The Retribution of Mara Dyer (25 page)

“Plus,” Jamie said, “bad shit happens to kids in foster care all the time.”

I looked at Kells’s frozen image on the screen, and pressed play.

“J. woke up two days after induction complaining of sickness. The thermometer showed a fever of 99.6. I’m hopeful that this is just a normal cold, or flu, since the others presented with temperatures above 101 before they expired.”

“Expired? Damn, that’s cold,” Jamie said.

“Claire seems fine, anyway,” Kells continued, looking perfectly calm, not worried at all.

“Fast forward,” Jamie said, and I did.

Kells looked tense and worried now. “J. has developed the fever. Same symptoms as the others, mostly, but with a few key differences. He seems disoriented. I’ve caught him speaking in the third person, to himself, and occasionally to me. He has asked to see Claire, but I don’t want to frighten her. I need her amenable and willing to endure future testing, particularly if Jude expires like the rest.”

I stopped the DVD. “Claire was in my grade,” I said to no one in particular.

“And Jude was in mine,” Daniel said.

Stella picked up the pile of papers on the table. “But it says they were fraternal twins. Pair five.”

I nodded.

“Why lie?” I asked.

I pressed play, but Dr. Kells had switched the focus of her interview, or recording, or whatever this was, to a discussion of the properties of Amylethe. Daniel and Stella kept watching as Jamie and I picked out the DVDs with the months and dates that corresponded to medical events in Jude’s file. When this DVD finished, we put the next one in.

Kells sat down at the little table in the green and white room, practically beaming. “My name is Deborah Susan Kells,” she said to the camera. “Today is Monday, March fifth,
two months after the induction of subject J.L. according to the Lenaurd protocol, which appears to have been a success.”

The four of us looked at one another.

“After the injection series, he began developing at a magnificent rate,” Kells said, leaning forward in her chair. “Beyond what I could have hoped.” She kept talking, about Jude’s advancement, his development, physical and otherwise. He was becoming “gifted,” to use Kells’s words, and she was proud of him, proud of what she’d done to him. But it was also changing him—subtly at first. And then not. When he was ten years old, she began to worry.

“He is moody, depressive—aggressive, even. I’ve noticed the development of secondary sex characteristics—deepening voice, the beginnings of facial and chest hair. He appears to be undergoing puberty, despite his age. I’ve ordered an evaluation and intervention, and I will report back with the results next month.” She turned the camera off.

We put the next DVD in, riveted.

“The psychiatrist has returned with a diagnosis of conduct disorder,” she said, clearly shaken. “And the behavior of Subject J continues to deteriorate. He has become antisocial and extremely aggressive. Claire reported that she caught her brother pulling the feathers off a sparrow fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. We’ve been administering Amylethe to try to arrest the . . . side effects . . . of the manifestation.”

“That’s why,” Daniel said quietly.

“Why what?”

“Why they lied about his age. If he started undergoing puberty at ten, he would have looked too old to pass for seventeen.” Daniel picked up a handful of paper and spoke while reading it. “She kept testing all kinds of drugs on him, not just the typical antipsychotics—hormones, experimental stuff.” And then Daniel looked at each of us. “This is why you guys look older than you are. There was something about rapid maturation in
New Theories
. It started at age eighteen in subjects, and continued to twenty-one.”

“Except none of us are eighteen,” Stella said aloud.

Jamie looked skeptical. “And people always think I’m younger than I am. Maybe it’s like that thing where growth hormones in milk make you go through puberty earlier?”

I wished Noah could have been there to hear that. “She gave me Amylethe too,” I said to Daniel, remembering Kells’s words in Horizons. “She said it would make me better.”

Daniel looked at me then. “Did it work? Do you feel better?”

I did feel better, but it wasn’t because of the drugs, or the implants. How could I describe what I’d gone through just to get here? How I’d felt beyond sick and not myself every day since waking up in Horizons? Until I’d gotten those things inside me out?

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it worked.”

“What about your, um . . . power?”

Jamie cringed. “It sounds cheesy when you put it like that.”

