“Stop talking now. Dom told us how you work. You take information, and then you use it.”
It’s such an absurd statement, I have no idea how on earth to respond. Isn’t that exactly what you’re supposed to do with information? Do people just collect it and store it, spouting out facts when prompted like a computer?
I can’t argue the point, so I don’t.
Instead I stop walking. Someone bumps into my back, mutters an apology, and continues past. He looks behind him as he walks past, as if I’m a memory he can’t quite grasp.
“What are you doing?” Cameron asks through his teeth, but it doesn’t look like he expects me to answer. In fact, it looks like he knows exactly what I’m doing. He grabs my arm and tilts his head back toward the sky, like he’s aggravated at the big expanse of blackness instead of me. “Listen, he’s not going to leave her. It would not go well for him if he did.”
“You’re sure?” I ask. But I look at him instead of the sky. I want to see his reaction. I want to know what he’s thinking, even if he’s not saying it.
He’s not sure. Not even close. “She’s going to make it,” he says. “Please don’t screw this up for her,” he adds. The same way he asked as we were dipping under the water. Don’t let go, he pleaded.
He frowns at his hand, which is wrapped around my arm and pressed against my side. He holds me with his other arm, brings his fingers to his face, and rubs them together. “You need stitches,” he mumbles.
My blood has seeped through this shirt to his fingers. “We can’t just stand here,” he says. As if the world is conspiring to prove him right, we hear the sound of a helicopter, the blades cutting through the air a few streets away. His eyes go wide, and then he tries to hide it. I start to run, but he tightens his grip again. “If you run, they’ll know. Get on my back,” he says.
“What?”
“Trust me,” he says, even though we’ve already established that neither of us trusts the other.
I hop onto his back, and his hands hook under my legs, and he weaves across the street as if he’s drunk. As if he’s a carefree kid. As if we’re not afraid of making a scene, of looking like fools.
I laugh into his ear, because I understand him, even if I am terribly afraid in that moment. I laugh because I know he’s afraid as well—I can feel it in the way he’s holding on to me, and the way his heart is pounding through his back. And now I know he’s smart. He’s not so different from me, actually.
I’ve spent the last seven months acting like a mindless fool so nobody would notice, too.
Chapter 6
Cameron drops me unceremoniously after he veers off the street at the next block. I hear the helicopter circling back around. I risk a quick glance behind us and notice them everywhere. Far away, near the island. Over the water. Over land. They’re searching, but they’re moving without purpose. Without tracking us.
I press a hand to my rib and imagine the tracker under the water somewhere. Everyone following a piece that they’ve cut out of me instead. I put pressure on the wound, but it feels dull and far away—something that has happened in another lifetime.
I follow Cameron as he cuts through a patch of trees without looking back, and it seems as though we’re in a real neighborhood now. The homes are large, with high, metal gates, complete with decorative spikes on the tops. Like people trying to carve a section of the world out for themselves, and only them.
Cameron punches a set of numbers into a keypad beside a high metal gate covered with ivy, and the sound of a lock catching breaks the silence. My island is made like this. A code, an emergency switch, and everything within the house latches. My window. The locks. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out.
They had to use it only once. After the incident with Dominic Ellis—
“Come on,” Cameron says, pulling me through the sliver of an opening. He closes the gate behind him, and it locks automatically.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Home, for now,” he says.
I don’t ask whose home, and I don’t ask for how long. “Shouldn’t we go farther away?”
Cameron looks over his shoulder at me, as if he knows something I don’t. He knows a lot of things I don’t. I hate the feeling.
He thinks that I don’t realize that I’m still in a prison. The things used to keep people out can turn in an instant to keep people in instead. The island, my island, had once been a fort. A layer of protection, a first line of defense against the outside, many years ago. Then it was supposed to be a safe haven. A safe place for me—somewhere nobody could reach me. Where revenge and anger and hate must stay on the other side of the steel netting. But it has become my prison.
The gates on the outside can keep people out, but they can also keep me in.
The inside of the house is dark, and he doesn’t turn a light on. The house is colder than it was outside, as if it’s been closed up tight with no heat for ages. “Watch the couch,” he whispers as he weaves in front of me. “The table,” he says next. My hand brushes fabric, not wood, and even in the dark, I can see the outline of sheets hanging over all the furniture, softening the edges of their shadows. It’s a ghost of a house, and I can tell from just this room that there’s no other life inside.
When we’re deep in the center of the house, he pulls me into a room and shuts the door. Only then does he flip a light switch. My eyes shut instinctively, and when I reopen them, I see that we’re in a bathroom. As far as bathrooms in abandoned houses go, it’s pretty fancy. All tile and curved metal and fancy towels. Cameron looks at my shirt, and I follow his gaze. There’s a dark stain through the black material, and it’s not from the water.
“It doesn’t even hurt anymore,” I say, as he pulls the fabric away from my skin. I hear it pull—like something detaching—and feel a delayed sting.
“That’s really not a good sign,” he says. He sighs to himself. “Casey is better, but I can do it.”
My fingers are numb and trembling as I reach for the hem of my shirt, and underneath, my entire body is shivering, covered in a uniform layer of goose bumps. Cameron opens the cabinet under the counter—designed to look like shutters—and grabs all the contents. There’s a white box with a red symbol on the lid—a first-aid kit—much like the one we have on the island. He tears open a packet of pills and holds one out to me, but I shake my head. “No,” I say. No way. I will not let anyone drug me. Not again.
“It’s for the pain,” he says.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I say.
He tilts his head, holds it out to me again. “This will.”
Oh. Still. “No,” I say, maybe a little too forcefully, leaving no room for discussion. I will not be calm and malleable and content. Not again.
He wrinkles his nose, and it makes him seem years younger. Now that he’s not in mission mode, with his perfect stride and his single-minded focus, he looks like a different version of himself. His brown eyes roam, and he looks a little lost. His dark hair falls across his forehead as he leans over to rifle through the white box, and his entire face takes on a look of uncertainty, despite his words. His teeth catch his lower lip as he tears open a disinfectant wipe, and he becomes someone else.
I imagine him in the kitchen of a house, grabbing half a bagel from the toaster, holding it between his teeth as he searches for his books, tossing them into his bag, like a familiar scene I have watched on the television. I imagine him running out the front door, shouting a good-bye to his parents over his shoulder, and Casey waiting for him on the porch.