I’ve pulled back from Cameron, but the moment must still be obvious on both our faces because Casey dumps a bag of food on the floor in the entrance to the room, drops her bag beside it, and says, “Wow, I’m so glad I just spent the last twenty minutes finding food for everyone and getting directions and checking the news. So glad to know you were doing something useful.”
He ignores her but grabs a can of soda and takes a bite out of a bagel that he’s found in a brown paper bag. Casey is staring at me, obviously trying to catch my eye, but I keep my gaze focused on the food while I rifle through and decide what to eat. How can I explain to her that I don’t have hope that there will be a right time, but that I want to? That I’m trying to create it out of absolutely nothing? That every choice is a betrayal to one side or the other?
I sit back against a wooden beam, next to Cameron, and I take a bite out of a slightly stale bagel.
A beam of light cuts through the night, and I drop the food, heart racing, ready to run. “Headlights,” Cameron says. We’re hidden, but only partly. I press myself, stomach first, against the floor, and hear them doing the same. The car engine idles near the end of the road, the headlights still breaking up the dark.
“What are they doing?” Casey asks. But the beams shift as the wheels move over the gravel, driving away.
We wait in silence, flat against the floor, for a good ten minutes before rising. “Probably just someone checking out the home sites,” Cameron says. But he doesn’t look at us when he says it. And neither of us responds.
We eat in silence, and then we rest against the wooden beams in silence. When at least another hour has passed since the car turned down this road, Cameron dusts his shorts off and says, “If anything happens while I’m gone, head down the road toward the highway, and I’ll find you.”
“While you’re gone?” Casey asks, and my food is stuck somewhere halfway down my esophagus.
“I need to get us a car,” he says.
“We’ll all go. What would’ve happened at the school if you weren’t back in time? If that car didn’t leave? No. No way. We’ll stay hidden while you get it,” Casey says.
“Seriously, it’s a lot easier for one person to sneak around a neighborhood than three people.”
“And what if you get caught?” I ask. “What then? There’s nobody to help you.”
“I won’t get caught,” he says.
I’m on my feet now. “How can you say—”
“Have a little faith, Alina,” he says, but he smiles when he says it. “I’m good at what I do, remember?”
But he cannot possibly know all the different potential outcomes. What might happen between now and then. He cannot promise that he’ll be okay. Oh, God, he has to be okay.
Casey has her arms folded across her chest, blocking the exit, which is ridiculous because he can just as easily slip between the wooden beams all around us. “Casey, I’ll be okay. I’m coming back.”
She nods, like she’s trying not to cry.
He turns to me, puts my face in his hands. “I’m coming back,” he says to me, too. And I feel it, those words, a promise down to my soul.
Casey gives me her best attempt at the cold shoulder, but it’s obviously not something she does a lot, because she could use some more practice. She’s cleaning up the wrappers and cans, and I’m helping her carry the leftover food back to the trailer when I say, “I do care about him.”
“Right,” she says.
“I do, Casey, and I’m not asking you to understand, but I want you to know that it’s true. I won’t turn on him, won’t turn him in, nothing. If I’m taken, I won’t tell them anything.” She keeps walking, pushing the door open with her hip. “For you, either,” I say.
“You expect me to trust you after you held me hostage? After I asked you to stay away from Cameron and you didn’t?”
“I don’t expect you to, just like I don’t expect you to understand—”
She laughs, and it sounds cold and mean. “You’re just a kid, Alina. A kid who doesn’t think about anything but herself. A kid with absolutely no responsibility, who hasn’t had to make tough decisions …”
She dumps everything into the trash container outside the trailer and folds her arms across her chest.
“I went!” I say. “That was a choice. You think that was so easy? To leave everything I’ve ever known?” The way I ache for the island, sometimes I think it’s a sickness, but other times I think it’s the most natural thing in the world. It belonged to me, I belonged to it—I knew my place there. I was treated kindly, if distantly. I was cared for, though not cared about. I had safety there. I could’ve stayed another year, rolled the dice to see what eighteen got me. I could’ve waited it out and crossed my fingers, but I didn’t. I took the risk, with people I didn’t know, with a plan I didn’t understand. I took a leap.
