Soulprint

by Megan Miranda

  He turns to me, tilts his head to the side, and says, “But I’m not.” He holds my gaze as I lie on the cot, and I let his words sink in. But I’m not.

  “There,” Dominic says. Casey and Cameron crowd around the computer screen, and I can’t see anything from this cot. “What the hell?” Dominic says.

  “What?” I ask, pushing myself onto my elbows.

  Dominic spins in his chair, narrows his eyes at me as if I have somehow done something to him. “It’s just change. Goddamn pennies.”

  Which makes me even sadder. That June felt the need to leave something to me, first of all, and that this was all she had left.

  “Where is the money?” Dominic yells, as if I might know. Sure, June and Liam allegedly took in a lot of cash through the blackmail, but who knows what she did with it for the year and a half she was in hiding? Maybe she needed it. Maybe she gave it away. I let the sliver of hope work its way in that maybe she gave it back.

  “Maybe Liam had it,” I say, but Dominic rolls his eyes. I know, June was said to take off with it after his death, because none was found with him, but who knows if that was true.

  “What’s the point?” he asks, pointing at the screen. “What’s the goddamn point? She even went through the trouble to make two deposits. Two. Pointless. Deposits.”

  I stand then, even though I feel the pressure drop from my head. I feel dizzy, but the screen beyond Dominic’s head sharpens into focus. “Thirty-five dollars and thirty-one cents,” he says. “Oh, look, another eighty-three. Wow.”

  “83.65,” I say, because I see something he does not. I see the screen of the GPS as we were hiking—the numbers and decimals—and I feel someone whispering to me, someone real. It’s the closest to June that I’ve ever been, right here, staring at those numbers. She’s telling me something. Something only I see in this moment.

  No, I’m not the only one who sees. Cameron’s eyes are soft and focused, and he slides them over to me for a second. He sees it too. I shake my head at him, just the barest shake. But Cameron leans forward and puts his finger on the screen. He seems to change his mind, because he pulls back and says, “Dinner on June tonight?”

  But not even Casey laughs.

  I don’t know what I’ve done to earn his silence, and I’m not sure if I trust it either, but I’ll take it.

  Because those numbers on the screen, they’re coordinates. Put a negative sign before the second number, and it looks a lot like the coordinates here. The money doesn’t mean anything.

  It’s a location.

  June is trying to show me something.

  I close my eyes and commit them to memory, the only place that has ever been safe for me. I close my eyes and recite them in a song, in the way I imagine my mother’s cadence, which is how I commit everything to memory. But this time, it doesn’t work. This time, I see June’s mouth, close to my ear, reciting the numbers. Her white teeth and full lips with the hint of a smile, enunciating them with perfection: 35.31 –83.65, 35.31 –83.65, 35.31 –83.65.

  It works out the same. I know I won’t forget.

  Dominic kicks the machine, and Casey jumps. And I remember this version of him on the island as well. How his confidence, his entire demeanor, became unhinged when things did not go his way. I heard him after he recovered, trying to explain it all away while I was locked in the next room. I heard him kicking the furniture, tossing things to the ground, throwing out accusations that couldn’t hold water. I refused to give any sort of statement at all, which made him even angrier.

  I didn’t go his way.

  I didn’t then, and I won’t now.

  The guards who cycle through are in a division of the National Guard, and most of them are fairly young. It’s not a desirable position—twenty-eight days in, twenty-four-hour responsibility, and they must hold me on a tightrope—I am a human being, not a prisoner, but one who must be balanced and assessed and held at bay but not restrained. I am a portion of their training. I am a goddamn test.

  And Dominic Ellis flunked the test.

  He was too cocky. Too sure of himself. Too sure of me.

  I was those things, too. But I was not the one being tested.

  Now, I’m being tested. Not by someone else, but this is it. This is the only test that matters. Fail, and my only chance is gone. Will it be another seventeen years before I have another?

