“Mutation?” I asked. “We’re mutants now?”
Jamie smirked. “Don’t tell Marvel. They’ll sue us. But listen, though. Genes don’t just appear in a few people. It just doesn’t happen. Genes change over centuries. They degrade, they alter—”
“They evolve,” I said.
“Exactly. So what we have—whatever we are, we’ve evolved into it.”
“Superman or Spider-Man,” I said quietly.
Stella looked back and forth between Jamie and me. “Explain?”
I remembered the conversation I’d had with my brother, when I’d told him I needed to fictionalize my problems for a fake Horizons assignment, so I could get him to help me without knowing he was helping me.
“So she could be a superhero or supervillain,” my brother had said. “Is it a Peter Parker or a Clark Kent situation?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, was your character born with this thing à la Superman or did she acquire it like Spider-Man?”
I didn’t know the answer then, but I knew it now. “Spider-Man acquired his ability from a radioactive spider bite,” I said. “Superman was born with it—”
“Because he’s really Kal-El, an alien,” Jamie said.
I was Superman. Just like I’d thought.
But when I’d told Noah about Daniel’s theory, he’d been convinced that we had to have acquired what was wrong with us.
“How many times have you wished someone dead, Mara? Someone who cuts you off on the highway, et cetera?”
“I’ve probably wished a lot of people dead a lot of times,” I said now, and repeated Noah’s words.
“Everybody does that,” Stella assured me.
“And Noah’s parents would’ve noticed that he healed abnormally fast when they took him to the doctor for shots, right? So why is everything starting to happen now, if it’s something we were born with?”
Jamie slapped his palm on the table. “There’s a trigger. It’s like cancer. They can screen you genetically to see if you’re at risk for developing it, because there are markers. But just because you’re at risk—”
“Doesn’t mean you’ll actually get cancer,” I finished, as the missing puzzle piece clicked into place.
“Exactly. It just means that you’re more at risk than someone else—and the risk factors are biological and environmental.”
“Or chemical,” I said, my mother’s words coming back to me.
“You’ve been through so much, and I know we don’t understand. And I want you to know that this”—she had indicated the room—“isn’t you. It might be chemical or behavioral or even genetic—”
An image had risen up out of the dark water of my mind. A picture. Black. White. Blurry. “What?” I’d asked quickly.
“The way you’re feeling. Everything that’s been going on with you. It isn’t your fault. With the PTSD and everything that’s happened— What you’re going through,” she’d said, clearly avoiding the words “mental illness,” “can be caused by biological and genetic factors.”
“But then, what’s the trigger?” I asked.
Stella looked at me. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Jamie?”
“Sixteen.”
“I’m also seventeen,” she said to me, “but I’ll be eighteen in a few months. Do you remember what Kells said in that video? She was talking about puberty or something, and the way the teenage brain develops?”
“It makes sense, that age would be the trigger,” I said. Stella first started hearing voices at sixteen. I was sixteen during the Ouija board incident. Rachel and Claire died six months later. “It makes sense that the progressions of our abilities are at different stages, because—”
“Because we’re different ages,” Jamie said. “I’m rhyming,” he added unnecessarily.
So that explained something. But not everything. I told Stella and Jamie about the flashbacks I’d had, of events that I couldn’t possibly have experienced. “I thought it might be genetic memory,” I said, and told them about the book Noah had found on one of his transatlantic flights, the one both of us had tried and failed to read, ostensibly about genetic memory.
“What was it called?” Jamie asked.
“New Theories in Genetics by—holy shit.”
“Is that . . . a pseudonym?”
“Armin Lenaurd,” I said. “The Lenaurd protocol.” I didn’t have to try very hard to remember where I’d heard that before. The list was burned into my memory. We’d just seen it.
J. L.: artificially manifested, Lenaurd protocol, early induction.
“I want to kill myself,” I said calmly. “Like, I actually want to die.”
“I’m missing something.” Stella said.
