Soulprint (20 page)

I've never seen a school, other than on TV. My school has always been held remotely, on a television. I watch lectures streamed from colleges. I have a room full of textbooks. I take online tests and complete practice work with answers I can check against a key afterward. Technically, I'm homeschooled. Technically, I earned my high school diploma two years ago. Technically, I'm a sophomore in college.

Not that I've ever been to one of those, either.

“Keep to the back roads,” Cameron says as we approach an intersection.

We pass a few stores as we keep to said back roads: country shops with small areas out front or to the side for parking—and I wonder if these, too, have video feed. “Head down, Alina,” he says, and I quickly listen, staring at the floor. “Just in case.”

I don't know if the periodic sound of helicopter blades in the distance is a normal occurrence, but it keeps my nerves on edge. From the way Cameron has his fists clenched in his lap, I'm guessing it's doing the same to him.

Casey turns the radio on, flipping from station to station, bypassing every song. After seven random turns on the road and what feels like an eternity of flipping stations, Casey lands on a news report.

“… three days since the elaborate escape of Alina Chase from her protection detail. To recap, she is believed to be traveling with nineteen-year-old Casey London. It is not yet known how they are connected. Photos taken at the scene also show a media intern registered under an alias. Authorities believe that he is the eighteen-year-old brother of Casey, Cameron London, who has previously served time in a juvenile correction facility for auto theft and is currently wanted for questioning in the presumed death—” Cameron lunges forward between the front seats and jams the power button on the radio with the side of his fist.

“Shit,” Cameron says, leaning back and resting his head on the seat.

“
What
?” My throat constricts. “Questioning in a
death
?” My shoulder presses against the window, and he sighs, shaking his head, his eyes squeezed shut.

“Presumed,” Casey mumbles.

How can anyone trust anyone out here? I amend the picture of Cameron in my head. I imagine him walking down the hall of a jail, his wrists shackled in front of him as he keeps his head down. I imagine him stepping out into the sunshine and squinting against the glare, rubbing at his wrists, now free of handcuffs. I see Casey picking him up in her car. And then I
imagine him taking a gun from the glove compartment and sliding it into the waistband of his pants, telling Casey to drop him at the corner …

“Listen,” he says, “I didn't. It's just for questioning. But the fact that I was already locked up for three months
really
doesn't look good. And now I'm eighteen. Sorry, not gonna risk it.”

I remember his arm, shaky with the gun. Unable to kill.

“You wouldn't …,” I say, and he tenses. I know he believes this is a weakness, but it's not.

“It doesn't matter if I
would
or not,” he says. “The point is that I
didn't
.”

“Which you could've cleared up by heading in for questioning—” Casey says.

“Don't,” he says. “They've already made up their minds, what they think of me.”

I stare at him, trying to see through him, trying to understand all the different versions of the boy in the seat beside me. The person who saved me but spent time locked up for crimes he does not deny. The person who couldn't kill but who's wanted for questioning in a presumed death.

He frowns at me. “The way you're looking at me pretty much says it all.”

I have forgotten to hide my thoughts, and I'm scared at what he sees on my face. “I know what it's like to be locked up,” I say. “To have people assume things about you. I wouldn't risk it either.”

His face relaxes, and so do his shoulders, his breathing, his posture. “So you see,” he says, “it's not just the past life that can come back to haunt you. It's the past in
this
life, too.”

I cannot reconcile the two different Camerons in my imagination. Which version of him is the real one? What is the nature of his soul?

I have aligned myself with people with their own questionable pasts. Is there anyone normal out there? Though I guess people wouldn't feel the need to risk anything, let alone their lives, if they had something worth losing.

I'm starting to feel nauseated, but I'm not sure whether it's the unpredictability of the people around me, if it's the feeling that I'll never know them—which version of my imagination is the true one standing before me?—or whether it's the motion sickness.

