The Reckoning of Noah Shaw Read online

  “I’m trying to help Jude, too, Noah. The applications—the benefits—of what we’re doing here outweigh the risks. I’ve tried to study Mara as noninvasively as I could, which is why I had her behaviour recorded before I took any specific action.”

  I swallow even though I want to scream. “How did you get into her house?”

  “I didn’t. Jude did.”

  “I never saw any cameras.”

  “That’s because there weren’t any.” She clears her throat again. “We used fibre optics, installed in her home while she and her family were not present to observe and record her behaviour before it escalated.”

  “You are sick,” I say.

  “Mara is sick, Noah.”

  “If that’s true, it’s because you made her that way.”

  “No,” Kells says through clenched teeth. “She was born that way. I can’t learn how to help Mara until I fully understand what’s wrong with her, and I can’t do that without you.”

  “How about this,” I say. “Get fucked.”

  “I’m disappointed to hear that.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I would have thought you’d want to see Mara again,” she says, rising from her chair.

  “Not like that,” I say. Never like that.

  She pauses for a moment, watching me. “What if you could be together? You and Mara? On your own.”

  Everything in me wants her offer to be genuine, even knowing that it can’t be. I watch Kells, I listen—her heartbeat is steady, her breathing calm. She isn’t lying.

  “Wouldn’t that be complicated somewhat by the fact that I just witnessed you telling Mara I was dead?”

  “I wasn’t truthful with Mara because I needed to attempt to trigger her—to be sure that she was responding to the medications. To give her the worst possible news—to say the worst possible thing, and make sure she wouldn’t react.” She inclines her head a bit. “And it worked. I can just as easily bring you to her, prove to her that you’re alive and well, and let you have some time alone with each other.”

  I don’t believe her. I’m desperate to believe her.

  “I regret the way I treated you when you first woke up,” she says. “Mara’s heart stopped when she was told that you were dead. I have no desire to torture her, or you, which is why I’ve answered all of your questions in good faith. I’ve explained everything to you, and have asked for nothing from you in return except your cooperation.”

  I extend my forearm, my hand curled into a fist. “Take my blood and be done with it, then.”

  “The answer isn’t in your blood. It’s in your brain. Your telomeres do replicate and show no sign of stopping, which we think allows for your own rapid cellular regeneration. But you’re able to heal not only yourself—you can heal other people, other things, too, right?”

  I stay silent.

  “Genes alter and degrade over time, and this one changes your brain chemistry, or triggers nerve processing that unlocks your ability to influence cells or action, possibly. The truth is that I don’t understand enough about how yours works. I do know that I need to study patients while they’re awake, and conscious.”

  “Well, you’ve got the rest of the weekend. What do you want me to do?”

  Her eyebrows rise. “The weekend?”

  “For the retreat? The bullshit pretext under which you had parents who thought their kids had depression or anxiety or an eating disorder or whatever and sent them to you for help, not knowing they were handing them over for human experimentation? Those parents are going to wonder where their children are, eventually. Mine included. You do know who my father is, I’m sure.”

  “Of course I do,” she says plainly. “He hired me.”

  “To fix me, no doubt.”

  Kells allows herself a smile. Says nothing.

  “He’s hired you and a dozen other psychologists over the course of my childhood. You’re a member of quite an unillustrious club, I’m afraid.”

  She observes me calmly. “I started working at a subsidiary of the EIC when I was twenty, just out of college,” she says. “David Shaw recruited me. Sponsored my doctoral research. Your father knows what you are. He knows what Mara is. His company’s been conducting research that probably spawned a clutch of Carriers all over the world. You’re here anyway.”

  It’s my pulse that hammers, now. My heart that stutters.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Noah? Your father left you here anyway.”

  “You’re lying,” I say through clenched teeth.

  “Listen to my pulse.”

  “You’re regulating it,” I snap. “You’re just trying to provoke me, trigger me, like you’ve done to Mara.”

