The Island (18 page)

And none of it mattered.

My soul is unbreakable.

Whatever happened here, they wouldn’t get that. Not Vornis, not Hanson, and none of the other men. If this was the end, and Lee knew that the stakes had never been higher, he was free to delve into his memories now. Free to take what he needed from them, and screw it if it hurt.

He studied the small grate in the floor and wondered where it led.

Regrets, Lee, count ’em up.

In eighth grade, he’d cheated on a math test. Which wouldn’t have been a regret at all, except he’d gotten caught. Two weeks of detention, and it had gone on his permanent record. They always said that, didn’t they?
This will go on your permanent record
. Somehow Lee had expected it to come back and bite him on the ass when he was applying for colleges:
Oh, now, we can’t possibly have a
cheater
here
, but maybe that permanent record thing was just bullshit, because nothing had ever come of it.

In eighth grade, you cheated. They can’t take that from you.

Troy Faulkner was a regret, a real one. A tenth grade regret. They’d been friends. They’d hung out in each other’s houses all one summer. It started because Troy’s folks had a pool and it had been a hot summer, but it turned out they had a lot in common. Troy was one of the weird kids. He liked music nobody else had ever heard of, he read books in the school cafeteria at lunch, and he made short films and dressed in thrift-shop clothes by choice. He was weird but cool, and nobody gave him too much shit.

He was also gay, but Lee had never done anything about it. All summer long, they’d bullshitted about all the girls they thought were hot and which of them they’d like to fuck, and they both knew they were lying. It was plain as anything in their eyes, but they both kept up the pretense. They were fifteen-year-old boys in a small town, each one of them terrified to make the first move in case the other one called him out as a faggot. Then Troy’s dad got another job out of state. On Troy’s last night in Andover, Lee had slept over at his place in a sleeping bag on a floor covered in packing boxes.

It had been before dawn.

“Lee?”

“What?”
He’d struggled up from sleep.

And Troy had pressed his lips against Lee’s, quickly, urgently, and Lee had felt his heart race and his breath quicken. And that was it; a single kiss, almost chaste, and the next morning Troy had left, and that whole long, hot summer had suddenly felt like a waste. They’d been best friends all summer. They could have been something more if only they hadn’t both been so scared.

In tenth grade, Troy Faulkner kissed you. That’s yours forever.

Lee shifted on his knees.

When he was seventeen, he had used a fake ID to go to his first gay bar. And when he’d drunk too much and was on his way home with a guy, he’d let it slip that he was underage. And the guy had called him jailbait, punched him, and told him to fuck off. Even now he didn’t know if he’d accidentally let it slip or if he’d just been too scared to go through with it. He’d hated that guy, even though in his place Lee knew he’d do exactly the same thing. It was still a regret, though. He ruined that guy’s night and his own.

You were a dumb kid. All yours.

He’d once thrown up on the Gravitron at the county fair. He shouldn’t have been drinking beer before going on it, but if he hadn’t been drinking beer, he wouldn’t have gone on for a fourth turn when Shaun had dared him. It was the most disgusting thing ever. Because the vomit had gone out and then come straight back and hit him and the people on either side of him. And everyone screamed, and it stank, and it hit them again every time they came back around, like being caught in a blender.

You once vomited on a whole bunch of people at the county fair. They’ll never forget you
.

He smiled at the floor, and tears stung his eyes.

He took Chastity to the prom. The name didn’t suit her. He’d thought it would be okay since she was still hung up on Shaun, but it was prom night, and she expected to get laid. His first and last time with a girl. It had been weird, and he’d only been able to get an erection by thinking about the time he’d walked in on her and Shaun at a party, and she’d been doing the reverse cowgirl. And it wasn’t her he thought about. It was Shaun, the muscles cording in his arms as he held her hips, the sweat on his chest, and his hairy legs sticking out from underneath Chastity. It was still a disaster. Chastity had told him in no uncertain terms how unfavorably he stacked up against Shaun, which he supposed was justified. He’d been terrible.

