We exit through the back door into a yard overgrown with weeds, and moss hanging from trees, clinging to the fences.
Dom leads us to a garage, where there’s a red car with no top. He manually lifts the garage door, wincing at the noise it makes. The sun is just starting to color the sky a dark pink. And there’s a chill in the air, even though it’s summer. I feel goose bumps form across my arms. Dom puts the car in neutral, and he and Cameron push it out of the garage, out the gate, to the long driveway still shielded by hanging moss and tall shrubs. He locks the garage back up and opens the trunk.
My eyes go wide, and my stomach flips at the thought. “No. I can’t.”
Casey jumps in. Apparently we’re both supposed to. Except then Cameron slides in beside her, and I realize that his face might be known, too, caught on someone’s camera during the escape. He has disappeared with us as well, and someone must know he was there and then not. That he is now tied to us, and we to him. Even if he’s not on the news yet, eventually he’ll be discovered, and then he can be traced back to us. I imagine the facial recognition software, the streetlights we must ride through, and storefronts we must pass.
“I’m going to be sick,” I say, not as an excuse but as a warning. “I get motion sickness.”
“We crawled through a storm sewer. I think we can handle you getting sick,” Cameron says.
I almost smile. I climb in beside him. There’s barely any room, and when Dominic closes the trunk, I have a moment of complete and total fear. I suck in a breath, and someone brushes the hair back from my face.
I don’t know who, and I don’t even care. But I imagine, in the dark, that it’s my mother, soothing me. I try to will myself to sleep, but I cannot.
The engine comes to life, the material at the base of the trunk feeling rougher as it starts to vibrate against my bare face. I strain to focus on the voice in my head instead. Truthfully, I’ve heard it only once, and not even in the song I imagine her singing. I know my mother’s voice not from my memory of her but from the memory of an interview when she was first released from prison. She ignored all the reporters’ questions, their microphones held out to her as she walked straight for a waiting taxi after seven years in prison. Until she got to the door, and someone said, “Do you have anything to say to your daughter?”
And her eyes, just like mine, stared right into the camera, piercing right into me, as she said, “I used to sing her a lullaby. Same as my mother used to sing to me. She can find me there, in her dreams.”
It was Genevieve who sang me the song after that. I never heard from my mother again.
Just a few words, that’s all I’ve ever heard her say. The rest I must be imagining.
The car begins to move, slowly at first, but I can no longer conjure the sound of her voice.
“How long?” I whisper, but nobody answers.
I realize why later. Much later. Because it’s been hours and we’re still moving. True to my word, I’ve been hovering on the edge of sick the entire time, but nobody has said anything about the noises that escape my throat, or the fact that I keep shifting, trying to find relief, leaving them with even less space. I moan again, and I feel an arm on my arm, holding me. I flinch for a moment, and then relax. The car lurches back and forth, as if we’re going around curves—I’m going to lose everything in my stomach, and this time I won’t be able to stop it.
Someone rubs my upper back, and the feeling passes. I take a deep breath through my mouth. I wonder, for a moment, if we knew each other in a past life. Everything feels so effortless with them. They know what to do without asking.
But I know that’s impossible. Souls have no memory. But I wonder, for the first time, if they can still be drawn to each other. If we wander restlessly until we find one another again. If some of us are full of a yearning, driving us to keep moving, searching for something we can’t quite name. I understand completely, in that moment, why the Soul Database was formed in the first place. Why people wanted it, wanted a record of themselves—a permanent, eternal history. So the people you’ve made a connection with can find you again, just in case. Because I suddenly don’t want to leave this trunk—let alone this life—even though another wave of nausea is beginning.
I wonder if the soul of Liam White would want to see me again, in this body. If he could look through my eyes straight to June. He wouldn’t want to, not at all, if he knew why I wanted to see him.
The car slams to a stop, and we become a pile of bodies. Of arms and legs, twisted and crushed.