  “Why? What good would that do me?” She rises from her chair. Walks up to the cage. Unlocks it. Meets my eyes.

  “I know you want to believe that I’m lying. But you know your father,” she says, indicating my shackled wrists. “You know the truth, even if you’re too ashamed or afraid to admit it to yourself.”

  “Why would I be either of those things?” My words come out in a whisper.

  She doesn’t answer, and it tortures me. “He wants her put to sleep. I think she can be saved. Will you prove me right, or wrong?” She holds up the keys in her hand.

  I don’t have enough time. To think. To decide. Which is why I make the wrong choice. “Take me to her.”

  14

  MY CREATION

  THE SIGHT OF HER BREAKS my heart.

  It’s been less than a day. Minutes, really, since I watched her through the glass. It feels like an era, like I’ve seen civilisations rise and fall in the time we’ve been apart, and now I’m left, staring at the ashes.

  That’s what she looks like since Kells told her I died. Like the ashes.

  I breathe her name from the doorway of the same room I last saw her in, newly unshackled but testing my steps. She doesn’t respond. I can’t even tell if she knows I’m here.

  I turn to Kells. “Is she awake?”

  Dr. Kells looks at a tablet. “Seems to be.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Only what you saw.”

  I look back at Mara, lying in a metal bed in the centre of the room, dwarfed by negative space. Her eyes are open, looking at nothing. She doesn’t respond to my voice. It’s as if by telling Mara I no longer exist, I’ve stopped existing for her, and I am close to breaking.

  “Is she paralysed?” I ask Kells, who pauses before answering.

  “No. The medication helps her be . . . present, as I explained. She’s likely experiencing strong emotions, which have triggered stress responses. They’ll come and go like waves, and she’ll be able to ride them out. She could move. She chooses not to.”

  I take a step toward her, and when Kells doesn’t stop me, I take more until I’m by her side. Her features don’t look relaxed, just . . . slack. She looks uninhabited. Like an abandoned house.

  There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to bring her back. Nothing.

  There’s an IV running into her arm, and a few monitors, but nothing else I can see, nothing I can use, to get us out.

  All of Kells’s words reverberate in my skull—about my father. About Mara. “What will it take,” I begin to say, “for you to let us go?”

  “Your honest answers to my questions, for a start, beginning with how you first discovered your ability. Then we’ll reevaluate from there. But if you prove to me that I can trust you, I will prove that you can trust me. Your mind is the key, Noah. I need you to let me in.”

  I’ve sworn at her. I’ve threatened her. I haven’t begged yet—I could try that, I suppose. But invoking my father has done something nothing else has managed to, yet. His power has opened doors for me my entire life, but for the first time, I’m now on the other side of it, that power. Nothing I’ve ever done has been any match for it. Nothing I could do could match it.

  “You promised me a moment alone with her,” I say to Kells. “Give
me that, and I’ll give you what you want.”

  She inclines her head, with the good grace not to smile, at least, and leaves the room.

  A wave of sadness threatens to choke me.

  Sadness tightens your chest and throat and lungs—you can’t breathe for it. You can only turn your grief over and over.

  Anger, though—anger can be used. If you can swallow the ache in your chest and let bitterness rise in your throat, you can burn it like fuel.

  I choose anger over sadness.

  I reach out to Mara’s face. She doesn’t react when I sweep the hair back from her pale forehead. Her eyes are fixed and staring, even as I lean in, until my lips are at her ear.

  “Get out,” I purr. “Then kill them. Kill them all.”

  Part III

  After

  Whitby, England

  Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  15

  THE LEAST ENLIGHTENED

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN SHITE AT advice.

  The room is dark when I awaken. Vague outlines begin to take shape in the dimness—a fireplace, and a bed I seem to be looming over, instead of lying in. Beyond it, the postcard-perfect view of the unmistakable Whitby Abbey, lit up in the night.