I’m shaking as I stand before Casey, and I don’t understand why.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m scared, and I’m taking it out on you.”
She takes me in her arms then. We’re about the same size, and my arms hook all the way around her back, and hers around mine. And this time, I don’t flinch.
“Casey,” I say, when my chin is on her shoulder. “I think it’s time to tell me what you’re after. When we get there, I can’t help unless I know.”
I feel her body stiffen, but she doesn’t pull away.
“My sister,” she says. Her chin is still resting on my shoulder, and her breath brushes my ear as she speaks.
There’s nothing we will find in the database that will make her happy. Nothing. “She won’t be the same person,” I say.
Casey pulls back, her chin off my shoulder, her hands off my back. But she’s still so close—I can see my reflection in her eyes. “No, you don’t get it. Before she disappeared, she got a message. I was home over break, and it was accidentally given to me—the curse of being a twin. A man hand-delivered it, and the only thing he said was, ‘What a lovely soul you are,’ which I really didn’t think anything about at the time. Inside was some website address with a really long password … I gave it to her, thinking it was for school or something. That’s when everything changed.”
“She disappeared?”
“Not at first, but she started acting different—not sleeping, constantly on edge. I confronted her, but she wouldn’t say anything. Just blew me off. I went back to school, because it was so important to me at the time, you know? Then she disappeared.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“The message. I couldn’t find the paper again, and Ava’s computer went to sites that just … didn’t exist anymore. Someone went through a lot of trouble to set that up. And the message. About the soul. Don’t you see? June blackmailed—”
“Allegedly,” I mumble, thinking of her message on that recorder.
“Whatever,” Casey says. “Someone sent Ava that note, and then she disappeared. I thought you were in the database again. I thought you were blackmailing her for something. I wanted to find out what Ava saw. So first I went after security where you’re held, thinking you’d still managed to get through it. But it was obvious you weren’t doing anything—nothing was sent from your location. But that’s how Dominic found me. I guess he watched what I was up to after that, too—how I started going after the database. He tracked me down and sent me a note. Told me I wasn’t so good at covering my tracks. Asked me what, exactly, I was after. So, yeah, Dominic kind of forced my hand, but I want in that database to see what happened to Ava. Which is what Cameron doesn’t understand. And I need … I need to prove she’s not in there again. Not reborn. Because if she hasn’t been reborn, she hasn’t died, just disappeared.”
It’s like proving the negative. “And what will that prove? What if she just doesn’t want to be found?” I ask.
“Alina, seriously? Cameron is wanted for questioning in her alleged death.”
And the bottom falls out of my world.
“He wouldn’t,” I say.
“I know that. But the evidence is … unfortunate. They were out with friends, and they left in a car together, and he’s the last person who saw her. They got in a fight, she was scared of something, he said. Jumpy and taking it out on him. Everyone saw them fighting. There’s evidence of blood in the car, but come on, that could’ve come from any time. Doesn’t matter, though, it all adds up to a case against Cameron. She had a lot of money in her bank account, which I guess would’ve gone partly to Cameron eventually … I seriously have no idea where that money came from. And there’s the problem of his past criminal record.”
“He’s not a killer,” I say. And now I want in the database to prove it for him. This. This is something I can give him. “Someone’s still in the database,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “Either there really is a shadow-database somewhere that someone still has access to, or someone else has hacked it.”
That letter to Ava came from somewhere, and it wasn’t me. And if it’s not me now, there’s the possibility that it wasn’t June back then, either.
June was in that database, that’s a fact. She released the information, that’s a fact. But there’s something more going on, and the proof—for all of us—is inside.
Casey and I return to our skeleton house and sit across the room from each other, our backs against the wooden beams.
How long have we been waiting for Cameron? He hasn’t come back yet. And the possibility creeps in that maybe he won’t.
I don’t know. June left Liam. Just left him there to take the fall, and she supposedly loved him.
Casey must see something in my face. “He’s coming back,” she says.
