The Becoming of Noah Shaw Read online

  “Even with that map?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” He bites his lower lip. “There’s a system. That’s how I found Kells’s own files and everything I thought we’d need, which we brought to Jamie’s aunt’s house and which Stella apparently went back and stole.” He exhales. “But we were looking for different stuff then—the stuff that led to Jude and Mara and all that. We might—if I knew where these other Gifted kids were born, maybe, well—obviously, actually—there were probably other so-called treatment facilities. I mean, has anyone even asked where Leo is from?”

  My thoughts exactly. A corner of my mouth lifts. “This is why you’re doing this.” Pause. “And no one else.”

  His eyebrows scrunch together. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’m granting you access. You and only you.”

  “So when you told Leo you were going to let him come here with me and Mara, what you actually meant was—”

  “The exact opposite.”

  He doesn’t seem surprised, but he is a bit frustrated. “I need at least someone to bounce stuff off of, help me go through things. Divide and conquer, you know?”

  I wave that off. “You’re not giving yourself enough credit, mate.”

  But Mara and Daniel wear what they’re feeling, and I know what Daniel’s about to say before he says it.

  “You’re talking about Mara,” he says. You don’t want Mara to know that I’m here.”

  Carefully, I say, “I don’t want anyone to know, including Mara.”

  “Why not?”

  I let out a tight sigh. “You know why not.”

  At this, he bristles. “No, I don’t. You love her, but you don’t trust her?”

  I see immediately where that train of thought’s headed, given Sophie’s betrayal, and stop it before it gets there. “That’s not it at all. Look, when it comes to me, her, and most importantly, anything that has to do with my father and our history? Mara isn’t a girlfriend I’m keeping secrets from. She’s . . .” I search for the right word, one that’ll trigger the response I need without risking a response I can’t manage. “Unpredictable,” I say finally. Every word matters right now. “You know what Mara can do,” I say, rather than You know what Mara’s capable of.

  An interminable pause before Daniel shrugs one shoulder. Enough for me to go on.

  “Have you ever seen her do it?” I ask, swerving hard to avoid specifics.

  Daniel does the same. “You mean, face-to-face?”

  “Face-to-face, or on camera, or anything like that? With her mind or with her hands?”

  Wrong words, those. I can physically see Daniel’s attitude change. “She killed people, and I use the term ‘people’ loosely, in self-defence.” Loyal to a fault, the Dyer family. He loves her so much. Therein lies the rub.

  For me as well. The word “love” doesn’t begin to capture what I feel for her. But I do see her in a way that he can’t—that no one else can. We’ve seen each other raw, stripped down to our essences, for better and worse. I recognise her, and she recognises me. I love her for the person she is, not the person I think she is, or want her to be, because I don’t want her to be anything else.

  Daniel’s love is different. He can’t see her that way. In fact, I’m sure Mara’s gone to great lengths to avoid sharing that private, secret pleasure she takes in her ability to destroy.

  “You don’t think she also wants this to stop?” He looks incredulous. “You think she wants people dead?”

  I don’t know what she wants, I don’t say. I don’t know whom she wants dead, is the truth.

  “She’s not a serial killer,” Daniel says. “She’s not a mass murderer.”

  They are statements, not questions, and I’m not even sure Daniel believes them. His heart is racing, I notice uneasily.

  The thoughts that arise bubble up from my conversation with Stella. If Mara does have something to do with it, it can’t be intentional—it doesn’t fit her pattern. “Whatever she does, she does because she believes it’s justified,” I say, trying to ease his mind a bit. And mine. “And I do trust her.”

  “I sense a ‘but’ in the future of that sentence . . . .”

  I shake my head. “There isn’t one. I love her. I’d do anything to protect her. And this is how to protect her. There is something about Mara that separates her from people like Stella, and Leo, Sophie—”

  Daniel’s expression darkens. “Right. Sophie.”

  “And Felix and Felicity, and even Jamie.”

  “And you,” Daniel says, voicing what I avoided.

