ONE YEAR LATER
The man sitting directly across the table from me toyed with his stacks of chips, his forehead shining under the warm lights in the poker room. Dressed in a fancy velvet hoodie that was only zipped up to his stomach, the thirty-something-year-old man let out a sigh and flicked the final chips onto the table in front of him, raising the bet.
He really shouldn't have, but his beer gave him confidence.
There were five of us left in the game – the oldest guy had folded in the third round. I'd watched his wrinkled face throughout the night and wondered why he was even here. His actions screamed better safe than sorry, and he never raised the pot. He reminded me of Stuart Neville when we played poker in Mexico. I was surprised that the man was still watching and hadn't gone to bed.
The player diagonally across from me, an overdressed woman with glittering earrings, put her chips on the table without thinking. She didn't catch me making my pupils bigger to see through her cards at the start of the game. These cards had dense black patterns on the back, and the amount of light I had to let in to see everyone's hand hurt my head. Glitter caught me blinking and rubbing the sting out of my eyes and gave me a smile, her teeth stained a little with her dark lipstick. She knew she had a good chance in the showdown with two tens that could get her three of a kind, and she'd been calculating her odds all evening. Glitter was intelligent, I could see. I was just luckier.
I'd become a bit of a regular here; some of the dealers already knew me by my alias. Even though I saw through everyone's cards every time, I won some and lost some. Not every hand was great, and if I was having a lucky day, I made sure to change up the game a little. If Dell Island had taught me anything, it was to be more aware and more calculating. I couldn't risk being blacklisted and being known for all the wrong reasons again.
I tossed the chips on the table. Called. Velvet Hoodie showed his hand. Then the others, all cards I saw from the beginning. A small smile crossed my lips as I flipped my two cards. A king-high flush.
Glitter glared at me. She ran a manicured hand through her short black hair to hide her disappointment. I ignored her and raised my chrome watch to see that it was coming up to four in the morning. Home time.
Not bad, Eva Jason, I thought to myself as the chips were swept to me. Not bad.
♟♙♟♙
I grinned at the case full of cash sitting in the trunk of my car. "Welcome home," I said, before lifting it out and striding to the foyer of the apartment building. My black coat flapped in the wind that gushed through the Manhattan streets. As much as I preferred a walk upstairs, I took the lift just to be safe. I got home, flicked on the small ceiling light, and locked up my new income at 4:20 am. Ironically, I was more awake than ever.
Walking to the balcony, I stared at the city through the thick glass doors. The light in the living room gave me a faint reflection, and I examined myself with the urban lights as a backdrop. Since Dell Island, since Mexico, I'd grown my hair down to my elbows. I was finally able to dress the way I wanted to with the life I'd built for myself – clean, business-like, but generally unremarkable in case Doctor A would have eyes looking out for me on the other side of the sea.
When we were in Mexico, Linkin was quite confident that whoever ran Dell Island wouldn't come after us, but the possibility never left my mind. Although I was free from them now, I could never be truly free. When I got enough money, I would get to the bottom of everything. Make them pay for the lives they took, the nightmares that followed me.
Then, I would be free.
"Eva?" The groggy voice made me wipe the hardened expression from my face. Nate Silveira, my flatmate for four months, squinted at me from the middle of the living room in his green pajamas. I had this place to myself for a while and I was going out of my mind. I'd picked him to share the apartment with me out of all my potential flatmates because his positivity reminded me of Jaysen. Nothing else matched – his brown hair was a few shades darker, his face was innocently oval, and he didn't have one piercing on him. "You just got back?"
I tied my coat up at the waist, even though it wasn't cold inside. I was worried that my train of thought might spill out into the open. Nate had already called me out multiple times on my "serial killer stare", and although it's now an inside joke, he couldn't be closer to the truth. He'd also woken me up once for bellowing in my sleep, just as Linkin and Stuart used to in Mexico. Somehow, the darkness always found a way to return.
"Eva?"
"Go back to bed," I said quickly. "I'm fine."
"I wanted some juice," he said, raising an eyebrow. I sighed and let him stumble into the kitchen. Nate knew that something was up with me, but he never asked. He knew that I was a gambler and that I had way more money than I needed to buy the place. He noticed that I would often zone out and think about the passing year. But he let me be, did his architectural designs on the dinner table, kept our friendship light and easy. I liked it that way.
