Soulprint

by Megan Miranda

  But I still can’t see. The mask is full of water. He’s trying to tell me something, tapping at my mouth, tapping at my mask. I think he means to use the air to push the water away, but when I remove the device, he puts it back in my mouth. Then he taps my mouth once more, traces his finger up along my cheek, to my forehead, down my nose—tracing the path the air might take. He presses against the top of my mask, and I understand. I take a breath through my mouth and let it out through my nose, and the water pushes out the bottom, and I see Cameron in front of me, nodding.

  I see.

  I see the netting behind me, covered in algae, but I can’t see much farther because it’s nearly dark. I see Dom in the wetsuit rising up from the bottom with another tank, and I watch as Cameron switches it out. Cameron illuminates his watch and presses himself against the netting as beams of light pass across the surface of the water.

  We wait.

  Dom has another set of equipment in his hands that must be for Casey. Beside me, Cameron leans forward, as if he’s waiting to see her swim out of the darkness. I understand. Cameron and Casey were supposed to meet up with us here, but I have screwed that up.

  We breathe underwater for a long time. Long enough for us to hear the motor of a boat ripping overhead. Long enough for me to stop worrying about Casey and instead worry about running out of air.

  Dom disappears into the darkness below us again, comes back with another set of tanks, and my fingers grasp ineffectively at the straps. I am a prune. I am a bleeding, blind prune, and I start breathing too fast, unable to control the panic. Because I am sure I will either become prey to something that has caught the scent of my blood, or else I will surely suffocate under here, in the darkness—and they will pull up my body a few days from now, and they’ll test all the newly born, and they’ll put my soul in a cage again.

  And then just like that, Cameron touches my shoulder and points up. Dom is near the surface, waving at us. I claw at the steel, pulling myself up out of the water. It’s as dark on the surface as it was underneath. This must be what we were waiting for.

  Darkness.

  I burst through the surface and spit out the mouthpiece, sucking in real, salty air. Waves, water, move around me, and I feel exposed, despite the darkness. My fingers tighten around the steel, digging through the algae. Cameron is still close, but he has his own equipment now. I wonder if he forgot that he doesn’t need to rely on me anymore.

  There are lights in the distance, from the island. And there are lights through the steel netting, from boats on the other side. And in the distance, far away, I see land. There is no way we will make it with this canister. I realize that, having gone through two already. There is no way we will make it without being seen.

  I wonder if this is a suicide mission.

  I wonder what will happen to my soul.

  The others have removed their mouthpieces as well, speaking in quick, low voices to each other.

  “What’s the plan?” I ask, as the current pushes my body into the steel.

  “We climb. And then we swim,” Cameron says.

  I look, wide-eyed, at Cameron.

  “There was a robotic sub,” he whispers quickly, “that we left just outside the cage, on the other side. Casey put your tracker on it.” He nods, as if he’s convincing himself she made it. “They’re not looking over here.”

  I want to believe him, but the beam from a boat cuts across the surface, and we all dive underneath for a moment. When I resurface, I expect them to make a new plan.

  “Climb,” Dom says.

  I have come this far. They have come this far with me. My muscles twitch in anticipation, because this is something I can do. And so I climb.

  This I do faster than either of them. I make it to the top and hook my legs over the other side, flattening myself against the netting, and see nothing but dark water, waiting to swallow me up.

  The boats cast their beams of light across the surface in a steady pattern. If light hits us, we are found. We need to get back into the water. Back under the water. I count the seconds in my head. The light moves in a steady, obvious pattern. Automated and predictable, but still, they need to move faster.

  The rope on my ankle tugs as I slip down the other side. The ocean is dark, except for the beams of light cutting across in the distance, heading this way. I wait for Dom and Cameron to come over, but they’re arguing as they climb.

  “I need to wait,” Cameron says, watching the water.

  “There’s not enough air,” Dom says. His voice cuts down to my stomach, or maybe that’s just the seawater. He’s holding something that looks like a walkie-talkie with a screen in one hand and his breathing device in the other. “Not for you to wait without being seen.” He points to the beams of light, stretching across the surface of the water periodically. “Not enough for both of you.” Cameron nods, like of course he knew that. Of course he does.

