I bathed in clean water that night, and scrubbed my body with milled, formed soap, a luxury I had learned of but not experienced. I marveled at the foam on my skin, the lather in my hair, and when I was finished, I climbed into bed naked, and let the air dry my body. I felt as though I had shed my skin like a snake, and this new skin would carry me to my new life.
The next day Mr. Barbary appeared at the door to inform me that my benefactor had died the previous week, but not to worry as he had provided for me in the event of his death. His widow had been informed of my existence and had agreed to take me in, as he would have someday. Mr. Barbary had booked my passage on the first available ship. It would leave the following week, and I was to entertain myself until then.
And I did. He left me a purse with my own coins, and I bought new clothes and food I did not have to prepare. My body softened after a week in the city, after stuffing myself whenever I wanted with glistening, steaming sweet and spicy foods.
The night before I was to leave, I laid my new things in my new small trunk with great care. I took out my doll from beneath my pillow, where I hid her during the day. I ran my fingers over her seams, touched the spot of Sister’s blood that marked her wrist, and wondered what shape my new life without Sister would take.
“Why does the white man pay for me?” I had once asked Uncle, after a trip to Calcutta for my inspection. The coins jingled with his steps.
“Because he believes you are valuable. And when you go to him, you will be.”
I took this in. “When will I go?”
“When you become,” Uncle said.
“Become what?”
“Yourself.”
But if I am not myself yet, then who am I? I thought.
5
THE FIRST THING I NOTICED when I woke up was that I was covered in blood.
The second thing I noticed was that this didn’t bother me the way it should have.
I didn’t feel the urge to scream or speak, to beg for help, or even to wonder where I was. Those instincts were dead, and I was calm as my wet fingers slid up the tiled wall, groping for a light switch. I found one without even having to stand. Four lights slammed on above me, one after the other, illuminating the dead body on the floor just a few feet away.
My mind processed the facts first. Male. Heavy. He was lying facedown in a wide, red puddle that spread out from beneath him. The tips of his curly black hair were wet with it. There was something in his hand.
The fluorescent lights in the white room flickered and buzzed and hummed. I moved to get a better view of the body. Its eyes were closed. It might have been only asleep, really, if it weren’t for the blood. There was so much of it. And by one of the hands the blood was smeared into a weird pattern.
No. Not a pattern. Words.
PLAY ME.
My gaze flicked to the hand. The fist was curled around a small tape recorder. I moved the fingers—still warm—and pressed play. A male voice started to speak.
“Do I have your attention?” the voice asked.
I knew that voice. But I couldn’t believe I was hearing it.
“Noah’s alive,” Jude said.
He had my attention now.
“And you don’t have much time. You probably recognize the dead man on the floor as Wayne Flowers. I’m the one who killed him, in case you were wondering. The good news is that he’s one of two people with access to Dr. Kells’s office—the other one being Dr. Kells. The bad news is that in order for you to get that access, and get out of this room, you’re going to need to cut out his left eye.”
What was this? A trick? A trap?
“I would’ve done it for you but there wasn’t time. I switched the syringe, the one they shot you with before your spinal tap. That’s why you had a . . . reaction . . . when they examined you, which—that was really freaky, by the way. Anyway, whatever. There’s a retinal scanner above her office door, top right corner, just like there is above this one. All the doors in this place auto-lock. When you have the eye, hold it a few inches above where yours are—he was taller than you. There is a video camera—they’re everywhere, can’t help that, she’ll see you, but she’ll see you wherever you are. Wherever you are, except in this room. There are no records made of anything that happens in this room. That’s why I dosed you before she took you in here, slipped in before Wayne could get out. I would’ve taken you too but you wouldn’t let me near you. Anyway, once you’re in Kells’s office, the door will lock behind you. You can get out using Wayne’s eye.
