Vitro (17 page)

“Something went wrong for Corpus, all right. Though from my perspective, something went terribly, terribly right. I never imprinted, Sophie, remember? The chip damaged the part of my brain responsible for forming that kind of bond. Or any kind of bond.”
“You’re a psychopath,” she whispered. “Like Mary. Like the others.”
“Yes . . .” He leaned down as if they were lovers entwined in one another’s embrace, making her shiver, and whispered in her ear, “Yes—I am a certifiable psychopath, Sophie. So you remember what I said about Mary, Jay, Wyatt? I was a little untruthful with you, sweetheart. I might have forgotten to include myself in that list. We’re all psychopaths. We’re the experiments that went bad.” He chuckled and kissed her, briefly and cruelly, before she could turn her head away. “They just never knew how bad.”

He never understood why it bothered him so much. She’d never been the apologizing sort. She was proud and stubborn, and had to always, always be right. She never said she was sorry, and that was the part that hurt the most.

“Son,” she’d said, her patience infuriating him, “sometimes people fall apart.”
Sometimes people fall apart.
What kind of a lame excuse was that? As if her cheating on his dad was some kind of accident, some kind of unfortunate twist of nature, as if their “falling apart” was no different than rain at a picnic.
If people could fall apart, why couldn’t they fall back together?
But he didn’t ask, he just nodded. His fury was the numbing kind, the kind that froze rather than burned. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t argue with her. He just nodded, like a useless idiot, and let her excuses wash over him.
“You can come with me,” she’d said. Come with her to the mainland—well, with her and Lance, the Navy guy she’d been sleeping with for two years behind his dad’s back.
But going with her meant leaving Dad. Meant cheating on him the way she had. He wasn’t a cheater. He couldn’t betray the only parent who hadn’t betrayed him. She didn’t like it when he refused. That was the moment she cut him off. He saw it in her eyes, a kind of closing door, a burning bridge. “Fine,” she snapped, and suddenly she stopped caring. He never understood how she did it, how she could turn people off, cut the ties between them as effectively as if she’d slammed a coffin shut over their dead body. She’d done it before, to his uncle, to his grandfather, to her friend Bettina when Bettina finally confessed to Jim’s dad that his wife was cheating on him. And she’d done it to her husband years before, only Jim had been too stupid to see it at the time.
Once she cut someone loose, she never looked back.
You say people fall apart, Jim thought, but it’s you who does all the falling.
He remembered it was the shouting that woke him that morning. His dad, his dreamer of a dad, still hoping, never giving up on her, chasing her down the hallway and trying to take her bag from her hand. She’d wrenched it away, and the keychain on it—the one with the beads with the Chamorrita poem engraved on them—had come loose in his hand, breaking off its metal ring. He was shouting, pleading, begging her not to go, and she yelled at him to lay off, and that was what woke Jim. He stood in the doorway of his room in a pair of sweatpants and an Atari T-shirt, confused and disoriented as she swept past him. She paused, just a half step, just long enough to glance at him and say, “The lemon tree needs watering twice a week.”
Not “I’m sorry.” Not “goodbye.” Not even “I love you.” The last thing his mother had said to him was about the stupid lemon tree. She’d raised it from a seedling; she didn’t have any way to transport it to California when she left.
He’d watered the lemon tree twice a week, never missing a day, until exactly one year later on the anniversary of her infamous departure. That day, he calmly carried the tree into the yard, set it on the driveway, and lit it on fire. It had two small lemons on it. He never forgot the way they smelled, those burning lemons.
Jim’s eyes shot open, and he stopped himself from inhaling just in time. He was underwater, and if he breathed in then his lungs would fill and he would drown.
He couldn’t tell how deep he was. It was too dark. There were no lights in any direction, just inky water, as if he’d fallen into a sea of black paint. For a moment, he couldn’t even tell which way was up. What if he swam in the wrong direction? What if instead of going toward the surface he only went deeper, deeper to a watery death?
