I don’t know what I’ve done to earn his silence, and I’m not sure if I trust it either, but I’ll take it.
Because those numbers on the screen, they’re coordinates. Put a negative sign before the second number, and it looks a lot like the coordinates here. The money doesn’t mean anything.
It’s a location.
June is trying to show me something.
I close my eyes and commit them to memory, the only place that has ever been safe for me. I close my eyes and recite them in a song, in the way I imagine my mother’s cadence, which is how I commit everything to memory. But this time, it doesn’t work. This time, I see June’s mouth, close to my ear, reciting the numbers. Her white teeth and full lips with the hint of a smile, enunciating them with perfection: 35.31 –83.65, 35.31 –83.65, 35.31 –83.65.
It works out the same. I know I won’t forget.
Dominic kicks the machine, and Casey jumps. And I remember this version of him on the island as well. How his confidence, his entire demeanor, became unhinged when things did not go his way. I heard him after he recovered, trying to explain it all away while I was locked in the next room. I heard him kicking the furniture, tossing things to the ground, throwing out accusations that couldn’t hold water. I refused to give any sort of statement at all, which made him even angrier.
I didn’t go his way.
I didn’t then, and I won’t now.
The guards who cycle through are in a division of the National Guard, and most of them are fairly young. It’s not a desirable position—twenty-eight days in, twenty-four-hour responsibility, and they must hold me on a tightrope—I am a human being, not a prisoner, but one who must be balanced and assessed and held at bay but not restrained. I am a portion of their training. I am a goddamn test.
And Dominic Ellis flunked the test.
He was too cocky. Too sure of himself. Too sure of me.
I was those things, too. But I was not the one being tested.
Now, I’m being tested. Not by someone else, but this is it. This is the only test that matters. Fail, and my only chance is gone. Will it be another seventeen years before I have another?
Dominic kicks the machine once more, but the machine doesn’t budge. The vials of test tubes on the table beside him rattle and clang against one another when he leans on it to regain his composure. Casey’s eyes are wide, and so are Cameron’s, and he looks at her and nods his head toward the door.
“Nothing changes,” Dominic says as they walk away. He smiles at me. “She hid it,” he says. “She hid the money, just like she hid the clues to the database. The answers are in you, Alina. You’re going to tell me everything.”
I pretend to be scared—only I find I don’t have to pretend at all—and I back into the table with the test tubes as he kicks it once more. My hand moves across the table behind me, the lone beaker falling to the floor and shattering, but Dom doesn’t notice over the sound of the test tubes rattling around.
“I don’t know anything,” I say.
“That’s what you think,” he says.
The last time we were in a room alone, I had the upper hand. There was a perceived safety, that nothing bad could truly happen to me. That island kept me safe, just like it promised to. There’s no one to protect me here. Only myself, and I don’t know if I am enough.
I slide to the floor, my back against the machine, like I’m terrified. His face twists and he steps back.
“Get up,” he says, backing away toward the door. He holds his hands up, palm out, toward me. “I’m not someone to fear, Alina.”
I grope around behind me until I find the shards of glass from the beaker. I keep my hands clenched into fists as I push myself to standing, and I stick them inside my pocket and try not to move more than necessary until I can store them someplace safer.
Until I need it.
Dominic waits in the entrance, and he puts his hand on my back as I pass. I hold my breath until I’m out of his reach. I feel a sharp point against my leg, and my heart beats wildly.
Now I have glass.
Casey is crouched in front of a television—or maybe it’s a computer screen—that she’s setting up in the main room. She powers it up and watches the black screen as Cameron sprawls on the brown couch that looks like it’s coated in a layer of dust.
She bites her lip and feeds a cable from the monitor into the back room, and a woman’s face fills the screen. She’s talking to us through the camera and there’s a red bar at the bottom with a phone number. The screen flashes to a picture of me. Pictures of me. Then back to her.
“Whoa, whoa,” Cameron says. “Sound!”
“Working on it!” Casey yells back.
Dominic sits beside Cameron and leans closer to the screen, as if he’s trying to read her lips. And then sound comes blaring from the speakers, and all of us jump at once. It’s too loud, but nobody seems to care, because the woman is talking about me. About us.
“—believed to be traveling with nineteen-year-old Casey London.” The screen flashes to Casey’s guard photo with her false identity, but then to another picture from another time and place. One that was obviously taken by her friends or her family. One handed over, along with her identity.
“Damn it,” Cameron whispers, and Casey has frozen beside me, standing behind the couch. They’re zooming in on her face now, but not before I see the person beside her. It’s Cameron, off to the side, not even realizing he’s been caught in the frame, and he’s talking to someone who looks just like Casey, but with heavier makeup and longer hair. Cameron seems younger, a little thinner. The camera zooms further, and they disappear from the edges of the screen. Casey is holding a glass plaque of some sort, smiling wryly at the camera.
“It’s not yet known,” the woman on the screen continues, “what their connection is. Only that Casey London is a talented computer programmer who unexpectedly, according to her teachers, dropped out of school last year after the disappearance and presumed death of her twin sister, Ava London, despite having a full scholarship to nearly any college of her choosing.” I cast a quick glance at Casey, but she’s riveted to the screen, her fingers digging into the back of the couch.
“It’s unclear how she assumed a new identity, but she joined the National Guard six months ago as Elizabeth Lorenzo. We haven’t been able to contact family yet for comment.”
The air in the room is heavy with silence. With Casey’s secrets. She pushes off the back of the couch and forces a laugh. “Foiled by academic awards. The irony.”
“I’m glad you think this is funny,” Cameron says, and Dominic shushes them both with a wave of his hand.
The number flashes on the bottom of the screen again. “Once again, law enforcement is currently offering a one-million-dollar reward for any information that leads to the capture of Alina Chase. Consider her dangerous if seen, and call this number immediately.”
“Whoa,” Cameron says.
Casey walks over and fidgets with the controls, turning the volume back to normal levels.
“Well,” Cameron says, “I guess we know exactly what she’s worth now.”
Dominic leans back against the couch. “They don’t want you out here for a reason, Alina. If it’s worth a lot to them, it’s worth a lot to us. Tell us everything.” He looks at the number on the screen, narrows his eyes back at me, and says, “Don’t tempt me, Alina.”
Chapter 10