Soulprint (7 page)

I laugh into his ear, because I understand him, even if I am
terribly afraid in that moment. I laugh because I know he's afraid as well—I can feel it in the way he's holding on to me, and the way his heart is pounding through his back. And now I know he's smart. He's not so different from me, actually.

I've spent the last seven months acting like a mindless fool so nobody would notice, too.

Cameron drops me unceremoniously after he veers off the street at the next block. I hear the helicopter circling back around. I risk a quick glance behind us and notice them everywhere. Far away, near the island. Over the water. Over land. They're searching, but they're moving without purpose. Without tracking us.

I press a hand to my rib and imagine the tracker under the water somewhere. Everyone following a piece that they've cut out of me instead. I put pressure on the wound, but it feels dull and far away—something that has happened in another lifetime.

I follow Cameron as he cuts through a patch of trees without looking back, and it seems as though we're in a real neighborhood now. The homes are large, with high, metal gates, complete with decorative spikes on the tops. Like people trying to carve a section of the world out for themselves, and only them.

Cameron punches a set of numbers into a keypad beside a high metal gate covered with ivy, and the sound of a lock
catching breaks the silence. My island is made like this. A code, an emergency switch, and everything within the house latches. My window. The locks. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out.

They had to use it only once. After the incident with Dominic Ellis—

“Come on,” Cameron says, pulling me through the sliver of an opening. He closes the gate behind him, and it locks automatically.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Home, for now,” he says.

I don't ask whose home, and I don't ask for how long. “Shouldn't we go farther away?”

Cameron looks over his shoulder at me, as if he knows something I don't. He knows a lot of things I don't. I hate the feeling.

He thinks that I don't realize that I'm still in a prison. The things used to keep people out can turn in an instant to keep people in instead. The island, my island, had once been a fort. A layer of protection, a first line of defense against the outside, many years ago. Then it was supposed to be a safe haven. A safe place
for me
—somewhere nobody could reach me. Where revenge and anger and hate must stay on the other side of the steel netting. But it has become my prison.

The gates on the outside can keep people out, but they can also keep me in.

The inside of the house is dark, and he doesn't turn a light on. The house is colder than it was outside, as if it's been closed up tight with no heat for ages. “Watch the couch,” he
whispers as he weaves in front of me. “The table,” he says next. My hand brushes fabric, not wood, and even in the dark, I can see the outline of sheets hanging over all the furniture, softening the edges of their shadows. It's a ghost of a house, and I can tell from just this room that there's no other life inside.

When we're deep in the center of the house, he pulls me into a room and shuts the door. Only then does he flip a light switch. My eyes shut instinctively, and when I reopen them, I see that we're in a bathroom. As far as bathrooms in abandoned houses go, it's pretty fancy. All tile and curved metal and fancy towels. Cameron looks at my shirt, and I follow his gaze. There's a dark stain through the black material, and it's not from the water.

“It doesn't even hurt anymore,” I say, as he pulls the fabric away from my skin. I hear it pull—like something detaching—and feel a delayed sting.

“That's really not a good sign,” he says. He sighs to himself. “Casey is better, but I can do it.”

My fingers are numb and trembling as I reach for the hem of my shirt, and underneath, my entire body is shivering, covered in a uniform layer of goose bumps. Cameron opens the cabinet under the counter—designed to look like shutters—and grabs all the contents. There's a white box with a red symbol on the lid—a first-aid kit—much like the one we have on the island. He tears open a packet of pills and holds one out to me, but I shake my head. “No,” I say. No way. I will not let anyone drug me. Not again.

“It's for the pain,” he says.

“It doesn't hurt,” I say.

He tilts his head, holds it out to me again. “
This
will.”

Oh. Still. “No,” I say, maybe a little too forcefully, leaving no room for discussion. I will not be calm and malleable and content. Not again.

He wrinkles his nose, and it makes him seem years younger. Now that he's not in mission mode, with his perfect stride and his single-minded focus, he looks like a different version of himself. His brown eyes roam, and he looks a little lost. His dark hair falls across his forehead as he leans over to rifle through the white box, and his entire face takes on a look of uncertainty, despite his words. His teeth catch his lower lip as he tears open a disinfectant wipe, and he becomes someone else.

I imagine him in the kitchen of a house, grabbing half a bagel from the toaster, holding it between his teeth as he searches for his books, tossing them into his bag, like a familiar scene I have watched on the television. I imagine him running out the front door, shouting a good-bye to his parents over his shoulder, and Casey waiting for him on the porch.

I imagine too much, I know this.

“Uh,” Cameron says, looking behind me at the glass shower, not unlike the one in my room. The glass here is clear but distorted, as if there's a film obscuring it. “Hot shower. Take one. You can't get the stitches wet after, and I want to try to prevent infection as much as possible … and, no offense, but you reek.” He wrinkles his nose again. “Also, you don't look so good.”

He turns on the water for me, and the pipes groan. Cameron shifts nervously on his feet as I attempt to peel the shirt over my head. “I'm sorry,” he says, turning around. “I'm not allowed to leave you alone.”

But I don't care at all. I want in the hot shower, and I'm already mostly undressed. “I'm used to it,” I say. He acts as if I'm not used to people watching me all the time. I barely even notice him as I step under the hot stream of water, his outline hazy on the other side of the glass.

There's a bar of soap, and I use it on my knotted hair, on my grimy skin, under my brittle nails. I clean around the wound as best I can, though it makes me wince. The hot water stings my scalp, and nothing has ever felt so good. I brace myself against the walls of the shower and let my entire body relax. I let myself breathe. I am out.
I am out
.

I can see Cameron, blurry through the glass, still facing away. “You okay?” he asks.

“Yes.”

