The Becoming of Noah Shaw Read online

  Felix, however.

  “How’d they do it?” I ask, though I know the answer already. “How’d they kill themselves?”

  Stella and Leo exchange a look.

  “You can’t tell me because you don’t know. They’re missing, not dead—”

  “As good as,” Leo says, straightening his spine.

  “Explain,” I say, leaning against the wall.

  Leo appears to be editing what he plans to say, which reminds me—

  “Stella, are you listening?”

  She turns practically white.

  “To us. Our thoughts. Right now.”

  She shakes her head emphatically. “That’s not what I’m doing,” she says, though her gaze flicks briefly to Jamie, Mara. “I have to concentrate, hard, to do it. And I hate it, so I take drugs to blur out the voices. Otherwise, it’s too much.” She looks at Jamie. “You guys know that.”

  “Drugs?” Goose perks up. “What sort?”

  “Prescription . . . ?”

  “Actually,” Daniel says. “No offence, Stella—”

  “He’s about to say something offensive,” Jamie stage-whispers.

  “I’d be more comfortable knowing you’re not poking around in my brain either. I think that would go a long way toward trust, on both sides.” Ever the mediator.

  Stella looks to Leo, and when he nods, I can actually feel her relief. Doesn’t escape my attention that she’s been looking to Leo for quite a lot. Codependent or . . . something more? Something . . . else?

  Stella retreats to the bathroom, returns with some pills. Shows them to Daniel. “Do they pass inspection?”

  He raises his hands up in defence. “You don’t have to show me. I know what you were going through last year. I know how badly you wanted a cure.”

  A cure. Mara mentioned that in passing, that it was Stella’s main motivation for joining her and Jamie in their search for me. She’d hoped they’d find something that would stop the voices in her head. She’d hoped to find a way to be rid of her affliction.

  A flush rises in Stella’s cheeks. She’s embarrassed. There’s a furtive glance at Leo as well. Is she not supposed to want it? A cure? Fuck. I’ve missed so much.

  She shakes out a couple of pills. We stand silently in the dead room, waiting, but they start to work quickly. Her heartbeat grows sluggish, her chest rises and falls slowly. It’s possible she could still hear our thoughts, but when asked directly, she says no, and I believe her.

  “Two days ago,” she says slowly, “Felicity just disappeared. We were sleeping in our bedroom”—she nods to the stairs—“and when I woke up on Saturday morning, she was just . . . gone.”

  “Wait, she was here?” Daniel asks. “The paper says she lived with her parents—”

  “She was Felix’s girlfriend,” Stella says. “He lived here, with us.”

  “Did the rest of them?” I ask Leo. “Live here with you?”

  Leo doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, Stella continues, “She told her parents she was staying with a friend Friday night, but then she just—”

  A movement from Leo, slight, barely perceptible. But I notice, as does Stella.

  “Obviously, Felix tried her cell phone, e-mail—Stella was listening, trying to find a trace of her but—”

  “No,” I say, annoyed and suspicious. “That doesn’t track.” I have the room now. “You followed Beth to the subway because you heard her thoughts, yeah? But you didn’t know her ability.” Which she was thinking about before she died, and which Stella would’ve known if she really did hear her.

  Silence from both of them—something’s off, but I don’t press, because I don’t want to admit to them that I heard Beth’s thoughts myself.

  “And us?” I ask instead, directing a piercing look at Stella. “You just happened to know we were in the city? Knew we’d be at the Second Avenue stop heading downtown?” I gesture to the papers of the other missing teenagers. “You said it yourself, Stella—it’s hard to focus on one person in all the noise—and okay, yeah, I’ll buy that Goose has an ability and is amplifying yours or whatever, but that doesn’t explain why Felix would kill himself two days after his girlfriend went missing. So tell me,” I say. “Stop fucking around and tell me. What is happening to these people? And how do you know about it?”

  Stella’s caught short by my aggression. Leo . . . isn’t. He’s considering, editing again.

  “We know someone who . . . can identify people like us. Other Gifted.”

  And there it is. He doesn’t go on, so Daniel tries to prompt him.

