61
NOAH
I HOLD MARA IN MY shaking arms as her pulse fades to nothing. My father doesn’t even wait until she’s dead before he soils the air with words.
“You did the right thing, Noah. I’m proud of you.”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had trouble with feelings. Other people get scared, or nervous, or shy, or excited, or happy, or sad. I seem to have only two settings: blank or empty.
I feel neither of those things now.
The pain of losing her is physical. Every breath of oxygen tastes like poison. Every beat of my heart feels like a hammer to my chest. How could she possibly have expected me to bear this?
“I’m going to take care of her brother,” my father says as he types something into his phone. “Her whole family. They’ll never want for anything.” He holds the phone up to his ear, and I hear a ring echo from somewhere inside the building.
Inside the building.
Daniel has been here the whole time.
It’s a double blow, one I can barely process as I stare at her unnaturally still body. I’ve spent too many nights with her to be able to pretend, even to myself, that she’s only sleeping.
“Noah?”
Jamie’s voice cuts through the static in my brain. I look over at the laptop.
His tear-streaked face is anxious, afraid. “Something’s happening. The machines sound weird.”
My father puts his hand on my shoulder. I can’t muster the energy to tell him not to touch me.
“I’ll go find out what’s happening,” he says. “He will be all right, Noah. I promise.”
As if his promises mean anything to me. But if he’s wrong, I will make him suffer every day for the rest of his worthless, pointless life.
He entreats Jude to watch me—so I won’t do anything crazy?—and when Jude agrees, my father leaves me to choke on my grief alone. Or almost. I am aware of Jude’s presence, the way his eyes have been hungrily staring at the knife my idiot father left here. I know Jude will reach for it. I’m not sure what he’ll do next, but I am sure that I don’t care.
“What are you waiting for?” I say.
He turns to make sure my father is gone, and then, as predicted, he reaches for it. Jude looks at me, his eyes filled not with hate but with hope.
Freak. “Go on, then. Do it.”
“Put her down,” he says. “And I will.”
I do. He does.
62
LIGHT STAINED THE BACKS OF my eyelids red. I bolted upright as if someone had plunged a syringe of adrenaline straight into my heart.
I remembered hands that weren’t mine sewing a letter into a doll. I remembered what the letter said. I remembered deaths I hadn’t wished for, families that weren’t mine, trees and beasts, ships and dust, feathers and hearts.
I remembered everything. Every feeling, every scent, touch, sight. I brimmed with echoes of my grandmother’s memories, her knowledge, my inheritance. They rose at the back of my throat, and I was bursting with the urge to tell Noah everything. But it wasn’t Noah’s face I saw when I opened my eyes.
Jude grinned, showing both dimples and looking like a child on Christmas. He held a syringe. “I knew you’d come back once you’d manifested. Doctor guessed you would, when you were finished changing.”
I didn’t care enough to ask him what he was talking about, or to think much about what he was saying and how creepily he was saying it. I had only one question, but my heart knew the answer before my eyes could confirm it.
I turned around to see Noah’s body stretched out behind me. The knife was still in his chest.
63
NOAH
I HEAR THAT VOICE BEFORE I see that face.
“You are not going to die,” Mara says. Her distinctive alto has an edge to it now. Angry. Hopeless. She’s a terrible liar. Always has been, at least compared to me.
I manage to open my eyes. I watch hers travel my body, and revel in the weight of her fingers on my chest. She looks so determined, so furious.
For some reason I think of the first time I saw her, kicking the shit out of the vending machine that refused to release her candy. Before that day, every hour of my life had been exactly like the one before it. Relentlessly boring. Painfully monotonous. But then she walked out of my waking nightmare and into my life, a complete mystery from Second One. Her presence was a problem I needed to solve, a problem that finally interested me. And then, somehow, she made me interested in myself.
Mara began as a question I needed to answer, but the longer I’d known her, the less I felt I actually knew. She was constantly surprising, infinitely complex. Unknowable. Unpredictable. I had never met anyone more fascinating in my life, and all the time in the world wouldn’t be enough to ever know her.
But now I want that time. My mind closes around memories of her, the feel of her hands in my hair, her cheek on my chest, her voice in my ear, her breath in my mouth. It’s so classic. I’ve spent most of my life waiting to die and now that I am, I don’t want to anymore. I manage a small, wry smile. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.