“In her office should be everything you’re looking for. Your files—the real ones, not the bullshit cover-their-ass fake stuff. There’s stuff about your friends; they’re here too, by the way. I’m getting them out while you’re listening to this. Once the tape ends, get to Kells’s office, grab what you need, and get out. The map in there will show you how to get off the island. Kells will either already be gone or— I—I—had to let her go. I’m sorry. But you should have enough time to get out before she can manually set the lockdown. I’ll get your friends out. Noah will be waiting for you.” He coughed hard. “Also, I left my watch for you. It’s in Wayne’s other hand. Get it before you—before you go.
“And, I know there’s no reason you should trust me. I’ve done— I—can’t talk about it. Sick shit.” He coughed again. It was deep and wet, and he was breathing hard when he spoke again. “I can’t talk about it. I don’t know how long I’ll be like this, be me, or if this is even me anymore, but whatever. I might as well— I want to say— I’m not going to say I’m sorry—‘sorry’ doesn’t mean anything when you can’t promise not to do it again, and I can’t promise. I’m just—I’m going to leave you alone now. I promise.”
The tape went silent. I was silent. I stared at the recorder, my lips parted and my body still.
“Sorry about the message in blood thing, by the way.”
I startled at the sound of Jude’s voice on the tape again.
“There was nothing else to write with.”
Then it clicked off.
Maybe I was in shock, because I wasn’t panicking, or screaming, or shaking, or even scared. My mind kept repeating two words, over and over and over again.
“Noah’s alive.”
But Jude was the one who’d said it.
I didn’t know whether I should believe him, but I did know that I wanted to. Part of me was terrified to let myself hope, but another part of me couldn’t help it. My mind seized on the possibility like a shark on a seal, and then I rewound the tape and listened to Jude’s words again.
“Noah will be waiting for you.”
All I had to do was get out of this room.
“You’re going to need to cut out his left eye.”
All I had to do was cut out Wayne’s left eye.
I looked over at him, a hump of bloodied flesh on the floor, his wire-rimmed glasses askew on his face. His eyes opened behind them.
“Fuck!” My heart exploded and I covered my mouth to keep from screaming. It was the first normal reaction I’d had since waking up in here. “Fuck,” I said again. Wayne’s small, piggy eyes followed my every movement. He was alive. Conscious.
“Are you serious,” I whispered. A gurgly groan erupted from his throat.
I was rooted to the spot, but I needed to not be. I was locked in a room with not-dead Wayne, and the only way out was to use his eye to trick the retinal scanner into releasing me.
But if he was alive, maybe I wouldn’t need to trick it? Maybe Wayne could just open it for me.
But for that he would need to stand. The pool of blood around him widened. The smell of it filled my nostrils, somehow metallic and animal at once. My nostrils flared.
“Wayne,” I said loudly. “Can you talk?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
Good. “Can you stand?”
“I—don’t think— No.”
Not good. “Did you hear what was on that tape?”
“What—” He wheezed. “What tape?
”
The minute hand on the watch shifted. I’d heard it, somehow. Kells was somewhere in this building, and Noah was too. I couldn’t wait to find him, or else she would find me first. I’d have to try to lift Wayne myself.
As I moved over him, my stomach contracted—with nausea, I think—and Wayne’s eyes widened in alarm. I rolled him gently, sort of, onto his back. That was when a different smell smacked me in the face. His intestines jiggled wetly from his slashed stomach.
“Are you serious,” I hissed through clenched teeth. I mildly wondered how I’d managed to not empty the contents of my stomach all over him as I placed my hands beneath his wet armpits and tried to lift him up.
“Stop!” He moaned. “Please.”
I stopped. My eyes darted around the tiled room looking for something, anything to help me, but it was pretty bare. A plastic table and two knocked-over chairs were at one end of it, and another chair, wooden, was strewn in pieces near the wall. A few of the tiles had been smashed, presumably by the chair. But something metal gleamed in the ruins of what once must have been a neat and tidy medical-ish room.
