There has really been only one official attempt on my life—two, if you count the time when I was ten, but that one was eventually ruled an accident and lost its official status. Really, if I had any say, they wouldn’t count that first one from my father, either. I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s the perceived threats—not the official attempts—that got me stuck in this prison.
That’s not a metaphor.
Prison, noun: a place or condition of confinement. This counts.
The threats are a nice excuse, I suppose. Something to make themselves feel better, to appease their collective conscience, to garner public support. But I am not here for my safety. Not really.
I am the perceived threat.
I was not born on this island, but I can’t remember anything before this. Not the foster family that took me in for a while when nobody else would—they must’ve been saints in a past life, honestly—and definitely not any time before that.
My mother spent more than half my childhood in jail—because she dug the tracker out from beneath a layer of skin and fat under my third rib when I was a baby, in a reckless attempt to free me from my past. My father was also sent to jail a few months later, after he tried to end my life—to save me—so that I might start fresh. So that I might be a person with no history.
I wish I could meet them, these people who loved me so fiercely. Who believed my soul was my own.
They are the only ones.
I wish I could remember a time before this, a place before this, other than in my imagination, because that’s not the same as a memory. I’m imagining my mother’s face right now, with my eyes closed, as I listen to the footsteps move across the room. It could be anyone. For the moment, it could even be her. But then someone speaks and the moment is gone and ruined.
I open my eyes, and I am still here.
Three women stand strategically throughout my kitchen—trying to pretend, for the moment, that they are family, or friends maybe, and not guards. One of them smiles in my general direction, her eyes skimming over my own so quickly I might’ve imagined that, too. “Wait until you see the cake,” she says. Another nods in agreement.
A cake. My life for a cake. I make myself uncurl my fingers from the corner of the table. “Can’t wait,” I say.
I don’t know her real name, or any of their names. They call each other Jen or Kate or something equally common and fake. It’s pointless anyway. They’ve been here thirteen—no, fourteen—days. They’ll be gone in fourteen more. Some will rotate back in, a few months or a few years from now, in a pattern I cannot decipher no matter how many ways I approach it. Some I will never see again.
Sometimes I think I’m onto it, the pattern, if there is one—the new rotation will be starting that morning and I’ll think, the green-eyed one, the one who jumps every time I speak, the one who goes by Mary—and then I’ll see her as part of the group stepping off the bridge after screening. But maybe that’s just coincidence—my mind trying to find meaning where there is none.
A girl with shoulder-length dark hair enters the room, averting her eyes from me as she carries the cake to the counter. She tucks her hair behind her ear and wipes her hands against the sides of her pants. The bottom of her pants are frayed on one side, near her heel, and I feel my heartbeat pounding against my ribs. Her. It has to be her. I remind myself to look away. To look anywhere else—at anything else. The ceramic floor. The dark stone counters. The older woman inspecting that white cake.
They are right about the cake, though. It’s iced to perfection, and Alina is written in sprawling, loopy cursive. I imagine a mother preparing this, licking the icing from her knuckle, cupping her hand over a match as she holds it to the candlewick, but I know this cake was made in a bakery by a stranger, and the woman lighting my candles now has never made eye contact with me.
There are seventeen candles, and they flicker, they burn. The smell of smoke carries through the otherwise pristine room. It’s a smell that always surprises me. Like something changing, something happening. Maybe because it’s so rare, and burning candles always means my birthday, and a measure of time, and one year closer to getting out.
I used to think that, anyway. But I’m not a child anymore. I understand the truth—that even though for now I am here and “cared for” because my own parents were deemed unfit and for now this legally falls under the guise of child welfare and protection—there’s no way they will ever let me out. It will be for another reason next year. A loophole: words that have been twisted to alter meaning, a law that has been bent to contain me.
I wonder, for a brief second, what I could do with seventeen burning candles. I wonder how much of this house—this island—is flammable.
Not nearly enough.
One of the women places a glass of water in front of me. Then she holds a walkie-talkie to her mouth and says, “Please proceed to the house.”
Everyone here calls this place a house, and I guess that’s not exactly a lie. It has a kitchen and a bedroom, a game room and a television room, all of which I’m allowed to roam through freely. And a basement, which I am not. There’s a yard—a big one—stretching from rocky cliff to rocky cliff.
Nobody ever calls it a jail, even though I’m not allowed to leave. Nobody calls it a punishment, either, even though that’s exactly what this is. The worst term anyone here ever uses is “containment.”
Like I need an island and thirty-two guards to contain my soul.
