The Reckoning of Noah Shaw Read online

  His company’s been conducting research that probably spawned a clutch of Carriers all over the world.

  Maybe my father got started somewhere closer to home.

  As the onions sizzle, Goose says, “Maybe it’s the copies who are dying, like Stella said, and the fact that Sam happens to be your cousin’s just a red herring.”

  There’ve been plenty of those. “A possibility,” I say.

  “What did it say next to Stella, on that list?”

  I try to remember. I try not to remember. “ ‘Suspected original,’ I think.”

  “Suspected isn’t confirmed, though, is it.”

  “No, it isn’t.” He sighs. “If only my name were on a list somewhere,” he mumbles tiredly. “I’d like to know if I’m going to vanish one day and reappear in your cellar, haunting your family manor.”

  “Mate,” I start.

  “No, no, it’s fine, don’t worry about me,” he says. “In some ways, you and Mara are awfully bloody lucky, you do know that, right?”

  I nearly laugh, but there’s bile in my throat. “Kind of playing it fast and loose with the word ‘lucky,’ aren’t we?”

  “Least you don’t have to worry about possibly being on a hit list, somewhere. Don’t get me wrong, your whole situation isn’t exactly enviable, but at the very least, you’re as original as it gets.”

  I’m about to retort, but the words catch in my throat as an idea shakes itself free.

  “I’m not, though, am I?” Not the first in my family bloodline with an ability. “There was my mother, and Simon.” He may not have had the same sort of Gift, but he had a role to play, the professor said. M knew them all. “What’s M’s role?” I ask aloud.

  Goose is slicing mushrooms when he says, “She wants to know where she came from. Her own history. Isn’t that what she said?”

  “She did,” I say, thinking. “She also said my family owes her a debt.” The professor and James mentioned a debt, but that’s all I seem to remember about it. “And when she first appeared, she said Mara’s life was in danger. Told me I needed to remember Simon in order to save her.” Slay the dragon, save your girl. “From the professor, I assume she meant. And then when I told her Mara didn’t need saving, she said she could help me get my abilities back.”

  “Hmm.”

  And when that didn’t work—

  I’ll keep Alastair in my thoughts.

  I’d nearly forgotten that, in the midst of everything else. I glance at Goose, uneasy. Have I told him what M said, already? Should I tell him now?

  “She’s the reason I went to the hospital to find you,” I say. “She cycled through all of her reasons for needing me to be here, in England, at the manor, one after the other. None of them worked. And then she said she’d keep you in her thoughts.” Which brought me to the hospital, where the car was waiting for us.

  Goose looks up. “You think she lied?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I say. “Less certain about what. But I’m not convinced we know what she’s after, yet.”

  “Learn what a person wants, and you can map his future.”

  The professor spoke those words to Simon, words I hadn’t remembered until tonight, until—

  Until Sam opened the door.

  “Who benefits from Sam’s death?” I ask. “And the seemingly random suicides of a handful of interconnected teenaged strangers.”

  “Maybe no one,” Goose says, cracking an egg into a bowl and scrambling it. “Maybe it’s just something that happens to the copies.”

  I’ve heard that—or something like that, when Daniel told me about his original trip to the archives. Kells’s experiments on baby twins, with Jude and Claire being the only survivors. She’d been trying to induce abilities in them but they all died anyway, eventually.

  Goose rolls his shoulders. “But I can see you don’t find that satisfying, so.”

  “Because it’s not a handful, is it. The professor said there needed to be balance, but—”

  “Partly, your father is to blame,” M said.

  “My father fucked with the balance, and now there are more of us than there should be.”

  “Should be?”

  “More than there’s supposed to be. If more of us keep cropping up? Eventually the world will be overrun.”

  “A Marvel scenario, definitely,” Goose says, lacing his fingers and stretching overhead.

  “Which the originals wouldn’t want,” I go on, ignoring him. What did M say? She doesn’t hide. She moves. “If you’ve been around for centuries, then you need secrecy to survive.”

  “You think the originals are destroying the copies?”