“You saw the list—with our names on it, what was wrong with us.” They both nodded. “If ‘J.L.’ and ‘C.L.’ are Jude and Claire Lowe,” I explained, “it means that there was some protocol, written by the author of this obscenely boring book, that basically explained what was done to them.”
“ ‘Artificially manifested,’ ” Jamie said quietly. “ ‘Early induction’ . . . that would mean, what? The doctors were trying to cause the effects of the thing we have—in normal people, maybe?”
“Jude is hardly normal,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why,” Stella said quietly.
“Why what?”
“Why he is the way he is,” Stella said. “But wait. If there’s a whole book about this thing that’s wrong with us, maybe we can stop it.” Her voice rose in pitch. “There might be a cure. It might be in that book!” She rounded on me. “Mara, where is it?”
“I gave it to Daniel.”
“Who?”
“My older brother.”
“So if we find Daniel, we find the book, and we find the cure—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up a second here, eager beaver,” Jamie said. “If there even is a cure in that book, which is a huge, massive ‘if.’ I mean, the Lenaurd protocol, whatever it is, was used on Jude, right? And I’d say it’s not working out so well for him. So are we sure we’d even want whatever else might be in that book? Like, Kells kept talking about how she was trying to ‘cure’ us and ‘save’ us and shit, and I don’t know . . . ending up on her side doesn’t feel right.” Stella opened her mouth to speak, but Jamie cut her off before she could. “Also, now that I know what’s actually wrong with me, I’m not sure I’d even want to fix it.” He paused. “Is that crazy?”
No one answered.
“Anyway, whatever. There’s no way to know if what we need is in that book, but there’s another problem.”
“Jude?” I asked.
“No. I mean, yes, he’s a problem, but another one.”
“How we’re going to survive without money?”
“No, another one. Listen,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Kells was a medical researcher. But it takes money to run the kind of facility she was running. Who was funding it? And how many people knew, or know, about it? About us? And are any of them going to be even mildly pissed that their staff was butchered and their research lost?” he went on. “And speaking of research, how many carriers are there? We can’t be the only ones, which means somewhere out there, there are more of us. Do we try to find them? What if they find us?”
“That’s a lot more than one problem,” Stella said.
Jamie wanted answers. Stella wanted a cure. I wanted Noah. And to punish whoever had taken him from me.
Jamie bit his lip. “So. Where do we start?”
16
WE COULDN’T AGREE ON WHICH problem to solve first, so we started by identifying what each of our problems had in common: Horizons. Stella withdrew the file folders she’d culled from Kells’s office and set them down on the table. This was what she’d taken:
Seven pages of patient records for someone we’d never heard of.
Twenty-three pictures of what seemed to be the insides of our throats and other pla
ces, and lab results from samples of our hair, spit, and pee.
One drawing of me, by me, with black scribbles over my eyes.
And a too-many-pages-to-count tax return for the Horizons Group, filed by Ira Ginsberg, CPA. The address was in New York.
With what little we had (Stella kept apologizing), Jamie suggested we follow the money. Stella and I agreed. But all of us would have to visit our parents first.
We didn’t know how pressing the parent problem was, which in and of itself was part of the problem. Where did they think we were? What did they know? All three of our families believed in Dr. Kells and had put us into her care—out of ignorance, not malice, but still. We couldn’t exactly show up on their respective doorsteps and explain the situation in good news–bad news format: Hey, Mom, I’ve been tortured and experimented upon, but don’t worry because my tormenters are dead. Because, P.S., I killed them. I didn’t know about Stella and Jamie, but in my experience, telling the truth only led to not being believed.
But Jamie was pretty sure (“Just pretty sure?”) he could manage to convince our parents of our general welfare enough to avoid statewide AMBER Alerts and enough to possibly find out where they thought we were, and with whom. Maybe they’d been contacted by someone other than Kells. Maybe one of the other Horizons employees was in on it (though Stella didn’t think so). We needed to talk to them to find out.
