The Retribution of Mara Dyer

  A girl stood in the doorway, but did not enter. She was half in shadow, but I did not need to see her to know who she was.

  The professor lifted a glass of amber liquid to his lips and sipped as he wrote in his notebook. “Come in, Naomi.”

  Naomi Tate hurried in, bringing the scents of rain and nervousness with her. She shut the door forcefully, rattling the shutters, and a few leaves that had clung to her coat scattered to the scratched wooden floor.

  “Bit early to be drinking, Professor?” she said casually, as she shrugged off her coat.

  “Perhaps it’s a bit late.” He continued to write without looking up.

  Naomi’s hair was damp and wild, and she tied what she could into a messy knot at the nape of her neck as she moved in front of the professor’s desk. Fine blond wisps curled around her forehead and temples, framing her face.

  That face. With high cheekbones and a long, elegant nose, Naomi was beautiful in a rare, peculiar way, in a way that demands attention. I’d known her for a year and still, I could never quite get used to looking at her.

  But there was something different about her today. I shifted in the tufted, battered leather armchair I always sat in, my island amid the chaos that was the professor’s Cambridge office, and sniffed the air. The scents in the room were all familiar: old paper mingling with leather and mold; the coriander and musk that was the professor; the paperwhites and cedar that was Naomi. And something else, something—

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Shaw?” he asked. He took another slow sip of whiskey.

  Mrs. Shaw. She was Mrs. Shaw, now. I kept forgetting. She’d married the grandson of Elliot, whom I last saw at eight years old, throwing books and toys about his room, because he couldn’t find the one he wanted. I did not know her husband well, but my impression was that David Shaw was not terribly different.

  Naomi refused to answer the professor; she would not fight for his attention. She would make him fight for hers. I loved that about her.

  After several seconds, he finally abandoned his notebook and looked up at her. His lips pulled back into a smile. “You’re pregnant,” he finally said.

  A sharp intake of breath. Mine. “How far along?”

  I hadn’t heard the professor rise from his desk, but he was standing when he spoke. “Early,” he said, approaching Naomi with slow, graceful steps. “About two weeks?”

  Naomi didn’t speak, but she nodded. She rubbed at a knot in the ancient desk with her finger—she was nervous, but grinning madly anyway.

  I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “It’s too early,” I said to the professor. “She might not be—”

  “I am,” she said, in a tone that left no room for argument. “I am.”

  The professor ran a hand over his chin and mouth. Then said, “May I?” He indicated her flat stomach. Naomi nodded.

  The professor drew nearer, until he was close enough to touch her. I noticed the way her muscles tightened in apprehension, the way her aqua eyes dropped to the floor as he reached out to her. When he placed his hand low on her belly, Naomi flinched. A tiny movement, one she tried to disguise. If it bothered him, he didn’t show it.

  “Three fifteen,” he said, and withdrew his hand. Naomi relaxed. “What does it mean to you?”

  Her cheeks flushed, and she began rubbing at the pockmarked desk again. “The day I conceived, I think. March fifteenth.”

  “Does David know?” I asked quickly.

  Naomi shook her head. “Not yet,” she said, and swallowed. She glanced up at the professor. “I wanted to tell you first.”

  “Thank you.” The professor inclined his head. He leaned over his desk and began to write. “For now, I’d prefer you didn’t mention it to him. Can you do that, Naomi?”

  “Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “You’ll be having a boy, you know.”

  All traces of her earlier irritation vanished. A smile lifted the corner of her mouth. “A boy,” she repeated, as if saying the word for the first time. “You’ve seen him?”

  The professor hesitated for a moment, then said, “Yes.”

  “Tell me everything,” she said, her face lit with excitement.

  “I don’t know everything,” the professor said, “but I do know he has your smile.”

  Her hands drifted down to her lower belly. “I can’t believe this is really happening.”

  “It is happening.” The professor had counted on this, on her, and I had too. “The boy is destined for greatness. Because of you, he will change the world.”