“Pick a point in the distance,” Cameron says as I feel my skin turn clammy. He's pointing through the front window. “Something stationary. Keep your eyes fixed on it. It'll help.”

I do. I watch the end of the road, the place where the dirt meets the sky, always somewhere out of our reach. And the world steadies. My stomach steadies. I close my eyes, and I hear my mother's voice:
Duérmete, mi niña, duérmete, mi amor
…

“Turn!” Cameron yells, and I jump. I lose the horizon, and my stomach lurches, instead noticing the white lines across the road, marking a school zone. “Drive past it,” he says. He's leaning forward, between the front seats. “Don't stare.”

Casey drives past the long brick building way under the speed limit. “Looks deserted,” she says.

“Yeah, well, it's Sunday,” Cameron says.

Casey turns down the next street, but it's residential and there are kids playing in the front yard of two of the homes. We drive past, and the smallest boy stops jumping rope for a moment, following our path with his eyes. I keep my head down.

“Do you hear that?” Casey asks. But all I hear are bells.
I am not the danger. I am not the threat. I am the bell, tolling out its warning
.

“Yeah,” Cameron says. “Go right.”

The bells sound like they're getting closer, and then we pull into a packed church parking lot. And I am confused, because it's currently full of cars and I remember reading about how the discovery of soul science conflicted with so many long-held religious beliefs. “What's this used for now?” I ask.

“Um, a church?” Cameron says. Casey turns off the engine, and we sit still, our breathing the only sound, watching for people in the parking lot before exiting the vehicle.

“But there's no …” I have Cameron's full attention now. Casey turns to look at me, her head tilted to the side. “Heaven,” I finish. “Afterlife. Anything.”

“Maybe not,” Cameron says, and he motions for us to duck down as someone walks across the lot, taking the steps up to the entrance two at a time, obviously running late. We rise when Cameron does.

“How many generations are in the database, Alina?” Casey asks.

I think about the computer printouts in June's hideaway. The number of lives grouped together. “Three, four tops.”

“And is every soul there?” she asks, but she obviously already knows the answer, because she answers it herself. “No. People could die out of the country.” Their souls reborn elsewhere. I wonder if one day, out of the blue, they will pack their bags and hop a plane, unsure why. I wonder if they will find a way back home.

“And some parents never register their children,” she continues.

“I know that,” I say. But the absence of one thing does not prove the existence of something else.

“And do you know for a fact that the
soul
is what's supposed to move on to heaven? That there's not some other essence to you? Is what we know now everything we'll ever know?” Casey asks.

I hate feeling like I'm a step behind. Like there was something missing inside my mind, and now it's struggling to make room for its possibility.

“Is it possible there's a heaven? Nirvana? An afterlife, besides on earth?” She shakes her head at me. “Faith doesn't disappear, Alina. It just shifts. It adjusts to make room for the things we know, and the things we believe. Faith isn't just something you have or don't have.”

This is easy for her to say, as someone who obviously has it.

“Our grandmother went to church,” Cameron mumbles. He grins. “I've heard that speech more times than I can count.”

“What about you?” I ask Cameron, who remained silent during Casey's speech.

He pauses before saying, “Can't say I have faith in the same things my grandmother did.”

They talk about her in the past tense, and I never hear him speak about their parents.

“Your parents?” I ask, and from the look on his face, I immediately wish I could take it back.

“Let's go,” he says, before I can say anything else. Casey grabs the bag, and I hand her the useless gun, which she tosses inside with the computer equipment and June's notebook. Once we're out of the car, Cameron strips off his shirt and starts wiping down the inside of the doors, the steering wheel, the radio dial. Casey and I wait in the trees, tucked out of sight. Then he shuts each door and wipes the outside as well. He puts his shirt back on as he joins us in the trees on the edge of the lot, but not before I see the raised scar across the back of his shoulder. It's whiter and rougher than the rest of his skin, and it still looks slightly pink down the center when the shadows shift and the sun hits it straight on.