And then the trunk pops open, and I squint against the glare of the sun. Dom doesn’t spare more than a glance before he says, “Out.”
I climb out first, since I’m closest to the edge. But the stillness and the solid ground don’t help. The ground spins, the horizon tilts, the axis shifts. I fall to my knees in the dirt and lose everything in my stomach.
Then I put my hands on the earth and look around. We’re in the mountains somewhere. I see them, stretching peak after peak, past a still body of water in front of us. There’s another car, dark colored and partially rusted, parked in the trees off the side of the road. I hear crickets in the grass and in the trees. These are not the trees I’m used to seeing. They are tall and thick and the leaves rustle in the gusts of wind.
I have no idea what lurks behind the first layer of trees. Whether there are animals or people or nothing at all.
I can hear the wind stirring up everything in its path, seconds before it reaches us, like a warning. Cameron and Casey stretch beside me, shielding their eyes from the bright light. But nobody else seems to notice the mountains that go on forever, or the wind that comes from deep in the woods, the way the sky seems to move if you stare at it too long—
“I think she needs some food,” Casey says as I stumble, bracing myself on the hood of the car.
I keep waiting for freedom to feel like something else. Something not so disorienting. Something not so terrifying.
Something more.
Chapter 8
Dominic places a hand on my elbow and squats to my level. He hands me a bottle of water, which I take, even though I hate to take anything from him. I rinse my mouth and spit in the dirt in front of me. “Where are we?” I ask as I pull myself to standing.
Casey pulls her shirt away from her skin, obviously as overheated as I am. “In the middle of—”
“Nowhere,” Dominic cuts in. “We’re nowhere.” But he’s holding a GPS, and I see the latitude and longitude numbers across the top, marking our location. Unfortunately, they mean absolutely nothing to me. I want to go back and tell myself how to prepare. Learn how to swim. Run blind. Study the latitude and longitude coordinates of the world. Seven months of preparation and I am helpless and lost. Seven months of preparation and I have traded everything I’ve ever known, tossed it in the air like a coin, and shrugged as it came back to the earth. Seven months of preparation and I am left at the whim of another, yet again.
Cameron throws our bags out of the backseat, and Dominic says, “Ditch the car.”
Cameron stares at him, as if he cannot believe the request. I can’t either. The car must be worth a lot of money, and it belongs to someone else. But after a prolonged look, Cameron disappears into the woods. He comes back out with a thick branch, which he wedges inside the driver’s side, against the gas pedal. He releases the parking brake as he jumps away from the car.
The red car drives straight into the lake, churning and angry, and the water bubbles as it goes deeper. It sinks slowly, sputtering, and we all watch it go. We watch from the dirt road until the surface of the lake is still again. And then Dominic swings a bag onto his shoulder and starts walking. “Let’s move,” he says. I don’t ask. I am so far beyond asking.
I just move.
These shoes they’ve given me are slowing me down because they don’t fit, blisters already forming against my ankle, so I stop to take them off even though the path is rocky. The callouses should help.
Came
ron is behind me, and he looks at my feet as I step out of my shoes and bend to pick them up, and for a second I think he’s going to say something. To offer something. “Bad idea,” he says, but I ignore him. He waits for me to move again, and I hear his steps behind me.
Ten more minutes of walking and I’m beyond irritated because Cameron was right and I’m trying not to show it. Walking in socks through the woods where there’s no path was a really bad idea. Obviously. I try to distract myself by watching my surroundings, and I try not to let him see me wince when I misstep.
I attempt to memorize our route, looking for markers along the way. A tree with a knot that overtook its trunk. A rock extending over our path, like a cliff. But this place is enormous, and most everything looks the same. Stumbling upon this mangled trunk or that sharpened rock again would be a miracle in and of itself. The world has never seemed so vast. I’m not sure I can find my way back out.
I need to find my way back out.
