Soulprint (35 page)

This story I'm telling is not just mine and June's, but everyone's. It's Casey's and Cameron's and Ava's, and it's the story of the others who have been kept silent.

“Ivory Street is locked in the cellar of her home. Dominic Ellis is the third person involved in breaking me off the island. He was once a guard. He wanted access to the database, and he thought I could give it to him.” I think of telling about his soul, about Liam White, but that is not mine to tell. “But it's bigger than blackmail. They've been using people. Moving people into positions of power to give them whatever they want. I was contained because Ivory Street saw me as a danger to her scheme. Not for any other reason. But I am not the danger. I am not the threat.”

Casey stops the van, backs up, turns it around. My heart picks up speed. Faster, I will need to go faster. And do better.

“The other people who rescued me …” I reach for the phone, and Cameron hands it to me. I point it at him for a moment, and then to Casey as she drives. I hold the phone myself, and turn it around, facing me. “Cameron and Casey London. They've been looking for their sister, Ava. She was approached by these people—blackmailed because of who they said she was in her past life and the inheritance she had just accessed—and when she wouldn't do what they said, she ran.” I take a deep breath. “June ran, too. But you're not allowed to run.”

Casey slams on the brakes and turns around. “We can't get out of here in the van,” she whispers, but I'm sure the camera is picking up her voice. I nod, and I speak into the camera once more.

“They've done nothing wrong, other than seek the truth to help the sister they love. They are the most selfless people I know. My name is Alina Chase, and this is the truth. I'm tired
of running. I'm going to get out of this van now, but before I go, this is what we have.” I show June's old hard drives, and I methodically flip through page after page of the notebook for the camera, committing them to the memory of this machine. “June replicated the study, with
all
the data. The results are not the same.” I take the gun from Cameron, open the back doors, and toss it outside. “We are unarmed,” I say, and then I hit End.

Casey takes the phone, and though she's still sucking in air—from crying, I think, and not the smoke—her fingers move effortlessly across the screen. “Posted,” she says.

“Where?” I ask.

“Everywhere,” she says. “It's been e-mailed to news stations and uploaded directly to video-sharing sites in its entirety.”

We get out of the van where the alley dead-ends, and Casey says, “Are we running?”

I'm not sure if Cameron
could
run, even if we wanted to. Even if we had somewhere else to go. I picture June and Liam's hole in the ground. I picture June, alone, for over a year. I understand why she came out of the woods. Why she risked it all.

“I'm done running,” I say. I gesture toward the phone in her hand. “That will have to be enough.”

Casey drops it to the ground as the first red-and-blue lights pull up the street and stop in front of us. Two more cars soon follow. And the helicopters circle above. I look up, and I see several have the symbols for different news stations. For once, I hope this will keep us safe. We have no weapons. The police are here, shouting instructions through a loudspeaker. I hold my hands up, straight over my head, and I turn around
like they tell me to. And I place my hand on my collar when they tell me to, lifting my shirt so they can see I have no weapon, slowly spinning around. I do everything they tell me to, and I hope that Casey and Cameron do as well, but I'm scared to look, to turn—I'm scared if I make even one misstep, they will see some element of danger. I walk backward, like they instruct, and the shouting grows. I drop to my knees, like they insist, and the footsteps race toward me.

I feel hands on my arms and metal on my wrists and a knee in my back. I cannot see Casey or Cameron as I'm yanked to my feet and led to the back of a police car. Someone guides my head so I don't hit it on the roof, and then I'm tossed across the seat, no free hands to brace my fall. The door shuts behind me.

I can't see what's going on outside, through the chaos of the people. I can't hear what's happening, through the static of the radio. I can't do anything more.

I close my eyes, and I picture my mother out there somewhere. I wonder if she sees the news. What she thinks of this. Of me.

I am kept in a hotel room, somewhere near my island—where the original event took place. They are careful not to call my escape a crime, because that implies I had been held captive. But still, I am kept. It is not a prison, or a containment. Not exactly. But it
is
a room with a guard just outside—it's for my own protection, I am assured.

I spent one day inside a cell while they sorted everything out, but they could not hold me any longer without charges. Not even for my own protection. Not with the public watching so closely. Not with the endless debating on television, which I have now come to love. It may save me this time, public opinion. Which is all law really is, anyway.

We make our laws, and then we must suffer for them.

I've been in this place for six days now, and I'm growing anxious.

Casey, Cameron, and I were kept in different rooms, paid
for by public donations to our cause. Yet again, I have become a cause.

Cameron spent the first two days in the hospital, and he was here for only one night before he and Casey left for their sister's memorial. I felt better when Casey was in the same building, but she and Cameron have been gone for four days now.

Even when they were here, we had very little contact.

We were watched at all times. We were never left alone together. I know we were all walking a line, each afraid to cross it.

Casey hadn't spoken about her sister other than that one morning over breakfast, before Cameron returned. “I just don't feel like she's gone,” she said.

But the thing is, she's not. Just like June isn't. Not entirely. I hope that thought gives her comfort.

Ivory and Mason are under investigation—kept under house arrest—but Dominic is gone. Disappeared through the tunnels during the chaos.

I am the only one here, once again.

The news reported that Casey has struck some kind of deal in the days after the memorial. And, they say, if she is free, then the logic goes that Cameron should also be free. And then maybe
I
will be free. But in the meantime, I am not eighteen yet, and there are legal loopholes to examine and stories to dissect and truths to create.

My lawyer said that part of Casey's deal will be her cooperation with the federal division of cyber crimes—I guess
technically they have recruited her. Part of me thinks this will make her happy, that she will love it, but I haven't had a chance to ask her. I don't know if I will. I don't know whether she will come back.

