The Retribution of Mara Dyer (23 page)

My heart skipped a beat when my brother said his name. Everyone at school knew about the Lolita incident, Daniel said. And the fact that Noah had been shipped off to a residential treatment facility for pushing a man into a killer whale tank had been big news. Daniel had suspected that Noah had been sent to Horizons—I’d been there, for one thing—but Daniel hadn’t been able to confirm it; patient privacy laws had prevented the Horizons staff from telling him. So he’d tried the next best thing—Noah’s parents. He had driven up to the house and been let in by Mr. Shaw.

“Wait, you met Noah’s father?” I asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

Daniel nodded. “He said Noah would be at Horizons until he was ‘sorted out,’ and then he asked me very politely to leave. Why isn’t Noah with you, by the way?”

My mouth opened, but I didn’t know what to say, or where to begin.

“He was in Horizons with us,” Jamie said. “And then the whole thing with Jude happened, and I wasn’t there, for the end of it—I was helping Stella because he’d hurt her, and Noah told us to run. I never saw him again after that,” Jamie said.

“Kells told us he died,” Stella said. “In the Horizons collapse.”

“But she’s a liar,” I cut in. “She lied all the time, about everything.”

“So where is he?” Daniel looked at each of us.

“We don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out.”

Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “I got a weird feeling from his dad. Like, I know Noah doesn’t get along with him, but shipping him off for the Lolita thing seemed extreme.”

“Our parents shipped me there,” I said.

“I know. But, Mara, you have . . .”

“What?”

“A history,” Daniel said carefully.

So does Noah.

“Anyway, I started looking into Mr. Shaw.”

“And?” Jamie asked.

“Every publicly filed document seemed legit. And there
was no connection to Horizons at all, obvious or otherwise. So anyway, I decided to go out there, to Horizons—”

“Wait, you were there?” I blurted out. “When?”

“A couple of weeks after you left. I grilled Mom and Dad about Horizons, and your being there, but they were so sensitive about it—Mom especially. She could barely talk about what you—about what she thought you did to yourself,” Daniel amended, glancing at my wrists. “So in the end I just told her me and Sophie were going to go out on Sophie’s dad’s boat for the day, and I went to Horizons instead.”

Daniel told us how he arrived at the island and security wouldn’t let him in to see me, which frustrated him so much that he began skipping his independent study in the afternoons and digging through the last five years of the corporate filings for Horizons LLC.

“And that was my first clue,” Daniel said. “I remembered Mom saying that Horizons had been open for only a year, but there were years of records to sort through—tax filings, annual reports, money coming in, money going out. And one of them led me to this accountant in New York—”

“Yeah, we met him too,” Jamie said. “So, what did you do?”

“I called him.”

“You just called him?”

“I gave him the name of one of Kells’s employees and said I’d been ordered to acquire documents relating to one of the ‘programs.’ ”

My eyes widened. “And that actually worked?”

“No.”

Oh.

“He told me I needed to give him some access code and follow the appropriate procedure, whatever that was, even if I was calling on Kells’s behalf. I knew I’d have to get to New York to find anything else out, but I didn’t want to go before I knew I’d be able to get what I needed, and at that point I obviously had no idea. So I kept digging through whatever documents I could get at that were publicly available, but there was nothing that told me anything. And then one day I came home exhausted and went to my room to play piano, and this was sitting on top of it.”

Daniel lifted something from one of the crates behind him. A copy of
New Theories in Genetics
.

“I’d forgotten about it after you left, and when I saw it there, I opened it and started reading. The premise was screwy, but it was so well researched that I couldn’t put it down.”

I made a face. “Only you would find that book captivating.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I did, because this baby is how I got in.”

Daniel told us about his hunch that a series of numbers that kept appearing in the book might be the access key the accountant had told him about. His hunch turned out to be right. He started to tell us more, rattling off incomprehensible jargon, and I had to fight to stay awake, but then I heard him say, “. . . eighteen twenty-one.”

I snapped to attention. “What did you just say?”

Daniel looked at me with a curious expression. “Those numbers I was talking about? The sequence? Lenaurd, the author, kept referring to them as genetic markers—the numbers of the genes that carry the anomaly that makes the subjects different. One of the studies he self-published determined that subjects with the anomaly see those numbers everywhere. The sequences stand out to them. Whenever they see a cluster—any pairing of one, eight, two, or three—they notice. It’s like an obsessive thought, or a form of OCD counting. They start seeing patterns where there are none, but they may not even realize they’re doing it. It’s one of the earliest symptoms.”

I wondered if I’d done it. If so, I hadn’t noticed.

“He talks about the degradation and evolution of these particular markers, claiming to have traced the lineage of some subjects back to before gene sequencing technology even existed. It’s junk science, like the stuff about genetic memory—”

“Like what stuff?” Stella asked.

“Sometimes an additional protein will bind to the gene. He called subjects who had it G1821-3 and claimed the third protein allowed them to retain memories from genetic ancestors, which is ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” I said softly. “It’s true.”

“What?”

I told Daniel about the dreams, the memories, whatever
they were—about India, and our grandmother’s doll.

“I don’t know what that means,” Daniel said when I was finished.

“It means that whatever Lenaurd wrote about in there is accurate,” I said. Stella’s eyes lit up with hope.

“He also said subjects with the anomaly had ‘additional greater abilities,’ ” Daniel said, looking at each of us. “Like, superheroish stuff.”

We were silent, until Jamie said, “Not superheroish, exactly.” I kicked his crate.

“But you can . . .” Daniel let his voice trail off, waiting for the rest of us to speak. No one did. “Do things?”

Jamie nodded slowly. “Yup.”

“Just—correct me if I’m wrong, here—so what you’re saying is, you can—”

“Hear your thoughts,” Stella said.