  “And once identified, you bring them here?”

  Leo shrugs. “Some people find us. Some people, we find. And we share what we know with the ones who stay here, practice with us—”

  Jamie straightens up. “Practice? Practice what?”

  “Using our Gifts.” Leo has Jamie’s full, hungry attention, which he knows, because he says, “I can show you, if you want,”

  “Maybe later, thanks,” I say, interrupting. “Right now we want to know everything you know about everyone who’s missing.”

  “And everyone who’s died,” Daniel adds. Mara is notably silent.

  Leo draws himself up. “Let me ask you this,” he says to me. “How did you know her name was Beth?” All eyes on me. “You can find people as well, can’t you?”

  “It’s not like that. I’m not hunting anyone,” I retort.

  “We’re not hunting anyone either.”

  “Oh, so the people you find, they want to be found?” I ask. Even Daniel quiets at this, and I’m rapidly losing the plot. “Tell me how it works. Tell me how you knew Sam.”

  “Did you know Sam, Noah?” Leo’s tone is suggestive, accusing.

  “No,” I say. But it takes effort to stay calm, dismissive.

  “Why don’t you tell us how it works?” Leo asks, “How you knew to come here?”

  “I can see and feel what they see and feel when they’re suffering, right before they die.”

  “But you didn’t stop it,” Leo says, picking my scabs.

  “Because it’s too late by then. I’m not there with them. I just see and feel. But this isn’t the case for you. These are your friends, no?” I pick up the papers. “Some of them lived here, but they keep going missing—”

  “They keep dying.”

  I round on Stella. “How do you know?”

  Her eyes dart nervously. Before she can lie, Leo says smoothly, “One of us can . . . see connections. To other people with Gifts. And when one of us goes missing, the connection dies. They just—vanish. Wiped off the grid.”

  “And who’s making these connections?”

  “She doesn’t make them, she sees them. Or feels them, I guess. And it’s not for me to out her. If she wants you to know, she’ll find you.”

  “So if they disappear,” Daniel says, “How’d you know where to find Beth?”

  “She says they flare up right before they die. I guess that part of her ability’s familiar to you,” Leo says to me.

  “You could’ve stopped Beth from killing herself,” I say, and then it’s out there. The reason I’m so angry. They actually could’ve done something to help her, and they didn’t—and without any guilt. I couldn’t have, but feel responsible anyway.

  “We didn’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” I say. “Stella could hear her thoughts.”

  “I couldn’t. It was like there was something—cloaking them. She was . . . different, somehow.”

  “And Sam?” Mara asks, the first thing she’s said since all this has come out.

  “He was too far away,” Leo says. “For us to do anything about.”

  Implying that there should’ve been a way for me to do something about it. I feel like hitting him. More than that.

  But Jamie’s actually the one to move on this, surprisingly. “How about Felix, then? He killed himself in your house!”

  “He chose to,” I say before catching myself. Leo’s pale eyebrows rise s
lightly.

  “Meaning what?” Jamie’s focused on me now. “That the others didn’t choose to kill themselves?”

  “It’s true,” Stella says, saving me. “And anyway we weren’t here when it happened.”

  “How convenient,” Jamie says.

  “It’s not like he’d have chosen a time when he could’ve been rushed to the hospital and had his stomach pumped,” I say without meaning to. Stella looks grateful, though I didn’t say it for her benefit. I shouldn’t have said it at all, as I’ve no interest in playing patient to Mara’s or Jamie’s armchair psychologist later—Mara’s expression is shadowed, and Jamie’s confusion has turned to suspicion. Daniel and Goose are both unruffled, knowing well enough to leave it alone. If Goose wasn’t actually present for all the injuries I tried to explain away in school, he would’ve heard about them.

  Leo takes advantage of my having thrown at least half the room off-balance. “Look,” Leo goes on. “We all want this to stop happening, right?”

  Daniel’s the only one to nod.

  “And we know what you guys went through,” Leo goes on. “That place, Horizons. Looking for a cure. The experiments they were doing on you in Florida. The research you found.”