  He slips down the rest of the steel, not worried about drowning when he hits the water again. He comes back up beside me.

  He looks like he’s about to throw up.

  He looks like he’s about to break down.

  “She’ll make it,” I say. He didn’t see the way she grabbed my arm and ran with single-minded focus. Or the way she did my hair, or switched our clothes. She’s going to make it.

  “Of course she’ll make it,” he says. And then he readjusts his mask, grabs on to a slack of the rope, and disappears under the surface again.

  For a second I wonder whether I’m expected to know how to swim now. Or whether I’ll be dragged by the rope. I see a beam of light coming, and I dip under the surface.

  Swimming feels like it should be easy. I push off from the cage, and I move my arms like I felt Cameron doing, and I kick my legs like he did, but mostly I’m just moving water around. And sinking.

  Then I feel his hand on my arm as he pulls me toward him, as he hooks my arm around his shoulder, and we start moving.

  We keep a slow pace—I don’t know how we know where we’re going, or how we’re going to get there with the air we have, but I don’t have any more options. Eventually Cameron stops, grasping a rope that’s tethered to a buoy, still under the water. I grip on to the rope as both of them follow it down, disappearing from my vision. I close my eyes. I am alone in the ocean, underwater. I count to ten, and I imagine shadows, shapes, circling me. Thirty seconds, and the water grows colder. Forty-nine … I jump when someone grabs my hand, pushing fresh equipment toward me. I open my eyes and the shadows disappear. Cameron holds his thumb up and keeps it that way, like he’s asking me. I do the same, mirroring his movement, and he nods.

  READY? YES.

  We switch out our tanks, leaving one behind for Casey, and we start moving again.

  I realize that’s what Dom has in his hand. A GPS, leading us on a marked trail that they had set up previously. Like a path with lights along the way. We stop at two more points, swim some more, but by this point I am numb past the point of shaking. I no long worry about being found. Being captured. I no longer worry about if we will … if we will … I breathe through the mouthpiece, and the endless ocean falls away.

  Duérmete, mi niña, duérmete, mi amor …

  The water shifts. It moves us. It pushes at us more and then pulls, in a rhythm. I open my eyes to darkness just as we are thrust against it. A darkness that is real and solid.

  A wall.

  I push off Cameron’s back. I am at the end of something. Or the start of something. An edge. I start clawing my nails at it, and one breaks off on the brick as I slide farther down. My eyes burn, even through the mask, as if I’m staring at the sun and trying not to blink.

  Someone pulls at my arm—I can’t feel it, only the pressure—and leads me toward a metal pipe. He pushes me inside first. It’s still full of water, and it’s pitch black, but it doesn’t matter that I can’t swim now—there’s barely enough room for me. My hands and feet push at the narrow, curved sides, propelling me along the steady incli
ne.

  I start to breathe too fast, and I imagine the air running lower, running out, and I understand in a way I can feel that this is it: this is the last air, and this is the last step, and this pipe leads to something I want desperately.

  I feel something other than water—the absence of water—on my back, and I clamber onto my knees. I pull the mask from my face and shake the tank off my back and suck in air. Humid, dank air, but air. Dom says, “Don’t leave this behind,” so I pick it back up and crawl onward. “You, too, Cameron.”

  “Why not? They know who I am,” Cameron says.

  “They know who she is,” he corrects, his voice deliberately quiet, but it still echoes through the tunnel. “They don’t know where we’ve been. They don’t know anything but your face so far, if that. Don’t give them anything more. They don’t know who you are.”

  Cameron laughs. “What I am is a dead man walking.”

  But he’s wrong. In fact, what we are right now, crawling through a pipe under the earth somewhere, is the exact opposite of dead.

  The pipe ends, and the room opens up. I see light filtering from somewhere beyond. And I hear water dripping, echoing, along with our movements. There’s stagnant water in a pool in the middle of the room, and we stand, silent, on the concrete ridge over top. There are clothes, in piles, shoved against the walls, curving upward. Clean, dry clothes. Cameron doesn’t speak as he pushes one pile my way with his foot. I’m wobbly on my legs, and my entire body is shaking, so I press my hand against the wall to steady myself as I undress.

