The Retribution of Mara Dyer (2 page)

“They don’t need restraints to keep us chained up,” she said. “The drugs do that for them. They make us compliant. Willing. But they’re changing us too, I think. I don’t know how yet, but it has to mean something, that your memory of Rachel is broken but your memories of Claire and Jude aren’t.”

“What about my brothers? My parents?”
And Noah
, I thought but didn’t say.

As I spoke, images of each of them filled the mirrors around me. Joseph was wearing a suit with a pocket square, rolling his eyes at someone. Daniel was laughing in his car, making a face at me from behind the wheel. The image of my mother showed her sitting on her bed, laptop on her lap, her face drawn and worried. My father was sitting up in his
hospital bed, eating a contraband slice of pizza. And Noah—

Noah’s eyes were closed, but he was breathing. Sleeping. One of his hands was curled in a loose fist by his face, and his T-shirt, the one with the holes in it, was twisted, exposing a sliver of skin above his boxers. This was how he looked the morning after I told him what was wrong with me. After we figured out what was wrong with us.

I couldn’t stop looking at them—the people I loved, laughing and talking and living behind silvered panes of glass. But as I did, I realized something wasn’t right. I looked closely at Noah. He was sleeping, not moving, which made it easier for me to finally see. His edges were faded. Blurred. I glanced back at the images of my parents, my brothers. Their edges were soft too.

“We’re losing them, I think,” the girl said. “I don’t know why, but I think Kells does, and I think she’s doing it on purpose.”

I was only half-listening. I couldn’t stop staring at the mirrors.

“I’m never going to see them again, am I.” It wasn’t a question.

“My sources say no.”

“You know,” I said to her, “you’re kind of an asshole.”

“Well, that would explain why we’re so popular. Speaking of, Jamie and Stella are here too. In case you were curious.”

“Have you seen them?”

She shook her head. “But Wayne mentioned ‘Roth’ once, and ‘Benicia’ twice, to Kells. And he talked about them in the present tense.”

I swelled with relief. My throat tightened and ached and I felt like I might cry, but no tears came. “What about Noah?” I blurted out the question before I could think about whether I really wanted the answer.

The girl knew. “Kells mentioned him once.”

But my question had gone unanswered. And now I had to know. “Tell me what she said.”

“She said—” The girl didn’t finish her sentence. Something hissed and clicked behind me, and she went still.

“What?” I asked. “What did she say?”

She didn’t answer. When she spoke again, her voice shook. “They’re here,” the girl said, and then she was gone.

3

U
NTIL THAT MOMENT I HADN’T
been sure if I was awake or hallucinating. But now the sounds I heard seemed very real. Too real. The click of high heels on the linoleum floor. The rush of air as a door opened somewhere behind my head. I glanced at myself in the ceiling. Opened my mouth. My reflection did the same thing.

So I was alone now, definitely. I might not have been sure what was real and what wasn’t, but I knew that I didn’t want Kells to know I was awake. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Good morning, Mara,” Dr. Kells said crisply. “Open your eyes.”

And they opened, just like that. I saw Dr. Kells standing beside my bed and reflected in front of me hundreds of times in the small, mirrored room. Wayne was beside her, large and puffy and sloppy, where she was slim and polished and neat.

“Have you been awake long?” she asked me.

My head shook from side to side. Somehow, I don’t know how, it didn’t feel like I was the one who shook it.

“Your heart rate spiked not long ago. Did you have a bad dream?”

As if I weren’t
living
a bad dream. She looked genuinely concerned, and I’m not sure I’d ever wanted to hit someone as much in my entire life.

The urge was sharp and violent and I enjoyed it while it lasted. Which wasn’t very long. Because as soon as I felt it, it thinned. Vanished, leaving me cold and hollowed out.

“Tell me how you’re feeling,” Kells said.

I did. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to. I didn’t have a choice.

“I want to run some tests on you. Is that all right?”

No. “Yes,” I said.

She took out a composition notebook. My handwriting was on the front of it, my name. It was my journal, the one I was supposed to write my fears in, at Horizons. From days ago. Or weeks, if what my reflection had said was true.