  I sit still, thinking. “Could be.” Everyone wanted to find us, at one point. There was Kells, of course, rounding us up in Florida on my father’s behalf. But also, didn’t Leo and Sophie claim to be searching for others in solidarity, or whatever? They even made that map at that safe house of theirs, leading anyone who saw it to everyone on it.

  The map. Sophie. A memory scratches at the door of my consciousness, asking to be let in.

  “Imagine all of us walking around with a candle,” she said at that disastrous dinner party Goose threw back in Brooklyn.

  “And then the light snuffs out. It just started . . . happening. People going missing. So we started tracking it. . . . People came and went from the brownstone—but pretty much whoever came to the safe house would stay when they got there. Everyone told us where they were from, what they could do—we started piecing together whatever we could. When Felicity and the others went missing, they fell off the map. Literally. There’s nothing I can do.”

  And then Sophie said, “We can’t do this by ourselves. We all have to work together—”

  I hear Mara’s voice in my mind again.

  “But you’re the hunter,” she said to Sophie.

  When I stepped into M’s car, I’d scarcely given a second’s thought to Leo and Sophie and whatever the fuck they might be doing now. I haven’t thought about suicide, much, either. Mine or anyone else’s.

  Have I stopped caring about them because I stopped feeling them?

  Appalling, if true. The rising tide of shame tells me it is.

  I’m tempted to ignore it, but watching Goose putter around in the kitchen . . .

  Least you don’t have to worry about possibly being on a hit list, somewhere.

  A hit list. When I first saw the map hanging at Sophie and Leo’s place in Brooklyn, the map they’d made, knitting connections among Gifted they’d come across, it seemed supremely stupid. What if someone had found it, used it to find others, not to help them but to—

  Hunt them.

  And when I asked Sophie who first fell off her map, she said—

  Sam. “I think Sam was the first.”

  A cold finger trails the nape of my neck.

  She didn’t know him, she insisted. I rifle through my memories, searching for her words—

  “A friend of Leo’s, her name’s Eva—he was her friend. I never actually met him, and he died in England. You were there. With Goose.”

  “I think I have an idea,” I say, as Goose folds the other ingredients into the eggs. “Someone who knew Sam. Who might not live far away.”

  “Go on.”

  “Sophie and Leo made that map, marking up places the other Gifted had cropped up, and where they came from.”

  “Oh, right.” He dusts his hands off on his jeans. “Took up most of the wall in that shabby room.”

  “Jamie and Mara took pictures of it. Mara sent them to me, hundreds,” I say, and as I speak I realise with growing horror what we’re about to have to do.

  Goose’s eyes widen encouragingly. “Even if your mobile isn’t here, your pictures would sync to the cloud, wouldn’t they? Surely someone’s got a tablet or a laptop here.”

  I try to walk it back. “Even if not, Sam Milnes—remember that grave, in Whitby?” Allegra Milnes, was the name on it. “It can’t be that hard to find someone who knows him.�
� Or knows of him. Like that man, Bernard.

  A door’s thrown open in my mind, illuminating the memory that has hidden itself from me. I glimpse Mara below stairs, black-frocked, and bright-eyed. I hear her voice in a breathless gush:

  “I started going on about how upset I am about your father, and what happened at the funeral, and then I go shivery and whisper, Sixth Sense style, that I saw the whole thing. He licked up everything I offered him, and then begins telling me, ‘in strictest confidence,’ how ‘The boy is the great-great-grandchild of a house maid that served your great-great-grandfather.’ There are pictures of him somewhere, a portrait in the house. There’s all of this stuff that goes back centuries, he said. Your family kept everything.”

  “Did he happen to add anything helpful, like, for example, where?” I asked.

  “Yeah, no. He talked about servant records and family trees and shit being here, in the house, but where here, he didn’t know. But he did give me a name.”

  “Need I ask?”

  “Sam Milnes. Familiar?”

  I said no.

