Soulprint

by Megan Miranda

  He’s right, of course. Even if I can prove the study wrong—that we are not bound to past criminal nature—still, this information in the wrong hands is terrifying. What of the people who seek revenge? Nothing good can come from this information being public. This information is dangerous. Ivory was right: it’s power. In the wrong hands, it’s destruction.

  The door at the far end of the hall shakes as someone pulls against the lock. Dominic has made it into the building, and has followed us this far. Casey chokes on a sob, because she knows. We have to go.

  He takes a deep breath. “Now give me the gun,” he says.

  And suddenly I have this image: It’s Christmas Day, and it’s starting to snow …

  No. Not again. Not. Again.

  I have a grip on the bag, but Casey pulls it off my shoulder, hands him the gun, mumbling a string of curses under her breath, and she places it in his hand. She raises her eyes and says, “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

  He looks at her, nods slightly. Then he looks away. “Take everything,” he says to her. “Don’t leave it with me. And Casey? Be fast. Get what we came for, and then you and Alina get the hell out of here. Promise me.”

  She doesn’t say a thing, but her eyes say everything in the moment before she runs toward the door at the far end of the hall, where Dominic is not. She’s waiting for me, but her hand is already on the metal bar, ready to make a run for it. She’s crying without making a sound. She is so strong.

  Cameron turns to me, but I’m shaking, the fake tooth with the blade in the palm of my hand. Something that saved me. His freedom for mine. The whole world in a balance. The only weapon he has left, other than his fists, other than the empty gun, is this tiny blade.

  My freedom for his.

  “I’m sorry, Alina,” he says, as if this is somehow his fault.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  I kiss him for all I’m worth. “I’m sorry,” I whisper as I back away, the warmth from him fading quickly.

  He shakes his head. “It’s okay. This was all for nothing if he finds you.”

  And I think, It’s all for nothing if I leave you.

  And so I kiss him one last time, and I push the button on the blade, so it is now twice the length. I shut my eyes, and I lean my forehead against his, and I ask for strength. I contort my face into calm and brave before I open my eyes again. I hold up the blade, watch as his eyes go wide.

  “Try not to scream,” I say.

  Chapter 25

  “No,” he says, his hand around my wrist.

  “Run,” I say to Casey. “Run now. I’ll get it out of him, I promise.”

  I hear the door open, but it doesn’t close. She’s watching us both, and then she looks straight at me, straight into me and says, “I know you will.” The door closes, and then it’s just us in this empty hall, and silence—Dominic has left the door, but he’ll be back. He’ll be back with a way in next time. We need to be fast.

  “You have to go. There’s no time,” he says. “It’s okay, Alina.”

  There’s nothing okay about him and Dominic and an empty gun. There’s nothing okay about leaving him behind.

  June left Liam. She left him. I could never do that. I’m not her. This means more than the truth. He means more than the truth.

  “Then lie down and stop wasting time,” I say. “Because I’m not leaving you. You’re coming with me.”

  “The database. The proof—”

  “I don’t care,” I say. But that’s not exactly true. It’s more that there are degrees of caring, and degrees of truth, and what you want and what you need are very rarely the same thing.

  “And when I pass out and you have to escape and I’m a sitting duck with no gun? And he can use me as leverage against Casey? Against you? What then?”

  I don’t know.

  “You’re going to have to trust me, Cameron.”

  His eyes are still wide, but he lies back. I press my lips to his one last time as I straddle his chest. “Well, I guess there are worse ways to go,” he says, trying to laugh.

  “Do me a favor?” I say. He cocks his head to the side, and something inside me splits in two. “Please don’t pass out.” He nods, a promise we both know he has no control over. “Now flip,” I say, and he twists on the hard ground from his back to his stomach.

  Then there is nothing between me and the long, white scar. I can feel his ribs, directly below. Dominic must’ve placed it along the scar somewhere. I try to channel Cameron when he did this for me. His calm, steady breath. His calm, steady hand. Impersonal. Efficient. But as I bring the sharp point of the blade to his flesh, this noise escapes his throat, and all I can think is Cameron.

