Liam White is beautiful in the movie version, but in pictures, he is not. It’s this fact that people always came back to: that she was so beautiful, beautiful and charismatic, and he was so not—and because of that, she could convince him to do anything. She could convince him to hack one of the most secure systems in the country, to commit the most notorious crimes of her generation with her. To keep her secrets. Help her escape. Sacrifice himself, even.
The movie ends with Liam begging June to run as the police surround their building. Whispering that her soul was not meant to be in a cage, that he’ll be okay, that they’ll be together again someday.
She clutches at his shirt as she wavers. But June is strong. She is strong enough to run. To let him go. She promises him that her soul will find him again. That she’d know him anywhere.
And then he does it. It’s Christmas Day, and it’s starting to snow, and there are lights strung up in the windows behind him. He runs for the barricade lined with police cars as she sneaks onto the roof and down the fire ladder, and 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.
The credits roll as 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. Liam White, the goddamn martyr. The snow will continue to fall until the screen goes white.
I know the movie by heart.
The movie doesn’t show June in hiding for the next year and a half. It doesn’t show her dying a very unbeautiful hit-and-run death when she suddenly reappeared. Not the baby being born twelve hours later, or the tracker implanted on its third rib, or the parents begging no. It does not show the house where I am kept.
Anyway, the whole thing has to be a lie. Liam White must’ve orchestrated everything. I feel it in my soul, like something whispering to me. I am not capable of such darkness, despite what science says. I’m sure of it. And now his soul is free and I am stuck here, even though I have done nothing. Nothing.
“Can someone please turn that off?” I ask. And then I realize my mistake. I should be content and slow and indifferent by now. “Because my head feels funny,” I add. And then I make myself smile. “More cake?”
Someone places another slice onto my plate.
“If there are leftovers,” I mumble, digging my spoon into the A of my name, “I’m having this again for breakfast.”
Someone forces a laugh, and I force another piece of sickeningly sweet birthday cake into my lying mouth.
Because today is my seventeenth birthday.
Today is the day we agreed on.
The girl with the short dark hair watches the clock over the table.
One hour and twelve minutes to go.
And then I will escape.
Chapter 2
There are things that must happen first. I know this. I look at the clock and imagine the spot on the underside of my third rib, under the scar where my mother dug out the tracker the first time, under the scar where they replaced it and stitched me back up. It must come out. I wonder, not for the first time, if I’m supposed to do this myself.
I’ve been waiting seven months for today. I’ve been waiting seven years for today, if I’m being honest. Since I first understood that escape was a thing that was possible. I was ten when it happened, when Genevieve, my longtime guard, tried to sneak me out in the back of a supply van, crammed in a compartment underneath the trash. The entire memory reeks of decay. We didn’t even make it over the bridge, and all that attempt got me was a change in protocol—a steady stream of changing faces, so no one would see me as anything other than their one-month assignment.
Well, it got me that, a gash in my forehead, and a fire continually burning in the pit of my stomach: the possibility of escape, filling my head and my heart and my bones for the last seven years. Escape. The word taking meaning, gathering context, becoming more than letters on a page but a promise, whispering in my ear.
Sometimes I imagine it’s June speaking to me. Go, she says in the voice I have heard in five different documentaries and countless news programs. Go. I hear it at night, when I wake up and the island is still. I feel it stirring under my ribs, restless and wanting.
And now, it’s really happening. This time, I’m ready. It’s been seven months since I deciphered the first message—hidden inside a strand of DNA code in my schoolwork. A simple and boring assignment: to decode the nucleotides of a DNA strand into the corresponding chain of proteins. The C-A-T was a histidine, designated by an H. Next: A-T-C, coding for isoleucine, written as I. On and on, until I stared at the protein strand on my page: H-I-A-C-I-S-E-E
Hi, A.C., I see.
Hi, Alina Chase. I see.
I must’ve stared at it for an hour, doing nothing but hoping, which is a very dangerous thing. It could’ve been a message or maybe just a random combination of letters that I was stringing my hope on.
But I don’t get a lot of chances here.
So at the next problem, when I was supposed to do the entire procedure in reverse, translating a random string of letters back into its original DNA strand, I ignored the letters assigned to me and substituted them with: HELP. And I sent back the corresponding DNA strand.
Someone responded in my assignment the next week. READY, it said, when I decoded it. Like a statement, or a question. For what? I wanted to respond, but there’s no codon designation for the letter O, and while I was thinking of how to rephrase that, I changed my mind. YES, I sent back.
But that was seven months ago, and there was only so much information we could exchange during the few weeks when I studied DNA. This is the grand summation of what I know of the plan:
DEATH DAY
GIRL IN FRAYED PANTS
DETACH TRACKER
DISTRACT
ESCAPE
Seven months of waiting. Seven months of anticipation.
And now I’m faced with the reality of the tracker lodged under my skin, under my muscle, and what exactly DETACH TRACKER will entail. There are no sharp objects in the house. It’s a subtle thing, though. Something I didn’t realize for a long time. Not until I went looking for something I could use.
It’s for my own protection, I’ve been told.
No knives. No pieces of furniture that can be unscrewed and fashioned into anything. Food is cooked and brought in on supply vehicles that get screened on the other side of the bridge. We use battery-powered razors. The guards don’t even carry weapons. The only sharp item that I’m aware of is the point of the needle they use to administer drugs on the rare occasion when I become unmanageable.
I turn the spoon over now, feeling along the dull end. I’m wondering if I’ll have to use a fork, if the ends will bend before they pierce my skin—and I don’t think it’s the cake that’s making me suddenly nauseated—when the girl with the shoulder-length hair hands me a napkin.
“To wash the cake off,” she whispers.
I push back from the table and announce to no one, to everyone, “I’m going to get ready.”
The older woman who inspected the cake looks at the clock, ticking closer to sunset. “One hour,” she says.
“I know,” I say. Oh, I know.
I wonder if the girl managed to sneak something inside. Something she has whittled into a point and left in my bathroom. It’s the only place, in addition to my room, with no surveillance. The cameras, too, are for my own protection, I am assured.
There are no locks, so I slide my dresser in front of the door when I shut it behind me. Then I step into my bathroom. There’s a man. No, a boy. No, a man. Whatever he is, he’s standing beside the sink. He must be stationed on the grounds or in the basement or in security, because men or boys or this in-between variety are no longer allowed in my house. Definitely not in my room. Not since the fiasco with Ellis. At least, I think that’s his name. The other guards called him Mark, but he said his real name was Ellis. I’m still embarrassed by the whole thing, that I trusted him so quickly, so readily.