And there was a fourth house we needed to visit, though Stella and Jamie didn’t know it yet. I needed to know what Noah’s parents believed. I needed to know if there’d been a funeral. Just thinking the word made me ill.
We left No Name Pub with full stomachs but not much else. Charlotte, the owner, tried to help us find a ride, but no one was heading to Miami that day. She offered to put us up for the night, but there was no guarantee that anyone would be heading to Miami the next day either, and none of us wanted to wait. So Charlotte, kind soul that she was, offered to wash our clothes and pointed us to a little tourist shop nearby that she and her husband owned, where we could change into one of half a dozen T-shirt variations on the I LOVE FLORIDA theme while our clothes dried. Jamie and Stella had shoes in their bags, but I, having no bag, had no shoes either, so Charlotte gave me a pair of flip-flops from her own closet. After everything I’d been through, I’d thought I couldn’t be surprised by people anymore. But Charlotte proved that I could.
Stella was already wearing a spare T-shirt of Jamie’s (the yellow one, with the text I AM A CLICHÉ), so Jamie and I were left to pick our poison, so to speak. He ended up with an I FLORIDA shirt. I picked WELCOME TO THE SUNSHINE STATE. There weren’t a lot of options.
I was changing into my shirt (and matching boxers! Wasn’t I lucky?) in the tourist shop bathroom when a voice said, “You look retarded.”
I looked up at the mirror. My reflection looked ridiculous.
“Yeah. Well. You don’t look so hot yourself,” I said back.
And so it was that the three of us, dressed like tourists, started hoofing it along the highway, getting whiplash every time a car passed us, which was a lot. Between the scorching heat and the insect-thick air, I thought it couldn’t get worse, but then it began to rain.
The sky opened, and we were instantly drenched; the water was warm enough that it felt like the clouds were sweating on us. Our faces mirrored expressions of misery as we ducked off to the side of the highway under a large tree that was still not quite large enough.
“My biscuits are burning,” Jamie said, taking off his shoes. The skin over his toes was cracked and bleeding. “Does anyone know how to start a fire?”
Blank stares.
“So we can’t start a fire,” he said. “We can’t fly. We can’t create a force field. We are the most bullshit superheroes.”
I pushed my limp, sodden hair back from my face. “Faulty premise.” I knew what he meant, but still. “Though, Stella’s not so bad.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “That means a lot, coming from you.”
I pouted. “That hurts my feelings.”
“Jamie’s right, though,” she said. “And the list of stuff we can’t do is even longer—we can’t use credit cards, we can’t call our parents, we can’t rent a car—”
“We might be able to steal a car, though,” Jamie said.
The two of us turned to him at once. “I mean, not like with hot-wiring or anything. I have no idea how to do that shit. I just meant—I might be able to talk someone into giving us their car?”
“Lending it,” I added helpfully.
Jamie nodded with enthusiasm. “Lending it. Exactly. If someone comes along.”
“Do you even have your license, Jamie?” Stella asked.
He feigned surprise. “Was that a short joke, Stella? Have our dire circumstances caused you to develop a sense of humor?”
“It was an age joke, actually. And an appearance joke. You have a baby face.”
Our circumstances were dire, though. We had no car, no money, no food, and no dry clothes. The hours passed, and the rain continued its assault, and we grew wetter and hungrier and colder but had no choice but to keep walking, me in plastic flip-flops that were murdering my feet.
The rain finally stopped as daylight dwindled into dusk. The sun bled into the clouds, coloring them pink and orange and red. We trudged up the road, which was framed on the shoulders by dense trees and creepers. After an eternity we came upon a gas station, if you could call it that. There was one pump, and the tiny clapboard building behind it listed precariously to one side; a small junkyard squatted in shadow beside it. A plastic doll head with only one eye was impaled on the broken wooden fence.