I went over to inspect it, kicking aside jagged pieces of wood and brushing off some ceramic tile bits, and then realized what I’d found.
It was a scalpel. I picked it up, brushing it against my soiled hospital gown to wipe away the dust. Just holding it felt strange. It seemed to conform to the shape of my hand.
Wayne moaned again behind me, a miserable, desperate sound. I turned to him. He was dying. He was mostly dead, really. And the fact that his left eye was still in his skull was the only thing keeping me from getting out. From getting to Noah.
As I stared at him, I tried to imagine his eyes closing—to think about him dying from blood loss or something, why hadn’t that happened yet? But Wayne’s eyes didn’t close. They just kept looking at me.
I told myself that in his current state, death would be a relief, a kindness. But the thing was, I didn’t want to kill him. I remembered, in a clinical sort of way, that he’d played a role in trapping me here, in torturing me, and that memory carried with it the sense that he’d enjoyed it. But I remembered these things the way you remember the name of your second-grade teacher (Mrs. Fish-Robinson). I didn’t really care that he’d done them. At that moment I didn’t want him dead, and I really didn’t want to be the one to kill him.
He must have seen my hesitation, because he whispered, “Good girl.”
I cocked my head.
“You’re not so bad, are you?”
Those were his last words before I cut his throat.
6
I FELT KIND OF BAD about it, honestly. it wasn’t a clean cut. Too much hesitation; I could barely watch as I did it. But I did make sure he was dead before I took his eye. That was something?
And I kept the scalpel. I had a feeling I would need it again.
By then a low, whooping alarm had been set off, but when I peeked out from the examination room, the halls were empty. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone here besides Dr. Kells and Wayne, but that didn’t mean much. There was a lot I couldn’t remember.
Wayne’s eye squelched in my closed fist. It was larger than I’d thought it would be, and rounder, too. Part of the optic nerve was still attached to it, peeking out between my fingers. Every second that passed could bring Kells with it, so I darted to the left, to where I thought her office might be. The fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed above my head, and the white walls seemed to curve and bend around me. There was no way to know how far I’d come, no way to make sure I was going in the right direction.
I tried to unravel my tangled memories of this place so I could pick a direction, any direction, to follow. But empty hallways dead-ended with locked steel doors or doors that opened up to rooms with nothing and no one in them. And there were no windows, no statues, no artwork, nothing that even remotely resembled the blurry picture of Horizons as I remembered it.
I grew panicked, turning corners and opening doors to find nothing but whiteness and metal. None of it looked familiar. I was a rat in a maze; I might not be locked in a cell, but I was still a prisoner. I tried to believe that Jude would get Jamie and Stella out, that Noah was alive and would be waiting for me, but every dead end killed a little bit of hope, until I barely had any left.
But then, I noticed a tiny door painted white to blend in with the walls. I opened it and crawled through. I was staring at a narrow flight of metal stairs.
I climbed them, of course. They creaked beneath my feet and my heart felt like it might burst. When I opened the door at the top, the hinges squeaked and I cringed.
Behind the door, something metal clattered to the floor. I heard a whispered obscenity. I knew that whisper.
“Jamie?” I asked, pushing open the door.
“Mara? Mara? No fucking way.” Jamie’s voice echoed in the mostly metal room, which was in fact an industrial kitchen. I searched for him but all I saw were gleaming, distorted reflections of myself in the steel cabinets that lined the walls.
“Where are you?” I asked.
I ducked beneath a hanging pot rack and caught one reflection that didn’t match the others. I tilted my head to one side as the reflection changed, distorted, as Jamie pushed open a cabinet door and crawled out of it. He nearly tripped on the cooking utensils scattered on the floor as he ran to me. He stopped just short of a hug. “Oh my God—Mara—what the fuck happened to you?”
