I did, only to be rewarded with the scent of acrid disinfectant filling my lungs, which itself masked a more pungent odor. The bare, colorless cinderblock walls muffled distant shouting, the scuffling and clinking of shackled limbs. It all made me feel tinyand vulnerable, though I knew the inmates here, for the most part, weren’t dangerous. Just very, very unlucky.
We walked on. Through seemingly infinite passages and corridors, our footsteps echoing on the linoleum, beneath the flickering yellow fluorescent lights I’d come to associate, now, indelibly, with slavery. Occasionally, I caught a glimpse, in the distance, of a shackled figure in a gray scrub uniform being led by a handler, and my stomach churned hard enough for me to worry that I wouldn’t be able to keep my lunch down. I tightly clutched my handbag—searched thoroughly by the guard at the gate—my bare fingernails digging hard into the leather.
But perhaps the strangest thing of all was that the shoulder I leaned into for comfort—the arm that drew me close—was myfather’s.
In the days and weeks since the mine, I hadn’t dared say it—dared tothinkit—but eventually, I’d had to face the truth: Keith Wainwright-Phillips was different.
Getting me back alive was certainly part of it, given that his second-to-last call from Agent Labrecque had been to inform him that the Cebolla Canyon mine had collapsed with me in it. I’d at one point thought I’d hated my father, but he still didn’t deserve to think the worst, even for a second. And once I realizedthat, it wasn’t much of a stretch to realize that I stilllovedhim. And that I wasgladI still loved him.
Accepting the truth about Ethan, of course, was part of what had changed him, too. And if he couldn’t have him back—if there was nothing he could change, for the arm of the law that had enslaved his son appeared long indeed—well, it made sense that he’d turn his attention elsewhere.
And the last ingredient, undoubtedly, was that they’d dropped the investigation into his involvement in the White Cedar debacle.
“New evidence has surfaced exonerating you from any wrongdoing, financial or otherwise,” Labrecque had informed him nasally over the speakerphone in his study earlier that week. Her disappointment was almost tangible. I’d listened from the other side of the door, breathing the way I was supposed to—three seconds in, five seconds out.
I knew exactly where the evidence had come from, of course: the flash drive in the envelope I’d given Erica, and that Erica had handed over to the police. Butonlythe flash drive—nothing else. The note, sadly, was gone. His chip had been destroyed, and the scientific formula that had removed it, for now, would remain carefully concealed. As much as I wanted to shout to the rooftops about my boy genius and what he had discovered, I knew Erica was right to want to keep it all under wraps. In the hands of the wrong person, the formula could be a dangerous cudgel—they’d seen that already. Besides, the only people who could be trusted to do anything with it were currently, well, indisposed. And lastly, the money, as it turned out, had already been spoken for.
“I used it to free Maeve,” Erica had explained immediately upon her arrival in my hospital room earlier in the week. For a few seconds, the room had gone silent but for the dull hum of machines. “I think it’s safe to assume it’s what he intended it for,” Erica had gone on calmly as if this were the kind of revelation she divulged all the time. “Don’t you think?”
“Wait,what?”
Erica frowned. “I told you, I?—”
“No, no, I get it, I just—how?”
I couldn’t believe it and didn’t understand it, but it was true. Maeve was free. Her brother, through his genius—in many ways—had done exactly what he came here to do.
And wherever he was, he probably had absolutely no idea.
During my three days in the hospital, I’d clung to a ridiculous hope that things would somehow turn out okay, even after theEMTs had spotted the number on his wrist, ripped us apart, whisked us off in different medevac helicopters, and in general made it abundantly clear that they wouldn’t turn out okay at all.
Fact was, we’d never even had a chance. I’d known that from the start. I’d panicked over it, and he’d talked me down, and that was the one and only reason I was alive. But now I was stunned to realize thathe’dknown it, too. He’d fought his way through the belly of hell itself knowing that if he got out alive, slavery would be his only reward. He’d fought for a life that wasn’t one.
But mostly, he’d fought for me.
And that was why, while the nurses in my private room in my well-appointed hospital had treated my wounds like clockmakers, humming and sponging and rubbing me down with a rosy-smelling salve, pumping oxygen into my lungs and taping and retaping bandages to my throat, I had to fight the urge to beat them all off and demand to know where he was. What kind of treatment he was getting, if any. And if, now, anybody had even bothered to tell him that his sister was free.
Which I still had to get to the bottom of. “I thought Max?—”
“Max transferred ownership of her to me for a dollar, electronically, just before you drove to the mine,” Erica had replied patiently. “Good thing, too, because if he hadn’t, she might have been detained indefinitely.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s been declared dead, and there are going to be years of legal wrangling over his money as part of the White Cedar fallout. All of his accounts are frozen, and they’ll stay that way for a long time.”
Dead?I didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. Not for asecond. And I suspected Erica didn’t, either, given how she glossed right over it.
“Will you miss him?” I asked her.
“The abolitionist community will miss him,” Erica said primly. “WhatIthink is immaterial. And by the way, if you’re wondering why we still had to pay the manumission fee for Maeve when her last sale price was a dollar, the government caught onto that little trick some time ago, unfortunately. I tried it with Milagros, too, with no luck.”
Milagros.“Oh, shit, Erica. How?—”
On the professor’s facenowappeared the biggest smile I’d ever seen on it. “She’s fine, Louisa. I left her room five minutes ago, where she was planning out where she’ll put her ‘woke up like this’ tattoo.”
So Milagros had survived. Maeve had survived.We’dsurvived. But Max Langer, the man who’d confidently underpromised, had not yet overdelivered.
Technically.