  “Right. Me as well. You heard what Sophie said. She can’t sense me for some reason.” Maybe I should feel paranoid, or unnerved, but mostly I feel numb.

  “But she can sense Mara.” He swallows. “You think she might—be at risk in some way?”

  Not in the way Daniel’s thinking. But perhaps I can use it, his fear for her, so I nod.

  He thinks about that for a moment, then takes a few steps forward, running his hands over some of the labels on the boxes nearest us. “I’ve been thinking that the common factor might not necessarily be a person but a trait.”

  Yes. Brilliant. “What sort?”

  “You’ve seen the list, right?”

  “Which?”

  He walks farther, footsteps echoing on the cement. “Dr. Kells created this list that she showed to Mara and Jamie and Stella, too, I’m guessing. There were two versions, actually—one that said you were alive, one that said you were dead.”

  Ah. That list.

  “Both listed all of your names, along with a bunch of others, Jude’s included, and had this designation after it,” he says. He peers over into the next aisle. “ ‘Original,’ ‘suspected original,’ or ‘artificially manifested or induced.’ ”

  “You think that’s got something to do with all this?”

  “Maybe,” Daniel says. “I mean, part of what was brilliant about what Kells did was giving the twins she worked on aliases.”

  This I’d heard about only in the briefest of summaries—my own fault. Mara didn’t talk about it, so I didn’t ask.

  “Go on,” I urge Daniel as broadly as I can. I’m not sure I want him to know just how much I don’t know.

  “The infants she fostered—I only found records here under their aliases, corresponding with the alphabet. It was all coded, and they died at different ages, from different symptoms, but there were at least seven, not including Jude and Claire, and someone, somewhere, would know about it if they were all from the same locations.”

  “But they weren’t.”

  Daniel shakes his head. “From all over the country. As diverse a roster as she could manage, probably. And she was on your father’s payroll then, so he’d have helped cover tracks.”

  No wonder he’d moved us to the States, ultimately. “It’s a big country.”

  “It’s a big world,” Daniel says. “Like I said, looking for names in here won’t get us far, but if we think more broadly—countries or cities of origin, birth dates, maybe, somewhere buried in what will probably look like a bunch of useless boilerplate corporate crap, we might find records for at least some of the people who’ve . . .”

  “Gone missing,” I finish for him.

  “I thought of looking up Stella’s stuff in here, actually, once she popped up here in the city. That was one of my first thoughts when I came to you.” His eyes rake over the height of the shelves, resting at the top.

  “Why didn’t you just say so when you first asked me?”

  He pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose—a nervous tic of his. “Mara and Stella and Jamie have an . . . unusual dynamic,” he says finally.

  “You didn’t want Mara to hear about your plans either,” I say, feeling rather self-righteous for a moment until Daniel shakes his head.

  “Actually, it was Jamie I was thinking of.”

  Well, well. “Why’s that?”

  “So, I always thought it was odd that Stella was designated
as a ‘suspected original.’ Not ‘original,’ like you and Mara, not ‘artificially manifested,’ like Jude. Once, when Mara wasn’t around, I asked Jamie about it.” He turns to face me. “Actually, it was when you guys all got those letters, remember?”

  Would that I could forget.

  “Anyway, we’d been talking about the Superman versus Spider-Man thing, born versus made theory, and I brought up the theory that maybe they didn’t know Stella’s genetic history when that list was made, and maybe that was how they were typing you guys.”

  Typing. I wonder for a moment if Daniel knows about the archetypes we supposedly represent—where my parents got the idea that I was destined to be some great Hero, and my father’s conviction about Mara being the Shadow, destroyer of worlds or some shite. That all came from the professor, a subject I’m desperate to avoid.

  “Anyway, Jamie mentioned that he was also a ‘suspected original,’ and I knew he was adopted; I kind of wanted to push the issue but, you know, still be . . . sensitive? Anyway, he went to get the mail when that came up. Stella got a letter too,” Daniel says. “Remember?”

  Now that he mentions it, I do, but just barely. Daniel had thanked me for saving his life from my own father, and I was trying to close my eyes to the world, just then. But I nod anyway.

