I start to breathe too fast, and I imagine the air running lower, running out, and I understand in a way I can feel that this is it: this is the last air, and this is the last step, and this pipe leads to something I want desperately.
I feel something other than water—the absence of water—on my back, and I clamber onto my knees. I pull the mask from my face and shake the tank off my back and suck in air. Humid, dank air, but air. Dom says, “Don’t leave this behind,” so I pick it back up and crawl onward. “You, too, Cameron.”
“Why not? They know who I am,” Cameron says.
“They know who she is,” he corrects, his voice deliberately quiet, but it still echoes through the tunnel. “They don’t know where we’ve been. They don’t know anything but your face so far, if that. Don’t give them anything more. They don’t know who you are.”
Cameron laughs. “What I am is a dead man walking.”
But he’s wrong. In fact, what we are right now, crawling through a pipe under the earth somewhere, is the exact opposite of dead.
The pipe ends, and the room opens up. I see light filtering from somewhere beyond. And I hear water dripping, echoing, along with our movements. There’s stagnant water in a pool in the middle of the room, and we stand, silent, on the concrete ridge over top. There are clothes, in piles, shoved against the walls, curving upward. Clean, dry clothes. Cameron doesn’t speak as he pushes one pile my way with his foot. I’m wobbly on my legs, and my entire body is shaking, so I press my hand against the wall to steady myself as I undress.
When I pull the wet shirt over my head, the bandage comes with it, and I let out a sound. The wound starts bleeding again, dripping down my stomach, and I wipe it away quickly, hoping nobody else notices.
I look over my shoulder. Dom, in the wet suit, is facing the pipe we came through, pulling the black material down his chest. Cameron stands halfway between us, and he’s watching me. He walks closer, half-changed, and whispers, “Casey will take care of it. Soon as she’s back.”
I nod and instinctively look at the untouched pile of clothes against the wall. Cameron finishes changing with his back to me. It’s funny, I think, the things people are supposed to keep hidden about themselves.
My entire life has been on display since forever.
“I’ll wait here for Casey,” Cameron says, speaking across the room. Dom turns around, his mask gone, and steps out of the shadow. He shakes out his hair, and I freeze. His mouth twitches when he sees that I see.
I try to grasp my bearings. To grasp the upper hand. But I feel instead as if I’m falling over the edge of the cliff again. I try to mimic his condescending gaze. I weigh the words before I speak them, so that I am sure of them. “Hello, Ellis,” I say. Emphasis on the lie he fed me to hide my shock.
“Always the skeptic,” he says, with a sad smile. He sticks his hand out, as if I would consider taking it. “Dominic Ellis,” he says. “Did you miss me?”
I sense, but do not see, that Cameron is stepping closer. I wonder if he’s as confused as I am. If he knows that I know this man. Knew this man. That he was a guard and I liked him. That he snuck into my room and we talked. And then, when I realized he wasn’t there for me, I did something more, something worse.
Dominic Ellis’s crooked grin turns into a full-on smile, and my heart plummets into my stomach, ruining that fleeting feeling of freedom. And I realize that I have made a terrible mistake.
Chapter 5
The saddest thing about this moment, as I finish dressing myself, as Cameron watches Dominic Ellis watching me, is that when he says those words, I realize I do, in a way. I did miss him. I missed the very idea of him—that there could be an ally in a prison, that he could see through the thing that I am portrayed to be to the person I am instead. When he showed up last year, he seemed closest to me in age, though I know he must’ve been at least eighteen. Maybe it was the way he didn’t distance himself, lacking the formality, or the way he smiled when he thought no one was looking—but it’s true, I missed him.
I miss the person I thought he was for the first three weeks of his assignment. I miss the guard I thought I knew, even though it was all a lie.
But he was not there to help me then, and he is not here to help me now. I am sure of it.
I need to get out of this sewer. Now.
“Dominic,” I say, leaving off the Ellis, the part that makes it seem as if he didn’t lie, not entirely. “Nice to meet you,” I say, and I grit my teeth together and force my lips to smile.
He laughs, which sounds strange in this place full of stale, standing water. “Sweetheart, I’m pretty sure we met good and official in your room last year.”
Cameron looks at me, and heat rises to my cheeks, even though there should be no reason for that to happen. I want to defend myself. To tell the truth. But I don’t yet know this person, and I have to remind myself of that. Because there’s something odd about clinging to someone’s back for several hours while you escape from the only place you’ve ever known—it tricks my mind into thinking that I do know him, or that he knows me, but that is not the case.
Dominic Ellis wanted something from me, and now he has me. Facts are weapons. So is silence. Right now, the silence lingers dangerously throughout the room, but I can’t grasp onto its source. Whether it’s Dominic. Whether it’s Cameron. Whether it’s me.
“I’m ready,” I say when the tension starts to feel dangerous. If Dominic expected something more from me, some apology, some begging, then he has made a mistake. “Where to?”
“What?” he asks. “No thank you?”
My gaze slides away from his, because I’m remembering the Ellis I knew before. He comes closer, reaches out like he’s about to touch me. I try to keep the discomfort off my face, but he must notice because he grimaces, his hand hovering beside my arm. “You’re welcome, Alina.”
“You’re wasting time,” Cameron says, and Dominic gives him this look that makes me truly understand the dynamics of this group. “I mean,” he starts again, “she needs to move. And I need to wait for Casey.”
Dominic tilts his head to the side. “You’re not waiting for Casey.”
“I’m not doing anything until—”
“I am fully aware of what you will and will not do for her. Which is exactly why I will wait for her. And why you will escort the lovely Ms. Chase to Point B. You will go straight there. You will get her there, and you will keep her there, until I arrive—as a function of this contract. Do you understand?”
Cameron doesn’t look much younger than Dominic. But he nods before looking away.
“And,” Dominic adds, “you will not listen to a word she speaks. Are we clear?”
I slide my feet into the sneakers that they have left for me, but there’s a gap between my heel and the back of the shoe. “Sorry,” Dominic says, like he didn’t just talk about me to Cameron as if I were a thing instead of a person. “We didn’t know your size.”
I misjudged him. I hate that I misjudged him.
I hate most of all that he’s the one who freed me.
Cameron and I stuff our wet clothes into a plastic bag, which he then places inside a canvas bag that he slings over his shoulder and across his chest. He looks instantaneously carefree, like the kids on TV shows who talk effortlessly, who smile effortlessly, who laugh effortlessly.
He gestures toward a metal ladder, and I step onto the first rung. “It’s an alley,” he says. “And the street connected to it will be very busy this time of night. We’re going to walk in plain sight. We’re going to blend in, in plain sight. Got it?”
“Got it,” I say, and I pull myself up the rungs of the ladder. It sounds like a horrible plan. I try to imagine eyes skimming over me, but I can’t picture it. I see the press, eyes fixed. I see the guards, who watch me without making eye contact. If they look away, it’s for a reason.