People do stupid things for the people they love. My parents went to jail for me. Cameron is here, giving up his freedom, a dead man walking, as he said, for Casey. And I don’t even know what June did for Liam White, or what he did for her. But I do know it was stupid, since they both ended up dead.
I understand Cameron, and my body thrums with anticipation.
He’s handing me a code. Like the lines of DNA: Hi, Alina Chase.
I was always looking for messages. For code. I was always sending them out, waiting for someone to respond. So when Cameron tells me these things, with his careful, deliberate words, I understand. When he leaves the glass in my pocket, I understand.
He’s saying I may need it—I don’t feel safe, and I may need it. He’s not sure Dom will let me go after this. Use it wisely, he’s saying. Use it better.
I’m not sure if I should trust him. But there’s a chance that I can. When the time comes, the chance will have to be enough, because it’s all I have.
There’s a list in my head, a list I start making for when it’s time: a GPS, food, water, blankets … and then I stop myself. I amend it. You. Just you. You and out there, you will make it.
Of course you will.
Cameron makes a fire in the wood-burning stove, but it’s not for cooking. It’s for the heat. The mountains are cold at night, even in the summer. It crackles, and the heat comes off it in waves. I’ve never been so close to a fire this size, and the smell of it sets my nerves on edge. Everything has changed.
We eat directly from containers—dried, salted meat, trail mix, lukewarm beans. I’m not going to lie: it’s disgusting.
“This is gross,” Casey mumbles, and even Cameron seems to gag as he chews.
“It’s just temporary,” Dominic says, yet again.
The temporariness of this situation goes unspoken—it lasts until I lead them to the way to access the information inside the database again, and we each get what we came for.
“I’m just saying it wouldn’t have killed you to get some chips or bread or something …” She’s looking at Cameron when she says it, but Dominic is the one to slam the container he’s been eating from onto the ground.
He fixes his eyes on her. “Do you have any idea how many trips the equipment alone took me? Cameron and I had to carry it all in here. Piece by bulky freaking piece. For weeks. While you were getting fed in training and on duty, standing around, watching her. Did you see a grocery store on the hike in? Excuse me if I picked efficient.”
My spoon scrapes against the metal can. This is the first moment we’ve had to pause and catch our breath. The plan is fluid, and developing as we speak, and it’s finally something other than the steps they had laid out in front of them. This is the leap of faith they were taking: that they’d find something in me. And now they have, only it’s vague and insubstantial with no end point in sight. The tension crackles through the room along with the fire.
Cameron cracks his knuckles.
“Efficient,” Casey says. Then she laughs. “My appetite is efficiently gone,” she says, slamming the half-empty can on the ground and heading to the bathroom.
I finish my portion. I finish hers, too.
I’m not used to the sounds in here—the crackle of the fire and the humming of the computers. But the fire dies down and the computers are shut off as we move to the bedroom, and I’m not used to the sounds that remain either. The crickets. The wind. The way you can hear it coming through the trees before it reaches the house, pushing against the door and the mesh-wired windows.
The sleeping arrangements are much like the night before. Except now we’re in thick sleeping bags on the hard floor. We’re all piled in one room together again—the difference this time is that somebody stays up at all times. I’m not sure what it is they’re worried I might do, whether I’ll claw my way through the wood walls, whether I’ll smother them in their sleep, but it makes me think that this place isn’t as secure as the locked basement we were last in. Maybe they’re right to be cautious—I already have glass resting in my pocket. I’m unable to move because of it, but I feel safer keeping it there.
I hate June Calahan for what she allowed to happen back then and for what she allowed to happen to me now. This is what June wanted, after all. It’s what she believed. A dangerous soul is dangerous. It’s funny, I think, that she didn’t realize she’d be lumped into that category when all was said and done.
I want to stay up. I want to whisper to Cameron and listen, I want to watch Dominic and Casey and learn more. But mostly, I want to be ready. And so I sleep.
