Vitro Read online

  Sophie stood on the bluff and stared at the place that had stolen her mother from her with the wind pulling greedily at her hair, as if trying to lure her over the cliff and to her death on the rocks below. She felt a sudden swelling of determination in her chest, a hardening of resolve. When she licked her lips, they tasted like the sea. She felt as if the island were laying a challenge before her: If you can steal my secrets, you can have her back.

  She remembered something her dad had said to her, not long ago, when she’d first announced her plan to follow in her mother’s footsteps: “She had her chance to be there for you, Sophie, and she gave it up. She chose her work. All these gifts, these lavish vacations”—he referenced the expensive dolls and toys her mother used to send her, which turned into electronics and cash cards as she grew older, the red Volkswagen on her sixteenth birthday, their trips together to Switzerland or Australia when her mother had vacation every few years—“they’re just her way of trying make up for the time she chose not to spend with you. Why can’t you see it?”

  “You talk as if she’s bribing me,” Sophie had retorted, furious. “She’s my mom! If you want to hate her, that’s your problem—but why do you insist that I hate her too?”

  “I don’t want you to hate her,” he said with a sigh. “I just want you to let her go.”

  But it was something Sophie could not do. Would not do. She loved her father, but when he said things like that, she hated him. As far as she was concerned, the day he dragged her across the ocean and forced her to restart her life, he lost all his right to interfere in her relationship with her mom. We could have stayed on Guam at least. Or I could have had a choice. Who knows? If she’d gone with her mom instead back when she was seven, she might have grown up with this Nicholas, maybe stayed friends with Jim. This Skin Island wouldn’t be a strange, menacing place that filled her with anxiety—it would be home.

  Despite the secrets it kept from her, from the moment she’d set foot on Skin Island, Sophie had been haunted with an inexplicable sense of familiarity, a kind of kinship with the palms and the sand and the sea. It had been calling to her for years and at last, she’d answered. “Take me to her,” said Sophie.

  Nicholas smiled.

  SIX

  JIM

  Jim stood and stared perplexedly from the plane to the runway to the beach. If I could just get it to the edge of the concrete, it should slide down the beach. . . .

  He pushed. He pulled. He cursed. He slapped the mosquitoes that hovered above his bare skin and snuck in a bite whenever he stood still. The plane, which had always felt light as a whisper in his hands when he was lost in the clouds, now felt as if it were weighted with a dozen tons of cement. He took the wheels off to see if there was some way to make use of them, but they couldn’t have been in worse shape if he’d shot them with a machine gun. In frustration, he chucked the bolts and the rubber wheels as hard as he could into the ocean. Then he realized the material of the wheels might be useful for patches if he ran out of duct tape, and he had to strip down and dive into the water to find them again. When he emerged, dripping and still minus one wheel, he was ready to give up. He halfheartedly pulled on his jeans, then collapsed into the sand with one arm flung over his face to block out the sun.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” He propped himself on his elbows and stared across the channel to Skin Island. It had been over an hour, and he’d seen no sign of Sophie—or anyone else, for that matter.

  I shouldn’t have come here. But it seemed to be an all-too-familiar pattern for Jim: plunging into situations before he considered the consequences. There was the time he lost every penny of his once-substantial savings when he bet on his friend Manny to win the island’s annual dragon boat race, and the time he and his friend Kong thought it would be a great idea to go cliff diving in the middle of the night, and Kong busted his arm and collarbone on the rocks and Jim had to jump in after him. Then the time he decided to go surfing just as a typhoon was sweeping in, and nearly drowned before his dad rescued him in their neighbor’s canoe. In fact, now that he looked back, he realized his life was a study in “it seemed like a great idea at the time,” going all the way back to the misadventures he dragged Sophie into when they were barely old enough to spell their names. Flying to Skin Island, however, could well be the worst of his great ideas yet.

