Soulprint (32 page)

While talking, his hands have made their way under the hem of my shirt, onto my bare waist, and I cannot speak. I want to get impossibly closer. I want to back up to the far wall. I am full of want. He trails his fingers up my stomach, until they reach the fresh wound that had once been a scar on my third rib. “Tell me this story,” he says.

“It's a long story,” I say. “And you already know it.”

“I like hearing you talk,” he says.

“I was a baby, just a baby in a nursery, and they stuck a needle in my back,” I whisper. “They said I was June Calahan, and so they cut, right here,” I place my fingers over his, over the scar, “and put a tracker there. Then my mother cut through the same line, and she took the tracker out. They came for her, threw her in jail, cut through the scar tissue, and put the tracker back. And it stayed that way for seventeen years.”

“You still had the scar,” he says.

“Mm-hmm. And then this boy showed up in my bathroom—”

“Boy?” he asks.

“Guy?”

“Good enough.”

“So this guy shows up in my bathroom, and he takes a freaking blade from his jaw, and I think, who
is
this boy—sorry,
guy
—with a freaking blade in his jaw? And he cuts the
tracker from me again. And then he stitches me back up, even though he doesn't know how, and then he touches the scar, and he asks how I got it …”

“You tell the best stories,” he says, raising my shirt off my stomach. “Let me tell you about this girl I met …”

I feel real and solid. I feel his heart through the layers of his rib and muscle and skin, and my own. I feel his lips, brushing against mine, as he is talking. And when I cannot take it any longer—of being so close, and yet not close enough—I make him stop talking. I press my lips more firmly on his. And his arms become solid around my back.

The moment is filled with all the never-haves and never-wills and every possible outcome of the day. In short, the end is coming—the end of this, whatever this is—and right now it looks like a cliff. Like the end of the world. I kiss him—even though I understand, like Casey said, that this is not the time—because we're hurtling toward it. “We'll be okay,” I say, waiting for him to say
of course we will
, but he doesn't.

He moves away from the wall, rolls onto his back, and drapes an arm across his eyes. So I sit beside him, and I run my fingers up his stomach, and he doesn't move—he stills. I trace the muscles, the skin, up to the bones of his rib cage, and I bring my face down to his chest, resting my cheek against him. His free hand goes to my hair, down to my shoulder, and he holds me to him like that. “Cameron,” I say.

My heart is in my head and my stomach—everywhere all at once—when we hear footsteps racing toward us.

I back away, back against the front seats, my hands
groping for anything I can use to defend us. The back doors start shaking, and Casey's voice carries through in panicked nonsense.

Cameron opens the double doors, and Casey doesn't take a second to chastise us or even take in what was happening, or what was about to happen. “He's here,” she says, and she can't calm down.

“Who?” Cameron asks, but she's staring over her shoulder, pulling us out the back. Cameron barely has time to pull his shirt back on.

“Dominic,” she says. “Dominic is here.”

We run along with her, to the side of an academic building. The doors are all locked, but Casey slides the ID through the card reader and pulls us inside. We race down the hall until we reach the next door, leading to a glass-walled atrium that spans the distance between buildings. There's another hall, off to the side, but we stay where we are, contained in the safety of this building—two exits, one hall, and we can see them all.

“I saw him get out of his car,” Casey says, her voice shaking. “From the window of the computer lab. He was walking down the road in your direction. I ran—he didn't see me, too busy staring at his GPS screen. I sprinted ahead through the trees to get there first.”

“Did he see the van? How did he know where we were?” I ask.

“I don't know,” she says. “I don't know. Maybe—”

The sound of the door being pulled against the lock echoes through the hall, and Casey grabs my arm. “Is that him?” I whisper.

“How the hell would he know we were here?” she whispers back.

Cameron creeps into an open classroom and cranes his neck around the window before diving back down behind the desk. He motions for us to stay away, out in the hall, and keeps low as he exits the dark room. “It's him,” he says.