He should have gone to prom with Dean. Dean had asked, but in a joking sort of way:
“So, dude, if you don’t have a date, do you want to go together? Just for a joke, you know.”

He’d seen the same lie in Dean’s eyes as he’d seen in Troy’s during that long summer years before, and it had freaked him out.

Prom had sucked. His, Chastity’s, and Dean’s.

Chastity hated you because of prom. They can’t have that.

In college, she’d once banged on his door in the middle of the night.
“I know you’re in there, Anderson! Open the fucking door!”
Then, seeing him and Tim scramble for their clothes, she’d arched a perfectly sculpted brow and tossed her blonde hair back over her shoulders.
“Hello,”
she’d said to Tim,
“I’m the slutty cheerleader he fucked on prom night. You can blame me for any feelings of inadequacy he displays.”

It made him smile, even now. Even here.

Chastity was your best friend in college. They can’t take her away from you.

When he was nine, he came off his bike and broke his arm. And because his mom had told him he was grounded and he’d gone out anyway, he’d tried to keep it a secret. He’d wrapped his arm in ice for a whole day, hiding the swelling under long sleeves and hoping it would magically disappear by the morning. In the middle of the night, suddenly panicking that his arm would swell up so bad it would turn black and fall off—that was what Shaun said would happen—he’d woken his parents and confessed to everything. And after they got back from the hospital, his mom had written
You’re still grounded
on his cast.

He smiled at the floor and shifted his aching shoulders as much as he could.

You broke your arm and didn’t tell anyone for ten hours. You were stupid and stubborn, and they can’t take that.

He had those memories and a million others.

The cuffs were digging into his wrists, scraping against the broken skin.

He didn’t look up. Not in here, not unless he was told. It wasn’t just obedience, but because the anticipation was difficult enough to manage with his gaze on the floor. There was a reason they made him wait in this room. The walls were hung with the instruments of his torture, and Lee couldn’t look at them. He knew from experience that if he let himself dwell on them, to speculate what order they might be used in tonight or what inventive variations Vornis had thought of for their use, he’d be a mess before it even began. And tonight he needed to hold himself together for as long as he could.

Something bad was going to happen tonight. Something
worse
. And this room would break him—it always did—but at least he could hold himself together until then.

Whatever happens in here, you know Shaw can’t help you.

Whatever game Shaw was playing, whatever he’d promised, and whatever Lee had believed, he knew Shaw wouldn’t help. Couldn’t help. He’d have to take a side when he came into this room, and that was okay. He’d given Lee more than he’d had any right to hope for, hadn’t he?

I know. I know he can’t help.

Lee closed his eyes briefly. Seven sand dollars today. Not a great haul, but they’d been good ones. Round and white and fragile. Lee always fought the compulsion to crush them when he was holding them in his hand, to turn them to sand and let the wind take them.

Whatever happens here, your soul’s unbreakable.

He kept his eyes closed.

It’s a shame the rest of me is made of fucking glass.

* * * *

“
Ukochany
,” Irina whispered.

Lee lifted his head, and pain ripped down his spine.

Irina knelt down in front of him and held out a cup of water. She held it carefully while he drank and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief.

When had water become such a luxury?

“Thank you,” he murmured and saw that her pale eyes were filled with tears. He forced a smile and didn’t know whose benefit it was really for. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

My soul is unbreakable.

She raised a hand to his cheek and touched it gently.

Lee closed his eyes and leaned into the touch. She had always been so kind to him. He heard the rustle of her clothing, and then the touch was withdrawn, and she was gone. The door opened—he heard laughter from somewhere in the house—and then closed again.

“One foot in front of the other,” he told himself, and the sound of his voice washed to the walls and back again to where he knelt.

In the chopper, John had shown him a photograph of his wife and kids. So it could have been worse. What would Lee leave behind when the time came? His parents and a few friends and an empty desk in the Denver office. No little kids wondering when Daddy was coming home, so it could have been worse.

He hadn’t known any of those guys, not really. Not beyond their names. He’d been the new guy, the interloper, but they’d made him welcome. He hadn’t known them enough to mourn them. So it could have been worse.

