Eventually we stop hearing the sirens. Eventually we hear helicopters instead. I look up from the corner of the window and see a news station symbol on the side of the nearest helicopter. But there are others in the distance—black and sleek with no visible designation. I instinctively back away from the window, but I keep watching. They circle the area over the school, possibly believing we’re still holed up inside. That kid took our picture. They will find our prints. They will know, for a fact, we were there. I don’t think they see our car. If they do, I don’t think they know we’re in it. I keep my face covered, just in case.
“Tell me you wiped the search history,” Cameron says.
“Of course I wiped the search history,” Casey says. “Who do you think I am?”
Search history. Right. That’s how I pulled up the article Cameron was reading.
“Of course, if they bring in someone who actually knows what they’re doing, that won’t really matter.” Cameron tenses behind the wheel. “But that will take time,” she says.
“I didn’t,” I say. “I didn’t wipe anything from the computer I was using.”
“Did you search for Ivory Street at all?” Casey asks, spinning around.
I shake my head. “No, just looking at the data on the hard drives.”
Cameron taps his fingers against the steering wheel in a frantic rhythm. “Can we disappear?” he asks Casey in a low voice. “Can you work up some identities?”
“And then this is all for nothing?” Casey asks.
“Not for nothing,” he says. I know what he means. I am out, and that counts for something. The idea of freedom would be nice, but we have limited options.
“There’s no turning back,” I whisper. “You’ll be fugitives forever. Dominic was right—we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt.”
It’s quiet inside the car, but outside, the helicopters circle. The sound is physically painful—I wince every time they come closer.
“Something doesn’t add up, about June, about me,” I say. I’m stuck thinking about the past life, but everyone else is focused on this one, like always. “I think June knew something … I think she and Liam stumbled upon something in there …”
“I want to find Ava,” Casey whispers. And again, I think of Ava in that database somewhere, and the fact that she will not be the same person, which Casey must know.
There’s a beat of silence as Casey rifles through the bag, checking on the safe keeping of the hard drives, when Cameron says, “I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“You won’t. I promise. But we’re out of options, Cameron. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” she says, pulling out the stacks of paper taking up space in the overstuffed bag. “But we have nothing right now. No answers, no money … Oh, God,” she says. She squints at the articles I’ve printed out.
“What?” I ask.
“I forgot. The printer has a memory. It can reprint.”
I’m picturing our secrets dispensing from the base of the printer, eyes reading what I’ve just read—I wonder what, if anything, they will see.
“Why would they even check?” I ask.
She turns around in the front seat, her eyes wide. “That kid is going to say he saw Alina Chase in the computer lab. Of course they’re going to check!” Casey says.
“Well, I’m sorry, I never knew that a printer had a memory. And you didn’t tell me. And they’re just science articles! What does it matter?”
“It matters because they’ll know what we’re after. It matters because they’ll eventually find what we were searching for. I printed off her picture. I can’t believe it. It matters because they’ll be able to find us, Alina. God!”
“We don’t even know what we’re after! We have no plan! Don’t you get it? My entire life is riding on this, right now!”
“Don’t you get it?” she yells back. “So are ours!”
“Stop!” Cameron says. “We’re in a car, we’re not caught, we’ve got some time. We need to stay a step ahead, is all. Get there first.”
I’m panicking, and the words are flowing from my mouth, unchecked. I have no control over the situation, and I can’t see beyond the four doors of this car. I can’t even imagine a place where I will be safe.
“Get where?” I ask, but I know the answer. Cameron catches my eye in the mirror, because we all know the options on the table. If we’re going forward, if we’re not throwing in the towel and trying to disappear with absolutely nothing, we’re going to find Ivory Street. I have no idea what June wanted her for, but I know she saw the same thing I did—her name on all these articles. Maybe Casey is right—maybe this is how they got into the database. Maybe Ivory Street will have the answers we need. June went to her, I’m sure of it. And now, so will we.
And then what? I want to ask. But I know the plan. There is none.
I can’t let myself think past the next step. There’s nowhere else to go.
