I picture a thousand different possibilities: Cameron stumbling upon security and firing the gun into the air—or worse, firing the gun at him; Cameron stumbling upon security and the guard firing the gun into the air—or worse, firing the gun at Cameron.
Casey grabs my hand, and I make a thousand silent pleas in my head. And then I hear footsteps.
I see him, through the trees. Not bleeding, not even running. Just strolling toward us. “Your entrance is ready,” he says.
“Tell me you did not shoot out a window,” Casey says, but I’m hoping that’s exactly what he has done. That seems the best possible outcome of the gunshot.
His silence is the answer, because Casey pulls him down to crouching. “Are you stupid? How quickly, do you think, will the cops show up?”
Cameron shakes his head. “You can always get away with one shot. People don’t give it a second thought. An engine backfiring, a firecracker. If there’s not a reason to think it’s a gun, they don’t think it’s a gun.”
But Casey makes us wait, not trusting this information. We wait a long time, maybe thirty minutes, and still nobody comes. “I hate that you know that,” Casey says, standing up.
Cameron only smiles, leading the way to the school. I hate that he knows that, too.
Chapter 16
The window he shot out belongs to the gym office, he says, and it’s just out of our reach. It’s wider than it is high, and honestly I’m concerned about Cameron’s ability to squeeze through. Cameron laces his fingers together and crouches down, and Casey steps into his hand. “Watch the glass,” he says. He pushes her up until her elbows are wedged at the base of the window, and her feet scramble against the brick for a moment before her upper body disappears inside. Her legs follow a second later. “All good,” she calls.
“Incoming,” he says, tossing her backpack inside.
“Ready?” Cameron asks, lacing his hands together again.
I place my hands on his shoulders as I step into his grip. “Thank you,” I say, as our eyes meet. I am thanking him for this, and for everything before, and everything to come. I am thanking him in spite of who he was, and who he might still be. And in that moment I believe in telepathy, because he freezes—his shoulders frozen beneath my hands, his hands frozen beneath my foot, his eyes frozen on mine.
“You’re welcome,” he says. And then the words jar us out of the moment, and he lifts me up, my elbows wedging into the sides of the open window. I let out a noise of weakness as my waist rests against the ledge, the rawness of the skin that was grazed by the bullet rubbing against the windowsill, and then I am through. Casey half catches me as I land on the carpeted floor, my arms bracing my fall. She has a cut on her hand—I imagine from the glass as she tried to brace her own fall.
She sees me looking. “It’s not deep,” she says. But she balls up her fist, and I wonder if she’s telling the truth.
She laughs as blood drips out the bottom of her fist, staining the carpet, a permanent trail of us. “God, we’re a mess.”
Cameron lands on his feet behind us. “Seriously, how do you do that?” she asks.
“Trade secrets,” he says. And then he focuses on her hand.
“No worries,” she says. “I’m sure there’s a first-aid kit. It’s the school gym. Band-Aids are sure to abound.”
Casey assesses the room. A computer, a desk, a phone, her backpack. She opens the drawers to find pens, some coins, and a few wires. “This could work,” she says.
Cameron pushes open the office door leading to the school gymnasium, which is dark despite the daylight. The doors to the outside are sealed, and the windows are high up, which is why we had to come through the office. Every step we take echoes. Doors labeled for locker rooms line the same wall as the office, and there are blue mats stacked up and pushed against the far wall.
“I doubt there’s anyone watching the security cameras, but they’re probably still running. So let’s keep out of the hallways,” Cameron says.
Cameron flips a switch, and a few panels of the ceiling move aside, revealing skylights. “Safer than turning on the lights,” he says.
There’s a basketball hoop directly over my head, and when I look through it, up to the skylights—at the clouds moving beyond them—it gives me the feeling of motion. When I look back, Casey has her hand in the water fountain, watching the watery blood circle down the drain. She wipes her hand on the side of her shirt, then guzzles the water from the fountain. She runs the back of her hand across her mouth, then puts her hands on her hips. “Okay, well, guess I’ll get started.” She strides back into the office, leaving the door open, so I can see her opening the bag of hard drives we found in June and Liam’s hideaway.
