Vitro (3 page)

laughing and saying, “See? No problem! That was easy as—” POP POP POP.
Something snapped, something Sophie knew was most likely not supposed to snap, and the plan went into a violent spin, skidding out of control across the pavement. She was thrown against the door, then against Jim, her seat belt cutting into her diaphragm and making it hard to breathe. Everything whirled around her as if she were caught in a giant blender, colors and shapes coalescing into a dizzying rush. An earsplitting screech sliced through her head, a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards, or forks scraping china plates, so loud that she felt it vibrating in her teeth.
She felt Jim’s arms around her, holding her tightly against him, and she pressed herself into him and was so seized with terror that she couldn’t even manage a scream.

For a long moment, Jim couldn’t move. His arms were still locked around Sophie, who had her hands over her face. Her slim form trembled against him. She was utterly silent, and had been through the whole ordeal. He was dazed and shocked—the landing had been going perfectly, smooth as water over glass, and then . . . What? The runway was clear, but it felt as though they’d hit a boulder.

Carefully, Jim extricated himself from Sophie, keeping one hand on her shoulder. He gently pulled her hands away and found her staring blankly at nothing, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. He shut off the plane and the propeller slowly wound down.

“Sophie?” He looked her in the eye, but sensed she couldn’t see him. “Sophie, are you okay?”
Slowly, her gaze focused on his. She drew a deep, shuddering breath and for a moment, he thought she might start hyperventilating. Hell, what do I do? He thought vaguely of a brown paper bag, but he didn’t have one and anyway, he didn’t see how that would help.
Thankfully, she seemed to gather herself. She pulled away and looked around. They both seemed more shaken than the plane was, though Jim would have to climb out and inspect the exterior before he could know how bad the damage truly was.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No,” she said, her voice wavering. “I don’t think so. You?”
“I’m fine. Come on, let’s get out. Be careful.”
She still seemed hazy, so he reached across her and opened her door, then clicked her seat belt off.
“If you wait, I’ll come around and help you.”
“No, I’m okay.” She slid out of the plane, dragging her backpack with her.
After he was sure she could stand on her own, Jim jumped out his side and gave the Cessna a quick once over. The underside of the floats were streaked and smelled of burning metal from where it had scraped across the pavement, and the wheels lay in four deflated puddles on the runway.
Jim stepped back, ran his hands through his hair, and let out a long, deep groan. Sophie stood beside him and stared at the damage.
“Can you . . . fix it?” she asked tentatively.
“The landing gear is trashed. Look at that—tires blew out, each one of them. No way.” He rubbed at his face and winced, looking up the runway. Maybe the cracks in the pavement were worse that he’d thought. “But the floats are still intact.” He dropped into a crouch to get a better look. The floats were dented and scraped and a bit loose, but if there were some way to get the plane into the water . . . She could do it. Maybe. He’d have to patch the holes in the floats and then do a complete engine check, to be sure there wasn’t any internal damage. The only other option would be to ask for help from Sophie’s mom, perhaps. There had to be a phone on the island, or some way he could contact his dad. He felt ill. Of all the places to be stranded . . . “Some holes in the floats. I’d have to patch it up.”
“How? There isn’t exactly an airplane shop around here.” She swept her hand, indicating their isolation.
“Duct tape,” he said.
Sophie raised one eyebrow. “Duct tape.”
“Oh, yeah. I use it for everything, and it’s never let me down.” He climbed back into the cockpit, dug through a compartment in the back, and emerged with three rolls in each hand. “See? The stuff is practically made of miracles.”
“Right.” Her tone was flat and skeptical.
Jim sighed and studied the damage, knowing that even with the tape, it would take a real miracle to get the plane back into the air.
Sophie was edgy, looking around and pacing to and fro, wondering where her mom was, Jim guessed. He pulled his eyes away from his plane. “See her?” he asked.