“Make you do what I want you to do,” Jamie said.

“And Noah can heal,” I said, watching the gears turn in Daniel’s mind. I knew what he would ask next, and I wasn’t ready for it. But I didn’t have a choice.

“What about you?” he asked me.

My gaze flicked to Jamie, then Stella. They avoided my eyes.

“I can do things,” I said lamely. “With my mind.”

Daniel tilted his head. “Things? Like . . .
Carrie
things?”

In a sense. “Do you know what Jude did to me, the night the Tamerlane collapsed?”

Daniel nodded. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Yeah.”

“That’s why I did it,” I said quietly, as Daniel’s eyebrows drew together. “I was scared. And angry. The asylum collapsed because I wanted it to.”

Daniel shook his head in confusion. “You’re saying—”

“I killed Rachel and Claire.” Daniel was opening his mouth to argue, but I spoke before he could. “And Mrs. Morales? She died because I was angry at her for failing me.”

“Mara, she died of anaphylactic shock.”

“Because I wanted her to choke on her tongue.”

My brother had no response to that. There was nothing to say.

It was Stella who finally rescued me from the awkward, painful silence that followed my confession. “Did you read anything in there about how to fix us? Like a cure?”

Daniel shook his head. “It’s not like that—the anomalous gene is more like, like an X or Y chromosome.” He met my eyes. “It’s just . . . part of you.”

“You’re not broken,”
Noah had said to me when I’d asked him to fix me a lifetime ago.

Maybe he was right.

39

S
TELLA HAD A HARD TIME
swallowing what Daniel had said, and she asked him if she could look at the book.

“You should all read it,” Daniel said as he handed it to her. “Maybe you’ll think of something I missed.”

Jamie unfolded his legs and rose from his crate. “What else have you found so far?”

“Not much to confirm what’s in the book,” Daniel said, “but a whole lot about one Deborah Susan Kells.” Daniel lifted up a stack of files from behind one of the crates. It was one stack of many. “I didn’t know anything about anything till I got in here, so I had no idea where to even start. Kells’s name
was the only thing I had to go on, so I used the access code to figure out the archiving system and found her file.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked him, looking around the small room at the little piles of knowledge Daniel had acquired and assembled in painstaking order.

“
Here
here? Or in New York?”

“Both.”

“When I got to the city, I had the accountant mail the access code to a professor I’ve corresponded with at NYU.”

“But wait,” Jamie said, holding out his hand. “So you’re saying it was a coincidence that Lukumi was in that picture?”

I shook my head. “There are no coincidences.”

Daniel eyed Jamie and me. “Back the truck up—who’s Lukumi?”

“We’ll explain later,” I said. “Keep going.”

“Okay . . . Well, so anyway, I made an appointment with him so he could show off his department and try to recruit me, but managed to filch it from his inbox with him none the wiser.”

“How naughty and daring of you. All that and you lied to our parents about the reason for your New York visit? I’m impressed.”

“Well, I
did
visit a college here.” Daniel grinned. “So, it’s not completely false.”

Jamie looked up. “A half-truth is a whole lie, my mother says.”

“He’s right, you know,” I chimed in.

“Guess I’m a rebel, then.”

“But wait,” Stella said. “What if the access code changes?”

“Then I’m screwed.”

“
We’re
screwed,” I said. “We can’t leave here without this stuff. There might be something here that will help us find Noah.”

Daniel nodded. “We should go through what I’ve found so far, and then one of us should start making a list of what we still need. We won’t be able to go through everything, but if we’re asking the right questions, maybe eventually we’ll hit on the right answers.”

“You can be our Gandalf,” I said, remembering our conversation from weeks ago, and smiling.

“I’m only a year older than you. But I’ll take it as a compliment, if you let me be Dumbledore instead.”

“If you insist.” I shrugged. “But Dumbledore is more dead.”

“Point,” Daniel acknowledged.

“You’re neither, actually.” Jamie looked up from a file he was reading. “You’re a muggle—”

“Hey, now.”

“Which makes you Giles.”

Daniel considered it for a moment. “I’ll take it.”

“Good. Now, Mara?” Jamie batted his eyelashes and handed me a stack of files. “Get reading.”

Stella and Daniel roamed the stacks and made their list, coming back periodically to dump file folders bursting with paper onto the drafting table. Jamie and I sat in that dim room, crouched and hunched over hundreds, thousands of pages of records, emails, transcripts, everything. I sucked down the information until I was saturated with it, until my fingers were sore from paper cuts and my brain sloshed with mostly irrelevant details. I seemed to have gotten the pile of crap containing the most mundane bits of Kells’s early life—notes from her kindergarten teacher, her fourth-grade science project, et cetera. I idly wondered why they—whoever they were—bothered collecting this shit, but the truth was, I didn’t really care. I was hungry for answers, starving for them, and they were here, somewhere under this roof, and I would find them.

“Mara,” Jamie said quietly. “Come look at this.”

Or they would find me.

Jamie handed me a thick file folder, already opened. “Don’t lose my place.”

I glanced down at the pages. Medical records, they looked like. There were hospital admissions, discharges, prescriptions, and more records of visits to—

“The Obstetrics and Gynecology Department,” I said aloud, and rechecked the name at the top of the page.

Kells, Deborah S.

“ ‘Patient conceived intrauterine pregnancy. Patient experienced miscarriage. Required termination.’ ”

“I counted six miscarriages in there so far,” Jamie said. “Then I skipped ahead. She was diagnosed with idiopathic infertility—they didn’t know what was causing it.”

“So . . .”

Jamie shrugged. “I don’t know what it means exactly. We need more.”

I looked at the dates of the records—1991, 1992, 1993. And that was just in this folder.