  And because of him, Naomi would die. It was a sacrifice she was willing to make. It cost the professor nothing; but I was the one who had convinced her to make it. I needed her child too, and her death was easy to accept when Naomi was just an abstraction, a stranger. But now I knew her, and I was haunted by guilt. I had befriended her, persuaded her, knowing that there was no time line in which she would have this child and live, and over the months, the specter of her someday-death haunted me. I dreamed of her hanging by a rope from the rafters in a stable, her feet bare, her body swinging after the tension in the rope snapped her spine. I dreamed that a shard of glass pierced her chest after in a car accident, and she died choking on her own blood. I dreamed of her murder, her drowning, her being buried alive beneath a collapsing building. I didn’t know when it would happen, but I knew that it would.

  Before her wedding, I couldn’t help but warn her again. She would be a martyr for this child, I told her.

  Every gift has its cost, she had said back.

  I could see the beginnings of that cost today. There was none of a new mother’s emotion in her expression, no awe or wonder, or even love. Instead she looked like a child who’d been told she’d be setting off on a great adventure soon, and she couldn’t wait to begin.

  She nearly bounced on her heels. “I wish I didn’t have to wait nine months to meet him,” she said.

  “He will be born in a good hour. Be patient.”

  “When should I tell David?”

  “I’ll let you know the next time we meet.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “Next Thursday. You, Mara and I shall meet at the lab, and we’ll see how everything is progressing. All right, then?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Very good. Then I shall see you then. Good day, Mrs. Shaw,” he said, as Naomi turned to leave. “And congratulations.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “Don’t call me Mrs. Shaw,” she added petulantly. “Makes me feel ancient.”

  A hint of a smile touched the professor’s mouth, and then the door closed behind her.

  “This pregnancy will be difficult for her,” the professor said, staring after her.

  “The child will live, yes?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  I paused for a moment. Then asked, “And Naomi?”

  “She will not die in childbirth.”

  But that wasn’t what I asked, and we both knew it.

  50

  I OPENED MY EYES TO darkness. I saw nothing but felt like a small thing alone in a wide, cavernous space. And high—I felt high up, which made me want to tuck my limbs in, tight and close to my body. I tried to but couldn’t. My arms and legs were bound. But I wasn’t afraid; I felt removed, distant. Where I should have felt frightened and terrified, I just felt clinical and calculating.

  Until I remembered my brother, calling for me in the dark.

  I could see only what was above me and on either side of my head, and not well at that. I was in some kind of warehouse; there was a source of light somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. I blinked and blinked again. A crumbling, pockmarked concrete ceiling materialized above me, framed by casement windows fogged with grime. And to my left and right were the shadows of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people.

  No. Not people. Mannequins. Or parts of them, anyway. An army of headless torsos standing at attention, extending farther back than I could see.
Dingy resin hands and arms, cloth torsos and plastic eyes, were heaped and scattered on the ground.

  But Daniel wasn’t there, not that I could see. I knew I wasn’t alone, but maybe I was the only one Jude had taken. I prayed to a God I did not believe in that I was right.

  “You’re wondering where we are,” a voice said. A strangely familiar voice, resonant and compelling, even though I’d never heard it before. My ears were ringing and my head was cloudy, and everything, including my thoughts, seemed distorted.

  “You’re wondering why we’re here.” I heard the sound of slow, purposeful footsteps but didn’t see anyone at first. Then, slowly, my eyes detected movement. A figure moved between the bodies, as tall and narrow as they were. I discerned the outline of a black suit among them, and as the footsteps grew nearer, the outline became a person.

  He had Noah’s blue-gray eyes, but he wasn’t Noah. And behind him stood Jude.

  “I’m afraid we’ve never been formally introduced,” the man said to me. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled, the slight curve of his mouth emphasizing the hollows beneath his sculpted cheekbones. “My name is David Shaw.”

  My tongue was thick in my mouth, and my thoughts dissolved before they could reach it. I had heard about Noah’s father but had never met him, and now, now he was here. He was here, and I had been brought here by him.