  I press down, and his body stiffens. I try not to think as I push down at the top of the scar, until I feel some resistance under the skin, as his whole body twitches, tenses—but my vision goes a little blurry. The blood starts coming then, and it comes fast, and I realize that I will need to be fast. Faster. Before there’s too much blood, before there’s too much pain.

  One shaky breath.

  One steady hand.

  Go.

  I move the blade in a quick stroke down the length of the scar, deep enough to find a hidden tracker. And at first Cameron must be trying not to hurt me, but he gives in, digging his fingers into my legs on either side of him, leaving bruises, I’m sure.

  There are tears streaking down from the corner of his eye, along his nose, to the concrete floor beneath him. And there are tears clouding my own vision as well. “Almost, Cameron,” I say. And then I dig my finger inside his back, and I press it down onto his rib, feeling along the edge, and he screams. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  It’s not on the first rib, not that I can tell—just bone and tendon and muscle, all soft along the smooth surface. But my hands are covered in blood, and Cameron’s back looks like he’s just been stabbed, because he has.

  I bite down on my lip to keep from crying, and I picture a spot in the distance to stop the nausea, like Cameron taught me. And I keep my eyes closed as I run my finger along the second rib.

  I feel something, something different—just over the muscle—and I take the blade and make one more cut, prying it out, and Cameron goes still. It’s smooth and narrow, but it’s covered in blood, and I have to wipe it off with the bottom of my shirt to be sure—the thin tracker, a curved piece of metal, out. It’s out. I throw it to the floor and I crush it under the butt of the empty gun, over and over again.

  But the cut that spans the length of his scar is bleeding more than I imagined it could. I ball up his shirt and press it against the wound, and I hold it there while he remains motionless. I strip the shoelaces from our ruined sneakers, and I use the blade to slice off a long piece from the bottom of my shirt, and I use both to bind his shirt to his back, looping the material around his shoulder, applying as much pressure as I can to his wound in the process. He recovered from this cut once before. He will recover again.

  And then I flip him over—his eyes blink open and slowly reclose. I quickly pull him to sitting, because I’m not sure if he can do it himself. “Cameron, wake up. Cameron, I got it,” I say.

  “ ’Kay,” he says, and he reaches for my face, as if he is talking in his sleep.

  I close my eyes and ask for strength, but the only feeling that floods through me is a sharp wave of panic.

  I guess that will have to be enough.

  I take my hand and bring it down hard and fast across his face, my palm stinging, the blood from my hands staining his face.

  His eyes pop open, and I say, “Get up.”

  He tries, and my God, I love him for it. He holds on to my shoulder as he pulls himself to standing, and I am so thankful for the muscles I have earned over the past year, pushing myself upright, and bringing him with me in the process. For once, they are useful. “We have to move,” I say.

  We’re both covered in blood, and it’s trailing behind us as he bumps into the wall while we walk. I have butch
ered him. I was not careful, or calm, or efficient. I was fast, and I was brutal. I wish I were better.

  “Thank you for waking up,” I say as we make it to the door.

  He leans into me, and for a second I’m scared he’ll pass out again. But he stays on his feet. He’s trying to say something, but his back connects with the door, and he winces.

  “Don’t,” I say. “I’m sorry. I know I made a mess of you. Please, if you’re going to be mad, be mad later. We have to move.” We have to move before Dom comes. We have to move before he passes out. Please, I think, let him not have lost too much blood. Please.

  We have to move to the fifth floor, and that thought alone seems insurmountable.

  We push through the doorway, and I see the stairs. “Don’t look up,” I say. I’m saying it for myself, but it will probably help him as well. I start moving, step by step, and his bare feet stumble alongside mine. He’s got half his weight on me, and half on the railing, or against the wall, but at least we keep moving.

  I try not to notice the walls, smeared with his blood, that we’re leaving behind. Who needs a tracker when you have a blood trail?

  Please let Casey be okay, I think. Please let her get what she came for, I think. Please let all of this be worth it for them.