“You remember this, don’t you, Mara?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent,” she said, and smiled genuinely. She was pleased that I remembered, which made me wonder what I might have forgotten.

“We’re going to work on your fears together today. G1821—the genetic condition that’s harming you, remember?—causes your ability to flare. Different factors switch it on. But at the same time, it switches
off
a different part of you.” She paused, studying my face. “It removes the barrier between your conscious thought and your unconscious thought. So to help get you better, Mara, I want to be sure I can prescribe you the accurate dosage of medication, the variant of Amytal you’re being given—Anemosyne, we call it. And in order to see if it’s working, we’re going to trigger the fears you recorded in this journal. Sort of like exposure therapy, combined with drug therapy. Okay?”

Fuck you. “Okay.”

Wayne opened a case he’d been carrying and laid out the contents on a small tray next to the bed. I turned my head to the side and watched, but then wished that I hadn’t. Scalpels, syringes, and needles of different sizes gleamed against the black fabric.

“We are going to measure your response to your fear of needles today,” she said, and on cue Wayne lifted a plastic-capped cylinder. He pinched the cap between his fingers and twisted it. The seal broke with a loud
snick
. He fitted the needle onto a large syringe.

“You’ve certainly seen plenty of these, considering your
time in hospitals, and judging from your records, your instinct is to fight back when touched nonconsensually by medical professionals,” she said, raising her penciled brows a fraction. “You punched a nurse on your first hospital stay in Providence after the asylum incident, in response to being touched and forcibly held.” She looked down at a small notepad. “And then you hit the nurse at the psychiatric unit in the hospital when you were admitted after you attempted suicide.”

At that moment two images competed for space in my mind. The first one was sharp and clear, of me standing alone on a dock and taking the shining blade of a box cutter to my pale wrists. In the other image, blurred and soft, the outline of Jude stood behind me, whispering into my ear, threatening me and my family until the box cutter bit deep into my skin.

My mind clamped down on the second image, the one with Jude. I hadn’t tried to kill myself. Jude had just tried to make it look like I had. And Kells, somehow, was trying to make me forget it.

Wayne bent down then and withdrew something from below the bed, beyond my range of vision. He stood up, holding a complicated-looking system of leather and metal restraints. Shackles, really. Still no fear.

But then Kells said, “Just relax.”

Her words echoed in my mind, in someone else’s voice.

Just relax.

There was a little flip in my chest, and the monitor beside
my bed beeped. I didn’t understand. Was it the words? A bead of sweat rolled down Wayne’s forehead. He wiped it away with his sleeved forearm, then moved his thick fingers to the crook of my elbow. My mind flinched and my muscles went tense.

Wayne seemed to feel it. “Are you sure—are you sure she’s stable?” He was nervous. Good.

Kells looked at my arm. “Mara, I want your body, your arms, and your hands to go limp.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, they did. I looked at myself in the ceiling mirror. My expression was slack.

“When you see something you’re afraid of, your mind tells your body to react. It tells your kidneys to release adrenaline, which makes your heart rate increase, and your pulse, and your rate of breathing. This is to prepare you to run away from, or to fight, the thing you’re afraid of, regardless of whether that fear is rational. In your case fear triggers your anomaly. So what we’re doing is making sure that the medicine we’ve developed to help you is doing what it’s supposed to, which is to separate your mental reactions from your physical reactions. The main goal, of course, is total aversion—blocking the pathway that transforms your . . .” She rubbed a thumb over her bottom lip as she searched for words. “Negative thoughts,” she finally said, “into action. Anemosyne doesn’t
prevent
your thoughts, but it prevents the physical consequences of them, rendering you as harmless as a non-carrier. Now turn her,” she said to Wayne.

Wayne swallowed, his jowls trembling with the movement as he took me by the shoulders and began to turn me over. At some point an attachment had been fitted to the bed that allowed me to lie on my stomach without craning my neck to either side. I stared at the floor, grateful that it too wasn’t mirrored. At least I wouldn’t have to watch.

My ankles were strapped down. He positioned each arm so that it hung over the side, then shackled my wrists together, like I was hugging the bed.