  But there wasn’t any point in lying around feeling sorry for himself. He rolled onto his feet and trudged up the beach, carrying the wheel he’d managed to recover. Then he stood on the runway and stared for a long time at his plane, thinking.

  He finally concocted a plan that he was fairly certain wouldn’t work, but he knew he had to try. He dragged as many fallen palm trunks as he could onto the pavement, which amounted to three, since the last two he found were too heavy for him to carry. He laid them in front of the plane and then pushed the Cessna with all his strength. It crunched and scraped in protest, but finally caught on the first log and started, slowly, to roll forward. He almost thought he’d figured it out, but then the warped wheel chassis caught on the log and he had to wrangle with it for a half hour before it finally came off and he could roll the plane forward. It moved fairly easily over the last two logs, and he was feeling pretty good about himself, but then it slipped away from him. The logs rolled once, twice, but not fast enough, and the plane scraped nose first into the concrete. Hissing through his teeth, Jim raced to the front of the plane and twisted the propeller so it didn’t get bent or snapped by the impact. If he lost the propeller, there’d be no hope at all. All the while, a pair of cormorants hopped a safe distance away, watching him with their heads cocked, and he could have sworn that their throaty cries were laughter at his efforts.

  Confident his rolling-log method would at least get the plane into the water, he set about patching the holes on the undersides of the floats. He ripped open the rolls of duct tape and set to work, moving quickly to make the most of what daylight was left.

  Once the holes were patched and all six rolls of tape had been used up, he started the entire process over again, dragging the logs around to the front of the plane and, more carefully this time, rolling the Cessna over them. His back and legs and arms all ached to the point of collapse, and he was drenched with sweat that stung his eyes and his chapped lips, but he kept going. Whenever he was tempted to take a break, he thought of old Nandu and his tale of guards with assault rifles, which was enough to spur him on, to pull on hidden reserves of strength he never knew he’d had. If he and Sophie needed a quick getaway, he would be sure they had one.

  It was well after dark when he finally got the plane to the edge of the runway, facing a downhill slope to the sea. He collapsed onto the concrete, his back against the dented fuselage, and almost blacked out from exhaustion. The moon was nearly full and poured silver beams over the water; glimmering rivulets of moonlight rippled over the waves to stain the sand and Jim’s skin pale blue.

  Jim stared off to his left, across the channel—now at high tide—at Skin Island. The sky above was dark, but the mountains were darker still, black on deep blue, a vacuum that sucked in the light of the moon and stars. It had sucked Sophie in and held her still. She should have been back by now.

  He’d ignored the warnings of the other pilots and his own sense in coming here. He hadn’t even told his dad where he was going. Not that he would have expected Steve Julien to remember or even care where his only son was after he woke from his afternoon alcohol stupor, though he might notice something was wrong when Jim wasn’t there to toss their TV dinners into the microwave. However unappetizing the frozen meals usually were, Jim wished he had one now—he was almost as hungry as he was tired.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Jim said aloud, his eyes fastened on the moon. The moon stared back, indifferent and cold. Jim sighed and rubbed his thumb at the corner of his eye, where a grain of sand had gotten trapped in his eyelash.

  “Where are you, Sophie Cr
ue?” Jim muttered. Maybe he should have taken her offer of payment. The repairs to the plane would be costly, worth well more than what he’d have charged the average tourist for a trip like this. If he couldn’t fly the plane properly, he couldn’t make any income. Without income, he couldn’t fix the plane. It was a vicious trap with no easy way out that he could see. It was highly unlikely that he could get insurance to cover anything, not when all the evidence pointed toward Jim as being the primary cause of the crash landing.

  But that was the thing—he was certain that the landing had been smooth. The landing gear had been perfectly sound when they left Guam. The conditions had been ideal. There was no violent crosswind, no drastically uneven ground. But the way all four tires had blown at once . . .