  “I felt kind of left out. I didn’t ask to read Mara’s because she’d just been through . . . stuff. All of you guys had been, so I kind of wandered off to give you space. When I saw Jamie next, he was wearing that pendant you used to wear, and was acting totally different. I tried to pick up the conversation we’d been having before, but he shut it down.”

  Not surprising.

  “But I asked him what he thought we should do with Stella’s letter, given that she’d left. I thought we should throw it out, maintain her privacy. You know what he said? ‘We’ll be seeing her again.’ ”

  “That’s . . .” I struggle for the word.

  “Weird?” Daniel’s nodding his head. “Yeah. Back then I thought it was just something to say, like, Oh, Stella’s around, not lost and gone forever, that sort of thing—but now?”

  “Now it’s weird,” I echo.

  “And did you see Jamie seize on it when Leo mentioned that those guys all practiced their abilities together?”

  “What if everything that’s happening is someone flexing their little Gift?” I think out loud.

  Daniel’s brow furrows. “It could even be unintentional.”

  “Could be.” Doubt it is. I doubt equally that Jamie’s the one responsible, but that he might be connected to whomever is seems more plausible by the moment.

  “What do you make of Leo’s tattoo?” Daniel asks me, and I go still. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you seizing on that at the brownstone.”

  It takes a conscious effort to remain blank.

  “Leo’s tattoo. Jamie’s pendant—”

  And mine. And Mara’s.

  “Which he got from Lukumi or Armin Lenaurd or whoever he is, who wrote the letters you all got. I thought you liked me because I was smart.”

  “More for your dashing good looks,” I say. “But fair play to you. Make anything of it?”

  “Where did you get your pendant from?” he asks.

  I play the only card I have. “My mother,” I say. “I found it in her things after she died.”

  “Oh,” Daniel says, shifting his weight.

  This was the moment. I could tell Daniel my sordid family history and my pathetic little sob stories, tell him about the letter my mother wrote me, the letter the professor wrote Mara, and on and on until he knew everything. About me. About us.

  But Mara hadn’t told him. She kept her letter to herself.

  You will grow in strength and conviction, and apart from you, Noah will too, the professor had written to her. You will love Noah Shaw to ruins, unless you let him go.

  That’s why she’d kept it from her brother all this time. She’d let me read it, though. It was our grand fight, the one we repeated in a hundred incarnations over the hundreds of thousands of hours we’ve spent together. Whether she should leave me, for my sake.

  I have seen his death a thousand ways in a thousand dreams over a thousand nights, and the only one who can prevent it is you.

  I refused to accept that then, and I refuse now. The stakes for Daniel are different, needless to say.

  “Do you think the professor’s still a player?” I ask, as if it hadn’t occurred to me before now. If I hadn’t just mentioned my dead mother, he’d likely call me on it.

  His eyes narrow just slightly behind the lenses of his dark frames as he nods. “He could be a candidate for chess master this time around . . . .” His voice trails off awkwardly, having invoked both of my dead parents in short order.

  I do wonder, though, what he would think if I told him everything. “What would that entail?” I ask. Hypotheticals are safe ground for him. For both of us.

  “I mean, Jamie mentioned ‘precogs’ when we met with Leo, and the guy’s always seemed to be one step ahead of us in the past . . . .”

  “But how would that even work?” I say. “He knows everything that’s ever going to happen? Free will doesn’t exist?”

  “It . . . would present a lot of philosophical problems,” Daniel says, nodding.

  “You’re a man of science. What do you believe?” I ask, genuinely curious.

  He smiles now, back on familiar territory. “Admittedly, your ability and Mara’s and Jamie’s and so on strain the boundaries of logic, but there’s at least a framework for them. Limitations. You’re carriers of a gene that’s turned on by environmental and biological factors. Cancer works that way, so, it’s precedented at least. Through some, I don’t know, maybe subatomic mechanism, that gene enables you to affect matter in different ways. Lukumi was also the author of New Theories in Genetics,” he says, shrugging. “It seemed absurd when Mara first showed it to me, but then, well, you know the rest.”

