The Becoming of Noah Shaw

  “It should be about Stella,” Sophie says, her voice quiet but threaded with self-righteousness. “And Felicity, who’s still alive.”

  “It is,” Jamie says, without any hint of his usual charm or humour. He’s furious.

  “Then why aren’t you asking me about them?”

  “Why aren’t you telling us about them?” Mara’s exterior is calm, watchful.

  “Because I don’t know anything! That’s the whole point—we can’t do this by ourselves. We all have to work together—”

  “But you’re the hunter—sorry, forgive me—the, what do you call yourself?” Mara asks her.

  “What do you call yourself?”

  Casual shrug. “Murderess, butcher—”

  “Quit it,” Daniel says to Mara. She tucks her fangs behind her lips, for now.

  “Like I said.” Sophie turns to me, having decided that I’m the Reasonable One, “when I’m on my own, I only know someone’s Gifted when I meet them. When Felicity and the others went missing, they fell off the map. Literally. There’s nothing I can do.”

  I can’t help but sympathise with that last bit, not that I’m about to admit it. And I don’t know that I want the answer to the question I’m about to ask, but I ask anyway. “Who was the first?”

  A beat before she answers. “Beth’s the first one I saw, but Sam—I think Sam was the first.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t know him personally—a friend of Leo’s, her name’s Eva—he was her friend. I never actually met him, and he died in England. You were there. With Goose.”

  And Mara.

  I close my eyes, and when I open them, everyone—Daniel, Jamie, Goose, Sophie—has a trickle of blood running from their noses. Mara appears to be smiling. Christ, I need a sleep. I blink hard, rub my eyes, and the image vanishes, thank fuck.

  “Eva told Leo when Sam killed himself, and said he went missing just before that. That’s when he thought we should try to keep track.”

  “Not working out very well though, is it,” Daniel says.

  Her eyes are cast down at her plate. “No.” She lifts her gaze up to Goose. “But you’re helping, even though you don’t know it. I’m starting to recognise what it feels like, when someone goes missing.”

  “What about Felix?” Jamie asks. “If his connection timed out, or whatever, you’d think he’d be the one you’d notice?”

  “Felix never went missing. He wasn’t . . . like the others.”

  “Just an old-fashioned suicide.” Mara says what I’m thinking, what Sophie’s just confirmed. There is a difference between the deaths, between the willing and the murdered.

  “Look, we’re scared, okay? For our friends, for ourselves.” A pleading look at Daniel here, who looks pained but doesn’t bite.

  Mara, however: “I’d like to know why you were taking notes on my Horizons file.”

  At least Sophie has the good grace to pretend to seem ashamed. Or perhaps she actually is. I’m not sure I care. “We thought it might help to learn everything we could about what that doctor did to you guys.”

  “You could’ve just asked,” Jamie says, unsmiling.

  “Right.” Sophie makes a noise. “Like you would’ve believed me if I told you what I could.”

  “Leo believed you. So did the rest of your friends,” Daniel interrupts. “You deliberately hid it. From me, from my sister—”

  “From me as well,” I say.

  She meets my gaze. “I didn’t know you were Gifted.”

  “How’s that?” I ask.

  “No connection.”

  “Not a metaphor, I’m guessing.”

  “No. I can’t sense you. It’s like you’re not even in the room.”

  Goose looks disturbed. “You’re not going to off yourself, are you, mate?”

  “No,” I say just as Sophie does.

  “I’ve never sensed him,” she continues. “It’s not like he’s gone missing all of a sudden. Speaking of which, whatever’s happening? There haven’t been enough . . . deaths . . . to see a pattern yet. I don’t know how long it’ll be before Felicity dies, or Stella—”

  “How do you know they will die?” Daniel asks.

  “Because Sam died.”

  “A pattern of one isn’t exactly a pattern.”

  She shakes her head. “Felix knew when Felicity was gone.”

  “Because you told him you couldn’t find her, and he lost hope,” I say, drawing Mara’s attention.