She shook her head and mechanically shrugged her backpack onto her shoulders and then stood still, staring around. From where they were, Jim could see the entirety of the little islet. Unlike its much larger neighbor, this island was mostly flat, composed of a thin scattering of palms, a lot of sand, and the airstrip. Tall grasses shimmered around them, bent by the salty wind, and old coconuts littered the ground.
Skin Island looked closer than it really was, rising out of the sea into a series of green peaks. It was probably too mountainous for an airstrip, which is why they’d used the smaller island, Jim reckoned. He knew Skin Island had once been a posh resort in the seventies and eighties, but had shut down for several years and fallen into disrepair. Then a group of scientists moved in and set up camp. They never seemed to use the airstrip, at least from what he could tell; the helicopters landed elsewhere. He’d never known anyone to ask questions about what went on there; people seemed to sense that whatever it was, it was best left alone. It was one of the few things his neighbors actually didn’t pry into. Jim had a running theory based on what he’d seen of the island communities in and around Guam—the smaller the island, the more time everyone spent in each other’s business. Half his neighborhood had known about his parent’s split before even he did. In fact, the morning his mom stormed out with all her belongings in two suitcases, there had been a crowd gathered to watch. They were all huddled in the neighbors’ yards, trying to be surreptitious and failing miserably, and Jim had refused to speak to any of them for months.
But when it came to Skin Island, even the most notorious gossips he knew kept their lips sealed. Even when Nandu had returned from his ill-fated trip there, no one had asked questions. Skin Island was something of a local horror story, their equivalent to a haunted house—a haunted island. “Jim?”
He shook himself and slowly stood up. Now that the initial shock had died down, the pain was setting in. His chest and stomach burned from the seat belt digging into him, and he knew the whiplash would only get worse in the next few hours. He stretched his arms, wincing a little as the movement sent a spasm of pain down his back. “Sorry, thinking. What is it?”
“There’s someone coming.”
He whirled to face the direction she was pointing. The ground slid downward from the airstrip, through a line of palms to a long, narrow beach that led to the channel between the two islands. A boy about their own age was strolling up the beach, his hands in his pockets, whistling to a flock of seagulls that screamed overhead.
Then the boy turned toward them, seemingly unsurprised to find them there. He began hiking up the slope in their direction, kicking aside the coconuts in his path. He had long dark hair that hung loose to his jaw and a sharp angularity to his features.
“Who are you?” Jim asked.
The boy pulled his hands from his pockets and let them hang loose at his sides, considering Jim with an odd look of amusement. “I’m Nicholas,” he said, as if the fact were obvious.
“Did my mom send you?” asked Sophie, walking toward him. “Where is she? Is she okay?”
“Calm down, Sophie,” Nicholas said, smiling. “Everything’s fine.”
She stopped short. “How do you know my name?”
Nicholas gave her a long, appraising look. Jim bristled at the way the boy’s gaze lingered on her body, a hungry look in his eye. Jim stepped forward. “Hey, man,” he said. “My plane . . . uh . . . had some trouble landing. . . .” The blood rushed to his face. “It wasn’t my fault or anything—something must have come loose. Point is, I need a phone.”
“Not one here you can use.” He studied the plane, shook his head. “Huh. They are not gonna be happy about this.”
“Who?” Jim asked. “Why can’t I just use the phone?”
But Nicholas was ignoring him. He’d gone back to ogling Sophie. “You came. You actually came.”
“Of course I came! Where is she?”
Nicholas sighed. “Calm down, okay? I’ll take you to her. You, pilot. You can’t use the phone because there’s only one on the island and it’s locked up. Besides, they monitor the line and the minute they find you’re here they’ll shoot you and dump you and your plane in the ocean.”
“What?” Sophie’s head flipped from one to the other. “Now, just wait a minute. Of course we can help him. My mom works on this island and she’d never shoot anyone.”
“Really?” He gave her a steady look. “And how well do you know your mother, Sophie Crue?”
