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.
Duérmete, mi niña … and the pain, the cold, the entire world falls away.
Something is wrong.
We’ve stopped moving. Cameron’s body shifts to vertical, and he pulls me toward him, and then past him, until I feel my forearms scrape against cold metal—we’ve reached the steel net.
My fingers tangle with the metal wires, and I press my face against them as my lungs beg for air. Cameron moves the mouthpiece to me, and I breathe too much. Too fast. We’re trapped.
I feel the tank being pulled away from me, off my back, and I start to panic. I claw my way up the netting toward the surface. I need air. I need out. But someone grabs my leg, trapping me between his body and the netting. He puts a mask over my face. A new breathing device in my mouth, and turns me around to strap it on my back.
But I still can’t see. The mask is full of water. He’s trying to tell me something, tapping at my mouth, tapping at my mask. I think he means to use the air to push the water away, but when I remove the device, he puts it back in my mouth. Then he taps my mouth once more, traces his finger up along my cheek, to my forehead, down my nose—tracing the path the air might take. He presses against the top of my mask, and I understand. I take a breath through my mouth and let it out through my nose, and the water pushes out the bottom, and I see Cameron in front of me, nodding.
I see.
I see the netting behind me, covered in algae, but I can’t see much farther because it’s nearly dark. I see Dom in the wetsuit rising up from the bottom with another tank, and I watch as Cameron switches it out. Cameron illuminates his watch and presses himself against the netting as beams of light pass across the surface of the water.
We wait.
Dom has another set of equipment in his hands that must be for Casey. Beside me, Cameron leans forward, as if he’s waiting to see her swim out of the darkness. I understand. Cameron and Casey were supposed to meet up with us here, but I have screwed that up.
We breathe underwater for a long time. Long enough for us to hear the motor of a boat ripping overhead. Long enough for me to stop worrying about Casey and instead worry about running out of air.
Dom disappears into the darkness below us again, comes back with another set of tanks, and my fingers grasp ineffectively at the straps. I am a prune. I am a bleeding, blind prune, and I start breathing too fast, unable to control the panic. Because I am sure I will either become prey to something that has caught the scent of my blood, or else I will surely suffocate under here, in the darkness—and they will pull up my body a few days from now, and they’ll test all the newly born, and they’ll put my soul in a cage again.
And then just like that, Cameron touches my shoulder and points up. Dom is near the surface, waving at us. I claw at the steel, pulling myself up out of the water. It’s as dark on the surface as it was underneath. This must be what we were waiting for.
Darkness.
I burst through the surface and spit out the mouthpiece, sucking in real, salty air. Waves, water, move around me, and I feel exposed, despite the darkness. My fingers tighten around the steel, digging through the algae. Cameron is still close, but he has his own equipment now. I wonder if he forgot that he doesn’t need to rely on me anymore.
There are lights in the distance, from the island. And there are lights through the steel netting, from boats on the other side. And in the distance, far away, I see land. There is no way we will make it with this canister. I realize that, having gone through two already. There is no way we will make it without being seen.
I wonder if this is a suicide mission.
I wonder what will happen to my soul.
The others have removed their mouthpieces as well, speaking in quick, low voices to each other.
“What’s the plan?” I ask, as the current pushes my body into the steel.
“We climb. And then we swim,” Cameron says.
I look, wide-eyed, at Cameron.
“There was a robotic sub,” he whispers quickly, “that we left just outside the cage, on the other side. Casey put your tracker on it.” He nods, as if he’s convincing himself she made it. “They’re not looking over here.”
I want to believe him, but the beam from a boat cuts across the surface, and we all dive underneath for a moment. When I resurface, I expect them to make a new plan.
“Climb,” Dom says.
I have come this far. They have come this far with me. My muscles twitch in anticipation, because this is something I can do. And so I climb.
This I do faster than either of them. I make it to the top and hook my legs over the other side, flattening myself against the netting, and see nothing but dark water, waiting to swallow me up.
The boats cast their beams of light across the surface in a steady pattern. If light hits us, we are found. We need to get back into the water. Back under the water. I count the seconds in my head. The light moves in a steady, obvious pattern. Automated and predictable, but still, they need to move faster.
The rope on my ankle tugs as I slip down the other side. The ocean is dark, except for the beams of light cutting across in the distance, heading this way. I wait for Dom and Cameron to come over, but they’re arguing as they climb.
“I need to wait,” Cameron says, watching the water.
“There’s not enough air,” Dom says. His voice cuts down to my stomach, or maybe that’s just the seawater. He’s holding something that looks like a walkie-talkie with a screen in one hand and his breathing device in the other. “Not for you to wait without being seen.” He points to the beams of light, stretching across the surface of the water periodically. “Not enough for both of you.” Cameron nods, like of course he knew that. Of course he does.
He slips down the rest of the steel, not worried about drowning when he hits the water again. He comes back up beside me.
He looks like he’s about to throw up.
He looks like he’s about to break down.
“She’ll make it,” I say. He didn’t see the way she grabbed my arm and ran with single-minded focus. Or the way she did my hair, or switched our clothes. She’s going to make it.
“Of course she’ll make it,” he says. And then he readjusts his mask, grabs on to a slack of the rope, and disappears under the surface again.
