Soulprint (4 page)

Casey guides me down a step. Last year I made it only to the first step. Nobody led me anywhere. But Casey keeps moving. We walk down the rest of the steps, down the brick path, much closer to the press than I've ever been before. It's not that we want to be close to them, it's that we want to be away from the house. They smile widely, holding microphones out to me.

I see a few guards look at each other—questioning glances that I haven't seen since they found that guard Ellis in my room.
This is not part of Casey's instructions, I am sure. And I'm supposed to be slow and malleable and content. I am not. I can see it in their eyes—they can see
I am not
.

They start to move closer. “One,” Casey whispers.

They won't get here in time.

“Alina,” someone shouts again. “What did you get for your birthday?”

“Two.” I see her hand reach into her pocket.

I glance at Casey. Her face is bare. The cameras see her as much as they see me. This is the last moment I will be complicit in my own imprisonment. This is the last moment she will be anonymous.

What I'm about to gain, she is about to lose. “You're about to see,” I say.

“Three.”

The explosion is more than just noise—it's a rush of air and a flash of light and, yes, noise. Everyone drops to the ground instinctively.

Except Casey, who has a grip on my arm, pulling me against instinct, dragging me away.

ESCAPE.

I leave my shoes behind, my feet calloused from months of training, and I run. I can't breathe. The air is full of dust and dirt, and then suddenly it's worse—smoke. I glance behind me quickly, but the house is fine. Still standing. The window from my room is missing and there's a gaping hole in the bricks surrounding it.

People are moving toward us.

And then I can't see anymore because smoke settles down from above. From the trees. I can't see at all, but that must be the point. I wonder if Cameron is up in the trees somewhere. Or if he's running with us right now.

I hear shouting, hear footsteps, feel the ground vibrating beneath my feet.

“Close your eyes,” she says, her hand still on my arm. I don't know how she can tell where she's going with her eyes closed, but she does. She counts as she runs. Stopping. Turning. Counting again.

I run with my eyes closed. I didn't train for this. If they had told me to memorize this island blind, I would have. I would've been ready, and not just someone who had to be dragged. I know this island. I know it better than anyone.

Casey slows, and I open my eyes. We've broken through the smoke and are deep in the trees—almost to the cliffs. She stops abruptly and rips her shirt over her head. “Switch!” she yells at me. “Hurry!” A wig comes off with her shirt, and a long dark braid weaves down her back. Her body is lean and muscular under her clothes as she tosses them my way. If I catch a glimpse of her from just the corner of my eye, she looks like me.

“Now!”

I tear off my dress, and the picture of my mother drifts away, and with a single gust, it flips over the edge of the cliffs and it's gone. I pull on her pants. Her shirt. She tugs at my hair, yanking the elastic out, and I understand, shaking out the braid.

She looks out over the edge. “This is where you jump,” she
says. I look down, but I shouldn't have. The waves crash against the rock, and the sea swirls and foams.

This is the edge of my world, and it looks exactly like an edge of the world should look.

I imagine my eyes are huge when I look back at her. “No. Over here.” She points behind her, and I lean over the edge. There's a small cove. It looks still, as far as oceans go. “Swim to the entrance.” She must be talking about the mouth between the rocks.

I thought I could do it, but there's no way. It's suicide. If I jump I'll be too deep, and how do you swim for the surface? Is it instinct? People drown every day, even people who know how to swim. I can't do it.

“There's netting, and—” And I can't swim. But they have made a mistake beyond that. There's no way out. It looks just like an island, and the guards look just like people, and the mile-long bridge doesn't need guns or barricades, because it lifts—it ceases to be a bridge unless a bridge is needed. This is a prison, and I am its captive. The air above is restricted airspace. And below the water, there's a cage. Steel netting, hooked into the floor, and it rises up out of the water, attached to steel posts. Everyone knows this. Algae and seaweed make it look natural. Beautiful, even. But this is a prison. There's no way through it. I'd have to climb up over the top, and everyone would see. Then again, I'd have to be able to swim there in the first place.

