Soulprint

by Megan Miranda

  “I’m going to see if Casey needs help,” he says, staring at the locker room door. “Do you want to come?”

  “You go,” I say. “I want a shower. I want to put on a ridiculous uniform.”

  He smiles, and my heart stops. “Okay,” he says, and then he leaves me. He leaves, and I am frozen. He didn’t even pause, didn’t ask me not to leave, didn’t warn me or threaten me. He just left me, with an open window, alone. He left me, with the cameras off and at least twenty different exit possibilities. He left me, trusting me to be here when he returns.

  I walk to the showers. And after I’m clean, I find the stash of uniforms, and I change into a softball uniform—long shorts, short-sleeved, soft shirt, a hat I tuck my hair through, creating a ponytail. I’m barefoot, and I stay that way. No need for more blisters.

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror—how common I look. This is the life I didn’t have. The girl with no past, with the normal life, going through high school.

  I think of Casey and Cameron somewhere far away in the building. I check the gym office, and I see Casey’s blood on the carpet. I take my time scrubbing it out. I look up at the open window and check the floor for any pieces of glass left behind, but it appears that someone has already cleared them up.

  I wipe down the computer and anything else I have touched with another shirt, like Cameron has taught me.

  And after, I go to find them.

  Chapter 17

  I remember cameron’s directions—left out of the cafeteria, right at the end of the hall. School is not how I pictured, or maybe it’s different when it’s completely empty. It’s more like how I imagine an empty jail, or some asylum, and everything about me echoes still. Lockers line the walls, and the wooden classroom doors are shut and closed off. There’s a window in the center of each door, and the classrooms beyond look sterile and dusty. I can hear my own breathing, my own heartbeat. There’s no one watching me. No one following my signal from a tracker. No one balancing me on a tightrope. I don’t hear Cameron or Casey. I don’t hear anything. I move faster, anxious to not be alone anymore.

  I see them through the window of the door, which they’ve kept closed. But it’s the only classroom with a light on right now. Casey’s hands fly across the keyboard, and she pauses to adjust the cables she has running from the hard drives, in some sort of maze, to the computer. Cameron sits at the desk beside her, leaning forward with his head resting in his hand, his eyes skimming his own computer screen.

  It’s so silent, I’m scared to break it.

  I raise my finger and tap gently on the glass. They both still jump, startled to see me there. I raise my hand, and their faces relax. Casey tilts her head to the side and grins. I know what I look like—someone unlike myself. Casey waves me in.

  She looks at Cameron as I enter the room. “You left her just wandering the school?”

  “No, I was taking a shower. Now I’m done taking a shower,” I say.

  I see his eyes flick over me quickly and go back to his computer. He keeps his gaze fixed on the screen. I walk behind Cameron and look over his shoulder as Casey goes back to her work. He’s reading articles about me. About us. “What do they say?” I ask.

  He closes the article before I have a chance to read further. “They can say anything they want. You know that, right?”

  “I know that.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “I know.” God, what must they be saying about me?

  But he doesn’t show me that article. Instead, he clicks on another tab, pulling up a different article, this one detailing the events of our escape—as much as they’ve figured out, at least.

  He pushes the chair beside him out with his foot, and when I sit down, he hooks his ankle around the chair leg and drags it closer, so we’re sharing the same space.

  The article has a lot of the escape details right, though they’re missing Dominic completely. But they’ve found the sets of breathing equipment. They know there was a fourth person, but if they have any guesses, they’re not being reported. Honestly, I’m not sure whether it’s better or worse that they don’t know. They’ve traced us as far as the sewer, and then after that we all but disappear. There’ve been reported sightings all along the East Coast, and at bus stops and gas stations all throughout the country. If Dominic has managed to reach civilization by now, it doesn’t appear he has turned us in. “We’re like ghosts,” Cameron says.

  “Except ghosts that have to stay hidden,” I say.

  The article also details the increased police presence, the helicopters perpetually scanning any region with reported sightings. I haven’t heard any helicopters flying overhead recently—maybe we’re really safe here. Or maybe it’s just the insulation of the building. Part of me doesn’t want to find out.

  The other articles we read are about what I might potentially do once I’m out. Whether June has left me instructions somehow. Whether there’s a second shadow-database. Whether I will continue what June and Liam started. Even if the only thing June left for me is the information she might’ve copied seventeen years ago, that’s a lot I could still do damage with. The article is open for comments at the bottom, and the first commenter manages to sum this all up with the following rather ominous line: What she might do, one can only guess; where she might go, one can only dream. About as vague and factless as the article itself.

  A-plus reporting right there.

  “Cameron, come here,” Casey says. He leaves me at the screen, and I quickly pull up the recent Internet history, searching for the article he didn’t want me to see. I want to know what they’re saying about me. All of it. I pull up the article and quickly scan the words, but it’s not about me at all. It’s about him and Casey and their missing sister, Ava. It’s about how Casey attended a specialized school—how promising she was—while Cameron and Ava remained home, raised primarily by their grandmother until she passed away, and then by the mother he never speaks about. It mentions that Cameron spent time in a juvenile detention center for auto theft.