We don't speak as we stay pressed against the wall, but we hear Dominic moving around the building. His footsteps pace the perimeter, he pushes at the windows—gently first, then with more force. It won't take forever. If he wants a way in, he will make one. Brick walls and glass windows and locked doors are not enough.

I grab them both by the hand and start running down the long, dark hall. There must be someplace else. Someplace to hide. “Tunnels,” Cameron says. “In the winter, students use tunnels to get from building to building.” We can use them, too.

“Mason Alonzo's office is on the fifth floor of the next building. We head that way. And then we get the hell out,” Casey says.

Where the stairs go up, they also go down. There's a door at the bottom of the stairs, and it's also locked. Casey uses the student ID to gain access, and we race down the murky hall toward the next building. There are a few computer stations down here, and a few storage units for A/V equipment. There
are no windows. We stay in the tunnel, hidden underground. Safe, for the moment. But I worry.

I worry because he found us once, in the van.

I worry because he found us again, moments later, in the building.

“He's tracking us,” I say.

We stand, staring at each other, in the muted glow of the basement hallway. We look at the clothes that don't belong to us and the shoes that we've been wearing since the sewer. “Shit,” Casey says as she strips them off.

Cameron removes the tooth from his mouth, flips the blade, and runs it through the rubber sole of his sneaker in sharp, harsh lines. He drops it to the ground, finding nothing, and picks up the next. He tosses each shoe, getting more frustrated each time, as he finds nothing. He checks Casey's shoes. My shoes. Strips of rubber litter the ground. Still nothing.

We search each other frantically for things that came from our time together with Dominic. I take the blade from Cameron as he examines his watch—it's sharper than I imagined. Cameron takes off his watch and uses the butt of the empty gun to smash it, his fingers sorting through the battery, the display, the metal pieces. He throws the fragmented pieces across the room with a grunt. He does the same with Casey's watch.

Casey dumps her bag, June's notebook and the papers in a heap on the floor, and runs her fingers through the fabric.

I take the blade to the buckles of the bag, tearing them off, but still, we find nothing. I fold the blade back in half, tucking it inside my closed fist.

I lift the bottom of my shirt, feel the patch of skin over my ribs, the fresh stitches done by Cameron's hand.

He grabs my hand, pulls it away, his fingers sliding between mine, and looks into my eyes. “We got it,” he says. “I got that out of you. If there was something else, your guards would've noticed, or they would've found you. It's not you.”

I should feel relief.

But I watch his mouth, the way his lips turn down in worry. I step closer to him as Casey takes apart the empty gun, which even she must know is a long shot.

“Cameron,” I whisper, and he freezes at the way I'm looking at him.

I bring my fingers to the bottom of his shirt and then underneath to his back. I run my fingers up to the scar running the length of four ribs. He sucks in a breath and takes a step back, tearing off his shirt as if it has the power to burn him. He spins, his back facing us, his fingers stretching, reaching, for the scar.

Casey's staring as well. “Oh, God,” she says. “Please tell me you were conscious when Dom stitched you up.”

He stares at Casey. Then at me. The panic in his eyes, the answer. His silence, the answer.

“
No
,” she says. Then she turns to me, her breath coming in a panic. “Where would he put it? Where's the tracker?”

I feel sick, and I have no answer. “Take it out.
Take it out
,” she says.

It could be on the underside of any of those four ribs. Under muscle, under cartilage. His scar is at least five times the length of my own, and I am imagining five times the damage, five times the pain, five times the blood.

“I don't … I don't know.”

I passed out when Cameron removed mine. I choked on a scream and passed out, and Cameron knew exactly where to look, what to do.

“Pack the bag back up,” Cameron says, in a voice eerily low. Casey looks confused but places everything back inside—June's notebook, the studies, the hard drives—her hands shaking. “Now pick it up,” he says to me, and I do, the fabric hanging limply over my shoulder, hoping this is part of some master plan that I don't understand that will save us all.