  Goose turns to me and mouths, “The fuck?”

  Did they know who ordered it all, though? Was that what the envelope was about?

  I inhale. “So you showed me your address, sent the clippings to let me know you knew all about me, and led me here to help you find the rest of these people before they die too?”

  “What clippings?” Leo asks.

  I can’t tell if he’s lying. Not even with Goose here, supposedly amplifying his heartbeat or whatever.

  Seeing me thrown, Daniel takes the lead. “Someone sent Noah an envelope with his father’s obituary and something about a poisoning in the NYPD.”

  “That’s . . . random,” Leo says. I notice Mara direct her attention to Stella—all of her attention.

  Stella, still refusing to look Mara’s way, says. “We didn’t send that.”

  So, who did?

  “Okay, question for another day,” Daniel says. “We want to pool what we’ve got, stop this from happening to anyone else. Right?”

  “Yes,” Stella says. “That’s what we were hoping.” Leo nods once.

  I’m trying to work him out. His breathing is even, heartbeat steady, but he doesn’t seem . . . right.

  All of us have gone quiet, so Daniel steps up again. “All right, there’s a lot to . . . digest.” He twists back to the windows, which are now giving off only the faintest beams of light. “It’s late, and we should be getting back,” he says to Goose, Jamie, Mara, and me. We nod like puppets. “But do you want to exchange numbers?” he asks Leo, who withdraws his mobile from a back pocket. Daniel gives it to him. Leo looks at me next.

  Oh, why not.

  As they lead us out of the house, Stella reaches out to Jamie, “It’s good. Seeing you again.”

  A single nod. “Yeah. We’ll catch up.”

  “I’d like that.”

  As Mara exits, Stella says nothing to her, nor Mara to Stella, though she does offer the slightest of smiles to Jamie and Daniel. The five of us assemble at the bottom of the stoop, raising a final glance at Leo. Stella’s already tucked herself back inside.

  We walk back to the train, Jamie and Mara speaking in low voices, Daniel talking at Goose. I’m trailing slightly behind when my phone vibrates.

  It’s Stella. I need to talk to you. Without Mara. LMK before 8.

  And then another text, right after:

  p.s. Please don’t tell her. Please.

  21

  NIGH INCURABLE

  THE AFTERNOON SCROLLS THROUGH MY head on a reel. I’m torn between irrepressible urgency and overwhelming—emptiness.

  Seeing the names and faces of the Gifted—that’s what Stella and Leo kept calling them, the word they preferred to use. But are we? Gifted? Seeing them cut skin, tuck pills under tongue, step into air. It’s . . . I’m—

  Triggered. Triggered is the word for it, much as I hate to admit. I keep trying to push it down, sweep it away, shut it down the way I always had when I’d seen the others hurt themselves or be hurt. But this—this is different.

  This must be like what Mara felt when Jude was tormenting her, pushing buttons she didn’t know existed, pushing her till she lost control.

  I’m losing control now. Jumping in to defend Felix’s choice to die because he thought his girlfriend had. It feels like wolves are at my door, my house, circling.

  I had a dream, after word reached me of my father’s death. I saw myself standing beneath a tree, a shadow me, faded and incomplete. I watch myself tie a rope to a branch; there’s no sound, no birds, no wind in the trees. I step onto a shadow and loop the rope around my neck. The ghosts of my family stand and watch, faces anaesthetised, wiped of expression. I meet my own eyes, and, without a word, my other self steps off.

  The veins in my neck stand out lividly, my feet kick, but my hands don’t reach up. It’s a reflex, the last gasps of a dying body, of the meat that contains me, struggling for air, for life. It wants to keep going so badly. My feet stop kicking, my body hangs limp. I looked so peaceful, as if sleeping midair.

  And then I heard the hiss of my father’s voice in my ear, in my mind; Coward. I hesitated, just for a moment; I wanted to retort, to deny it, but I couldn’t. Because I was.

  That’s what they call suicides. Cowardly. Selfish. But looking around at the little clumps of people on the train, part of me truly doesn’t understand—how do they do it? How do they fill the minutes and hours and days and years of their lives? What’s missing in me that I don’t know how to fill mine? That I don’t want to?

