“Do I?” I push her without quite knowing why. I’m still holding the knife.
“Um, should we . . . give you guys a minute?” Daniel asks.
Mara looks at me, challenging. But I’ve decided. I want to do this, which is why Mara doesn’t.
I’d done what she asked me to, all those months ago. I started keeping that journal for her, wrote about nothing but her, and then she went behind my back and read it, and we had our most splendid fight.
“You want to hear how I first learned about my ability? About being told that we were moving into yet another miserable home two days before we left by my father’s secretary, because he couldn’t be bothered to tell me himself? About feeling so numb to it and everything that I was sure I couldn’t actually exist? That I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing, that the pain the blade drew from my skin was the only thing that made me feel real?”
She looked like I’d struck her.
“You want to hear that I liked it?” I went on. “Wanted more? Or do you want to hear that when I woke up the next day to find no trace of any cut, no hint of a forming scar, all I could feel was crushing disappointment?”
“You want me to hurt you,” she’d said.
“You can’t.”
“I could kill you.”
If I hadn’t been so furious with myself, I might’ve laughed. As if killing me would be the worst thing she could do to me.
I took a step toward her. “Try.”
Now she’s threatening me again, but with something worse. So I’m not quite sure what possesses me to take the knife and slide it across my palm. The steel parts my flesh like soft butter, and the blood instantly pours to the white floor, puddling, blooming. Mara spins, deft as a deer, that gorgeous face marred by pain and betrayal, and takes the stairs at a run, with footsteps hard enough that I think she may shatter it.
“Dude,” Jamie says, going pale, backing away.
Daniel rushes for a towel. “Pressure.” He forces it against my palm. I take it from him, let it fall. The blood hasn’t stopped rushing, hasn’t slowed.
Goose even looks sick. “That’s . . . mental. Jesus fuck.”
Daniel again. “Noah, you need stitches.”
A single shake of my head. “Watch.”
We all do, all except Jamie, who has a blood thing, apparently.
“It’s going to be fine,” I say, but the words feel furred, each letter separate and fuzzy. Daniel forces the towel back into my hand, holds it there.
“Dude.” Jamie. “Maybe we should go to the hos—”
“Stop.” I gather myself as Mara did, coalescing around a spark of white I feel in my chest. I close my eyes. “You wanted this. Both of you. Don’t pussy out now.”
I watch the two of them watching me. Daniel watches the clock. Everyone’s heartbeat is rabbit-quick and frightened. I ignore it, them, and listen to myself, a bundle of raggedy notes splintering at the edges. A mangled theme that won’t stop scraping at me. If I blot out everyone else, concentrate on each note, I’ll fix it.
My blood’s soaked through the first towel, but with each breath, it slows, now only petaling the second. They all watch in curious, dazzled horror. But Goose watches with scepticism. I’ve never had to prove myself to anyone before this, and it makes me wonder for a moment—just a moment—whether I’ll heal myself.
I peel off the towel, look down at the cut—still bleeding, pooling in my palm. But not to the floor. A surge of pride, and a gratifying—rush. Like I’ve let poison out, and for the moment, I’m clean.
We wait till the blood stops pooling, which, if I’m being honest, takes a bit longer than I thought it would.
“Well, there we are, I’m a cunt,” Goose says.
“Not news.” I get up to rinse my hand, and my body nearly sways, surprising me, but I right it in time, before they notice. Run my hand under the faucet, and Goose, Daniel, and Jamie are all slack-jawed and staring. My anger’s burned itself out, and I want to talk to Mara, talk her down, really, but the loft seems to breathe and stretch, the stairs seeming impossibly far.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” I say, and push off the counter.
Coward.
All in my head. Back straight, gait long—keep up or fuck off.
I find Mara in our bed, clothes on, curled on her side. Closet’s open, and some clothes lie in a little nest at the bottom. One glance at her bag shows she’d started to pack.
“Going somewhere?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Mara.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Say my name.”
“Shall I come back later?”
“You can do whatever you want. It’s your house.”
“I had to do it. Goose wouldn’t’ve believed any other way—”
“Bullshit.”
I stay where I am. “It isn’t.”
I can’t hear her. Not her heartbeat, her pulse, nothing. The silence frosts the windows. All I can hear is the train trembling by on the Manhattan Bridge.
“You’re really going to leave?”
She doesn’t answer that, either.
It’s like approaching a dangerous animal—show no fear. I cross to the bed and run my finger along her bare instep, and she kicks out at me and swears. For a moment she lies there, half shadowed by the ash grey sky, turning darker by the second. She leans up on her elbows and twists, lip under teeth. If looks could kill, I would be dead already
“You said you’d never cut yourself again.”
“This wasn’t like that—”
“You promised.”
“Mara—”
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You’re lying now. To yourself.”
I sit next to her on the bed. “Do you want to see it?” She looks down at my hand, curled into a fist. “It’s not even bleeding anymore.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
Annoyed, frustrated. “Fine, that isn’t the whole point.” There she is, my Mara. “You weren’t just proving yourself to Goose. You were . . . hurting yourself. On purpose. A chef’s knife, a straight razor, your father’s hunting knife. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Or how you excuse it.”