  It is interesting that I’ve begun to hallucinate, but only mildly. Obviously the drugs and the previous night’s binge drinking were a monumental mistake; this is not a normal reaction. And I don’t want to fucking imagine Horizons, of all places. Or Mara, of all people.

  But now that I have, it’s that dead voice of hers that echoes in my mind. Those vacant eyes that didn’t register my face. I want to scrub them from my skull.

  I peel off my clothes as if I can shed the images with them, and run the shower at scalding. I vaguely hear a phone ring, somewhere. I press my palms against the white tile and bow my head, trying to ignore it as the water scorches my skin. Finally the ringing stops.

  I shut off the water and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirrored medicine cabinet. My fist is a bruised, possibly broken mess, and I take obscene pleasure in it.

  I was fifteen when I first learned that I could heal. I’d been coolly informed by my father’s secretary that we were moving the next day, to the United States. To Miami. No warning. No notice. I spent the evening at the pub with friends, getting piss drunk not because I cared but because I didn’t. I should have, but I felt nothing, and that, more than anything else, terrified me.

  I stumbled into my father’s study—he was gone, as usual. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Liquor possibly. Probably. Every part of me was numb. I skirted the desk my father never sat at and walked slowly toward the bar. The walls were gauzy and insubstantial, not shimmering, not moving, just . . . barely there. My hands roamed the surface of the bar. They found a knife.

  Everything was out of focus, and then, when my fingers touched the handle, not. The grooved bone handle—or was it ivory?—felt so real in my palm, like the only real thing in the room. Including myself. The edge of the blade was sharp and gorgeous, and suddenly—strangely, I remember thinking—the hand that held it looked sharp as well. My hand. The rest of me didn’t seem to be there. Not real. And then I thought that if I wasn’t real, I couldn’t bleed. I was made of nothing and so if I cut myself, nothing would happen. There was a pinprick of wrongness about it, but it faded quickly. I took the blade to my forearm, feeling a—a pressure, unlike anything I’d ever felt. I needed to do it.

  Everything shivered into focus at the touch of the metal on my skin. I inhaled and the air was cold and gleaming and I laughed, because it felt real and magical at once. I didn’t hesitate the way you should when you anticipate pain. I was ready. I wanted it. I dragged the knife across my arm.

  I closed my eyes and pressed harder. A rushing sound filled me and my heart beat again, almost against the blade, it felt like. I watched, surprised—astonished, really—as blood welled in the line of the cut and spilled over onto the floor. It was slow-seeming and yet happened faster than I’d imagined it would, because I hadn’t imagined I would bleed at all.

  My arm throbbed, and I slid down against the bar until I found myself sitting on the floor, legs askew, propped against the furniture. Everything was real, then. The pull of the cabinet bored into my back, the glossy wood cool on the nape of my neck. The pain quickened my breath and my heartbeat and giddily, I realised my blood was pooling on the floor.

  I took off my shirt, tore a strip of it off, and wound it around the cut. It mustn’t have been as deep as I first thought, because the flow of the blood was already slowing. The strip of fabric felt tight and solid, and I knelt and cleaned the blood from the floor—my parents couldn’t know I was bleeding, couldn’t know what I’d done. I was surprised by the sudden, slight sting of shame.

  I swallowed it back with disturbingly little effort. And then climbed the stairs and fell into bed.

  I woke up the next morning to the sounds of a house disassembling. I felt hungover—the light punctured my eyelids and my head was heavy and dull and everything in me hurt. I remembered almost nothing of the night before—stumbling out of the pub with Patrick and Goose and going home and then, and then—

  I looked down at my arm, at the strip of my grey T-shirt still wound around it. The blood had dried, and it now looked like rust. It had soaked through the fabric and had gotten on my sheets and I swore, knowing I’d need to bleach them unless I wanted sneering questions about my menstrual cycle from my father. As if he’d even hear about it. Or care to mention the blood to me regardless. He was probably already gone.