Our main problem comes not in the form of a search helicopter, which apparently stayed near the school, but three hours later in the form of a nearly empty gas tank. “It’s safer to just get another car,” Cameron says.
“Of course, because we’re on a goddamn crime spree! It’s like the Cameron London show—how many crimes can you commit in five days?” Casey responds, her hands flailing in the air as she speaks.
“Casey, what do you want me to do? Pull up to the gas station with no money, fill up the tank in view of the cameras, and drive away, leaving them a map of where we’ve been? What the hell are we supposed to do?” He pulls the car off the highway, and we take the ramp.
“It makes us look bad,” she says. “Like we’re just a bunch of criminals. That we didn’t do it for a good reason.”
“We didn’t,” he says, and he calmly puts the blinker on at the stoplight.
“I did it for Ava. And for you,” she says, but he spins on her.
“You did it for me? Are you sure? Did you really? Or did you just … want an excuse? Because this, what we’re doing, doesn’t make me seem like anything other than what everyone already thinks. That I’m a criminal. It’s just an excuse and you know it.”
She leans back but doesn’t respond.
“Maybe you’re wrong to have so much faith in me, Casey,” he says. “Maybe I’m nothing more than what everyone already assumes.”
“You’re not,” she says. And I silently agree.
True to his word, Cameron is good at staying hidden. He drives the car far off the main roads. There doesn’t seem to be much off the exit other than a truck stop, a gas station, and a convenience store. He bypasses all of these and takes a few turns until the straight roads turn curvy. We idle for a moment in front of a sign announcing a community with home sites available. He rolls down the windows, and I hear the sound of construction, of vehicles. “What time is it?” he asks.
Casey checks her watch. “Just after three.”
He starts driving again, turning into the neighborhood, but we don’t go far. The gas gauge hovers dangerously close to zero. “We’ll never make it to Ivory Street’s office before it closes for the day anyway. And this is as perfect as it gets.”
There’s a dirt road off to the side that leads to a dead end, around the bend of the road. There are home sites listed on signs stuck into packed dirt with the number to call for more information. But the sites are still filled with trees for now, backing into the woods. He pulls the car off the dirt road around the bend, hidden from the street unless someone turns down this dead-end road. “Now what?” I ask.
“Cross your fingers that nobody comes down here,” he says. “And cross your fingers they don’t see us when they leave in a few hours.”
Casey quickly exits the car and walks a few paces into the woods. She leans back against a tree, leans her head against the bark as well. I go to follow, but Cameron says, “Leave her. Give her a few minutes.” So I close the door again, and I crack my knuckles against my legs.
The car is off, and the heat automatically starts to settle in, like a thickness to the air, but it’s more than the heat. It’s the tension of being alone with him again. Of not knowing where we stand. “We’re going to asphyxiate in here,” I say.
He unbuckles his seat belt and stretches, smiling at me in the rearview mirror. “Imagine the headlines. ‘Alina Chase Found Dead in Hot Car.’ Watch how I can spin this.” Then he holds up a pointer finger. “ ‘Wanted Criminal Holds Hostage in Car in Apparent Murder-Suicide.’ ” Another finger: “ ‘Accidental Death while Hiding from Authorities: Alina Chase and Accomplice Fall Asleep and Forget to Crack the Window.’ ”
“I don’t like that one,” I say. “We sound stupid.”
He puts up a third finger. “ ‘Foul Play Suspected in Hot-Car Death. Bodies Moved Postmortem.’ ” He turns to face me. “I mean, technically, we could suffocate anywhere …”
I grin. “I’m suffocating now,” I say.
“I’m just getting started. That’s just the news reports on the first day. Soon we can get into conspiracies. The government found us, staged our deaths, and is currently holding the soul of Alina Chase in an undisclosed location. Or a horde of angry citizens takes their revenge.” I cringe, because it feels a little too close to the justification for keeping me on the island. Cameron’s smile stretches wider. “Or aliens.”
I laugh. “That one will never hold up. Nothing to back it up.”
He shrugs. “You can do anything you want with facts, make up any story to fit. Truth is in the eye of the beholder.”