  I do. “So, do you believe in free will, or predestination?”

  “Free will,” he says decisively.

  I know things that Daniel doesn’t, and I’ve seen things he hasn’t, but I believe the same. I have to. Or else, what’s the point?

  33

  HOW VAIN IT IS

  WE LEAVE THE ARCHIVES SHORTLY after, having satisfied Daniel’s curiosity and letting him reach his own conclusions about what to do next.

  “Get invited back to the brownstone, find points of origin for all the Carriers Leo knows, cross-reference for subsidiaries of your father’s company that might’ve operated there or nearby, and then use that to come back here and see if there’s a Kells-ish person in the mental health field who’s treated more than one of them, who might be at the hub of a particular wheel. Start small, branch out.”

  “Brilliant,” I say. The metal shutter screeches as I pull it down over the door. “We start tonight.”

  “Have your flatmates send their pictures over to me, and I’ll start on the map. And you . . .” He waits expectantly.

  “Will talk to Jamie.”

  “And Goose,” he adds.

  “And Goose,” I parrot, before we part ways.

  When he first brought it up, he’d asked what Goose’s moral compass was like, and I said I didn’t know, that the last time I really spent with him, he could scarcely shave. “Why?” I’d asked him.

  “Because,” Daniel said, running his hands through his hair, “I hate this expression, but there’s no denying he’s a game changer. If . . . what’s happening . . . is connected to Mara . . . somehow . . .”

  What went unsaid is that he could turn Mara into a weapon of mass destruction, if she wanted to be.

  I watched Daniel as he spoke the words, knew he was thinking that she wouldn’t want to be.

  I’m not as sure.

  I’m anxious to get back to the flat, and not just to see Mara. My shield’s been up for too long today, and it’s bloody exhausting.

  No one else is there when I a
rrive, though. I should be relieved; instead, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the emptiness of it. Even when it’s just Mara and I, her presence is enough to fill it.

  I pace to the bar, pour myself a shot of whiskey. Down it, then another. My inability to get properly, thoroughly wasted only makes me feel worse.

  My footsteps echo on the stairs, and I ignore the chilled air and the swift movements of clouds beyond the glass that make me dizzy for some reason. When I reach the office, I close the door behind me.

  Daniel’s wheel metaphor has been spinning in my mind. I can’t seem to break it or stop it, so I let it spin and end up standing in front of the trunk full of my mother’s things. Hardly surprising, considering I spent the day in my father’s archives. I would bore even the worst therapist.

  I rummage through her books and things, not finding anything of particular interest until a small red journal peeks out from under The Once and Future King. There’s a ribbon threaded through the pages edged in gilt.

  A day may yet come when I stop being my own worst enemy, but that day is not today. I open my mother’s journal and begin to read.

  26 June

  Jesus fuck, I’ve just met David’s parents for the first time, and I think I might be happier if I were to drown in the Thames—or to jump from one of the turrets of their beloved manor house—than marry into that wretched family.

  His harpy of a mother greeted me with a look of disdain to compliment her nearly invisible smile, then his father, not an altogether horrid man, peppered me with questions about hunting and shooting, both of which I abhor, which David knows, and I could practically hear him grinding his teeth during tea, worrying what his common beloved might say and do to offend the Lord and Lady.

  It isn’t just his family. I wish it were, honestly. David is just so . . . dull. Not dull-witted, obviously. Never second at anything, not collections or mods or finals—his gang of mates is always scrunching on him about it, out of jealousy, likely. He’s the only one at the pub on Suicide Sunday, not worrying in the slightest whether he’ll pass or fail his classes. And he is objectively gorgeous, one has to give him that. It’s the brandy after dinner shite, the “summering” in Cornwall, Yorkshire, for the “season”—by which he means hunting season, though we’ve talked (shouted) about that, and he’s sworn to stop, which will send Lady Sylvia into a fit. He is trying, and I know he’s trying for me, which almost makes it worse.