“Trust me,” she says as she zips up the dress and backs away.

“You're not coming with me?” I ask.

I cover my face as another round of smoke drops over us. Over the whole island. Cameron darts out of the clearing. “Let's go,” he says to her, not even looking at me.

“We jump somewhere else,” she says. “With your tracker.”

And then I understand. She will be running through the smoke with another person, dressed like me, carrying my tracker. She is the diversion.

“I can't,” I say. I grip on to her, like she'd been doing to me.

“You have to,” Cameron says. “You can't see him, but Dom's there. He's outside the cove. Under the surface. He's waiting for you.”

“Okay?” Casey says, but I shake my head. Not okay. There must be another way. I've been training. I am strong, but I'm seized with the fear of water in my lungs. With the fear of never resurfacing, of drowning, of dying, of becoming nothing. I can't will myself to jump—to trust that I can reach the surface, to trust that someone is waiting for me.

“We're behind schedule,” Cameron mumbles. He turns me around, facing the water, and I realize what he's about to do the second before he does it.

“I can't swim!” I scream, but it's too late. His hands are already on my back, and his weight is already behind it, and I'm leaning over the edge—my feet kick up dirt, and I feel Cameron's fingers grasping at my shirt. He's too late. I'm too far. I feel air, and my feet clamber for nothing. My hands, for nothing.

But then I feel him still, his fingers tightening on the
fabric, and then his arm around my waist, but I'm still falling. No.
We
are falling.

We hit the water, and it's colder than I imagined it would be. And it slams into my side—or my side slams into it—at the same moment my head collides with Cameron's. Either way, it feels nothing like freedom.

The shock of cold wears off, and my head throbs, and my eyes burn, but the cut on my rib burns far more. I feel Cameron pulling me by the waist, his legs moving below, and I keep mine still, against instinct, so I don't make things worse. We break through the surface, and I suck in air. Except the water crests up at the same moment, and I take in salty water, burning a path to my lungs.

Cameron lets go of me as he turns his face to the top of the cliff, and I start to slip under. I reach up and throw my arms over his shoulders in a panic, taking him down with me.

He pushes me off under the water, then comes up coughing, holding me by my arm. I follow his gaze to the top of the cliff and see Casey leaning over the edge. He waves vigorously for her to go, and she disappears.

“
Shit
,” he says. “Shit, shit, shit.” Then to me: “Float. Can't you even do that?”

My face burns. My stomach burns. I didn't expect
everything about the ocean to burn. It seems like it should do the opposite.

I try to do as Cameron says. I lie back, but my hips dip first, and then the rest of me, like my body mass is off. Over the last year, I've traded in most of my curves for muscle, most of the give of my body for a tense resistance, but people don't notice under the nondescript clothes. The doctor comes every year after my birthday. She has not seen what I have become yet.

Everyone has seen me run—my soul is understandably restless—but I've hidden the fact that I do nothing but push-ups and sit-ups and lunges in my room, deep into the night, and I hide the results even more. I thought it would help me escape, but it's weighing me down. I haven't done a thing on my own.

His arm is around my chest again, and I'm on my back, and he's swimming on his front, cursing repeatedly under his breath. He pauses and pushes me against the rocks. I reach around and dig my fingers into the crevices, supporting myself for once.

A person's head, covered in black material, rises up beside us. I assume this must be Dom. His hand rests on my shoulder. His lips smile around the breathing apparatus in his mouth. But he stops abruptly when he sees Cameron beside me.

“She can't swim,” Cameron says through clenched teeth.

Dom has a face mask over his eyes and, with that thing inside his mouth, I can't tell the level of his annoyance or disappointment—not like I can see on Cameron.

Like it's my fault.

“Excuse me for not spending the last seventeen years
anywhere near a goddamn swimming pool!” I slap at the water with one hand, the words pouring out before I have a chance to weigh them, like I usually would, and I momentarily lose my grip on the side. I dig my hand back into the slick rock. “I don't even have a bathtub.”