She looked faintly blindsided by this. “Wh-what?”
“I’ve been rude. Forgive me. Welcome to Skin Island.”
He held out a hand and she took it. He ran his thumb over her knuckles and pulled her closer to him, Sophie looking uneasy but not pulling away. Jim’s fingers curled into fists, and he thrust them into his pockets and kicked a loose scrap of metal that his plane had dropped.
“You’ll take me to my mom?” she asked.
Nicholas nodded. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going just as it should.”
“What does that mean?”
Jim looked from Sophie to Nicholas; they were inches apart, eyes locked on each other, ignoring him completely. He threw up his hands. “Okay, I’m done. Whatever trouble you’re getting into, that’s your problem and not mine.” He turned and stalked back to the plane.
Sophie ran after him. “Jim! Come with us. I’m sure my mom can work things out.”
“I’d rather not take my chances, thanks. From the sound of things, your mom’s not in a position to help herself, much less me.” He turned to see the look of distress on her face, and he sighed and shook his head. “Don’t worry about me. I can manage this. Just go on.” He glanced over her shoulder at Nicholas, who stood still, watching them with a mild expression. Jim leaned down and whispered. “I’ll wait for you here.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll be fine. If you can, you should just go back. I’ll pay you for the trip.”
“Nah,” he said. “It was for old time’s sake.”
“You don’t have to wait for me.”
But he did. He couldn’t just leave her in the middle of nowhere with the first random guy who waltzed up and flashed her a smile. “Go find your mom, and then let me know you’re okay. Then I’ll go.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll come back in a few hours and let you know everything’s kosher, okay?”
“Sure. I’ll try to figure a way to get this thing into the water.”
“The water?” Nicholas called, looking vaguely curious. “You can still fly that thing?”
“If I can get her to the water, I might be able to float her out,” Jim said. He heaved a sigh and scrubbed at the back of his neck. “But it’ll take a hell of a miracle.”
Sophie took a step toward him, but he could tell from the way her eyes kept flickering to Nicholas that she was eager to move on and find her mom. He couldn’t blame her. “Thanks, Jim,” she said. “I’ll see if my mom can’t help. That is, if she’s . . .” She stopped and bit her lip.
If she’s alive? Jim wondered how she would have ended that thought. He shrugged. “Go on. I’ll wait till dark.”
“Thanks,” she said. Their eyes met and held briefly, and Jim nodded. The look in her eyes as she turned away was fierce; he reckoned that if her mother was on Skin Island, Sophie would find her. She had a determination about her that wore him down, made him weary just to watch. Had she been this steely when they were kids? She seemed so much older now, in more than just her looks. He thought of all that had befallen them since those happy days, and how much it had altered them both.
Nicholas threw Jim a half-salute, half-wave, then took Sophie’s hand and led her down the beach to where a small motorboat was anchored, out of Jim’s sight until he took a few steps to his left. In minutes, they were speeding across the channel toward Skin Island, and Jim was left alone beneath the palms with his broken plane and a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

“Who are you?” she asked after several minutes of trekking in silence, listening only to the crunch of sand and leaves under their shoes and the fading rush and roar of the ocean. “I mean, I know your name—but what are you doing here? You seem young to be a doctor or scientist.”

“Not much,” she admitted, then added, “Well, nothing at all, really.”
He nodded distractedly, letting go of the branch. It whacked her head from behind.
“Ouch! Hey!”
Nicholas stared at her as if seeing right through her, then he blinked and the look was gone, replaced by a sheepish smile. “Oh. Sorry.”
He started forward again, but she caught his arm and held it tight. “Please,” she said. “Just give me a straight answer. My mother, Moira Crue—where is she and how is she? She sent me a message, saying there was an emergency and that—”
He covered her hand with his. “Sophie. Sophie Crue. Everything is fine. Just relax. You’re jumpier than a fish on a string.”