I didn’t answer my brother, because the truth was, I didn’t know if it still worked or didn’t. I hadn’t tried it, not since— “Wait right here,” I said, and threw off my blanket. I took the stairs two at a time and pushed open the door to the bedroom I would sleep in for as long as we were here. I spotted what I was looking for on a chair in the corner.

I looked through the small gray duffel bag until I found them. The implants, the capsules or whatever, that had been inside me until Stella cut them out. I closed my fist around them and brought them downstairs. Daniel examined one of them under the light.

“These were inside you?”

“Yup.”

“Where?”

“In my stomach, I think.”

“They couldn’t have actually been in your stomach, or you would have died taking them out.”

“Fine,” I said. “They were forty-two degrees south of my right fibia and seventh metatarsal.”

“You don’t have a fibia. That’s not a real bone.”

I gave my brother the finger.

“No need to get snippy,” Daniel said prissily. “Okay, so, these were inside you when you left Horizons, right?”

“Right.”

“And your ability didn’t work after you left there, right?”

“Correct.”

“You tried?”

I thought about Mr. Ernst. About what I’d done to him after what he’d tried to do to Stella and me. “Yes.” I did try.

“What happened?” Daniel prodded. “Who did you try to . . .” His voice trailed off. “Who hurt you?”

Jamie almost literally began to whistle and twiddle his thumbs. Stella looked at the floor.

“It was nothing,” I said, falsely calm. “It was fine in the end.”

Daniel handed me back the implants and then looked down at the mess of papers. “All right. We know the anomaly is triggered by fear and stress. So, what if anytime your nervous system was flooded with adrenaline, or cortisol, those things reacted, negating your ability? Like a fail-safe to make you safer, better, in case you ever left Horizons.”

But they hadn’t made me safer, I thought. My mind conjured an image of Mr. Ernst, what I did to him, and I blinked, hoping it would disappear.

Daniel chose his words carefully. “But you
were
actually safer in the sense that you couldn’t
accidentally
 . . . hurt someone. You couldn’t protect yourself, but you were safer for other people to be around.”

I wondered if that were true.

“Anyway, Dr. Kells thought of herself as a scientist, a researcher. She had plans to send you back home, right?”

“That’s what she said.”

“So those implants must have been part of her plan to do it. She thought she’d have time to tweak the effects, figure out how to counteract the anomaly, before you guys escaped.”

Before I killed her. But Daniel had a point. Everything Kells had done to us, done to me, had been in pursuit of a cure. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And when she hadn’t succeeded, and Jude had let me out, she’d decided to put me down like an animal before I could be set loose and hurt anyone else.

As we watched the interviews, we realized Daniel had been right. Jude got worse, no matter what Kells did to try to fix him. She attempted to hide her distress as he grew older, more dangerous, but the drugs she pumped into him didn’t always mitigate his behavior. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know who he was; he was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and when someone “else” emerged, Claire was the only one who could get him, the
real
him, to break through, which Daniel guessed was why Kells had been willing to foster her, gender notwithstanding.

Hearing and watching Kells talk about Jude made the hair rise on my skin. You could tell she was losing control but she couldn’t admit it. Jude was her success story after years and years of failure. She couldn’t accept that in trying to cure the anomaly, she had actually done something worse. Her only true success had been managing to keep Claire and Jude alive after induction. Claire was completely normal, actually, despite Kells’s efforts to make her otherwise. Kells guessed
Claire wasn’t a carrier. If she had been, Kells could’ve triggered the mutation the way she had with Jude.

“That explains why Jude survived after the asylum but Claire didn’t,” Daniel said. But then again, almost to himself, “But what about his hands?”

Jude’s hands. The hands he supposedly didn’t have anymore, after the patient room door at the Tamerlane had slammed shut on him, separating him from me, and his wrists from his hands.

“It doesn’t make any
sense
,” Daniel mumbled.

“Doesn’t it, though?” Stella looked from Daniel to me to Jamie. “Jude has a healing factor.”

“So did Noah,” Jamie said. I shot him a look. “Does. So
does
Noah.”

Which is why he
had
to be alive. “Which is why he’s still out there,” I said.

“But Jude can’t heal without hurting someone else,” Stella said. “When the door slammed shut on him in the asylum, you wouldn’t have been affected, because you’re . . . different.”

