I don’t know what Dominic expects me to say—what they all expect me to say. Oh, hey, I know where the shadow-database is hidden. Or I know how June and Liam hacked inside, no problem. I was convinced the rumors were bullshit, but now I’m not entirely sure. I think of the coordinates. Even if it were possible, that information is poison. It destroyed my last life. I’m not going to let it destroy this one.
“I’ve been contained my entire life, how could I possibly know anything?” And I’m also growing painfully irritated. Even though I realize they haven’t freed me for some altruistic reason, I still wanted it to be about me. Me, and not June.
“Has anyone tried to contact you?” he asks.
“Other than you, no,” I say immediately.
“Think,” he says, but I roll my eyes at him and catch Cameron grinning. Dominic thinks I haven’t been looking for the last seven years? That I haven’t looked for patterns in the guards’ speech, in news programs, in the way my chicken was cut and positioned on the plate? That I haven’t counted the time between the lights turning on and off in my own room, that I haven’t spent nights awake watching the lights I could see in the distance? How else does he think I caught his codes? I was looking for them. I was always looking.
“June must’ve left pieces of information with different people. They must’ve been instructed to pass it along to you somehow,” Dom says.
“How were they supposed to know who June became?” Casey asks. “I’m sure June didn’t think she’d be sought out and contained for her entire life. Her identity wouldn’t be public information.”
Dominic doesn’t want to hear it. He flicks his hand through the air, as if he can push the question aside. “It was her bargaining chip,” he says. “June set it up, and she let them know. Kind of like blackmail. If you kill me, I’ll come back and haunt you.”
Cameron says, “Looks like she was bluffing.”
Dominic’s face pulls into a scowl. “June didn’t bluff.”
Maybe not, but the only one she’s haunting is me.
All these people believe they know June—what she would do, what she wouldn’t do. I know her better than anyone. Better than everyone. I’ve spent my life learning about her, hearing about her, trying to crack through to the truth.
“That guard who tried to kidnap you when you were a kid. Did she tell you anything?” Dominic asks.
“She wasn’t trying to kidnap me, she was trying to free me,” I yell, and Cameron looks surprised by my outburst. “Unlike you,” I add.
Dominic comes closer. “Sometimes you act older than your age, and sometimes you act like a child still. This? This is how you get freedom. What do you think happens the second you show your face out there?” He gestures into the wilderness, or maybe somewhere beyond. “You’re Alina Chase, and I’m sorry to say that you cannot actually be anything you want. We all have to play the hand we’re dealt. You’ve got a good hand. Use it.”
He reminds me of someone, the way he speaks, so sure of his words and the meaning behind them. And then I realize: June. He reminds me of June. How she spoke those words with such conviction because she believed them. Right or wrong, she believed.
He should really already know this story, anyway. I’m sure this information is part of their training. The second attempt on my life, before it was ruled an accident. Casey must have heard it as well when she joined the guard. I have nothing to lose by telling him again.
“Genevieve. Just a guard,” I say, in case Cameron doesn’t know. “She didn’t tell me anything.”
“Are you sure?” Cameron asks. I’m surprised he’s the one who asks. And for a moment, I am not anymore. He does that to me, makes me question what I know of myself. Makes me not trust my instincts. He makes me nervous, more than Dom does, and Dom has the power to hold me and keep me.
“I was ten. How should I remember?” But while that may be true, it’s also true that I do remember all of it. When day after day is so much the same, the different takes on life, a string of individual moments burned permanently into my memory, all on its own.
Genevieve was probably my mother’s age, and for the two years she was stationed there, she was the closest thing I had to one. On four days, off three. I had another guard for the three days Genevieve was gone, but she was older and her hands were dry, and she always smelled like licorice. They had been screened rigorously—no connections to June or Liam, their families or mine—and their identities were kept private for their own safety and their families’ safety.
Liam’s family blames June for his death. They are not on my side. June’s family has fled, disappeared, and wants nothing to do with me. Not that I blame them—it’s the safest option. I had two caretakers, but Genevieve was the only one who cared for me.
I trusted her—and I gave her a letter when she was leaving for her days off, a letter to my mother. I asked her to get it to her, but she squeezed her eyes shut, crumpled it in her fist, and put it back in my own. “Tell her yourself,” she said, “when you’re dreaming.” Then she held me while I cried, and she sang me that lullaby, the one I like to imagine my mother singing to me instead.
Three weeks later, she smuggled me out. I had no warning, but I trusted her. She wrapped something stiff and cold around my arms and across my ribs as I was getting dressed. At the time, I thought it was some sort of bulletproof vest, like I’d seen in the movies. But now I know it was probably to block the signal of the tracker. I remember it was dark, and her fingers were tight on my arm as she led me into the back of the delivery van, the engine already running. I remember she was dressed differently, and that her nervous energy transferred to me. She lifted a lid on a container, helped me inside, and before closing me in, she touched her finger to her forehead, her heart, and both shoulders, in a gesture I didn’t fully understand.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Duérmete, ni?a,” she said—sleep, girl—and the lid enclosed me in complete darkness.
But we never made it past the bridge. The wheels started spinning harder as I heard the gears of the bridge being raised up ahead. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t orient what was happening, whether the van was hurtling through empty space or losing control on solid ground, and I’m not sure whether it was the motion, the disorientation, or the uncertainty of it all that made me so violently ill, but I now cannot sit in a moving vehicle without that same feeling every time.
The crunch of metal was loud and fast, and I felt the world becoming smaller, so it was just me with bags of trash and caved-in walls. I suppose I’m lucky, because the garbage cushioned me in, softened the blows as the container was tossed about in the back of the van.
They pried me out, and they did it quickly, hands grabbing and assessing, sharp whispers that settle like fog in my memory. I wish I remembered some resistance from Genevieve or some bravery on my part, but I was sobbing, and Genevieve didn’t fight. I remember only the blurry vision of faceless people and the smell of gas and dirt as they ran me back inside.
They were all gone the next day.
I knew enough not to ask for Genevieve, but even when I looked up the incident years later, I was unable to find any reference to her—just an attempt on my life, a plot from the inside, leading to a change of protocol, and the threat neutralized. No follow-up.
I looked up “duérmete” later, too, with the stinging hope that maybe it was a location and not just an order to sleep, but it turned out not to be a real place after all.
Like my mother, Genevieve only exists in my imagination now.
I feel a quick wave of anger, but then I push it away. My mother never speaks out. Never makes statements. I can find no trace of her on any Internet search, other than from our very notorious past. She has all but disappeared.
I’m glad for her. I am.