead lights flashed blue. The school used that to signal the start of class instead of a bell.

  “Okay, today we’re going to do something a little different,” Dr. Diaz said. “We’re going back into the big lab, and I want each team to choose a piece of equipment and experiment with it. What doesn’t it do that would be cool? We’re too tempted to be limited by the equipment we have. But if the technology exists, it means that the work that requires the technology already exists. To make breakthroughs we might need to start with our own equipment.” He paced as he spoke, his teasing tone gone. He sounded intense and passionate. “I want you to be revolutionaries. I want you to create revolutions. Come up with a modification for your piece of equipment or come up with a whole new piece if you want. Today’s an outside-the-box day.” He looked over at Sarah and smiled. “Okay, let’s get going. And have fun!”

  He strode over to a metal door in the back of the room and pressed his finger against the pad to open it. Sarah followed the other kids as they headed in. When she stepped through the doorway, she stopped so abruptly someone ran into her. Sarah glanced over her shoulder. “Sorry,” she told Eliza, moving out of the way, her gaze returning to the lab as she matched pieces of equipment she’d only seen in pictures to the real things—an X-ray microanalyzer, a multi-wavelength ellipsometer, and—what she was pretty sure was—a microprocessor-controlled potentiostat.

  It took her a second to realize that Dr. Diaz was standing next to her, grinning. “Kind of a nice setup, huh?” he asked.

  “Kind of,” Sarah repeated in awe.

  “Why don’t you play around with the STM,” he said. “We did an experiment using it last week. This will give y
ou a chance to catch up. There are instructions in the binder next to it, but let me know if you need a hand.”

  Great googly moogly. The expression had been stuck in her head ever since her interrupted late-night cartoon binge with Karina. But it fit perfectly. She was going to get to use an STM, a fucking scanning tunneling microscope! It could show the individual atoms on the surface of a sample. With the STM, she could do more than look at atoms, she could move them around, manipulate them to create a chemical reaction. When she reached the table holding the scope, she couldn’t bring herself to touch it, even though she’d lusted after it from the first time she heard about it. It was small. At only eight inches high, compared to the three-and-a-half-foot-tall electron microscope Bryce and his lab partner were using, it didn’t look all that different from the 30x compound microscope she’d gotten to use at her various schools. But it was worlds away. Galaxies away.

  Sarah sat down and picked up the binder. That she could touch without worry. She didn’t want to do anything with the STM until she’d read every word, even though she’d already read everything she could find and probably knew enough to take the scope apart and put it together. She flipped to the first page and read the table of contents, then turned to the next page, which gave the history of the STM. “In the early twentieth century, the developments in quantum mechanics—”

  A loud banging on the lab door interrupted Sarah. Dr. Diaz walked over slowly, taking his time, and opened it. Ethan, possibly one of the Steeres, came in. He didn’t seem at all embarrassed or apologetic about arriving late.

  “Diaz,” he said as he passed the teacher.

  “Steere,” Dr. Diaz replied. “You want to fill us in on what you were doing that kept you from being on time? Not that we aren’t delighted that you’ve decided to show today.”

  “I was in the tunnels under the insane asylum, looking for an escape route,” Ethan replied. That got a few snickers, but most people in the class were already caught up in the assignment. Really into it, in a way Sarah hadn’t seen much at her old schools.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know that when you do make it to class, you won’t be without a lab partner anymore. You’ll be working with our new student, Sarah Merson. Since she wasn’t here for the experiment analyzing a sample with the STM, I’m having her use it today. Fill her in on what she missed. And she can fill you in on today’s assignment.”

  Ethan gave a noncommittal grunt that could mean “fine” or “that sucks” or just “I heard you,” and joined Sarah in front of the microscope. He barely even glanced at her. “Put on gloves for starters. And don’t breathe on any of the system parts,” he said.

  Sarah’s back stiffened. She knew that. Breath had billions of organic substances. “Hi,” she snapped.

  Ethan turned to her, plastered a huge fake grin on his face, and said, “Hi! Are you enjoying your time at our wonderful school so far?”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “Do you want to know the assignment or what?” she asked.

  “Sounded like my assignment was babysitting you,” he replied, dropping the faux enthusiasm. “The first thing you need to do is make the tip. You take—”

  “I got it. While I do that, you can start thinking about a way the STM could be improved, something that could lead to a scientific breakthrough.” She couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

  “Look at you. All eager beaver.” Ethan sprawled in the chair next to hers. She couldn’t help noticing his shirt ride up, showing a sliver of hard belly above his low-slung jeans. He noticed her noticing, and one side of his mouth curved up in a self-satisfied smile.

  She took her time moving her gaze away. She wasn’t going to let him think she cared that he’d caught her looking. “If advancing our understanding of the world is so boring, why are you here? There are people who’d kill to be in this lab, getting to use this equipment,” she shot back in an even voice.

  Ethan slapped his hand against his chest. “You’ve wounded me, but in a way that has opened my eyes. My life will be much more meaningful now that I’ve befriended a poor but scrappy girl to make me appreciate everything I have.”

  She had sounded like that. Crap. “I have not befriended you.” Sarah pulled a pair of latex gloves out of a box on the lab table. “And you know nothing about me.”