  Dominic kicks the machine once more, but the machine doesn’t budge. The vials of test tubes on the table beside him rattle and clang against one another when he leans on it to regain his composure. Casey’s eyes are wide, and so are Cameron’s, and he looks at her and nods his head toward the door.

  “Nothing changes,” Dominic says as they walk away. He smiles at me. “She hid it,” he says. “She hid the money, just like she hid the clues to the database. The answers are in you, Alina. You’re going to tell me everything.”

  I pretend to be scared—only I find I don’t have to pretend at all—and I back into the table with the test tubes as he kicks it once more. My hand moves across the table behind me, the lone beaker falling to the floor and shattering, but Dom doesn’t notice over the sound of the test tubes rattling around.

  “I don’t know anything,” I say.

  “That’s what you think,” he says.

  The last time we were in a room alone, I had the upper hand. There was a perceived safety, that nothing bad could truly happen to me. That island kept me safe, just like it promised to. There’s no one to protect me here. Only myself, and I don’t know if I am enough.

  I slide to the floor, my back against the machine, like I’m terrified. His face twists and he steps back.

  “Get up,” he says, backing away toward the door. He holds his hands up, palm out, toward me. “I’m not someone to fear, Alina.”

  I grope around behind me until I find the shards of glass from the beaker. I keep my hands clenched into fists as I push myself to standing, and I stick them inside my pocket and try not to move more than necessary until I can store them someplace safer.

  Until I need it.

  Dominic waits in the entrance, and he puts his hand on my back as I pass. I hold my breath until I’m out of his reach. I feel a sharp point against my leg, and my heart beats wildly.

  Now I have glass.

  Casey is crouched in front of a television—or maybe it’s a computer screen—that she’s setting up in the main room. She powers it up and watches the black screen as Cameron sprawls on the brown couch that looks like it’s coated in a layer of dust.

  She bites her lip and feeds a cable from the monitor into the back room, and a woman’s face fills the screen. She’s talking to us through the camera and there’s a red bar at the bottom with a phone number. The screen flashes to a picture of me. Pictures of me. Then back to her.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Cameron says. “Sound!”

  “Working on it!” Casey yells back.

  Dominic sits beside Cameron and leans closer to the screen, as if he’s trying to read her lips. And then sound comes blaring from the speakers, and all of us jump at once. It’s too loud, but nobody seems to care, because the woman is talking about me. About us.

  “—believed to be traveling with nineteen-year-old Casey London.” The screen flashes to Casey’s guard photo with her false identity, but then to another picture from another time and place. One that was obviously taken by her friends or her family. One handed over, along with her identity.

  “Damn it,” Cameron whispers, and Casey has frozen beside me, standing behind the couch. They’re zooming in on her face now, but not before I see the person beside her. It’s Cameron, off to the side, not even realizing he’s been caught in the frame, and he’s talking to someone who looks just like Casey, but with heavier makeup and longer hair. Cameron seems younger, a little thinner. The camera zooms further, and they disappear from the edges of the screen. Casey is holding a glass plaque of some sort, smiling wryly at the camera.

  “It’s not yet known,” the woman on the scr
een continues, “what their connection is. Only that Casey London is a talented computer programmer who unexpectedly, according to her teachers, dropped out of school last year after the disappearance and presumed death of her twin sister, Ava London, despite having a full scholarship to nearly any college of her choosing.” I cast a quick glance at Casey, but she’s riveted to the screen, her fingers digging into the back of the couch.

  “It’s unclear how she assumed a new identity, but she joined the National Guard six months ago as Elizabeth Lorenzo. We haven’t been able to contact family yet for comment.”

  The air in the room is heavy with silence. With Casey’s secrets. She pushes off the back of the couch and forces a laugh. “Foiled by academic awards. The irony.”

  “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Cameron says, and Dominic shushes them both with a wave of his hand.

