Butterfly in Amber (Spotless Book 4) Page 5

  A perplexed frown creases Stile’s brow, before he nods. “All right, but let’s go through your shopping list first.”

  I give him a thumbs-up and follow him inside. There, I make a beeline to the Christmas aisle and start filling our basket with a steady hand, piling golden balls, light garlands, little reindeer plushy ornaments . . .

  Stiles watches me compare two stars with his arms crossed. After several minutes of silence, he cocks his head at me. “You’ve livened up lately.”

  He’s right. I want this new energy I feel flowing through me. I love feeling so sharp, so pumped. My mind is stirring awake at long last, and I want out of the cocoon my father has crafted around me . . . I think of the colorful pills I threw up before leaving the castle and shush my conscience as I tell Stiles, “I told you I was feeling better . . . I kept blaming everything on my meds, but I just needed to give myself a kick. Rising up, back on the street, you know the drill.”

  Stiles chuckles, taking the glittery white star I picked. “I see . . . Got everything you need, tiger?”

  “Yup.” I take determined strides toward the register. “Now, all I need is a phone, and next time that crap firewall acts up, I’ll just switch to my data.”

  His eyes seem distant as he places our loot on the conveyor belt. “Christmas market first, maybe?”

  I grin. “You’re tempting me . . .”

  “Then let’s go,” he retorts with a wink.

  After a brief stop to the car to load our purchases in the trunk, we’re ready to take on the Christmas market, with its small wooden houses selling stuff no one needs yet everyone will buy. The heady scent of freshly baked pastries and fried food tickles my nostrils as I stop in front of a stall selling a multitude of flashy Peruvian beanies.

  I’m so used to Stiles always hovering behind me that it takes me a whole minute to notice he’s stopped a few feet away, in front of a different stall. His eyes dart my way—the professional never sleeps. I trot back to him to see what could have possibly distracted the steadfast Joshua Stiles . . . and stifle a laugh. Those tiny Christmas costumes were meant for dogs, as evidenced by the many pictures hanging on the shop’s walls, but it won’t stop him: I can already see the cogs spinning fast in Stiles’s head as he examines a reindeer costume and its pair of felt antlers.

  “Feeling inspired?” I ask.

  He strokes his chin. “Could be.”

  While Stiles rummages through the owner’s stock, a series of shrill sounds reaches us, coming from the direction of the ice-cream truck. We look over our shoulders to check the source of the commotion. Flash tantrum: a little girl just collapsed in the snow and is now emitting otherworldly screeches. Stiles returns to his shopping, but I keep watching, fascinated. Apparently they’re out of strawberry cones, and the child is now attempting to tear off her clothes in a textbook case of possession.

  The crowd too witnesses in consternation as the mom attempts to reason with the vile little turd writhing in the slush at her feet. Suddenly, a scoop of ice cream flies from the truck, fired at the kid with deadly precision. The shrieking stops. The air becomes still as the girl stares up at the old and burly clown leaning over the counter. Her round face is smeared with pinkish goo; she looks winded. Before she can open her mouth again, the clown finishes her with a handful of sprinkles that land in her hair and barks, “Seuraava.” Next.

  In the US, that would probably go all the way to trial, but instead the mom simply picks up her child with a solemn nod in the clown’s direction. Tough shores. I look back to see that Stiles is paying for the reindeer costume. A cold flake lands on my nose. I look up; snow is starting to fall again, like a thousand stars tumbling down from above to melt at our feet. In the food truck, the clown is gone, leaving a young guy to serve the customers instead. I feel suddenly a little cold, despite the wool scarf around my neck. A shiver raises goose bumps on my arms. Something is wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it. From the corner of my eye, I see Stiles taking a paper bag from the dog-costume seller. Around me, people walk, run, laugh under the snow.

  That’s when I notice that someone in the crowd isn’t moving, standing still. I stare back at the man in a long black coat I am now certain is staring at me. My chest tightens. It’s not real—I know it’s not . . . Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown up my meds because now I’m hallucinating hard. My pulse picks up, and I can’t look away from the tall silhouette, the short chestnut hair. I’m certain his eyes are a dark blue, the color of the ocean, which is logically impossible to ascertain from this distance.