After a few seconds he oriented himself and began swimming what he was fairly sure was upward. When he broke out of the water, it was on his last stroke, his head screaming with pain and his lungs flaming. He gasped in air and then fell back underwater, thrashing and struggling. For several minutes his life hung by a thread, balancing on the outcome of his battle with the sea. Every time he found the air a wave pushed him down again, as if the ocean was determined to have him. But he fought back with all his strength until at last he found a length of aluminum bobbing on the water and he threw himself over it. Then, exhausted and panting, he drifted aimlessly for a long while as the stars grew brighter and the moon rose higher. It felt like hours, but barely thirty minutes had passed when he finally lifted his head and looked around. He was extremely disoriented, having no idea where he was or what had happened, and the memories trickled slowly through his thoughts.
The aluminum.
He looked down, then pulled away as if he’d found himself clutching a dead body. It was a piece of the wing of his plane. Bile surged in his throat, and he had to grab the wing to hold himself up when he retched, half from horror, half from being tossed by the waves.
The plane had exploded, and him nearly with it.
The only thing that had saved him had been his growling stomach. With one hand on the yoke, he’d used the other to open Nicholas’s backpack, curious to see what snacks the Vitro had packed. Instead he’d found an alarm clock bound to large vials of clear liquid, and he didn’t need to look twice to know what it was, or to see that the timer on the clock was within seconds of hitting zero.
He threw open the door to the plane and jumped, hitting the water feet-first and feeling as if he’d dropped into a sheet of concrete. The pain had shattered up his body and he blacked out. How long had he been sinking before he awoke? How much longer did he have before his air ran out and he drowned?
He stopped thinking about it. He was alive and that was all that mattered, though his situation was still pretty dire. The darkness cloaked the island, and he turned in a circle, scanning the horizon for any sign of land.
It was hard to concentrate with his mind pulling in the other direction. Nicholas tried to kill me. He literally handed me a ticking bomb, and like an idiot, I took it. And now Nicholas had Sophie. Whatever he wanted her for, after what Jim had just witnessed, he knew it couldn’t be good.
Well, whatever was happening on Skin Island, all he could do now was swim for his life and hope Sophie could take care of herself for a while. He could wait till morning, conserving his energy, and then hope to spot the island in the daylight. But then he would risk drifting out of sight entirely. He knew this area from the thousand times he’d flown over it; Skin Island was a lonely strip of land in a wide empty sea. Most of the other islands were miles and miles away, too far to offer him any chances. It was Skin Island or it was the ocean. Only one held a chance of survival, however slim.
The longer he stared at the darkness, the better his vision became, as long as he didn’t look directly at the moon. He was shivering; the water was warm enough, but his mind was a riot of memories: the pain as he hit the water, the image of his mother dragging her suitcase down the hall, the sound of his plane exploding above him, the smell of burning lemons.
“You could have said you were sorry,” he whispered. “You could have at least apologized.”
Only the stars were there to listen, and they maintained glittery silence.
Jim dropped his head onto the wing with a clunk. The metal smelled burnt, like used gunpowder. He’d loved that plane, loved it more than anything else he owned, though technically it was his dad’s. It was the Cessna that had taken him above the world when the world had no place for him. Lost in the noise of the engine and the haze of clouds, he could almost forget. It was his one haven, his last sanctuary, and now it was scattered across the Pacific in a million burning bits.
It just wasn’t fair. Jim pounded a fist against the aluminum. If he’d just stuck to his own advice and stayed out of Sophie’s business, he’d be home by now. But no. Oh, no. He just had to entangle himself in problems that had nothing to do with him. Getting involved means getting hurt. He’d tried to mend things between his parents, been naive enough to believe he could fix everything as if they were living some cheesy, feel-good Hallmark Channel flick. And what did he get in return? His mother shut him off, and shortly after, his dad might as well have. He lost himself in drinking and Jim lost himself in the sky.
