You were safe once.
I was safe once, too. But it wasn’t enough.
Chapter 13
“Take the cot,” dominic says. I’m not sure what’s with his change of attitude, but I don’t care for it. It’s somehow worse. Like I’ve done something to please him, and I guess I have.
All I did was exactly what they asked of me. I found June. I found what she wanted me to see, though none of us can make any sense of it. And she’s not finished with me.
Cameron hasn’t spoken to me again, not since Dominic has started being nice, as if I am somehow on his side. Maybe June wasn’t ever real to Cameron before—just a story, a legend, a person who never truly existed in his mind—but being here changes all that. Seeing her things, the signs she has left for me, the truth she has sealed inside those boxes … she’s real, and she’s guilty, and she’s me.
I grab a sleeping bag and unroll it across the cold ground, ignoring Dominic’s gesture. I draw the line at sleeping in her bed, shifting restlessly in her shadow. The material is cold, and definitely dirty, and I try not to imagine June curled up inside here in the winter, her blond curls spilling out as she tucks her chin farther inside, Liam smiling at her from nearby.
Casey takes a cot, and so does Dominic, wedging the ladder between himself and the wall. But he leaves the door over the top open. Maybe he doesn’t like the feel of a coffin either. Nobody would find us if we were trapped down here. June was counting on it.
My sleeping bag rustles every time I move. I am restless, living in her place. The outside noises fall away, and all that remains is the steady breathing of the people around me while I stare at the angled walls in front of me. I feel like if I stare at the dark corner for long enough, she will take solid form, emerging from the darkness. I turn away from the corner, and Cameron’s sleeping bag rustles nearby.
I feel like I am still on display, even in the dark, the sleeping bag giving me away: Alina turns to the right. Alina still isn’t sleeping. She turns over again. Pulls her legs up. Alina’s soul is restless. Like they can still see everything I’m thinking. Screw it. I kick out of the sleeping bag and stand in the dark, backing toward a wall in the blackness, waiting for my eyes to adjust, but they never do. The only thing I see is the square of moonlight shining through the entrance. I sit inside the square of light, and eventually I lie back against the ground, and I picture my mother.
I picture her looking exactly like she did in the article after she was arrested, saying to my father, “I cannot be responsible for the soul of June Calahan.” I picture a baby crying in a bassinet, all alone. And when she gets out of jail she changes her name and thinks, Finally I am free of her. And she disappears into the world that is so, so big, like Dominic says.
I feel the dirt taking root under my fingernails. I hope she’s happy. I really do.
I dream that someone is holding me underwater. I do not fight it.
I wake up gasping for breath, water dripping down my face, falling into my mouth, my open eyes—mud forming in the ground beneath me. I sit up and refocus, grasping for my bearings. Rain. It’s raining, and I’m in a cave. June’s cave. My hand rests over my heart as I try to slow my breathing. Cameron is up, or I have woken him with the gasping for breath, and it takes him a moment to realize what’s happening, dripping wet as I am in the middle of a dark cave.
He’s beside me then, pulling me up, and says, “We need the tarp before it spreads.” But the tarp is up above and we are down below and the ladder is behind Dominic. And I am covered in mud and dirt and grime. So I take a breath and I stand under the rain, already coming down lighter than a minute ago, like it’s a shower. And I feel the clothes sticking to my skin, and Cameron’s eyes taking me in, and the mud and dirt and grime trailing down my body to the earth.
He comes closer, takes my hand, like he’s going to pull me out of the rain. He tries, tugging me toward him, but he’s not expecting me to resist so much—I do not want anyone touching me, and I do not want to go back to the dark shadows, where June lingers—and when I pull back, he falls toward me, suddenly wet. He steps back, but then his face shifts, and instead he steps closer, underneath the hole with me, and he laughs silently as the rain soaks him as well. He wraps his arms around my back, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and the rain and his arms feel so good I can’t even think about why, why he’d possibly do such a thing, before I’m resting my head against his chest and trying to pretend that I’m laughing instead of crying, until the rain lets up.