  The number flashes on the bottom of the screen again. “Once again, law enforcement is currently offering a one-million-dollar reward for any information that leads to the capture of Alina Chase. Consider her dangerous if seen, and call this number immediately.”

  “Whoa,” Cameron says.

  Casey walks over and fidgets with the controls, turning the volume back to normal levels.

  “Well,” Cameron says, “I guess we know exactly what she’s worth now.”

  Dominic leans back against the couch. “They don’t want you out here for a reason, Alina. If it’s worth a lot to them, it’s worth a lot to us. Tell us everything.” He looks at the number on the screen, narrows his eyes back at me, and says, “Don’t tempt me, Alina.”

  Chapter 10

  I don’t know what Dominic expects me to say—what they all expect me to say. Oh, hey, I know where the shadow-database is hidden. Or I know how June and Liam hacked inside, no problem. I was convinced the rumors were bullshit, but now I’m not entirely sure. I think of the coordinates. Even if it were possible, that information is poison. It destroyed my last life. I’m not going to let it destroy this one.

  “I’ve been contained my entire life, how could I possibly know anything?” And I’m also growing painfully irritated. Even though I realize they haven’t freed me for some altruistic reason, I still wanted it to be about me. Me, and not June.

  “Has anyone tried to contact you?” he asks.

  “Other than you, no,” I say immediately.

  “Think,” he says, but I roll my eyes at him and catch Cameron grinning. Dominic thinks I haven’t been looking for the last seven years? That I haven’t looked for patterns in the guards’ speech, in news programs, in the way my chicken was cut and positioned on the plate? That I haven’t counted the time between the lights turning on and off in my own room, that I haven’t spent nights awake watching the lights I could see in the distance? How else does he think I caught his codes? I was looking for them. I was always looking.

  “June must’ve left pieces of information with different people. They must’ve been instructed to pass it along to you somehow,” Dom says.

  “How were they supposed to know who June became?” Casey asks. “I’m sure June didn’t think she’d be sought out and contained for her entire life. Her identity wouldn’t be public information.”

  Dominic doesn’t want to hear it. He flicks his hand through the air, as if he can push the question aside. “It was her bargaining chip,” he says. “June set it up, and she let them know. Kind of like blackmail. If you kill me, I’ll come back and haunt you.”

  Cameron says, “Looks like she was bluffing.”

  Dominic’s face pulls into a scowl. “June didn’t bluff.”

  Maybe not, but the only one she’s haunting is me.

  All these people believe they know June—what she would do, what she wouldn’t do. I know her better than anyone. Better than everyone. I’ve spent my life learning about her, hearing about her, trying to crack through to the truth.

  “That guard who tried to kidnap you when you were a kid. Did she tell you anything?” Dominic asks.

  “She wasn’t trying to kidnap me, she was trying to free me,” I yell, and Cameron looks surprised by my outburst. “Unlike you,” I add.

  Dominic comes closer. “Sometimes you act older than your age, and sometimes you act like a child still. This? This is how you get freedom. What do you think happens the second you show your face out there?” He gestures into the wilderness, or maybe somewhere beyond. “You’re Alina Chase, and I’m sorry to say that you cannot actually be anything you want. We all have to play the hand we’re dealt. You’ve got a good hand. Use it.”

  He reminds me of someone, the way he speaks, so sure of his words and the meaning behind them. And then I realize: June. He reminds me of June. How she spoke those words with such conviction because she believed them. Right or wrong, she believed.

  He should really already know this story, anyway. I’m sure this information is part of their training. The second attempt on my life, before it was ruled an accident. Casey must have heard it as well when she joined the guard. I have nothing to lose by telling him again.

  “Genevieve. Just a guard,” I say, in case Cameron doesn’t know. “She didn’t tell me anything.”

  “Are you sure?” Cameron asks. I’m surprised he’s the one who asks. And for a moment, I am not anymore. He does that to me, makes me question what I know of myself. Makes me not trust my instincts. He makes me nervous, more than Dom does, and Dom has the power to hold me and keep me.