  She lets out a shaky breath. “No, Felix was an empath. He could feel, and change, people’s emotions. And when Beth went missing, and killed herself—he knew it was happening to Felicity, too.”

  “I don’t know, seems like he gave up kind of quick,” Jamie says.

  “He didn’t want to live in a world without her,” I say. Daniel looks up—my defence of Felix is an unintentional defence of Sophie, so I circle back to offence, where it’s safer. “So what’s your plan, Sophie?”

  “My plan?”

  “You must’ve thought about it,” Mara says. “Or were you planning to lie to us forever?”

  “You’ve read my file as well, I imagine,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “You don’t have one.”

  Jamie’s forehead scrunches. “Sure he does. I’ve seen it.”

  Sophie shrugs. “Maybe Stella never took it out of Horizons, then.”

  “But she stole mine,” Mara says—to herself, I think. A slight smile appears on her lips. “Of course she did.”

  “Tell me something,” Jamie cuts in. “Did you know about me too? In Croyden? Because we’ve both been there since elementary school—”

  “I didn’t know that there was something going on with me until I was sixteen, and you’re two years younger than me. When I met Leo and he told me I wasn’t crazy, I never thought there was anything special about you—”

  “Thanks.”

  “We passed each other all the time, and nothing, until one day—”

  “Something,” he finishes, leaning back against the chair.

  At that, Daniel stands up. “I can’t. I can’t do this anymore.” He rises from the table, and Sophie scrambles to follow. The chair scrapes against the floor as she pushes it away from the table.

  “I’ll take the train back with you,” she says.

  “Pass.” He goes to get his coat, but Mara crosses the room and says something to him I can’t hear—Sophie’s talking at him, Jamie’s asking Sophie for her address, and Goose is going for the whiskey.

  “Called you a car, dude,” Jamie says to Daniel before he walks out the door. Jamie looks down at his mobile. “It’s just down the street. It’ll be here by the time you’re downstairs.” Daniel pauses for a moment, then says to Sophie, “You’d better head out. Before it leaves without you.”

  She looks confused. “You’re not coming?”

  “Not tonight.”

  That visibly shakes her. “I love you,” she finally says, quiet and honest and sad.

  Daniel doesn’t reply, but Mara opens the door and holds it open. Once Sophie’s walked into the hall, Daniel says, “You don’t lie to people you love.”

  If only that were true.

  “Daniel, you should spend the night,” Mara says as he stands by the now-closed door.

  “I want to be by myself,” he says flatly. “I’m just waiting until I know she’s gone.”

  “You can be alone here,” Mara insists.

  “Stop.”

  “You should,” I say. “It’s late. We have the room. We’ll let you alone.”

  He wants to argue, but he’s wrung out. “Where?” he asks, glancing upstairs.

  “Second floor, make a left after the first bank of rooms. It’s completely quiet—”

  “I don’t want quiet.”

  “There’s a telly,” Goose says. We all turn to him. “What? There’s one in all the rooms.”

  “Not ours,” Mara mouths to me.

  Because we have better ways of spending our ti
me, I’m a bit tempted to say, but, not quite the moment, is it?

  “Fine,” Daniel shrugs off his jacket, loops it over his arm. “I’ll see you guys . . . whenever.”

  “Take care, buddy,” Jamie says.

  “Night, brother,” Mara calls up as he disappears. No response.

  Jamie and Goose awkwardly disperse, leaving Mara and me alone.

  A dark look up through dark lashes. “I’m going to bed.” She doesn’t look tired. I think I hear her heart charged up, her pulse pounding in her veins.

  “I’ll be a bit,” I say. “I want to clear up.”

  She nods, then, letting out a long-held breath, says, “I could kill her for what she did to Daniel.”

  An edge of a grin. “Literally or figuratively?”

  She kisses me lightly on the mouth, then darts up the stairs and calls out, “Haven’t decided yet.”

  With Mara, there’s no way to tell whether she means it.