  The article paints Cameron as a criminal, and Casey as a genius, and Ava as absolutely nothing—a figment of our imagination. A girl who is gone, and is therefore irrelevant now.

  According to the article, Cameron got out after serving three months, and he reported Ava missing soon after. At which point Casey dropped out of school, and I guess that’s when Cameron went into hiding, taking Casey with him this time. And for what? For this?

  “Come see, Alina,” Cameron says, and I close the window and plaster a blank look across my face as I approach.

  Numbers scroll across the screen, in lines grouped in three or four, like the printouts in the hideaway underground. Some are starred, just like in the printouts. “Spreadsheets of numbers, that’s the only thing on this one.” She switches hard drives and pulls up the next files. She selects the first one, and it’s a science journal, dated over twenty years ago: “Generational Linkage of Violent Criminal History in Souls.”

  My eyes skim the article. I recognize the material, though I’ve never read the original article. It’s the data, and the statistical analysis, the grant funding, the science. I take in as much as I can before Casey closes the document. She opens the next, and it’s an unrelated paper: “Genetic Influences versus Soul Influences: A Study of DNA and the Soul.”

  Every file here is a scientific article: “The Role of the Soul in Sociopaths; Correlation of Areas of Extreme Giftedness and the Soul.” Casey opens each article, quickly scans it, and moves on to the next. On the last one, my eyes skim the authors, and I see: Ivory Street.

  I grip the edge of the table. “Go back,” I say. “Open the last article again.” She opens the file before, and there she is, right under the title. I point out her name in the list of authors.

  “Holy shit,” Cameron says. “Ivory Street.”

  We scan through every one, and her name is in every author list. “Why did June have this?” Casey asks. “Do you think that b
ecause this Ivory Street person conducted this study, she had access to the database?” Casey gets so excited, she pushes her chair back from the desk. She starts talking with her hands. “Someone had to have access, right? To do the study, somebody needs access. Do you think June got access from her? Maybe she didn’t just break in.”

  I look at the name on the screen, and I wonder. Maybe it’s easier to break a person than to break a code.

  I don’t know, but Casey’s eyes are wide and hopeful. There’s a pattern here, and I need to find it. There are similarities within the documents that my mind trips over as I skim through them. “Give me some paper,” I say, nudging Casey out of her seat.

  “Um,” she says, but she doesn’t object. She pulls a ream from the nearby printer. I don’t know what I’m doing exactly, but something’s taken over me. Like June, stumbling upon this herself. I picture her doing this very same thing. I’m closer. I’m close. I can feel it.

  “Okay, I guess, um, you do whatever it is you’re doing … and I’m going to find this Ivory Street.”

  Cameron pulls up a chair and props his feet on the bottom of my own. “What are we looking for?” he asks, his voice low, like he’s in on a secret.

  “Honestly? I don’t know,” I say. “Get me a pen. Or a pencil. I need one.”

  He pulls out the drawer beside me and shows me the collection. “Oh.” I pull one off the top and get back to work.

  I’m scanning the documents, jotting down notes for myself—author names, funding sources, data analysis programs, population samples—when Cameron taps the brim of my hat with his finger.

  I’m jarred back to reality, but at first my eyes don’t leave the screen.

  “So, question,” he says. “And it’s kind of important. You’re left-handed?”

  I stop writing. I put the pen in my left hand down. “Not exactly.”

  “I’m confused. I thought these papers”—he gestured toward the screen—“I thought that science proved that left- and right-handedness were almost completely tied to the soul. And June was right-handed, if I’m remembering correctly.”

  “Just because I’m right-handed doesn’t mean I have to use my right hand.” I flex my fingers, transfer the pen to the other side, where it does feel easier, and say, “When I was ten, I started pretending that I didn’t have a right hand. Now it’s habit.”

  “When you were ten?”

  “Yeah. When I realized my whole life was bullshit. That I was stuck. That it was … a prison. So I thought if I could convince them I wasn’t June, that they were wrong, they’d let me out. To my ten-year-old brain, this made sense. If science says it’s passed down, and if I’m not right-handed, then I can’t be her, right?”

  He grins and taps the brim of my hat again, and I look away, back to the screen. “It’s pathetic, I know. I was ten.”

  He’s silent for a long time, and I’ve gone back to working by the time he responds. “It’s not pathetic,” he says. Cameron pushes his chair back, the legs squeaking against the linoleum. “I’m going back to the gym. Hungry.”

  Casey raises her hand as he passes but doesn’t make eye contact.

  Eventually, I decide to print out the articles and bring them back to the gym, where I can spread them out and analyze them a little better. And eat at the same time.

  “Hey,” Casey says, as I’m leaving the room. “Save me dinner.”

  “If by dinner you mean cereal, that won’t be a problem.”

  “By the way,” she says, the door half-closed. “Nice outfit.”

  I don’t see Cameron anywhere when I get back to the gym, so I pull one of the blue mats onto the floor and spread the articles around, lying on my stomach, propped up on my elbows between them. I should’ve printed off the other hard drive, the one with the information June kept in the hideaway, with all the numbers, but that would’ve taken far too long. Besides, sorting all of that … that’s the kind of stuff you use a computer for. I’ll ask Casey to help with that later. But this is the kind of stuff you need your own brain for.