  “He’s apparently also the great-great-grandson of the old groundskeeper, but his G3 was fired as soon as they discovered the lady’s maid was pregnant, and moved south to do something else, I don’t remember, and Sam’s dad is a chef at a pub about an hour away from here. Not at the funeral.”

  “His father wasn’t? Mother?” I asked.

  “Nope. No one in his family. I asked specifically.”

  “Bad blood?” I wondered.

  “Bernard mentioned something about a rumour that he wasn’t the groundskeeper’s kid, that someone in the family knocked her up, then sent both of them packing to hide it.” She shrugs one shoulder. “Or some other shit happened so long ago that no one cares about it anymore.”

  I relate all of this to Goose, rather desperately, as he chops up some chives and sprinkles them on our omelettes, which I’ve no appetite for any longer. “So, we could log in to literally any computer anywhere and access your pictures which contain biographical and possibly geographical information to find the person who knew the living version of a ghost we’ve seen who has unfinished business with us,” Goose says, placing one plate on the marble counter. “Or we can go back to Whitby, look up the name of the woman whose grave you punched, who’s been dead for so long we’d have to use microfiche in an ancient library somewhere to see if any news articles come up about her and your family, and track down Sam’s father in whatever pub he’s working in, and work backward from there? Those are our choices?”

  Fuck. Fuck.

  Goose blinks silently.

  “Fine,” I say miserably. “If our shit’s not here yet, we’ll ask Kate for her laptop instead.”

  As it happens, our shit is here, much to my surprise. I didn’t have my own room in the manor—I hadn’t spent enough time here to claim one—but upon reencountering Mrs. McAdams, Goose has the presence of mind to ask her about our things, and she shows us to one of the guest rooms with several boxes and trunks I recognise. Painfully.

  “They arrived the other day,” she says cheerfully. Victoria Gao kept her promise.

  I survey the mess. My mobile must be somewhere, in it. I’m far too much of a coward to look.

  If I find it, I’ll know whether Mara’s texted or hasn’t. Emailed or hasn’t. Whether there’s been silence for the last several days or weeks or lifetimes since I read her words and heard her voice. I’ve crossed an ocean to get away but she’s taken up residence in my head.

  Goose recognises his own bag right away, though, and upon noticing my apparent paralysis, asks me for my username and password.

  “I won’t linger anywhere I shouldn’t,” he says in response to my obvious wretchedness.

  I tell him, and he does not give me shit about it, for which I am forever in his debt.

  Can’t bear to watch him scroll through pictures, though. Can’t even look in his direction.

  “Found the map,” Goose says.

  I exhale the breath I’ve been holding for a year. “I think we’re looking for an Eva.”

  “That makes it easy.”

  “Well, start in England.”

  “Thanks for that most obvious advice.”

  I finally muster the strength to stop being a pussy and turn to watch him. His eyebrows are scrunched up. “There aren’t many Gifted in the UK, it seems.”

  “Or not many who crossed Leo and Sophie’s path in Brooklyn, anyway.”

  “Point,” he says. Then his eyes narrow. “There’s a Ceridwen Evangeline in Cardiff.”

  “Evangeline, Eva—close enough?”

  “Close enough for me,” Goose says. “No offence, but I’m ready to get out of this fucking house.”

  “So soon?”

  Goose returns a flat stare.

  “So, off to Wales, then?” I say.

  Goose shakes his head. “No, she’d be my year, or a year ahead. On gap or at uni.” He turns back to his phone. “Shame, I suppose we’ll have to creep her social media.”

  “Shame, indeed.”

  It takes Goose less than a minute before he finds her. “Pack your things, friend. We’re off to Cambridge.”

  Fancy that.

  32

  UNFATHOMABLE BEING

  THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE MISSING,” I say to Goose, as the bus from the train station drops us on King’s Parade, which seems to be swarming with an alarming number of swotty-looking freshers.

  “Not missing,” he says peevishly. “Not technically, not yet. They’ve just come from their gap yahs promoting literacy in the third world—”

  “Or, alternately,” I say, “experiencing a spiritual awakening in—”

  “Machu Picchu,” Goose picks up.

