54
I HADN’T REALLY BEEN WORRIED until I heard those words. Noah’s father wasn’t going to kill him. He most likely couldn’t kill me, or I wouldn’t be alive. So I simply sat back and enjoyed watching Noah arrogantly swat away his father’s grave warnings, his dire predictions. He was the boy I loved, still. He couldn’t have cared less. But then.
She is your weakness.
Contraindication: Mara Amitra Dyer
As you are hers.
Contraindication: Noah Elliot Simon Shaw.
“When she evolves fully, you will be at risk every day you spend with her. Your cells will not regenerate. Your telomeres will not replicate. If she exceeds her threshold—if she is in pain, or afraid, or under severe stress, and you are close? You will not be able to heal yourself. Her ability is dominant; it negates yours. Which is why I made sure she was told you had died. Your propensity for self-harm, a side effect of the gene that makes you different, makes Mara irresistible to you. It isn’t your fault, but being with her isn’t your choice.” And then David Shaw gave me this look, a mixture of pity and contempt. “He wouldn’t love you if you weren’t what you are.”
I remembered kissing Noah in his bedroom during a thunderstorm, watching his lips turn blue. I remembered facing him in a midnight-colored dress on a silent beach after I’d read something I shouldn’t have, and thought I understood what it meant.
“I won’t be what you want,” I’d said to Noah then.
“And what do you think that is?”
“Your weapon of self-destruction.”
Noah had said that I wasn’t, that I couldn’t be, and I’d wanted so badly to believe it. But hearing those words issue from his father’s mouth sliced me open with the truth.
“I don’t want to be here,” Noah’s father said. “Whatever you think of me, I loved your mother. She was my life. She was my reason for existing. And I promised her that I would keep you safe. I may have failed her in every other way, but I cannot fail at that. Look at Jude,” he said, gesturing to him. “A project of Deborah’s, one that has not paid off.”
If Jude minded being spoken about as if he were a thing, as if he weren’t there, he didn’t show it. His expression was flat, his eyes empty.
“He is unpredictable and unstable, despite Deborah’s efforts to control him. It could be said that he is responsible for her death, since he is the one who let Mara out.”
“It was a mistake,” Jude said then, in a firm, alien voice.
David regarded him warily. “Yes. It was.” ?Then he refocused on me. “What is happening to Jude will happen to you, too, Mara. You hallucinate. You are violent in response to pain. You show signs of dissociative personality disorder. You are on your way.”
Maybe I was already there.
“I knew your grandmother, once upon a time. Not well, not well enough at all, but she haunted my wife in the guise of a friend, a confidant. She was unpredictable. She was unstable. She was a liar, like you, and a murderer, like you. She led my wife to her death, and you would lead my son to his.”
Noah interrupted his father. “You think I care if I’m powerless? That’s what I want.”
“So you can finally kill yourself?”
I held my breath, waiting for Noah to answer. He never did.
“You are sick, Noah. The consequences of your affliction could destroy you, the way they have destroyed other sick children, and I will die before I let that happen,” David said.
Maybe I could help him with that.
“The more time passes, the stronger she’ll become, until she fully manifests, and I can’t predict when that will happen.” David turned to me. “After that stunt you pulled on the subway platform, I figured you must be close.”
So he knew about that. Hmm.
“We can’t afford to wait any longer,” David said to Noah. “Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s a bomb ticking inside of her, waiting to go off. With one thought, one wrong thought, she could end millions of lives.” He took a cautious step forward.
“If you don’t stop it, your mother will have died for nothing. You would exist for nothing,” David said, his voice cracking. “I loved your mother, and she died to save you so you could be the answer to illness, to aging, possibly even to death. I couldn’t have cared less—all I wanted was her. But I wasn’t given a choice. However, I will give you one.”
David Shaw drew in a shaky breath composing himself. Then he lifted the leather bag and opened it. He withdrew a gun and a syringe and set them on a table in front of me next to the knife.
Jude wasn’t here to hurt me, and Noah wasn’t here to save me. I knew that now.
“I didn’t know how you and she would prefer to do it.”
“Do what?” Noah shouted.
I waited until the echo faded before I answered for his father. “Kill me.”
An obscene laugh bubbled up from Noah’s throat. “If you could think that there is anything in the world that could possibly make me do this,” he said to his father, “you have no idea who I am.”
“I don’t need to know who you are. I know her.”
David withdrew something else from his bag. A laptop. He typed something, and then propped the laptop up on an empty cardboard box, positioning it so I could see.
My brother lay in a bed, in a room, hooked up to a thousand machines. Jamie sat next to him in a chair. He was tied to it, and conscious. My brother was not.