Cameron motions for me to follow him, and we check out the closets and storage areas attached to the gym—we find a bunch of team uniforms and a box of lost and found items, which we drag into the open gymnasium.
There’s a tall toolbox on wheels behind a net full of basketballs and a stack of cones, and Cameron rifles through it. He pulls out a screwdriver and something that looks like a set of pliers but smaller. “Casey!” he calls, and her name echoes loudly across the gym. I cringe.
“Yeah?” she calls back, and nothing happens. No alarms sound. Nobody comes. It’s just us.
“Tools in the closet if you need anything.”
“Okay,” she says.
He points out a map—a labeled fire-evacuation plan—hanging on the open closet door, and we see a layout of the school with an X marking our location. His finger traces the rooms. “Looks like the cafeteria should be attached somehow, through whatever’s on the other side of the locker rooms.” Then he grins. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” I admit.
I follow him through the boys’ locker room, passing the bathroom stalls, the lockers, the showers, and I think, Thank God. If there’s food, I might stay here forever. I want to stop running. How long until school starts again? One month? Two? What I wouldn’t give to pause here, stay hidden for that month or two, until interest dies down, until the conjectures begin—that I’ve died, that I’ve disappeared, that I’m gone. And then maybe I’ll dye my hair and put in colored contacts and walk out of the school, and nobody would know who I am—nobody would be looking for me any longer.
Cameron tests the handle on the unmarked door beyond the second alcove of lockers, but it doesn’t budge. He takes the tools from the cargo pocket—the screwdriver, the thing that looks like pliers—and crouches in front of the lock. It doesn’t take him long.
“Oh,” I say.
His hair drops in his eyes, and when he looks up at me I cannot read his expression. “I’m very good at what I do,” he says.
“I know you are,” I say, suddenly feeling entirely inadequate. Because the thing I’m supposed to be good at, I have avoided. And the things I am good at are not coming in useful right now.
“Okay.” He pushes the door open, and we find ourselves inside a storage closet that must be used by the janitors. There are mops and buckets and cleaning supplies, and the room smells faintly like bleach. There’s also a door on the other side, and Cameron starts working on the lock again.
“Cameron,” I say. “What is it, exactly, that you do?”
He pauses, pretending to concentrate on the door in front of him. He’s thinking of what to say, how much to say, how to say it. Eventually he says, “I get things for people.”
“Is that why you did this?” And by this I mean me. “You got me for Dominic?”
“No, Alina,” he says, opening the door. “You’re not a thing.”
Finishing that lock, he continues into the next room, and he doesn’t notice that I have frozen. Because it’s the first time someone has acknowledged that maybe I am my own person, someone other than June. “I’m Nobody, who are you?” I mumble, following him. We’re inside a large room with tables, but the tables have all been stacked against the walls for the summer. There’s a long metal counter set up with a plastic shield, separating
the cafeteria from the kitchen.
“You’re Alina Chase,” he says, which is what everyone calls me. Full name. Because I am a thing. A thing in a history book. Nothing around me has ever been real. People speak with me because they are supposed to, and they don’t speak with me if they’re not supposed to.
I weigh my words before I say them. They’re one thing I do have control over. And so I am purposeful with them. Deliberate. I decide what to give and what to hide. I watch for reactions. I study their impact.
I remember Dom saying that everyone was scared of me on the island. And I can’t say he’s wrong.
I have become the very thing they feared.
“Okay, Cameron London. See? Even you talk about me like I’m a thing on the news.”
He looks at me from the side of his eye. “Or maybe I just really like your full name. It’s got a good ring to it.” He grins. “And it sets you apart from all the other Alinas in the world. I know you just fine.”
I’m not sure what he means by that—what he thinks he knows of me. That I am weak, that I don’t know how to swim, that I had to be dragged to safety, that I made an impulsive decision that got us all into this mess.