I sit on a rock when Dominic and Casey stop for a rest, and I use the opportunity to put the shoes on again. I don’t look at Cameron, but I’m sure he sees. They’re all watching me.
We keep moving. I wonder what will happen if I just … stop. If someone will throw me over a shoulder and bring me anyway. I wonder what will happen if I run. If I could survive out here, at latitude 34.88 and longitude –83.17. If maybe I could find a way out, find a friendly face, a safe place. I think of my mother, who is the only person I can imagine helping me, even though she has all but disappeared—at least, from the news, from the Internet, from the world I have access to. There’s a small article about her violating parole, but I don’t know if anything ever came of it. But she’s not in jail, and her death was never reported, so I believe she’s out there. Alive.
I don’t suppose I have anyone else. June didn’t have any allies left, at the end. Maybe from before she got tangled up with Liam White, but not any longer. Like her family, I’m sure they don’t want to be associated with her any longer.
She and Liam were famous once. They were the kids who broke into the unbreakable system—a challenge originally set up to test the security of the Alonzo-Carter Cybersecurity Data Center. I’ve seen the original report, watched the interview with the creators. Two men, Mason Alonzo and Paul Carter, arrogantly declaring it unhackable and issuing the challenge as the final test. I mean, come on. That’s just asking for it.
Nobody knows how they did it exactly. But June and Liam got in. They released a screenshot as proof. That should’ve been the end of it.
But they didn’t stop once they were in. All that knowledge, just there waiting for them. I want to believe it was just curiosity at first that made them look. But then it turned into something they couldn’t unsee.
All that information.
All that truth.
She had to warn people. It was the right thing to do.
They searched out the names of dead criminals from the generation before, and they found the record of their current lives. It was a public service, they claimed, much like warning residents of a local ex-con, but there were reasons the privacy laws were in place. Scientists had studied the correlation between generations, and they did find a high linkage of violent crimes committed by past criminals in their next life when all other factors were stripped out. Not 100 percent. But a correlation. The famous study, the one that started all the debates, showed a violent crime correlation of 0.8, with 1.0 being complete.
Part of the debate over using this information is that the studies were flawed by the very nature of the data used—criminal records. It didn’t take into account anything else. And the law says you can’t punish someone for something he or she might do. The very idea of it threatened the foundation of justice. Thinking bad things does not equate guilt. Words mean nothing. Action, everything.
Still, 0.8 is high. Higher than the genetics of IQ and the heredity of height.
A dangerous soul is dangerous.
It wasn’t a conviction, June claimed. It was a warning. We had a right to know who we lived with, who our neighbors were, who our leaders were. It was for our own safety. We had a right to the information.
And at first, the world loved them for it. For allowing them to be on guard. For putting the information into their hands.
I’ve watched that speech that June delivered over the airwaves from an undisclosed location more times than I can count. I am the bell, tolling out its warning. She was very convincing.
People supported them. People hid them, sheltered them, provided them with money. Meanwhile, the people whose names they released became unemployable, the targets of numerous threats. And still the public supported June and Liam. Until they released names of children, of people’s children. When slowly the vigilante groups began to form against the names on her list.
When people stopped just listening to the warning and started acting on the information instead, hurting people who had done no wrong in this life, seeking revenge from the crimes of the past, the tide began to shift in public opinion, turning on Liam and June.
That part, that’s her own fault. June was too impulsive. Too proud. Too self-righteous. Too selfish. Watch one of the many documentaries and take your pick of flaws.
She was an idealist, believing that information belonged to everyone. That people should be free to draw their own conclusions from it. That knowledge should never be hidden behind closed doors and firewalls and passwords. Personally, I think she just had too much faith in humanity, releasing that information to begin with.
As if knowledge would be used only for good.