  There’s so much time, endless time, and I stand here in the centre of it with my dick in my hand, completely clueless.

  It’s wrong, they say. Selfish, they say. Most people would do anything to get more time. They would kill me if they could steal mine.

  I look at Mara—she’s been through hell, and she did what she had to, to get out of it. She fought to stay here, and not for me. For her.

  That was always Mara’s purpose—to hold on to herself. From the very first, it’s what she worried about most.

  When we burned her grandmother’s doll and found the pendant inside of it, the one that matched mine, and the one the professor had sent Jamie, we’d retreated to my room. She was shaking, ashen, and I was desperate to help her.

  “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” I remember saying. “Tell me what you want and it’s yours.”

  “I’m afraid I’m losing control,” she had said.

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “You can’t stop it,” Mara said back. “All you can do is watch.”

  I’d felt powerless for so long, I was resigned to it. All I could do was watch. And then she’d said:

  “Tell me what you see. Because I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t or what’s new or different, and I can’t trust myself, but I trust you. Or don’t tell me, because I might not remember. Write it down, and then maybe someday, if I ever get better, let me read it. Otherwise, I’ll change a little bit every day and never know who I was until I’m gone.”

  Mara was so wrong about herself, and so right about me. She was never in danger of losing herself. If anything, she became herself, and she never needed me or anyone to remind her.

  I, on the other hand. I’ve always wanted to lose myself. She’s all I’ve ever wanted to hold on to. So if I could die, if I lost Mara the way Felix lost Felicity? I would probably do what he did too.

  I’ve failed to notice that we’re off the train, at the clock tower, in the lift. Mara unlocks the door, and once we’re in, Goose explodes.

  “Okay. Someone seriously needs to tell me what the bloody fuck is happening. And by someone, mate, I mean you.” He rounds on me.

  “It’s . . . complicated,” I say to Goose.

  “Yeah, twigged tha
t,” he says. “But, really, you couldn’t be arsed to tell me about any of this before?”

  “When?” I ask. “When would’ve been a good time to tell you about—”

  “About your bloody superpowers? That girl back there, all of that—you’re putting me on, somehow, right?” He looks from me to Jamie. Jamie shakes his head slowly.

  Goose falls back onto the sofa, closes his eyes and rubs his temples. “Well then, you’re going to catch me up, because despite that girl reading my mind and whatever else the fuck was happening back there, I’m not at all convinced you’re not taking the piss.”

  I sigh. Only one way to convince him. Jamie’s ability is difficult to prove. Mara’s—well. Self-explanatory. But mine. I glide to the kitchen, begin opening drawers. Then I find what I’ve been looking for—the knife block. The sound it makes when I slide the chef’s knife out makes my blood quicken.

  “No.” Mara’s voice is clear, defiant. Loud. “You’re not doing that.”

  “You know,” Jamie says, making his way to the kitchen, “I’ve always wanted to see this, actually.”

  “No.”

  “Mara, it’s the only way.”

  “It is not. You’re not doing this.”

  I look past her to Goose, still in the living room, observing us with a sort of detached curiosity. I hold the knife in one hand and turn the other out, palm up in offering. “Just a small cut.”

  Jamie pouts. “What? Don’t pussy out. Cut off a finger or something,” he urges. “Does it grow back?”

  “Never done it.”

  “No time like the present,” Goose says, his voice edgy now.

  “If you do it, it’s over,” Mara says. “We’re over.”

  It takes a beat for that to land. Daniel, Jamie, and Goose are uncomfortably, awkwardly silent.

  “I mean it, “ Mara repeats. She’s breathing quick and hard, so angry, so fast. “I’m leaving the loft, moving back in with my parents. We’re done, completely.”

  “Mara.” Daniel puts a hand on her shoulder—withdraws instantly, as if burned.

  “No.”

  “Mara, I’ll heal,” I say casually.

  “That’s not the point and you know it.” She looks around at everyone, visibly holds herself back from saying something.