Page 4 of Waters that Drown Us
“Yeah, pretty new,” I answer noncommittally, shrugging as I overanalyze the numbers she’s scribbled down. “Anyway, I’ll give you a call if I have an answer in the morning.”
“Thanks again, really,” she says, tapping the counter with her fingertips again before hiking her backpack further up on her shoulder and backing away. I slip the card with her phone number into my pocket, pressing my thumb into the edge.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name,” I call out as she turns toward the parking lot, making her do a full turn back toward me. It seems like she hesitates for a moment, but I can’t see her expression clearly from this distance.
“Emily,” she says, lifting her arm in an awkward little wave. “Emily Vargas.”
Chapter 2
Emily
Even when I can’t see her, I know she’s beautiful.
I stand at the edge of the bluff, frigid wind whipping against my cheeks. Tendrils of hair that have slipped from their tie twist around my face. I’m drawn toward the ragged edge, even though the thought of the drop below paralyzes me. Bright yellow sunlight bleeds orange, red, and pink against the horizon, blending in the choppy waves of the ocean’s surface. Among the whitecaps sits a catamaran, dipping and climbing with the movement of the water. And on its bow she stands.
I can’t make out details, but seeing her yesterday has branded her image behind my eyelids. Short, petite, fragile. Like a flower, like a bomb. White-blonde hair pulled high into a ponytail, pale freckles that dance across her even-paler skin. Bright blue eyes, wide and framed by near-translucent lashes. The angles of her cheeks so severe they could cut the glass it seems like she’s made of. She dances around the bow of the ship, a gaggle of passengers around her, pressing their bodies to the railing to look over the edge.
The thought of the depth of that water makes my stomach churn, but I swallow hard against the sensation. I’m safe on land. Well, relatively safe. Still not a big fan of how far up I am.
I suck in a deep breath, trying to steady my heart rate. Alisa is a target. A mission. Nothing more, nothing less. The girl I saw on stage all those years ago, bathed in warm light and wrapped in golden petals, is not the same one who presses herself against the ship’s railing now. And I’m not the same person I was when I first saw her.
It was a lifetime ago, anyway. Before I had any real responsibility in The Syndicate. Before Alisa’s father was more than a mid-tier longshoreman with a penchant for making connections and looking the other way. More than a decade has passed since I watched this girl pull a horsehair bow across viola strings in front of a crowd.
I force myself not to be enraptured by the memory. I was just a teenager with a crush, obsessed with the prettiest girl I’d ever seen in the way most teenagers are. I’m no longer the rebellious, carefree girl who went back to that theatre four times in a week, to watch the girl who shone like gold play over and over again.
She doesn’t even use the same name. Alisa Zakharov is a ghost, neither dead nor alive. Schrodinger’s victim. Alice Zimmerman is the shadow I’ve been hunting for the past six weeks. And Alice is who I have to extract information from before Clara, Charlie, and Bea decide to do it the old fashioned way.
I repack my equipment into my bag, trying to be careful with the camera Deniz let me borrow. I’m not much of a surveillance expert but he definitely is, and the gear he set me up with me is professional-grade. I try very hard not to think about the fact that he used this exact equipment to infiltrate my own family, via Clara.
Man, this family really needs to address how often we stalk the people we end up romantically involved with.
I’m both reluctant and relieved to leave my perch on this cliff, peeking over my shoulder a few times to watch the little speck ofa catamaran on the water as I huff it back to my car. Alice didn’t call me this morning, so I took the opportunity to watch her from afar, to try to gather information on her daily routine.
If she’s working for her father, I can’t imagine what utility she is to him here. Despite it being Nesika Beach’s purportedbusy season, it’s fairly dead. There are two motels on the main drive along the ocean, and both of them have plenty of vacancies. The patrons who sail on Alisa’s—I meanAlice’s—whale watching excursions are far more likely to trek the extra half hour south to Brookings or north to Port Oxford, towns with chain restaurants and corporate hotel options. And I really don’t blame them.
Bea’s voice rings in the back of my mind, reminding me that Alice doesn’t have to be working for her father to beof useto us. If she really did fake her death all those years ago, she is an objectively invaluable bargaining chip to get Konstantin where we want him.
As far as I know, no one in my family knows about that night in Vladivostok. Obviously Zia Lucia’s trip wasn’t a secret, and neither was my accompanying her, but Alisa only made one formal appearance, strung on her father’s arm like an accessory, albeit an angelic one. She hadn’t spoken to a single soul, only floated around the room in Konstantin’s shadow, disappearing before Lucia and I had even been introduced.
No one knows about my midnight treks to that wine bar. Or the way the girl painted in a sunrise bouquet became the standard of beauty I’ve held everyone else to from that moment on.
I know I’m biased, that I can’t be objective in my assessment of her. But I couldn’t allow my cousins to kidnap and torture her, not without at least trying to prove she knows nothing. What comes after that…I’m not ready to contemplate.
I drive back into town, if you could even call it that. There’s two bars, both equally dive-y. A church with a moth-eaten couchon the lawn. A diner, a pawn shop, a liquor shop, and a discount store. There are a few houses tucked back off the main road, along with some mobile homes and one run-down apartment complex, which Alice lives in.
Upon initial assessment, the only building I found in the entire town with a security camera was the liquor store, which Deniz was easily able to access. The feed is dull, but I still click the disguised app on my phone that Clara’s fiancé set up, watching the thirty-something owner stare at the TV on the counter.
All the other cameras in town are ones I’ve placed.
As I drive down Nesika Road, the few locals milling about crane their necks to stare. It’s not often that a new face stays more than a day or so, and I’ve made my intentions to be around for the next few months rather obvious. On a normal mission I’d lay low, try not to draw attention to myself, but there’s little point here. Every small change is the talk of the town.
Luckily, as far as Deniz and I can tell, we haven’t drawn the attention of anyone outside the eight mile radius of this town, which we can only pray holds. The last thing we need is for Konstantin to catch wind that we’re hunting his daughter. Unfortunately, the children of The Syndicate are much less subtle than Alice has been.
When I pull into the otherwise-empty motel lot, the owner makes a show of leaning against the open door to the tiny lobby. A lit cigarette hangs from her fingers—a Marlboro red, if I’m recalling the scent correctly—as she watches me unload my backseat. I wave a little too enthusiastically at her, which only makes her glare harder. If I was anyone else, the lack of trust might sting, but these peopleshouldn’ttrust me.
Plus, it probably doesn't help that I told her I don’t want housekeeping service while I’m here. I’m sure she assumes I’m doing something highly illegal in her establishment, but I paidwell over the market rate in cash in advance for my entire planned stay. Money buys a lot of things.
Once inside my dingy room, the exhaustion of the last few days finally hits me. This is part of the reason I hate surveillance, and prefer non-human research. I don’t have to put on an act or consider my positionality when I’m analyzing data or trekking through the forest to find some lethally poisonous frog. And while my preference for solitude has put me in some sticky situations in the past—Clara will never forget the time I nearly died in a swamp because I insisted I could handle venomous snakes without a safety buddy—I sometimes think I’d rather die of hubris than deal with this many people.