“You’re thieves,” I say, the realisation dawning. They haven’t been offing Carriers to stay hidden, like I thought, like I suggested to Goose. “You’re stealing abilities—”
“When someone dies, as has happened naturally over time, of course, or unnaturally, due to your father’s interference, we’ve seen others born with that same ability, eventually,” Victoria says. I wait for her to explain further. She doesn’t, leaving me to listen for what she doesn’t say.
Eventually, she said. Eventually isn’t now, though, is it. “You accelerate the process,” I say. “By which I mean, you kill them.”
Victoria hesitates. “The unique genetic imprint of a Carrier’s ability seems to remain intact after they die.”
“Allowing you to steal it.”
“Recycle,” M corrects.
I narrow my eyes, not sure who to aim my questions at. I settle on M, though she seems to be taking this less seriously than Victoria—seems being the operative word. Nothing they say can be trusted.
“How do you decide who gets which ability, once a Carrier’s dead?” I ask, trying to sound neutral. “This can’t be all of you. How many of you are there?”
“Normally, how it works is everyone gathers at a site of ancient importance, whilst wearing robes, and we draw lots and chant until the next person’s chosen. That’s why the party tonight, and the fresh local corpse.” She almost keeps a straight face, but cracks at the end. “Fuck! Nearly had it.”
She sounds like Mara, just then, and it’s like a spike through my chest. She adapts, chameleonic, until all verbal traces of the past hundred and fifty years are stripped away. If I were blind, without my ability, I might not know the difference. I’m nearly speechless with horror.
Nearly.
“You’re not funny,” I force myself to say, flattening my voice so it hovers between contemptuous and bored. “Just really fucking sad.”
“You’re not exactly a barrel of laughs yourself,” she replies. “I honestly can’t puzzle out what my granddaughter saw in you.”
“She was probably just using me for sex,” I say, shrugging. Then, “You must be very weak, if you have to shepherd kids to their deaths, force them off ledges, platforms—”
“No,” Charlie says. It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice. “No one was ever forced before.”
“Not by us, at least,” M says lightly. But there’s a spark in her eyes.
“Which one of you does it?” I press, looking at each in turn.
“None of us,” says Victoria. M sucks in her lips, biting back a grin. A sprite, mischievous and teasing.
None of them. Which means . . . one of us?
The room shudders, and a film begins to form on my vision, like frosted glass. A crack spiders out from the centre top, splitting and branching until M, Victoria, Dalrymple, Jamie, Charlie, and Isaac are reduced to vague shapes and desaturated colours. Then it shatters. Everything’s the same, everyone’s the same except—
Sophie’s wearing a chartreuse silk dress, standing in the spot Charlie occupied just seconds ago.
44
THE PASSION OF THE POSSIBLE
HOLY SHIT,” JAMIE MURMURS.
I went to school with Sophie Hall for years. Jamie, longer. She’d proven herself a liar already, having betrayed Daniel’s trust, and that was shit, obviously, but normal, human shit. This—whatever this is, that I’m looking at, is . . . malevolence.
A wave of revulsion crests, breaks. Isaac’s feeling it too—even his expert poker face can’t disguise his horror at the betrayal.
She tucks her short blond hair behind one ear, an anxious expression on her face.
I can’t fathom it. Don’t know where to begin, what to say, how to process the layers of deception and make sense out of whatever polluted motive is behind them. So instead I say, “Mara’s going to kill you. And she’s going to do it slowly.”
Sophie’s blue eyes are like water, translucent. “There are worse things than death,” she says.
I nod calmly. “I hear psychological torture’s pretty fucking brutal. Though you’d have to ask Felicity and Sam and Beth and Stella and Leo and whoever else you’ve manipulated about that. Or, I suppose not, since they’re all either dead or brain-dead, in Stella’s case.”
Stella, who blamed Mara right up till the end. Everyone probably had, at one point—I’d even wondered myself. She was guilty of so much else, it was almost easy. M said it herself, didn’t she?
If you spend your life in a house with no windows and no doors, if you’ve never seen a tree reaching for the sky, or felt grass under your feet, or heard a bird’s wings beat the air, your eyes might be open, but how much can you see?
