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tightly in my entire life.
    The muffled sound of blades cuts through the wind. I know that noise. They came for me once before, when we were in the path of a hurricane. They didn’t even need a rope then—just a shot beforehand. But it didn’t help with the motion. I threw up in the back of the helicopter. I feel Cameron’s pulse pick up through my palms that are pressed so tightly to his chest. I feel like throwing up again, because this time they are not coming to save me.
    He drops us both under the surface, into the dark.
    From the cliffs, from my home, the water looks clear. A blue calm stretching into the distance. But Cameron has the face mask, and my eyes burn and see nothing when I open them. There’s nothing to guide us, nothing to direct us, but the rope stretching before us. Cameron breathes slowly, calmly, and my lungs start to ache long before he hands the device back. And then I take breaths too quickly, too desperately, and have to give it back too soon.
    I keep my eyes squeezed shut, trying not to hear the blades over the surface or the sound of the air I’m draining from the tank. I try to picture my mother, like she looked in the newspaper clipping. Not the photo from after she was arrested.
    I did not print that one out.
    I imagine her humming a song, as she shushes me with a lullaby, as she cuts into my skin. In my head, I do not scream, even though I’m sure I did. I was just a baby. In my head she takes out the tracker and holds me to her, wrapping a blanket around my body. In my head she tries to run.
    In my version they do not arrest her at home, like the article claims.
    In the article, they say she put the tracker in the garbage disposal. That she knew they would come for her. That she must’ve been
hoping
they’d come for her. That she didn’t want to be responsible for the soul of June Calahan.
    Like June’s family did for their own safety, severing ties, taking new identities, leaving the country, so they would never be associated with her name again.
    I wonder if they would’ve let me grow up there, with mymother, with my father. If she hadn’t been so blatantly defiant. If he hadn’t held a pillow to a baby’s face and then changed his mind, unable to go through with it in the end. He brought me to the hospital. They never returned me.
    I hold my breath and press my head into Cameron’s back, imagining a time before all of this, before I was June—that first day, when I could’ve been anyone—before the needle in my back. I can hear my mother, and only her, as if my ear is pressed to her chest, as she sings me to sleep.
    Duérmete, mi niña
… and the pain, the cold, the entire world falls away.
    Something is wrong.
    We’ve stopped moving. Cameron’s body shifts to vertical, and he pulls me toward him, and then past him, until I feel my forearms scrape against cold metal—we’ve reached the steel net.
    My fingers tangle with the metal wires, and I press my face against them as my lungs beg for air. Cameron moves the mouthpiece to me, and I breathe too much. Too fast. We’re trapped.
    I feel the tank being pulled away from me, off my back, and I start to panic. I claw my way up the netting toward the surface. I need air. I need out. But someone grabs my leg, trapping me between his body and the netting. He puts a mask over my face. A new breathing device in my mouth, and turns me around to strap it on my back.
    But I still can’t see. The mask is full of water. He’s trying to tell me something, tapping at my mouth, tapping at my mask. I think he means to use the air to push the water away, butwhen I remove the device, he puts it back in my mouth. Then he taps my mouth once more, traces his finger up along my cheek, to my forehead, down my nose—tracing the path the air might take. He presses against the top of my mask, and I understand. I take a breath through my mouth and let it