“Show her the syringe,” Dr. Kells said to him.

Wayne moved the needle in front of my eyes, letting me see it from every angle. My heartbeat sped up, and with it, the monitor.

“Should her heart be beating like that?” Wayne asked nervously.

“Just a reflex,” Kells explained. “Her body is still capable of responding to reflexes, but her emotions, her fear, can’t trigger her ability regardless of what she thinks,” she said matter-of-factly. “Consciously or subconsciously.”

Wayne lifted the back of the white hospital gown they’d dressed me in. I didn’t want him touching me, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

Then something scraped, slid toward me on the floor. A mirror. It showed me my face, which was white and bloodless, and in the ceiling mirror I saw my exposed back. I looked thin. Unhealthy.

I didn’t want to see whatever it was they were going to do to me, and that I
could
do something about. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Open your eyes,” Dr. Kells said, and I did. I had to, and I hated it.

She angled the mirror, and I watched as Wayne took a cotton ball from the metal stand beside the bed and drenched it in iodine. I flinched when he rubbed it on my back.

He noticed. “What does that mean?”

“Just a reflex,” Kells said, her voice thin. Exasperated. “To the cold,” she said to him. Then to me, “If I were to hit your knee with a hammer, Mara, it would jerk. It’s just your response to fear that we’re trying to dull. If we’re successful, you’ll be able to live a normal, productive life unhindered by your irrational fears, and without having to worry that you will unintentionally will consequences that could be disastrous for the people you love and others.”

I vaguely remembered that I used to care about that.

“We’re going to extract some of your spinal fluid first,” Kells said, and Wayne positioned the needle closer to my skin. “This will only hurt a little.”

Every movement from that moment on was processed in slow motion. The needle as Wayne allowed it to hover just millimeters from my skin. The feel of cold steel piercing my skin, first a pinch; then, as it went deeper, a sting, an ache, a burn, and I wanted to thrash but I didn’t move, couldn’t move.
Kells told me to watch my face in the mirror, and I did. It was still blank. A mask of skin hiding every feeling. My mind screamed but my mouth stayed shut.

There was pressure as the syringe sucked fluid from my spine. “You’re doing very well,” Kells said, her voice toneless. “Isn’t this better, Mara? There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a needle and it’s only pain. Pain is just a feeling, and feelings aren’t real.”

After what felt like hours Wayne withdrew the needle, and the pressure stopped but the pain didn’t. Something cold and wet trickled slowly down my skin before Wayne pressed a piece of gauze to absorb it. My breath was deep and even. I didn’t gasp, I didn’t throw up. I’d thought those were reflexes. Guess not.

Wayne cleaned up my back, unshackled my wrists, unbuckled the straps from my ankles, and then gently, in a way that made my mind sick, turned me over onto my back.

“I know that wasn’t pleasant for you, Mara,” Kells said. “But despite your internal discomfort, it was a very successful test. What the drug is allowing you to do right now is separate your mental reactions from your physical reactions. The side effect, though, is also quite exciting.” She didn’t sound excited at all.

“I’m sure you wanted to react during that procedure. I’m sure you wanted to scream and probably cry. But thanks to the drug, your physical reflexes will remain intact, but they’re
divorced from your emotions. In other words, with Anemosyne, if someone chops onions near you, or if an eyelash is stuck in your eye, you’ll still tear in response to stimuli. Your eyes will try to flush out the irritant. But you’ll no longer cry because of fear, or because of sadness or frustration. It severs that connection to prevent you from losing control.” She hovered over me. “I know it’s a strange sensation for you now, but you’ll adapt. And the benefit to you, and others, will be enormous. Once we settle on the appropriate dosage for you, we’ll need to boost your infusions only every few months. You’ll eventually be able to go home to your family, come to therapy with me, and have the normal life that you wanted, as this drug keeps working.” She reached out to smooth my hair in what I supposed was meant to be a maternal gesture, and I felt the urge to bite her.

“We’re going to give you another drug now so that you won’t even remember today’s unpleasantness. Won’t that be nice?” A smile snaked across her lips, but then her eyebrows pinched together. “Wayne, what’s the current room temperature?”