“You get involved to the point where there’s no getting uninvolved,” Sophie had said. “Because that’s what love is.”
Well, then love was stupid. He had no place for it. Love was treacherous and it cheated and it blocked other people out. It burned bridges that could never be rebuilt. Love was just an excuse people used to get what they wanted. It was the all-powerful so-called virtue that people threw around like an overused trump card, a trick ace played to win the pot and beggar the competition. What good was love if it was so easily abused? What good was love if it could be turned into a weapon?
He should have known better. He should have told Sophie no the moment he saw her.
But now Jim was involved to the point where he couldn’t be uninvolved, just as Sophie had said, though it wasn’t for love. It was because his plane was in more pieces than a Lego kit and his only chance of getting home now was Sophie. He had to find her and her mom and hope he could work out some kind of deal. There was always Lux. . . . No. He wouldn’t go there. He couldn’t abuse his power over her that way—it was sick. Anyway, what could she really do to help him? She was hardly capable of walking on two legs.
None of this would matter if he didn’t find the island. He forced all his attention on finding it, and after consulting the few star patterns he could remember to orient himself, finally settled on a slightly darker smudge of black to the southeast.
Jim began to wearily kick his legs, propelling himself and the wing in the general direction of the shadow he hoped was the island. The waves tossed against him, rolled him along, pushing and pulling. He seemed to be getting nowhere, but he swam anyway, though his limbs were weak and wobbly and about as much good as spaghetti noodles.
Oddly, he kept thinking of some stupid poem he’d had to study in his tenth grade lit class. He couldn’t remember the title, just something about an albatross around a guy’s neck, dragging him down, and one rhythmic line that pounded through his brain in time with his pulse: Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. . . . He found himself mouthing the line as he swam, like an escaped lunatic.
Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. . . .

“ Keep up!” Nicholas called, yanking the cord that he’d wrapped around Sophie’s ankles. Her hands were free, but she couldn’t attempt to run or he’d just jerk the cord and bring her crashing to the ground. The knots around her ankles were just loose enough to allow her to walk, but running was out of the question.

She gritted her teeth and said nothing, waddling awkwardly behind him. They wove through thick, rolling groves of bamboo, heading south. Sophie stumbled blindly, too overwhelmed with shock and grief to put up much of a fight. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Jim’s plane breaking apart, shattering in the sky in a ball of hungry flames.

“What do you want with me?” she mumbled. She was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that the boy she’d pitied, the boy she’d gone out of her way to help, had turned out to be a conscienceless, homicidal psychopath who had played her like a piano. “Why are you doing this?”

He stopped and looked back at her, at the bloody bandage on her shoulder and her skinned knees and her pale cheeks, and he sighed. “We’ll stop for a few minutes.”

They were at the highest point in the bamboo forest. The land dipped on either side of them, though any view of the island below was obscured by darkness. But to the west, the rising moon gave view of the infinite sea. When Sophie looked at it, she felt a cold knot rise in her throat, and she dropped to her knees and vomited bile over the edge of the bluff.

“It’s my fault,” she gasped. “You killed him but I’m just as guilty.”
“Good God, will you stop whining?” He sat on a half-buried rock and crossed his legs, looking intensely bored.
She looked at him over her shoulder, burning with hate. “I was almost in that plane. I would have died with him. If you want me dead so badly, why don’t you just push me off this cliff now and be done with it? Why all of this?” Her voice turned to a snarl and she yanked the cord between them.
“Because,” he said calmly, “I don’t want you dead. Why do you think I begged you to stay? The bomb was meant for him, not you. The pilot did a thing very few people can do— he made me angry, so I had to eliminate him. But you—you and I have plans.”
“You’re delusional.” She eyed the drop below; the cliff plunged into rocks and violent waves. If he were just a yard closer she could grab him and throw them both off the cliff. It would almost be worth it; they both deserved to pay for what had happened to Jim.