I looked up, staring at myself in the steel backsplash behind an enormous oven. This was what I saw:
One scalpel (held)
One tape recorder (held)
One human eye (brown) (held)
One blood-soaked surgical gown (worn)
One gold Rolex (worn)
I really wished the stupid hospital gown had pockets. My reflection shrugged, even though I had not.
“Blood’s not mine,” I said.
“I’m afraid to ask . . .”
“Wayne,” I said.
“Well, then, I have never been so happy to see you covered in blood.”
And I’d never been so happy to see him. He was not a mess, and was not wearing a hospital gown either. He had on clothes that would have been normal—khaki pants, a polo shirt, no shoes, just tube socks—except they weren’t normal for him. They didn’t fit him either. The cuffs of his pants came to his ankles, and the shirt he wore hung loosely off his frame. His hair had been buzzed so short that his scalp shone beneath it.
“We have to find Stella. Any ideas?” I asked.
Jamie shook his head. “I don’t even know where my room is.”
“How did you get out?” I silently hoped that Jude was the answer.
“I was playing solitaire when I heard the door to my room—cell, whatever—hiss and unlock. The hallway was empty, so I made a run for it. Except I didn’t know where to go, and at one point I thought I heard footsteps behind me, and I didn’t really want to run into anyone, obviously, so I opened the first unlocked door I could find—this one,” he said, swinging the kitchen door, “and hid. But not before I made a metric fuck ton of noise, obviously.”
“And I was the footsteps.”
“You were the footsteps.” His expression softened. “I’m glad you were the footsteps.”
“Me too.”
“I really want to hug you, but you’re disgusting, no offense.”
A smile turned up the corner of my mouth, a real one. “Why is it that whenever anyone says something offensive, they always add ‘no offense’ after it?”
“Offensive or not, you’re objectively covered in blood,” he said, giving me a long look. His eyes landed on the watch on my wrist. “And bling. WTF?”
“Jude’s.” I turned away from Jamie and poked my head out into the hallway, trying to decide which way we should go.
“Did you just say what I think you said?”
“The watch belonged to Jude,” I said slowly. “He left me a tape, told me how to get out of here,” I said, ho
lding out my palm and releasing my fist slowly, so as not to let Wayne’s eye slip out.
“Okay. One, that is foul, Mara, and I don’t understand, but that seems to be the running theme here. Two—what tape?”
I showed him the tape recorder in my other hand. “I’ll play it for you but not now. But Jude’s the one who let me out.”
Jamie’s eyes widened.
“And he’s the one who let you out too, I think. Listen, I’ll tell you everything, but now we need to go.”
“I appreciate this, Mara. I appreciate our situation, I really do. But listen to yourself. You’re talking about trusting the guy who is largely responsible for our current situation.”
I took a deep breath. Jamie was right. But he hadn’t heard what Jude had said about Noah. And now wasn’t the time to tell him. “I didn’t have much of a choice,” was all I said. “Look, I woke up in this room, and Wayne was dead.” Well, mostly dead. “The tape was in his hand, the door was locked, and on the tape Jude said the only way out was to use Wayne’s eye to trick the retinal scanner, which would get me out. It also opens the door to Kells’s office, which is where we have to go next. But first I thought, ‘Well, Mara, your situation can’t get much worse,’ and so I did what Jude told me to do. And that led me to you.” I started walking down the corridor, trying in vain to ignore the squish of Wayne’s eye in my fist.
Jamie didn’t have to work hard to keep up with me; he was taller than I remembered, taller than me. “And I’m happy about that, truly, but am nevertheless concerned about the veracity of our would-be savior.”
I stopped short. “Do you want to go back?”
He rubbed his forehead with both hands and pulled at his face until his eyes drooped.
“Well?”
“No.” He dragged out the word.
“Then kindly shut up and help me.”
But, Stella found us first. She’d relied on the old hide-in-the-broom-closet trick, except that when we passed it, she reached out and grabbed Jamie by the sleeve, making him scream, which made me scream.