  “I was ten. How should I remember?” But while that may be true, it’s also true that I do remember all of it. When day after day is so much the same, the different takes on life, a string of individual moments burned permanently into my memory, all on its own.

  Genevieve was probably my mother’s age, and for the two years she was stationed there, she was the closest thing I had to one. On four days, off three. I had another guard for the three days Genevieve was gone, but she was older and her hands were dry, and she always smelled like licorice. They had been screened rigorously—no connections to June or Liam, their families or mine—and their identities were kept private for their own safety and their families’ safety.

  Liam’s family blames June for his death. They are not on my side. June’s family has fled, disappeared, and wants nothing to do with me. Not that I blame them—it’s the safest option. I had two caretakers, but Genevieve was the only one who cared for me.

  I trusted her—and I gave her a letter when she was leaving for her days off, a letter to my mother. I asked her to get it to her, but she squeezed her eyes shut, crumpled it in her fist, and put it back in my own. “Tell her yourself,” she said, “when you’re dreaming.” Then she held me while I cried, and she sang me that lullaby, the one I like to imagine my mother singing to me instead.

  Three weeks later, she smuggled me out. I had no warning, but I trusted her. She wrapped something stiff and cold around my arms and across my ribs as I was getting dressed. At the time, I thought it was some sort of bulletproof vest, like I’d seen in the movies. But now I know it was probably to block the signal of the tracker. I remember it was dark, and her fingers were tight on my arm as she led me into the back of the delivery van, the engine already running. I remember she was dressed differently, and that her nervous energy transferred to me. She lifted a lid on a container, helped me inside, and before closing me in, she touched her finger to her forehead, her heart, and both shoulders, in a gesture I didn’t fully understand.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Duérmete, niña,” she said—sleep, girl—and the lid enclosed me in complete darkness.

  But we never made it past the bridge. The wheels started spinning harder as I heard the gears of the bridge being raised up ahead. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t orient what was happening, whether the van was hurtling through empty space or losing control on solid ground, and I’m not sure whether it was the motion, the disorientation, or the uncertainty of it all that made me so violently ill, but I now
cannot sit in a moving vehicle without that same feeling every time.

  The crunch of metal was loud and fast, and I felt the world becoming smaller, so it was just me with bags of trash and caved-in walls. I suppose I’m lucky, because the garbage cushioned me in, softened the blows as the container was tossed about in the back of the van.

  They pried me out, and they did it quickly, hands grabbing and assessing, sharp whispers that settle like fog in my memory. I wish I remembered some resistance from Genevieve or some bravery on my part, but I was sobbing, and Genevieve didn’t fight. I remember only the blurry vision of faceless people and the smell of gas and dirt as they ran me back inside.

  They were all gone the next day.

  I knew enough not to ask for Genevieve, but even when I looked up the incident years later, I was unable to find any reference to her—just an attempt on my life, a plot from the inside, leading to a change of protocol, and the threat neutralized. No follow-up.

  I looked up “duérmete” later, too, with the stinging hope that maybe it was a location and not just an order to sleep, but it turned out not to be a real place after all.

  Like my mother, Genevieve only exists in my imagination now.

  I feel a quick wave of anger, but then I push it away. My mother never speaks out. Never makes statements. I can find no trace of her on any Internet search, other than from our very notorious past. She has all but disappeared.

  I’m glad for her. I am.

  So I tell Dominic the story. I tell him all of it, about the letter I tried to send and her order to duérmete and the accident. And at the end I shrug and say, “Did they tell you about Genevieve? Is she in jail? Why don’t you ask her?”

  Casey and Cameron share a quick look, and Dom’s head tilts just the slightest bit to the side, and he examines me as if he’s trying to understand something. “I would, Alina. I would. But that woman is dead. They told us this story during our training. She died in the van, crushed from the impact. Don’t you remember?”

  But no.