The Retribution of Mara Dyer

by Michelle Hodkin

  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 ca
n’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.

  My thoughts hung like loose threads, frayed and tangled. It didn’t help that I was exhausted. I leaned my head in my hands, staring at the documents in front of me. The words on the page arranged themselves into an incomprehensible shape as I fought to stay awake, and lost.

  43

  BEFORE

  Cambridge, England

  IT HAD BEEN OVER A century since I fled London with the professor, and yet he still treated me like a child.

  Tonight he was in a particularly sulky mood. The weather was customarily dreary, and his office was cold and damp and in ruins. He warmed himself with a bottle of whiskey, his preferred poison, and scribbled furiously in one of his books. Torn paper and worn books littered the scarred wooden floor. I watched him in silence.

  Something had caught his attention recently, focused him in a way I had never before seen. A coming shift, he called it. He thought he might have discovered a way to trigger it. But he refused to share his thoughts with me.

  He had cared for me during the fevers as my Gift blossomed inside of me, as my body changed to accommodate it. He forced me to eat when food lost all its taste. He comforted me during my night terrors and caught me, stopped me, the first time I tried to do myself harm.

  But I didn’t need him for those things now—I hadn’t in many, many years. I had shed the girl who had fled London in darkness, the one who cried over her husband of one night. I was strong, bold, and I could control myself perfectly. If I wanted to.

  I did not want to anymore.

  I’d grown tired of pretending to be someone else just so I could be safe for others. I wanted to be who I was. The professor knew me the way no one else did, which was why I wanted to be with him. But no matter how I broached the subject, he dismissed it. Dismissed me. He still wouldn’t even tell me his name.

  The sound of shattering glass snapped me to attention. The professor sat stick straight at his desk, staring at nothing.

  No. Not nothing. I followed his gaze to a painting of himself that hung on the opposite wall. It had been given to him by a student, he’d said, and though he would not tell me which, I had my suspicions—the style was familiar and distinctive. But the picture glistened with the remains of his drink, making his skin and hair look wet. The fiery scent of spilled whiskey mingled with that of his old books.

  “What is it?” I asked gently.

  He didn’t answer, so I stepped between his desk and the portrait. He looked right through me, as if I were invisible.

  But I would be seen tonight. I would be felt.

  I skirted the edge of his desk, until I came to his chair. “What is your name?” I asked him, not gently at all. “Tell me.”

  He smiled a little. I’d been asking that question for a very long time. Each time I asked, he would give me a different answer.

  But this time, tonight, he reached for a scrap of paper, a torn-out map. My heartbeat quickened. He wrote something on it in a language I’d never learned to read, and showed it to me.

  I smoothed my finger over the words. “I am in love with you,” I said.
/>   “I raised you,” he replied, and did not meet my eyes.

  “You did not raise me. Sarah Shaw raised me—”

  “Until you were eighteen. Then I took you, I taught you—”

  I moved over to him, pressed my hand to his cheek. He flinched. I didn’t move. “I know you watched me when I was young. I know you feel responsible for me. But you are not my parent and I am no longer young.”

  “This is wrong.” His voice was blank and empty.

  I climbed onto his lap. “It doesn’t feel wrong,” I said. There was no sound except for our breath, and the slither of a belt being pulled through its loop. I kissed him below his jaw. He shuddered a breath, and I kissed his lips, just once.

  It was enough.

  The professor was gone when I woke the following morning. I bore a daughter nine months later. I did not see the professor again for twenty-one years.

  Laurelton, Rhode Island

  Twenty-one years later

  The Professor knocked on the door of my cottage on the morning of Indira’s graduation from Brown. I did not want to open the door for him, but I knew I had no choice. He didn’t look a day older than he had when I’d last seen him. Then again, neither did I.

  “I found him,” he said to me, his eyes lit with a childish excitement that was incongruous with the dark, serious suit he wore. He looked like an undertaker.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I found the one.”

  “Please leave,” I said flatly.

  “Mara—”

  “Don’t you dare say my name. You have no right to say anything to me.”

  He closed his eyes. “May I come in?”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  I wanted to close the door in his face, but I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t leave even if I did. He would stand there, sleep there, turn up everywhere I went, until he gave me the message he wanted me to hear.