  “Island?”

  I whirl around to find myself nose to chest with Stiles. I stagger back, blink up at him, and immediately turn again to check the surroundings of the ice-cream truck. There’s no one there. God, I have serious issues . . .

  “Island, are you still with me?” Stiles’s inquiry sounds muted, like I’m pressing my hands over my ears not to hear him. But my arms are actually dangling alongside my body, so it can’t be that.

  When I finally face him, he’s studying me with narrowed, worried eyes.

  I shake my head, struggling to calm my racing heart. “No, I mean . . . yeah.”

  He places a hand on my shoulder. “We’d better head back.”

  SIX

  BEYOND THE GREAT WALL

  Stiles didn’t comment on the way I zoned out at the Christmas market, but I’ve been feeling his gaze on me all the way back to Ingolvinlinna. There was a point when the weight in my chest became too heavy, and I wanted to tell him about the blue-eyed ghost, ask him . . . if maybe he knows something about him. But it felt shameful, intimate, like pulling the scab off of a wound and baring it to him, so I sat by him in the boat in silence.

  He went to see my father in his study right after lunch, and now it’s 3:00 p.m., night is falling already, and they’re still giving no sign of coming out. I paced in the salon for a while under the scrutiny of a pair of bodyguards standing in the doorway—I gather that’s what Stiles means when he sometimes says he has eyes in his back. Pacing didn’t help, so I tried to pick up my book about the Franklin expedition, paced some more, and eventually returned to my bedroom . . . to resume torturing myself with scenarios where Stiles tells my father I’m completely crazy, calls Bentsen to have her confirm his diagnosis, and concludes that I’d better stay locked up in the castle for the foreseeable future.

  Yeah . . . maybe he didn’t spend that long up there just to rat on me. I figure they’re discussing business and going over the castle’s expenses. But I don’t know, and that’s why I’m sitting on my bed in the penumbra of dusk, wrenching my hands. The room has progressively grown entirely dark, save for the eerie glow of the moon reflected on the snow outside. I let myself fall on my bed, palming the cool disc of amber resting between my clavicles as I summon a vision of my mystery man.

  Unfortunately, the ceiling doesn’t hold any answers as I wander through the empty aisles of my memory. Maybe he never existed in the first place. He could be someone I saw in an advertisement, or some guy I eye-banged in the subway once. But my instinct tells me this could be some sort of sign, a tiny fragment of the life I left behind. The need to know creeps under my skin, frightening and overwhelming . . .

  I check the blue digits glowing in the dark on my nightstand. Only 4:02. I wish the sun would shine longer in Finland. I sit up and squint at the outline of the TV mounted on the wall opposite to my bed. Technically, it’s not a TV, more like a screen connected to a hard drive and whose primary use is to watch series. But I can also use it to browse the Internet—or at least a fraction of it.

  I’m thinking again of those e-mails about my Yaycupid dates I saw in my mailbox. There wasn’t much, honestly. Just a handful of notifications confirming I accepted dates from “ElijahCool” or “LonelyAngara87,” and subsequent mentions of those guys in my chats with Joy. Some convos were missing—likely deleted out of shame—so the exhaustive timeline of my romantic exploits was hard to follow, but from what I gathered, those enc
ounters were disappointing at best and creepy at worst. Until now, I took it for granted that none of my suitors could be the mystery guy . . . but at the time I checked, I was depressed, shrouded in the haze of my meds, and honestly, that sheer mass of old e-mails and unknown faces scared me to the point that I hesitated to fully explore it.

  No more.

  I open the nightstand drawer to retrieve my keyboard and set it on the bed in front of me. Let’s try this again. This time, I’ll start by combing through my Yaycupid account. There must be some sort of log of the profiles I checked in there—Dear Lord Jesus, please let him not be ElijahCool, because even if he had blue eyes, he’s apparently also the guy who cancelled our second date because his pet snake died.