The wait is as endless as the ocean. Where everything falls away but the voice I long to hear, whispering through my head. Only this time, it’s not my mother, or even Genevieve, singing a song. It’s Cameron, laughing. Telling me that I’m a surprise.
It’s long past midnight, and we haven’t slept. It’s probably halfway to dawn. Neither of us has spoken, because then we’d have to acknowledge that he’s not back yet, and maybe something happened, and then what will we do? Neither of us wants to think it, and so we do not speak.
Casey hears it first. It’s completely dark, no lights anywhere nearby, and we should probably be trying to sleep, but we’re listening for everything, for anything. She turns onto her hands and knees, crouched low, face pressed between wooden beams, and then I hear the slow sound of tires over gravel. Casey has one foot pressed onto the ground, as if she’s at the starting line of a race, waiting for the sound of the gun. And I understand. If this is not Cameron, we run. Run for the highway, and he will find us.
If he’s okay.
There are no headlights. But a dark van turns the corner and pulls directly in front of this house, the engine still idling. There are no windows in the back, and the ones up front are still dark. A window rolls down, and I hold my breath. “Is there some secret code word?” Cameron calls.
I’m smiling so big as Casey and I run for the back doors and pull them open. The overhead light turns on, and I see that the van is a dark shade of blue, and inside, there are old blankets and no seats and it smells like smoke in here, too. Like something burning, something changing.
Casey smacks him lightly on the arm from the back of the van. “Took you long enough.”
He grins at her, then catches my eye in the rearview mirror, and says, “Told you.”
The windows up front are tinted. And I think, He has found us the perfect car, because he is perfect. And I wonder if people do this all the time: fall for people because of their ability to pick getaway cars; or fall for people because of the way they look when they think nobody is watching; or fall for people because of the things they say, or the way they look at them, or the things they give up, or the things they cannot do.
I thought it was because of hair and eyes and a sense of humor, or similar personalities and common interests—but it’s not. It’s the ability to pick getaway cars. To weigh crimes. To take the risk on someone again, even when he’s been betrayed once before. To have faith in himself and in me. To see me.
He pulls a knit hat down over his ears, his hair curling out the bottom, and he turns to us for a second as he shifts the van into gear. “Full tank. Tinted windows. No complaining.”
“Good job, little brother,” Casey says.
He looks at me, to check my reaction, and I say, “Blue is my favorite color.”
He smiles.
I smile.
We are not even faking it.
Cameron pauses at the end of the road. “Which way?” he asks, but I know what he’s really asking. Are we going to disappear? Or are we going to take the risk and track down this lead?
Casey is silent, which means that for some reason they’re waiting for me. “If someone’s in the database, and that someone isn’t me,” I say, “then maybe it wasn’t June back then, either.”
Casey stares at Cameron. “I told her about Ava,” she says, and he nods.
I pause, thinking of how to put into words what I’m just barely understanding. “The study. I think it’s wrong.”
“What study? What are you talking about?” Casey asks.
“The big one. The only one that matters! The one June and Liam used. I think, once June got into the database, she saw something. Something that didn’t match. The souls are tagged, but I don’t know how they’re tagged.” I close my eyes, because I know what I’m about to sound like. “I need to get into the database. I need to prove it.”
“That’s … that’s something bigger than us. That’s huge.”
It’s bigger than us, but it’s everything. It’s the force behind all of this. “I can clear June’s name,” I say. And then I think, And yours. And mine.
“Okay,” Cameron says. “Okay. We keep going.”
Dawn is approaching when we make it back onto the highway, me and Casey in the back, no seat belts and viewless, Cameron up front, hoping the tinted windows do their job. I get nauseated, but I don’t get sick. Maybe I’m getting used to it. Maybe motion is just another thing I was deprived of, that I wasn’t accustomed to, and now I’m part of this world, always moving.
Casey hands him the directions. “We should get there before noon,” she says.
“Oh, there’s food under the gray blanket,” he says, and I pull it back to find real food. Fruit in a plastic container and packets of sliced cheese and bottles of water.