  31

  BY MY EXPERIMENT

  UNABLE TO SLEEP, I CLEAR the untouched mess left in the wake of the inquisition on my own and am in the kitchen burning toast and making tea when Mara descends the stairs at dawn, desultory. The sun fades in through the windows, pale and weak.

  “Morning,” I say.

  “God is dead.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Again?”

  She folds her arms on the counter and lets her head fall over them, issuing a muffled, “I hate everything.”

  I ignore the toast and the prospect of tea (and sex, let’s be honest) and stand beside her. Stroke back her hair, prompting a turn of her head that leaves one cheek and eye exposed. She’s so hurt I ache.

  “What can I do?”

  “I don’t know. He’s been crazy about her since our first day at Croyden. And now he thinks she only started talking to him because of me. To find out more about me.”

  “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him now.”

  Mara rounds on me. “She lied—”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “Why are you defending her?”

  A good question. I do find myself sympathising with Sophie a bit. Something she said last night—seeing Beth in the subway, her light appearing on Sophie’s mental map again just in time for her to snuff it out herself. I know what that’s like.

  There’s much about Leo and his little operation, which we now know includes Sophie, that I find suspect—but so far I can’t find an excuse to lay the blame for Sam’s and Beth’s deaths at their feet. And so far they’re the only ones with real connections to the Gifted who’ve gone missing. Not us.

  What’s different about us?

  “Look,” I say, needing to appease Mara before I can get away to think on it. “Daniel was betrayed by someone he loves. It’s savage. But here’s the thing: Part of that betrayal isn’t heartbreak—it’s because she had her eyes on you. It’s because he loves you that he’s hurting so much. He feels like he should’ve seen it coming.”

  An assumption, surely; one I make because it’s how I feel about her, though there’s no one more capable of protecting Mara than Mara. But I know Daniel as well.

  “He feels like he failed you,” I say.

  Incredulous, she says, “How could he think that?”

  “Because he feels responsible for you.”

  “But he knows me, he knows what I can do—”

  “He’s your big brother. No matter how strong you are, he’ll always worry about you.” A stirring of guilt, because I’m not there, haven’t been there, for my own sister. Haven’t even been thinking about how she’s faring in the roiling, shark-infested sea of adolescence and mourning the loss of her doting father.

  Mara’s face falls again. “I know. I hate what she did to him.”

  I let Mara have that, but, confession, I don’t. Hate her, that is. Sophie lied by omission, true, and she may well have been spying on us for Leo et al., of course. But I haven’t got the sense that it was malicious. Wary, yes. Curious, surely. But we’ve been acting the same toward them, in truth.

  Despite differences in specifics, they want what (most of us) want: answers. The truth. They care about one another the way we do.

  And then, I’ve an idea. “I think you, Jamie, and Goose should meet with Leo today.”

  “What?” Mara rears back a bit. “Now?”

  “Now that we know what we know from Sophie, I think we’ve got to come around to the fact that Stella’s genuinely missing. It’s been a long fucking night, and I’ve thought about it. Two of us have killed ourselves already—Sam hung himself, Beth jumped in front of a train.” Mara dips her head, knowing what’s coming, that I’m right, before I say it. “We should work with the others. Match the pieces we have with whatever they’ve got. You and Jamie and Goose, despite his appearance to the contrary, are brilliant.”

  “So why don’t we figure it out on our own?”

  “Because we had no idea who they were. They might have some documents and tapes and reports and shite, but we don’t know the people this has been happening to, Stella excepted. Sophie and Leo do. It’s their friends committing suicide so far, but there’s a grand design somewhere, and a clock counting down, and we’ve no idea when, or for whom. If we want to find a connection, we need to look, really look, at the people connected, and so far, that’s them.”

  Mara wilts into a curl of sulk.

  “What? You don’t want to go?” You don’t want to help Stella is the question I don’t ask.

  “It’s not that. I’m just—I hate leaving Daniel alone.”

  “He needs it.”

  Mara reaches out, tugs at the hem of my shirt. “Why don’t you come with us?” she asks.