  “Get off the wall,” I say when we reach the landing for the third floor. I take my bloody hands and smear them across the entryway to the hall. I run down and try to leave a trail of blood, transferring what’s on my hands, my body, to these concrete walls.

  Cameron wavers in the middle of the landing. He looks pale but his expression is alert. He’s here. He’s back. “No more blood on the stairs,” I whisper as I race back toward him, but even that echoes. He leans on me but manages to support himself—by sheer willpower, I’m sure—as we make it to the fifth floor, where Casey should be.

  The hallway is dark and silent, but we are barefoot and alert.

  There’s an open doorway.

  The sound of her voice.

  And the sound of another.

  Cameron rushes by me, and I put my arm out, trying to stop him—but he keeps moving, almost running, until I catch him by the arm and hold him back.

  Patience, I want to tell him. But I don’t dare speak. I keep my back pressed against the wall and pull him beside me as I walk closer to the room.

  “It’s just one name,” I hear Casey say.

  I hear a gravelly voice speaking, aged and smoke laden. “It always starts with just one name. It never is, though. It never ends.”

  Casey’s voice is shaky, and I want to tell her to be calm, be brave. Though I have no bravery and no calmness to spare her. “Ivory said she would trade me for it. She said you could do it. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Ivory Street would throw me under the bus in a heartbeat. I didn’t go to her when she called, though I’m sure she expected me. No, I waited here. I waited for you to come to me.” Ivory must still be in the basement, waiting, waiting, for someone to come. “But you are not the one I’m waiting for. Where is she?”

  I hear the sound of knuckles cracking, and I smile. Casey, buying time. Casey, gathering herself. “Alina? Oh, she got bored with this whole thing,” she says. “Took her freedom and ran with it.” God, I love her. I do.

  He laughs. “You’re a terrible liar. All youthful arrogance, like June was.”

  I ease my head around the entrance, and I can see only the back of him. Slacks with deep wrinkles, as if he’s been folded up inside them for days. A plaid collared shirt, and a sprinkling of gray hair along the base of his skull. From the back, he looks perfectly nondescript. Perfectly like anyone else. He takes a step forward, and I expect his knees to creak. A generation passed since the picture I saw of him was taken—when he first set up the Cybersecurity Data Center.

  Casey sits behind his dark-brown desk, facing me—the room is full of computers and machines with periodically flashing lights, and there’s a door to the side that must lead to his work lab—because there’s a window in the door, and I can see the blue blinking lights behind it. Her face looks unnaturally white in the glow of the monitor. She doesn’t see me. There’s a wall of windows behind her where I can see the reflection of the monitors and the man before her, but I worry he will catch a glimpse of me in the reflection as well. I pull myself out of the doorway. “How badly do you want this, single, solitary name, child?” he asks.

  “Badly enough to break Alina Chase out of her containment,” she says.

  “Good,” he says. “Then that’s the price. Alina Chase for the name.”

  She pauses. “I can’t. I don’t know—”

  “That’s the price, and your time is running out.”

  I peek again. He doesn’t seem to have a gun, so I’m not sure why he’s saying that. I don’t see any immediate danger—he’s just an old man in a computer lab. He has his cell phone out, and he holds it up to her. “I called the authorities as soon as I was sure you all were here. Your price went up, child. Two million dollars for information leading to the capture of Alina Chase. How long do you think they will take? If I were you, I’d want a pretty good head start.”

  Casey stands, the sound of the chair scraping along the floor out from underneath her as she moves away from the desk. She takes one last, longing glance at the screen. “Am I free to go then?” she asks.

  “I’m sure I cannot stop you,” he says, stepping aside.

  All this for nothing.

  Her name for nothing.

  I’ve got my answers, even if I can’t prove them.

  I stand in front of the open door, even though I feel Cameron’s hands reaching, and then losing, a grip on my arm.

  “Hello,” I say, and the old man spins around.