  When I pull the wet shirt over my head, the bandage comes with it, and I let out a sound. The wound starts bleeding again, dripping down my stomach, and I wipe it away quickly, hoping nobody else notices.

  I look over my shoulder. Dom, in the wet suit, is facing the pipe we came through, pulling the black material down his chest. Cameron stands halfway between us, and he’s watching me. He walks closer, half-changed, and whispers, “Casey will take care of it. Soon as she’s back.”

  I nod and instinctively look at the untouched pile of clothes against the wall. Cameron finishes changing with his back to me. It’s funny, I think, the things people are supposed to keep hidden about themselves.

  My entire life has been on display since forever.

  “I’ll wait here for Casey,” Cameron says, speaking across the room. Dom turns around, his mask gone, and steps out of the shadow. He shakes out his hair, and I freeze. His mouth twitches when he sees that I see.

  I try to grasp my bearings. To grasp the upper hand. But I feel instead as if I’m falling over the edge of the cliff again. I try to mimic his condescending gaze. I weigh the words before I speak them, so that I am sure of them. “Hello, Ellis,” I say. Emphasis on the lie he fed me to hide my shock.

  “Always the skeptic,” he says, with a sad smile. He sticks his hand out, as if I would consider taking it. “Dominic Ellis,” he says. “Did you miss me?”

  I sense, but do not see, that Cameron is stepping closer. I wonder if he’s as confused as I am. If he knows that I know this man. Knew this man. That he was a guard and I liked him. That he snuck into my room and we talked. And then, when I realized he wasn’t there for me, I did something more, something worse.

  Dominic Ellis’s crooked grin turns into a full-on smile, and my heart plummets into my stomach, ruining that fleeting feeling of freedom. And I realize that I have made a terrible mistake.

  Chapter 5

  The saddest thing about this moment, as I finish dressing myself, as Cameron watches Dominic Ellis watching me, is that when he says those words, I realize I do, in a way. I did miss him. I missed the very idea of him—that there could be an ally in a prison, that he could see through the thing that I am portrayed to be to the person I am instead. When he showed up last year, he seemed closest to me in age, though I know he must’ve been at least eighteen. Maybe it was the way he didn’t distance himself, lacking the formality, or the way he smiled when he thought no one was looking—but it’s true, I missed him.

  I miss the person I thought he was for the first three weeks of his assignment. I miss the guard I thought I knew, even though it was all a lie.

  But he was not there to help me then, and he is not here to help me now. I am sure of it.

  I need to get out of this sewer. Now.

  “Dominic,” I say, leaving off the Ellis, the part that makes it seem as if he didn’t lie, not entirely. “Nice to meet you,” I say, and I grit my teeth together and force my lips to smile.

  He laughs, which sounds strange in this place full of stale, standing water. “Sweetheart, I’m pretty sure we met good and official in your room last year.”

  Cameron looks at me, and heat rises to my cheeks, even though there should be no reason for that to happen. I want to defend myself. To tell the truth. But I don’t yet know this person, and I have to remind myself of that. Because there’s something odd about clinging to someone’s back for several hours while you escape from the only place you’ve ever known—it tricks my mind into thinking that I do know him, or that he knows me, but that is not the case.

  Dominic Ellis wanted something from me, and now he has me. Facts are weapons. So is silence. Right now, the silence lingers dangerously throughout the room, but I can’t grasp onto its source. Whether it’s Dominic. Whether it’s Cameron. Whether it’s me.

  “I’m ready,” I say when the tension starts to feel dangerous. If Dominic expected something more from me, some apology, some begging, then he has made a mistake. “Where to?”

  “What?” he asks. “No thank you?”

  My gaze slides away from his, because I’m remembering the Ellis I knew before. He comes closer, reaches out like he’s about to touch me. I try to keep the discomfort off my face, but he must notice because he grimaces, his hand hovering beside my arm. “You’re welcome, Alina.”