He steps away first, without any warning, as if he had been in a trance and someone has suddenly freed him. I don’t understand at first, and then I see Casey sitting upright, flashlight in hand, watching us. “Dominic,” she says. “The tarp.” They go to work, climbing to the surface, securing the top, making sure nothing is damaged. And after, she climbs back into her bed, flashlight still on. She looks at me once more, like I am responsible. Like he was under a spell, and I am the witch.
We bring the boxes to the surface in the morning, even though the ground is wet, the water still dripping periodically from the leaves, or maybe the sky—it’s impossible to tell. Dominic puts the green tarp over the other boxes when we’re not looking through them.
They are full of everything. Full of nothing. They are the random assortment of thoughts and things that June decided to keep. We cannot tell her motive or her intentions. Whether this wooden box with wet matches inside means something besides This is the box I kept matches in, but they got wet. Whether the engraving on the bottom, the RGB, are initials—whether they have meaning behind them, or whether they’re the generic branding of the manufacturer.
There are more printouts, too. Lists of names in order by time stamp, not birth date—with a long code assigned. I guess the file number of their soul in the database. But there’s only one set, one generation. I take Liam’s postcards and try to match the numbers he’s written to the printouts. But the truth is, the data is endless, and we need a computer to sort it.
Casey and Dominic are looking for something specific. They are looking for information about this alleged second shadow-database, or some sort of instructions. We have the address, but that could be anything. Maybe where the money is.
They’re looking for something in their own language—something written in a programming language—something they could understand. I don’t bother telling them, yet again, that June was not a programmer. That was Liam. They know this, and yet they believe June is the key.
It’s what others believe, too. That it was the two of them together, two different ways of seeing things, that got them inside. Liam with the coding. June with the patterns—like she could break a code that nobody else could see.
I don’t know if I really want to follow her trail any farther, because the closer I get to her, the farther I feel from myself. But I also know there’s no way to be free until I see this through. Because I have this feeling that she’s telling me something—that her math means something—and if there’s the slightest possibility that she’s not at the center of this all, if she was telling the truth in that recording she left with Liam White, then I need to prove it, for the both of us. So while they look for code, I look for the trinkets, the things that give me insight to her motive. God, I want her to have a motive. I want her to have been wronged and misguided. I want there to be a reason. I want there to be a chance it is not in her makeup, or mine, but a thing that veered her life off course, off its intended trajectory. I want her to be the anomaly.
She lived here alone for over a year. What must it have been like, with no one but herself to talk to? I see no diary. And then I start laughing. I know exactly what it’s like. Who am I kidding? I spent seventeen years contained on an island. I spent the last several with people who had no sincerity.
Do they not realize that they have made me in her likeness?
I think of what June is trying to lead me toward.
What do they think I will do with it when
I have no other options?
Sometime after lunch, Dominic has all but given up finding anything else. “Pack up everything worth taking,” he says. I take that notebook with June’s equations, the one the note fell out of, and I slide it into Casey’s bag along with the hard drives.
Dominic has his GPS out—the paper with June’s handwriting sticking out from his open wallet as he looks from one to the other, plugging in the numbers, the street, the city. “It doesn’t exist,” he says. “Not in Edmond. But there are, like, fifteen other places with this address …”
I grab for the paper, knocking his wallet to the ground. Not that it will change anything, but it’s mine. If June wanted someone to see it, that person is me.
I hear June’s voice, reciting the information in my ear. 224081 - Ivory Street.
I picture the reams of paper with the numbers. Six or seven or eight digits long.
224081 Ivory Street.
“What the hell, Alina?” he asks, grasping for my arm.
He’s got a hold on my right arm, and the paper is balled up in my fist, but like a child making a last stand with a piece of candy, I refuse to unfurl my fingers. “What do you want with June?” I ask. “What’s the obsession?”
