Free Soulprint by Megan Miranda Page A

anyone to offer it to me. I rip open a granola bar and devour it in two bites, downing an entire bottle of water afterward. I focus on the door at the top of the stairs. It’s closed, but I didn’t notice anyone lock it. Still, I don’t know where to go. What to do. I can’t think of a single person who would take me in. Who would keep me hidden.
    â€œLet me see your rib,” Casey says. “We need to disinfect and stitch it up.”
    I shake my head, swallowing the last of the water. “Cameron did it.”
    She raises her eyebrows, and one side of her mouth lifts along with it. “Did he now?”
    â€œI have many talents,” he says from across the room.
    She puts one hand on her hip and says, “I bet outrunning three guards and outswimming a motorized boat aren’t on
your
list of talents.”
    Cameron is enraptured as she tells us the story of how she raced across the island, through the smoke, and dove off the cliff. She says her hands brushed the air tank on her way down. “It was just … perfect,” she says, as if the whole world was conspiring to enable her escape. She must’ve looked like a girl who died under the surface, never coming back up. By the time they realized the tracker was still moving, she was probably already halfway to the cage.
    There were too many boats, she says, after she put the tracker on the sub, and she couldn’t get to the next tank in time. She ran out of air. And so she stayed near the surface, with her nose peeking above the water with every dip of the wave—breathing, when she could, right in front of everyone. “I was
right there
,” she says, wide-eyed. She laughs, almost out of breath, as if she can’t believe her own luck. She says she didn’t dare move until dark. She hit the rendezvous point at the steel netting after we’d already left. She had her own GPS. And she swam through that dark ocean by herself, crawled through the pipe by herself, found her way to freedom by herself.
    Seeing her now, standing before me, the others watchingher with awe, I wish I was more like her. More competent, more capable.
    â€œSo,” she says. “I’m beat.” And she flops back against a mattress, smiling at the ceiling.
    â€œWait,” Dominic says, turning up the television a notch. We’re on the screen. Casey and I. I look wild, feral, as my eyes smile before the explosion. They zoom in on Casey’s face after, because everyone already knows me. “According to her file, Elizabeth Lorenzo, age nineteen, joined the guard unit about six months ago,” the woman’s voice says, but the picture stays zoomed in on Casey’s face.
    She pushes herself up on her elbows.
Elizabeth
, she mouths to Cameron, like it’s funny.
    â€œBut we have reason to believe that this information is false.”
    Her mouth twitches as a number appears at the bottom of the screen.
    â€œIf you have any information about the identity of this woman, please call the number below.”
    â€œWell,” Cameron says, arms crossed over his chest. “There goes your identity.”
    Casey turns to Cameron and says, “I’m Nobody, who are you? Are you Nobody, too?” She laughs at her own joke, but he looks away.
    She laughs louder, and pushes him in the shoulder, but he still doesn’t say anything.
    â€œThen there’s a pair of us, don’t tell,” I say, completing the poem by memory. Casey turns to me and looks surprised,as if maybe she thought I had something better to do over the last seventeen years rather than to read and read and read some more.
    Casey tilts her head to the side and smiles at Dominic Ellis. “I like this Alina Chase girl, Dom. Can I keep her?”
    Dom turns the television off, turns the light off. He locks the door at the top of the stairs and pockets the key. “Sleep,” he says. “We leave early.”
    I lie on the mattress,