Chapter 3

Cameron leaves through my window. I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not difficult, once you get the hang of the tree. I’ve done it myself before. But I am surprised that there’s nobody there to see him do it. The guards stationed outside always make sure that I know they see me, and I pretend not to notice. Not that there’s anywhere for me to go, but I like to see how far I can push them. What I can get away with, what they report back on later, and what they approach me about right then.

So I expect them to be there watching, but they’re not. The press must be waiting out front already. The guards must be restationed. It must be almost time.

The press come every year, because the public likes to see that I’m treated well. Kept safe. Proof that this is not a punishment but a humanitarian effort. My parents cannot care for me, so the state must watch over me. This is their mistake, after all—that everyone knows who I am—and now they are responsible. The pictures from when I was younger, eating my cake and laughing, hugging a stranger, kept the public content. Except now that I’m older, I no longer smile and laugh and hug strangers. I have seen the headlines. Now I make them nervous.

It’s not my fault that I am what I am, and so, like the mentally ill, they like to see that I am both contained and cared for. Like if you cross your eyes and look through the blurry filter, maybe I am even free. And so the guards will look like people who keep me company today. They will watch the press very closely. They will watch me, probably following my blip on the computer screen from somewhere in the basement. They will not watch my window, or see the guy jumping from it, or the trees he disappears into.

I consider doing it myself. I can see straight to the section of woods. I could hide there for a bit, now that the tracker is out. Create some chaos as the media sets up their cameras. Make a scene. Make that speech I’ve been saving since last year. Wait for people to rise up in support, to lobby for my cause, to fight for me. But I’m not June. I’m not good at the same things that she was, despite what science claims about the elements fully bound to a soul: left- or right-handedness; the results of standardized personality tests; areas of extreme giftedness.

Whatever. All the charisma in the world couldn’t save her. She couldn’t persuade her way out of death. There was no equation to be solved that would extend her life, no pattern she could find that would keep everyone from turning on her.

And my father has tried. He had appealed to the masses from behind the bars of his cell. And when he was released five years ago, he came a step too close to me—a violation of his parole—and ended up back in jail.

There’s a plan. There’s a plan, there’s a plan, and I’ll stick to it. READY. YES.

There’s a knock on the door just as Cameron disappears into the distance. He runs like he’s been training for it, like someone taught him how to move his arms and the perfect length of a stride. He doesn’t look back.

I’ve been training, too. But nobody teaches me how to run faster. All I can do is imagine someone after me, someone who trains every moment I’m thinking of taking a rest. I always outrun them. My muscles twitch with adrenaline just thinking of it.

“Just a sec,” I say as I move the dresser away from the door.

The girl—Casey—is there. She looks at my dress, at the spot where my third rib sits underneath, and she says, “All set?”

“Yes,” I say, even though it’s an effort not to hunch over, to hold my hand against my rib cage.

She touches my hand, and I flinch. Then I feel her fingers spreading, and something cold and hard that she presses into my palm. “Under your desk,” she whispers. “And I need the tracker.”

She shifts her weight from foot to foot and casts a quick glance over her shoulder. I want to tell her to calm down, to not draw attention to herself, but I realize I’m doing the same thing. My fingers tremble as I place the small cylinder under my desk. I wonder how she got this inside. It looks like a candle, all waxy on the outside, but without the top. And then I realize: the cake. No wonder she was nervous when she brought it in.

I guess this is what they meant by DISTRACT.

I told them no casualties, and at this point I have to trust that this is just that—a distraction. That it won’t destroy everything. Just this. My computer. My journal. My life.

Everything I’ve been for seventeen years will be gone. Everything I’ve known for seventeen years …

I open the bottom drawer and grab the picture buried near the bottom. The newspaper clipping with my mother’s photo that I printed off years ago, and I fold it up and shove it into the sleeve of my dress.

I grab my journal from the desk.

Casey watches me from the doorway. She frowns and says, “You can’t take that with you.”

I nod. Of course I understand. It’s too bulky, too noticeable, and I’ll be in the water at some point anyway. But my nails dig into the softened spine. I know it’s just words, but they are my words. I know the people here can and probably do read it, but I don’t even care. It’s the words of Alina Chase, not June Calahan, and in a way, it’s the only tangible evidence of my existence. It’s proof that I am something other than the soul of June Calahan. Her soul may be mine, but my mind is my own.

I clear my throat and dart to the bathroom, tossing the journal behind the toilet, hoping it survives. I want it to exist. Even if I never see it again, whether it’s peeled back and exposed for everyone to see, or whether it’s kept locked up in some closet of evidence, I want to know it’s somewhere.

I retrieve the tracker from the bathroom, balling it up in my fist, preparing to hand it to her the same way she passed me the candle.

Casey frowns as our hands connect. “Your hair is wet,” she says.

“I took a shower.” Not a lie.

“Turn around,” she says. She pulls an elastic band from her wrist and holds it in her teeth. I do as I’m told. I feel her hands in my hair, dividing it up, weaving it together. She spins me around and smooths back the sides of my hair. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I leave my room for presumably the very last time.

A braid runs down my back, and my dark hair looks just that—dark. Slick, like it was styled that way. And with the dress, I look like I cared that there were cameras coming. That my face would be splashed on every network today. And in the coming days.

Jen or Kate or whoever stands at the end of the hall. “You look lovely, Alina,” she says, eyes flat and full of dispassion. “Leigh will take you out to see them now.”

I look in the hall, wondering who this Leigh is, and then I realize: she meant Casey. Cameron gave me her real name, and I’m wearing her elastic, and she did my hair. I hear both of us breathing over my pounding heartbeat. I try to slow it, to be calm, act normal, but nothing is working.

I feel my mother’s picture crumpled against my shoulder, and I concentrate on that. Not on the fact that I am following her, the girl in the frayed pants—a person with a real name—and I am walking away from my room for the very last time, down the hall for the very last time, out the door for the very last time.

I hear the shutter of camera lenses as I step outside. I shield my eyes for a moment—from the sun on the horizon in the distance, from the flashes at the edge of the path. Casey walks down the steps, and I follow.

“Alina,” a reporter shouts. “Do you have anything to say?”

I picture June and that speech she made when she was barely older than I am now, appealing to the people. I am not the danger. I am not the threat. I am the bell, tolling out its warning. I am delivering a message.

She had such poise, such grace. She made people believe in her. She made them believe that a criminal past life should be public information. That the warning she delivered justified the crime she committed to provide it.

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.