Soulprint (11 page)

Dominic comes up behind me and places a hand on my tense shoulder. “Relax, Alina, it won't hurt much.”

But my shoulders go tense because I don't understand. “What the hell is this?” I ask. Nobody looks me in the eye. “Casey?” I say, but she keeps herself busy at the screen. Dominic wanted a sample from me in my room as well. He didn't tell me why then either. “Cameron?” I say.

Cameron cuts his eyes to Dominic. “I thought you said she wanted this,” he says.

“Wanted what?” I ask, panic rising, rage rising. “Wanted
what
? You think I'm not her?”

Dom looks at me with something close to compassion. “No, I know you're her. Calm down, Alina,” he says, but that only succeeds in making me even less calm, because he's also blocking the door.

We all know June's soul is mine; what more do they intend to see? There
is
nothing else to see. That's the problem with soul fingerprinting. We still don't know what it can do, what it can tell us. All we can do is find a match.

There have been several studies on the nature of the soul, but it's not information that comes from the soul fingerprint itself—there's no secret revealed in the readout; it's like seeing
a DNA strand but having no idea what it codes for. The only way science has learned anything so far is by linking the soul with a person, monitoring each generation, and seeing what traits correlate from life to life. Science explains the correlations the same way it explains DNA markers. In the same way that some sequences in a DNA chain indicate an increased likelihood of developing certain multifactor diseases like Alzheimer's, there's no certainty. And here, they're not even using hard facts—no markers in the soul fingerprint they extract in the spinal fluid itself. The “markers” they use as evidence are personality tests, self-surveys, or in the case of the famous study, specific types of criminal records tied to each soul. But there are only a few generations in the database, and it's no secret that even these so-called markers are flawed. People could be committing crimes and not getting caught. People could be caught and not convicted. People could be framed. But it's the best they can do. A human being isn't quantifiable. So they study those markers from generation to generation to assess the correlation. Seems a lot less like science to me. Most of the results were reported during June's lifetime.

They already know the nature of my soul.

The only thing they can get from that needle is knowledge they already have.

Dominic flips a switch on the side of the rectangular box, and the liquid in the beaker begins to disappear, sucked inside the machine as it stutters to life. “It's time to see exactly what you're worth, Alina Chase.”

“No.” I back up toward the door, but Dominic is blocking my way.

Cameron turns around but doesn't look at me. “She doesn't want this.”

Dominic comes closer and says, “Of course she wants this. She's June. This isn't to hurt you, Alina. It's to access your money.”

“What money?” I ask, even as the pieces are falling into place. I know what he's trying to do, to see if June has left herself an inheritance. But to check funds, to
transfer
funds, you need to have this procedure done at a bank to prevent fraud.

It's rare, truth be told. Most everyone leaves their assets to their children, their spouses, their loved ones. It's only the lonely people who do this. The people who have no one else. Something cold settles through my bones, and I hope that the account is empty.

“Won't it be frozen anyway?” I ask.

“That's the beauty of privacy,” Dominic says. “It's not tied to any names. Your soul fingerprint is the username and password. The banking system merely searches for the match. The money is just sitting there, waiting to be retrieved.” That way, either life can retrieve the cash. Nothing else may be passed along. No messages, no notes, no confessions or last words. Just a sum of cash. Nearly everyone checks it on their eighteenth birthday, because why not?

But I'm not eighteen and I'm not in a bank, and if I were, surely I would be arrested before I could get the money, regardless.

Surely June would've been arrested had she walked in to make a deposit.

“That's it?” I ask. “You just want the money?” It's a price to pay for my escape, I suppose. It's not really mine, anyway. Honestly, I could use it. But I'm not June, and I don't want her blood money.

“No,” he says. “But we're going to
need
the money.”

We're on the run, after all. Money is necessary for survival. I understand this on some academic level, but I've never had it, and I've never needed it. But it must have cost them a considerable amount of money to pull off that escape.

“I owe you money, though. Isn't that right? How much do I owe you?” I ask.

I want there to be a price—a price I can pay and be free. But nobody responds as I crawl onto the table and hike my shirt up to my ribs and pull my knees to my chest, like I've seen done
on television a hundred times before. I've had this procedure done three times, but I don't remember any of them. The first, when they were searching for June. The second time, by request of my parents, to double-check. Dumb hope. The third, by request of the state when I was placed in their care.

June Calahan, every time.

When I was younger, I tried to prove I wasn't her in other ways: June was right-handed, so I sat on my right hand and wrote with my left, until it felt natural. Left- and right-handedness transferred at a correlation of .99, and so I fought it. I refused to study the things June was good at, skimming over math problems and pretending I didn't see the patterns in the IQ test. I was quiet when she was loud, and I stayed far away from anything she liked to do, according to all the documentaries.

Didn't matter.

Still June.

Even though I don't remember having this procedure done, I've seen it enough on TV.

Every year, there are at least three movies that deal with the “what ifs” of soul science. Like when DNA, and all its implications, was discovered, and there were movies on human cloning and scary government regulations and selecting for perfect traits and an end to life as we knew it. None of which happened. Life stayed pretty much the same, and science was pretty much used for the betterment of all: disease prevention, genetic screening, criminal evidence. Sometimes there'd be news of a couple who screened their embryos for a perfect match for their
sick child, and there'd be some ethical debate about it, but mostly people did what they did for their loved ones. It was all still a matter of privacy. And sometimes there was more knowledge than we really wanted. Did we really want to know if we were going to die from a horrible disease? Did it change anything, other than provide a ticking clock? And that was something that privacy law protected as well. It's your decision to check such things. It's only your information to know.