  Jim stood and walked back up the runway, past where he’d gathered all the pieces that had been torn away, to the spot where the plane had first touched down. Though it was dark, the concrete reflected the moonlight enough that he could see the cracks and stones on its surface. There were a few pebbles, but nothing nearly big enough to have caused that much damage. He combed the pavement, stooping at times to run his hand over a crack to see if it might account for the wreck.

  Then he found it: two long, thin bamboo planks with nails driven through them, laid horizontally across the runway, the wood blending in with the concrete so it was nearly impossible to see.

  The skin on his arms and shoulders prickled with goose bumps. This was no accident. Someone had meant for their plane to stay grounded—but who? Had the Corpus guards laid this out after Nandu’s trip, to deter any future unwanted visitors? He studied the wood that held the nails in place. How long ago had Nandu been here? Six months? A year? The wood wasn’t weathered or dirty, as it should be after a year of exposure. From what he could tell, it had been put down recently. Was it there to cripple just any planes—or whatever plane was supposed to bring Sophie to the island? If someone had discovered that Sophie’s mom wrote to her, and wanted to prevent her from coming, wouldn’t it have been easier to stop her before she reached the island? Or to just wait with guns ready for her to arrive? Why go to this length?

  He swore and went back to the plane. The discovery had fueled his frustration and gave him the extra spurt of energy to push the plane down the beach, though it didn’t slide as smoothly as he’d hoped and he had to keep using the logs to roll it along. Once he was up to his knees in the shallows, the floats finally took over, and all he had to do was tether the plane. He used the cord, looping it through the floats, and tied it around a bent palm that dipped low over the water. The plane bobbed on the surf, glinting in the moonlight. Jim pushed it as far out as he could so the waves wouldn’t toss it onto the shore.

  I’ll give her a few more hours. Maybe she got held up.

  He climbed wearily into the cockpit and settled into the cracked yellow leather of the seat, and in moments, the gentle roll of the waves rocked him into sleep.

  SEVEN

  SOPHIE

  Sophie and Nicholas crept through a patch of spiky, palmlike plants, keeping low to the ground. Fifty yards ahead of them, across a swath of open grass, rose a two-story building with four long wings, crouched like a giant spider on the top of the high bluff. The windows all opened onto balconies drenched in morning glory vines, and Sophie remembered what Nicholas had told her about Skin Island’s former life as a secluded resort. This building must have once been a hotel. Several windows glowed with warm yellow light, and intermittent floodlights lit the grass around the building. She didn’t see anyone inside, but it looked as though all the windows had blinds on them, and some were even boarded up. Off to her left and down a narrow seashell path huddled a series of smaller buildings, and beyond those, she could just barely make out a line of tall, tile-roofed villas that marched away to the east. Faint starlight hung over the scene, staining the leaves around Sophie faint silver.

  “Stay down,” Nicholas whispered. “Guards are going by.”

  A pair of men in dark uniforms wandered by, rifles slung over their shoulders and caps pulled low over their eyes. They chatted in soft tones, their conversation lost to Sophie though she was only yards away. The foliage around her provided more than enough cover, especially in the dark, but she still shrank away from their approach. Her knee came down on a stick, and it snapped in half. The guards paused, glanced around, then continued on. They rounded the building and were out of sight.

  “Why are we hiding?” she asked.

  “They don’t know you’re here,” he said.

  “Obviously.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Why? What are they hiding?”

  Now he looked her squarely in the eye, all emotion drained from his face. “Me.”

  Before she could ask what that meant, he jumped up and sprinted across the lawn, then pressed himself flat against the building. He looked right and left, then waved for her to join him. Sophie drew a deep breath, went into a runner’s stance, and rocketed out of the bushes. She covered the stretch in a quick sprint. She reached the wall and leaned against it, startling several sphinx moths that had been crawling across the plaster.

  “Now what?” she asked, her heart hammering as if she’d sprinted a mile instead of a mere fifty yards. “And what do you mean, they’re hiding you?”

  “Well,” he said, “me and others like me. Well. Not really like me—I’m one of a kind.” He smiled.

