“Nothing,” I say, warning the others off. “They’re just paranoid.”
“?’Bout what?” Goose is genuinely innocent—he has no idea what we’re doing here. Which should’ve been fine, as Jamie’s supposed to be handling this, but since he isn’t handling it, and I’m not sure why and can’t very well ask at the moment . . .
“Notice the two police cars parked down the street?” I say to Goose. “Some of us here have had a few run-ins with the law.”
“Oh, who hasn’t, really?” Goose says, clapping my shoulder. “When we were boys . . .”
Before Goose can finish his sentence, Mara ascends the steps and knocks on the door, silencing everyone. Then directs a glare my way.
So we’re doing this.
Instead of an answer, however, the door to the garden apartment opens, and a moon-faced, doughy man pokes his pale, balding head out and examines us.
“Can I help you?” the man asks, his voice a bit scrapey.
The boy’s father, perhaps? I was expecting . . . I suppose I’m not sure what I was expecting. The man looks rather . . . like a paedophile, really. He has this soft, moony, harmless look about him, and yet. His button-down shirt is tight around the middle, and he has the sort of worn-out, drawn, put-upon appearance, as if he’s been a prisoner of war but doesn’t quite remember the experience and would be embarrassed if anyone mentioned it.
The man squints at us. “You’re like them, aren’t you?”
I can feel everyone exchanging very tense glances as Goose asks, “Like whom?”
“Kid who died this morning. And the rest. All gone now.” He breaks into a ridiculous, there’s-something-not-quite-right-with-me smile.
Christ. Everyone’s adrenaline’s in overdrive—I try and quiet my mind enough to dissolve the noise into meaning. I can hear every heartbeat on the block, but ours are the loudest, the most frantic.
“Sir,” I begin without actually knowing what I’m going to say, “I’m not sure what you mean. We came to visit someone—”
The door creaks open. Waiting at the threshold is The Boy Who Watched.
“Rolly, I’ll take it from here,” he says.
And like that, moon-faced Rolly retreats into his apartment like a snail into its shell, and the boy’s blue, unblinking eyes find mine. “Come on in,” he says with a smile. Mara steps past me, through the doorway.
If I could go back to one moment in my life and undo it, that would be the one.
18
NUTSHELL OF CIVILITY
UP CLOSE HE SEEMS OUR age, wearing a slightly too big dark blue T-shirt, with the symbols of each member of the Justice League on it. Though he stands with a slight slouch, he straightens when I walk past.
“Hi,” the boy says to me—only me, I notice—and extends his hand. “I’m Leo.”
“Noah.”
Cloudy light spills through filmed windows in the long parlour of the town house; We face a banister painted a shade just off robin’s-egg blue, and to our right, the parlour. Mint paint peels off the walls, and I’m thrown for a second—it’s the colour of the room the boy killed himself in. He died here, and the address that somehow magically appeared on my skin and disappeared is this address. Every detail of this place matters—and everyone in it.
Though I don’t see anyone else here but Leo. A line of dusty glasses on every flat surface, some rims stained with lipstick, announces that the house has not always been this empty. It’s as though there’s a ghost of a teenager draped on every surface; a tufted amber leather chaise with a slash in it, the ivory sofa and ottoman, the farm chairs at the dining table in the back. There’s a chessboard resting on a faded Oriental rug, which seems to have been abandoned mid-game.
Leo, making his way to the back of the brownstone, asks, “Can I get anyone anything to drink?”
“I’m not sure we’re staying long,” I say, just as Goose says, “I think I do fancy one, thanks.”
My idiot plan to bring him along to pawn off on Jamie is backfiring spectacularly, as Jamie’s made no attempt to corral or even address the Goose Problem.
Like me, Jamie and Daniel have been warily eyeing what looks like the frozen scene of a hastily abandoned party. By contrast, Mara’s stomping around like there’s nothing weird about this at all. She even bends to move a piece on the chessboard, which is interesting, because she doesn’t play chess. I don’t think.
“Checkmate,” she says, and she’s right.
Leo glances at her over his shoulder, smiles. “I’m Leo. I didn’t catch your name?”
“Mara,” she says casually, and I hear Leo’s heart stutter. He’s stopped midway between the parlour and the kitchen, looking at Mara for a beat too long. Then the rest of us.
“I wasn’t expecting all of you.”
“You were expecting some of us though.” Count on Daniel to say what I was thinking.
Leo’s gaze flicks to Daniel, then back to me. In a slightly nasal, abrasive voice, “The Non can’t stay.”
The word clicks in place, like the safety off a gun. I knew Leo had to be a Carrier, but now I know.
“He’s my brother,” Mara says. “He stays, or none of us do.”
“Then none of you do.” He says it without pause or inflection, his face expressionless.
Mara walks over to him, and there’s a responding chorus of quickening hearts because it’s Mara, and who knows what she’s going to do.
“It’s fine,” Daniel says. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Does, though,” I say. To Leo: “You’re the one who asked us here, I recall?”
“Did we?” We? He fixes me with that dark blue stare. “Do you recall?”
I grin at the challenge, say nothing, betray nothing, wait for my silence to unsettle him. It doesn’t.
Things are spiralling—Jamie may not know the details, but he’s got things sorted well enough. And knows he’s the only one who can even begin to try and fix it.
“Daniel’s staying,” he says to Leo. His words ripple the close air, plucking mental strings inside all of us, though the words are directed only at Leo.
He blinks slowly. An automatic smile creeps across his lips as he nods, compliant. The parlour is staticky with energy, my mind with the realisation that Jamie’s mind-fuck is working on another Carrier. It’s working on one of us.
“Well,” Leo says, eyes flat, pupils blown, “if you’re staying, don’t just stand there.” He turns around and glides to the kitchen, separated from the rest of the house by two shabbily painted French doors with transom windows above them.
That gets to all of us. “What the shit?” Mara whispers. Daniel slides his gaze to Jamie, who’s trying for ice-cool and failing. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. Pulses hammer and heartbeats gallop, and it sounds like there’s an army in this house, not six teenagers.
This is what I know: Leo’s a Carrier. He’s singled Daniel out as the Other. He’s not singled out Goose.
Not. Goose.
I turn to my Westminster friend. “All right, chap?”
“Never better.”
“You know, this place isn’t up to scratch.” I glance at Jamie, who gets it. “Why don’t you and Goose and Daniel go on with Mara to that café on Fulton, and we’ll meet you there.”
Goosey tilts his head. “You seem tense, mate.”
“Hardly. Though, since you mention it, is there anything you’d like to share with the class?”
His mouth curves up, amused. “Can’t think of a thing.”
I don’t know whether to stay and press, or leave and let it go.
The sound of indelicate footsteps descending the staircase barely merits my attention, but the voice attached to them snaps my head around. “He doesn’t know,” the voice says, a voice I haven’t heard in months, not since Horizons. And there, standing at the foot of the staircase, is Stella.
19
OUR PREJUDICES
SHE’S DIFFERENT FROM WHAT I remember. Her once-soft shape is filed down to edges, the spray of freckles across her olive skin more livid. She does not look well.