An image had risen up out of the dark water of my mind. A picture. Black. White. Blurry. “What?” I’d asked quickly.
“The way you’re feeling. Everything that’s been going on with you. It isn’t your fault. With the PTSD and everything that’s happened— What you’re going through,” she’d said, clearly avoiding the words “mental illness,” “can be caused by biological and genetic factors.”
“But then, what’s the trigger?” I asked.
Stella looked at me. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Jamie?”
“Sixteen.”
“I’m also seventeen,” she said to me, “but I’ll be eighteen in a few months. Do you remember what Kells said in that video? She was talking about puberty or something, and the way the teenage brain develops?”
“It makes sense, that age would be the trigger,” I said. Stella first started hearing voices at sixteen. I was sixteen during the Ouija board incident. Rachel and Claire died six months later. “It makes sense that the progressions of our abilities are at different stages, because—”
“Because we’re different ages,” Jamie said. “I’m rhyming,” he added unnecessarily.
So that explained something. But not everything. I told Stella and Jamie about the flashbacks I’d had, of events that I couldn’t possibly have experienced. “I thought it might be genetic memory,” I said, and told them about the book Noah had found on one of his transatlantic flights, the one both of us had tried and failed to read, ostensibly about genetic memory.
“What was it called?” Jamie asked.
“New Theories in Genetics by—holy shit.”
“Is that . . . a pseudonym?”
“Armin Lenaurd,” I said. “The Lenaurd protocol.” I didn’t have to try very hard to remember where I’d heard that before. The list was burned into my memory. We’d just seen it.
J. L.: artificially manifested, Lenaurd protocol, early induction.
“I want to kill myself,” I said calmly. “Like, I actually want to die.”
“I’m missing something.” Stella said.
“You saw the list—with our names on it, what was wrong with us.” They both nodded. “If ‘J.L.’ and ‘C.L.’ are Jude and Claire Lowe,” I explained, “it means that there was some protocol, written by the author of this obscenely boring book, that basically explained what was done to them.”
“?‘Artificially manifested,’?” Jamie said quietly. “?‘Early induction’ . . . that would mean, what? The doctors were trying to cause the effects of the thing we have—in normal people, maybe?”
“Jude is hardly normal,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why,” Stella said quietly.
“Why what?”
“Why he is the way he is,” Stella said. “But wait. If there’s a whole book about this thing that’s wrong with us, maybe we can stop it.” Her voice rose in pitch. “There might be a cure. It might be in that book!” She rounded on me. “Mara, where is it?”
“I gave it to Daniel.”
“Who?”
“My older brother.”
“So if we find Daniel, we find the book, and we find the cure—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up a second here, eager beaver,” Jamie said. “If there even is a cure in that book, which is a huge, massive ‘if.’ I mean, the Lenaurd protocol, whatever it is, was used on Jude, right? And I’d say it’s not working out so well for him. So are we sure we’d even want whatever else might be in that book? Like, Kells kept talking about how she was trying to ‘cure’ us and ‘save’ us and shit, and I don’t know . . . ending up on her side doesn’t feel right.” Stella opened her mouth to speak, but Jamie cut her off before she could. “Also, now that I know what’s actually wrong with me, I’m not sure I’d even want to fix it.” He paused. “Is that crazy?”
No one answered.
“Anyway, whatever. There’s no way to know if what we need is in that book, but there’s another problem.”
“Jude?” I asked.
“No. I mean, yes, he’s a problem, but another one.”
“How we’re going to survive without money?”
“No, another one. Listen,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Kells was a medical researcher. But it takes money to run the kind of facility she was running. Who was funding it? And how many people knew, or know, about it? About us? And are any of them going to be even mildly pissed that their staff was butchered and their research lost?” he went on. “And speaking of research, how many carriers are there? We can’t be the only ones, which means somewhere out there, there are more of us. Do we try to find them? What if they find us?”
“That’s a lot more than one problem,” Stella said.
Jamie wanted answers. Stella wanted a cure. I wanted Noah. And to punish whoever had taken him from me.
Jamie bit his lip. “So. Where do we start?”