If someone controls what you see, that affects what you believe. And that affects what you do.
Sophie walked in our footsteps, painting over doors if we walked out of the room, hanging pictures over windows when we looked the other way. Manipulated the view.
But who designed the house?
“Daniel isn’t dead,” Sophie says, cutting into my thoughts. “Yet.”
“Yet.” I repeat the threat, or the promise, or whatever it is that invoking Daniel’s name is supposed to do. I glance at Jamie, feigning scepticism to mask my anger. “I don’t know, you think that’ll save her once Mara finds out what she is?”
A rage, explosive and shocking in its suddenness, overcomes her. “I am what your father made me!” she screams, her short, slight frame trembling. “I had a life before him. He made it a living hell. I’m still living with it, every fucking day!” She’s still shaking after she’s gone quiet.
No one speaks, giving me time to consider what to say next. Jamie offers nothing, not a clue, no help at all, so I stay silent. Sort of.
I catch Sophie’s eye, and rub my forefinger and thumb together.
She crosses the room and grabs my hand mid–tiny violin gesture, trying to crush my fingers in hers. She’s much smaller than I am, but it does hurt when someone actively tries to rebreak one’s fingers. I can’t move due to whatever’s been done to me by someone in this room—Charlie, I thought then. Could be Victoria, though—could be any of them. Anything I see, hear, think, might have some construction of theirs. Might not be real.
No wonder Isaac lives the way he does.
“You do understand that I rather enjoy pain, right?” I ask Sophie. The skin on her pale chest flushes, up to her neck and cheeks. A vein bisects her forehead.
I’m genuinely surprised when she drops my hand instead of hitting me.
“Like your father,” she spits.
A beat. Then, to Sophie, “Please, do tell me your tale of woe,” I say as flatly as I can, hoping to buy more time to work it out. “The origin story that made you betray and manipulate and murder your friends and lovers and everyone who trusted you.”
“I didn’t murder them—”
“Wrong,” I say. “I heard their last thoughts, begging for help. They didn’t want to die until you made them want it.” I look to Jamie again. “So much for that self-destruct claim.”
“We all wanted it,” Sophie says, her face going pale again. “We all thought about it. That’s how your father engineered us,” she spits.
“Thinking’s not doing, though, is it,” I say. “You’re still here, after all.”
“That’s not a reward, it’s a punishment,” Sophie says, her eyes filling with tears. Victoria interrupts us.
“You should go, Soph. Get some rest.” A tear spills, rolls down Sophie’s cheek as she nods. Victoria whispers something to her and strokes the crown of her head, once. Then Sophie wordlessly leaves the room.
“Well,” I say to M, Victoria, and Dalrymple. “She’s mad.”
“Sophie wrestles with big emotions,” Victoria says, and I nearly laugh out loud at the understatement. “She isn’t delusional, but she struggles with reality sometimes, and—”
“And no doubt one of you helped her with that struggle,” I say. “I don’t care. Hon
estly, truly I don’t. If she’s sick or broken or Frankenstein’s monster, it doesn’t matter. We’re all sick. We’re all broken. We still have a choice.”
M is nodding. It’s deeply alarming, her agreeing with me. “You’re right. We all have a choice. Sophie’s daily existence is such misery she thinks it’s merciful, to end it for others like her.” Shades of the professor in her voice, now, the cadence and tone. “Especially once she knew she was helping some of us.”
Dalrymple dabs at his forehead with his kerchief. “I was able to do what that young fellow Leo could, once upon,” he says forlornly. “I helped find others like myself. I’d know everything about them. Names, histories, temperaments.” His shoulders heave with a wistful sigh. “Even helped some of your family,” he says, nudging me with his elbow.
Family. He was at my father’s funeral, he said. And he was there when Sam died—Victoria, too.
It’s M’s face I watch, though, as Victoria speaks. M, who revealed herself in calculated fits and starts, unspooling just enough details each time to fit with what Mara might’ve told me, what I might’ve read in family letters and journals. Using them as a lure when baiting me with the promise of saving Mara didn’t work, arranging them so they propped up a narrative casting the professor as the villain. And Simon, with him.