“I’m good at what I do, too,” I say. “But those skills are really not useful right now. A lot of the things June was good at, I ignored. I should be better.”
Cameron runs his hand across the metal counter, walking toward the kitchen, as he says, “You escaped an island, let me cut the tracker from your rib, swam when you couldn’t swim, figured out where the hideaway was when no one else could, threw my sister out of the way of a bullet—yes, don’t look so surprised, I noticed that. Honestly, helping you escape will probably turn out to be the one good thing I do with my life. You’re incredible.”
My heart is beating too fast, and I’m hoping he doesn’t turn around again, because he will see the heat creeping up my neck. My face feels as if it’s on fire. I make myself look busy, prying open a box left in the corner.
Except he pauses.
Because he knows.
I’ve noticed that Cameron doesn’t always weigh his words. He speaks them, whatever he’s thinking. He doesn’t study their impact, or wonder how they’ll be received, or what he can gain. He says them, and they’re out there now, and I don’t know what to do with them other than to continue rifling through this container filled with boxes of dried cereal like I haven’t heard him.
“Well, if you ever decide to start getting people,” I say, “I think you’re pretty good at that, too.”
“Inanimate objects are a lot more predictable,” he says. But since I’m avoiding eye contact, I can’t tell if he’s being serious or trying to make a joke. The conversation stops, but it still lives, replaying inside my mind. I am imagining the twenty different possible things I could’ve said back to him, and how everything could’ve changed from a sentence. If I told him I thought he was incredible, too, or if I’d told him I’ve spent the last four days in a state of total fear—that I did those things because there was no other way. No going back, only forward. I am imagining each of these things, and in every scenario, Cameron comes closer. But imagination is not the same as a memory, and I make myself stop. I see the scenario for what it is: I am ignoring him, and he is pretending not to notice.
In the end, we decide to bring back the cereal and a bunch of snacks that Cameron has miraculously retrieved from the vending machine without money.
We avoid eye contact as we carry everything back, and we remain silent as we enter the gymnasium. Casey is standing in the middle of the empty room. “God, you guys scared me to death. I had no idea where you went.” Then she punches Cameron in the arm. “Next time, tell me, asshole.”
“Casey, we’re going to look for food. Be back in a few.” He smiles.
She punches him again. But then seeing a sealed chocolate bar, she smiles. “My favorite,” she says.
“I know,” he says.
She opens it on the spot, talking while chewing. “I hit a roadblock. Those hard drives are at least seventeen years old, and I don’t have the right cables. I need to check out the computer room or media center or whatever.”
Cameron mumbles something and grabs a team uniform from the box and disappears into the locker room. When he comes out, he looks hilarious in basketball shorts that come past his knees and a navy-blue jersey with the number twelve on the front. “Don’t laugh,” he says, but Casey giggles anyway.
He has a ball cap pulled down low over his face, and his hair is tucked behind his ears. He grins at me and says, “Welcome to high school. This is what we look like.”
“So basically I haven’t been missing anything?” Except as ridiculous as he looks, I am ridiculously drawn to him.
“I’m in disguise,” he says with a smile. “Okay, seriously.” He moves his jaw around, as if he’s trying to keep from smiling. “I’m assuming the cameras aren’t on a live feed, because what’s the point? So I’m gonna go turn them off. If they look back through the tapes later, hopefully they’ll just see a kid in a basketball uniform. Not us, just some kid up to no good.”
“Just some punk,” Casey says, but she grabs his upper arm as he passes. “Hey, punk?”
“Hmm?”
“Don’t trip anything,” she says.
“I won’t. But if I do, do me a favor and run.”
“Not a chance,” I say. And I’m not sure where that came from. They’re both looking at me.
“Like she says,” Casey says, “not a chance. So just don’t trip anything. Got it?”
“It’s a school,” he says, rolling his eyes as he backs away, “not a bank vault.”