“Keep in the trees,” he whispers. The roads are lined with trees, but they back to more streets. We're not in the safety of the woods any longer. We're in a neighborhood, completely exposed.

We stand out. We make people look. We're still in hunting gear. And I'm bleeding. And we're sweaty and gross. We eventually have to leave the protection of the trees to cross several streets, and Cameron sends us one at a time, waiting a few moments between each of us. I watch for cars and people, and I listen for the sound of helicopter blades, but we have very
few options if someone stumbles upon us. Mostly, I stay low to the ground and hope for the best. It's all I can do.

Eventually we find ourselves behind the school, and I let myself relax for the moment. It's less than a mile away from where we've left the car, and the parking lot is completely empty, from what we can see. The lights are off, and the doors are shut.

Cameron tells us to wait behind the school, that he's going to look for the easiest way inside. “There are probably security cameras in the halls,” he says. “And the doors will have alarms. But if we can get into the gym, we'll have a lot of different exit strategies.”

He stands, ready to leave, and says to Casey, “I need the gun.”

“It's empty,” I say.

He holds his hands out, presses his lips together, and doesn't meet my eyes. “It's
almost
empty,” he says. “There should be one left in the chamber.”

Casey hands it to him, and I don't like the fact that he either needs it or intends to use it. I don't like the fact that he knows how guns work, and that he didn't tell me I was missing a bullet when I emptied it.

I imagine Cameron holding a gun steady as he approaches a car on the street and telling a man to get out of the driver's seat. I imagine him tossing the driver to the ground. Stealing his car. Racing as the police sirens follow him.

“Don't look at me like that.” He's talking to me, but I don't know what he means.

“Like what?”

“Like I'm a criminal.”

Except he is. He's wanted. We all are. “We're all criminals,” I say. Casey laughs and Cameron kind of grunts before turning around and heading toward the building, gun in hand.

While he's gone, Casey says, “It's not his fault. He and Ava kind of got sucked into a shitty group.”

It still sounds kind of like his fault. A shitty group does not equal blackmail or coercion. A shitty group does not dictate your entire fate.

“But you didn't?” I ask.

“I got accepted to a high-tech boarding school across town. The whole programming thing. I didn't go to school with the same people. Not since middle school, anyway. I was only home on weekends, and in summers I'd take any internship I could find, just to get away from that house. It only got worse after our grandma died. God, I couldn't wait to leave.” She pauses for a moment, lowers her voice. “When Ava disappeared … at first the cops didn't even look too hard. ‘Oh, she ran away,' they'd say. Or ‘She fell in with the wrong crowd.' ” She turns to face me, her eyes wide and piercing. “But she was so close to getting out of there. We were going to get a place where we could go to school together after graduation, take Cameron with us. We had a plan—”

The sound of a gunshot cuts her off, and we jump. My hand is on Casey's arm. Her muscles are tense and frozen.

I picture a thousand different possibilities: Cameron stumbling upon security and firing the gun into the air—or worse,
firing the gun at him; Cameron stumbling upon security and the guard firing the gun into the air—or worse, firing the gun at Cameron.

Casey grabs my hand, and I make a thousand silent pleas in my head. And then I hear footsteps.

I see him, through the trees. Not bleeding, not even running. Just strolling toward us. “Your entrance is ready,” he says.

“Tell me you did not shoot out a window,” Casey says, but I'm hoping that's exactly what he has done. That seems the best possible outcome of the gunshot.

His silence is the answer, because Casey pulls him down to crouching. “Are you stupid? How quickly, do you think, will the cops show up?”

Cameron shakes his head. “You can always get away with one shot. People don't give it a second thought. An engine backfiring, a firecracker. If there's not a reason to think it's a gun, they don't think it's a gun.”

But Casey makes us wait, not trusting this information. We wait a long time, maybe thirty minutes, and still nobody comes. “I hate that you know that,” Casey says, standing up.