Nicholas sighed and rubbed his thumb over the cord in his hands. “So they say. So they say. Enough resting. Let’s go.” “Wait.” She paused, licked her lips, wincing at the memory of his harsh kiss. If she could stall him from executing whatever plan he had in mind, maybe the guards or doctors would find them first. She’d rather be in their hands than his. They had to be out scouring the island; had they seen the explosion?
She turned away from the cliff, abandoning her mad inspiration of tossing Nicholas and herself over it, and instead scanned the trees for any sign of possible aid. But she had to keep Nicholas sitting still for as long as possible.
“Why do you need me?” she asked. “Do you really believe I’ll still help you, after what you just did?”
He studied her flatly, then rose and held out a hand. “You’re trying to stall me. Well, it won’t work. The guards won’t find us, not in this bamboo. Still, it was a nice try.”
She ignored his proffered hand and rose to her feet on her own, her face burning.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He led her inland, through a grove of dense jungle and then a clearing riddled with rocks, all of them covered in moss and leaning at crazy angles, their shadows deep purple pockets of cool air that made her shiver when she passed through them. After that, more bamboo, and a narrow, lively stream filled with smooth round stones. She nearly lost her balance stepping from one stone to the next, and grabbed an overhanging pine branch to steady herself, startling a bright green gecko that had been sunning itself on the leaves. Moments later they stepped out of the jungle and onto an old concrete pathway that must have led back to the resort. It had been overgrown with vines and grasses, and a rotting fence ran along its length, large portions of it having crumbled away altogether. They went some distance down the path until they began passing buildings lurking in the vegetation: a spa, its windows shattered inward by some past storm, a restaurant with a giant wooden lobster on its roof. More than ever Sophie sensed the ghosts of this place.
“We’re here,” Nicholas finally announced, and pointed at a one-story stucco building with a sagging front porch and terra cotta tiles on the roof. Many of the tiles had slipped off and were smashed on the ground around the building.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Old salon,” he said. “For the ladies to get their hair done.”
What do you know about salons? she wanted to ask, but she bit her tongue.
“Well?” he said. “Do you want a haircut?” He bounced the light over the wooden steps leading to the door, which had once been made of glass, but she could see shattered fragments of it littering the porch.
Sophie frowned. “Why are we here?”
“Come in and find out.” He regarded her with sudden gravity. “Don’t you want to know the truth, Sophie Crue? The whole truth?”
She studied Nicholas very carefully, trying to imagine what went on inside his head. “What truth?” she asked carefully.
“The one you know is still out there. The piece you know you’re still missing.”
She drew a deep breath and stared through the gaping doorway. It was dark inside. “Do I have a choice?”
He laughed. “Of course not.”
Heart frantically pounding, as if trying to push her in the other direction, Sophie carefully climbed the steps. They creaked and bowed under her feet, but held. The broken glass crunched as she crossed the porch and stepped through the gap it had once filled. Nicholas followed close behind, still keeping a hold of the cord. Inside, Sophie found cobwebbed walls and moldy carpet patterned with faded roses. The building smelled strongly of damp must and mildew. A curling poster on the wall showed a woman with long outdated clothing and a huge perm.
The poster alone attested to the years of disuse this place had seen, as if the dust, wallpaper, and bowed ceiling weren’t testimony enough. With a chill, Sophie wondered what Nicholas planned to do to her in this creepy ruin. She was prepared to fight him tooth and nail. When she found herself contemplating how to wrap the cord around his neck and strangle him from behind, she swallowed a rush of nausea. What am I becoming? He’d not only revealed the evil in himself; he was also revealing the evil in Sophie.
“Through there,” he said, directing her to a doorway at the end of the hall. She went toward it, feeling as though her body temperature were dropping by a degree with each step. The room inside was windowless and completely dark. She froze and nearly retreated. She’d never been scared of the dark before, but was beginning to suspect Skin Island would change that.
“Scared?” Nicholas said. He closed in on her from behind, standing so close she could feel his breath. “Tell me, what does it feel like to be scared, Sophie Crue? I have always wondered.”