  By him.

  He stood there looking at me kindly, sympathetically, as if Jude, my tormenter, were not standing beside him. As if he hadn’t been the orchestrator of my torment, using Horizons and Wayne and Kells as tools.

  Struck dumb by shock or drugs, all I could do was stare at him and Jude, who scarcely resembled the creature I remembered. Gone was the smooth conviction he’d displayed at the dock when he’d forced me to cut my own wrists. I saw none of the anger he’d shown in the garden at Horizons, when he’d tortured my friends and Noah and me. He was whispering to himself. Mumbling. I couldn’t make out the words.

  “You’re afraid,” David Shaw said to me.

  I wasn’t. Not anymore.

  “I am truly sorry for this. I wish things could be different.”

  They would be. I wasn’t going to kill him like I’d killed everyone else. I would torture him, the way he had tortured me.

  I didn’t need him to tell me why he had done it. I didn’t care. I only cared about only one thing, but my mouth wouldn’t form the words until David Shaw gave it permission to. I recognized the sensation. I was on Anemosyne, Kells’s drug of choice.

  “Did Noah know?” My voice was scratchy and hoarse, and I wasn’t sure he heard me, until his eyebrows lifted in surprise.

  “You’re wondering if he betrayed you?” David’s eyes narrowed a bit. “How little you trust him.” His sentence was punctuated by the ringing metallic clang of metal on metal and the sound of approaching footsteps. “Speak of the devil,” David said, and then Noah appeared behind him.

  51

  NOAH

  I DULLY STALK BEHIND MY father, briefly noting the fiberglass army of armless, headless mannequins that surround us. They seem to stiffen at my arrival, to cringe at my too loud steps. So sinister. Lovely touch.

  Walking feels like an effort, as does thinking, unfortunately. My vision is oddly tunneled; we appear to be in a large, probably condemned warehouse of standard decrepitude; the plaster is peeling off of the dingy once-white walls, the casement windows are thick with grime, et cetera. I notice a sign just outside one of the windows with the words STORAGE WAREHOUSE: FIREPROOF painted on it, except someone had blackened out the letters so that it read, RAGE WAREHOUSE: IREPROOF. Mara would love that so much.

  Thinking her name cuts through something in my brain, steals the laughter from my throat. And then I see her.

  But it isn’t Mara—or at least it isn’t the Mara I remember. The one with quick, smudged fingers, lips that couldn’t decide whether to swear or smile, with eyes that told me nothing about her and everything about me.

  The last time I saw that Mara, she stood held against Jude’s body, his blade at her naked throat. Or no, no, that wasn’t the last time. A split-second frame flickers in my mind, a quick and blurred picture of her pressing Jude against a wall, almost into it, with her hands at his throat, digging into his bare skin. And I remembered what preceded it. Mara began as his victim, and then she made him hers.

  But it wasn’t just us fucked up teens that last night in Horizons. A scentless something invaded the air, made it shimmer and wave. I remembered my voice as I called out to her, the way it competed with the sound of blood rushing beneath my skin, with the sound of my ragged breath roaring in my ears, before my world went black.

  God knew how many minutes, hours, days I’d spent in darkness after that, waking up to be forced to eat by a person, or people, with blurred, blank faces and gloved hands, only to be swallowed back into unconsciousness as a dark, wet tongue pushed me to the back of its throat. I remembered practically nothing until today, when my father’s face appeared at the door.

  “You’re safe now,” he said, and miracle of miracles, led me out into the world. I felt bliss for a moment when I saw the sky, until I realized it was the color of spoiled milk. My father seemed to be talking to me, reassuring me or something, but I had trouble translating the words. I did try to find some sliver of gratitude for him, some rejoicing at my freedom, but I felt absolutely nothing at all.

  Until he mentioned her name.

  My father had found her the way he’d found me, he said. She needed help that only I could give her, and would I go with him?

