The Retribution of Mara Dyer

  “Okay,” Jamie said. “Two blocks east, three north, and we should be there.”

  The sun slipped behind the jagged city horizon as we walked. It was almost dark when we arrived.

  “This is it,” Jamie said, looking up at a mammoth shuttered warehouse. There were dozens of windows reaching up several stories high. Most were boarded shut with wood, and others were just dark. Adrenaline surged through my veins. This was where we were supposed to be. I could feel it.

  “How are we supposed to get in?” Stella kicked the huge metal shutter enclosing what must have been the entrance.

  “Fool of a Took!” Jamie hissed through his teeth. “If someone’s in there, they probably heard that,” he said, and stooped down to the ground. “Look. Padlock’s off.”

  “So someone is in there,” Stella said. “Lukumi?”

  “Maybe,” I said. Or maybe Noah.

  Jamie looked at me. “Are you sure we should do this?”

  “No,” I said honestly, staring up at the building. “Lukumi has been leagues ahead of us this entire time. He’s known everything we’re about to do before we’ve done it. He’s probably expecting us.”

  Stella tugged at her hair. “I don’t really like the idea of that.”

  “I don’t either, but the alternative is turning around and going home,” I said. “And I can’t do that.”

  Jamie looked at me and then crouched and lifted the shutter with both arms. You could probably have heard the metal groan all the way in Miami. We stood in front of a dark brown, or maybe rusted red door with a window covered in newspaper in it.

  “Well,” Stella said, “if he didn’t know we were here before, he definitely does now.”

  I put my hand on the doorknob. It turned without effort, and I led the three of us in. The darkness outside was nothing compared to the darkness inside. It seemed solid, almost. Like if you reached out your hand, you would feel it.

  “Should we look for a light?” Stella whispered.

  “Are you afraid of the dark?” Jamie asked.

  “I’d rather not break my neck tripping over you.”

  “And I’m pretty sure we already announced ourselves unintentionally,” I said. “I vote for light.” In no small part because I suddenly felt very afraid of the dark.

  Jamie turned and scanned the wall behind us for a switch. It took a while, but soon—

  “Bingo,” he said, and flicked it on.

  Rows and rows of lights slammed on, illuminating the vast space, which was lined with shelves that nearly scraped the ceiling. We heard something crash to the floor.

  “Ow!”

  Jamie and Stella looked at each other. Neither of them had spoken.

  I didn’t look at either of them. I just stared straight ahead, my mouth hanging open. I knew that Ow.

  “Daniel?”

  38

  WHAT—MARA?” DANIEL SAID AT full volume. And then he poked his head out from behind a shelf at waist height.

  I couldn’t run fast enough. My brother was kneeling on the floor, rubbing one knee, and I dropped down and gave him the hug of his life.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice muffled by his shoulder. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe how good it felt to be hugged by my big brother. Or hugged period, really.

  “I heard the shutter opening and flipped off the lights and hid, sort of, behind the stacks. And then you turned the lights on, and I tripped over a footstool.”

  “You are a genius,” I said, smiling.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I pulled back, and the words just came pouring out of me—what had happened to me at Horizons, what had happened to me before Horizons, all of it. The dam had burst, and there was no putting it back together. Daniel’s expression morphed from confusion to shock to horror to resignation and back to confusion as I spoke, breathless and flushed by the time I finished.

  “So you’re telling me . . . ,” Daniel started. “You’re telling me it was all real.” A nervous laugh escaped from his throat. “Everything you—everything you said you were writing, for that Horizons assignment, that fiction thing? It wasn’t fiction. There was no protagonist. You were talking about you.”

  I smiled, thinking of what Noah would have said if he were there. He’d thought I was being too obvious about my little problem, by telling Daniel it was an “assignment.” I wished he were there, so I could say, I told you so.

  Instead I said to my brother, “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Because it’s— How is it possible?”

  “We don’t know,” Jamie said. “We’re here to try to figure it out.”

  Daniel closed his eyes. “I need a minute.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “You’re not telling me—you can’t fly or anything.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “And you can’t, like, scale tall buildings and shoot webs out of your fingers.”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay,” Daniel said. “Okay.” He looked around, his eyebrows drawn together, and he seemed to notice Jamie and Stella for the first time then. “I don’t know you,” he said to Stella. “But I know you.” His eyes were on Jamie. “The Ebola kid, right?”

  “Daniel.”

  “Right,” Jamie said, a smile turning up the corner of his lips. “Jamie Roth,” he said, holding out his hand. Daniel shook it slowly, still dazed.

  “Stella Benicia,” she said next, introducing herself. “And now that you know who we are, and we know who you are, mind telling us what you’re doing here?”

  Daniel looked a bit taken aback.

  I sighed. “We were expecting—”

  “A Santeria priest,” Jamie interrupted. “You didn’t happen to see anyone else here when you arrived?”

  Daniel shook his head, looking even more confused, if that were possible. “It was just me.”

  “How did you get in?” Jamie asked.

  “That’s kind of a long story,” Daniel said.

  “Lucky for us,” I said, “we have a bit of time.”