And when that tide began to shift with public opinion, it shifted in them as well. People claimed that June and Liam started to use the information for blackmail instead. They stopped releasing the names at all, instead allegedly blackmailing the wealthy or powerful with that information and taking their money to disappear. June’s name appeared on accounts the few times the crime was reported, the few times people tried to call their bluff. I have to believe that was Liam. I have to.
They didn’t bluff. They released the names, like a hit list, to the vigilante groups.
And then how the people turned. Oh, how they turned.
No more protection. No more public support. No, it was a witch hunt. Liam was dead within two months, when they were caught on a security camera of a computer warehouse and surrounded on Christmas Day. June escaped but was killed when she resurfaced a year and a half later, run down in the street as she raced for the woods. A generation later, and countless threats to any foster parents who dared to care for me, and I am a prisoner on an island for my own safety.
This is what a belief can do to you. It can drive you, without reason, without cause. It drives you more than law, more than love. It drives you until you are the belief. Until your very soul becomes imprisoned by it.
“Not much farther,” Dominic calls, and I’m relieved to hear that this walk has taken something out of him. My limbs are shaking, but that could just be from the adrenaline of the last day.
We don’t stop until we reach the cabin. I didn’t even see it until I was on top of it. The logs are the same color as the trees, the windows dark and unassuming. We’re all out of breath, even Cameron, who seems as if he’s in the best shape of all of us. They drop their bags on the wooden porch, and Dominic does a quick loop around the house. I see windows, doors, woods that I can disappear into. No fence. No gate. No cliffs or steel cage or mile-long bridge.
I see chances, an opportunity for later. So when they sit down on the ledge of the wooden porch with smiles of relief, I do the same.
“We made it,” Casey says, that same expression of pure joy across her face.
Cameron smirks at her. “Of course we made it,” he replies.
I tilt my head back, with my eyes closed, and pretend not to notice Dominic’s shadow cross my face, or his steps as he settles in beside me.
“Did you know, Alina,” Dominic begins, “that people have sta
yed hidden in these woods for years?”
I stop smiling. My stomach clenches at the word “years.” I have already been waiting years. I cannot stand to wait another hour. But I’m also seized with the realization that I have nowhere to go. And the things I want—no, the thing I want—isn’t a location at all. June is still a chain around my ankle, shackling me to dark rooms and car trunks and hidden cabins.
“June disappeared in them. For over a year. Nobody found her,” I say.
Nobody found her until she made a mistake. Until she chose to come out of the woods. A huge, epic mistake.
“Did you also know,” he says, leaning back on his arms, “that you could wander the woods for weeks and never find your way out?” It’s like he can read my mind, or my fears, and give voice to them. “I’m not the enemy,” he says, but I’m not sure how he expects me to trust him yet again. “You’ll be safe with us.”
Every part of me wants to bite back with a sarcastic remark, something to wipe the smile off his face, to knock his ego or confidence, to gain a step forward, but instead I put the water bottle to my lips. Control my words, control the situation. I will speak only when the emotion has passed.
I swallow too much water, and it hurts going down, but it forces down the tension that has been clawing upward. “And if I ever do get lost,” I say, keeping my eyes fixed on Dominic’s mouth, “I’m grateful you shared the coordinates with me.” I’m trying not to smile, but I’m losing. I see Cameron over his shoulder, the surprised grin on his face.
Dom’s mouth tenses and he stands up, and for a second I wonder if he’s going to lean over and shake me, but instead he begins to laugh. “I can tell why people listened to you,” he says, like someone who has watched June’s movie way too many times. “I really can.” He stands and opens the front door, which apparently does not need a lock—my heart races to see—and he says, “Grab your stuff and come inside.”
I stop smiling when I walk inside. The cabin is equipped with a stash of water bottles, a long wooden counter, a wood-burning stove, and stacked cans of food. There are also bags of clothes, all the color of the woods—like we’re kids playing out some military mission. But then I remember that Dom and Casey were members of the National Guard, since that’s where my guards are pulled from. That they are old enough, and that they’re definitely trained.
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