“Everyone gets scared,” she breathed.
“Not me.” His hand reached around her, and for a moment she thought he was going to grab her, but he only flicked a light switch on the wall. A glass globe in the middle of the ceiling blinked on with a high whine. She felt a flash of terror, as if expecting to see a dead body or some nightmarish monster, but it was just a small studio with three chairs facing three mirrors and a row of hair drying seats. The huge dome dryers were polished clean, which surprised her. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw the room had been recently cleaned and redecorated. Rows of pictures hung on the wall. Unlike the posters in the hallway, they were untouched by humidity and age. They looked like magazine clippings, and all showed different shots of New York City. On the floor sat half-used candles, playing cards, a croquet mallet, and boxes of crackers. Nicholas opened a small refrigerator in the corner and took out two grape sodas. He tossed one to Sophie, cracked his open, and fell into one of the dryer seats, taking up the slack in the cord by wrapping it around his wrist.
“That’s New York City,” he said, nodding at the pictures on the wall. “Corpus is based there. We’ll go there, when we leave this place.”
She looked around the room. It looked like a hideout. Maybe this was where Nicholas snuck away to with Mary and the others.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” she said. “We were trying to help you. He was going back to Guam to get help, you know.” She leaned against the wall and stared unseeingly at the calendar from 1994 hanging opposite her with a picture of a half-dressed cowgirl seductively draped over a John Deere tractor. Her eyes slipped shut, releasing the first tears. “Jim was . . . he was my—”
“Jim, Jim, Jim—shut up!” He jumped to his feet and rushed toward her. She pressed against the wall and held her breath, heart lurching, as he stood over her and gripped his soda can so hard the metal dented. “I’m sick of hearing about Jim! You hear me? Sick. He’s gone! Forget about him!”
Nicholas stepped back, drained his soda, and tossed the can into the corner. He drew a deep breath, let it out with a sigh, and then smiled. It wasn’t a cruel smile, but a charming, slightly mischievous one. Sophie didn’t know what to think. It was like looking at a completely different person. He moved from emotion to emotion as if he were changing hats, as if the expressions were mere masks.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not really angry. See?” He spread his hands wide and bowed.
He’s insane, Sophie thought.
“C’mon, Sophie. Sit down. I’m just messing with you, you know. That’s all. Sit down and I’ll tell you about yourself.” But he didn’t let her sit. He kept her pinned to the wall with his body, and as he tilted his face down to look into hers, his hair fell forward, creating a kind of curtain around their conversation. She felt as if he’d sucked her into his own small, dark world.
“I know everything about this island,” he said. “Every room, every key, every secret. I know when the tides come and go and where to find the seagulls’ nests and how many steps it is from north to south—and I know everything about you. I know that you think you’re special, because you’re Moira Crue’s daughter. You think you’re better than us. But you’re not. Oh, no, you’re not. You’re not as special as you think, Sophie Crue.”
Suddenly he kissed her, hard and rough and greedily, and she pressed her hands against his chest and shoved him away. He stumbled backward, dropping the cord, and Sophie leaped forward. But he caught her by her hair, pulling her backward, and she screamed and dropped the soda she’d been holding. His arm snaked around her waist, and she grabbed it and bit it. With a shriek, he let go of her hair and she darted forward again. This time she scooped up her soda can, whirled, and smashed it into the side of his head. Grape soda sprayed all over the room, splattering the mirrors and staining the carpet. He hissed and dropped to his knees, his hands pressed to his temple. Before she could make a dash for it, he grabbed the cord and pulled her feet from under her. She fell heavily to her knees.