Cameron and Casey will not need the public's funds any longer. They don't have to come back here, once they are set free. He and Casey will inherit the money that Ava had left to herself in her previous life. Once they are free, they will truly be
free
.

I tried to catch Cameron in the hotel lobby as he left for the memorial. But I barely got a chance to say anything other than sorry as he and Casey were ushered past me, through the open glass doors and into the back of a black SUV, disappearing down the road.

And so I am in a room, alone, with a television and a laptop and a window blocked by trees—no view in, but no view out, either. With a guard outside and the media out front and a lawyer who sits in the lounge all day and doesn't let anyone question me anymore.

The news is on again—this time, it's a talk-show-style debate about Ivory Street and the falsified study. They cannot disprove the study for certain without going back into the database; but they also cannot prove it. They show June's math on the screens, pictures captured from the video I took in the van and enlarged for all to see. Our fates will be decided by the public. Not science. Not law. I know that.

We cannot be reduced to numbers. A human being isn't quantifiable.

Even if we could find out for sure—whether one life affects the next, whether our nature is predetermined—people keep saying it's better not to know. There's too much at stake. Too many consequences. We want to believe in free will here. We want to believe in the power of redemption here. That we are always capable, for this life or the last, of making each life worth something.

What I would give for that chance—what I
have
given for that.

Nobody's sure what to do about Dominic. Where he fits in the balance of good and evil, right and wrong. If Cameron, Casey, and I are to be free, then shouldn't he be as well? I think about telling the investigators about the gun, and the way he pointed it at Casey, the way the bullet grazed my skin. That's a crime with a standard punishment. An accepted consequence.

But part of me does believe in some sort of karmic justice, and my soul cost him his life once before. I do not want to be responsible for the containment of his soul anymore.

I have given them the location of the hideaway, so sure he would be there. And the cabin, too, but it had been destroyed. It doesn't seem fair to me that he should be out there when I am still being held. But then I think of June, driven underground, unable to show her face. Out, but not free. And then I think that maybe it's fitting.

There are different types of prison, after all.

Besides, Dominic has too many cards to play. He's too smart. He'll strike a deal if he gets a taste of containment—maybe end up like Casey. I don't want to be anywhere nearby when he
crawls out of the woodwork. I need to shake myself free of his obsession as well. I have this fear that he is in a basement somewhere, watching us. Hacking into the security feed of the hotel, watching my keystrokes on the computer. Sometimes I write him notes, typing and deleting them in a blank document, just in case he is watching.

Go live
, I tell him.
Live
this
life
.

Sometimes I type
I'm sorry
.

I don't know for sure whether he's alive or dead, but he's a ghost to me either way.

I'm lying on my stomach with the laptop propped up between myself and the television. I scroll through a new article I find and stop at the bottom, at the comments section. It's become an obsession, reading the comments on the articles and the blog posts. I probably shouldn't, but I cannot stop. The opinions vary, but the majority are in support of my freedom. Many offer their homes, their names, their help. I've read thousands. And still I cannot stop.

Because the first article I read, three pages down in the comments, I found this, sent from an anonymous account:

I wonder what you dream of, niña. I hope you find it
.

And I remembered that commenter from the article we read in the school computer lab.

Where she might go, one can only dream
.

So I began an endless search, every place our video feed appeared. Every news site, every blog, every online journal. I read every comment, searching and searching for more.

I've found 107 comments. Every one from an anonymous source. Every one the same:

I wonder what you dream of, niña. I hope you find it
.

There aren't any comments left on this one yet. So I close the article and bring up that video feed of my mother, the only time she spoke to the press. I watch it again, even though I know it by heart. But I like to see the shape of my eyes mirrored back at me as she speaks. In truth, there's a lot I get from her. Not everything comes from June, from my soul. We are more than that—a combination of genetics and the soul and the experience of our lives. And something more, I am sure.

“I used to sing her a lullaby,” she says on the video. “Same as my mother used to sing to me. She can find me there, in her dreams.” I see myself reflected in her. Her eyes. Her resistance. Her refusal to barter with lives. And her ability to bide her time, to trust that I might find her.

Go to sleep, and we will see each other in the land of dreams. Tierra de Sueños
.

She can find me there
, she told the media—she was telling me.

Find me there
.

I am not supposed to leave. It's for my own protection, I am told. But there's a gaping void the size of a lifetime that can fit between “not allowed to” and “not supposed to.” I have read the comments. I have listened to the news. I believe they will let me go. I believe that if I walk out that front door and turn down the street and wave good-bye, nobody will stop me.

I am not okay with waiting for someone else to decide my fate.

But I sit here, still, on the seventh day, growing anxious and antsy and claustrophobic.

I sit here still, because after I said sorry to Cameron as the lobby doors slid open, he leaned in close, placed his cheek against mine, even though the cameras were on us. And he whispered, “Wait.”

Because he knows. I will not stay here long.

My lawyer has requested a meeting over lunch, which I am all too happy to take, because it's in the dining hall and not this room, and she will not allow anyone to follow us.

She's eating a salad with slices of fruit and nuts sprinkled on top, and I order the same because my mind is ten thousand miles away.

“I'm working on declaring you an emancipated minor,” she says. “Are you okay with that?”

I shift in my seat. Emancipated means free, so at least this is in the right direction. “How long will this take?”

She chews on her lettuce for an eternity before speaking. “First, we file a petition with the court. Then we go from there.”

“Sure,” I say. “Let's file the petition.” But I am used to laws that are bent to contain me, not a court that grants me freedom. It makes me nervous. It's a nice thought, though. It might just work. Too bad I won't be sticking around long enough to find out. Maybe they can emancipate me in absentia.