He decides to leave through the locker room, explaining that if he’s on film, he wants them to think he came from the cafeteria instead of the gym, which I think is for our benefit. He seems completely unworried, and Casey smiles, like she’s not nervous either, except she’s pacing. Pacing and pacing and pacing. She doesn’t speak to me.
“Casey?” I say, and she grunts at me but keeps moving. “What are you hoping is on the hard drives? Could it be the shadow-database?”
There’s a long moment where I think she won’t answer me, but then she does. “No,” she says. “It’s not nearly big enough. If there is a shadow-database that June managed to set up and hide somewhere, it’s got to be bigger than this, to store all that data. But maybe … maybe this is some of the data she copied. Or maybe this will show us the way to get back inside,” she says, still moving across the room.
“So you just mentioned that the hard drive is seventeen years old, and that’s a problem. Don’t you think security has changed over the course of seventeen years? Don’t you think June would’ve known that?”
She stops pacing. “Maybe they left themselves some sort of password access. Maybe they do have everything mirroring to a second device somewhere. The point is, nobody knows. The point is, she left something. June didn’t do it alone. She had Liam. And you have me. I’m as good as Dominic, I promise.” Then she pauses. “I’m better, I think.”
“I think so, too,” I say.
The locker room door flies open, and we both jump. “Cameras off. Computer lab unlocked.” Cameron bows.
“You’re so cocky it pains me,” Casey says. “Also, you’re the best.”
“Remember that next time you’re trying to pull the big-sister act, okay?” She rolls her eyes. “Turn left out of the cafeteria, go to the end of the hall, turn right.” She starts to move. “And Casey? Nothing stupid.”
“Ha,” she says. And Cameron laughs, too. Because we all know, this thing they’ve already done? They can’t possibly do anything stupider.
And then we’re alone in this big empty room that echoes. Cameron clears his throat. “How’s the side?” he asks, his gaze just over my hip.
It stings. “It’s fine,” I say.
He’s looking at my shirt. At the spot where he stitched me up. At the other spot, lower and to the left, where the bullet grazed my ski
n. But then his gaze moves to my eyes, and there’s a danger to his honesty—now it’s reflected in his eyes. I read his look. I’ve never seen it before—never directed at me, anyway. But I understand it completely, and I can’t move forward.
I should show him. It’s what I would do—what I would’ve done—yesterday, or a few hours ago, even. But something very sudden has shifted. Something I don’t know what to do with. “Let me see,” he says. I’m searching for that girl who pulled her shirt over her head so he could take out the tracker. I’m searching for the girl who took a shower with him on the other side of the distorted glass. And I’m searching for the girl who doesn’t understand the need to keep things hidden like that. But all I can think of are the words he has said to me, and there’s a feeling in the pit of my stomach like the churning ocean, like the horizon shifting.
I lift my shirt, but only a little, and only on the left side. He comes closer and kneels beside me, examining the mark. His hand is on my stomach, and I can’t breathe. His fingers trace the edge of the mark, and I don’t know what to do, other than to continue not breathing. “Yeah, it’s just gonna sting. I’ll see if I can find some antibiotic cream around. Let me check the stitches. Make sure there’s no sign of infection.”
He starts lifting my shirt higher, his knuckles trailing inside, and I push him away. “I want Casey to do it,” I say.
He freezes and drops my shirt. “I’m sorry. Okay.” He cringes and looks down. “I’m sorry,” he says again.
I’m cringing, too, and not doing a very good job of masking it. “No, it’s fine. Don’t apologize.” I try to backpedal, because he hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s me, it’s the situation. It’s him too close and the words he’s said and the way he looks at me. It’s a wave of nerves where there should be none. I’ve had Dominic in my room, and I knew what to say, how to say it. I kissed him, even, but the only nerves I felt then were for the weapon in my hand I was about to use. “You didn’t do anything, I just …”
“Okay,” he says. “We’re fine.” And I think that maybe he doesn’t understand why I acted like that. He clears his throat and stands up. Backs away. He runs his hand through his hair, turns to say something to me. Stops himself. No, I was wrong, he understands.
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