But he was looking for someone else, someone other than me. He was looking for June—for her information, like everyone else. I’m not sure why I was surprised. I’m not sure why I was upset. I blame it on hope.
I don’t know what happened to him afterward, exactly. After they dragged him out of my room, shaken and only partially conscious. I assume he got in a lot of trouble. I didn’t. I am already in trouble.
Women only from then on. A core group of guards. Precise and watchful. I was hoping my birthday would be an exception.
It is.
I shut the door to the bathroom behind me now and waste no time. I know what he’s here for. I pull my shirt over my head. His gaze doesn’t linger too long. He doesn’t look surprised. He opens his mouth and looks away as his fingers unscrew his eyetooth, pulling out a small metallic blade where the root should be. I wonder absently whether it hurt.
It occurs to me in that moment that this is about to hurt me.
He flips the blade, and it is now twice the length. He turns on the shower, but I’m not sure why. Then he takes a washcloth and balls it up, and I’m not sure why. He grips my chin and holds it to my mouth. I understand, biting down on the towel. But I still don’t understand the shower. If he needs water, the sink is right beside him.
He lowers me onto the cold tile, and I lie back. My head is on the hard floor. He’s leaning over me, his breath on my chest. Dangerously close. I feel his fingers trace the ribs as he counts them, then he takes a breath and the metal slides into my flesh. It stings in a shocking, sudden way, and I have this moment where I realize that, though this place has kept everything from me, it has also kept pain from me.
The blade slides under the bone and I feel it scraping at something, at the inside of me, and then I understand the need for the shower. For the sound of it.
I’m crying.
I grit my teeth into the towel, trying, trying, trying not to make this sobbing sound that seems to come from the deepest place inside me. Trying not to make any noise at all. But the pain builds, and it will smother me if I don’t let it out. If I don’t scream it out. “It will be worse if I take a break,” he says, I guess as an apology.
But he doesn’t stop. And I feel the pain, and I bite back the scream until it tastes like vomit, and it chokes me from the inside until everything turns gray.
I wake up under the lukewarm water on the floor of the shower. “No time for stitches,” he says from the other side of the glass. He turns away as I examine the damage to my rib.
“I’m still bleeding,” I say, almost in surprise. And it still hurts. Burns. Throbs. I hold my fingers to the skin around it.
“You’ll keep bleeding until it’s stitched.”
I start to panic. The blood keeps coming. It’s not a big cut, but any cut here is quickly tended to and treated. I needed stitches across my forehead when I was ten, after the failed escape. But someone gave me a shot and I slept through the stitches and my forehead was kept numb for days. I also sprained my ankle once when I fell from the tree outside my bedroom window, but the leg was braced and I was medicated before I could even explain what happened.
“Are you going to pass out again?” he whispers as he glances at the black watch on his wrist.
“No,” I say, pushing myself to standing. He goes to leave, and I notice he’s not wearing the same uniform as the guards. He’s got a media badge, but his clothes look close enough to blend in anywhere on the island. He puts a big wad of gauze on the sink counter, and a roll of tape. The tracker sits beside them both. I’m not sure how he plans on sneaking out, but he can’t. Not yet. “I don’t know what to do next,” I say.
“Just press down on the wound. And get ready,” he says, and his fingers grip the side of the doorway on his way out. READY, someone wrote.
YES, I responded.
“Wait,” I say, before I can stop myself from sounding desperate. “I …” He doesn’t turn around at first. A boy. He’s still a boy. And the girl out there, she’s still a girl. And they are terrified.
“What’s your name?” I ask. I’m not good at putting people at ease. It takes practice. It takes me doing the opposite of everything instinct tells me to do. Right now, I want to beg him to stay with me. Right now, I want to cry that this is not a prank, or a dare, or an assignment. That this is my goddamn life. I want to tell him that I’m terrified, too.
“Cameron,” he says. He’s still standing in the doorway, and I notice that one of the muscles in his upper arm is twitching. I notice that his dark hair is starting to curl at the nape of his neck from the moisture in the room. I notice that he’s gripping the wall so hard that his knuckles blanch white.
“Cameron.” People always respond better when you use their name. Which is probably why nobody here uses their real names. I take another breath, to steady my words. “Cameron,” I repeat, “I need you to help me.” I look back down again, at the watery blood running down my stomach. At my shaking hand covering the wound. I grab a towel and swallow my panic and relax my face into calm and brave before he turns back around.
He keeps checking his watch, and he keeps moving, moving me, as fast as he can.
“What’s the girl’s name?” I ask as Cameron tears the tape with his teeth. He’s not much taller than I am, and I notice the eyetooth is back in place. I wonder what it feels like inside his mouth. If he screamed when they dug into his flesh, like I did. Or whether he was already unconscious.
He pauses, the tape an inch from my stomach, before he says, “Casey.” She means something to him. I can tell by the way he looks down and mumbles her name, like he doesn’t want me to know. Like her name belongs to him alone.
“Which one of you have I been communicating with?” I hold a dress out to him, asking him to help me with it. In truth, this is not what I need help with. I need help with finding out what the hell is going on, but I’d rather have him think it’s the dress.
He tugs it over my head, helps me snake my arms through without loosening the bandage. “Neither,” he says. He clears his throat, whispers even lower than he has been. “You’ve been in touch with Dom. He’s the one who will pull you from the water.”
I suck in a breath, and Cameron apologizes, trying a different angle of my arm. I don’t tell him that I have no idea what happens under the broad heading of escape. I don’t tell him I have no idea what to do when he leaves this room, only that there will be a girl with frayed pants, that there will be a distraction and we will escape. I’ve only received words, or short phrases, in the code. I don’t tell him that I don’t really know the plan at all. That I’ve only been guessing. That I lie on my bed and stare out the window, with the perfect angle—past the tree—to the sky, imagining racing across the bridge or being snuck out in the back of one of the media vans. But the bridge is a mile long, and the media vans are left on the other side of the bridge before each person is screened for potential weapons. Once, I imagined a helicopter, but I knew it would be nearly impossible to sneak one through restricted airspace.
“I have to go,” he says, as he zips up the back of my dress.
“Thanks,” I whisper. My heart races as I imagine the ocean—the calm blue that stretches straight to freedom. It races no matter how I picture being pulled from its depths: an arm reaching under the surface to grab me; a man throwing a rope as I strain to keep my head above water. You can do it, I tell myself as Cameron walks away.
I don’t tell him I’ll see him later, because I’m not sure if I will. I don’t tell him good luck, because luck has never been on my side.
And I sure as hell don’t tell him that I don’t know how to swim.
Chapter 3