Hanging my coat up by the door, I ran a hand through my hair. It was frizzy now, and I had to break a few strands to free my fingers at the ends. Yelling a goodnight, I went to bed without taking off my makeup.
When I woke up the next morning, Nate had already left for work. I took jam out of my fridge to devour with toast and noticed that a new quote had been whiteboard-markered on the fridge.
Either you run the day or the day runs you. —Jim Rohn.
I laughed through my bite of the sandwich. Today was a day off and the sun was bright. I spent days off reading about anything I could get my hands on, but the quote had me itching to go on a run.
♟♙♟♙
My run turned into a slow stroll through Central Park, and when I saw how many birds were on the grass, I made a detour for the supermarket and came back with a bag of seeds. I sat on the lawn for hours, throwing grains at the excited birds and singing them a Russian song that I remembered in my mother's voice. I wondered if she ever thought about me – her lost, kidnapped child – when the common song came up in her life. I closed my eyes and took this moment to remember everyone I'd lost – my family, Celestia, Jaysen, Linkin, Stuart.
It was harder than anything leaving the latter two after I'd regained my health in Mexico, but I felt like our paths diverged from there. We were all damaged survivors, even Stuart, who'd seen some of the worse things that test subjects were barred from seeing. We became the strangest trio of friends over our experiences, but as the days went on, it became clear that they wanted something different to me.
I could still see the horror on their faces when I'd told them that the bruises on my face and body were worth it, because I found out where to get a fake passport. I'd wanted to get back to American soil and track down how my disastrous free vacation came to be. It was clear that Linkin and Stuart just wanted a relatively normal life, so that left me to preserve the memory of Jaysen and all the other innocent test subjects on my own.
It wasn't until a bird flapped right in front of my nose that I realized that a tear was running down my face. I couldn't break the other children out of the human trafficking camp, and I couldn't stop the cruelty on Dell Island. But one day, it would be destroyed.
Deciding that I couldn't be the birds' cheerful companion anymore, I scattered the rest of the seeds on the ground. A swarm of birds joined the feast, their beating feathers darkening the sky for a moment. I ran away from it all.
♟♙♟♙
Anxious memories consumed me for the rest of the day. I tried reading one of Nate's glossy books about design on the balcony, but my mind kept tugging me elsewhere. At 4pm, I felt like ants were crawling all over my body. Not being able to sit still any longer, I got changed and headed down to the pool.
There was a guy in the apartment building who was also a regular swimmer. It was a heartwarming moment when I found out that his name was Dylan, my alias back in Mexico. We'd gone on a few dates despite having nothing in common except that we were attracted to one another. After a few times, we skipped the dates.
Dylan wasn't at the pool today, not yet. I hoped that he wouldn't appear until I could clear my head, though he was a fairly good distraction, too. I just wanted to have some time on my own, when it was just me and the cool water.
Swimming was the first class that I'd enrolled in when I had enough money to spare. I needed to overcome my fear of the water if I was to have any shot at taking Dell Island from the outside. I still thought about Celestia's gills and webbed fingers on the side of the rusty boat every now and then, but I learned to shut off my mind as I ploughed through the water. Exposure was a good form of therapy – Stuart had taught me that. I kicked down to the bottom of the pool and swam without breath until my chest ached. When I came up for air, I saw that I was almost at the other end of the lap pool.
I waded to the other end to do it again.
This time, clouds took out the sunlight and left me surrounded by a dull blue. My throat clenched but I decided to think nothing of it – it was just the weather. But when I kicked up for air, I realized that the shadow wasn't from a cloud. There was somebody else with me in the water, and, against my thrashing, they pushed me down by the neck and held me there.
It only took a few seconds for me to take the first gulp of water in panic. My head and lungs felt like they were going to explode, and my underwater screaming was producing so many bubbles that I couldn't see who my attacker was. I tried to push the hands away, but they were stronger and pushed me even deeper.
This was it, I thought. My terrible feeling today must have been an omen.
Just when I thought I was going to black out, the pressure disappeared from my body. Then came a scoop – I had no control over my limbs anymore to push whoever it was away. The next thing I knew was large hands pumping water out of my lungs. My head was spinning and I wanted to throw up, but I recognized the voices.
"What happened?" Dylan asked, moving me to a recovery position.
"She was drowning," Celestia replied. I wouldn't forget her voice in a million years. "I tried to help her."