“Stopping whom? Stella’s in control here. Aren’t you, Stella?”
She looks around, up at the frozen police, the paramedics. Then at each of us, landing on Mara, last.
“Am I?”
I follow her gaze—the bodies of everyone who isn’t Us shimmer and blink. And then—gone. It’s elegant, the way they’re wiped away. Replaced with blank space. The pieces don’t completely fit—the pavement shivers, miragelike, where they once stood.
“She’s in your head too,” Stella says to me, but it’s Leo I look at.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“I’m trying to make it so we focus on Stella, because I can’t hold the rest of them for long.”
I turn to Goose, who’s sheet-white, with Daniel next to him, speaking in a low voice. Mara takes a step toward Stella. “What am I saying to you, in your head?”
“You’re not saying anything. You’re just there, crouching like a tiger.” Stella laughs, which is especially disturbing, considering the fact that there’s nothing between her and a 135-foot drop. When she rights herself, she steadies her gaze on Sophie.
“You’re next, I think.” She blinks slowly. “I think you’re safe for a while, Leo. I’m glad.”
“I’m begging you,” he says to her. “Don’t do this.” I try and focus my energy on him, on listening to his heartbeat, to hear if he’s lying to all of us or telling the truth, but all I hear is a swarm of flies. I look back and see Sophie, but instead of her face, I see a skull.
“Stop,” I say to Leo through clenched teeth, but Stella thinks I’m talking to her. She’s about to say something back when Mara says—
“Let go, then.”
The words echo, then flatten, then become part of the swarm.
“Stella,” I say quickly, “this isn’t happening the way you think it is.” I turn back, looking for Daniel, for Jamie, for help, and the bridge behind me vanishes, rubbed into white space.
“You said you wanted a cure,” I hear Mara say. “You could be fighting for one. Instead, you’re giving up.”
“Fuck you,” Stella spits. “I’m not giving up, or letting go. I didn’t get to choose my own adventure, but I can choose my own ending.”
I don’t know if it’s a trick of my eyes, of Leo’s, or if what I’m seeing is real, but Stella doesn’t fall from the bridge, or jump.
She dives.
41
STRONG AND VALIANT NATURES
THE LAST CONSCIOUS THOUGHT THAT Stella has, that I can hear, is
Your move
It’s stunning, watching the river swallow her body. The closest person to her, proximity-wise, was Mara. But I was the one she was thinking about as her neck broke. A white sear of pain and then, nothing.
I hadn’t noticed that dawn had risen, that it was morning, until now. The police are back in motion, talking to us, coming toward us, and Jamie’s in gear, leading the way with Leo. The illusion’s broken, Daniel and Goose are by my side. Goose is leaning on to the rail, weakest of all of us. “Drained” would be a better word, I suppose. I twist back, looking for Mara, but the only person I see behind us is Sophie. She’s crying, silently.
“Have you seen Mara?” I ask her.
She looks up at me through dark blond lashes. “She left as soon as soon as Stella . . .”
“The cops are going to want to talk to all of us,” Daniel says. “There are cameras on the bridge, not to mention the helicopters—”
“Did any of them get audio, do you think?” I want to replay what just happened. Make sure my own memory is untainted.
“Who cares?” Leo turns, faces me. “Who the fuck cares?”
“We all should,” Daniel says, though not for the reason I expect. “Especially us, seeing as we’re eighteen.”
“And that’s relevant why?” Leo asks.
“Because it means we can be questioned without a guardian present,” Daniel says flatly. “Because we can be charged as adults.”
“Charged for what? She committed suicide,” Sophie says quietly. “No one’s going to be arrested for murder.”
“Even though one of us should be,” Leo says. He turns his assholic stare on me as Mara’s not here.
“Shut up,” I say as Jamie talks us past one of the cops, but I don’t say it out of anger. I stop at the railing, threading my fingers through the fence. A boat arcs through the river, its wake curving like a smile.
Beneath the cars, beneath the trains, beneath the voices and sounds of every living thing in New York—
Beneath the water, there’s a heartbeat.
42
HOWEVER MEAN
SHE’S ALIVE.” I’M STARING DOWN at the water, watching the boat, but it’s as though someone took an open palm to an unfinished oil painting and smeared it. I can’t tell if her body’s floated up, or if they’ve sent divers down for her, and my mind can’t reach simple facts I should know.
Leo steps beside me, looks down. “How—”
“I need to get to her.”
“Noah.” Sophie puts a light hand on my arm. “She’s gone.”