“Clothes!” Casey says, grabbing the stash from beside the food. She pulls out two T-shirts and shorts that probably won’t fit right, but at least the shirts cover the uniform. Then I notice that Cameron has changed as well. Khaki shorts, a black T-shirt, like he could fit in anywhere.
“How did you get this?” I ask.
“You don’t want to know,” he says. And then I see the key dangling from the ignition, and I realize he must’ve broken into a home, taken their food, their clothes, and then their car. Maybe while they slept nearby. I feel a twinge of regret, but I still can’t think of a better option.
Casey digs in while looking at some of the figures on the articles. “Was Ava good at computers, too?” I ask.
The van is silent, except for the periodic grooves in the highway that we drive over. Eventually Casey says, “She wasn’t bad at computers, but it wasn’t really her thing. She’d help me if I asked, but she didn’t love it. Not enough to get to my level.” She smiles at me. “People were always surprised by that—that just because we’re twins doesn’t mean we like the same thing. We’re not the same person.”
“Not the same soul,” I add.
“Art,” Cameron says. “She likes art.” His face changes as he thinks about it. “You should’ve seen what she managed to do to the side of our old school with just a few bottles of spray paint,” he says with pride.
“So,” I say, “she was more like you?”
“Ouch,” says Casey.
My face burns, because I didn’t mean it as an insult. “I just meant …”
“I know what you meant. Yes, Alina. Same friends. Same neighborhood. I don’t even have a reason for doing the things I did, I really don’t.”
“Like you ever had a choice,” Casey says. “Come on, your friends practically roped you into it. Guilt by association. You never stood a chance. If I lived there full time, I’d be right there with you both.”
Cameron grimaces. “Nah, I doubt it. The thing is, it was just … effortless. It’s so easy to take the path of least resistance,” he says. “To be exactly who people think you are. To not fight it.” He looks at me then, and says, “And then you’re so deep in it, you figure, this is who I am. And then your girlfriend strikes a deal to save her own ass,” he mumbles.
“Ella?” I ask, and he nods, just the slightest. Then I imagine him with a girlfriend, and I don’t like the way it makes my stomach churn, and I realize I am jealous of even that. Nice, Alina.
“And then,” he says, “because seventeen is considered an adult, and it’s on your record, your name is worthless.”
And maybe you are, too. I can imagine him thinking it, believing it. But he is not.
“It’s just a name,” I say, knowing Casey can make us new identities with time, and maybe money. Not that I’d be able to show my face now. Not that any of us could now. But he could have. Before.
“Do you want to pick a new one?” he asks, one eyebrow raised.
Alina Chase. It comes with a lifetime full of baggage. And yet, here’s the thing: I do not.
Some people believe in karma—that what you do in one life affects the next. But it’s too hard to study, to quantify. Too many variables. What makes one life better than another? Nobody really agrees. Maybe I was terrible in a past life, and that’s why I’m stuck in a prison this time around. But then I look at the people sharing this journey with me and I think, How lucky I am. Does hope count for something?
Maybe there will be a consequence for my choices in the next life. But right now, this is the only one that matters.
I know we’re close when we begin stopping more frequently, turning every few minutes. We’ve moved from the highway into a city, the horns blaring as soon as the lights turn from red to green. I’ve been reading the science articles again, after Casey looked at them sideways, upside down, and backward. “The only thing in common is her name,” she says. Ivory Street. She’s the only thing that stands out.
I think of June’s math, and these papers, and the math in these papers. The formulas are similar. The answers are different.
“Stop,” I say.
Cameron stops. In the middle of the street. A car honks and weaves around us.
“Go,” I say. “Sorry. Just listen. June died. She knew she was going to die. She was scared of it. We need to remember that.”
The mood changes inside the van as we remember. We’re running not only from the people who would punish us but from those who would stop us.
“It’s the three of us,” Cameron says, and I’m not sure what he means. “That’s it. That’s the only people we trust. The three of us.”
I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’m included in this. What have I done to earn it? I’m not sure. But now that I have his trust, I don’t want to break it. I want to use it for something right. I want to save us all.
