“They couldn’t have actually been in your stomach, or you would have died taking them out.”
“Fine,” I said. “They were forty-two degrees south of my right fibia and seventh metatarsal.”
“You don’t have a fibia. That’s not a real bone.”
I gave my brother the finger.
“No need to get snippy,” Daniel said prissily. “Okay, so, these were inside you when you left Horizons, right?”
“Right.”
“And your ability didn’t work after you left there, right?”
“Correct.”
“You tried?”
I thought about Mr. Ernst. About what I’d done to him after what he’d tried to do to Stella and me. “Yes.” I did try.
“What happened?” Daniel prodded. “Who did you try to . . .” His voice trailed off. “Who hurt you?”
Jamie almost literally began to whistle and twiddle his thumbs. Stella looked at the floor.
“It was nothing,” I said, falsely calm. “It was fine in the end.”
Daniel handed me back the implants and then looked down at the mess of papers. “All right. We know the anomaly is triggered by fear and stress. So, what if anytime your nervous system was flooded with adrenaline, or cortisol, those things reacted, negating your ability? Like a fail-safe to make you safer, better, in case you ever left Horizons.”
But they hadn’t made me safer, I thought. My mind conjured an image of Mr. Ernst, what I did to him, and I blinked, hoping it would disappear.
Daniel chose his words carefully. “But you were actually safer in the sense that you couldn’t accidentally . . . hurt someone. You couldn’t protect yourself, but you were safer for other people to be around.”
I wondered if that were true.
“Anyway, Dr. Kells thought of herself as a scientist, a researcher. She had plans to send you back home, right?”
“That’s what she said.”
“So those implants must have been part of her plan to do it. She thought she’d have time to tweak the effects, figure out how to counteract the anomaly, before you guys escaped.”
Before I killed her. But Daniel had a point. Everything Kells had done to us, done to me, had been in pursuit of a cure. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And when she hadn’t succeeded, and Jude had let me out, she’d decided to put me down like an animal before I could be set loose and hurt anyone else.
As we watched the interviews, we realized Daniel had been right. Jude got worse, no matter what Kells did to try to fix him. She attempted to hide her distress as he grew older, more dangerous, but the drugs she pumped into him didn’t always mitigate his behavior. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know who he was; he was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and when someone “else” emerged, Claire was the only one who could get him, the real him, to break through, which Daniel guessed was why Kells had been willing to foster her, gender notwithstanding.
Hearing and watching Kells talk about Jude made the hair rise on my skin. You could tell she was losing control but she couldn’t admit it. Jude was her success story after years and years of failure. She couldn’t accept that in trying to cure the anomaly, she had actually done something worse. Her only true success had been managing to keep Claire and Jude alive after induction. Claire was completely normal, actually, despite Kells’s efforts to make her otherwise. Kells guessed Claire wasn’t a carrier. If she had been, Kells could’ve triggered the mutation the way she had with Jude.
“That explains why Jude survived after the asylum but Claire didn’t,” Daniel said. But then again, almost to himself, “But what about his hands?”
Jude’s hands. The hands he supposedly didn’t have anymore, after the patient room door at the Tamerlane had slammed shut on him, separating him from me, and his wrists from his hands.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Daniel mumbled.
“Doesn’t it, though?” Stella looked from Daniel to me to Jamie. “Jude has a healing factor.”
“So did Noah,” Jamie said. I shot him a look. “Does. So does Noah.”
Which is why he had to be alive. “Which is why he’s still out there,” I said.
“But Jude can’t heal without hurting someone else,” Stella said. “When the door slammed shut on him in the asylum, you wouldn’t have been affected, because you’re . . . different.”
“Oh my God,” Daniel said.
“What?” I looked at him.
“Rachel and Claire,” Daniel said. “They were normal, not carriers. They were at the Tamerlane with you and Jude. Jude healed because of them. He killed them, not . . .”
Me. Not me.
I swallowed. There was no way to really ever know what had happened, or who was more responsible. I’d wished that the building would collapse. I’d wished for Jude to die. It had collapsed and he hadn’t died, but if Rachel and Claire had been killed because of Jude’s ability, because his body had needed to heal itself, it still wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been the one to hurt him. So who was responsible for that? Him or me? Did it matter?
“A question, though,” Stella said, interrupting the silence. “Something I don’t get. Maybe one of you can help me out. Why no girls? Why did Kells foster only boys till Claire? I mean, if I’m a carrier, and Mara’s a carrier, and we’ve manifested, then why—”
Daniel cut in. “Why were most of the twins boys?”
Stella nodded.
“There was something in New Theories about the Y chromosome and a healing factor,” Daniel said, getting up to search for the book. “Most greater abilities were of different subtypes that could bind to an X or Y chromosome, but not that one. It had to be a Y.”
I thought about the children Kells had experimented on. Eight little boys, once healthy and now dead. She’d been trying to solve a problem, she’d said, to fix the anomaly, to create someone who could heal himself and, by extension, others—and her, too.
She had been trying to create Noah, but she’d made Jude instead.