He shook his head as he stood up and gave her a pitying smile. “Look at you. You’re pathetic,” he said. “Now look at me.” He spread his hands wide; Sophie had never known anyone else who could strut while standing still, but Nicholas pulled it off. “They say psychopathy is a ‘condition,’ a handicap, a thing to be cured and treated. But it’s so much more than that, Sophie. It’s a gift! It’s ultimate freedom—freedom from the stupid conventions of conscience and guilt. It’s the true ticket to happiness, you know. I mean, look at me! I can blow up your sad little boyfriend—pow!—just like that and not think twice about it! I can do anything!”
She stood up and slapped him, leaving a cherry red mark on his cheek. He froze, then laughed.
“You can’t make me mad,” he said. “I don’t get upset. I don’t cry. I don’t care, Sophie. That’s what it all comes down to. I don’t care about your pilot being blown apart into a million tiny pieces of skin and hair and bone and scattered all over the ocean for the fish to eat. I don’t care that you hate me for it. I don’t care if you think it’s wrong or evil.”
“You’re twisted,” she hissed.
“It’s so liberating.” Nicholas’s tone took a dreamy timbre. “You don’t get held back by feelings. You can do whatever you want and never feel bad about it. It doesn’t make sense to me, you know? How people like you can hurt someone and think, Oh, man, I shouldn’t have done that. It makes me feel so bad. So wrong . . . What’s it like, Sophie? Is it like wearing a collar around your neck all the time, having some invisible moral hand yanking you around, dragging you away from the things you really want?
“You know what I think?” Nicholas went on. Does he never shut up? Sophie wondered. “I think you people aren’t as good as you say you are. Okay, okay, stop.” He held up his hands. “I know. I have an idea. Close your eyes.”
She glared at him.
“Oh, come on, just do it! Just close your eyes.” When she still refused, he pushed her roughly into one of the dryer seats and wrapped a hand around her throat, choking her just enough to make her panic a little. “Close your eyes,” he insisted.
She closed her eyes.
“Good! Now, just imagine, just think about this: Have you ever wanted to lash out at someone but you knew you couldn’t because you’d get in trouble? Or maybe you wanted to just take something from someone because you knew they didn’t deserve it? Ever want to just cut out all the crap and the fakery and the shallow politeness and just be who you want to be?”
She refused to let him into her mind, and instead pictured herself somewhere else; on the soccer field, pouring all of her strength into strikes on goal and cheering with her team the way they had after they won regionals. The fantasy was strong, but it didn’t block out his voice, not enough.
He released his grip on her throat and she opened her eyes. “See,” he said softly, contemplatively, “I don’t buy this whole conscience thing. At least, I think it’s a kind of last defense. Like, you already want to do something terrible, and you probably think about how you’d do it and how you’d get away with it. But then your conscience steps in and is all, ‘Oh, Sophie, you can’t do that, that’s wrong.’ And so you don’t. Or even if you do, you feel bad about it. Your conscience beats you for it for days, right? But, see, what if committing that terrible thing in your mind is the real crime? Maybe there’s not such a difference between you and me. Maybe the only difference is that I have the guts to do what you’ll only think about.”
He dropped to a whisper and ran his hand over her hair and her cheek, studying her with consuming intensity. “Are you really so noble? So good? The urge is in you to do terrible, unspeakable things. It’s in everyone. It’s part of us, like a monster in our heads. Are you really so different from me?”
“You are completely obsessed with yourself,” she said, narrowing her eyes in frank, horrified fascination. “You really are. You think you’re some kind of enlightened messiah, don’t you? Unlocking the secrets of the universe, discerning the core of the human psyche. But you’re just a delusional, lonely little boy inside who throws a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way.”
Nicholas stepped back as if she’d slapped him again, and he scowled. “You’re the child, Sophie Crue! Not me.”
“Really? What do you honestly know about the world? You grew up on this island, isolated from real society. What, do you watch movies? Read books? You must have some kind of Internet access to have sent me that e-mail. Do you really think you know what people are like, when you can count the number of people you know on two hands? Oh, the other Vitros don’t count—they’re just shadows of people.”
“I’m going to leave this island,” said Nicholas, “and I’m going to take whatever I want.”