He looks away. “Don’t you see? The database is power. It’s money. It’s whatever you want it to be.”
“It’s blackmail. And death,” I say.
“It’s knowledge,” he says, like he’s trying to appeal to my desires. “It’s fate,” he adds, so low I barely hear it. His eyes are staring into mine, but I won’t be the first to look away.
He gives in first, glancing at his shoulder. At Cameron’s hand on his shoulder. “Let go,” Cameron says, but he doesn’t.
Except then Casey says, “Edmonton? Edgington? Maybe there’s a mistake?” She’s typing away at the GPS, completely ignoring us, and Dominic finally releases my arm.
“Let me see,” he says, leaning his head toward Casey’s.
The paper is still in my hand. Dom is focused on the list of addresses on the screen as Cameron bends for the wallet.
“224081,” I whisper to Cameron. “224081. Dash. Ivory Street.”
“Oh,” he says, holding Dom’s partially open wallet. “Oh,” he says again.
I nod—the knowledge, the excitement, pulling my lips into a smile.
The numbers before the name. The file name. It’s not a place. It’s a designation. It’s a soul. A person. Ivory Street is a name. A name that June wrote in permanent marker and stuffed in the back of a notebook full of equations.
“Try Edmont,” Casey mumbles to Dominic.
Holy shit, Cameron mouths.
I glance at the wallet in his hand. “Is he telling the truth?” I ask.
Cameron examines Dominic’s license and holds it toward me. “Looks like it.” And it does. His picture. The name “Dominic Ellis.” The official state seal. His birth date.
His birth date.
I tear the wallet from Cameron’s fingers, bringing it closer to my face, and feel the earth start to move, though I know it’s not the earth at all, but me. My world, shifting again.
“Dominic!” I yell, and he slowly turns around. He stares at the wallet in my hand. Everything seems to hum—the trees, the air, the truth.
“You were born the day after Christmas?” I say a little too loudly. My voice comes out high and tight. I look to him to confirm, and it’s like he’s mentally debating something, and so I say, louder, “Your birthday. It’s the day after Christmas?”
His gaze moves from his wallet to my eyes. “Yes,” he says, and he waits for my next question, because he knows it’s coming. I see the year. I know the facts.
It’s Christmas Day, and it’s starting to snow, and there are lights strung up in the windows behind him.
“Where were you born?” I say, but I can’t seem to make my teeth separate as I talk. They’re clenched together. The edges of my vision clouds, so Cameron disappears, Casey disappears, and he is the only one in my sights.
He runs for the barricade lined with police cars as she sneaks onto the roof and down the fire ladder.
Dominic shakes his head.
“Answer me,” I say.
He pulls a weapon at the last minute, and the sound of gunfire accompanies June as she races frantically through the woods, as tears run down her cheeks.
“Cut to the chase,” he says, and he says it so faintly that at first I’m not sure if he meant to speak it at all.
But I don’t even want to say it. “Did you find out who your soul belonged to? When you turned eighteen?”
“Yes,” he says.
His blood seeps into the thin blanket of snow surrounding him, beside the weapon that turned out not to be a weapon at all but a metal recorder.
I know the answer, but I ask anyway. “Is it Liam White?”
“Yes,” he says, and everything that has happened—last year in my room and now in the woods—takes on new meaning.
Liam White, the goddamn martyr.
“Did you know?” I ask Cameron, I ask Casey. “Did you?”
They look at each other, at him, at me. They did not know.
God, what the hell are they doing here?
Now. I have to go now. There is only one reason Liam White comes back for me, if not for revenge for his death, and that’s to get inside the database and continue what they started. Power and money. The belief that it’s rightfully his. June and Liam. Me and Dominic.
I drop the wallet, and my hand moves instinctively to my pocket, the one with the glass. I cannot be here. Not with him. Not with him. On the one hand, I’m furious. On the other, I am responsible for his death somehow. He is the thing on the tightrope that must be balanced, and for once, I must do the balancing. This is my test.