We park in front of a long building, curving in on itself in something between a U and a straight line, three stories high, with an artificial green area in the middle. There’s a fountain beside the sign.
“Here’s what I could dig up on Ivory Street,” Casey says. “Her lab received several grants based on proposals from the NSF—a government-run agency that funds proposed projects—and those papers are the result of that research. She published a lot of papers over a span of five years, and then it mostly stopped. There was an announcement about her stepping down from her position about eighteen years ago, which fits in with the time frame—that June managed to break her somehow. Her picture shows up at a lot of political fund-raisers, but she disappears from science journals until this recent one—as the contact for the grant foundation.”
“So what’s she doing here?”
“She’s got an office here, as part of the grant decision-making process. But she doesn’t conduct her own research anymore.”
“So this is a government agency?” Cameron asks, shrinking in his seat. “No way we’re getting close. No way.”
“No, we call and lure her out,” Casey says.
“With what phone?” I ask.
“Any phone,” Cameron whispers, and I know this is yet another crime that will be added to our list. I think how hard it is to disappear with no money: no car, no food, no phone, no place to sleep.
Where the hell did June keep that money? What happened to it? We could use it. We really could. How else are we going to disappear?
And then I think how easy it is to disappear with no money. It’s doable. We’ve been doing it. We’ve made it this far. It doesn’t take money to cease to exist. The world is big. We just need to leave.
One more day, I think. I hope. We meet Ivory Street, we figure out how to access the information in the database, we see what June knew, and we find what Ava saw. After that, we can leave. I have to hope that will be enough.
But right now, we need to borrow a phone.
Cameron looks for a phone in a crowded park nearby. Kids are on swings, with fathers or mothers pushing them, and I picture my own. I wonder if she imagined doing this when I was growing inside her. If she pictured what I would look like, what I would sound like—my high-pitched squeal as I tipped my head back toward the sun at the apex of the swing’s arc. It’s a thought that suddenly feels like a memory. Her laughter a shadow of my own. And I am overcome with a wave of grief that the memory isn’t real. That it doesn’t exist.
Cameron’s hand slides into a purse left abandoned on a bench. He doesn’t take the wallet. Just the phone. Casey and I watch from the van. I look at Casey, but she’s staring at the same scene, seeing something in her own memory. “What?” I ask.
“When we were little,” she whispers, “we had a park in our neighborhood. And Cameron couldn’t pump yet. Me and Ava used to take turns pushing him, because he used to bitch and complain until we did. I pushed him so hard once, he fell off the swing and dislocated his elbow. I was going to get in so much trouble.”
“I can imagine,” I say. Cameron heads back toward us. There’s a man in uniform at the other end of the park, and my heart beats wildly. But Cameron is perfect. He pretends not to notice. Not to care.
“We were all kind of terrified of our father, not that he ever did anything to make us fear him. He was mostly all talk, but the talk …,” she says. “Anyway, he said he fell off by himself. I don’t know why. He was just a kid. We were all just kids. Even then he was protecting me, when it should’ve been the other way around.”
Cameron opens the door just then and hands the borrowed phone to Casey as he climbs in beside us. “Did you see the cop?” I ask.
“Yeah, I saw,” he says.
Casey dials information, asks to be connected to the NSF headquarters, and after a moment, she speaks into the receiver. “Ivory Street’s extension, please,” she says in a very official and bossy tone of voice.
Her face lights up when someone who must be Ivory Street picks up the line. “There’s been a break-in at your residence,” she says. “Someone out walking their dog called it in. We’ll need you to see what’s missing in order to make a statement.” A pause. “Sure. 555-4439.” Then she hangs up.
“Is that the phone number?” I ask.
“I have no idea.”
We watch the front double doors beside the fountain and the sign, and a few people trickle out, but they are too young, or too old, to be her. Casey has the printout of her photo spread between us. And then we see her. A woman in her midfifties, a blouse tucked into a narrow skirt that hits below her knees, moving quickly and deliberately toward a black car across the street.
“Bingo,” Cameron says. He climbs into the front seat, tosses the phone out the window in the general direction of the park, and eases into traffic behind one Ivory Street.