  I wind a finger around her hair, concealing the tiniest hint of resentment and self-loathing in my voice. “I want to look through the things the solicitors sent over. From England,” I lie. Sort of.

  “And you want to be alone.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s just that you sorting through old architectural plans and whatever else is likely to be less productive than you sorting through what Leo and Sophie collected. No one knows more about what really happened at Horizons than you,” I say. “And Jamie.”

  Jamie descends the stairs first. “Off to find the droids we’re looking for, I hear.”

  “You’ll keep yourself entertained, I trust?” asks Goose, right behind him.

  “Always,” I say as they pocket their mobiles and shrug into jackets. The sun arrows through the glass clocks, slicing the apartment’s shadow with white.

  Mara tosses one watchful look over her shoulder, so I half smile at her. “Don’t be too long,” I say, just loudly enough for her to hear it.

  She turns away, but not before I glimpse her eyes rolling and a grin on her face. I shut the door behind them.

  And head straight for Daniel.

  32

  MEN OF STRAW

  I KNOCK ON HIS DOOR, not politely. I try the door and it’s locked. “Daniel!” I shout. “It’s an emergency! I need your—”

  He opens the door, eyes bloodshot but wide. “What is it? What happened?”

  “Time to wake up.”

  His face puddles into confusion. “What—”

  “Nothing happened. Everything’s fine.”

  “Then what the hell—”

  “I need your help.”

  “You’re going to have to live with disappointment,” he says, and begins to close the door.

  I stop it with my hand. “Sorry, but no. Get dressed. You’ve got class.”

  “I’m skipping.”

  “Daniel, Daniel. Remember who you are.”

  Nothing. His eyelids droop, his arms cross against his chest. “I just want to be alone, okay?”

  He sounds pathetic, and it does pull at the single heartstring in my chest, but.

  Petulant, he adds, “You said I’d be left alone.”

  “I say a lot of things. And anyway we did leave you alone
last night. Time’s up. Get dressed.”

  His nostrils flare, and for a second I see the family resemblance that’s normally hidden between him and Mara. “Where are we going?”

  “I think you know.”

  I’d never wanted to see the place before, and now that I stand here, looking up at it, nondescript and shuttered in a toxically ugly part of Brooklyn, I feel justified. There are windows stretching up for stories, boarded shut, crudely. Father always was good at hiding.

  “You’re serious?” Daniel asks, staring at the building.

  “Deadly,” I say. I lift the metal shutter; it groans in protestation, and I feel my way for the lock. The rusted red door opens, and I slide my hand over the wall for the light switch.

  The lights slam on at once, the sudden artificial brightness a bit shocking. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything in here that’s going to help prevent whatever’s going on,” I say, looking up at the towering shelves, “but you do. And I trust you with whatever might or might not be in here.”

  Daniel’s quiet, staring ahead at the aisles that go on forever.

  “So this is what’s happening today,” I go on. “Mara, Jamie, and Goose are at the brownstone with Leo—”

  “And Sophie, probably,” Daniel mumbles.

  I shrug a shoulder, as if it doesn’t matter. “Perhaps. No one’s texted yet, and I don’t much care, honestly. But listen—there was a map that I just barely got a glimpse of—I have a near-photographic memory, but the room was dark and I couldn’t make everything out. Now that we’re all on the same team—”

  Daniel’s eyes drop, and he looks away.

  “The same let’s-not-allow-innocent-people-to-die team,” I inhale, trying not to sound frustrated. “You’ve always thought the answer to the suicide question was here. So Mara and Jamie and Goose are there, collecting names of the other Carriers, places they came from, their abilities, and most importantly, getting you pictures of that map. And you’re going to cross-reference them with the shit in here.”

  Daniel barks out a laugh. “You have no idea how it works.”

  “All right, how does it work?”

  “Kells gave the kids she experimented on false names, so they couldn’t be traced in case anyone did find this place. I assume that was your father’s suggestion,” Daniel says. Sounds like it. “So trying to match up names, find files—the idea of cross-referencing them is”—he looks up at the scale of the building—“It’s impossible.”