  “After a stint working a bar in Australia and joining their mates in—”

  “Thailand,” he cuts in. “For a Full Moon Party.”

  “Which they can’t remember because of the hallucinogens they tried in Cambodia—”

  “There was a lot of banter, though—”

  “And made for the best Insta-story ever.”

  Goose laughs, then tips his head at one of the younger-looking boys with an overloaded rucksack. “Do him.”

  “Firsts in all A-levels at . . . Harrow,” I start. “He’ll spend Freshers Week reinventing himself, buying decks off a second-year and discovering a love of house music. Easy.” I scan the hordes before spotting a laughing brunette holding court in a squad of other girls. “Her?”

  “Looks like she says the word ‘yay’ a lot and is so there for her friends.”

  “Savage.” I narrow my eyes, before landing on a target. “That one’s going to vlog his drunken exploits manning a trolley on Caesarian Sunday.”

  Whilst we’re snarking, neither of us notices the boy who walks up to us until he’s already slipped envelopes into our hands.

  “Think we’ve been mistaken for gownies?” Goose says.

  I hold up the envelope, my full name in printed script. Goose’s matches.

  “Life comes at you fast,” I say.

  We open them at once.

  King’s Library

  Midnight

  I flip mine over. “That’s all there is.”

  Goose nods in agreement.

  “Thoughts?” I ask, already suspicious.

  “Could be from a Westminster bloke who recognised us?” Goose asks. “Freshers Week, there’ll be soc initiations, formal hall . . .”

  “How charmingly naïve,” I say with a sigh. “More likely, someone knows we’re coming. M did suggest we come up, after all.”

  Goose examines the invitations. “She’s never bothered with formality before.”

  “True,” I admit. “Might be the person we’ve come to look for knows we’re here, looking?”

  “How?” Goose asks, then answers himself. “Right. Superpowers. I forgot.”

  “The professor has a habit of knowing where and when to appear to maximise his fuckery.”

  “This
is the chap who knows the future, yes? Of the world. And human history. And he’s decided to spend his time printing invitations for us?” Goose asks witheringly.

  It does sound stupid, out loud. And yet.

  Goose inspects the college gates. “Colleges’ll be locked tonight. Especially King’s—I’ve heard the porters are terribly strict, because of the tourists.”

  I examine the gate more closely, and the green beyond it. None of it’s accessible to the public.

  “We’ll have to apply our considerable charm. Might do to stop and shop for formal dress?” Goose says, eyeing a store across the street. A mannequin dressed in white tie stands guard in the window.

  “Why would we?”

  He holds up the invitation. “These are posh. They’re engraved, even. Wouldn’t want to look out of place, would we?”

  “We don’t even know what it’s for,” I say, rather vexed.

  “A party? Or a soc? Or hall?” Upon registering my expression he gives an exaggerated sigh. “Or it’s a trap and we’re being invited to our own beheading.” He turns over the invites again. “Quite elegantly, I must say.”

  I rake my fingers through my hair, wound up.

  Goose met M. Heard everything I told him. Saw what Stella did to herself on the bridge and heard about the others.

  But that’s the problem, isn’t it—he’s only heard most of what has happened to us, Sam’s ghost aside. He met M, was entranced by her, but did he believe what she told him, truly? She was interesting, no question, and she told a good story.

  Goose does love a good story. Always up for an adventure.

  That’s what this is, mostly, for him. A story he’s caught up in. Nothing gained, nothing lost. Not yet.

  I can’t exactly blame him. I was him, once.

  When Mara first told me about herself, I believed her because I’d heard her myself. Heard her voice in my mind, anguished and angry, trapped beneath the asylum she’d brought down with her thoughts:

  Get them out.

  But when she confessed the rest of it? Her certainty that she’d hurt me, that she was my weakness? I dismissed it. She’d been in my bed, in my arms, vulnerable and exposed. On her birthday, she said she’d kissed me and I denied it. She said she’d hurt me, and I told her she was dreaming—