A dark look up through dark lashes. “I’m going to bed.” She doesn’t look tired. I think I hear her heart charged up, her pulse pounding in her veins.
“I’ll be a bit,” I say. “I want to clear up.”
She nods, then, letting out a long-held breath, says, “I could kill her for what she did to Daniel.”
An edge of a grin. “Literally or figuratively?”
She kisses me lightly on the mouth, then darts up the stairs and calls out, “Haven’t decided yet.”
With Mara, there’s no way to tell whether she means it.
31
BY MY EXPERIMENT
UNABLE TO SLEEP, I CLEAR the untouched mess left in the wake of the inquisition on my own and am in the kitchen burning toast and making tea when Mara descends the stairs at dawn, desultory. The sun fades in through the windows, pale and weak.
“Morning,” I say.
“God is dead.”
“Coffee?”
“Fuck you.”
“Again?”
She folds her arms on the counter and lets her head fall over them, issuing a muffled, “I hate everything.”
I ignore the toast and the prospect of tea (and sex, let’s be honest) and stand beside her. Stroke back her hair, prompting a turn of her head that leaves one cheek and eye exposed. She’s so hurt I ache.
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know. He’s been crazy about her since our first day at Croyden. And now he thinks she only started talking to him because of me. To find out more about me.”
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him now.”
Mara rounds on me. “She lied—”
“Don’t we all?”
“Why are you defending her?”
A good question. I do find myself sympathising with Sophie a bit. Something she said last night—seeing Beth in the subway, her light appearing on Sophie’s mental map again just in time for her to snuff it out herself. I know what that’s like.
There’s much about Leo and his little operation, which we now know includes Sophie, that I find suspect—but so far I can’t find an excuse to lay the blame for Sam’s and Beth’s deaths at their feet. And so far they’re the only ones with real connections to the Gifted who’ve gone missing. Not us.
What’s different about us?
“Look,” I say, needing to appease Mara before I can get away to think on it. “Daniel was betrayed by someone he loves. It’s savage. But here’s the thing: Part of that betrayal isn’t heartbreak—it’s because she had her eyes on you. It’s because he loves you that he’s hurting so much. He feels like he should’ve seen it coming.”
An assumption, surely; one I make because it’s how I feel about her, though there’s no one more capable of protecting Mara than Mara. But I know Daniel as well.
“He feels like he failed you,” I say.
Incredulous, she says, “How could he think that?”
“Because he feels responsible for you.”
“But he knows me, he knows what I can do—”
“He’s your big brother. No matter how strong you are, he’ll always worry about you.” A stirring of guilt, because I’m not there, haven’t been there, for my own sister. Haven’t even been thinking about how she’s faring in the roiling, shark-infested sea of adolescence and mourning the loss of her doting father.
Mara’s face falls again. “I know. I hate what she did to him.”
I let Mara have that, but, confession, I don’t. Hate her, that is. Sophie lied by omission, true, and she may well have been spying on us for Leo et al., of course. But I haven’t got the sense that it was malicious. Wary, yes. Curious, surely. But we’ve been acting the same toward them, in truth.
Despite differences in specifics, they want what (most of us) want: answers. The truth. They care about one another the way we do.
And then, I’ve an idea. “I think you, Jamie, and Goose should meet with Leo today.”
“What?” Mara rears back a bit. “Now?”
“Now that we know what we know from Sophie, I think we’ve got to come around to the fact that Stella’s genuinely missing. It’s been a long fucking night, and I’ve thought about it. Two of us have killed ourselves already—Sam hung himself, Beth jumped in front of a train.” Mara dips her head, knowing what’s coming, that I’m right, before I say it. “We should work with the others. Match the pieces we have with whatever they’ve got. You and Jamie and Goose, despite his appearance to the contrary, are brilliant.”
“So why don’t we figure it out on our own?”
“Because we had no idea who they were. They might have some documents and tapes and reports and shite, but we don’t know the people this has been happening to, Stella excepted. Sophie and Leo do. It’s their friends committing suicide so far, but there’s a grand design somewhere, and a clock counting down, and we’ve no idea when, or for whom. If we want to find a connection, we need to look, really look, at the people connected, and so far, that’s them.”
Mara wilts into a curl of sulk.
“What? You don’t want to go?” You don’t want to help Stella is the question I don’t ask.
“It’s not that. I’m just—I hate leaving Daniel alone.”
“He needs it.”
Mara reaches out, tugs at the hem of my shirt. “Why don’t you come with us?” she asks.
I wind a finger around her hair, concealing the tiniest hint of resentment and self-loathing in my voice. “I want to look through the things the solicitors sent over. From England,” I lie. Sort of.
“And you want to be alone.”
“No,” I say. “It’s just that you sorting through old architectural plans and whatever else is likely to be less productive than you sorting through what Leo and Sophie collected. No one knows more about what really happened at Horizons than you,” I say. “And Jamie.”
Jamie descends the stairs first. “Off to find the droids we’re looking for, I hear.”
“You’ll keep yourself entertained, I trust?” asks Goose, right behind him.
“Always,” I say as they pocket their mobiles and shrug into jackets. The sun arrows through the glass clocks, slicing the apartment’s shadow with white.
Mara tosses one watchful look over her shoulder, so I half smile at her. “Don’t be too long,” I say, just loudly enough for her to hear it.
She turns away, but not before I glimpse her eyes rolling and a grin on her face. I shut the door behind them.
And head straight for Daniel.
32
MEN OF STRAW
I KNOCK ON HIS DOOR, not politely. I try the door and it’s locked. “Daniel!” I shout. “It’s an emergency! I need your—”
He opens the door, eyes bloodshot but wide. “What is it? What happened?”
“Time to wake up.”
His face puddles into confusion. “What—”
“Nothing happened. Everything’s fine.”
“Then what the hell—”
“I need your help.”
“You’re going to have to live with disappointment,” he says, and begins to close the door.
I stop it with my hand. “Sorry, but no. Get dressed. You’ve got class.”
“I’m skipping.”
“Daniel, Daniel. Remember who you are.”
Nothing. His eyelids droop, his arms cross against his chest. “I just want to be alone, okay?”
He sounds pathetic, and it does pull at the single heartstring in my chest, but.
Petulant, he adds, “You said I’d be left alone.”
“I say a lot of things. And anyway we did leave you alone last night. Time’s up. Get dressed.”
His nostrils flare, and for a second I see the family resemblance that’s normally hidden between him and Mara. “Where are we going?”
“I think you know.”
I’d never wanted to see the place before, and now that I stand here, looking up at it, nondescript and shuttered in a toxically ugly part of Brooklyn, I feel justified. There are windows stretching up for stories, boarded shut, crudely. Father always was good at hiding.
“You’re serious?” Daniel asks, staring at the building.
“Deadly,” I say. I lift the metal shutter; it groans in protestation, and I feel my way for the lock. The rusted red door opens, and I slide my hand over the wall for the light switch.