There are more printouts, too. Lists of names in order by time stamp, not birth date—with a long code assigned. I guess the file number of their soul in the database. But there’s only one set, one generation. I take Liam’s postcards and try to match the numbers he’s written to the printouts. But the truth is, the data is endless, and we need a computer to sort it.
Casey and Dominic are looking for something specific. They are looking for information about this alleged second shadow-database, or some sort of instructions. We have the address, but that could be anything. Maybe where the money is.
They’re looking for something in their own language—something written in a programming language—something they could understand. I don’t bother telling them, yet again, that June was not a programmer. That was Liam. They know this, and yet they believe June is the key.
It’s what others believe, too. That it was the two of them together, two different ways of seeing things, that got them inside. Liam with the coding. June with the patterns—like she could break a code that nobody else could see.
I don’t know if I really want to follow her trail any farther, because the closer I get to her, the farther I feel from myself. But I also know there’s no way to be free until I see this through. Because I have this feeling that she’s telling me something—that her math means something—and if there’s the slightest possibility that she’s not at the center of this all, if she was telling the truth in that recording she left with Liam White, then I need to prove it, for the both of us. So while they look for code, I look for the trinkets, the things that give me insight to her motive. God, I want her to have a motive. I want her to have been wronged and misguided. I want there to be a reason. I want there to be a chance it is not in her makeup, or mine, but a thing that veered her life off course, off its intended trajectory. I want her to be the anomaly.
She lived here alone for over a year. What must it have been like, with no one but herself to talk to? I see no diary. And then I start laughing. I know exactly what it’s like. Who am I kidding? I spent seventeen years contained on an island. I spent the last several with people who had no sincerity.
Do they not realize that they have made me in her likeness?
I think of what June is trying to lead me toward.
What do they think I will do with it when I have no other options?
Sometime after lunch, Dominic has all but given up finding anything else. “Pack up everything worth taking,” he says. I take that notebook with June’s equations, the one the note fell out of, and I slide it into Casey’s bag along with the hard drives.
Dominic has his GPS out—the paper with June’s handwriting sticking out from his open wallet as he looks from one to the other, plugging in the numbers, the street, the city. “It doesn’t exist,” he says. “Not in Edmond. But there are, like, fifteen other places with this address …”
I grab for the paper, knocking his wallet to the ground. Not that it will change anything, but it’s mine. If June wanted someone to see it, that person is me.
I hear June’s voice, reciting the information in my ear. 224081 - Ivory Street.
I picture the reams of paper with the numbers. Six or seven or eight digits long.
224081 Ivory Street.
“What the hell, Alina?” he asks, grasping for my arm.
He’s got a hold on my right arm, and the paper is balled up in my fist, but like a child making a last stand with a piece of candy, I refuse to unfurl my fingers. “What do you want with June?” I ask. “What’s the obsession?”
He looks away. “Don’t you see? The database is power. It’s money. It’s whatever you want it to be.”
“It’s blackmail. And death,” I say.
“It’s knowledge,” he says, like he’s trying to appeal to my desires. “It’s fate,” he adds, so low I barely hear it. His eyes are staring into mine, but I won’t be the first to look away.
He gives in first, glancing at his shoulder. At Cameron’s hand on his shoulder. “Let go,” Cameron says, but he doesn’t.
Except then Casey says, “Edmonton? Edgington? Maybe there’s a mistake?” She’s typing away at the GPS, completely ignoring us, and Dominic finally releases my arm.
“Let me see,” he says, leaning his head toward Casey’s.
The paper is still in my hand. Dom is focused on the list of addresses on the screen as Cameron bends for the wallet.
“224081,” I whisper to Cameron. “224081. Dash. Ivory Street.”
“Oh,” he says, holding Dom’s partially open wallet. “Oh,” he says again.
I nod—the knowledge, the excitement, pulling my lips into a smile.
The numbers before the name. The file name. It’s not a place. It’s a designation. It’s a soul. A person. Ivory Street is a name. A name that June wrote in permanent marker and stuffed in the back of a notebook full of equations.
“Try Edmont,” Casey mumbles to Dominic.
Holy shit, Cameron mouths.
I glance at the wallet in his hand. “Is he telling the truth?” I ask.
Cameron examines Dominic’s license and holds it toward me. “Looks like it.” And it does. His picture. The name “Dominic Ellis.” The official state seal. His birth date.
His birth date.
I tear the wallet from Cameron’s fingers, bringing it closer to my face, and feel the earth start to move, though I know it’s not the earth at all, but me. My world, shifting again.
“Dominic!” I yell, and he slowly turns around. He stares at the wallet in my hand. Everything seems to hum—the trees, the air, the truth.
“You were born the day after Christmas?” I say a little too loudly. My voice comes out high and tight. I look to him to confirm, and it’s like he’s mentally debating something, and so I say, louder, “Your birthday. It’s the day after Christmas?”
His gaze moves from his wallet to my eyes. “Yes,” he says, and he waits for my next question, because he knows it’s coming. I see the year. I know the facts.
It’s Christmas Day, and it’s starting to snow, and there are lights strung up in the windows behind him.
“Where were you born?” I say, but I can’t seem to make my teeth separate as I talk. They’re clenched together. The edges of my vision clouds, so Cameron disappears, Casey disappears, and he is the only one in my sights.
He runs for the barricade lined with police cars as she sneaks onto the roof and down the fire ladder.
Dominic shakes his head.
“Answer me,” I say.
He pulls a weapon at the last minute, and the sound of gunfire accompanies June as she races frantically through the woods, as tears run down her cheeks.
“Cut to the chase,” he says, and he says it so faintly that at first I’m not sure if he meant to speak it at all.
But I don’t even want to say it. “Did you find out who your soul belonged to? When you turned eighteen?”
“Yes,” he says.
His blood seeps into the thin blanket of snow surrounding him, beside the weapon that turned out not to be a weapon at all but a metal recorder.
I know the answer, but I ask anyway. “Is it Liam White?”
“Yes,” he says, and everything that has happened—last year in my room and now in the woods—takes on new meaning.
Liam White, the goddamn martyr.
“Did you know?” I ask Cameron, I ask Casey. “Did you?”
They look at each other, at him, at me. They did not know.
God, what the hell are they doing here?
Now. I have to go now. There is only one reason Liam White comes back for me, if not for revenge for his death, and that’s to get inside the database and continue what they started. Power and money. The belief that it’s rightfully his. June and Liam. Me and Dominic.
I drop the wallet, and my hand moves instinctively to my pocket, the one with the glass. I cannot be here. Not with him. Not with him. On the one hand, I’m furious. On the other, I am responsible for his death somehow. He is the thing on the tightrope that must be balanced, and for once, I must do the balancing. This is my test.