Jamie huddled closer to me. “This is serial killer territory.” He linked arms with me and Stella. “United front,” he whispered. “They can smell our fear.”
I would have liked to pretend that I wasn’t as nervous as he was, but . . .
I dipped my hand into the waistband of the boxers to make sure my scalpel was still resting against my skin. It was. The warm steel under my fingertips made me feel better.
Finally, the three of us walked inside. It was dimly lit, naturally. We glimpsed a bar composed of ridged metal sheeting, and three rather large men sitting at it. One of them wore a black wife-beater with black sunglasses perched on his balding forehead. Another wore an improbably long-sleeved flannel shirt and a cowboy hat, of all things. The third had white hair and a tobacco-stained white beard. He had only one eye.
Someone else appeared out of the shadows, cleaning a glass with a dirty rag.
“You look a little lost,” he said to us.
I expected Jamie to speak first, but Stella surprised me. She offered up our fake sob story to the men, told them about being abandoned on a camping trip, blah blah, and then said we needed a ride. I was incredibly impressed. Jamie looked like he was ready to wet himself.
“Where’re you headed?” asked Cowboy.
“Miami,” Stella offered.
“You’re heading north. I’m heading south.” He crossed his arms in opposite directions, as if we needed him to explain what that meant. The other men were silent.
Jamie nodded just once and cleared his throat. “Well. Thank you anyway, gentlemen. For your time.”
Dejected, we left the gas station or bar or serial killer meet-up, whatever it was, and headed back outside. It was nearly night now. Insects buzzed around us, and on us. The air was loud with their noise as we walked down the road.
And then we heard something else—a truck spitting gravel and groaning as it left the station. It pulled up beside us.
“I felt bad for ya,” Cowboy said. “Come on. Hop in.”
My legs ached with relief as I sat in the front of the cab. Jamie had discreetly shaken his head when he’d been offered shotgun, and Stella had already climbed into the back.
The cowboy was doing us a favor, and a long one, so I decided to make conversation, be polite. “So where are you from?” His name, we had learned, was Mr. Ernst.
“B
orn and raised in Canton, Ohio. You three?”
“New York,” Jamie and Stella and I said all at once, sticking to our script. Not suspicious at all.
“And your friends just abandoned you like that?” he said, shaking his head with disbelief.
Stella changed the subject. “So, what brings you to the Keys?”
“Oh, just driving the old girl here,” he said, patting the dashboard with a toothy grin. “Just me and her and the road.”
But as he leaned forward, I caught a glimpse of a gun in a holster on his hip. I stiffened.
Jamie had seen it too. He pretended to be interested in it, and asked Mr. Ernst about it, who happily obliged with the make and model and whatever it is people talk about when they talk about guns. I wasn’t really listening. I felt wrong, off, and the feeling made me nervous.
“Never know who you might meet on the road,” Mr. Ernst said. “Gotta be careful. God bless the Second Amendment.” He patted the holster and winked at me.
The road stretched on into infinity, and we didn’t see a single pair of headlights pass in our direction. Suddenly, after who knew how long, I felt the truck slow down.
Stella did too. She wiped her red-rimmed eyes. Jamie kept running his hand over his scalp. They were worried too.
“Where are we?” Stella asked chirpily.
“Mmm, pretty deep in the Keys,” he said evasively. “Still got a couple of hours ahead of us till we reach Miami.” We passed a sign that announced a rest stop in a quarter mile. “It’ll be a while till we hit another bathroom,” Mr. Ernst said. “Nothing around here for miles, so I thought we’d all stop and take a leak.”
Jamie exhaled just a little too loudly. I glared at him.
“I should go,” Stella said.
“Me too,” Jamie admitted.
“Do you have a map?” I asked Mr. Ernst.
He raised his eyebrows. “Girly, I’ve been driving since before you were even a twinkle in your mother’s eye. The only map I need is up here,” he said, pointing to his temple.
“Right,” Stella said, looking back at the road. But we could all feel it: Something was wrong.