  And so I rose from my bed, ignoring the dull throb in my arm and my head and my all-over stiffness, and made my way to the bathroom. I spilled a few over-the-counter painkillers into my hand—two? three?—and swallowed them back without water. I leaned my forearms against the sink—my head ached and my throat was raw, and when I looked in the mirror at my shadowed eyes and my roughened face, I was startled.

  I looked different.

  Or, more likely, I was simply hungover. The skin under the strip of cloth itched, and I turned on the shower and rummaged through the vanity drawers looking for gauze. I found some and untied the bandage.

  There was nothing there.

  I staggered back against the wall, holding my arm out in front of me, turning it, flexing it. I’d been piss drunk, yes, but that drunk?

  Had I even cut myself?

  If I hadn’t, then where had the blood come from?

  I examined the unbroken skin on my arm once more, and let the strip of cloth fall to the floor. I stared at myself in the mirror and smiled.

  That was three years ago.

  Everything and nothing has changed since then, and I find myself reaching for the medicine cabinet, longing for a razor blade and not to shave with, when the phone rings again. I wait for it to stop. It doesn’t. Goose shows up in my room instead.

  “Noah.” Goose stands in the doorway, looking unusually unsettled.

  “What?” I ask, more sharply than I intended.

  “Hate to interrupt your wank, but you’ve got a call.”

  “If it’s the bloody solicitor—”

  “It’s not.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “It’s Mara,” he says.

  “Which?”

  “What?” Goose looks perplexed.

  I narrow my eyes. Is his memory the problem, or is mine? Did we have the conversation in which I drunkenly explained M’s existence, or not?

  “Where’s the phone?” I ask.

  “In the kitchen,” he says.

  I blink, then drift past him.

  He calls after me. “You do realise you’re naked, yes?”

  I look down; it appears he is correct. My hair is still dripping wet. “Seems so,” I say, though I’m not sure to whom. I swipe the towel from the top of the door, and knot it round my waist in the hall.

  “Mate,” Goose says, cov
ering the receiver. “How’d she get this number?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “You’re sure you want to talk?”

  I’m not sure about anything. Even if my Mara is on the other end of the line—I try imagining it, but my mind empties out. I’ve no idea what I’ll say.

  It’s not her, though. It won’t be her. “Hello?”

  “I thought you were going home,” M says.

  I exhale. “How did you get this number?” I ask, as promised.

  “Ask me in person.” She hangs up. Instead of silence, a brash, awful sound assaults my ears. Goose walks in to find me wincing, holding the receiver midair.

  “Went well, did it?”

  “Obvious?”

  “Brought you your trousers,” he says, handing them to me.

  “You seem inordinately concerned about my state of undress.”

  “Of course I am. What would the driver think?”

  “What driver?”

  “The one on the street who I believe is waiting for us.” He claps me on the back. “I’m still game for Ibiza or wherever, mate, but it appears we’ll be going to the Shaw estate, first.”

  16

  ENTRUSTED ME

  THERE DOESN’T SEEM TO BE much point in resisting anymore, once we’ve been found. And so I spend the vast majority of the drive to the manor either being too triggered by familiar sights or overwhelmed by thought spirals—about a surprise reappearance of the professor (he loves those), or about the remote possibility of my own grandmother and Mara’s meeting face-to-face—to take advantage of the mini-bottles of liquor that come with the car. I regret it immediately, once we arrive.

  The manor was closed to the public for my father’s funeral, but it is quite clearly open for business today. There are tourists (tourists!) clustered in couples and families over the grounds and in the car parks. The driver deposits us in one of them instead of taking us up the private drive to the main residence.

  “These were my instructions, sir,” he says when questioned by Goose. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate or care. The manor was typically closed to the public when our fucked-up little family made the occasional visit here from London, so the tourists are a novelty and possibly a welcome distraction from the tedium, should we need one.