“Right,” she says.
“I do, Casey, and I’m not asking you to understand, but I want you to know that it’s true. I won’t turn on him, won’t turn him in, nothing. If I’m taken, I won’t tell them anything.” She keeps walking, pushing the door open with her hip. “For you, either,” I say.
“You expect me to trust you after you held me hostage? After I asked you to stay away from Cameron and you didn’t?”
“I don’t expect you to, just like I don’t expect you to understand—”
She laughs, and it sounds cold and mean. “You’re just a kid, Alina. A kid who doesn’t think about anything but herself. A kid with absolutely no responsibility, who hasn’t had to make tough decisions …”
She dumps everything into the trash container outside the trailer and folds her arms across her chest.
“I went!” I say. “That was a choice. You think that was so easy? To leave everything I’ve ever known?” The way I ache for the island, sometimes I think it’s a sickness, but other times I think it’s the most natural thing in the world. It belonged to me, I belonged to it—I knew my place there. I was treated kindly, if distantly. I was cared for, though not cared about. I had safety there. I could’ve stayed another year, rolled the dice to see what eighteen got me. I could’ve waited it out and crossed my fingers, but I didn’t. I took the risk, with people I didn’t know, with a plan I didn’t understand. I took a leap.
I’m shaking as I stand before Casey, and I don’t understand why.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m scared, and I’m taking it out on you.”
She takes me in her arms then. We’re about the same size, and my arms hook all the way around her back, and hers around mine. And this time, I don’t flinch.
“Casey,” I say, when my chin is on her shoulder. “I think it’s time to tell me what you’re after. When we get there, I can’t help unless I know.”
I feel her body stiffen, but she doesn’t pull away.
“My sister,” she says. Her chin is still resting on my shoulder, and her breath brushes my ear as she speaks.
There’s nothing we will find in the database that will make her happy. Nothing. “She won’t be the same person,” I say.
Casey pulls back, her chin off my shoulder, her hands off my back. But she’s still so close—I can see my reflection in her eyes. “No, you don’t get it. Before she disappeared, she got a message. I was home over break, and it was accidentally given to me—the curse of being a twin. A man hand-delivered it, and the only thing he said was, ‘What a lovely soul you are,’ which I really didn’t think anything about at the time. Inside was some website address with a really long password … I gave it to her, thinking it was for school or something. That’s when everything changed.”
“She disappeared?”
“Not at first, but she started acting different—not sleeping, constantly on edge. I confronted her, but she wouldn’t say anything. Just blew me off. I went back to school, because it was so important to me at the time, you know? Then she disappeared.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“The message. I couldn’t find the paper again, and Ava’s computer went to sites that just … didn’t exist anymore. Someone went through a lot of trouble to set that up. And the message. About the soul. Don’t you see? June blackmailed—”
“Allegedly,” I mumble, thinking of her message on that recorder.
“Whatever,” Casey says. “Someone sent Ava that note, and then she disappeared. I thought you were in the database again. I thought you were blackmailing her for something. I wanted to find out what Ava saw. So first I went after security where you’re held, thinking you’d still managed to get through it. But it was obvious you weren’t doing anything—nothing was sent from your location. But that’s how Dominic found me. I guess he watched what I was up to after that, too—how I started going after the database. He tracked me down and sent me a note. Told me I wasn’t so good at covering my tracks. Asked me what, exactly, I was after. So, yeah, Dominic kind of forced my hand, but I want in that database to see what happened to Ava. Which is what Cameron doesn’t understand. And I need … I need to prove she’s not in there again. Not reborn. Because if she hasn’t been reborn, she hasn’t died, just disappeared.”
It’s like proving the negative. “And what will that prove? What if she just doesn’t want to be found?” I ask.
“Alina, seriously? Cameron is wanted for questioning in her alleged death.”
And the bottom falls out of my world.
“He wouldn’t,” I say.
“I know that. But the evidence is … unfortunate. They were out with friends, and they left in a car together, and he’s the last person who saw her. They got in a fight, she was scared of something, he said. Jumpy and taking it out on him. Everyone saw them fighting. There’s evidence of blood in the car, but come on, that could’ve come from any time. Doesn’t matter, though, it all adds up to a case against Cameron. She had a lot of money in her bank account, which I guess would’ve gone partly to Cameron eventually … I seriously have no idea where that money came from. And there’s the problem of his past criminal record.”
“He’s not a killer,” I say. And now I want in the database to prove it for him. This. This is something I can give him. “Someone’s still in the database,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “Either there really is a shadow-database somewhere that someone still has access to, or someone else has hacked it.”
That letter to Ava came from somewhere, and it wasn’t me. And if it’s not me now, there’s the possibility that it wasn’t June back then, either.
June was in that database, that’s a fact. She released the information, that’s a fact. But there’s something more going on, and the proof—for all of us—is inside.
Casey and I return to our skeleton house and sit across the room from each other, our backs against the wooden beams.
How long have we been waiting for Cameron? He hasn’t come back yet. And the possibility creeps in that maybe he won’t.
I don’t know. June left Liam. Just left him there to take the fall, and she supposedly loved him.
Casey must see something in my face. “He’s coming back,” she says.
The wait is as endless as the ocean. Where everything falls away but the voice I long to hear, whispering through my head. Only this time, it’s not my mother, or even Genevieve, singing a song. It’s Cameron, laughing. Telling me that I’m a surprise.
It’s long past midnight, and we haven’t slept. It’s probably halfway to dawn. Neither of us has spoken, because then we’d have to acknowledge that he’s not back yet, and maybe something happened, and then what will we do? Neither of us wants to think it, and so we do not speak.
Casey hears it first. It’s completely dark, no lights anywhere nearby, and we should probably be trying to sleep, but we’re listening for everything, for anything. She turns onto her hands and knees, crouched low, face pressed between wooden beams, and then I hear the slow sound of tires over gravel. Casey has one foot pressed onto the ground, as if she’s at the starting line of a race, waiting for the sound of the gun. And I understand. If this is not Cameron, we run. Run for the highway, and he will find us.
If he’s okay.
There are no headlights. But a dark van turns the corner and pulls directly in front of this house, the engine still idling. There are no windows in the back, and the ones up front are still dark. A window rolls down, and I hold my breath. “Is there some secret code word?” Cameron calls.