  The screen lights up with a tap of my finger on the keyboard’s smooth glass surface. As soon as the browser launches, I crack my joints and type the URL . . . before stifling a groan. I just got swiftly kicked back to our firewall’s warning page. I huff at the blank homepage and try again. One time. Two times . . . ten times. Again and again, in the bottom left corner of the page, I see my request to load Yaycupid being redirected to a local IP before my sorry ass lands on the firewall page again. I’m not sure why or after how many tries I get the idea to open the Developer Tools to check the network logs. Before I know it, my fingers are flying fast on the keys, testing the page, generating error after error, until I move to the big guns and launch the command line. I type a first string of code to retrieve info on the router and his goddamn firewall. The more I type, the more I feel . . . alive.

  My entire body tingles from the excitement of yet another transgression, from the pride to discover that I can still do this; my fingers are going through the motions, and each new line of code calls for another. The router resists me. Not for long. Because I’m going to win this—I’m not just a lost girl with a damaged brain. I’m an engineer—I’m . . . more. A wonderful thrill licks down my spine when I make it into the router’s admin. Here they are, the credentials I need to browse freely.

  I launch a new window with a squeak of victory. Before my fingers freeze on the keyboard. The homepage has changed. A stack of colorful boxes now crowds the page, which I guess the firewall used to purge. Weather forecast, ads . . . news. Yaycupid can wait; first I want to click on all this! I load the news, scrolling through articles about the Finnish municipal elections, the latest antics of bizarre billionaire media magnate and part-time President Reginald Steed, who, when he’s not battling accusations of conflict of interest, works on building a giant wall to “secure the Canadian border” and takes on whoever disagrees on Twitter—also that’s a pretty fierce yellow toupee on his head . . .

  I keep scrolling when my attention is drawn to a flash of turquoise blue. I draw an unsteady breath as I open an article about the dismantling of the ruins of the Poseidon. In the related links, I see dozens of old videos dating back from April. My fingers tremble on the touchpad. I think of Stiles’s constant helicoptering, my father and Bentsen’s reluctance to let me return to the noise of civilization . . . and for the first time, it occurs to me that maybe the firewall didn’t kick me out because it was developed by monkeys; it did because they don’t want me to face this.

  My stomach twists into knots, but I know I need to know. I need to see it all to put the past at rest and move forward. I press play.

  —Hi, I’m Karen Mills, and you’re watching ABN Live News. All eyes are turned to Rangiroa in French Polynesia tonight as forty-six people are confirmed dead following the collapse of the Poseidon Dome, and thirteen are still reported missing. Local authorities announced that Dries Kovius, the man responsible for the bombing of flight DL504 four days ago, died in his successful attempt to destroy the resort. Over three thousand guests were safely evacuated before the dome’s collapse. Hundreds have been injured, but according to Prefet Clément Martier, “No lives are in danger anymore.” Three US citizens are among the victims. Fifty-four were wounded and are currently being treated at the CHPF in Papeete. If you or one of your relatives were—

  I pause the video. Dries Kovius.

  The name rings a bell. Probably because he’s responsible for what happened to me. For my shattered wrist that took months to heal, for the memories I’ll never recover. Dries Kovius. My stomach heaves as if I’m about to throw up. I need to see his face. I type his name in the search bar, and immediately, thousands of links appear. News articles, blog posts about conspiracy theories, all illustrated with what seems to be the only pic they have of the guy. A ten-year-old black-and-white portrait. I draw a shaky breath and zoom to better examine him. There’s something familiar about his sharp features—the thick eyebrows over a piercing gaze, the straight nose . . . I can’t look away from that man, who murdered almost seven hundred people in less than a week and would have killed three thousand more if the cops hadn’t been able to evacuate the dome.

  I scroll down the results of the image search, feeling sick and empty. It’s an endless mosaic: faces, pics of the plane he bombed, of the remnants of the Poseidon Dome emerging from the water. And his face, over and over. My face too.

  My face?

  It’s like a bomb detonates in my chest. I can barely breathe as I recognize myself among the many pictures Google dug up. My forefinger jerks and clicks before I’ve even consciously formed the intent. It feels so strange to see the logo of this company where I worked, that I don’t remember at all. EM Group . . . It’s a post on their PR blog, where CEO Hadrian Ellingham himself bemoans the loss of three of his employees, two in the plane crash, and one in the collapse of the dome.