I risk a finger, tracing it down the line of her shoulder to the inside of her wrist. She’s still quiet—all of her—but she doesn’t protest.
“You’re my preferred method of self harm.” She tries to hide a tiny smile. If I didn’t know her the way I do, I wouldn’t catch it.
But I do know her. And I do catch it.
“I know I am,” she says. “ ‘You’ll love him to ruins,’ the professor said. ‘Unless you let him go.’ ”
“Fuck’s sake, Mara. Really? I’m fine.”
“You’re not, and if you say that again, I really will kill you, and you’ll prove the professor right.” Her heart’s not in it though.
“All right,” I say. “I’m not.” Her body goes slack, and she curves back into the bed. “I’m—I don’t know what to do with all this. Sam. Beth. Goose explains why I’m seeing, feeling more—he magnifies everything we’ve got. Which, by the way, means I’m even more safe around him. You have even less reason to worry.”
Even as I say it, though, I realise the opposite must also be true. He must amplify her, too. I see the thought reflect in Mara’s eyes.
“You think he’s magnifying you, too.”
“All for one, one for all.”
I turn her face toward me. I open my fist. The cut is deep, still open, but not bleeding. “Look. No scar.”
There is, though, and Mara knows it. The scars you can’t see are the ones that hurt the most.
22
MAN’S CAPACITIES
AS SOON AS I’m alone, I text Stella to say that I’ll meet her tonight, and she almost instantly sends me a location. Jamie and Goose seem to have retreated to their rooms, and Daniel’s gone back
to his dorm, which saves me the trouble of having to lie about where I’m going when I leave. I write Mara a short note in case she emerges, then take the train to the park Stella mentioned. There’s an old stone house at the entrance. Stella’s waiting for me outside the gate.
“Thanks for coming,” she says.
“Rather odd place to meet, isn’t it?”
A slight, shivery shrug. “It’s between your place and ours.”
“Meeting in the middle,” I say, looking about. “Obvious metaphor or just convenient?”
Her eyes crinkle at the corners.
“You’re not worried about walking through parks at night by yourself?”
She arcs an eyebrow. “This is Park Slope. And it’s basically a playground.”
“Playgrounds without children are even eerier.” A fall breeze rustles the trees, and a swing nearby creaks, making my point . . . until I see the dog that brushed it, squatting as his owner dutifully waits for him to finish his business.
“What did you tell Mara?” she asks, refocusing my attention. “About where you were going?”
“Nothing,” I say. “She went to bed.”
Stella’s forehead scrunches. “So early?”
“We had a . . . disagreement.”
“Trouble in paradise?” She examines me, and that’s when I notice her noticing my wrapped-up hand.
I take the opportunity to look, really look, at Stella for the first time. She is different from the girl I knew at Horizons, which might as well’ve been years ago. It’s not just that her hair’s lost its shine, or that her face has hardened, her curves whittled down. There’s something missing behind her eyes. Something lost.
“How’d you end up in New York?” I ask.
She blinks. “I was in New York. With Jamie and . . . Mara.”
“Right, but as I understand it, you left?”
“I went home.”
I wait for her to finish. Clearly, she has something she wants to get out, or she wouldn’t’ve asked me here.
“Once it was obvious we weren’t going to find a cure for our . . . Gifts . . . I just. I stayed for a while after that, but then after Mara . . .” Her voice trails off. “I was going to go back to Miami—I didn’t know where else to go. But I left without anything—I had no money, no friends. I literally didn’t know what to do. I ended up sitting for hours in Grand Central, just sitting there, when Leo just walked right up to me.”
“What a coincidence.”
She avoids my eyes. “It wasn’t a coincidence. One of us can . . . find people like us. We told you that.”
“You did, but failed to mention whom,” I say, bored by the mystery already. Leo wouldn’t give anything away, but perhaps Stella might.
“She doesn’t live in the brownstone,” she says. “It doesn’t matter—the point is, Leo found me, told me I had a choice—he’d help me get home if I wanted to go, but also said I had a place with them if I ever wanted it.”
“How generous.”
She shrugs one shoulder.
“So you went home with a perfect stranger?”
At that, she laughs a little. “Safer than staying with my so-called friends.”
“And your family?”
Her bitterness deepens. “Not everyone has a perfect home life.”
“We have that in common.”
“Anyway, Leo wouldn’t have hurt me. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, but I knew—he’s not like anyone else I’ve ever met. He’s special.”
Aren’t we all.
“Look, the town house is like a safe house for people like us. Anyone can go there, anytime, and they take care of each other. It’s like—they’re like a family, okay?”
They, not we.
“And they welcomed me in, and Leo helped me figure out what I’m capable of. And Felix, and Felicity and S—” she catches herself. Was she about to say Sam? I want to ask, but I don’t want to throw her off. “They matter to me. I’m worried for them.”