  “There are more of you?”

  He began inching along the wall, toward a metal, windowless door.

  “Nicholas. Were you . . . born on this island?”

  “In here,” he said, opening the door.

  “What? All this security and they just leave the door unlocked?”

  “I jammed it open earlier. Now come on.”

  She followed him inside, and he softly shut the door behind her, then flicked the lock. “There,” he said. “They’ll never know.”

  “You’ve done this before,” she commented, and again he flashed her a bright grin. She had to admit, this Nicholas had her intrigued with his sneaking around, his secrets, his infectious smile.

  They stood in a narrow alcove that opened into a lit hallway. The air here was as moist and warm as it was outside; if the building had air-conditioning, it certainly wasn’t on. The floor was apricot-colored tile laid in a swirling mosaic, and pale blue wallpaper patterned with seashells lined the walls. It immediately reminded Sophie of the condos her dad and stepmom rented each summer on the Florida gulf coast, all pastels and shells and beach tones. And yet there was a strong chemical scent to the air—formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol and latex. It smelled like her tenth-grade biology class, so much so that she almost expected hunchbacked Mrs. Forbes with her rubbery blue gloves and ancient bifocals to come limping around the corner, demanding to know why Sophie hadn’t finished dissecting her frog yet.

  “Where’s my mom?” Sophie hissed.

  “This way.” He peered around the corner, then waved for her to follow as he slipped down the hallway.

  Clam-shaped wall lamps lit their path. Sophie walked on the balls of her feet; the tile seemed to amplify her footsteps. She saw no one except Nicholas ahead of her. They passed door after door, most of them windowless with faded brass numbers tacked on them. 241, 242, 243 . . . Definitely an old hotel, then. It seemed like an odd place to put a research lab.

  “Where are we going?” Sophie asked. Her nerves began to twist into knots. What if he wasn’t taking her to her mother at all? What if this was some kind of trap?

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered, without looking back. “I’ll take care of you, Sophie Crue.”

  She had no reason to trust this Nicholas. For all she knew, he was the one who’d hurt her mother. Sophie began to slow a little, letting him put distance between them. When he turned to glance back, she waved and gave him a little smile, letting him know she wa
s still following. When he turned back around, the smile dropped from her lips and she began looking for a way to lose him. They seemed to be working their way outward from the center hub of the building; from what she’d seen outside, the hotel’s four wings connected in a central atrium. Nicholas was leading her away from that atrium, toward the end of the wing.

  They passed a door that was slightly cracked. Sophie slowed and slipped her hand through the slit, pushing the door wide enough for her to peek through. The room was dark, but light spilled in from the hallway and illuminated a bed with a figure sleeping on it. A girl. She looked to be Sophie’s own age, with a head of wild brown curls and a riot of freckles on her face. Sophie stared, her thoughts a jumble of questions and bewilderment.

  Suddenly a hand grabbed her arm and yanked her away, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from squealing. Nicholas pressed a finger to his lips as he silently shut the door. “Do you want to get yourself shot?” he asked.

  She turned her head to look him in the eye. “I want to see my mother. Now. Let go of me.”

  “All right! All right!” He released her and stepped back.

  “What’s your game?” she asked. “What are you after?”

  “I’m trying to help you. Why won’t you let me?”

  “What did they do to you? And that girl in there—are you test subjects or something?”

  “Or something. Do you want to see your mom or not?”

  Sophie tried to read him, to get some idea of what he was and what he wasn’t telling her. He made her head spin, with his constant verbal dodging, his hovering presence, his kinetic buzz. He reminded her of a racehorse at the gate, all nerves and energy and impatience, forced to walk when he wanted to burst into a run. His fingers constantly moved, tapping and twisting. Was he a druggie? Hyperactive? On some kind of medication? Maybe Skin Island was a rehab center, some kind of top secret therapeutic retreat for disturbed kids. But then, why the secrecy?