The lights slam on at once, the sudden artificial brightness a bit shocking. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything in here that’s going to help prevent whatever’s going on,” I say, looking up at the towering shelves, “but you do. And I trust you with whatever might or might not be in here.”
Daniel’s quiet, staring ahead at the aisles that go on forever.
“So this is what’s happening today,” I go on. “Mara, Jamie, and Goose are at the brownstone with Leo—”
“And Sophie, probably,” Daniel mumbles.
I shrug a shoulder, as if it doesn’t matter. “Perhaps. No one’s texted yet, and I don’t much care, honestly. But listen—there was a map that I just barely got a glimpse of—I have a near-photographic memory, but the room was dark and I couldn’t make everything out. Now that we’re all on the same team—”
Daniel’s eyes drop, and he looks away.
“The same let’s-not-allow-innocent-people-to-die team,” I inhale, trying not to sound frustrated. “You’ve always thought the answer to the suicide question was here. So Mara and Jamie and Goose are there, collecting names of the other Carriers, places they came from, their abilities, and most importantly, getting you pictures of that map. And you’re going to cross-reference them with the shit in here.”
Daniel barks out a laugh. “You have no idea how it works.”
“All right, how does it work?”
“Kells gave the kids she experimented on false names, so they couldn’t be traced in case anyone did find this place. I assume that was your father’s suggestion,” Daniel says. Sounds like it. “So trying to match up names, find files—the idea of cross-referencing them is”—he looks up at the scale of the building—“It’s impossible.”
“Even with that map?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” He bites his lower lip. “There’s a system. That’s how I found Kells’s own files and everything I thought we’d need, which we brought to Jamie’s aunt’s house and which Stella apparently went back and stole.” He exhales. “But we were looking for different stuff then—the stuff that led to Jude and Mara and all that. We might—if I knew where these other Gifted kids were born, maybe, well—obviously, actually—there were probably other so-called treatment facilities. I mean, has anyone even asked where Leo is from?”
My thoughts exactly. A corner of my mouth lifts. “This is why you’re doing this.” Pause. “And no one else.”
His eyebrows scrunch together. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m granting you access. You and only you.”
“So when you told Leo you were going to let him come here with me and Mara, what you actually meant was—”
“The exact opposite.”
He doesn’t seem surprised, but he is a bit frustrated. “I need at least someone to bounce stuff off of, help me go through things. Divide and conquer, you know?”
I wave that off. “You’re not giving yourself enough credit, mate.”
But Mara and Daniel wear what they’re feeling, and I know what Daniel’s about to say before he says it.
“You’re talking about Mara,” he says. You don’t want Mara to know that I’m here.”
Carefully, I say, “I don’t want anyone to know, including Mara.”
“Why not?”
I let out a tight sigh. “You know why not.”
At this, he bristles. “No, I don’t. You love her, but you don’t trust her?”
I see immediately where that train of thought’s headed, given Sophie’s betrayal, and stop it before it gets there. “That’s not it at all. Look, when it comes to me, her, and most importantly, anything that has to do with my father and our history? Mara isn’t a girlfriend I’m keeping secrets from. She’s . . .” I search for the right word, one that’ll trigger the response I need without risking a response I can’t manage. “Unpredictable,” I say finally. Every word matters right now. “You know what Mara can do,” I say, rather than You know what Mara’s capable of.
An interminable pause before Daniel shrugs one shoulder. Enough for me to go on.
“Have you ever seen her do it?” I ask, swerving hard to avoid specifics.
Daniel does the same. “You mean, face-to-face?”
“Face-to-face, or on camera, or anything like that? With her mind or with her hands?”
Wrong words, those. I can physically see Daniel’s attitude change. “She killed people, and I use the term ‘people’ loosely, in self-defence.” Loyal to a fault, the Dyer family. He loves her so much. Therein lies the rub.
For me as well. The word “love” doesn’t begin to capture what I feel for her. But I do see her in a way that he can’t—that no one else can. We’ve seen each other raw, stripped down to our essences, for better and worse. I recognise her, and she recognises me. I love her for the person she is, not the person I think she is, or want her to be, because I don’t want her to be anything else.
Daniel’s love is different. He can’t see her that way. In fact, I’m sure Mara’s gone to great lengths to avoid sharing that private, secret pleasure she takes in her ability to destroy.
“You don’t think she also wants this to stop?” He looks incredulous. “You think she wants people dead?”
I don’t know what she wants, I don’t say. I don’t know whom she wants dead, is the truth.
“She’s not a serial killer,” Daniel says. “She’s not a mass murderer.”
They are statements, not questions, and I’m not even sure Daniel believes them. His heart is racing, I notice uneasily.
The thoughts that arise bubble up from my conversation with Stella. If Mara does have something to do with it, it can’t be intentional—it doesn’t fit her pattern. “Whatever she does, she does because she believes it’s justified,” I say, trying to ease his mind a bit. And mine. “And I do trust her.”
“I sense a ‘but’ in the future of that sentence . . . .”
I shake my head. “There isn’t one. I love her. I’d do anything to protect her. And this is how to protect her. There is something about Mara that separates her from people like Stella, and Leo, Sophie—”
Daniel’s expression darkens. “Right. Sophie.”
“And Felix and Felicity, and even Jamie.”
“And you,” Daniel says, voicing what I avoided.
“Right. Me as well. You heard what Sophie said. She can’t sense me for some reason.” Maybe I should feel paranoid, or unnerved, but mostly I feel numb.
“But she can sense Mara.” He swallows. “You think she might—be at risk in some way?”
Not in the way Daniel’s thinking. But perhaps I can use it, his fear for her, so I nod.
He thinks about that for a moment, then takes a few steps forward, running his hands over some of the labels on the boxes nearest us. “I’ve been thinking that the common factor might not necessarily be a person but a trait.”
Yes. Brilliant. “What sort?”
“You’ve seen the list, right?”
“Which?”
He walks farther, footsteps echoing on the cement. “Dr. Kells created this list that she showed to Mara and Jamie and Stella, too, I’m guessing. There were two versions, actually—one that said you were alive, one that said you were dead.”
Ah. That list.
“Both listed all of your names, along with a bunch of others, Jude’s included, and had this designation after it,” he says. He peers over into the next aisle. “?‘Original,’ ‘suspected original,’ or ‘artificially manifested or induced.’?”
“You think that’s got something to do with all this?”
“Maybe,” Daniel says. “I mean, part of what was brilliant about what Kells did was giving the twins she worked on aliases.”
This I’d heard about only in the briefest of summaries—my own fault. Mara didn’t talk about it, so I didn’t ask.
“Go on,” I urge Daniel as broadly as I can. I’m not sure I want him to know just how much I don’t know.
“The infants she fostered—I only found records here under their aliases, corresponding with the alphabet. It was all coded, and they died at different ages, from different symptoms, but there were at least seven, not including Jude and Claire, and someone, somewhere, would know about it if they were all from the same locations.”
“But they weren’t.”
Daniel shakes his head. “From all over the country. As diverse a roster as she could manage, probably. And she was on your father’s payroll then, so he’d have helped cover tracks.”