She frowned and pulled her hand away. “Look. It’s been a really long day for me, okay? I don’t know who you are or what your connection to this place is, but I want you to tell me straight out—have you or anyone else harmed my mom? Because I swear—”
“Dr. Crue is waiting for you,” he interrupted, and the smile came off his face. “She’s fine. No one’s hurt her. Now come on.”
“Then why would she—”
He rounded on her, his vague demeanor suddenly sharpening into something intense and wild. His eyes were brown, not amber-brown like Jim’s, but gray-brown, almost colorless, and oddly flat, as though someone had forgotten to add the flecks of green and black that should have been there. She was hypnotized by his gaze and did not move.
As if realizing his stare was unnerving her, he relaxed and gave her a shy smile, twisting his hands together. “You’re very pretty,” he said. “Prettier than I expected. Sorry, I’m not good with . . . with all the questions. We don’t often get visitors, you know.”
He let go of her and stepped back, shrugging his shoulders apologetically. “You could say I’m not really a people person.”
Slightly bewildered, Sophie brushed at her hair and watched him from beneath a furrowed brow. “It’s okay,” she said hesitantly. He talks as if he’s always been on this island. If he had, she could understand his . . . eccentricities. “Just let’s hurry, all right? I want to see her, to see for myself that she’s okay.”
He nodded crisply and charged on at a faster pace. Sophie hurried to keep up, but her mind was already miles ahead. If her mother was truly fine, as Nicholas insisted—why the message? What could her “emergency” possibly be that she would suddenly invite Sophie to the one place that had always been forbidden to her? It was true Sophie had always wanted to see Skin Island—but not under circumstances like this. Not because her mother was ill or dying. But was she? Just what is going on here?
She thought regretfully of Jim back at the airstrip, and wondered if she should have asked him to come after all. He seemed quite upset over the damage done to the plane, and Sophie felt a bit guilty about not feeling guilty enough. After all, if it wasn’t for her, he and his plane would be safe and intact back on Guam. Well, it was him who mucked that landing, not me. Maybe her worry was misplaced, and it wasn’t Jim who deserved her concern but herself. If Nicholas was lying— though she couldn’t see why he would be—and her mother needed help and possibly a quick getaway, Jim might be their only way out. She hoped he would find a way to get the plane off the ground, for all their sakes. The last thing she wanted was to be stranded with no way out. She’d always thought of this place as exotic and exciting, a secret haven of cuttingedge research, filled with brilliant minds racing to combat everything from dementia to cancer. She’d never imagined it to be so . . . sinister.
She wondered what Skin Island had to hide, and what her mother had to do with it. For some reason, the usual explanation about medical research and Alzheimer’s didn’t seem to be measuring up to the level of dread Jim and the other pilots had about this place. She stuck close to Nicholas, weaving in and out of tall, swaying stalks of bamboo.
“How much further?” Sophie asked.
“Not far.”
They came across a narrow path made of cracked pavement; at one time, it must have been smooth and flat, but now it looked like it was made of cobblestone, with grass shooting up between the cement plates. It led back toward the smaller island, winding through a grove of thick bamboo, and forward to, she hoped, her mother. She studied Nicholas as she followed him through the tall bamboo stalks. His hands were sunk deep into his pockets and his chin maintained a perpetual upward tilt, so that he seemed always to be looking down on the world. He walked with the confidence of one well acquainted with his surroundings, and she wondered what his story was, why he was on this island—why he was allowed on the island when she was not.
“How long have you been here?” she asked softly.
He didn’t turn or slow, but his head swiveled to the left, revealing the curve of his jaw and a hint of dark eyelash. “Too long,” he said sepulchrally, then added in a brighter tone, “But not for much longer.”
“Does your mom or dad work for Corpus too?”