  Daniel narrowed his eyes at me. “I bet you do. Follow me, Little Sister.”

  Daniel led us up a winding, rickety metal staircase and then down a narrow passageway that led to the back of the building. He pushed open a door to an exposed-brick room with a bare bulb and a drafting table. Several books and files were neatly organized on and around it.

  “I think this was a garment factory once,” he said, pulling up a stool. There were a few dusty old sewing tables and crates leaning against the walls of the small room. We each pulled one up and sat on them as Daniel began to talk.

  “I first figured out something was wrong after the Horizons retreat,” Daniel said, looking at me. “When Noah didn’t come back.”

  My heart skipped a beat when my brother said his name. Everyone at school knew about the Lolita incident, Daniel said. And the fact that Noah had been shipped off to a residential treatment facility for pushing a man into a killer whale tank had been big news. Daniel had suspected that Noah had been sent to Horizons—I’d been there, for one thing—but Daniel hadn’t been able to confirm it; patient privacy laws had prevented the Horizons staff from telling him. So he’d tried the next best thing—Noah’s parents. He had driven up to the house and been let in by Mr. Shaw.

  “Wait, you met Noah’s father?” I asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

  Daniel nodded. “He said Noah would be at Horizons until he was ‘sorted out,’ and then he asked me very politely to leave. Why isn’t Noah with you, by the way?”

  My mouth opened, but I didn’t know what to say, or where to begin.

  “He was in Horizons with us,” Jamie said. “And then the whole thing with Jude happened, and I wasn’t there, for the end of it—I was helping Stella because he’d hurt her, and Noah told us to run. I never saw him again after that,” Jamie said.

  “Kells told us he died,” Stella said. “In the Horizons collapse.”

  “But
she’s a liar,” I cut in. “She lied all the time, about everything.”

  “So where is he?” Daniel looked at each of us.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out.”

  Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “I got a weird feeling from his dad. Like, I know Noah doesn’t get along with him, but shipping him off for the Lolita thing seemed extreme.”

  “Our parents shipped me there,” I said.

  “I know. But, Mara, you have . . .”

  “What?”

  “A history,” Daniel said carefully.

  So does Noah.

  “Anyway, I started looking into Mr. Shaw.”

  “And?” Jamie asked.

  “Every publicly filed document seemed legit. And there was no connection to Horizons at all, obvious or otherwise. So anyway, I decided to go out there, to Horizons—”

  “Wait, you were there?” I blurted out. “When?”

  “A couple of weeks after you left. I grilled Mom and Dad about Horizons, and your being there, but they were so sensitive about it—Mom especially. She could barely talk about what you—about what she thought you did to yourself,” Daniel amended, glancing at my wrists. “So in the end I just told her me and Sophie were going to go out on Sophie’s dad’s boat for the day, and I went to Horizons instead.”

  Daniel told us how he arrived at the island and security wouldn’t let him in to see me, which frustrated him so much that he began skipping his independent study in the afternoons and digging through the last five years of the corporate filings for Horizons LLC.

  “And that was my first clue,” Daniel said. “I remembered Mom saying that Horizons had been open for only a year, but there were years of records to sort through—tax filings, annual reports, money coming in, money going out. And one of them led me to this accountant in New York—”

  “Yeah, we met him too,” Jamie said. “So, what did you do?”

  “I called him.”

  “You just called him?”

  “I gave him the name of one of Kells’s employees and said I’d been ordered to acquire documents relating to one of the ‘programs.’ ”

  My eyes widened. “And that actually worked?”

  “No.”

  Oh.

  “He told me I needed to give him some access code and follow the appropriate procedure, whatever that was, even if I was calling on Kells’s behalf. I knew I’d have to get to New York to find anything else out, but I didn’t want to go before I knew I’d be able to get what I needed, and at that point I obviously had no idea. So I kept digging through whatever documents I could get at that were publicly available, but there was nothing that told me anything. And then one day I came home exhausted and went to my room to play piano, and this was sitting on top of it.”

  Daniel lifted something from one of the crates behind him. A copy of New Theories in Genetics.

  “I’d forgotten about it after you left, and when I saw it there, I opened it and started reading. The premise was screwy, but it was so well researched that I couldn’t put it down.”

  I made a face. “Only you would find that book captivating.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing I did, because this baby is how I got in.”

  Daniel told us about his hunch that a series of numbers that kept appearing in the book might be the access key the accountant had told him about. His hunch turned out to be right. He started to tell us more, rattling off incomprehensible jargon, and I had to fight to stay awake, but then I heard him say, “. . . eighteen twenty-one.”

  I snapped to attention. “What did you just say?”

  Daniel looked at me with a curious expression. “Those numbers I was talking about? The sequence? Lenaurd, the author, kept referring to them as genetic markers—the numbers of the genes that carry the anomaly that makes the subjects different. One of the studies he self-published determined that subjects with the anomaly see those numbers everywhere. The sequences stand out to them. Whenever they see a cluster—any pairing of one, eight, two, or three—they notice. It’s like an obsessive thought, or a form of OCD counting. They start seeing patterns where there are none, but they may not even realize they’re doing it. It’s one of the earliest symptoms.”

