The Retribution of Mara Dyer

  “I’ll let your parents know, after, about what you did to Phoebe.”

  But I hadn’t done anything to Phoebe.

  “And Tara.”

  I hadn’t done anything to Tara, either.

  “You have a well-established history of violence under sedation,” she said, her cheeks wet, her nose running. “And a documented diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. It will be extremely difficult for your family to come to terms with the loss, but with time they’ll come to accept it. They’ll have to accept it.” She placed the syringe on a metal table by the gurney. I looked down and saw a drain in the floor. I looked back up, at the strange-looking metal cabinets behind her. It took me a few seconds to realize what they were, and where I was.

  The room was a morgue.

  “I’ve done nothing but spend years of my life trying to help teenagers like you, and you in particular. But I can’t kid myself anymore.” Her voice broke on the words. “You can’t be fixed. You can’t be saved.” She rolled the sleeve of my stained gown up to my shoulder. I felt her fingers brush my skin. A wave of sensation trailed in their wake.

  My body had been numb before, but the wave crested and left my arms, my hands, and parts of my back tingling. Still nothing in my legs or feet.

  I felt the scalpel, tucked into the elastic waistband of my underwear, the metal warm from my body. Either Dr. Kells didn’t know about it or she’d forgotten about it, because she was very surprised when I stabbed her in the neck.

  I swung my arm with so much force that I fell off the table and crashed to the floor, knocking over the metal table with the syringes. Dr. Kells hadn’t strapped me down. Why bother if I was paralyzed? Pain speared my left shoulder, and I fought the instinct to grab it—I needed to keep the scalpel in my right hand. Kells backed up against the wall, then sank to the floor. She held her neck with both hands, her eyes wide, blood flowing freely through her fingers.

  I told my legs to move, but they wouldn’t. I’d have to crawl. I glanced at the door to the morgue. I could probably reach the handle, but the door itself looked heavy. I might not be able to push it open.

  Mara.

  I looked up when I heard his voice, Noah’s voice. And then I saw his face. Fine-boned and elegant and pale, with the sarcastic tilt to his mouth that I loved so much, and a shadow of stubble on his jaw. It was him. Just the way I remembered.

  But then a gash appeared in his throat, as if someone had cut into it with a serrated knife. There was no blood, no sound as the wound formed a jagged smile at the base of his neck.

  It wasn’t real. I knew it wasn’t real. But I was seeing it for a reason.

  I rounded on Dr. Kells. She was pale but still conscious, still able to move, and she edged away from the wall. The floor was slick with her blood.

  “Where’s Noah?” I said. My voice was thick and flat.

  “Dead,” she whispered. She bunched up the corner of her lab coat, trying to use it to stanch her bleeding.

  “You’re lying.”

  “You killed him.”

  “Jude told me he’s alive.”

  “Jude is sick,” she said hoarsely.

  I believed that. But I also believed that Noah was alive. I would feel it if he weren’t, and I didn’t feel anything.

  “Tell me where he is,” I said, my tongue heavy in my mouth. I tried to think what I could say or do to make her tell me, force her to tell me, then remembered what she had said to Jude.

  She had told him I could bring Claire back. Jude had believed it. Maybe he’d been right to.

  “Tell me where he is so I can bring him back.”

  “He’s never coming back.”

  “You told Jude—Claire—”

  “I lied.”

  Even I thought that was cruel. I was about to say so when I caught her reaching for the syringe. Rage threw me forward, and I managed to swat it away with my hand. Then I pushed myself up.

  Dr. Kells was right. I had killed her a thousand times in my head, but she was still here. Whatever drugs she’d given me were working, making it impossible to kill her with my mind. But I could kill her with my hands.

  She had dropped her coat, and the blood flowing from her neck had slowed to a trickle.

  She’s going to die anyway, part of me whispered.

  “But she could kill you before she does.”

  I swung my head in the direction of my voice. I stared at my reflection in one of the steel drawers. She—I—shrugged my shoulders as if to say, What can you do?