“Oh my God,” Daniel said.

“What?” I looked at him.

“Rachel and Claire,” Daniel said. “They were normal, not carriers. They were at the Tamerlane with you and Jude. Jude healed because of
them
.
He
killed them, not . . .”

Me. Not me.

I swallowed. There was no way to really ever know what
had happened, or who was more responsible. I’d wished that the building would collapse. I’d wished for Jude to die. It had collapsed and he
hadn’t
died, but if Rachel and Claire had been killed because of Jude’s ability, because his body had needed to heal itself, it still wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been the one to hurt him. So who was responsible for that? Him or me? Did it matter?

“A question, though,” Stella said, interrupting the silence. “Something I don’t get. Maybe one of you can help me out. Why no girls? Why did Kells foster only boys till Claire? I mean, if I’m a carrier, and Mara’s a carrier, and we’ve manifested, then why—”

Daniel cut in. “Why were most of the twins boys?”

Stella nodded.

“There was something in
New Theories
about the Y chromosome and a healing factor,” Daniel said, getting up to search for the book. “Most greater abilities were of different subtypes that could bind to an X or Y chromosome, but not that one. It had to be a Y.”

I thought about the children Kells had experimented on. Eight little boys, once healthy and now dead. She’d been trying to solve a problem, she’d said, to fix the anomaly, to create someone who could heal himself and, by extension, others—and her, too.

She had been trying to create Noah, but she’d made Jude instead.

42

I
TOLD EVERYONE WHAT I
thought. They were silent, but they knew I was right.
I
knew I was right. In trying to develop a cure for what was making people sick, she’d just made them sicker. If she’d been alive, she’d still be trying.

And as we watched deeper and deeper into the night, we found out that once she’d tracked down my grandmother as being a known carrier (by methods she never specified), she’d started watching my family. Everything had been arranged, planned—Jude and Claire’s move to Rhode Island, enrolling them in my school so Jude and Claire could get close to me—all of it. Daniel even found records that showed a subsidiary of
Horizons LLC, paying for 1281 Live Oak Court, the address that I’d once thought was Jude’s. Whoever Noah had met there weren’t his parents, but they
were
liars.

“She couldn’t have done all of this on her own,” Daniel said. “We know she didn’t—she was recording these interviews for someone, using research she didn’t come up with herself. Someone was supporting her, funding her, making everything she did possible.”

“Lukumi,” I said.

“We think,” Jamie added.

Daniel rubbed his eyes like a little kid. “This is much, much bigger than just us,” Daniel said. “I mean, look at the archives. There are millions, maybe billions of pages in there. And what Kells said before, about tracing the gene back to our grandmother? There are other carriers out there. Like you,” he said, looking at me. “But what doesn’t make any sense is, if that’s true, why hasn’t anyone else discovered you guys by now?”

No one understood the answer to this better than I did. “Because if we tell anyone the truth, people just think we’re crazy.”

“Okay, well, at this point you’re right, Mara. All roads are leading to Lukumi,” Daniel said. “He’s the only person whose name keeps coming up.”

“Actually, that’s not his real name,” I said.

“Uh, what?” Stella had been reading something, but looked up.

“Noah and I looked for him,” I explained. “We went
back to Little Havana, we did the requisite Google search. ‘Lukumi’ is the name of some Santeria case that went to the Supreme Court.”

Jamie nodded. “Of course it is. That doesn’t make this harder at all.”

“Whoever he is,” Daniel started, “he’s the only one who can actually prove that you’re innocent.”

Well, not innocent exactly.

“He’s the only one who knows about you.”

The only person alive, anyway.

“Which means that if I were a betting man, I’d bet he knows about Noah, too.”

I was betting on that too.

We watched interviews and read papers and worked all night, combing through everything we’d brought with us from the archives. Property records, the deed to my parents’ house, the bar admissions certificate of the man who’d referred my father to the Lassiter case, medical records from the sixties, medical records from the nineties, pictures of scarring on the inside of Jamie’s throat. (“What in fresh hell?” Jamie said.) But there were still so many pieces of the puzzle missing.