“You were right,” she says. “Our Gifts age too. Like the rest of us. Not as fast, not the same, but they weaken, with time.”
I look from her, to M, to Dalrymple, finally, beginning to understand. Leo’s death returned his Gift. Made him stronger.
“The more of us there are, the weaker you get,” I say. “Have I got it right?” I don’t need to look at Dalrymple’s reddening face to know that I am.
“Half right,” M says. “You’re one of us too. Born, not made.”
I stare blankly for a moment, before turning to Victoria. “So, you’ve rounded us up, revealed the plot twist, fed me some answers wrapped in bullshit justifications. What now? The plea for assistance?” I turn to M. “Or wait, no—we’re past that, aren’t we. Is it time for the threats?”
“We don’t need either of those things, thanks to your friend,” M says. I glance at Isaac, then Jamie.
“James is here to encourage you to do the right thing,” Mr. Dalrymple says.
“Which is what, exactly?”
“Your inheritance,” M says plainly.
Congratulations on your inheritance, the professor wrote.
“Is that why he’s here?” I say, tipping my head at Isaac, as much as I can move it at all. “To root around in my mind?” M has been chasing my memories from the start, haunting me until my resistance chipped away. And it worked.
“Your family started this madness,” M says. “We want it to stop.”
“All right, let’s stop it,” I say. “You needn’t have wasted so much time and effort assembling this little tableau, though. The drugs you gave me? They worked. I remembered Simon, the professor. All there, for the taking. Have at it,” I say carelessly.
A slow grin spreads across M’s mouth. “I didn’t give you drugs. I gave you sugar and hinted that it was something else, to see how suggestible you are. And you are quite suggestible. Your mind filled in the rest.”
“So why bother with them?” I say, tipping my head at Isaac, Jamie. “I’ll tell you what you want, or you can take it, however the fuck that works, I honestly don’t care.”
“Because you’re suggestible and stubborn. Anything I asked, you turned down out of contrariness, not caution. I tried a plea. It didn’t work. I tried guilt. That didn’t work on you, either. Neither did self-interest, or even threats.” She looks at me appreciatively. “You’re got a complex psychological profile. Hard to pin down.” She looks at the others. “I’m not sure any of us would be here, if it weren’t for Goose.”
My muscles tense.
“The second I mentioned him, and you went to the hospital? We had it locked up.” She smirks. “Knew we could use him to move you in the direction we preferred, and he did.”
“His psychological profile is . . . less complex,” Victoria says.
“Where is he?” I ask. I don’t mention Ceridwen, in case there’s a chance, however fleeting, that they don’t know about her. Information is currency.
“Around, I’m sure,” M says with a shrug.
“He’s close enough to be useful, and far enough that you needn’t bother worrying about him, just now,” Victoria says. “I must say, I didn’t think you’d appear, tonight, for the benefit.”
“Are you holding my sister hostage as well?”
M gives me an exasperated look. “Neither of them is a hostage. We didn’t know you’d come—but we were certain Goose would. Vee was certain you wouldn’t show because of the association with your father. Especially if you got wind that Kate might be there.”
“I was sure you’d cancel it, honestly,” Victoria says.
“But I’ve gotten to know you and Goose a bit, haven’t I?” M asks.
“Why lie?” I ask Jamie, uselessly. He hasn’t offered a single word of assistance yet. He’s plainly out of sorts, but I’ve no idea what’s happening, there.
“Jamie learned about tonight on his own,” M says, eyeing Jamie with an amused expression. “He overheard us, planning. We wanted to see what he’d do.”
“What he’d do?” I ask, looking at Jamie steadily.
“Whether he’d be in touch, beforehand. Warn you. He’d allied himself with the professor, which I believe you knew. But he’s seen, now, that that was a mistake. When he overheard us, he volunteered to help himself. Thought it would play well to Goose.”
Jamie’s expression betrays nothing.