  My arms trembled with the effort to hold myself up, but I would not let go until I had an answer. “How do I find Noah?” I asked.

  Kells was scrabbling away from the door, away from me, but kept slipping on her own blood. I pulled at her legs, and her skin seemed to come off in my hand. No. Not her skin, her stockings. “What did you do to him? Tell me.”

  She didn’t answer. She stared at me and then, without warning, dove for the syringe again.

  I slid with her, and in a burst of strength pulled myself on top of her and pushed down on her chest, on her neck. She gasped for air as I wrestled the syringe from her curled fist.

  I couldn’t leave her alive. Not after everything. I couldn’t take that chance. But as I held the syringe, I realized I could make death painless for her, just like she’d said she would do for me.

  But was what she’d done to me painless? She’d hurt me before tonight, before today. She had tortured me. She’d said she had her reasons, but then, didn’t everyone? Did reasons matter?

  She was mouthing something—praying, maybe? I hadn’t seen that coming.

  When I’d thought about death before, it had been so abstract. I’d thought things but I’d never felt them. But this, this was real. My face was just inches from hers. I could hear her heart beating weakly in her chest with the effort to pump what blood still remained in her body. I could smell the sweat on her skin and almost taste her blood in my mouth, hot and metallic.

  The truth was, I had known since the second I’d woken up in Horizons, since the second she’d confessed what she’d done to me, since she’d showed me the list, that if given the chance, I would kill her.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Dr. Kells. “This will only hurt a little.”

  12

  I HALF-STUMBLED, HALF-CRAWLED ALONG THE metal walkway as the feeling returned to my legs. My hands were scored from pulling myself up the grated catwalk. When I reached a fork in the walkway, I looked left, then right, and saw Jamie and Stella standing maybe a hundred feet away.

  I didn’t have to say a word before they began to run toward me. Stella slipped in her socked feet, and she grabbed the railing to steady herself, dropping some files she’d been carrying under her arm, but soon they were by my side. They didn’t ask what had happened. They didn’t say anything at all. Each of them took a shoulder, and hauled me up. They half-carried me out of the hallway that led up a brutal, narrow flight of stairs and eventually outdoors.

  “We got worried you weren’t coming out,” Jamie finally said as the three of us collapsed, panting, against the concrete building we’d just escaped from.

  “What about Ebola?” I asked breathlessly.

  Jamie coughed and wheezed, then said, “What’s a little hemorrhagic fever between friends?”

  I smiled, despite everything.

  “Guys?” Stella asked. “We should probably not stay here.”

  Probably not.

  “We need to hide,” Jamie said. “Until you can walk.”

  He was right of course, but we didn’t have too many options. The building I practically crawled out of had to be the uppermost level of the maintenance shed. It was mostly hidden by trees, but it was nearly dawn and they weren’t that thick. We could even see Horizons—part of the treatment facility, anyway—in the distance, on No Name Island. Unfortunately, that meant that someone standing on No Name Island might be able to see us, too.

  I looked down at my useless legs, smeared with blood and dirt.
I felt a twinge of panic. “What if I can’t walk?” I swallowed thickly. “What if—what if—”

  Stella knelt at eye level. “What does it feel like?” she asked gently.

  “Like parts of my feet and legs are just dead, but other parts—other parts are stinging.”

  “I remember feeling like that once, in there,” Jamie said, glancing at the closed door. “I woke up and couldn’t feel my legs.”

  “What did she do to you?” I asked, but I was scared to hear his answer. Why would she make it so we couldn’t walk? What had she done to us?

  “It wasn’t Kells, it was Wayne,” Jamie said. “And he wasn’t exactly forthcoming.”

  Not comforting. But at least Jamie could walk now. Which meant I would again, too. I hoped.

  “How long did it take to wear off?”

  Jamie shrugged. “There were no clocks, not that I saw anyway, so I’m not sure, but I think an hour or two maybe? I felt strange after . . . like my limbs just floated away—like they were clouds.”

