The pain was subsiding, but I could feel the swelling still, and was having trouble thinking clearly.
“The island,” I said. “Something about the island.”
“Yes!” said Aspen with wide, excited eyes. “What about the island?”
“I don’t know. Isabelle was killed out there, wasn’t she? She saw something they didn’t want her to see.”
“Who’s they?”
“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “The people who run this place. They killed her to keep her quiet.”
Aspen sighed and sat down on the stool. “No. She didn’t die. She left, and she took something very important with her when she did. Do you have any idea what that was?”
“No,” I said, feeling increasingly disoriented. “Why would I know that?”
“It was a code. Do you have any idea what that code might be?”
“What? No. I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me, but I know what really happened. There’s blood out on that island, all around a pillar. That’s her blood, isn’t it?”
Aspen shook her head. “That’s not her blood. No one killed Isabelle.”
My mind raced, desperately trying to piece something together, but my head throbbed and my body ached.
Above us, the fluorescent light started to flicker. Now off, now on.
“Listen to me. I need you to remember,” she said, and the room became deadly still except for the light, which dimmed and flared, shivering like the beat of a thousand straining insect wings.
“What?” I asked, my voice catching, breaking.
“Focus,” she said. “I asked you before what you thought we did here and I’m going to ask you again. What do we do here?”
“Alchemy,” I said, my head feeling strange, like I was swimming, like the entire world was somehow turning inside out.
“No,” she snapped. “What do we do here? What does Isabelle do here?”
“Cognitive neuro-programming.”
“That’s right. And what does that mean?”
I was feeling increasingly on edge, like electrical currents were zapping through me, lighting up my spine, setting the base of my brain on fire.
“She studied the brain—perception, cognition, memory.” I paused when I said that word,memory,and I looked up at Aspen, suddenly terrified. “No,” I whispered.
“Who do you think you are?” She was standing over me.
My head was throbbing, and I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.
It was coming together now. All those bits and pieces, all those things I’d blocked out, that I hadn’t wanted to see.
I stared down at my hands. I touched my swollen cheek.
“Come on. This isn’t that hard, is it?”
All the subtle things I’d recognized, all those things I shouldn’t have known—the way Jim seemed to know me when he picked me up at the airport, the way I’d instinctively known how to unlock the basement gate.
“No,” I said, tears spilling from my eyes.
The way they’d all looked at me right from the start, as if I was something dangerous, but also something familiar.