Tonight it would be worse. Tonight this room would break him again, every part of him. It always did. It wasn’t a surprise anymore. It was almost a relief when they ratcheted up his fear and pain as far as it could go, and it crashed over him and broke him. Because at least then he could let go, until next time. He could scream and not care, and cry and not care. He could call them
sir
and do what they told him and not care. He wanted to be in a place where he didn’t care. He always told himself that the waiting was the worst, and some crazy part of him always believed it until the torture began.

Tonight would be the worst yet because those other men would be here, and Vornis would want to put on a good show for them, and Shaw would be here as well. And Shaw would see him break, and Shaw would have a hand in breaking him because you had to pick a side in this room.

Lee shifted on his knees and wondered why Vornis had chosen him. He’d been the youngest guy on the chopper, and maybe he was just unlucky enough to be Vornis’s type. He would have thought a man like that would have got more satisfaction out of breaking Ramon, though. Ramon was big, and Ramon had been in charge. Shit, not that he’d wish this on anyone else. He just wondered, that was all.

He thought of the boy in the red vest with his tired eyes and his unsmiling face. Vornis had called the painting a thing of beauty. Lee had thought the boy looked sad. Those tired eyes looked like they had seen too much. They wanted to close.

Two tired boys, but Vornis would only destroy the one with a heartbeat. One was a work of art, and the other was nothing.

Lee fixed his gaze on the grate in the floor.

Ramon was one of the guys who had dug his own grave in Colombia. One of the guys who’d looked at Lee and pitied him. Ramon had been rotting in the shallow ground for eight weeks now, and Lee envied him that. Wherever he was now, whatever he believed—Ramon had worn a silver crucifix, he remembered now, that had glinted in the sun when he’d been digging—at least the worst was over for him. It was never over for Lee.

In the beginning, he’d wanted to die. That had changed. Now he wanted to survive as long as he could, and that was down to Shaw. Shaw and the tiny thread of hope he’d spun.

Shaw won’t let you die here. He’ll get off the island, and he’ll make the call.

Lee sighed and closed his eyes again.

Maybe. But he’ll be here tonight. And he’ll hurt me.

Lee wondered if it would be all right as long as Shaw looked after him when it was over. Would Shaw’s hands feel different on his flesh if he was the one who had made it burn with pain? Because it wasn’t really a betrayal. The fragile trust he’d nursed since Shaw came to the island was his own creation. Shaw hadn’t forced him to believe. That had been his own choice, and he’d always known how it would end.

Shaw won’t hurt you.

He thought of the way that Shaw’s face changed when he looked out at the brilliant blue Pacific. Shaw wasn’t like the others. Shaw saw something beyond the horizon. Shaw looked him in the eye and saw a human being looking back.

Shaw won’t hurt you.

Except he will. He has to.

It was still there, though, that stupid, insistent voice in the back of his head that clung to hope:
Shaw won’t hurt you.

Lee bowed his head and wished it were true.

When it was over, maybe they would go and sit on the beach and listen to the ocean, and Shaw would clean him up and rub antiseptic lotion into his wounds and say,
“It is what it is, Lee. Don’t cry.”
And in that strange stillness after the pain, when his body was numb with shock and flooded with endorphins, when he could feel his skin glowing with pain that didn’t quite reach his mind, maybe he’d believe it.
It is what it is
. Maybe he’d even take some comfort in it, because Shaw’s voice was so calm.
It is what it is.

One foot in front of the other.

One sand dollar and then another.

Time would pass. It always did.

And one day it would end, one way or another.

He had hope, and they could take that in a heartbeat. But he could build more. Wasn’t that his strength? In some corner of his mind, wasn’t he still resisting? And wouldn’t he always? There was a part of him they couldn’t touch in a million years. It had always been there, but Shaw had unknowingly given him the means to find it. That shining thread of hope; Lee had followed it like Theseus in the labyrinth and discovered that it led to freedom. They didn’t own him. They didn’t even fucking know him. He’d had a whole life beyond this island. He was a human being.