And this is no different. It exists, and we know it, and there are movies about understanding the nature of the soul, of quantifying and labeling people, and there are movies about souls trying to reach some nirvana, and about illegal screening and revenge scenarios and government plots, none of which have happened. No, I am the only mistake.

So I know what to do, to pull my legs up so my spine sticks out, so they can ease the needle between my vertebrae and extract the clear liquid from the base of my spine, that they can run through the spectrometer and see the color spectrum the marker of the soul emits, in a pattern that is unique to itself. Like a fingerprint.

I wonder what mine looks like. If it's all blues and purples, which is how I feel inside. Whether the colors mean anything. Personality. Predisposition. Good. Evil.

DNA was just a combination and pattern of nucleotides before we knew what they stood for, too.

I expect it to be Dominic who sticks a needle in my back, but he goes to the computer and his fingers fly across the keyboard. “Casey already has us remotely on site.” I'm surprised
to hear this, that she's the one who hacked into the bank. I don't know why, but I didn't want it to be her. “All we need is your username and passcode.”

I feel something cool against my lower spine. And then the sharp smell of alcohol. “Hold very, very still,” she says, and even Dominic stops typing. I feel a sharp pinch, and then pressure, so unlike when Cameron extracted the tracker from my rib, but at least it was a hurt I could quantify. This becomes a pull, the feeling that my nerves are moving in a way they shouldn't. It feels so very, very wrong.

“There,” she says, and I feel the needle slide out from between my vertebrae. She applies pressure and tapes something over the top. I push myself up, but she puts a hand on my shoulder. “No, you need to lie still for a bit.”

Casey carries a small vial filled with a clear liquid over to the rectangular machine, removes the beaker, and slips the test tube over the pin.

“Were you left anything?” I ask, because every piece of information is useful. The type of people they were, the type of people they are. I can use it all.

“No,” Dominic says, and he looks exceptionally angry by the fact that his soul must've had loved ones, must've had a family or friends or a cause to donate to.

“Not me,” Casey says.

I stare at Cameron, but he doesn't answer. “He never checked,” Casey says. “He doesn't want to know.”

“You could be a millionaire,” I say, just to bait him into speaking.

He turns to me, tilts his head to the side, and says, “But I'm not.” He holds my gaze as I lie on the cot, and I let his words sink in.
But I'm not
.

“There,” Dominic says. Casey and Cameron crowd around the computer screen, and I can't see anything from this cot. “What the hell?” Dominic says.

“What?” I ask, pushing myself onto my elbows.

Dominic spins in his chair, narrows his eyes at me as if I have somehow done something to him. “It's just change. Goddamn pennies.”

Which makes me even sadder. That June felt the need to leave something to me, first of all, and that this was all she had left.

“Where is the money?” Dominic yells, as if I might know. Sure, June and Liam allegedly took in a lot of cash through the blackmail, but who knows what she did with it for the year and a half she was in hiding? Maybe she needed it. Maybe she gave it away. I let the sliver of hope work its way in that maybe she gave it back.

“Maybe Liam had it,” I say, but Dominic rolls his eyes. I know, June was said to take off with it after his death, because none was found with him, but who knows if that was true.

“What's the point?” he asks, pointing at the screen. “What's the goddamn point? She even went through the trouble to make two deposits. Two. Pointless. Deposits.”

I stand then, even though I feel the pressure drop from my head. I feel dizzy, but the screen beyond Dominic's head
sharpens into focus. “Thirty-five dollars and thirty-one cents,” he says. “Oh, look, another eighty-three. Wow.”

“83.65,” I say, because I see something he does not. I see the screen of the GPS as we were hiking—the numbers and decimals—and I feel someone whispering to me, someone real. It's the closest to June that I've ever been, right here, staring at those numbers. She's telling me something. Something only I see in this moment.

No, I'm not the only one who sees. Cameron's eyes are soft and focused, and he slides them over to me for a second. He sees it too. I shake my head at him, just the barest shake. But Cameron leans forward and puts his finger on the screen. He seems to change his mind, because he pulls back and says, “Dinner on June tonight?”

But not even Casey laughs.

I don't know what I've done to earn his silence, and I'm not sure if I trust it either, but I'll take it.

Because those numbers on the screen, they're coordinates. Put a negative sign before the second number, and it looks a lot like the coordinates here. The money doesn't mean anything.

It's a location.

June is trying to show me something.

I close my eyes and commit them to memory, the only place that has ever been safe for me. I close my eyes and recite them in a song, in the way I imagine my mother's cadence, which is
how I commit everything to memory. But this time, it doesn't work. This time, I see June's mouth, close to my ear, reciting the numbers. Her white teeth and full lips with the hint of a smile, enunciating them with perfection:
35.31 –83.65, 35.31 –83.65, 35.31 –83.65
.

It works out the same. I know I won't forget.

Dominic kicks the machine, and Casey jumps. And I remember this version of him on the island as well. How his confidence, his entire demeanor, became unhinged when things did not go his way. I heard him after he recovered, trying to explain it all away while I was locked in the next room. I heard him kicking the furniture, tossing things to the ground, throwing out accusations that couldn't hold water. I refused to give any sort of statement at all, which made him even angrier.

I didn't go his way.

I didn't then, and I won't now.

The guards who cycle through are in a division of the National Guard, and most of them are fairly young. It's not a desirable position—twenty-eight days in, twenty-four-hour responsibility, and they must hold me on a tightrope—I am a human being, not a prisoner, but one who must be balanced and assessed and held at bay but not restrained. I am a portion of their training. I am a goddamn test.

And Dominic Ellis flunked the test.

He was too cocky. Too sure of himself. Too sure of
me
.

I was those things, too. But I was not the one being tested.