He turned and walked backward, surveying her with, oddly, disdain. “No. Not exactly.” He spun around, and a dozen more questions crowded her brain but she held them back. She wasn’t here to get entangled in the affairs of some Corpus kid, however mystifying he was. Maybe he was older than he looked, and worked for them in some capacity. Maybe he was an intern. Maybe it’s none of my business, and anyway, we’ve been walking for ages. Shouldn’t we have gotten somewhere by now?
And at that moment, Nicholas stopped at a bend in the road, where the trees and bamboo opened to a sudden rocky cliff fringed with tall grass. “There it is,” he said. “Halcyon Cove.”
“Halcyon Cove?” She swatted at a cloud of gnats that hovered in front of her face and stared around him and across the shallow bay below, which glittered in a thousand shades of gold. The sun, just a hand’s breadth above the horizon, burned red behind a cluster of buildings on the cliff opposite. They were sharp silhouettes against the sunset, black and harsh, the red light behind them making them look as if they were on fire.
“It was once a resort,” Nicholas said. She glanced at him and saw that he was gazing at the buildings with smoldering intensity, as if they had wronged him in some unforgivable way. “But there’s nothing of that left now except a bunch of buildings.”
“My mom’s over there?” She looked back at the buildings and had to hold a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun’s last rays.
He nodded. “Let’s go. But . . . stay quiet. We might see people now, and if we do, it’s best if they don’t know you’re here.”
“Why?” Her heart clenched. “Did they do something to my mom?” She still wasn’t sure who they were; she had a vague idea of white coated doctors like her mother, but after hearing the pilots’ stories, she now imagined them holding assault rifles. “Nicholas, what do they do on this island? My mom’s researching a cure for Alzheimer’s, right?”
Nicholas studied her sidelong, his dark hair whipping around his face in the strong ocean wind. “Do you want to find out?” he asked.
Yes. “I want to find my mom.” But she felt a tug of desire— desire to unmask the secrets that had been kept from her all her life. It went deeper than mere curiosity. Over the years, Skin Island and her mother had grown into a single amorphous entity. She felt that if she discovered one, she discovered the other.
Sophie stood on the bluff and stared at the place that had stolen her mother from her with the wind pulling greedily at her hair, as if trying to lure her over the cliff and to her death on the rocks below. She felt a sudden swelling of determination in her chest, a hardening of resolve. When she licked her lips, they tasted like the sea. She felt as if the island were laying a challenge before her: If you can steal my secrets, you can have her back.
She remembered something her dad had said to her, not long ago, when she’d first announced her plan to follow in her mother’s footsteps: “She had her chance to be there for you, Sophie, and she gave it up. She chose her work. All these gifts, these lavish vacations—” he referenced the expensive dolls and toys her mother used to send her, which turned into electronics and cash cards as she grew older, the red Volkswagon on her sixteenth birthday, their trips together to Switzerland or Australia when her mother had vacation every few years— “they’re just her way of trying make up for the time she chose not to spend with you. Why can’t you see it?”
“You talk as if she’s bribing me,” Sophie had retorted, furious. “She’s my mom! If you want to hate her, that’s your problem—but why do you insist that I hate her too?”
“I don’t want you to hate her,” he said with a sigh, “I just want you to let her go.”
But it was something Sophie could not do. Would not do. She loved her father, but when he said things like that, she hated him. As far as she was concerned, the day he dragged her across the ocean and forced her to restart her life, he lost all his right to interfere in her relationship with her mom. We could have stayed on Guam at least. Or I could have had a choice. Who knows? If she’d gone with her mom instead back when she was seven, she might have grown up with this Nicholas, maybe stayed friends with Jim. This Skin Island wouldn’t be a strange, menacing place that filled her with anxiety—it would be home.
Despite the secrets it kept from her, from the moment she’d set foot on Skin Island, Sophie had been haunted with an inexplicable sense of familiarity, a kind of kinship with the palms and the sand and the sea. It had been calling to her for years and at last, she’d answered. “Take me to her,” said Sophie.
Nicholas smiled.