“We already said we’d help.”
“Daniel said,” she corrects. “You didn’t.”
“Is this why you asked me here in the middle of the night? Because honestly, you needn’t have gone to the trouble—”
“I wanted to talk to you about Mara.”
I’m on guard, but try not to show it. “What about her?”
Her eyes dart away. “You seemed . . . left out . . . at the house earlier.”
Nerve struck. I pretend otherwise. “Excuse me?”
Stella meets my eyes. “What did she tell you about what happened after Horizons?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I heard what you were thinking!” Her voice echoes in the empty park, but it’s the words that lift the hairs on the back of my neck.
She takes a deep breath. “You were right. I was listening to you.”
“And what is it you think you understand?” My voice is low, quiet, but I’m furious.
“That Mara and Jamie went through something together that you weren’t a part of.”
She’s pressing on bruises, and she knows it. I refuse to give her the satisfaction. “You didn’t need to read my thoughts to know what’s literally true.”
“I know that she never told you what that something was.”
“She never told me because I never asked.”
Stella lifts her chin. “Because you don’t actually want to know.” She takes a step closer to me. “With your friend around? I can hear more than just the words you think before you say them out loud. I can hear what you’re afraid to admit even to yourself.”
My breath quickens as I grow angrier. “You were spying, in the most exploitive, violative way. Why should I believe anything you say?”
“Because you know I’m telling the truth.”
“I can’t believe I came out here for this.”
A bitter smile. “I can. You came because you know something’s wrong and despite acting like you don’t give a shit, you give a shit more than anyone—about this, at least. You don’t want anyone else to die. I may not be able to read your mind right now, but I know you can tell whether I’m lying or not. And you know I’m not.”
“I know you think you’re not. But just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.”
“And what do you believe, Noah? You think all of this is a coincidence? Everyone dying all of a sudden? Your father was the first, wasn’t he?”
The words I was about to say die in my throat. Does she know about him? What he did? Who he was?
Instead of those questions, I ask, “So you did send the clippings.”
She squints. “No. I didn’t. But I did read the obituary.”
There was nothing of consequence in the obituary. Which is what I’m about to say when Stella says, “It was a lie.”
I keep my voice even. “Was it.”
“He disappeared before he died.”
How does she know? I want to ask, but I don’t want to give anything away. “Why do you think that?”
“Are you saying it’s not true?” she asks. “That he didn’t disappear and then commit suicide—which happens to be how our friends are dying? How Sam died, at his funeral?”
A finger of ice trails my spine.
“What do you think Mara has to do with it?” I ask, but I’m feeling uneasier by the second, and my mind rebels against Stella’s words, pressing on me to leave. “Look, whatever happened between you and Mara, you’re clearly not over it, but I couldn’t care less, so if that’s all there is, I’ll just be going—”
“Whatever happened between me and Mara?” She laughs without humour. “God, you really don’t know her at all.”
“Oh, but you do. Because you were so close?”
“Because I was there. When she murdered Dr. Kells—”
“And what’s his name, right? Sorry, if you’re trying to shock me, you’re going to have to try harder.”
“Do you know what Mara did to him?”
&
nbsp; “Killed him,” I say plainly. “Freed you, as I understand it.”
Another icy smile. “Yeah. She killed him. But not before cutting out his eye. While he was still alive.”
Got me there. I try not to show it, not to betray that her words cut me off midbreath.
“And she didn’t just murder Dr. Kells. She butchered her.”
“All of you were prisoners, test subjects. Mara got you out of there.”
“She did, but not before locking herself in a room with Kells and cutting her into a thousand pieces.”
“A bit dramatic—”
“With a scalpel. That she still has.”
That’s . . . indisputably disturbing.
She throws me a knowing look. “Oh, she left that part out?”
“Are you actually saying that you think Mara’s responsible for people she doesn’t even know committing suicide?”
Stella says nothing.
“What’ve you told Leo about her? Your friends?”
She lets out a puff of laughter. “That’s what you’re worried about? What I’ve told them about her?”
I’m feeling ill, light-headed, and not remotely about to admit that Stella is right about anything, any of this. Mara had no reason to want strangers dead—she wanted to find out about Sam as much, if not more, than I did. I stop playing defence, start playing offence.
“If Mara hadn’t killed Kells, and Wayne, you’d probably still be there, or dead. And,” I add, as Stella opens her mouth to speak, “despite all this, you still escaped with her and Jamie. And stayed with them for quite a while.
“I did stay. Until I couldn’t anymore.”
I already know I don’t want to hear why. “You were fucked with, abused, tortured. Whatever any of you did or didn’t after, you’re not responsible for it.”
She turns on me then, the force of her almost knocks me back. “We’re responsible for everything we do. We always have a choice.”
My words, once.
“And Mara chose wrong. Every time. There was this trucker—”
“Stop.”
“A trucker picked us up. I had to go to the bathroom, so we stopped and got out and Mara came into the bathroom and I left and she came out covered—soaked—in blood and he was dead.”