I wake up once, during Cameron’s shift, because I feel a body standing nearby, and my senses are on high alert. But he’s not looking at me. He crouches beside Casey, and I can’t hear them exactly, but I can tell they’re disagreeing. I hear someone say, “This is completely screwed up,” and I know it’s Cameron, because his shadow clenches its fists at the same time the words carry through the room.
Then Casey pushes herself upright, and she sticks her finger at him, saying, “I need to do it, we need to do it.”
“No, we don’t,” he says.
It feels as if they’ve repeated these words to each other over and over again, because Casey just lies back and says, “We’re already doing it.”
“It won’t change anything,” he says.
“It changes everything,” Casey says. I don’t even have to strain to hear her, and Dominic’s sleeping bag rustles.
The shadow retreats to the door, Casey rolls over, the conversation is done.
The next time I wake, there’s just the faintest color to the sky, so I can see the mesh wires crisscrossing the solitary window. Casey is sitting with her back against the door with her eyes closed. But I can tell from the tension in her jaw that she’s not asleep. Light snoring comes from the other two sleeping bags. “Hey,” I whisper, and her eyes flutter open, focusing on me. “Can I use the bathroom?”
She checks her watch and stands. Then she looks beyond me. “Dom,” she says. “Time to wake up.”
She waits for them to stir, then leads me out of the room without touching me. Whatever sort of camaraderie we shared yesterday is gone now. We’re all playing our hands. There’s no point pretending anymore.
I have decided the most essential item for survival is a pair of shoes that fit. Blisters are the devil. At this point, I’d rather have Cameron cut a tracker out of my rib again. Okay, maybe not. But still. I slide the shoes onto my feet and already feel the chafing on my heel, my ankle. Dominic is packing an insane amount of material into a tiny knapsack, like a magic trick. And Casey makes a trip out back where there’s allegedly a well for fresh water.
I stare at the front door, open just a crack, calling to me like a magnet.
“Alina,” Cameron says, like he’s already said it. I shift my gaze to him, and he shakes his head, just once. “Heads up.” He tosses me a roll of beige tape from the first-aid kit on the counter. “Wrap your ankles. It helps.”
I do, and he’s right. I end up binding the sneakers as well, tightening them even more, securing them in place. “Thank you,” I say. Then I take another strip and place it in my pocket, folding the pieces of glass inside.
Casey comes back with several canteens. Dominic can barely keep the smile from his face. Casey is anxious as well, checking the lids, lining everything up in neat rows.
Cameron watches her with his breath held.
“Okay, everyone,” Dominic says, scanning all our faces. “Breathe. It’s just a hike.”
Casey laughs, and Cameron relaxes, and even I feel something unfurl inside me.
Because as much as I would like to think about running—as much as I think about the door open a crack and the glass in my pocket—I hear those numbers whispered into my ear, and I want to know. God, I want to know. They’re meant for me, and I want to know what’s waiting there.
I feel like June must’ve felt, in the moments before she got inside the database. All the informat
ion, just waiting to be seen. I’m like her after all—truth at any price. No matter what it says about me, about me and June in the same sentence, it’s true.
Dom shrugs the largest pack onto his shoulders and waits for us to do the same. We walk in a single-file line out into the sunlight. Dom, then Casey, then me, then Cameron.
I picture June’s mouth reciting the coordinates to me, and I want to grab her. I want to shake her, and ask her why, and then I want to see what she has left for me.
I guess we’re about to find out.
We’re mostly silent for the hike. Mostly, I think we’re all lost in our own thoughts, because whenever somebody does speak, it takes the others a moment to catch up. Which is what’s happening right now.
“I mean, it’s been seventeen years, it’s not just going to be sitting somewhere in the middle of the woods, right?” Casey asks like she’s been mentally talking to herself. “We’re looking for some instructions she’s left behind, right? It can’t be this easy, can it?” Her voice is breathy and hopeful.
“I wouldn’t call this easy,” Cameron mumbles.
