Vitro by Jessica Khoury Read Free Book Online Page A

walked backward, surveying her with, oddly, disdain. “No. Not exactly.” He spun around, and a dozen more questions crowded her brain but she held them back. She wasn’t here to get entangled in the affairs of some Corpus kid, however mystifying he was. Maybe he was older than he looked, and worked for them in some capacity. Maybe he was an intern. Maybe it’s none of my business, and anyway, we’ve been walking for ages. Shouldn’t we have gotten somewhere by now?
And at that moment, Nicholas stopped at a bend in the road, where the trees and bamboo opened to a sudden rocky cliff fringed with tall grass. “There it is,” he said. “Halcyon Cove.”
“Halcyon Cove?” She swatted at a cloud of gnats that hovered in front of her face and stared around him and across the shallow bay below, which glittered in a thousand shades of gold. The sun, just a hand’s breadth above the horizon, burned red behind a cluster of buildings on the cliff opposite. They were sharp silhouettes against the sunset, black and harsh, the red light behind them making them look as if they were on fire.
“It was once a resort,” Nicholas said. She glanced at him and saw that he was gazing at the buildings with smoldering intensity, as if they had wronged him in some unforgivable way. “But there’s nothing of that left now except a bunch of buildings.”
“My mom’s over there?” She looked back at the buildings and had to hold a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun’s last rays.
He nodded. “Let’s go. But . . . stay quiet. We might see people now, and if we do, it’s best if they don’t know you’re here.”
“Why?” Her heart clenched. “Did they do something to my mom?” She still wasn’t sure who they were; she had a vague idea of white coated doctors like her mother, but after hearing the pilots’ stories, she now imagined them holding assault rifles. “Nicholas, what do they do on this island? My mom’s researching a cure for Alzheimer’s, right?”
Nicholas studied her sidelong, his dark hair whipping around his face in the strong ocean wind. “Do you want to find out?” he asked.
Yes. “I want to find my mom.” But she felt a tug of desire— desire to unmask the secrets that had been kept from her all her life. It went deeper than mere curiosity. Over the years, Skin Island and her mother had grown into a single amorphous entity. She felt that if she discovered one, she discovered the other.
Sophie stood on the bluff and stared at the place that had stolen her mother from her with the wind pulling greedily at her hair, as if trying to lure her over the cliff and to her death on the rocks below. She felt a sudden swelling of determination in her chest, a hardening of resolve. When she licked her lips, they tasted like the sea. She felt as if the island were laying a challenge before her: If you can steal my secrets, you can have her back.
She remembered something her dad had said to her, not long ago, when she’d first announced her plan to follow in her mother’s footsteps: “She had her chance to be there for you, Sophie, and she gave it up. She chose her work. All these gifts, these lavish vacations—” he referenced the expensive dolls and toys her mother used to send her, which turned into electronics and cash cards as she grew older, the red Volkswagon on her sixteenth birthday, their trips together to Switzerland or Australia when her mother had vacation every few years— “they’re just her way of trying make up for the time she chose not to spend with you. Why can’t you see it?”
“You talk as if she’s bribing me,” Sophie had retorted, furious. “She’s my mom! If you want to hate her, that’s your problem—but why do you insist that I hate her too?”
“I don’t want you to hate her,” he said with a sigh, “I just want you to let her go.”
But it was something Sophie could not do. Would not do. She loved her father, but when he said things like that, she hated