Now what?
I think. I look at Cameron.
Now what?

“Now go,” he says.

Casey puts her hand to her mouth. “I'm not leaving you here while—”

“I'm sure he hasn't come here unarmed,” Cameron says. “If he gets to us, he can use us to get into the database. And if he gets in the database—he can't. You can't let him.”

He's right, of course. Even if I can prove the study wrong—that we are not bound to past criminal nature—still, this
information in the wrong hands is terrifying. What of the people who seek revenge? Nothing good can come from this information being public. This information is dangerous. Ivory was right: it's power. In the wrong hands, it's destruction.

The door at the far end of the hall shakes as someone pulls against the lock. Dominic has made it into the building, and has followed us this far. Casey chokes on a sob, because she knows. We have to go.

He takes a deep breath. “Now give me the gun,” he says.

And suddenly I have this image:
It's Christmas Day, and it's starting to snow
…

No. Not again. Not. Again.

I have a grip on the bag, but Casey pulls it off my shoulder, hands him the gun, mumbling a string of curses under her breath, and she places it in his hand. She raises her eyes and says, “I'll come back for you. I promise.”

He looks at her, nods slightly. Then he looks away. “Take everything,” he says to her. “Don't leave it with me. And Casey? Be fast. Get what we came for, and then you and Alina get the hell out of here. Promise me.”

She doesn't say a thing, but her eyes say everything in the moment before she runs toward the door at the far end of the hall, where Dominic is not. She's waiting for me, but her hand is already on the metal bar, ready to make a run for it. She's crying without making a sound. She is so strong.

Cameron turns to me, but I'm shaking, the fake tooth with the blade in the palm of my hand. Something that saved me. His freedom for mine. The whole world in a balance. The only
weapon he has left, other than his fists, other than the empty gun, is this tiny blade.

My freedom for his.

“I'm sorry, Alina,” he says, as if this is somehow his fault.

“Don't,” I say.

I kiss him for all I'm worth. “
I'm
sorry,” I whisper as I back away, the warmth from him fading quickly.

He shakes his head. “It's okay. This was all for nothing if he finds you.”

And I think,
It's all for nothing if I leave you
.

And so I kiss him one last time, and I push the button on the blade, so it is now twice the length. I shut my eyes, and I lean my forehead against his, and I ask for strength. I contort my face into calm and brave before I open my eyes again. I hold up the blade, watch as his eyes go wide.

“Try not to scream,” I say.

“No,” he says, his hand around my wrist.

“Run,” I say to Casey. “Run now. I'll get it out of him, I promise.”

I hear the door open, but it doesn't close. She's watching us both, and then she looks straight at me, straight into me and says, “I know you will.” The door closes, and then it's just us in this empty hall, and silence—Dominic has left the door, but he'll be back. He'll be back with a way in next time. We need to be fast.

“You have to go. There's no time,” he says. “It's okay, Alina.”

There's nothing okay about him and Dominic and an empty gun. There's nothing okay about leaving him behind.

June left Liam. She left him. I could never do that. I'm not her. This means more than the truth.
He
means more than the truth.

“Then lie down and stop wasting time,” I say. “Because I'm not leaving you. You're coming with me.”

“The database. The proof—”

“I don't care,” I say. But that's not exactly true. It's more that there are degrees of caring, and degrees of truth, and what you want and what you need are very rarely the same thing.

“And when I pass out and you have to escape and I'm a sitting duck with no gun? And he can use me as leverage against Casey? Against
you
? What then?”

I don't know.

“You're going to have to trust me, Cameron.”

His eyes are still wide, but he lies back. I press my lips to his one last time as I straddle his chest. “Well, I guess there are worse ways to go,” he says, trying to laugh.

“Do me a favor?” I say. He cocks his head to the side, and something inside me splits in two. “Please don't pass out.” He nods, a promise we both know he has no control over. “Now flip,” I say, and he twists on the hard ground from his back to his stomach.