  “A spinal block, maybe?” Stella suggested. “So you couldn’t feel what they were doing to you.”

  “You know this how?” I asked.

  “My mom’s a nurse.”

  “Can I just take a second to say, I am so happy they’re dead,” Jamie said, running a hand over his scalp, then over his face. He peeked at me through two of his fingers. “She is dead, right?”

  Oh yes. “Yes.”

  “What happened in there?” Jamie asked me.

  “It wasn’t really Noah. It was just his voice. Kells recorded it, played it, played me.”

  “So, ’twas a trap?”

  “Yup,” I said. “You were right.” I felt his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry, Mara,” Jamie said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, about—about Noah, I mean.”

  “He’s not dead.” Jamie said nothing. I pushed myself up until my spine was straight. “I don’t know how I know it, but I do. He’s out there, somewhere.”

  “Then why isn’t he here?”

  That was a very good question. One I would do anything to answer.

  “Kells said the building collapsed,” Jamie started.

  “She told me that too. But that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  There was no way to know without going back there. But even if it had collapsed, there was more to Horizons than just the treatment facility, we now knew. And if Jamie survived, and Stella survived, I had to believe Noah survived too. He was the only one of us who could heal. He had to be alive.

  “Do you still have the tape?” I asked. Jamie’s forehead creased. “The tape Jude made me?”

  “Stella had it last, I think,” Jamie said.

  I spun around. “Where’d she go?”

  Just then, a rusty hinge creaked. Our heads snapped up, but it was only Stella, emerging from the building holding three bags. One was Jamie’s, another must’ve been Stella’s, and the last one—the last one belonged to Noah.

  An image of him appeared in my mind, of Noah standing with that bag over his shoulder, guitar case in hand, dripping wet from the rain, waiting to be led into the Horizons Treatment Center so he could save me. My heart leapt. “Where’d you find this one?”

  “She kept our things—boxes of stuff—in a little room near the morgue,” Stella said, handing the bags to me and Jamie. “I guess if we died or something, she wanted to make sure we were in our own clothes and not hospital gowns or whatever. Stage the scene.”

  I wondered what she’d done with my things. How she’d planned on staging that scene.

  I gripped Noah’s bag with what was probably excessive force. “How did you know this was—” No, not “was.” Is. “How did you know this is his?”

  “There were cubbies labeled with our names. And his guitar was next to it.”

  His guitar. He wouldn’t have left that behind. An ache rose in my throat, but I swallowed it back down.

  “Did you look in the morgue?” Jamie asked Stella.

  “Um . . . ” She shot me a nervous glance. I both did and didn’t want her to answer.

  “No,” she finally said.

  “One of us should.” Jamie’s voice was soft.

  I shook my head. “Noah isn’t in there.”

  “If you don’t want to go, I will,” Jamie said.

  I thought of what he would find there if he went—the blood, Kells’s body. I thought I should go with him, to explain it.

  Stella decided to come with us, and the two of them helped me up and let me use them as crutches as we opened the door and began the trek back down.

  Despite our lack of shoes, our footsteps echoed loudly on the metal grates, and I knew I wasn’t the only one wondering if what we were doing was smart. If we weren’t alone down there, someone else would easily hear us. But we kept walking (in my case, limping) anyway. We had to see what was there . . . or wasn’t.

  The door to the morgue was slightly ajar, and a bloody, smeared handprint wrapped around the edge, just beneath the handle. It was mine. Jamie and Stella just stared at it. I pushed the steel door open with my fingertips.

  Dr. Kells was where I’d left her, her dead eyes fixed on nothing. Stella’s chin wobbled as she surveyed the scene. “What happened?” she whispered. But Jamie spoke before I could answer.

  “I’ll look in the drawers,” he said, but made no move to enter the room. I urged both of them forward, breaking the spell. We stared at the rows of large metal cabinets, wanting and not wanting to know what was inside them.