  I would go anywhere, with anyone, to see the girl I loved again. Obviously.

  The girl before me now doesn’t quite look like her. She is different in a way I can’t name, in a way that goes beyond her thinness, her new shape. If she were naked beneath the faded black T-shirt she wears (one of mine—the hem is half-torn), her ribs would show, her spine would protrude, her collarbones would cut glass. But she doesn’t look ill, not the way she had begun to before Horizons. Color blooms in her cheeks, and her eyes are lit with an emotion I can’t name. And there’s something more, more than the change in her features and in her body. Looking at her is like walking into a home you once lived in to find it changed by new, alien owners. She is bound, prone, and Jude, that absolute horror of a human being, looms over her, but she looks nothing like a damsel in distress. She looks like a dragon instead. I am struck dumb and thoughtless with the sense that I don’t know a thing about this person until she speaks my name.

  The sound of her voice thaws my mind and my blood; it pulses hotly through my veins. I ignore Jude’s presence—she and I can butcher him together later. My feet carry me to my girl and I kneel and reach for her. Something stops me—not Jude. Not my father. My hand curls into a fist and falls by my side, and a strange, unfamiliar voice inside me whispers, Don’t.

  I look to Mara for an answer to the question I haven’t asked. She says instead, “You’re here.” But what I hear in her tone is, Where were you?

  My heart would break if it weren’t filled with happiness. Her voice is the same. It’s home.

  My father pollutes the air with his, however. “Mara was told that Horizons collapsed.”

  I look up in confusion. “Why?”

  “To keep you safe,” he says to me.

  “From what exactly?”

  “From her.”

  Mara is silent for a moment, and blinks her dark lashes that frame her too-wide eyes. They would look innocent on anyone else. “I would never hurt him.”

  My father looks at her with no expression. “You already have.”

  52

  BUT NOAH WASN’T HURT. HE was alive. Whole.

  Here.

  I nearly choked on my own breath when I saw him, and when I heard him speak, I thought I would dissolve. If I had been standing, I would have fallen to my knees.

  He wore unfaded jeans and a T-shirt, too new-looking to be his, and they hung loosely on his already lean fram
e. He knelt beside the table and examined my hands.

  “Do you have something I can cut these with?” he asked his father. I blinked, confused, as his father withdrew something from a nylon briefcase beside him. My neck hurt trying to see what it was.

  A knife.

  “Yes,” Jude mumbled. “Yes.”

  Whatever warmth I’d felt at Noah’s timely reappearance vanished. Something was happening here, but I didn’t understand what.

  Noah didn’t either, clearly. He cut the zip-ties on my wrists, on my ankles, with no protests from David or Jude. What were they playing at? What was this?

  My limbs were shaky and weak, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand or run. But I could sit up. Noah helped me.

  “What happened to you?” he asked as his hands gripped my shoulders, propping me up against the wall.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it; it just bubbled up from my throat. How could I even begin to answer that question?

  Noah looked away from me, his jaw tense now. “Who did this to her?” He focused on Jude. His voice was flat when he asked his father, “Why is he here?”

  David plucked a manila folder from his bag. “I told you today that I needed you to help her,” he said, and I wanted to spit in his face. “This is why.”

  He laid out several sheets of paper. Or no, not paper. Pictures. Photographs. Full color. Graphic.

  “Wayne Flowers, age forty-seven. Mara cut his throat and took his eye as a souvenir.”

  Noah’s face was impassive, his eyes flat.

  “Deborah Susan Kells, age forty-two, died of several dozen stab wounds, inflicted by Mara with nothing but a scalpel. Robert Ernst, age fifty-three, father of two. Mara stabbed him with a scalpel as well. His body could barely be identified by the police when they found it, rotting in a rest stop in the Keys.”

  Noah didn’t look at me for confirmation, but he lifted the picture of Dr. Kells from the table. Then looked at his father.

  “Did you know her?” he asked. “Do you know what she’s done to Mara? To me?”