“I thought that was beauty,” I say.
“Both. People see you a certain way, and it’s so easy to believe it. To believe that’s all of you.”
I imagine he’s talking about his own past, but it could also be mine. And I hate that his smile is gone. I want it back.
“Or,” I say, “this was all an elaborate ruse by Alina Chase. The body isn’t even hers. Whereabouts unknown.” I lean my head back.
“Alina Chase, you continue to surprise me. Who knew you were such a sucker for the happy ending?”
Our eyes meet in the mirror. “This was all part of my plan, you see,” I say. “Didn’t you get my subliminal messages, leading us to this very spot?”
He actually laughs, and in some corner of my brain, I know that this is not a normal conversation. That talking about methods of death and our own inevitable demise is not typically a reason for laughter. And yet, here we are. “Do I survive the ruse?”
“Of course,” I say.
“How generous of you. Where do you go then?”
And this is when the conversation turns dangerous, because suddenly it’s straddling that line between fiction and hope, and hope is something I cannot afford right now. Something clamps down on my heart. “To the land of dreams,” I say, trying to be ironic. But Cameron frowns, and Casey knocks on the window.
“You guys are going to asphyxiate.”
And then the moment is broken. I laugh as Casey walks away.
When we exit the car, we follow Casey into the woods. The sound of the construction vehicles makes me nervous—there are people too close, or we are too close. But nobody seems aware of our existence. I ask for Casey’s bag, putting aside the empty gun and hard drives to get to the articles and June’s notebook again. Cameron and Casey talk strategy for tonight, in hushed voices that still carry on the wind. Cameron needs to figure out directions, and he’s sure there will be Internet access somewhere on the premises. He’s also convinced there will be a place for us to sleep. Casey wants to know where he’ll get another car, but he says she worries too much about the details.
Meanwhile, I am drowning in details. I have nothing to write with anymore, so I’ve taken to carving numbers in a space of dirt I’ve cleared of leaves.
I’ve got rocks holding down pages of a few articles, and June’s notebook is open in the middle of the area, and I’m standing over them all, writing numbers that jump out at me in the dirt with a long stick. I use June’s equations as a guide, plugging in the data from the study. I’m so engrossed in this, the numbers ordering themselves in my head, and not quite aligning how I expect them to. It’s this unsettled feeling I’m trying to grab on to. It’s not the numbers I have. It’s the thing that’s missing.
“What are you looking for?” Cameron asks. He’s right behind me, and when I turn around, I see Casey not too far away, leaning against a tree, watching me work. I don’t know how long they’ve been standing there, watching me this way.
“I don’t know. But something is wrong. Something is missing.”
They look at me very carefully, with heads tilting toward me, toward the numbers on the ground. “What’s missing?” Casey asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t know how the data was selected and sorted, but I can’t make it fit. And I won’t know unless I can get in the database and see what she used.”
I know who I sound like: June. Convincing people her motives were altruistic. But they led to chaos, to death, to this.
Casey eyes the dirt. “This means something to you?”
I feel Cameron looking at me, and I get the meaning in Casey’s words. This was June’s thing. I’m just a shadow of her, but I can feel it in me, this talent. I’ve wasted it, but it’s there.
I use my feet to dig into the dirt, swiping it back and forth, reducing it all to nothing again.
We hear the trucks rumbling up the hill when the sun is still in the sky, and Cameron motions for us to stay very still. I hold my breath, begging them not to turn down this road, but they rumble past us. A steady stream of vehicles moves by over the next thirty minutes, and we wait another hour still, until the sun is low and the shadows are long and the mosquitoes come out for blood.
Cameron takes his shirt off to wipe the car down again, and I get a better look at his back this time. The scar is long and white and raised, and I wonder if maybe the cut on my rib cage will eventually turn itself into the same.
Casey is packing up her bag and checking our site when Cameron turns back around, catches me staring. And I don’t want him to think it’s for any other reason. “Looks like it hurt,” I say.
He puts his shirt back on quickly. “Do me a favor, Alina. If you ever decide to stab me, don’t do it in the back.”
