Leo takes advantage of my having thrown at least half the room off-balance. “Look,” Leo goes on. “We all want this to stop happening, right?”
Daniel’s the only one to nod.
“And we know what you guys went through,” Leo goes on. “That place, Horizons. Looking for a cure. The experiments they were doing on you in Florida. The research you found.”
Goose turns to me and mouths, “The fuck?”
Did they know who ordered it all, though? Was that what the envelope was about?
I inhale. “So you showed me your address, sent the clippings to let me know you knew all about me, and led me here to help you find the rest of these people before they die too?”
“What clippings?” Leo asks.
I can’t tell if he’s lying. Not even with Goose here, supposedly amplifying his heartbeat or whatever.
Seeing me thrown, Daniel takes the lead. “Someone sent Noah an envelope with his father’s obituary and something about a poisoning in the NYPD.”
“That’s . . . random,” Leo says. I notice Mara direct her attention to Stella—all of her attention.
Stella, still refusing to look Mara’s way, says. “We didn’t send that.”
So, who did?
“Okay, question for another day,” Daniel says. “We want to pool what we’ve got, stop this from happening to anyone else. Right?”
“Yes,” Stella says. “That’s what we were hoping.” Leo nods once.
I’m trying to work him out. His breathing is even, heartbeat steady, but he doesn’t seem . . . right.
All of us have gone quiet, so Daniel steps up again. “All right, there’s a lot to . . . digest.” He twists back to the windows, which are now giving off only the faintest beams of light. “It’s late, and we should be getting back,” he says to Goose, Jamie, Mara, and me. We nod like puppets. “But do you want to exchange numbers?” he asks Leo, who withdraws his mobile from a back pocket. Daniel gives it to him. Leo looks at me next.
Oh, why not.
As they lead us out of the house, Stella reaches out to Jamie, “It’s good. Seeing you again.”
A single nod. “Yeah. We’ll catch up.”
“I’d like that.”
As Mara exits, Stella says nothing to her, nor Mara to Stella, though she does offer the slightest of smiles to Jamie and Daniel. The five of us assemble at the bottom of the stoop, raising a final glance at Leo. Stella’s already tucked herself back inside.
We walk back to the train, Jamie and Mara speaking in low voices, Daniel talking at Goose. I’m trailing slightly behind when my phone vibrates.
It’s Stella. I need to talk to you. Without Mara. LMK before 8.
And then another text, right after:
p.s. Please don’t tell her. Please.
21
NIGH INCURABLE
THE AFTERNOON SCROLLS THROUGH MY head on a reel. I’m torn between irrepressible urgency and overwhelming—emptiness.
Seeing the names and faces of the Gifted—that’s what Stella and Leo kept calling them, the word they preferred to use. But are we? Gifted? Seeing them cut skin, tuck pills under tongue, step into air. It’s . . . I’m—
Triggered. Triggered is the word for it, much as I hate to admit. I keep trying to push it down, sweep it away, shut it down the way I always had when I’d seen the others hurt themselves or be hurt. But this—this is different.
This must be like what Mara felt when Jude was tormenting her, pushing buttons she didn’t know existed, pushing her till she lost control.
I’m losing control now. Jumping in to defend Felix’s choice to die because he thought his girlfriend had. It feels like wolves are at my door, my house, circling.
I had a dream, after word reached me of my father’s death. I saw myself standing beneath a tree, a shadow me, faded and incomplete. I watch myself tie a rope to a branch; there’s no sound, no birds, no wind in the trees. I step onto a shadow and loop the rope around my neck. The ghosts of my family stand and watch, faces anaesthetised, wiped of expression. I meet my own eyes, and, without a word, my other self steps off.
The veins in my neck stand out lividly, my feet kick, but my hands don’t reach up. It’s a reflex, the last gasps of a dying body, of the meat that contains me, struggling for air, for life. It wants to keep going so badly. My feet stop kicking, my body hangs limp. I looked so peaceful, as if sleeping midair.
And then I heard the hiss of my father’s voice in my ear, in my mind; Coward. I hesitated, just for a moment; I wanted to retort, to deny it, but I couldn’t. Because I was.
That’s what they call suicides. Cowardly. Selfish. But looking around at the little clumps of people on the train, part of me truly doesn’t understand—how do they do it? How do they fill the minutes and hours and days and years of their lives? What’s missing in me that I don’t know how to fill mine? That I don’t want to?
There’s so much time, endless time, and I stand here in the centre of it with my dick in my hand, completely clueless.
It’s wrong, they say. Selfish, they say. Most people would do anything to get more time. They would kill me if they could steal mine.
I look at Mara—she’s been through hell, and she did what she had to, to get out of it. She fought to stay here, and not for me. For her.
That was always Mara’s purpose—to hold on to herself. From the very first, it’s what she worried about most.
When we burned her grandmother’s doll and found the pendant inside of it, the one that matched mine, and the one the professor had sent Jamie, we’d retreated to my room. She was shaking, ashen, and I was desperate to help her.
“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” I remember saying. “Tell me what you want and it’s yours.”
“I’m afraid I’m losing control,” she had said.
“I won’t let that happen.”
“You can’t stop it,” Mara said back. “All you can do is watch.”
I’d felt powerless for so long, I was resigned to it. All I could do was watch. And then she’d said:
“Tell me what you see. Because I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t or what’s new or different, and I can’t trust myself, but I trust you. Or don’t tell me, because I might not remember. Write it down, and then maybe someday, if I ever get better, let me read it. Otherwise, I’ll change a little bit every day and never know who I was until I’m gone.”
Mara was so wrong about herself, and so right about me. She was never in danger of losing herself. If anything, she became herself, and she never needed me or anyone to remind her.
I, on the other hand. I’ve always wanted to lose myself. She’s all I’ve ever wanted to hold on to. So if I could die, if I lost Mara the way Felix lost Felicity? I would probably do what he did too.
I’ve failed to notice that we’re off the train, at the clock tower, in the lift. Mara unlocks the door, and once we’re in, Goose explodes.
“Okay. Someone seriously needs to tell me what the bloody fuck is happening. And by someone, mate, I mean you.” He rounds on me.
“It’s . . . complicated,” I say to Goose.
“Yeah, twigged that,” he says. “But, really, you couldn’t be arsed to tell me about any of this before?”
“When?” I ask. “When would’ve been a good time to tell you about—”
“About your bloody superpowers? That girl back there, all of that—you’re putting me on, somehow, right?” He looks from me to Jamie. Jamie shakes his head slowly.
Goose falls back onto the sofa, closes his eyes and rubs his temples. “Well then, you’re going to catch me up, because despite that girl reading my mind and whatever else the fuck was happening back there, I’m not at all convinced you’re not taking the piss.”
I sigh. Only one way to convince him. Jamie’s ability is difficult to prove. Mara’s—well. Self-explanatory. But mine. I glide to the kitchen, begin opening drawers. Then I find what I’ve been looking for—the knife block. The sound it makes when I slide the chef’s knife out makes my blood quicken.
“No.” Mara’s voice is clear, defiant. Loud. “You’re not doing that.”
“You know,” Jamie says, making his way to the kitchen, “I’ve always wanted to see this, actually.”
“No.”
“Mara, it’s the only way.”