“You know what I mean,” she says. “The Alonzo-Carter Cybersecurity facility hasn’t been compromised since June and Liam—not for lack of trying. So either she’s leading us to a shadow-database she set up to mirror the original, or to some sort of instruction guide to hack it externally …”
“My money’s on some sort of code,” Dom says.
“I don’t know,” Casey says. “Security could change a lot in seventeen years, which she must’ve known. My money’s on some sort of shadow-database.”
“Funny,” Cameron says, “considering neither of you has any money right now.” I laugh unexpectedly, but Dominic scowls at him. “Maybe we’re just being led to the money,” Cameron says, but Dom waves him off.
“June was about more than money,” Dominic says.
June. God, he’s obsessed with her. “How would you know?” I ask. “She’s dead. The only thing you know is what other people tell you about her.”
“And you,” he says. “I know you.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You do realize June wasn’t a programmer, right?”
“Oh, we know that,” Dominic says. “We know that she used Liam to get in. But after she got him killed, she still had access somehow. The blackmail continued until her death. So either she knew how to get in or she had a shadow-database set up, copying the information remotely. Either way, she was in.”
“It’s just a movie,” I mumble, but Dominic stops walking. We all stop walking.
“What did you say?”
“I said, it’s just a movie. We’ve all seen it. But the only people who were there are June and Liam, and they’re both dead, so how do we know what really happened? Maybe Liam set her up to take the fall. Ever think of that?”
“He had a recorder, Alina. When he was shot. That’s how they know.”
The recording was actually released—I heard it in one of the documentaries on her life. There have been several. Some paint June as misguided, or at the very least, a reluctant villain. But this documentary was particularly harsh on her, painting her as borderline sociopathic. This documentary made it seem as if she didn’t even have the potential for good.
That’s another thing scientists have correlated as best they could with the data they had: sociopathic tendencies. It’s not a chance—it’s practically a guarantee, like left- and right-handedness.
Anyway, the recording was of June’s voice, in the same voice I’d heard a thousand times before, where she said that she was not the threat, not the danger, but the message. The bell. Warning people about the potential criminals among us.
But in this recording, her voice was tight and desperate, and her words echoed off the walls. It was recorded in that building where they were surrounded on Christmas Day. It’s the message that landed me in a lifetime of prison.
I did not take any money, she claimed. I did not blackmail or bribe. The truth will not die with me. It will still be here, waiting for me. You cannot end me. I will be back. This is your warning.
And then they left it recording, as they said their good-byes. I would know you anywhere, she says. The voice is hers but strained. Pained.
You can even hear the gunshots at the end of the recording, but then most everything is muffled, the recorder on the ground. Everything static and foggy—even Liam White’s very labored breathing, until eventually that, too, fades to nothing.
“It actually makes perfect sense,” Dominic says. “We’ve both tried—we’ve been trying—for a long time. I can’t figure it out. Casey can’t figure it out, and she’s incredible.” Casey looks shocked by the compliment, but I believe it. “We can’t even come close enough to see what we’re up against. It’s impossible to hack. It was made to be impossible. June wasn’t a hacker. She thought different …” He scans me quickly. “And so do you.”
They’re insane if they think I’ll miraculously see how to break into a database, when I know nothing of programming or code. They’re insane if they think I’ll be able to decipher June’s life and find some hidden shadow-database that nobody else has managed to find. It won’t be in these woods. Not functioning in the middle of a forest for seventeen years. They’re wrong, and I’m terrified because I will not see what they need me to see. “I don’t know if you realize this,” I say, “but it didn’t end well for the people who hacked into it last.”
Dominic laughs. He really laughs, like I’m funny. But I was serious. “They were loud,” he says. “They were loud when they should’ve been quiet.”
Casey won’t look at me. I stare at her, hoping to catch her eye. “You want to be like June, Casey? You want to be the villain and have your soul suffer for it forever? You want to end up like me?” When she doesn’t answer I turn to Cameron. “And you would let her do this? So much for anything.” And he flinches.
