Her face goes slack. “She’s still alive. Burning. He’s not going to save her in time.” She lets out a bitter laugh. “I knew he wouldn’t.” She blinks, looks down at something, then back at the lens. “I think you could, though, if you opened your mind to it. To them. But she’d never let you. She wants you broken. She likes broken things. Loves that she’s the one breaking you.”
She picks up something else—she must have her mobile resting against something, because the lens goes dark, but we can still hear her.
“I bought these, too.” In the next frame, you can see a hunting knife and a bottle of something, as well as needles. “I can feel you in here, but I’m still me. My time’s not up yet. I mean, I know there’s nothing I can do at this point”—she shrugs casually—“I was made this way, to not be able to fight you. But I figure, at least I can choose how I die?” Her face vanishes, and the shot pans over the knife, the needles and a syringe, the gun and a box of ammunition, lingering on each for a shaky moment. “But nothing here’s really speaking to me.” She inhales deeply. “The gun feels like you. The needles . . . definitely not you. You hate needles. You used to hate blood, remember?” She throws back her head, laughing. Her throat moves, fills the shot. “You’ve changed a lot.” Her expression hardens, her eyes distant again. “We all did. But you the most.”
There’s a knock on the front door, and Jamie pauses the video just as I shake my head. “Goose, let them in. Daniel, how long does it go on?”
“I think it’s still going,” he says, glancing back up at the TV. Jamie checks his mobile before getting up as well.
I lower my voice. “You know what Stella’s saying,” I say to Daniel. “Do you think Mara . . . ?” My voice trails off. I can’t even make myself say it, not even to him. I twist around—Jamie’s still by the door, with Sophie and Leo and Goose. Where is Mara?
Daniel shakes his head. “This points at her, yeah. But I don’t think it is.”
“Why?”
“Listen to how Stella’s describing it—this isn’t murder. This is—someone’s in their heads, influencing them to do it. Coercing them.” He glances back at the door. Jamie’s on his way back over, along with Goose and Sophie and Leo. “Did you do what you said you would?”
I nod.
“And?” he asks.
“Gang’s all here,” Jamie says, standing beside Goose, Leo, and Sophie.
I remember last night. The scalpel Mara hid. The secrets she’s kept. I swallow my words, put my fist out to stop the train of thought that’s barrelling toward me. I catch Daniel’s eye and shake my head. He would rather believe it’s got something to do with Jamie. But this isn’t Jamie.
Sophie’s seated on another sofa, and Goose has taken the armchair. Leo’s standing, watching the silent news.
“I’m sorry,” I begin, looking at him. “About Felicity.” No response.
“The news picked up the explosion,” Sophie says. “Her parents . . .” Her cheeks and nose are red. She’s been crying.
Daniel turns to me. “That building is in your name,” he says quietly. “You’re going to start getting calls.”
“I haven’t heard anything.” I check my pockets. My mobile isn’t with me. Must’ve left it upstairs.
“You should check your phone,” Daniel says. “People are probably trying to reach you.”
I’m not sure how much I care, but I rise anyway. “Keep watching,” I tell them, though only Daniel and Sophie seem to be listening to me. “See if there’s anything that gives away where Stella is. Sophie, you haven’t seen her, have you?”
She shakes her head. “She’s missing, for me. Still. She didn’t . . . flare. If that’s what you’re asking.”
It is. “So there’s still time.”
“Uh, mates?” Goose has unmuted the television. “You should hear this.”
Stella had been missing from the frame, but she’s picked up her mobile again, or whatever she’s using to record herself.
“I want you to see it,” Stella says to the lens. “To watch me do it, not from inside my head but what it looks like on the outside, too. I’ve got all this stuff here, but it’s not . . .” She shakes her head. “It’s not what I want. Not that I want this at all, but since I don’t have a choice—since you’re bullying me into suicide, basically, at least I can still choose to go out the way I want. I still have some choices left.”
The echoes from my conversations with Daniel, with Jamie, with Mara—it’s as though she’d been listening.
“That’s why I’m recording it all. Everything. I know you think you’re the most loyal person alive, that I already betrayed you by leaving you—you realise I could name you, you know, right? All of you? I know you’re watching this. I want all of you to see me do it, but . . . this isn’t . . . right. It’s not . . . personal enough.” Stella looks somewhere else, then back at the lens. “I want your eyes looking at my eyes when she kills me. I want you to see what she’s really capable of,” she says, and a cold finger trails the back of my neck, because I know she’s speaking to me. “You won’t believe it any other way.”
Then Stella reaches toward the lens, and the screen fades to black.
38
THE CHIEF END OF MAN
LOOKS LIKE YOU GOT YOUR wish.”
It takes me half a second to register that it’s Leo speaking. He’s still staring at the television screen.
“Pardon?” I ask, because no one else speaks up.
“The archives are gone, just like you wanted,” he says plainly. “Whoever killed her made sure she’d throw you a bone on her way out.”
It doesn’t escape me that he uses the pronoun “she.” Unconsciously, I look for Mara again. “That’s not fair,” I say, unsure if I’m saying it in my own defence, or hers.
“Not fair?”
“Guys.” Daniel stands up, between Leo and me. “This is the exact definition of ‘unhelpful.’ Leo, I am truly, terribly sorry about Felicity, but we might still be able to help Stella. Sophie, is there anything at all, any way you can tell if she’s . . . around?” He’s grasping at straws, and Sophie’s the nearest.
“It’s not like she’s wearing a GPS collar,” Sophie says flatly.
Daniel closes his eyes. He’s not one to shout, but if there were ever a day to start . . .
“I’m going to check if anyone’s called,” I tell him, hoping to redirect him for the moment. He meets my eyes. Nods.
I avoid giving Leo the satisfaction of my attention as I pass, and climb the stairs. Not that I’d know what to say to anyone if they were to call, which version of the truth to hand over, and let them pick at. I consider shutting my mobile off when I find it, until I remember that Stella has my number and might call or text.
My pace quickens—she might’ve called already. The office door is cracked open. I push it the rest of the way to find Mara sitting on the floor.
She’s sitting cross-legged, holding the journal I’d just read from in one hand, while in the other, a letter, old, unfolded. The small silvered trunk is still open.
She looks up at me through a fringe of black lashes. Her expression isn’t guilty, or ashamed, or even angry. It’s nothing.
Mara speaks first. “You didn’t tell me.”
I don’t know which letter she’s holding, I’ve no idea what pages she’s read, but it doesn’t matter. It’s enough that she didn’t ask, and feels entitled enough to accuse me of hiding things from her.
“We don’t have time for this,” I force myself to say. She stares at me like I’m speaking another language, and I’m reminded of the way she looked when she got up from bed one night and threw out her grandmother’s doll, with no memory of it in the morning. Maybe Daniel’s right, and it is involuntary, and she’s got no control of it.
I crouch, taking the letter and journal from her hand. Making contact with her skin. “Felicity’s dead,” I say. “And Stella . . .”
The name brings her to life. “I saw.”
I examine her face, search her eyes, but she looks like herself. Sounds like herself. “You didn’t see her big finish,” I say finally.
Mara blinks, once. “She didn’t—”
“No. Not yet. But she was talking to us. In the . . . film . . . she made.”
“Did she name me?”