I hear the television turn on in the next room as we wait for everyone to come inside, and I assume it’s one of the guards from the basement—someone who doesn’t typically have access to one, someone who treats today like a holiday. He’s almost right. It’s a memorial, and we are the topic.
I hear June’s name on the television, like music, like nails on a chalkboard, humming through my blood, scratching at my nerves. They haven’t gotten to me yet. But it’s coming. Today is the seventeenth anniversary of the day that June Calahan died. And the day her soul was reborn, twelve hours later, six miles away, in me.
Most souls are free of their pasts. Of their crimes and transgressions, their love and hate. Because a soul has no memory, and that’s a scientific fact.
Still, most people agree it’s better not to find out who you once were. And if you do find out, it’s best to keep that knowledge to yourself. Because while the soul has no memory, the world does, and that is usually enough.
I didn’t have a choice. I’m being contained because it’s too dangerous for my soul to be free. That’s what they say every year on my birthday, on every news station and half of the non–news stations, too. And this year will be no different. Whether my freedom is too dangerous for me or for them, I guess it depends on the filter you’re looking through.
I’ve been avoiding the television all day. The endless debating—every year the same words, the same sides—and nothing ever changes. Someone says, Alina Chase is being held because she’s dangerous. Something about June leaving me with information to continue her crimes, which is ridiculous, because June is dead and I am here, and I have nothing. But then someone else says, Alina Chase is being protected, because who would care for the soul of June Calahan? And for some reason, that one feels worse. Whichever way the news spins, it all comes back to June—the girl with the blond curls, the bright eyes, too young and too beautiful to look guilty. Her crimes. Her life.
When June died, they tested all the newly born with a lumbar puncture—the fingerprint of your soul in the sample of spinal fluid they draw out in the enormous needle. There was no option, no choice to opt out of the database like usual, though most everyone chooses to leave a record anyway. They sedated the babies, and they tested them all, any born within a hundred-mile radius, though souls rarely ever travel that far. Not unless they have to. Not unless there’s no one around. They tested everyone, checking the results right then—instead of waiting until the children turned eighteen and made that choice for themselves. They screened them all and ran the results, against the parents’ wishes, to find June.
There are laws against this now, privacy laws meant to protect, but they’re a little too late for me.
And now all this talk is a waste of air, of thought, of time. All the talk in the world, and nothing ever changes.
The only thing that ever changes here is me. My anger. My hate.
It’s perhaps the biggest irony of all that the main reason why soul fingerprinting still belongs primarily to science and not yet to the public is because of this very fear: that revenge, hate, guilt, punishment, could be carried over into the next life, because a soul never dies, it just takes a new form. And if I pay too much attention to the words on the television, if I listen too closely, if I feel the words as some people argue that I am not June Calahan but Alina Chase, I won’t be able to hide the anger. I won’t be able to hide the hate.
And I have to hide it.
Today, most of all, I have to hide it.
The kitchen fills with more people—people who work here in the house and on the grounds. People who are never allowed in here on most days. People who are no longer at their posts. I have been counting on this.
They sing “Happy birthday, happy birthday, dear Alina,” and I breathe in the smoke and relax my clenched fists, and I smile.
That’s one of the skills I taught myself with the hours and days and years of time. I can understand Spanish. I can run the perimeter of the island in just under eighteen minutes. And I can bury my anger beneath sedate indifference.
“Make a wish,” someone says. I smile. I choose not to make a wish—words, whether spoken or thought, never change a thing.
They applaud as I blow out the candles, the smoke rising and blurring their faces. They are all the same anyway. They are everyone and no one. The people who work here rotate out every month, lest they get too attached, like when I was ten. Lest they grow soft. Lest I manipulate them into letting me out. June Calahan would’ve been able to. She would’ve talked and talked until her words felt like theirs, her ideas their own. She would’ve been able to see the pattern of guards, if one exists.
I may have her soul, but I am not her.
I am not.
As the applause winds down and the noise drifts away with the smoke, the only sound left besides the plastic dishes and cups and utensils being spread across the counter is the ridiculous television news program from the next room. They are still discussing June, but they’re really discussing me. My God, it’s the same thing every year. The discovery of soul fingerprinting, the scientific studies that followed, the development of the Soul Database, the privatization of the information, and the construction of the presumed unhackable Alonzo-Carter Cybersecurity Data Center to house it. And the study of violence—the one that showed a high statistical correlation in criminal history from one generation to the next. The study June used to ruin lives. Ruining her own, and mine, in the process.
