Page 18 of Never the Same

“Gideon Wyndham,” I read out loud, hating that my hands were still slightly shaky. “No other names like the two of us have?” I handed him back the Montana ID, somehow doubting he truly resided there.

“It’s just one of my aliases,” was all he gave me.

“I’m still not convinced you’re my brothers. You could be serial killers.” I searched for the camera again, and it was still active.

“We don’t have photos of us together on our phones. We’re not the selfie types. It’s hazardous to our health,” Julian said in a humorless tone, then flipped over his forearm to show me a tattoo, as if that was supposed to mean something. “Our family crest.”

“Are you about to tell me I have one of those on my body?”

“On your lower back,” Gideon let me know before he began speaking to Julian in another language as if I wasn’t there, and I rapidly translated everything in my head with relative ease.

While I still didn’t know if I could fully trust them, at least I didn’t pick up on any back-and-forth that suggested they’d done this to me. “You do realize I know what you’re saying?”

Julian brought his hands to his hips, the corners of his mouth lifting into a semi-smile. “You still remember Aramaic?”

“Apparently.” I shouldn’t shrug. I should be hysterical. But I wound up settling in between, like Julian had suggested. I went with nervous-ish. Apprehensive-of-them-ish. Annnd still a little panicky-ish, too.

“You’re fluent in seven languages.” Julian swiped the locks of his unruly hair away from his face, then sat on the edge of the bed and began testing me.

I responded back to his first remark in Italian.

Spanish? No problem.

French? Almost sounded like my mother tongue.

He tried out three more, but on the next, my brain put up a wall. “Sounds like Mandarin, but I don’t speak it, do I?”

“I was just testing you.” Julian held open his palms. “This is . . . interesting, to say the least.”

“You mean terrifying, devastating, and a bunch of other words that end in ing?”

Julian eyed Gideon as if searching for the right thing to say.

“Repeat what you were just discussing, this time in English.”

Julian stretched out his neck, rotating it around like he’d been the one stuck in a box. “Our family, well . . . we’re cautious people.”

How long had I been in that coffin before they found me in the streets? Not long enough to die from a lack of oxygen, clearly. But still. The whole thing was a nightmare from start to finish, and if I could wake up anytime now, that’d be great. “Are you planning to add details to that statement, or just leave it hanging in the void?”

Julian brought a fist to his mouth, hiding a dark chuckle. “I’m sorry, really. I don’t handle this kind of shit in normal ways.”

“Like a nervous tic? Laugh-at-a-funeral kind of thing?”

He nodded.

“I’ll take the laughter over the brooding,” I said, unable to contain the jab at Gideon.

“That’s another very you thing to say.” Julian rested his hand on his lap. “That’s why I keep smiling. You’re in there somewhere—we just need you to follow the light and come on out.”

“Yeah, well, right now I’m Alice falling down a rabbit hole, and it feels like it’s never-ending. So maybe you could throw me a lifeline here and help me out. Tell me what happened?”

“Alice, eh?” Julian raked a hand through his hair. “Well . . . our tattoos themselves are trackers. Yours went offline while you were in Rome. Unfortunately, we don’t know why you were there.”

He kept talking, his voice all code words and science while discussing signals, nano-somethings, and a chain. Somehow most of it didn’t go over my head, which was saying a lot, given my situation.

I waited for chills to break out across my skin. This would be the perfect time for them. But nothing came. Not yet.

“We went to your last location, which was a hotel room in Rome. While we were there, your signal came back online, which means your chain was removed,” Julian said, his tone growing flatter. “We thought it might be a trap, baiting us to the location. We showed up in the Czech Republic, prepared to infil a monastery, but you took off just before we got to you.”