I see his leg bouncing, but I don't want to leave the water yet. “So …,” he says, “how do you know Dom?”

I wait a moment before I speak. “How do
you
know Dom?” I respond.

And I'm surprised when he answers. “I don't. I didn't. Casey did. I'm here to help Casey.” It's like he needs to tell me that he is not my ally here. I appreciate the honesty, but I already understood that.

“He was a guard,” I say, giving him a piece of information for the piece he has given me.

“Yeah, I know. But it seems like you know him better than that,” he says, like he's accusing me, though I can't be sure why he is or why I care.

It's embarrassing, is what it is. It's embarrassing to admit how I know him. That I was naive. That I wasn't thinking. That I trusted so easily. “I don't know why he'd want to rescue me,” is all I say, because it's true.

“Guess you made an impression,” he says, and I turn off the water.

I laugh, and it sounds fake, like how I'd laugh back on the island. For a purpose. For a reaction. I grab a towel off the rack, wrap it around myself, and stand in front of Cameron. His head is tilted to the side, and his brown eyes are looking into mine, as if he can see through them. I close my eyes and look away.

“He pretended to be my friend,” I say. And I decide to tell him. I'll tell him so he knows that I will not fall for it again.

“He used to leave me secret messages,” I say. I had my head in a book when he passed me a note on the first day, a slip of paper taped to the inside of my cup when he set it before me, so only I could see. I saw the paper before I saw him, and so I liked him even before I set eyes upon him. The paper said:
I'm Ellis
. I looked up at him then, and he was looking right at me, right into me, with half a smile—so unlike anyone who had ever worked there before. When everything is the same, the different can blindside you. And then another guard said to him, “Mark, take out the trash.” And it felt like a secret, a code, that he was giving just to me.

“And?” Cameron says. He looks away again, I guess because
I'm standing in nothing but a towel. “You had a fight because you found out he was pretending?”

A fight? Oh, if only. When I don't respond, he looks at me again. I smile at him the same way he looked at me over his shoulder when we walked into this place—like I know something more than he does.

He notices. “How did you find out?” he asks, trying a different approach.

“He gave himself away,” I say. The notes had continued, every day, same as his smile. They'd say things like,
Where's the junk food?
And I knew he could've just asked anyone, but it was like a game, or a test, maybe. So I'd go to the cabinet and grab the chips, eat half the bag, and then leave them out in the middle of the table when I left the room. We were communicating in code. Establishing trust.

I'd hide the notes in my pockets, flush them when I was back in the privacy of my bathroom, something wild and hopeful running through my veins.

“I found out,” I say, “when I caught him in my room a few days before the end of his assignment.”

“Aren't there cameras?” Cameron asks.

“How did
you
get in?” I ask. “Same way, I assume.”

Ellis—no,
Dominic
—acted surprised when I opened the door, with his hands still hovering over the keyboard of my computer. He froze. Then he hit a few buttons, turning the monitor to black. He put his hands in his pockets, and he smiled.

It was the same way he smiled at me the first day—crooked and personal, as if he were talking to me without making a
sound. It was the way he looked at me, like I was a girl he saw walking by, not an assignment. But that was the moment I knew that he was pretending—that he had always been pretending. I guess maybe I had been pretending, too.

“Do you ever think of getting out of here?” Dominic had asked, looking anywhere but at my computer. It's not like the guards never go through my things. They do, all the time, but they don't hide it. This was the first time I realized that maybe computer searches weren't private. And I was thinking about the things I'd been researching.

“No point,” I'd said. I thought about it every second of every day. I thought about it as I looked at the sky, at the sea, at the blackness behind my eyelids, but I made a point never to say the things that were merely hope, things that might burst if I gave voice to them, stranded out in the air by themselves.

“You don't want to?”

I didn't understand at first. I thought I did, I thought he was going to help. And then his eyes shifted from one electronic device to the next: the computer, the printer, the light fixture, the clock.

I felt the truth seep into my bones, like acid.

“Are there cameras in here?” I asked, turning away so I could mask my expression. Turn it to calm. How else would he know?

“No,” he said, “and you know that.” It's true. The humanitarian groups are allowed to screen this island twice a year, to make sure I am treated humanely. Like an animal.
You can keep her forever, just give her the decency of some privacy
. What a joke.

I had been researching what I could make with batteries, with the pieces of the electronics I'd taken apart and put back together. If I could make a radio. A phone. Or a bomb.

How to start a fire.

And he knew.

How did it not occur to me that computers were monitored? That just because it was in my room didn't make it mine? Of course later I found out about search histories and remote access, but I didn't know as much about computers when he was a guard eight months ago. Just that I had one and it was
full of information
. Lots of information. Information is free to me, I just can't send it out. Just like in a prison.

I felt my anger grow, and I buried it under my indifferent expression.

At first.

“Do you ever get messages from the outside?” he asked.

June. Like everyone else, he was looking for June.

I set my jaw, set my resolve. “Yes,” I'd told him, “but you can't tell.” I gave him a small smile. “And not through the computer.”

If he was playing me, I was going to play him right back. “How, then?” he'd asked, leaning toward me, the light from the window catching off the blue of his irises. His whole face seemed to glow.

“I don't know how exactly, but sometimes at night, there are words shining directly onto my wall.” I pointed to the wall opposite the window for emphasis. “It says, ‘In the ocean is the key.' What do you suppose that means?” The lie slipped out as
effortlessly as it manifested in my head. I walked closer, studying his reaction.

Dom was mumbling to himself. “I don't know.” Then he refocused on me, searching my face. “I can help you,” he said, “but I need something from you. Just one thing.” He pulled the needle out of his pocket—the one they use to administer shots—but it had been refashioned in some way, so the syringe was instead a glass tube. “I need a sample.”