“There you are,” he said cheerily, shutting the door behind him. “Been looking for you.”
She backed up until she was pressed against the wall beside the window, watching him through slitted eyes. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Your pilot’s made a mess,” Nicholas said with a grimace. He shook his hair back from his face, then tucked it behind his ears, which gave him an elfin look. “Don’t pretend you don’t know it. You heard us out there.”
She folded her arms and glared. “I know it was you who hit me last night. Why?”
He looked offended. “It wasn’t me!”
“It had to be you! Anyone else would have reported me to Strauss or my mom.”
“Anyone except Mary.”
“The girl in the hallway?” She pointed at the door.
“Yes,” he sighed. “She’s crazy. In fact . . .” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “She and her friends, Jay and Wyatt, they’re all psychopaths, you know. Certifiable. They’re the Vitros who went wrong. The experiments that went bad.”
Sophie digested this, then narrowed her eyes. “Mary hit me on the head?”
“I found her standing over you. She’d used an old Bunsen burner. Must have hurt. Oh, sit down, Sophie. You’re all cagey and mean. It doesn’t help your looks.”
Smoldering, Sophie sat on the edge of the bed, her arms still folded. “Why did she knock me out?”
“I told you. She’s a psychopath.”
“And what are you?”
He met her gaze steadily, his face serious. He hooked a foot around the chair by the dresser and slid it in front of the door, then sat, his fingers dancing on his knees. “I’m the first Vitro. The oldest one. That’s the truth. That’s who I am. When I found Mary standing over you I sent her away and made her swear to say nothing about you. You wouldn’t wake up and I didn’t know what to do, so I hid you with the other Vitros, thought they’d never look there, that you’d blend in. But then Lux went missing and they went searching and then they found you and . . . it all spun out of control.”
So he had been the one to put her in the gown. She reddened and folded her arms over her stomach, suddenly wishing he would just go away. “But it was more than just a bump on the head. I was drugged—I know I was. I felt it. When I tried to wake up I just fell back under, as if you wanted me to stay asleep. And where are my clothes?”
“Ugh. Details. Boring.” He leaned forward, his feet bouncing and his eyes bright. “So what do you think of Skin Island? The Vitros? Your mother? Come on, tell me—I’m dying to hear your impression.”
She felt as if she were playing tennis without a racket, and his words ricocheted around her and bounced back to him without her ever managing to get a handle on the conversation. He made her dizzy. “Nicholas. Why did you send me that e-mail? I know it was you—it had to be you. You knew to meet me at the airstrip yesterday, and you knew the message was supposedly from my mom. But why? Why do you want me here?”
His face darkened and he leaned back, crossing his left ankle over his right knee, his foot still bouncing. “All right, fine. I wanted your help.”
“My help?” She hadn’t expected that. She uncrossed her arms. “To do what?”
He leaped from the chair to the bed in one swift move, sitting beside her before she could get away. He took her hands in his and met her eyes steadily, his gaze suddenly desperate. “I think you know.”
She tilted her head, studying him as if he were an optical illusion presenting one image until she blinked, and suddenly he was something else. “You’re not like the other Vitros. They’re all . . . puppets, weak and mindless. But not you. Why is that?”
“Does it matter? I’m not imprinted on anyone, thank God.” He turned over, propped on one elbow. He picked at a loose thread on the comforter. “I’ve been trapped on this island my entire life and I spend my days cleaning up after the doctors, scrubbing toilets, mopping floors, reorganizing their sock drawers if they ask. It’s not a life, Sophie. But they’ll never let me leave. Ever. Think of that! I know what’s out there, in the rest of the world, but I’m not allowed to ever see it. I want to see cities, Sophie Crue! I want to go to a movie theater and order popcorn and I want a driver’s license. I just . . .” He bent over, his hands knotted over the back of his head so that his hair hung like a black curtain around his face. “I just want to be free. I want to get away, and to do that, I need your help. You were the only person I knew outside the island, because of Moira. She talks about you sometimes, you know.” He looked up at her. “You have no idea what it’s like to be trapped your whole life, to be looked at as if you’re a monster even when you’ve done nothing wrong. The only escape I’ve had is in my mind. Every time this place closed in on me, when I felt like I was suffocating, I thought about you, about how free you were and what you must be doing.”
“What do you want from me?” she asked softly.
“At first, I just wanted to meet you,” he confessed. “I just wanted to meet you, to know for myself that you were truly real. God, I know it sounds weird—but you were like my imaginary friend, you know? Ever since I was little, you were this image in my head . . .” His fingers strayed to hers, then stopped as if he were afraid to touch her. “You were my escape.”
She stared at him, her chest suddenly hurting, trying to imagine what his life was like. Seventeen years of frustration must be roiling behind his eyes. She turned around fully, her legs bent beneath her, to gauge from his expression whether or not he was telling the truth. He looked at her more earnest than she’d seen him yet.
“I need your help,” he said.
“Really?” she asked, still suspicious, not wanting to be taken in. “It’s that simple?”
“And that complicated.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that from the beginning?”
“Would you have taken my word for it, if I’d told you the moment you landed that your mom was manufacturing slaves?”
She sighed. “You might have tried, at least.”
“Either way. Now you know the truth. Now you can help me.” He stood up and breezed to the bed, sat beside her. “Please, Sophie.”
“By helping you escape? You want to leave with us in the plane? Then why did you go through all the trouble of lying to me, bringing me all the way here? Jim could have flown off by then and you’d have missed your chance.”
He shrugged and rolled onto his back. “I saw how he looked at you. He wasn’t going anywhere, not without you.”
Sophie reddened. “So . . . what? You were going to give me a tour of the place and then try to convince Jim to fly you away into the sunset?”
“Something like that,” he said. “But then Jim, brilliant Jim, steals Lux thinking she was you and now Moira’s on alert and soon the others will be too, once they discover that you’re a fake and Lux has imprinted on a no-account idiot—bleh.” He grimaced in disgust. “Messy. So here we are.”
“How many of you are there? Non-imprinted Vitros, I mean?”
“Oh, just us four. But that’s not important now. What is important is that we hurry and leave the island, before Strauss finds out you’re here.”
“And how do you propose we do that?”
“The Corpus helicopter is parked on the other side of this building. We don’t know if your pilot’s plane will fly—not after he mangled it up. All we need is a chopper pilot.”
“Jim?”
“Lux.”
“What?”
“She’s a bodyguard model,” he said patiently. “All the bodyguard models come preprogrammed with the ability to operate every vehicle under the sun. I’d say let’s take Clive but this way you’ll have an extra incentive—you get to save both me and your twin.”
“My twin,” Sophie echoed in a hollow tone.