Soulprint
Authors: Megan Miranda
For Alexa and Jake
Prologue
There is a saying, an old one, from before meâbefore June even:
To know your soul is to become it
.
True or not, it's the main reason most people don't check who they were in the past life, when given the choice. Such a luxury, that choiceâI hope they appreciate it.
I would give anything not to know.
I'd trade everything I have, every drop of information I surround myself with, down to the hope I hold tight like a blanket.
I'd trade it all for my parents sleeping in the next room and an alarm clock waking me before dawn to catch the bus for school. For a heavy backpack and a forgotten umbrella as I walk through the rain up the front steps on the first day of class. For bumping into strangers in the doorway who mumble half apologies, for running straight down the hallway as the bell rings. For a girl catching my eye when I walk in late and grinning in a secret understanding. For the empty seat that she has saved
beside her. For the teacher looking at the class roster and then back at me, and asking
Alina?
because he doesn't know.
Because nobody knows.
What I'd give for that.
I'd trade you my next life, and the one after that. I'd trade you every one of themâfor however long my soul should lastâfor this life.
Just this one.
There has really been only one official attempt on my lifeâtwo, 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 threatsânot the official attemptsâthat 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 wouldâthey must've been saints in a past life, honestlyâand definitely not any time before that.
My mother spent more than half my childhood in jailâbecause 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 lifeâto
save
meâso 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 kitchenâtrying 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 thirteenâno, fourteenâdays. 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 oneâthe 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
âand then I'll see her as part of the group stepping off the bridge after screening. But maybe that's just coincidenceâmy 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 elseâ
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 truthâthat 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 protectionâthere'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 houseâthis islandâis 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 yardâa big oneâstretching 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 basementâsomeone 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 nonânews 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 debatingâevery year the same words, the same sidesâand 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 Juneâthe 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 punctureâthe 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
âinstead 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 peopleâpeople 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.