Every year, they show our pictures side by side on the news, and I look nothing like her. My picture changes every year, but hers remains the same—stuck at the age of nineteen, as old as she will ever be. Alongside her, our faces splitting the screen, I always look like her shadow. My hair is nearly black, and my skin is darker than hers—my mother was, is, Hispanic. But I think my eyes are a problem. They confuse people. Make me unplaceable. Dangerous.
Year after year, they show my eyes as they zoom in on my picture, and it makes people see her. They are so light they are almost clear. Like you could look through them to see my soul.
Straight to June.
The girl with the short dark hair serves me a piece of cake. Her hand shakes as she places it on the table—the plate wobbles on the surface before settling. Someone else looks at her. At me and her. I pick up my spoon and force a bite into my mouth, and I change my mind about that wish. I look at the girl, who is now serving someone else, and I think: Please don’t screw up.
I swallow the cake and watch as others do the same. Last year I assumed it was something in the cake they give me every year that made me pleasant and malleable when the press showed up—permitted to visit on this one day a year. That I was drugged by something other than sugar and iced perfection. Something that kept me from crying out about the injustice of it all. Something that kept me from screaming that speech I practiced last year—that my name was Alina Chase, and that my incarceration (not containment) was unconstitutional, unjustified, and inhumane.
So I didn’t eat the cake last year, but it didn’t matter. The press showed up just before sunset, and I just grinned and waved from the front entrance. No speech. I felt content and slow and indifferent. The articles the next day said my soul was gloating.
So this time I’d eat the cake. I just wouldn’t drink. I could not afford to be content or slow or indifferent today. I’d been drinking from the tap in my sink, but that was it.
I hold the cup to my mouth, feel the water touch my lips, and bring it back down to the table.
The cake is delicious. I’m not going to lie.
In the lull of inactivity, as people scoop cake into their mouths and remark on the taste or the texture or something else completely safe and meaningless, someone in the next room switches from the news station to that movie, the only thing I’d want to hear less.
Of course it’s on today. June of Summerton. Like Joan of Arc or Helen of Troy. But it’s barely even about the crimes, or the fact that she was once considered a hero before she was the villain. It’s a love story, which is apparently more interesting.
Liam White is beautiful in the movie version, but in pictures, he is not. It’s this fact that people always came back to: that she was so beautiful, beautiful and charismatic, and he was so not—and because of that, she could convince him to do anything. She could convince him to hack one of the most secure systems in the country, to commit the most notorious crimes of her generation with her. To keep her secrets. Help her escape. Sacrifice himself, even.
The movie ends with Liam begging June to run as the police surround their building. Whispering that her soul was not meant to be in a cage, that he’ll be okay, that they’ll be together again someday.
She clutches at his shirt as she wavers. But June is strong. She is strong enough to run. To let him go. She promises him that her soul will find him again. That she’d know him anywhere.
And then he does it. It’s Christmas Day, and it’s starting to snow, and there are lights strung up in the windows behind him. He runs for the barricade lined with police cars as she sneaks onto the roof and down the fire ladder, and he pulls a weapon at the last minute, and the sound of gunfire accompanies June as she races frantically through the woods, as tears run down her cheeks.
The credits roll as his blood seeps into the thin blanket of snow surrounding him, beside the weapon that turned out not to be a weapon at all but a metal recorder. Liam White, the goddamn martyr. The snow will continue to fall until the screen goes white.
I know the movie by heart.
The movie doesn’t show June in hiding for the next year and a half. It doesn’t show her dying a very unbeautiful hit-and-run death when she suddenly reappeared. Not the baby being born twelve hours later, or the tracker implanted on its third rib, or the parents begging no. It does not show the house where I am kept.
Anyway, the whole thing has to be a lie. Liam White must’ve orchestrated everything. I feel it in my soul, like something whispering to me. I am not capable of such darkness, despite what science says. I’m sure of it. And now his soul is free and I am stuck here, even though I have done nothing. Nothing.
“Can someone please turn that off?” I ask. And then I realize my mistake. I should be content and slow and indifferent by now. “Because my head feels funny,” I add. And then I make myself smile. “More cake?”
Someone places another slice onto my plate.
“If there are leftovers,” I mumble, digging my spoon into the A of my name, “I’m having this again for breakfast.”
Someone forces a laugh, and I force another piece of sickeningly sweet birthday cake into my lying mouth.
Because today is my seventeenth birthday.
Today is the day we agreed on.
The girl with the short dark hair watches the clock over the table.
One hour and twelve minutes to go.
And then I will escape.