I don’t shake her off. She’s barely there, flickering in and out. I call out to Jamie, “Can you get us through?”
I have to shout it—it’s deafening up here, now that the illusion’s broke. The cars and trains and the city—we would barely’ve been able to hear ourselves speak.
“I’m trying!” Jamie calls back, just as Goose falls to the pavement.
Daniel’s voice tugs at me as he crouches over my friend. “Can you do anything?”
I try and let it all in, every sound I can usually hear; lungs expanding, blood rushing through arteries, hearts like metronomes, but instead it’s everything else; pistons firing in engines powering cars, a garbage bag being stepped on, glass breaking, the ticking of Leo’s watch.
I’m bent over Goose—I can see his chest move, but can’t hear him breathe. I tilt my head, my ear to his mouth, and still I can barely hear a shudder of a breath, even though I can see it. It feels like I’m backing into a corridor, the lights going out one by one. Someone’s calling my name, but I’m on the pavement, deaf, but not blind. A drop of blood wells up in Goose’s nostril, then drips down the side of his cheek. It drips to the ground. I can’t hear that, either. The air stirs his hair, the collar of his shirt.
Daniel’s mouth is moving, but no words are coming out. Goose blinks out of my field of vision even though I’m kneeling over him. When he blinks back in, his hand is on my shoulder and I’m the one on the pavement, on my back, shouting for everyone to shut the fuck up.
I watch two pigeons take flight between the suspension cables. The colour leaches out of the sky; the world is grey and white before I black out.
43
PAINT THE VERY ATMOSPHERE
HER VOICE CURLS AROUND MY nerves.
An instantly familiar alto with a slight growl that gives her words a faintly sarcastic edge. I first heard her in a thick, pulsing crowd at a club. The tourist hordes descend on South Beach in December like beasts, but I glide past bouncers one, two, and three without effort. This Croyden idiot named Kent’s toted two of his Pine Crest friends along; I’ve already forgotten their names. They’re staring openmouthed at the girls—models, mostly—writhing to music in a haze of fake smoke.
I feel the notes beneath my skin. Atrocious, but they drown out the sound of things I shouldn’t be able to hear but can, chords of life blending together in a discordant soup of noise.
I open my eyes to find two tall, angular blondes—twins, perhaps—twining around each other and dancing feet away from us. One tosses me a look, then speaks to the other in Russian. Kent and his friends are spellbound; I am relentlessly bored. I rest against the seat, legs stretched out in front of me, and wonder if I could possibly sleep. But one of the girls moves in closer. Watching me to see if I’m watching her.
I lift my glass and take a slow sip of scotch. The girl is now dancing between my legs. If I don’t break eye cont
act, in six seconds she’ll kneel.
At four, I look away.
The girl moves back into the crowd, but throws a look over her shoulder. She’s hurt.
Better this way. She wants connection, and I can’t connect.
Kent says something obscene over the music, and I consider hitting him to break the tedium. I manage to resist, barely, and take another sip. I haven’t been able to get properly drunk in years, but I like the burn.
That is what I’m thinking when I hear her voice for the first time. Fear and rage twisted into three words:
“Get them out.”
Her voice brings pain with it; my head throbs and aches and every muscle feels sore. Then I go blind.
I would panic, if this were the first time this had happened. But it isn’t, and I know that I’m still with Kent surrounded by tourists, though when I try and look down at myself out of habit, I see nothing at first. Then out of the darkness, hands come into focus. Pressed up against something—a wall, a ceiling perhaps. Not my hands, though—the fingernails are small, dirty, the fingers slender, feminine. But I see them as if I’m looking through the lenses of my own eyes. They push against the wall, and I can feel the texture of the cinderblock and dirt even though my hands are clean.
The waking nightmare ends, eventually, but now, nearly two months later, I hear that same voice again. Those same words.
The sun is shining aggressively, and I’m staring at the thatched roof of one of Croyden’s absurd tiki huts, avoiding it and class. I don’t look up to see who happens to be beating the shit out of the vending machine until I hear that voice. I would know it anywhere, in any dream or memory, but I never imagined I would hear it in reality.
When I do, I lean up and watch her. The girl’s more angry than annoyed, as if the malfunction is personal.
“You have an anger management problem,” I say. She whips around.
My psychic disaster seems to have developed a life outside my psyche. She stands there in dark jeans that would be indecent if she didn’t wear them so casually, with a loose, faded black T-shirt that sets off her skin. Not from Florida, clearly new, and so beautiful I nearly laugh out loud. And with this look on her face like she doesn’t give a fuck what I think of her. Perfection.