“All we want is to go back to before,” Dalrymple adds with a kindly smile. “When you feel . . . encouraged enough to make the right decisions, Isaac will help recover whatever memories you may have lost, over time. Dear old James will help encourage Isaac, and you, in sharing them.”
“Really,” I say tonelessly, my mind speeding off in a thousand directions as I try to work it all out. “And what are you getting in exchange for all this . . . encouragement?” I ask Jamie. Or what are they threatening you with?
No one speaks, until Jamie says, “Isaac’s my brother.”
Hardly surprising, given the resemblance, I suppose. I wait for more, but no one elaborates, “And?” I finish.
Jamie talks to Isaac directly. “No one knows if your Gift is original, like mine, or if it’s been artificially induced, like Stella’s.” Then, turning to me, “If it’s the second, you’re going to heal him.”
“Oh. Got it. Sure.”
“I can hear your sarcasm font,” Jamie says. “But you can do it. There is a cure for the protocol. The thing you’ve been looking for?” Jamie says to Isaac. “It’s him.” Jamie’s pointing to me.
No sign from Isaac that Jamie’s line has landed. Good. “Quite the little cheerleader, all of a sudden, aren’t you,” I say to him. Even if his abilities weren’t gone—which they mustn’t be, he was either lying, in New York, or they’d been restored for him—even if he could force Isaac to do what he wanted, we can’t use them on each other, not without—
Goose.
I bite my tongue, knowing in the pit of my stomach that wherever he is, even if he’s not a hostage, he can’t possibly be far enough. “Fine,” I say to Jamie. “Let’s say you’re right, and I can heal him. I’d do it anyway for you, without holding anyone you care about for ransom. You do know that, don’t you?” I meet his gaze as steadily as I can, praying he does know.
When he doesn’t answer, I ask, “How do you know they’re telling you the truth? They’ve lied to all of us, just as the professor has. All of them—they’ve got every incentive to treat you like a condom.”
“Goodness!” Dalrymple says.
“Condom?” M repeats.
“Used once and then discarded,” I say. I study Jamie’s face as I say it—he accused me of using Mara that way. If he breaks, cracks a
smile, shows any sign at all that he’s aware, I can use it, perhaps—
“We would never,” Victoria says. “His ability is infinitely more valuable than yours.”
“So he’s more of an investment piece, then? A collector’s item? Property?” I say to M, watching her eyes narrow at the word. I flick a glance at Jamie—does he tense a bit? I can’t quite tell. “And where does Mara factor into all of these brilliant plans to hijack my mind and my life?” When no one answers, I say, “Whatever it is, you won’t find her so amenable.”
“She doesn’t need to be,” M says simply.
I can’t work out if she’s saying that because she knows something, or because she knows nothing.
It doesn’t matter, I decide. “Mara will come for me. God help you when she does.”
M stalks toward me, Mara’s dress moving silkily with every step. She bends toward my ear and says, “I’m counting on it.”
45
RESIGN EVERYTHING
SO I’M THE BAIT, THIS time. Fitting.
“Do you know what makes Mara so powerful?” M asks, her tone, her voice sliding back into something older. “She chooses to be. She’s accepted herself, completely. Without judgement.”
“I thought that made her a sociopath?”
She smiles. “It makes her dangerous. In your experience, when are people at their most destructive?”
When they have nothing to lose.
“Mara can be, and has been, exploited. Her love, her loyalty.”
I know it. I’ve exploited them myself.
I’ve used Mara’s loyalty as a weapon, her love as a key. I’ve held myself back so she would run toward me. Fled from her to see if she’d give chase.
I doubted her, mistrusted her, made her prove herself to me over and over again, and when she did, and trusted me enough with the truth of it, I said she’d proved it too much and walked away from her without looking back.
“So it’s your turn to exploit her, is it? What do you think’ll happen then?” I ask, my voice hoarse. They can’t steal her ability—she’s original, like me. They’d need something else—someone else?—if that’s what they’re after. M claimed she’s a Shadow, Mara’s precursor—and perhaps her ability weakened after all, with Mara’s birth and manifestation. Or she could’ve been lying about all of it, lying even now. Victoria as well.
The Reckoning of Noah Shaw Page 24