  My first reaction is a sort of remote disbelief. Maybe I’m still in Hamina, in the middle of the Christmas market. The snow is falling, I’m hallucinating things, and now I’m reading that I’m dead. No—that Island Chaptal is dead. A girl who looks like me, bears my name, worked where I worked, and grins happily on her corporate portrait. Her hair is shorter; there’s more color on her cheeks. It’s a better version of me, a remote part of myself notes, before the panic sets in. Pain flares in my veins as I type my own name in the search bar, like I have a few times before, in hope to pick up the scattered pieces of my past.

  But this time, instead of a few meager links to my résumé or the Facebook account I haven’t been able to access in ages, hundreds of pages of results pour in.

  All saying I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead . . . I’m shaking too much to keep going. My vision is blurring, and wave after wave of nausea hits me, making me dizzy. I’m dead. They’re saying I’m dead.

  Lights blind me; someone just entered my room. A blurry silhouette approaches, and I’m too petrified to move, to speak. I recognize that fear—it’s the same I experienced months ago, when I woke up and I thought nothing was real, when I screamed, fought back, writhed helplessly on my bed. The terror has returned; it’s crushing my lungs and turning my blood to ice. But this time, I know it’s not my brain making up imaginary threats.

  It’s all real.

  A white shirt and black tie come into focus. The pounding in my head becomes unbearable as I crawl away from Stiles.

  “Island,” he asks softly. “What were you looking at?”

  SEVEN

  FALLEN AWAKE

  “Stay away! Don’t touch me!” My voice sounds unnaturally shrill, hysterical, even to my own ears.

  In contrast, Stiles’s is pure honey as he walks around the bed, looming closer. “Easy, Island . . . calm down.”

  I try to leap from the bed, but I’m no match for his speed and strength. I barely register his movements before I’m pinned facedown on the mattress, his body straddling mine. I thrash, fight his grip around my wrists, and scream until I feel my vocal chords might snap. Dark shapes move at the edge of my vision—several guards have entered my bedroom. Stiles barks for someone to go get Dr. Bentsen in Helsinki ASAP.

  One of them leaves, but the others, they just watch. They won’t help me. No one will . . . because I’m dead to them?

  “Ca
lm down,” Stiles repeats with an exasperated sigh.

  I’m hurting myself more than he is, writhing and straining under him in a futile attempt to free my legs and arms. Above me, a guard looms closer, and I hear Stiles snap, “Give me that.”

  A sudden sting of pain in my arm makes me bite down on the sheets with a long wail. There’s a dampness on my cheeks—tears, mingled with sweat. He stabbed me with something, he’s hurting me . . . yet the hold around me is easing already, and his touch grows softer. In a second of vertiginous despair, I understand that it’s because I’ve stopped struggling. As my body is becoming numb, his voice drops down to a murmur.

  “That’s it. Easy, sweetheart . . .”

  He’s stroking my hair like I’m a dog, and I can’t shove him away. I can barely blink, and no matter how much I will the room to come in focus, it’s getting blurrier, like clouds of dark smoke are swallowing everything. Is this another dream?

  No . . . this time I’m waking up.

  •••

  I don’t recognize this room. It’s not my bedroom; there’s less furniture, and I never noticed cameras before in the castle. I watch black butterflies flutter and spin in circles on the ceiling. I think they can’t get out because there’re no windows, only four bare walls and an instruments tray nearby.

  The butterflies won’t stop spinning, and my body feels like cotton all over. I can’t move, but I’m not asleep. It’s because they strapped me to that stretcher. Large bands secure my torso, biting into my wrists and my ankles. There’s a drip in my arm too, each drop falling in the tube like the water clouding my father’s absinthe. Some distant part of me coldly concludes that I’m being drugged, and I wonder if I’m dying. If I am, it doesn’t really hurt. All I can do is admire the dance of the butterflies and listen to the voices in my head. They’re a little muted, as if my father and Dr. Bentsen were on the other side of the bubble I’m trapped in.