Sophie froze from head to toe, her heart icing over. “Mmph,” she groaned, but he didn’t stop.
“I know that when you were thirteen, your stepsister Emily stole your journal and read it aloud to all her friends and when they laughed at you, you hit Emily so hard you broke her nose. They said there was something wrong with you, didn’t they?” He chuckled. “They said you weren’t normal. They even whispered things like antisocial, didn’t they? Funny.” Nicholas’s grin widened. “That’s just almost like saying you’re a psychopath.”
She stared at him, transfixed with horror. He knew everything, every dark secret she’d buried deep in her memory. Every part of herself she kept most hidden he dragged out and pinned to the wall. She felt as if he were vivisecting her right there in the leaves.
“Mmm,” she groaned, and he finally let go of her mouth. “I’m not a psychopath!” she shouted. “It wasn’t me—none of that was me! Yeah, I hit Em, but she deserved it, and it was Noah who killed Popcorn! You are the psycho, not me. Get off of me!”
“Don’t you think they knew that?” he asked. “According to this, they did.” He rose up and hooked his foot under a drawer in one of the dressing tables, pulling it open. Then, keeping an eye on her all the while, he lifted out a thick binder packed with papers.
“What is that?” she whispered.
He turned it so she could read the label on the folder: Sophie Jane Crue.
Her blood froze over.
“This folder,” he said slowly, crouching beside her and rubbing his hands over it, “contains the story of your life.” He opened it, pulled out a photo, and showed it to her: it was her and her mother, kneeling side by side as they did tea ceremony at a restaurant in Osaka. Sophie had been ten on that trip. It was still one of her favorite memories, but pinched between Nicholas’s fingers, it suddenly sickened in her mind, like a leaf turning brown and ugly before dropping away.
“What—what is this?” she asked. “My mom will kill you for—”
“Oh, come on!” He gave her a disgusted look. “You don’t need her to defend you! Why can’t you stand up for yourself? Is this what you’ve been your entire life—a whiny, needy brat who blames all her problems on her absent mom? Look. There’s just one rule, just one basic law that everyone lives under: Take control or be controlled. That’s what it comes down to, Sophie Crue. You’ve been controlled your entire life, haven’t you? By your mom, by Corpus, by your fake family.” He shook his head and gave her a pitying look. “They tried to control me, too. But not anymore. I’m taking control now. Why won’t you? The first step toward being free is recognizing that you’re not.”
“She loves me.”
“Oh, oh, yes she does, I’m sure. And guess what? She loves me, too, in her own way—because she created me. I’m her project; she doesn’t love me, but the reflection of herself in me.”
He crumpled the photo in his fist and dropped the folder, making it fall open. Photographs, every one of them a memory Sophie held dear, scattered across the floor. Sophie at twelve, smiling from horseback in one of the expensive riding lessons her mother had paid for. Sophie at fourteen, holding up a third-place trophy from some soccer tournament. One photo caught her eye in particular and cut her like a knife: her fifth birthday, a photo of her blowing out the candles on her Little Mermaid cake—and a tiny, freckled Jim Julien behind her, holding up bunny ears over her head and grinning impishly. She stared at it with wide, unblinking eyes, a crescendo of grief roaring in her head, searching for a way out.
“What is this?” she said hoarsely. “Where did you get these?”
“You should be more like me, Sophie,” Nicholas said. “You should be that person they said you were. If you were—if you just stopped following their idiot rules—you’d realize how stupid they all are. How fake, how shallow. You’d be free like me. You’d finally be in control of your own life—isn’t that what you want?”
“I don’t want to be anything like you.” She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the photo.
“We’ll see.” He stood up and hauled her to her feet by her hair. She blinked away tears, biting her lip so hard she drew blood. “It’s all about the control, Sophie. You don’t even know what you are.”
“What do you mean? What do you want from me, Nicholas?” Exasperated and bewildered, she could only stand helplessly lest he wrench her hair out by its roots.
“I want you,” he said, his smile dropping, replaced by solemn steadiness. “I want you and I want the world. Is that too much to ask? You fascinate me. I’ve known you my entire life. Since day one I’ve been trapped here on this god-awful island—you said it yourself. You think I don’t know anything about the world, but I know one thing—I know you. And I have dreamed of this day for years.” He pulled her close, his one hand still tangled in her hair but the other pressed against the curve of her lower back, thrusting her against him. When he spoke, his breath was a hot cloud against her forehead and the tips of his long hair brushed against her eyelashes. “You are my window to the world, Sophie. Everything I know about what lies beyond this island, I learned from you. And now we’re going to leave together. We’ll take the world together. You’ll be mine as you’ve always been mine, only now you know it.”
“Creep!” Sophie choked. “You’re insane!”
“Maybe.” He shrugged, unperturbed.
“I’ll never go anywhere with you!”
“What else are you going to do? Go back to your stepfamily? Stay here with your so-called mom, who’s been lying to you your entire life? Run off with your pilot boyfriend—Oh. Wait.” He smirked. “That’s right—I killed him.”
She roared like a wild animal and began beating at him with her fists, managing to knock his jaw and his temple before he caught her wrists and wrestled her into submission again. This time he drew more cord from his pocket and twined it around her wrists, so tightly that it bit into her skin and red welts began to show. She twisted and fought, but he was too strong for her, and she only succeeded in wrenching her hurt shoulder and doubling her pain.
“You don’t even know what you are,” he said again. He almost looked genuinely sorry for her, though she knew it was all an act, every bit of it. He could change emotions as if they were masks he carried in his pocket. “Poor little Sophie. You’re a very special girl, you know.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, though when he said it, she suddenly felt as if she had always known the truth, that it had been hidden inside her from the start.
He reached for the folder, drew out a photograph. Before she showed it to her, he studied it closely, his head tilted to the right. Then he turned it around, a slow smile spreading over his face. It showed a wide-eyed baby with light blond curls that Sophie recognized as herself, held tightly by a much younger Moira Crue—who was standing in the same lab in which Sophie had first seen Lux. Nicholas ran his thumb over the baby’s face and stared intently at her.
“You’re a Vitro, Sophie. Skin Island’s own special, very first Vitro.”
TWENTY EIGHT SOPHIE
She shook her head and shut her eyes, denying it with every fiber of her mind.
“Oh, come on,” said Nicholas above her. “You seriously never saw it? Never suspected? Never wondered?”
How could she? She hadn’t known the Vitros existed until yesterday.