  His ice-blue eyes slowly ran from her off-brand sneakers to her $9.99 haircut. He didn’t say anything, but he smirked, like he knew everything he needed to know. Why was Karina with this asshole?

  “You can also think of a completely new kind of equipment.” Sarah snapped on the gloves. She’d read a breakdown of how to make a tip for the STM and how to prepare a sample. It flashed through her brain vividly, along with the ads that had been scrolling down the side of the screen on the library computer she’d been using at the time.

  First she had to prep the tools—wire cutter, tweezers (pointed and rounded), flat-nose pliers. She took them from the drawer to her left. Now she needed the ethanol. Not on the table. Not in the drawer. She glanced around the lab, trying not to be too obvious.

  “Need help with something, Sofía?” Ethan drawled.

  “It’s Sarah,” she told him snidely. “And no.” She’d just spotted a row of cabinets along the far wall. She figured the basic supplies would be there.

  “Says ‘Sofía’ back here.” Suddenly his warm fingers were on the back of her neck, sliding under her collar, tucking the tag of her Sofía T-shirt back into place. Sarah froze, praying he didn’t know that Sofía was part of Sofía Vergara’s exclusive clothing line for Kmart. Flushing, she scrambled to her feet and hurried across the room. She was relieved to find that she’d been right about where to find the ethanol and other stuff she needed.

  “So where were you really when class started?” she asked Ethan when she returned to the table. She wanted control of the conversation.

  “In the tunnels under the insane asylum, looking for an escape route,” he answered, in the same flat, matter-of-fact voice he’d used with Diaz.

  4

  “Want to get together later and study?” Ethan asked, falling into step with Sarah as they left chemistry a couple of weeks later. He’d started following her out when he bothered to show up to class, and Sarah figured it would be weird not to walk to lunch together, since they pretty much always ate at the same table.

  Sarah hadn’t thought she would still hang out with Izzy and Karina once they were done helping her get settled. But they’d made her a real part of their group of friends, including her in everything—including eating basically every meal together. They both still disappeared in the middle of the night once in a while, but they hadn’t gone together since that first strange night. A couple mornings a week Izzy was up and out of the room before Sarah and Karina woke up. Karina called it Izzy’s “secret assignation,” and Sarah figured she didn’t need the details.

  She glanced over at Ethan. He was almost painfully good-looking—and knew it. Still, sometimes when she was with him, she got a crazy impulse to reach out and trace the perfect shape of his upper lip with one finger.

  “By study, you mean you copy my lab notes from the times you were searching for escape routes?” she asked, ignoring the impulse. He still hadn’t admitted the real reason he showed up late—or not at all.

  “Pretty much,” he replied, as they headed to the back exit.

  Sarah wished she could just zap him the notes, but she didn’t use her laptop in chem lab. Pen and paper was easier because she liked to add sketches of what she was looking at under the ’scope. “Yeah, okay,” she answered. He was Karina’s boyfriend. And he was her friend. Kind of. In the way an obnoxious guy who was part of your actual group of friends was your friend. It was hard to believe she had a group of friends. She’d barely ever managed more than one before the social worker showed up and moved her again. But nobody was coming for her at Sanctuary Bay. She couldn’t leave even if she wanted to.

  They walked outside and started toward the dining hal
l. Sarah caught sight of the trees near the path vibrating. Almost immediately, the Puffin lacrosse team burst out of the woods and charged toward the school. She didn’t see anyone give a signal, but as one, they dropped to the ground and began doing burpees in perfect unison. It was the lacrosse players she’d seen from her window her first night here. She’d found out their coach believed in workouts at odd hours. He also believed that his team should think of themselves as one being. They had to eat every meal together—and they did that in sync too, every fork up and down at the same time—study together, and socialize together.

  The Lobster coach was just as crazy—or crazier—in his own way. There were rumors about him forcing his players to endure extreme physical and psychological pain so that nothing they experienced on the field could distract them. He was supposed to be a genius at discovering their deepest fears and then making the players experience them again and again until they were inoculated against them.

  Both coaches mixed up special protein drinks—each with a carefully guarded recipe—for his team. You never saw a Puffin or a Lobster without a sports bottle in the team colors.

  “Coffee place at seven?” Ethan asked. He flicked the end of the red scarf Izzy had loaned her. Red and white were Lobster colors, and her roommates were both Lobster fans, which made Sarah’s team affiliation a no-brainer. “Obviously you’re going to the big game.” He made it sound like some archaic ritual that he was way too intelligent to believe in.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said again. “Seven.”

  “Not so many big words,” he begged. “You’ve got to remember my parents bought my way in here.”

  Sarah just shook her head. He thought he was being funny, but his parents probably had bought his way in. Not that he was stupid, but he was a slacker, who probably wouldn’t have made the cut without the family cash. They could afford it. Turned out he was one of those Steeres. After that first class she’d typed “Ethan Steere” into Google and up came a thousand pictures of him at political rallies, red carpet premieres—there was an Oscar-winning actor Steere in the mix too—and fancy charity events. Sarah had never gone to anything that could be called an event. But she was here. At Sanctuary Bay. That was enough. “Since your parents spent the bucks, maybe you should, I don’t know, try to make it worth their while,” Sarah suggested.