He wants me. He wants June. He needs us both.
He’s walking closer, but carefully, as if I’m a skittish animal that could bolt at any moment. I stay perfectly still, waiting. Waiting. “Guess you were wrong, huh?” And I don’t understand what the hell he’s talking about. “Turns out you wouldn’t know me anywhere, after all.”
But I’m not sure. Because the first time I saw him, the first time he smiled at me, I don’t know. I don’t know what really happened back then, and I don’t know what’s happening now. Is it possible? I really don’t know.
I think of what Cameron said to me. About that chance.
I would do anything for my sister.
I hope this is true.
Because I’m not stronger than Dominic. And I’m not stronger than Cameron. But I think I’m stronger than Casey.
I circle to the side, away from Cameron, away from Dominic, so we have to switch places—like I’m scared of him. I mean, I am. I really am. But that’s not the only reason I’m moving. I circle slowly, with nervous eyes, taking in everything around me as I move closer to Casey and farther from Dominic and Cameron.
He reaches for me but doesn’t come any closer. “Okay, calm down, you’re shocked. You’re in shock.”
I am not.
“You don’t have to be afraid. Don’t be afraid.”
But I am.
“Casey,” he says, like a warning. To grab me? What?
I close my eyes and breathe steadily. I’m not sure, to be honest, if I’m stronger than Casey. But I believe I want to escape more than she wants to hold me, and that must count for something. I need the distraction, and I have to trust that Cameron will let me go.
I want it more, I want it more, I want it more …
She’s moving closer, I guess because Dominic told her to, and I count. One step. Two. And then I move.
I lunge behind her, catching her by surprise, and bring an arm around her neck, my other hand gripping the longest shard of glass, pointed at her neck. I feel her heartbeat through her skin. I see the artery in her neck, pulsing, right under the glass. I hear the catch of her breath each time she breathes in, the rest of her body completely rigid.
I stare at Dominic,
who looks surprised. I can’t look at Cameron. I can’t.
“Whoa, whoa,” says Dominic. “No need to get violent.” He steps closer, his hand out, and something in my face must make him stop. “Alina, be real. I’m not going to hurt you. I need you.”
“You need June. I’m not her.”
“You’re making a mistake,” he says.
“What was your plan, huh? Let’s say you got in. What happens to me, then?” I’m backing away, and my hand starts to shake. Casey moans, and Dominic holds his hands up for a moment.
“Whatever you want, Alina. Okay? So what is it that you want right now?” Like he knows, of course, I would only do something for a trade. For a purpose.
I don’t want to be part of this. I don’t want to become June.
“I want to leave. I want to be done with everything related to her.” I want to stop chasing the last life and live this one instead. “I’m leaving,” I say, and I take a step back. Casey follows my lead. I want to tell her I don’t mean it, that I won’t hurt her, that I would never, but now is not the time. I will drag her to the tree line, and then I will run. I will find my way out, because I have to. It’s the best I can do.
Dominic runs his teeth across his bottom lip, moves his hands to his hips, and says, “No, Alina, you’re not.” And before I can register what’s happening, his hands have slipped behind him and under his shirt, and he pulls a gun out. He points it at my head. Why the hell does he have a gun?
What good will the glass do if he pulls the trigger? I am outmaneuvered and he knows it.
“Stop,” Cameron says, but I don’t know who he’s talking to.
Dominic grins, just the slightest bit, and begins to lower the gun. It drifts from my head downward, to Casey’s chest, where it remains. Casey shudders, or maybe it’s me.
Here I am trying to get redemption from my past life, and I haven’t even bothered to realize who I’ve been harming in this one. Like a vicious cycle, here I am again.
Here I am again, with another person about to die in my place.
Chapter 14
I am going to get her killed. I am killing her right now. It’s me with the gun. It’s my action. Her life on the tightrope. He doesn’t care about her. He’s going to shoot my leverage.
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