For a second I wonder whether I’m expected to know how to swim now. Or whether I’ll be dragged by the rope. I see a beam of light coming, and I dip under the surface.
Swimming feels like it should be easy. I push off from the cage, and I move my arms like I felt Cameron doing, and I kick my legs like he did, but mostly I’m just moving water around. And sinking.
Then I feel his hand on my arm as he pulls me toward him, as he hooks my arm around his shoulder, and we start moving.
We keep a slow pace—I don’t know how we know where we’re going, or how we’re going to get there with the air we have, but I don’t have any more options. Eventually Cameron stops, grasping a rope that’s tethered to a buoy, still under the water. I grip on to the rope as both of them follow it down, disappearing from my vision. I close my eyes. I am alone in the ocean, underwater. I count to ten, and I imagine shadows, shapes, circling me. Thirty seconds, and the water grows colder. Forty-nine … I jump when someone grabs my hand, pushing fresh equipment toward me. I open my eyes and the shadows disappear. Cameron holds his thumb up and keeps it that way, like he’s asking me. I do the same, mirroring his movement, and he nods.
READY? YES.
We switch out our tanks, leaving one behind for Casey, and we start moving again.
I realize that’s what Dom has in his hand. A GPS, leading us on a marked trail that they had set up previously. Like a path with lights along the way. We stop at two more points, swim some more, but by this point I am numb past the point of shaking. I no long worry about being found. Being captured. I no longer worry about if we will … if we will … I breathe through the mouthpiece, and the endless ocean falls away.
Duérmete, mi niña, duérmete, mi amor …
The water shifts. It moves us. It pushes at us more and then pulls, in a rhythm. I open my eyes to darkness just as we are thrust against it. A darkness that is real and solid.
I push off Cameron’s back. I am at the end of something. Or the start of something. An edge. I start clawing my nails at it, and one breaks off on the brick as I slide farther down. My eyes burn, even through the mask, as if I’m staring at the sun and trying not to blink.
Someone pulls at my arm—I can’t feel it, only the pressure—and leads me toward a metal pipe. He pushes me inside first. It’s still full of water, and it’s pitch black, but it doesn’t matter that I can’t swim now—there’s barely enough room for me. My hands and feet push at the narrow, curved sides, propelling me along the steady incline.
I start to breathe too fast, and I imagine the air running lower, running out, and I understand in a way I can feel that this is it: this is the last air, and this is the last step, and this pipe leads to something I want desperately.
I feel something other than water—the absence of water—on my back, and I clamber onto my knees. I pull the mask from my face and shake the tank off my back and suck in air. Humid, dank air, but air. Dom says, “Don’t leave this behind,” so I pick it back up and crawl onward. “You, too, Cameron.”
“Why not? They know who I am,” Cameron says.
“They know who she is,” he corrects, his voice deliberately quiet, but it still echoes through the tunnel. “They don’t know where we’ve been. They don’t know anything but your face so far, if that. Don’t give them anything more. They don’t know who you are.”
Cameron laughs. “What I am is a dead man walking.”
But he’s wrong. In fact, what we are right now, crawling through a pipe under the earth somewhere, is the exact opposite of dead.
The pipe ends, and the room opens up. I see light filtering from somewhere beyond. And I hear water dripping, echoing, along with our movements. There’s stagnant water in a pool in the middle of the room, and we stand, silent, on the concrete ridge over top. There are clothes, in piles, shoved against the walls, curving upward. Clean, dry clothes. Cameron doesn’t speak as he pushes one pile my way with his foot. I’m wobbly on my legs, and my entire body is shaking, so I press my hand against the wall to steady myself as I undress.
When I pull the wet shirt over my head, the bandage comes with it, and I let out a sound. The wound starts bleeding again, dripping down my stomach, and I wipe it away quickly, hoping nobody else notices.
I look over my shoulder. Dom, in the wet suit, is facing the pipe we came through, pulling the black material down his chest. Cameron stands halfway between us, and he’s watching me. He walks closer, half-changed, and whispers, “Casey will take care of it. Soon as she’s back.”
I nod and instinctively look at the untouched pile of clothes against the wall. Cameron finishes changing with his back to me. It’s funny, I think, the things people are supposed to keep hidden about themselves.
My entire life has been on display since forever.
“I’ll wait here for Casey,” Cameron says, speaking across the room. Dom turns around, his mask gone, and steps out of the shadow. He shakes out his hair, and I freeze. His mouth twitches when he sees that I see.
I try to grasp my bearings. To grasp the upper hand. But I feel instead as if I’m falling over the edge of the cliff again. I try to mimic his condescending gaze. I weigh the words before I speak them, so that I am sure of them. “Hello, Ellis,” I say. Emphasis on the lie he fed me to hide my shock.
“Always the skeptic,” he says, with a sad smile. He sticks his hand out, as if I would consider taking it. “Dominic Ellis,” he says. “Did you miss me?”
I sense, but do not see, that Cameron is stepping closer. I wonder if he’s as confused as I am. If he knows that I know this man. Knew this man. That he was a guard and I liked him. That he snuck into my room and we talked. And then, when I realized he wasn’t there for me, I did something more, something worse.
Dominic Ellis’s crooked grin turns into a full-on smile, and my heart plummets into my stomach, ruining that fleeting feeling of freedom. And I realize that I have made a terrible mistake.