“No,” Casey says, “I care about only one thing in there. A single thing.” I remember the news program. Her twin sister died. Of course. Basic human nature, refusing to let go.
“You want to find who Ava is in the next life?” I ask. “I’ll tell you: an infant. An infant who deserves its own life. She won’t be the same person,” I say, and for a second I think she’s going to hit me. Instead she just shakes her head at me, like I’m a fool.
“You know what would be great?” Cameron asks. “If we can get on with it already.”
We start moving, and Cameron falls into stride with me for a moment. “It’s not what you think,” he says. “I promise.”
But to take him at his word requires both belief and trust, and I am currently empty of both.
The GPS coordinates aren’t specific enough. Dominic says the coordinates cover an area one kilometer in each direction. The area in question all looks the same as the rest of the woods. No particular paths, no cabins, just brush and roots covering the soil, trees like every other tree in the forest. “Keep your eyes out,” Dominic says. He puts an orange stake into the ground and keeps walking, marking off the area as we follow.
“For what?” Cameron mumbles.
There’s nothing here. I know it as we trace the potential area together, and I feel them know it as their breathing comes in short, desperate pulls. As they walk faster, their bodies become tenser. We finish the loop, and all we’ve seen are trees and dirt.
“She could’ve buried it,” Casey says, and Dominic nods, but everything’s starting to take the tone of desperation.
“Right. Of course she did, otherwise it wouldn’t survive seventeen years. I’m just looking for some sort of marker, but again, it’s been years. It could be crushed, or eroded, or just … gone,” Dominic says.
“Check the trees,” I say, and they all look at me like I have some unexplainable insight into June’s psyche. I roll my eyes and say, “Bark doesn’t change as much over time. If she wanted a marker to last, she’d use that.” We all know June wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to stick a stak
e in the middle of the floor and expect it to last until the next generation.
I stop at a tree, running my fingers over the bark, imagining June’s pale hand doing the same. “Cameron,” Dominic says. “Stay with her. Casey, you’re with me.”
Why did she leave something? How did she know she would die? That she wouldn’t just be put in jail where she could leave letters for real people? That she wouldn’t just disappear forever? Dominic made it sound like this was June’s blackmail. A fail-safe. A reason for her not to be killed. So again, I wonder, How did she know she would die?
It’s like she didn’t trust the world. Didn’t trust the law, or humanity, any of it. Like she knew what would happen when she left the woods. God, June, why did you leave the woods?
“Do you really think there’s something?” Cameron asks. He’s close. I didn’t feel him coming closer, but he’s close enough that I can feel his breath on my shoulder as he tries to see what I am seeing.
“Yes,” I say, and it’s the truth.
“What about this one?” Cameron asks, running his fingers along the bark of a tree. There’s a diagonal scar across the trunk, and it’s impossible to tell if it was put there on purpose or if it’s just a naturally occurring scar.
I shrug. “Mark it,” I say, and Cameron ties an orange piece of tape around it. This is our fifth marker, and we’re not even one-third of the way through our section. It’s painstaking, checking each trunk, around and around, from base to branch level. Looking for discrepancies. At the rate we’re moving—or not moving—we won’t be going back to the cabin tonight, that’s for sure.
We back down a row, and Casey and Dominic are coming toward us from the other direction. Cameron calls over to them. “I guess it’s too much to hope that you found her initials carved in the side of a trunk inside a heart or something?”
“Ha,” Casey says. “So far, let’s see, we’ve found three random lines, three circles, or circularish marks, and one arch, like a horseshoe.”
I stop moving. Stop breathing. “Show me the arch,” I say, and they look at me like I’ve lost my mind, and maybe I have. But suddenly I can see June walking this same path, her hair swaying as the wind comes, her steps sure and determined. “The horseshoe. Show me.” Dominic shrugs and gestures for us to follow.
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