  “You’re wasting time,” Cameron says, and Dominic gives him this look that makes me truly understand the dynamics of this group. “I mean,” he starts again, “she needs to move. And I need to wait for Casey.”

  Dominic tilts his head to the side. “You’re not waiting for Casey.”

  “I’m not doing anything until—”

  “I am fully aware of what you will and will not do for her. Which is exactly why I will wait for her. And why you will escort the lovely Ms. Chase to Point B. You will go straight there. You will get her there, and you will keep her there, until I arrive—as a function of this contract. Do you understand?”

  Cameron doesn’t look much younger than Dominic. But he nods before looking away.

  “And,” Dominic adds, “you will not listen to a word she speaks. Are we clear?”

  I slide my feet into the sneakers that they have left for me, but there’s a gap between my heel and the back of the shoe. “Sorry,” Dominic says, like he didn’t just talk about me to Cameron as if I were a thing instead of a person. “We didn’t know your size.”

  I misjudged him. I hate that I misjudged him.

  I hate most of all that he’s the one who freed me.

  Cameron and I stuff our wet clothes into a plastic bag, which he then places inside a canvas bag that he slings over his shoulder and across his chest. He looks instantaneously carefree, like the kids on TV shows who talk effortlessly, who smile effortlessly, who laugh effortlessly.

  He gestures toward a metal ladder, and I step onto the first rung. “It’s an alley,” he says. “And the street connected to it will be very busy this time of night. We’re going to walk in plain sight. We’re going to blend in, in plain sight. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I say, and I pull myself up the rungs of the ladder. It sounds like a horrible plan. I try to imagine eyes skimming over me, but I can’t picture it. I see the press, eyes fixed. I see the guards, who watch me without making eye contact. If they look away, it’s for a reason.

  And I feel Dominic Ellis’s eyes following me, rung by rung, as I climb.

  The walls around us narrow until
I can’t see Dominic and he can’t see me, and our breathing and our steps echo off the brick walls. There’s a metal circle above me, and I hear the sound of muffled screaming—or maybe laughter—carrying through.

  Cameron touches my calf briefly before speaking. “They won’t know you,” he whispers. “They’re done with work or school, and they’re out—they aren’t watching the news.”

  The idea seems so foreign, that there’s this world that exists without me, and yet even as I think it, I know that it’s entirely egotistical and selfish of me. But in my world, on my island, there does not exist a time when I am not at the center, when I am not the axis.

  Cameron climbs up the other side of the ladder, his feet carefully avoiding my feet. His hands avoiding my hands. I have my elbows hooked over the final rung, but I’m frozen. “But look at us,” I say. Meaning our wet hair, our wrinkled fingers, our chattering teeth.

  “People only look,” he says, his hands flat against the metal circle, twisting it gently, “if you give them a reason to.” He tests the lid, which gives easily, and a rush of fresh air flows in before he sets it back down again. “We’re going to be together. Just two people walking home.” Then he nods at me, gives my elbow a squeeze, and I flinch. “Ready?”

  But he doesn’t wait for me to answer, probably because he knows that I am not. Probably because he remembers how he had to push me over the edge of the cliff. Possibly, but I’m not sure how, he understands how overwhelming and terrifying that big expanse of freedom actually is when you get there.

  Cameron pushes the lid and lifts himself effortlessly out. He reaches his hand down for me—just one hand, one person, one step—and I take it. YES.

  And then, before I can process the magnitude of this moment, I am out. We’re in a narrow street and there are people walking, lots of people walking, by the entrance to this alley. Cameron kicks the lid back in place, and the sound of metal on metal makes someone pause. Makes someone look.

  His hands are on my waist, and every muscle in my body freezes. Then they twitch with adrenaline again, waiting for the signal to run, but instead he comes closer, and I feel the brick wall against my back, and his body pressed close to mine, and I’m trying to move because there’s too much all at once, but there’s nothing but an unforgiving wall. I feel his breath in my ear as he says, “It would help if you pretended to like this.”