  I wondered if I’d done it. If so, I hadn’t noticed.

  “He talks about the degradation and evolution of these particular markers, claiming to have traced the lineage of some subjects back to before gene sequencing technology even existed. It’s junk science, like the stuff about genetic memory—”

  “Like what stuff?” Stella asked.

  “Sometimes an additional protein will bind to the gene. He called subjects who had it G1821-3 and claimed the third protein allowed them to retain memories from genetic ancestors, which is ridiculous.”

  “It’s not ridiculous,” I said softly. “It’s true.”

  “What?”

  I told Daniel about the dreams, the memories, whatever they were—about India, and our grandmother’s doll.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Daniel said when I was finished.

  “It means that whatever Lenaurd wrote about in there is accurate,” I said. Stella’s eyes lit up with hope.

  “He also said subjects with the anomaly had ‘additional greater abilities,’ ” Daniel said, looking at each of us. “Like, superheroish stuff.”

  We were silent, until Jamie said, “Not superheroish, exactly.” I kicked his crate.

  “But you can . . .” Daniel let his voice trail off, waiting for the rest of us to speak. No one did. “Do things?”

  Jamie nodded slowly. “Yup.”

  “Just—correct me if I’m wrong, here—so what you’re saying is, you can—”

  “Hear your thoughts,” Stella said.

  “Make you do what I want you to do,” Jamie said.

  “And Noah can heal,” I said, watching the gears turn in Daniel’s mind. I knew what he would ask next, and I wasn’t ready for it. But I didn’t have a choice.

  “What about you?” he asked me.

  My gaze flicked to Jamie, then Stella. They avoided my eyes.

  “I can do things,” I said lamely. “With my mind.”

  Daniel tilted his head. “Things? Like . . . Carrie things?”

  In a sense. “Do you know what Jude did to me, the night the Tamerlane collapsed?”

  Daniel nodded. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Yeah.”

  “That’s why I did it,” I said quietly, as Daniel’s eyebrows drew together. “I was scared. And angry. The asylum collapsed because I wanted it to.”

  Daniel shook his head in confusion. “You’re saying—”

  “I killed Rachel and Claire.” Daniel was opening his mouth to argue, but I spoke before he could. “And Mrs. Morales? She died because I was angry at her for failing me.”

  “Mara, she died of anaphylactic shock.”

  “Because I wanted her to choke on her tongue.”

  My brother had no response to that. There was nothing to say.

  It was Stella who finally rescued me from the awkward, painful silence that followed my confession. “Did you read anything in there about how to fix us? Like a cure?”

  Daniel shook his head. “It’s not like that—the anomalous gene is more like, like an X or Y chromosome.” He met my eyes. “It’s just . . . part of you.”

  “You’re not broken,” Noah had said to me when I’d asked him to fix me a lifetime ago.

  Maybe he was right.

  39

  STELLA HAD A HARD TIME swallowing what Daniel had said, and she asked him if she could look at the book.

  “You should all read it,” Daniel said as he handed it to her. “Maybe you’ll think of something I missed.”

  Jamie unfolded his legs and rose from his crate. “What else have you found so far?”

  “Not much to confirm what’s in the book,” Daniel said, “but a whole lot about one Deborah Susan Kells.” Daniel lifted up a stack of files from behind one of t
he crates. It was one stack of many. “I didn’t know anything about anything till I got in here, so I had no idea where to even start. Kells’s name was the only thing I had to go on, so I used the access code to figure out the archiving system and found her file.”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked him, looking around the small room at the little piles of knowledge Daniel had acquired and assembled in painstaking order.

  “Here here? Or in New York?”

  “Both.”

  “When I got to the city, I had the accountant mail the access code to a professor I’ve corresponded with at NYU.”

  “But wait,” Jamie said, holding out his hand. “So you’re saying it was a coincidence that Lukumi was in that picture?”

  I shook my head. “There are no coincidences.”

  Daniel eyed Jamie and me. “Back the truck up—who’s Lukumi?”

  “We’ll explain later,” I said. “Keep going.”

  “Okay . . . Well, so anyway, I made an appointment with him so he could show off his department and try to recruit me, but managed to filch it from his inbox with him none the wiser.”

  “How naughty and daring of you. All that and you lied to our parents about the reason for your New York visit? I’m impressed.”

  “Well, I did visit a college here.” Daniel grinned. “So, it’s not completely false.”

  Jamie looked up. “A half-truth is a whole lie, my mother says.”

  “He’s right, you know,” I chimed in.

  “Guess I’m a rebel, then.”

  “But wait,” Stella said. “What if the access code changes?”

  “Then I’m screwed.”

  “We’re screwed,” I said. “We can’t leave here without this stuff. There might be something here that will help us find Noah.”

  Daniel nodded. “We should go through what I’ve found so far, and then one of us should start making a list of what we still need. We won’t be able to go through everything, but if we’re asking the right questions, maybe eventually we’ll hit on the right answers.”

  “You can be our Gandalf,” I said, remembering our conversation from weeks ago, and smiling.

  “I’m only a year older than you. But I’ll take it as a compliment, if you let me be Dumbledore instead.”