Jessica Khoury - Vitro

He started forward again, but she caught his arm and held it tight. “Please,” she said. “Just give me a straight answer. My mother, Moira Crue—where is she and how is she? She sent me a message, saying there was an emergency and that—”

He covered her hand with his. “Sophie. Sophie Crue. Everything is fine. Just relax. You’re jumpier than a fish on a string.”

She frowned and pulled her hand away. “Look. It’s been a really long day for me, okay? I don’t know who you are or what your connection to this place is, but I want you to tell me straight out—have you or anyone else harmed my mom? Because I swear—”

“Dr. Crue is waiting for you,” he interrupted, and the smile came off his face. “She’s fine. No one’s hurt her. Now come on.”

“Then why would she—”

He rounded on her, his vague demeanor suddenly sharpening into something intense and wild. His eyes were brown, not amber-brown like Jim’s, but gray-brown, almost colorless, and oddly flat, as though someone had forgotten to add the flecks of green and black that should have been there. She was hypnotized by his gaze and did not move.

As if realizing his stare was unnerving her, he relaxed and gave her a shy smile, twisting his hands together. “You’re very pretty,” he said. “Prettier than I expected. Sorry, I’m not good with . . . with all the questions. We don’t often get visitors, you know.”

He let go of her and stepped back, shrugging his shoulders apologetically. “You could say I’m not really a people person.”

Slightly bewildered, Sophie brushed at her hair and watched him from beneath a furrowed brow. “It’s okay,” she said hesitantly. He talks as if he’s always been on this island. If he had, she could understand his . . . eccentricities. “Just let’s hurry, all right? I want to see her, to see for myself that she’s okay.”

He nodded crisply and charged on at a faster pace. Sophie hurried to keep up, but her mind was already miles ahead. If her mother was truly fine, as Nicholas insisted—why the message? What could her “emergency” possibly be that she would suddenly invite Sophie to the one place that had always been forbidden to her? It was true Sophie had always wanted to see Skin Island—but not under circumstances like this. Not because her mother was ill or dying. But was she? Just what is going on here?

She thought regretfully of Jim back at the airstrip, and wondered if she should have asked him to come after all. He seemed quite upset over the damage done to the plane, and Sophie felt a bit guilty about not feeling guilty enough. After all, if it wasn’t for her, he and his plane would be safe and intact back on Guam. Well, it was him who mucked that landing, not me. Maybe her worry was misplaced, and it wasn’t Jim who deserved her concern but herself. If Nicholas was lying— though she couldn’t see why he would be—and her mother needed help and possibly a quick getaway, Jim might be their only way out. She hoped he would find a way to get the plane off the ground, for all their sakes. The last thing she wanted was to be stranded with no way out. She’d always thought of this place as exotic and exciting, a secret haven of cuttingedge research, filled with brilliant minds racing to combat everything from dementia to cancer. She’d never imagined it to be so . . . sinister.

She wondered what Skin Island had to hide, and what her mother had to do with it. For some reason, the usual explanation about medical research and Alzheimer’s didn’t seem to be measuring up to the level of dread Jim and the other pilots had about this place. She stuck close to Nicholas, weaving in and out of tall, swaying stalks of bamboo.

“How much further?” Sophie asked.

“Not far.”

They came across a narrow path made of cracked pavement; at one time, it must have been smooth and flat, but now it looked like it was made of cobblestone, with grass shooting up between the cement plates. It led back toward the smaller island, winding through a grove of thick bamboo, and forward to, she hoped, her mother. She studied Nicholas as she followed him through the tall bamboo stalks. His hands were sunk deep into his pockets and his chin maintained a perpetual upward tilt, so that he seemed always to be looking down on the world. He walked with the confidence of one well acquainted with his surroundings, and she wondered what his story was, why he was on this island—why he was allowed on the island when she was not.

“How long have you been here?” she asked softly.

He didn’t turn or slow, but his head swiveled to the left, revealing the curve of his jaw and a hint of dark eyelash. “Too long,” he said sepulchrally, then added in a brighter tone, “But not for much longer.”

“Does your mom or dad work for Corpus too?”

He turned and walked backward, surveying her with, oddly, disdain. “No. Not exactly.” He spun around, and a dozen more questions crowded her brain but she held them back. She wasn’t here to get entangled in the affairs of some Corpus kid, however mystifying he was. Maybe he was older than he looked, and worked for them in some capacity. Maybe he was an intern. Maybe it’s none of my business, and anyway, we’ve been walking for ages. Shouldn’t we have gotten somewhere by now?

And at that moment, Nicholas stopped at a bend in the road, where the trees and bamboo opened to a sudden rocky cliff fringed with tall grass. “There it is,” he said. “Halcyon Cove.”

“Halcyon Cove?” She swatted at a cloud of gnats that hovered in front of her face and stared around him and across the shallow bay below, which glittered in a thousand shades of gold. The sun, just a hand’s breadth above the horizon, burned red behind a cluster of buildings on the cliff opposite. They were sharp silhouettes against the sunset, black and harsh, the red light behind them making them look as if they were on fire.

“It was once a resort,” Nicholas said. She glanced at him and saw that he was gazing at the buildings with smoldering intensity, as if they had wronged him in some unforgivable way. “But there’s nothing of that left now except a bunch of buildings.”

“My mom’s over there?” She looked back at the buildings and had to hold a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun’s last rays.

He nodded. “Let’s go. But . . . stay quiet. We might see people now, and if we do, it’s best if they don’t know you’re here.”

“Why?” Her heart clenched. “Did they do something to my mom?” She still wasn’t sure who they were; she had a vague idea of white coated doctors like her mother, but after hearing the pilots’ stories, she now imagined them holding assault rifles. “Nicholas, what do they do on this island? My mom’s researching a cure for Alzheimer’s, right?”

Nicholas studied her sidelong, his dark hair whipping around his face in the strong ocean wind. “Do you want to find out?” he asked.

Yes. “I want to find my mom.” But she felt a tug of desire— desire to unmask the secrets that had been kept from her all her life. It went deeper than mere curiosity. Over the years, Skin Island and her mother had grown into a single amorphous entity. She felt that if she discovered one, she discovered the other.

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 Volkswagon 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?”