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 non–news 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 debating—every year the same words, the same sides—and 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 June—the 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 puncture—the 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—instead 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 people—people 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.
“Make a wish,” someone says. I smile. I choose not to make a wish—words, whether spoken or thought, never change a thing.
They applaud as I blow out the candles, the smoke rising and blurring their faces. They are all the same anyway. They are everyone and no one. The people who work here rotate out every month, lest they get too attached, like when I was ten. Lest they grow soft. Lest I manipulate them into letting me out. June Calahan would’ve been able to. She would’ve talked and talked until her words felt like theirs, her ideas their own. She would’ve been able to see the pattern of guards, if one exists.
I may have her soul, but I am not her.
I am not.
As the applause winds down and the noise drifts away with the smoke, the only sound left besides the plastic dishes and cups and utensils being spread across the counter is the ridiculous television news program from the next room. They are still discussing June, but they’re really discussing me. My God, it’s the same thing every year. The discovery of soul fingerprinting, the scientific studies that followed, the development of the Soul Database, the privatization of the information, and the construction of the presumed unhackable Alonzo-Carter Cybersecurity Data Center to house it. And the study of violence—the one that showed a high statistical correlation in criminal history from one generation to the next. The study June used to ruin lives. Ruining her own, and mine, in the process.
Every year, they show our pictures side by side on the news, and I look nothing like her. My picture changes every year, but hers remains the same—stuck at the age of nineteen, as old as she will ever be. Alongside her, our faces splitting the screen, I always look like her shadow. My hair is nearly black, and my skin is darker than hers—my mother was, is, Hispanic. But I think my eyes are a problem. They confuse people. Make me unplaceable. Dangerous.
Year after year, they show my eyes as they zoom in on my picture, and it makes people see her. They are so light they are almost clear. Like you could look through them to see my soul.
Straight to June.
The girl with the short dark hair serves me a piece of cake. Her hand shakes as she places it on the table—the plate wobbles on the surface before settling. Someone else looks at her. At me and her. I pick up my spoon and force a bite into my mouth, and I change my mind about that wish. I look at the girl, who is now serving someone else, and I think: Please don’t screw up.
I swallow the cake and watch as others do the same. Last year I assumed it was something in the cake they give me every year that made me pleasant and malleable when the press showed up—permitted to visit on this one day a year. That I was drugged by something other than sugar and iced perfection. Something that kept me from crying out about the injustice of it all. Something that kept me from screaming that speech I practiced last year—that my name was Alina Chase, and that my incarceration (not containment) was unconstitutional, unjustified, and inhumane.
So I didn’t eat the cake last year, but it didn’t matter. The press showed up just before sunset, and I just grinned and waved from the front entrance. No speech. I felt content and slow and indifferent. The articles the next day said my soul was gloating.
So this time I’d eat the cake. I just wouldn’t drink. I could not afford to be content or slow or indifferent today. I’d been drinking from the tap in my sink, but that was it.
I hold the cup to my mouth, feel the water touch my lips, and bring it back down to the table.
The cake is delicious. I’m not going to lie.
In the lull of inactivity, as people scoop cake into their mouths and remark on the taste or the texture or something else completely safe and meaningless, someone in the next room switches from the news station to that movie, the only thing I’d want to hear less.
Of course it’s on today. June of Summerton. Like Joan of Arc or Helen of Troy. But it’s barely even about the crimes, or the fact that she was once considered a hero before she was the villain. It’s a love story, which is apparently more interesting.