And I feel Dominic Ellis’s eyes following me, rung by rung, as I climb.
The walls around us narrow until I can’t see Dominic and he can’t see me, and our breathing and our steps echo off the brick walls. There’s a metal circle above me, and I hear the sound of muffled screaming—or maybe laughter—carrying through.
Cameron touches my calf briefly before speaking. “They won’t know you,” he whispers. “They’re done with work or school, and they’re out—they aren’t watching the news.”
The idea seems so foreign, that there’s this world that exists without me, and yet even as I think it, I know that it’s entirely egotistical and selfish of me. But in my world, on my island, there does not exist a time when I am not at the center, when I am not the axis.
Cameron climbs up the other side of the ladder, his feet carefully avoiding my feet. His hands avoiding my hands. I have my elbows hooked over the final rung, but I’m frozen. “But look at us,” I say. Meaning our wet hair, our wrinkled fingers, our chattering teeth.
“People only look,” he says, his hands flat against the metal circle, twisting it gently, “if you give them a reason to.” He tests the lid, which gives easily, and a rush of fresh air flows in before he sets it back down again. “We’re going to be together. Just two people walking home.” Then he nods at me, gives my elbow a squeeze, and I flinch. “Ready?”
But he doesn’t wait for me to answer, probably because he knows that I am not. Probably because he remembers how he had to push me over the edge of the cliff. Possibly, but I’m not sure how, he understands how overwhelming and terrifying that big expanse of freedom actually is when you get there.
Cameron pushes the lid and lifts himself effortlessly out. He reaches his hand down for me—just one hand, one person, one step—and I take it. YES.
And then, before I can process the magnitude of this moment, I am out. We’re in a narrow street and there are people walking, lots of people walking, by the entrance to this alley. Cameron kicks the lid back in place, and the sound of metal on metal makes someone pause. Makes someone look.
His hands are on my waist, and every muscle in my body freezes. Then they twitch with adrenaline again, waiting for the signal to run, but instead he comes closer, and I feel the brick wall against my back, and his body pressed close to mine, and I’m trying to move because there’s too much all at once, but there’s nothing but an unforgiving wall. I feel his breath in my ear as he says, “It would help if you pretended to like this.”
So I move my hands to his back, and I hear a giggle from the mouth of the alley, but the muscles in his back do not relax.
“You’re nervous,” I whisper back. He’s not supposed to be nervous. He made it seem like this was the easy part.
“Not about this,” he says.
I know he’s thinking of Casey, even as he runs his fingers down my arm and takes my hand as he backs away.
“You don’t like Dom,” I say, not as a question.
He pauses. “I don’t trust him.” Neither do I.
“Then let’s go back. I can help.”
He looks at me quickly and then away again as he snakes an arm around my waist and pulls me even closer as we exit the alley. “I don’t trust you either.”
It should hurt when he says it, but it doesn’t. I understand. The feeling is mutual. And somehow, his harsh honesty makes me trust him just a little, just enough to keep going.
We step onto the street, and there are tons of people—laughing, yelling, weaving in and around us. We blend in, and my heart races. We walk, and nobody sees me. Just a girl who maybe drank too much and can’t walk straight, like I’ve seen in movies. Just a boy taking a girl home after a night out. I lean into him. We reek like the stagnant water from the sewer, and our hair is still wet, and our fingers are wrinkled, and I still can’t shake the chill. But I look up at him, and this sound escapes my throat—I think it’s laughter.
He smiles.
I smile.
I am not even faking it.
This street goes on forever in a straight line, like that mile-long bridge connecting my island to the rest of the world. The rest of the world. I’m finally here. Walking through it. Watching things change just by walking. Where there had been restaurants and bars, now there are houses and convenience stores. The crowd has thinned out, but a few people walk this way still, following signs for a bus stop. I can finally hear the thoughts swirling through my head. We are through it. We are through it all.
Moss hangs from the trees along the sides of the roads, looking black now that the lights have faded. Even the houses are dark here. Children tucked into bed by someone who cares for them. Not lights that have been automated, like on my island, after they realized I was flashing my lamp in Morse code like a beacon.
I see the shadow of a child in an upstairs window, and I lower my head, as if she might recognize me. But she seems to find the moon more interesting than me. For a moment, I picture the window I will never look through again, with the perfect angle past the tree to the sky. I spent hours last night watching the moon, unable to sleep. Just imagining … and now I’m here. The adrenaline has worn off, and though I tell myself we have made it through the danger—I have survived—I can’t shake the lingering fear lodged in the center of my chest.
I am thinking of the fact that, even though it took a long time, law enforcement still eventually found June and Liam. I realize, then, how traceable I am. Cameras in the streetlights to catch traffic violators, catching the angles of my face, like a fingerprint. My prints on the ladder rungs in the sewer. My DNA in the blood I’ve been leaving in my wake.
My soul that can be screened from the base of my spine.
I wonder how soon they will find me.
I wonder if I will be safer on my own. Without Casey’s face, and Cameron’s face—without a group of people hiding, but one person moving.
But most of all, I wonder why Dominic has come back for me. If this is the most dangerous element of all.
“He’s going to leave her,” I tell Cameron.
His body tenses, but he keeps walking. There’s another alley up ahead, past a sign and between two dark and silent houses. I bet it cuts into more alleys, more homes. I can see them, stacked up behind one another. I could lose him right here. I could make it. But instead my words make his arm tighten around me, his steps speed up.
“No,” he whispers, and then his fingers dig into my hip. “You’re trying to distract me, and then you’re going to run. I know because it’s exactly what I would do. Right up there.” He jerks his head toward the alley I had spotted.
“Maybe,” I say, because I want him to believe me. “But it’s true. I know you’re not supposed to listen to me, but I know him. He’s going to leave her. I swear it.” I know I sound convincing, because I mean it. He would. I understand him now. Not like I thought when he was the guard with the crooked smile and the secret notes. He is selfish, and he was using me then, and so he must be using them now. If, as science claims, the nature of a person doesn’t change from life to life, then it definitely doesn’t change within the same one.
“No,” he says, never once faltering. “You don’t understand. If I don’t bring you directly there, then she’s screwed. We’re both screwed.”
“She’s screwed anyway,” I say. I’m not trying to win anymore, just trying on the truth. Her face will be plastered on every news station by tomorrow morning. “Why are you doing this for him, then? If you don’t trust him?”
“I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for her.” Of course. Love. People always do stupid things for love.
My parents were sent to jail.
Liam White is dead.
June Calahan is dead.
“Well if you love her—” I start.