  In the end it was Stella who opened the first drawer. I leaned on Jamie as she unlocked it. We collectively held our breath as she slid out the tray, and collectively sighed when it turned out to be empty. Every nerve in my body felt raw and exposed as she unlocked drawer after drawer, each of them empty, until one wasn’t.

  A sheet covered a shapeless mass. No, not shapeless. Body-shaped. Person-shaped.

  Stella didn’t reach for it, so I broke away from Jamie, using the wall to support myself. I slid the sheet off and found Adam. Dick-Adam. Whom I could have saved, maybe, but had chosen not to. And now he was here, and dead, like Kells and Wayne and everyone else I’d hated.

  But not Noah. Not Noah.

  13

  WE SLEPT BY THE WATER. The beach was half sand, half mud and was littered with jagged shells and tree roots, but I felt more dead than tired, so I stuffed Noah’s bag under my head and crashed anyway.

  The feeling came back into my legs in a trickle, not a wave. When I woke up, my muscles ached with soreness, my mouth tasted spoiled, and my stomach hurt. I was itchy and filthy and miserable, but when the sun peeked through the trees and I realized that I could stare at it, bask in it, worship it if I wanted to, my mouth curved into a smile. I was free.

  Jamie and Stella were still sleeping. Mist crept up from the gray ocean onto the beach, reaching for their feet, clinging to the tall sea grass. I stood quietly, weak-kneed but able to walk on my own. Seagulls picked over something on the shore. They scattered at my approach.

  My papery hospital gown was crusted with blood and sand and dirt. I had no clothes, so I brought Noah’s bag with me, figuring I’d wash myself off in the ocean and change into something of his. But my hand froze on the zipper.

  I didn’t know if I could keep it together if I opened his bag and smelled his scent and felt the fabric that had touched his skin. I knew he was alive—knew it—but he wasn’t here.

  I walked back just as Jamie was waking up, stretching his arms up to touch the tree branch above him.

  “I feel like ass,” he said.

  Stella yawned loudly. “You look like it too.”

  “So, what’s for breakfast?” Jamie asked.

  Stella rolled her eyes. “Cute.”

  “My gastric juices are dissolving my stomach lining,” Jamie said. Stella made a disgusted face. “My stomach is eating itself. And I’ve never been this sore in my life.”

  Stella propped herse
lf up on her elbows. “Maybe there are coconuts or something?”

  “We’re not foraging for coconuts,” I said. “We have to get off the island.”

  Stella agreed. “I grabbed some files from Kells’s office, but I didn’t really look at what I took. We could go back—she had to have a way of coming and going. Maybe we can find it.”

  “Then what?” Jamie asked.

  “There’s a resort on No Name Island,” I said. “If we go back, we might be able to find a phone . . .”

  But my voice trailed off as I followed that train of thought. Who would we call?

  “And what would we say?” Jamie added, seeing where I was going with it.

  “Kells mentioned Phoebe and Tara before—” Before I killed her. “Said that it would look like I was the one who’d killed them.”

  “But Jude did it,” Stella said.

  “Right in front of us,” Jamie added.

  “Dr. Kells—that was self-defense,” Stella said. “We’ll back you up.”

  I took a deep breath, steadying myself. “It won’t matter. Everything is already in my file. We can’t count on anyone”—even my parents—“believing any of us.”

  Even my brothers.

  “If she told anyone about it before she died, showed anyone my file,” I continued, “then, depending on what was in them, people”—my family—“will think we’re crazy and still under her care, or crazy and missing, or crazy and dead. But no matter what, people”—my family—“are going to think we’re”—I’m—“crazy.”

  “And dangerous,” Jamie added, giving my bloody hospital gown a long look.

  “And dangerous.” I really needed to change.

  “So okay,” Stella said. “We don’t call anyone we know to get us out of here. There’s the ferry, though? What about that?”

  I looked down at myself. “We look a little—”

  “Suspicious,” Jamie said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Is there anything of Noah’s you can wear?” Stella asked.

  “I . . . haven’t looked yet.”