“Deal,” I whisper, and I quickly look away.
We walk with everything we currently own—that is, everything that fits in Casey’s bag and the school uniforms we’re still wearing—down the dirt road, and eventually Cameron points out what he calls “the main office,” which to me looks like more of a trailer than an office. It sits in the middle of the construction site, between four partially built homes—skeletons with roofs, in various degrees of completion.
Cameron unlocks the trailer door for us, though I’m sure we could’ve gotten inside in countless other ways. And the first thing I’m met with is the scent of cigarettes and sweat. Casey flicks a light switch, and a fluorescent rectangle on the ceiling buzzes to life. The carpeting is covered in muddy orange footprints. There’s a desk with chairs on either side and a small table near a smaller refrigerator. I opt to stay outside. I wonder what my first foster home was like—if it was full of scents and dirt and the remainders of real people—or if it was more like my island. I can’t remember. But I’ve seen the envelopes, the letters, that led to my removal from that place. I’ve read about the lives that June had ruined; I’ve felt their need for revenge. It wasn’t safe for me out there, within reach. If they left me there and something happened, they’d be at fault. I see it now, the fine line of my imprisonment. That perhaps we are all victims of circumstance. Products of both chaos and fate.
There’s a monitor on the desk, and Casey walks straight for it, seemingly unaffected by the odor.
“If you’re going to stand out there,” Casey says, “at least keep an eye out for anyone coming.”
I turn around, my back to the room now lit by the unnatural white glow, and I stare out at the twilight. We’re not in the mountains anymore, but possibly we’re at the edge of them—the roads rose and dipped on our drive, the trees became denser the farther we got from the highway. Cameron and Casey talk behind me, but not to me, and I imagine myself disappearing—walking straight into the distance, nobody to stop me; or standing right here, fading to nothing. They’d look up, and I’d be gone.
I could do it, if I wanted. I’ve earned their trust, and I could run. It’s becoming more and more clear that I will never shake her skin—that I will always be seen as June Calahan living inside the shell of Alina Chase to everyone else.
But not right here. Right here, when I look over my shoulder and Cameron catches my eye and smiles, when Casey barks a command in my direction—listen for cars—it’s only to me.
The world is big, and we are small.
But maybe this is enough.
I’m lost in a daydream—me in a yard somewhere, standing like this, and laughter from the cabin behind me, and a deep voice calling my name—it’s so real I can feel it taking shape inside me, and I know how dangerous this is, I know. How hope can spread, how it multiplies when you linger in it. How it works its way into your life, before you remember that it’s not real. How insidious hope can become if you let it.
I’m deep within this dream, so I must not hear Cameron the first time. Because his hand is suddenly on my shoulder and his voice is in my ear. “Alina,” he says, and the vision is gone, replaced by the sound of Casey’s fingers typing on the keyboard, the floor that creaks below us, the smell of the cigarettes and sweat. “Check out the home sites with me?”
He doesn’t grab my hand, but his passing body has the same effect, pulling me along.
We walk toward the half-built homes. One, with a door and green paper covering the roof and walls. One, just a foundation and the start of a wooden frame. The other two completely framed, but without windows, without drywall. I can see through the beams of the houses in sections—a hallway from this perspective, but step to the left and the wood lines up, and I can see into another room. Cameron steps through the doorway of the closest one onto the solid, wooden floor.
The whole place smells like sawdust, with the scent of something faintly burning.
“Do you smell that? Like a fire?” I ask.
“Left behind from a saw on wood, probably. The heat from the friction almost makes it burn,” he says.
The scent sets my heart on edge. Like the candles on my birthday cake—like something changing, a passage of time. It’s been only five days, but it feels like a lifetime we’ve spent running.
Cameron heads down the hall, but I check out the rooms off to the sides. Perfect squares, empty and exposed. The walls will go here and be painted, and the wood floor will be hidden. I can picture a couch here, against the wall, maybe blue. And a black-and-white picture hanging on the wall behind it. And me, sitting there with a book, legs crossed at the ankle … light footsteps down the hall, the sound of my mother humming before she comes into view …
I’ve got to stop this. This dreaming of possibilities that can never be.