  I don’t like being in this empty gym, I don’t like this feeling of being alone, that anything can happen to me and nobody would know, but this information is like a comfort to me. Like June is here with me, sharing it. Pointing things out. Her ideas, her thoughts, twisting their way into mine.

  I read the articles in full. The famous study, reduced to numbers and math. To get the right data—a sample of uninfluenced human data—they used markers for other aspects correlated to criminal activity. For instance, they only studied souls that remained the same sex from generation to generation, because most violent crime was committed by men. They didn’t want the fact that a man’s soul later became a woman’s soul to influence the data, since one had a higher chance of violent criminal activity to begin with. They also grouped by souls born from generation to generation with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, living in areas with similar crime statistics. So all that was left was a subset of souls with little variation from generation to generation, as controlled an experiment as a human soul could be, I suppose.

  The resulting evidence was purely empirical, but it’s presented with graphs and equations and a concluding statement about the calculated correlation between violent criminal activity and the soul in the samples they studied: 0.8.

  Damning.

  When I’m done reading several of the other articles in detail, I flip onto my back with my eyes closed and let June’s voice tell me what we know: the data subsets, the publishing journal, the grants received, the tagged markers, which must correlate with the starred data on the spreadsheets. Her words fill my head until they start to make sense, coming together as something I can almost grasp on to. Like I can see the connection, but not what it’s connecting.

  I hear steps, and I know it’s Cameron the same way I know things belong to June. I’ve been studying him without realizing it. I know his walk. His pace. His looks. The mat underneath me shifts with his weight, but I don’t know what will happen when it’s just the two of us here on the blue mat and I open my eyes. I’m not sure what I’ll say. What I’ll do. I have not had time to think it all through.

  “You up?” he asks, but he asks it so softly, I’m not sure if he expects me to answer, to have heard.

  I am thinking of all the different incarnations of Cameron I have been imagining, wondering which one is the closest to the truth. But maybe this is the only one that matters. Right now, this is the real one.

  I open my eyes, turning my head toward him, but his eyes are drifting over my shirt, down my arms, down my legs, to my toes. And I feel a rush of something—like I am more naked, fully clothed, than when he cut the tracker from my rib. I wiggle my toes, and his gaze drifts back up quickly, and he sees me looking.

  He stands abruptly and says, “Casey’s probably on her way back by now.” Like that’s a legitimate reason for him to stand. To move away.

  “It’s not a crime to sit here,” I say. “I mean, not that that would stop you …”

  He sits back down. “Are you making criminal jokes now? Is that what’s happening here?”

  I meet his eyes, and I summon every ounce of bravery I possess to the surface. “I don’t know what’s happening here.”

  He nods so subtly I only see it because I am currently hyperfocused on everything Cameron. “About earlier,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable. I thought you were used to people seeing you. Looking at you. You told me that once, and I just thought …”

  “I’m not used to people looking at me like that,” I say, pushing myself up on my elbows. It comes out accusing, but I don’t mean it to.

  He winces, but he doesn’t deny it. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  God, it’s impossible to say what I mean, to even put it into words. I feel like we’re having a conversation with the things we don’t say instead, and the only thing he’s capable of saying is I’m sorry.

  But I don’t want to forgive him for it. It’s no
t something I want him to take back. “I just said I’m not used to it. That’s all.” It made me feel out of control again. Out of my element. Like I wasn’t in charge, didn’t have time to weigh everything and think about what to say, what to do.

  He plays with the back of my ponytail for a second, as if he’s testing something, and I stay perfectly still until he lets it drop.

  I don’t know whether it’s normal for my heart to beat so fast it feels like it’s tripping over itself.

  I don’t know whether it’s normal to both want and fear a kiss. For the anticipation to be both crippling and thrilling. He’s close enough to do it, but he hasn’t moved. Like he’s waiting for some sign from me.

  I think back to every movie I’ve seen, every television show, every book I’ve read. I turn to look at him, I drop my head slightly to the side, I lean, just an inch, toward him. But he doesn’t do anything. Doesn’t come closer or bring his hand to my face or anything. I know my face is red now, which makes me even more embarrassed, which makes me ever redder, I’m sure. I lean back that one inch, and I straighten my head. I look away.

  “Can I ask you something?” he asks. But he doesn’t wait for me to answer. He puts a hand gently under my chin, guiding me to look at him. “What Dominic said out in the woods—about June and Liam, and how they would die for each other, and how that kind of love lasts beyond just one life. Do you think that’s true?”

  “No,” I say. “Remember the whole ‘he’s a psychopath’ thing?”

  “Yeah, but what if you’d met him somewhere else. If you weren’t locked up. If he wasn’t trying to use you for something.” He drops his hand from my face and looks away. “You’re drawn to him, aren’t you? You were at one point, anyway. And I’ve seen the way he looks at you sometimes. I think it would be easier for him if he didn’t care, but he does. And so do you.”