No wonder he’d moved us to the States, ultimately. “It’s a big country.”
“It’s a big world,” Daniel says. “Like I said, looking for names in here won’t get us far, but if we think more broadly—countries or cities of origin, birth dates, maybe, somewhere buried in what will probably look like a bunch of useless boilerplate corporate crap, we might find records for at least some of the people who’ve . . .”
“Gone missing,” I finish for him.
“I thought of looking up Stella’s stuff in here, actually, once she popped up here in the city. That was one of my first thoughts when I came to you.” His eyes rake over the height of the shelves, resting at the top.
“Why didn’t you just say so when you first asked me?”
He pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose—a nervous tic of his. “Mara and Stella and Jamie have an . . . unusual dynamic,” he says finally.
“You didn’t want Mara to hear about your plans either,” I say, feeling rather self-righteous for a moment until Daniel shakes his head.
“Actually, it was Jamie I was thinking of.”
Well, well. “Why’s that?”
“So, I always thought it was odd that Stella was designated as a ‘suspected original.’ Not ‘original,’ like you and Mara, not ‘artificially manifested,’ like Jude. Once, when Mara wasn’t around, I asked Jamie about it.” He turns to face me. “Actually, it was when you guys all got those letters, remember?”
Would that I could forget.
“Anyway, we’d been talking about the Superman versus Spider-Man thing, born versus made theory, and I brought up the theory that maybe they didn’t know Stella’s genetic history when that list was made, and maybe that was how they were typing you guys.”
Typing. I wonder for a moment if Daniel knows about the archetypes we supposedly represent—where my parents got the idea that I was destined to be some great Hero, and my father’s conviction about Mara being the Shadow, destroyer of worlds or some shite. That all came from the professor, a subject I’m desperate to avoid.
“Anyway, Jamie mentioned that he was also a ‘suspected original,’ and I knew he was adopted; I kind of wanted to push the issue but, you know, still be . . . sensitive? Anyway, he went to get the mail when that came up. Stella got a letter too,” Daniel says. “Remember?”
Now that he mentions it, I do, but just barely. Daniel had thanked me for saving his life from my own father, and I was trying to close my eyes to the world, just then. But I nod anyway.
“I felt kind of left out. I didn’t ask to read Mara’s because she’d just been through . . . stuff. All of you guys had been, so I kind of wandered off to give you space. When I saw Jamie next, he was wearing that pendant you used to wear, and was acting totally different. I tried to pick up the conversation we’d been having before, but he shut it down.”
Not surprising.
“But I asked him what he thought we should do with Stella’s letter, given that she’d left. I thought we should throw it out, maintain her privacy. You know what he said? ‘We’ll be seeing her again.’?”
“That’s . . .” I struggle for the word.
“Weird?” Daniel’s nodding his head. “Yeah. Back then I thought it was just something to say, like, Oh, Stella’s around, not lost and gone forever, that sort of thing—but now?”
“Now it’s weird,” I echo.
“And did you see Jamie seize on it when Leo mentioned that those guys all practiced their abilities together?”
“What if everything that’s happening is someone flexing their little Gift?” I think out loud.
Daniel’s brow furrows. “It could even be unintentional.”
“Could be.” Doubt it is. I doubt equally that Jamie’s the one responsible, but that he might be connected to whomever is seems more plausible by the moment.
“What do you make of Leo’s tattoo?” Daniel asks me, and I go still. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you seizing on that at the brownstone.”
It takes a conscious effort to remain blank.
“Leo’s tattoo. Jamie’s pendant—”
And mine. And Mara’s.
“Which he got from Lukumi or Armin Lenaurd or whoever he is, who wrote the letters you all got. I thought you liked me because I was smart.”
“More for your dashing good looks,” I say. “But fair play to you. Make anything of it?”
“Where did you get your pendant from?” he asks.
I play the only card I have. “My mother,” I say. “I found it in her things after she died.”
“Oh,” Daniel says, shifting his weight.
This was the moment. I could tell Daniel my sordid family history and my pathetic little sob stories, tell him about the letter my mother wrote me, the letter the professor wrote Mara, and on and on until he knew everything. About me. About us.
But Mara hadn’t told him. She kept her letter to herself.
You will grow in strength and conviction, and apart from you, Noah will too, the professor had written to her. You will love Noah Shaw to ruins, unless you let him go.
That’s why she’d kept it from her brother all this time. She’d let me read it, though. It was our grand fight, the one we repeated in a hundred incarnations over the hundreds of thousands of hours we’ve spent together. Whether she should leave me, for my sake.
I have seen his death a thousand ways in a thousand dreams over a thousand nights, and the only one who can prevent it is you.
I refused to accept that then, and I refuse now. The stakes for Daniel are different, needless to say.
“Do you think the professor’s still a player?” I ask, as if it hadn’t occurred to me before now. If I hadn’t just mentioned my dead mother, he’d likely call me on it.
His eyes narrow just slightly behind the lenses of his dark frames as he nods. “He could be a candidate for chess master this time around . . . .” His voice trails off awkwardly, having invoked both of my dead parents in short order.
I do wonder, though, what he would think if I told him everything. “What would that entail?” I ask. Hypotheticals are safe ground for him. For both of us.
“I mean, Jamie mentioned ‘precogs’ when we met with Leo, and the guy’s always seemed to be one step ahead of us in the past . . . .”
“But how would that even work?” I say. “He knows everything that’s ever going to happen? Free will doesn’t exist?”
“It . . . would present a lot of philosophical problems,” Daniel says, nodding.
“You’re a man of science. What do you believe?” I ask, genuinely curious.
He smiles now, back on familiar territory. “Admittedly, your ability and Mara’s and Jamie’s and so on strain the boundaries of logic, but there’s at least a framework for them. Limitations. You’re carriers of a gene that’s turned on by environmental and biological factors. Cancer works that way, so, it’s precedented at least. Through some, I don’t know, maybe subatomic mechanism, that gene enables you to affect matter in different ways. Lukumi was also the author of New Theories in Genetics,” he says, shrugging. “It seemed absurd when Mara first showed it to me, but then, well, you know the rest.”
I do. “So, do you believe in free will, or predestination?”
“Free will,” he says decisively.
I know things that Daniel doesn’t, and I’ve seen things he hasn’t, but I believe the same. I have to. Or else, what’s the point?
33
HOW VAIN IT IS
WE LEAVE THE ARCHIVES SHORTLY after, having satisfied Daniel’s curiosity and letting him reach his own conclusions about what to do next.
“Get invited back to the brownstone, find points of origin for all the Carriers Leo knows, cross-reference for subsidiaries of your father’s company that might’ve operated there or nearby, and then use that to come back here and see if there’s a Kells-ish person in the mental health field who’s treated more than one of them, who might be at the hub of a particular wheel. Start small, branch out.”
“Brilliant,” I say. The metal shutter screeches as I pull it down over the door. “We start tonight.”
“Have your flatmates send their pictures over to me, and I’ll start on the map. And you . . .” He waits expectantly.
“Will talk to Jamie.”