I open my eyes, and the room is bare, the night visible through the slats of wood. And the footsteps are Cameron’s hiking boots. “Hey,” he says, “I was worried you got lost.” He leans against the wooden beam at the entrance to this room, and there’s nowhere to go but closer to him. Casey asked me to keep away, and it’s the least I can do for her, but there’s nowhere else to go. There’s no other choice, and he’s walking closer.
“This will work,” he says, looking around the space, and I’m trying to see what he sees. What version of this house he’s talking about.
“Work for what?” I ask.
“For tonight.” He smiles, and he stands maybe three feet from me, keeping his voice low. “I know it’s not completely protected or anything, but it’s a shelter, and there’s a computer nearby. Oh, and there’s a ton of food in the minifridge back at the trailer, in case you missed it.”
“I did,” I say. “I missed it.” Stuck in my daydream instead of reality.
“Yeah, I thought so. Where were you back there?” He taps the side of my head.
I shake the thought away. “Just imagining things. Got lost for a minute.”
“Good things?” he asks.
I remember the voice I heard behind me, the deep voice from inside, and I fear he can see it all on my face. “Things that won’t happen.”
He tilts his head to the side. “I hope you’re wrong,” he says, but it’s the word he uses, that he knows how unrealistic that is, too, but the room starts to shift on me, and I can see both at once. The empty room, the full one. Me at the center.
“Whoever lives here better realize how lucky they are,” I say.
He shakes his head. “A house doesn’t make people lucky.”
“But the people in it,” I say, “the people you live with.”
He cringes and then gestures to me. “Some people never know their parents and wish they did.” His lower jaw shifts. “But some people do know their parents and wish they didn’t. No house in the world would’ve changed that,” he says.
I wish, for a moment, that the world was simple and predictable. That a family meant safety and unconditional love, and all the things I read about in children’s books.
This is my fear, too—the one I keep buried. That maybe the reason my mother does not speak out, does not fight, is because I no longer matter to her. That I am but a distant memory that resurfaces when she hears a crying baby, or reads an article in the paper, or realizes it’s my birthday. That when she said I could visit her in my dreams, in that song, that was her way of saying: nowhere else. That maybe she is scared of me, too.
“Do I scare you?” I ask.
“No. You surprise me, Alina,” he says, pulling me toward him effortlessly.
And that’s the change I was sensing in the air, not the scent of something burning, but this. One moment I’m sinking, and then I’m floating. Like being in the ocean with him.
But I put my hands on his chest and push back. “I promised Casey,” I say. And then, when he frowns, “She’s your sister.” That must count for something.
“She is my sister,” he says, but he’s not backing away. “Not my dad, not my mom, and not in charge of me.” And then he adds, “Or you.”
He is the spell. He’s the spell, not me, and I need to break it. “It’s not the time,” I say, repeating Casey’s words, because they make sense, they have logic and a purpose.
He looks around the empty house, and I know he’s seeing a thing none of us will ever have. Not anymore. He leans his forehead against mine. “I’m scared,” he whispers, “that this is the only time.”
I hear Casey in the distance, the door to the trailer, and I know she’s coming.
Cameron presses his lips quickly to my forehead.
I feel him slipping away, feel time doing the same.
“I hope it’s not,” I say.
Imagination is not the same as a memory, and hope is not the same as reality, but still, I am filled with hope for everyone in that moment. For my mother and father, for Cameron and Casey, for June’s soul, and I guess for my own, too. I hope there’s something more than what we were and what we’ve been. I hope that life surprises me.
So I change my mind and pull him toward me, and I’m the one to kiss him this time. I do it even though I hear Casey’s feet just outside, and even though it’s reckless and this isn’t the time. I do it because I realize that life did surprise me, and it comes in the form of the guy in a ridiculous-looking basketball uniform in a half-built house. And it comes in the form of the girl walking down the hall, too. And it comes in the form of me, standing on my toes to reach him, and this moment I can steal, even here, even now.