  He smiles, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his lips cracking as they pull farther apart. “You’re even smaller than I imagined,” he says. “Such a little thing. Such a big mess …”

  From the front, he looks like anyone’s grandfather. Sparkling eyes, thick glasses, crooked and slightly discolored teeth, and a stomach that hangs over his waistband. Years and years since that picture was taken. A lifetime, for me. “We have a lot in common, Alina Chase,” he says. “We should talk, truly. Ivory Street got me, too, with the past life. Ensnared me for a lifetime of doing her bidding.” He licks his lips, and I wonder who he was in the past life, and who he was in this life, before Ivory Street.

  Ivory Street must have discovered something about Mason Alonzo. About his past life. Must’ve learned something he didn’t want revealed and coerced him with it.

  “Her study was a lie,” I say. “She falsified the data. Only included the data that supported her theory. You don’t have to do her bidding. She has nothing on you.”

  His face twists—first down, then up—before he speaks. “Yes, she does. Everything I’ve done since then, child. Everything I’ve let her do since then. I gave people to her. I let her see data that should’ve been protected at the highest level. I let her use it. That’s my crime now.” There’s a sound of bones popping, but I don’t think he’s moved. Maybe it was his jaw. Or maybe it was Casey, standing behind him. “I suppose,” he says, “when all is said and done, my crimes in this life will far exceed the last. So be it.”

  I see it in his eyes: he is that selfish. He doesn’t want to go back, to drag it out into the light. He is fine with the situation. With the power of it all. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. When all I’m thinking is please, don’t do this.

  And then he laughs. “Now I get it. Now I get why Ivory was so set on making sure you were found and then contained. It didn’t make sense to me back then: why June and not Liam? It wasn’t the fear of the information June left about accessing the database—we closed that door anyway. It was this. What you just told me. That June knew the truth, and that she left that for you.”

  “Ivory had me contained?” I ask.

  “She had you sought out—it all happened so fast. And there was no precedent for it. She left n
o time for debate. Act now, act fast. She pushed, and someone listened. I don’t even know who it was. She has a lot of people in law enforcement wrapped around her finger. Of course, now I’m wondering if she wasn’t just a bit spiteful that June figured her out. If it wasn’t meant to be a punishment, after all.”

  I am filled with pure rage, that Ivory was the force behind my containment. I hate her. I hate her and I hope she stays locked in that basement for eternity. But I try not to let it show on my face. I take a deep breath, and I focus on the faces of the people I love instead.

  I see my mother, free somewhere, and my father, still in prison.

  I see Cameron.

  I see Casey.

  I see June.

  And again I think of her—I see her walking away from me, a small smile as she looks over her shoulder, her blond curls swaying with each step, blue eyes looking straight into mine. I close my eyes, and I thank her for all she has done, and what she was trying to do. That she believed in redemption, in her own life. She discovered she had made a horrible mistake. She was wrong, and she was going to reveal it anyway. She was going to take herself down with them. She was the bell and the whistle. If only she had lived …

  I feel her in me—the parts of her I like, the parts I struggle against, all of them—and I gather her close. I think I must love her, anyway. She was beautiful, and she was wrong, and she was brave. I want to see my own life stretched out before me, like she must have, and think not of myself but of truth, and who it belongs to. There is nothing selfish in her soul. Maybe she wasn’t born good or bad. Maybe her choices were both. Mostly, though, they were her own.

  As are mine.

  “Is that it? The shadow-database is in there?” I ask, gesturing behind him. Casey said it would have to be big to store everything, but it seems impossible that it would just be sitting here, in his office.

  “No, no, there’s no complete copy. This is just a piece of it. Just a storage unit—the information we’ve accessed over the years,” he says. He points to the computer on his desk. “It’s all linked. Whatever we access gets copied and stored for when we might need it. The data Ivory pulled for the study. The souls we pulled after, with the new names attached, it all gets copied and stored right here. Funny, huh? How it’s just sitting here, in my lab, mixed in with my other projects? Ivory convinced me, very persuasively, to leave a portal open for myself—to set this up—when I went back in to upgrade security. The irony, right? She’s no different from anyone else, not June or Liam or you, even. Once you get in, you can’t let it be. Too much power in that knowledge. Too much you can do with it. Like moths to a candle, flitting around it while your wings are on fire.”