“I have to go back for Casey,” Cameron says, but looking at the slick rock, at the concave cliffs, I know it's impossible. He knows it, too. I think he just needs someone else to tell him he can't.

So I do. “You can't,” I say, as my fingers tremble to keep me above water. No one can. It's a
prison
, which nobody seems to understand but me. He knows it's true, but he focuses all his anger at me.

Dom looks at the sky, points to his watch. I hear his breath, slow and loud, through the device. He hands Cameron a face mask, a set of flippers, and an air tank with a hose attached. “She'll be fine,” Cameron says, but he's saying it to himself, I'm sure.

Dom disappears under the surface, but not before holding out a long piece of rope. I feel him under the water, like a shark brushing against my skin. His hand grips on to my bare ankle. And then the rope tightens, which is more than anyone here has ever done to me. They don't need to. When I used to act up, to fight, to push back, all it would take was a sedative shot. And when I trained myself to bury it—to hide it—instead, they mostly stopped needing the shots as well.

In the water, where I can't swim, with a rope held by a stranger, I fear what I have traded everything for.

Dom gives a thumbs-up, and Cameron comes very close.

He shows me the breathing device, and he straps the tank onto my back. “Five breaths. Slow and steady. Then pass it back.” He hands it to me, and I place it between my lips, nodding at him.

“And whatever you do, don't let go.”

I remove the mouthpiece for a second and say, “There's always the rope.” It may be to hold me, but it will also keep us from getting lost, being left behind.

But he turns away and whispers, “For you.” And I realize the power I have, as I wrap my arms around his neck, and my legs around his waist, preparing to dip under the water. If I let go of him, he could be stranded in the middle of the ocean with nothing.

“Do not let go,” he says again, trying to be stern. But he is asking. As he lowers the mask around his face, I see it in his eyes. He is pleading.

“I won't,” I say. I have never held on to something so tightly in my entire life.

The muffled sound of blades cuts through the wind. I know that noise. They came for me once before, when we were in the path of a hurricane. They didn't even need a rope then—just a shot beforehand. But it didn't help with the motion. I threw up in the back of the helicopter. I feel Cameron's pulse pick up through my palms that are pressed so tightly to his chest. I feel like throwing up again, because this time they are not coming to save me.

He drops us both under the surface, into the dark.

From the cliffs, from my home, the water looks clear. A blue calm stretching into the distance. But Cameron has the face mask, and my eyes burn and see nothing when I open them. There's nothing to guide us, nothing to direct us, but the rope stretching before us. Cameron breathes slowly, calmly, and my lungs start to ache long before he hands the device back. And then I take breaths too quickly, too desperately, and have to give it back too soon.

I keep my eyes squeezed shut, trying not to hear the blades over the surface or the sound of the air I'm draining from the tank. I try to picture my mother, like she looked in the newspaper clipping. Not the photo from after she was arrested.

I did not print that one out.

I imagine her humming a song, as she shushes me with a lullaby, as she cuts into my skin. In my head, I do not scream, even though I'm sure I did. I was just a baby. In my head she takes out the tracker and holds me to her, wrapping a blanket around my body. In my head she tries to run.

In my version they do not arrest her at home, like the article claims.

In the article, they say she put the tracker in the garbage disposal. That she knew they would come for her. That she must've been
hoping
they'd come for her. That she didn't want to be responsible for the soul of June Calahan.

Like June's family did for their own safety, severing ties, taking new identities, leaving the country, so they would never be associated with her name again.

I wonder if they would've let me grow up there, with my
mother, with my father. If she hadn't been so blatantly defiant. If he hadn't held a pillow to a baby's face and then changed his mind, unable to go through with it in the end. He brought me to the hospital. They never returned me.

I hold my breath and press my head into Cameron's back, imagining a time before all of this, before I was June—that first day, when I could've been anyone—before the needle in my back. I can hear my mother, and only her, as if my ear is pressed to her chest, as she sings me to sleep.