She considers me for a long moment, her eyebrows drawing together.
“Get him out,” Mara says. It’s her voice, but her mouth doesn’t move. And the tone is off—oddly tinny, and far away.
“What?” I ask, or try to, but something’s wringing the air from my lungs. The sun pierces the shade of the roof.
“He’s waking up; I’ll call you back.” Those words come from nowhere. And that is definitely not Mara’s voice anymore. It’s Jamie’s.
44
WHAT I LIVE FOR
I BLINK, AND THERE’S A flare of light. The sun in my memory becomes a fluorescent tube light in reality.
“Noah, come on, we gotta go.”
It’s Jamie, shaking my shoulder. I gasp for air, and Florida sheds its skin; the picnic table shrinks into a hideous chair, the thatched roof bleaches out into a white ceiling. The vending machines are still here.
“Where is everyone?” I ask him.
“Where we need to be.”
“Where are we?”
“Mount Sinai,” he says, and the pieces fit together. We’re in a waiting room. “You insisted.”
“I insisted?”
“They brought Stella here, but.” Jamie shakes his head. “It’s not good.”
An image comes to me, a memory, possibly, of people pulling her out of the water—one of her shoes was still on.
“Is she alive?”
Jamie nods, but his eyes dart away. “For now.”
“Can you get me to her?”
He shakes his head, his dreadlocks flicking his cheeks. “No one’s getting near her right now. Her neck’s broken and she’s on life support, I overheard.”
I can choose my own ending.
She didn’t, though, seeing as how she’s still alive. Seems especially cruel.
“Noah, we really need to go.”
“Where’s Daniel?” I say as I get up, swaying on my feet. I steady myself on one of the chairs. Jamie’s not watching—he’s looking at the front entrance.
“At the precinct,” he says. “Waiting for his parents.”
“What? What precinct? The fuck—why?”
“Because he doesn’t want to talk to the police without a lawyer. And neither do you.”
“I’ve got enough to go round,” I say. “But it would be simpler for you to just get us out of it.”
“I can’t get us out of anything. You can’t do anything. Are you listening to me?” He faces me, fake smiling, speaking through clenched teeth. “Someone cut the power. Like literally, in our case—our abilities are gone. We have to go.”
45
UNSURVEYED AND UNFATHOMED
JAMIE TRIES TO FILL IN the gaps in my memory as I walk numbly out of the hospital with him.
“Goose passed out on the bridge as I was trying to get us out of there,” he says. So that happened in truth. Good to know. “Daniel was getting paranoid,” he finishes.
“For good reason, it seems.”
“As it happens, yes. So when Goose passed out, you tried to heal him, but I guess you couldn’t.”
“He’s all right though? When you said someone cut the—”
“He’s fine. I don’t know what the fuck happened up there, but none of us seems to be able to do what we can do anymore.”
“None of us?”
“None,” he says, shaking his head. But he stops midshake. “Well. One assumes.”
“One should never assume,” I say, mostly to myself. “Anyway, I’m sure it’s likely temporary.”
“Sure, why not,” Jamie says, head down, hands in his pockets. I notice he’s been avoiding the main streets. “Anyway, I realised I couldn’t do what I usually do, and the cops stopped us. Sophie started talking to them while we were still on the bridge. Offered to explain everything. She doesn’t seem to do well under pressure.”
“Christ.”
“So that’s where she, Leo, and Daniel are. If they haven’t destroyed each other yet.”
“And I insisted we get to the hospital,” I say. “To help Stella.”
“Actually, you had the presence of mind to say to the cops that you needed to go because of Goose. Being English and all, him not having family here, blah blah. It worked, they brought him to Mount Sinai too. I got to tag along because I said I was sick too. Felt pretty shitty, TBH.”
“He’s not still at the hospital, is he?”
Jamie shakes his head. “No, checked himself out.”
“Where’s he, then?”
“On his way to a hotel, I believe.”
“And Mara?” She’d been there until Stella dove. After that . . .
Jamie pauses before saying, “Not . . . entirely sure.”
“How’s that?”
“Because she didn’t say.”
“But you saw her leave?” I have no memory of it.
Jamie appears to though. “Yes, but I didn’t ask where she was headed. We have a sort of a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy with each other.” He looks up for a second. “I recommend it.”
Instead of his face I see Goose, unconscious, a drop of blood running from his nose to his cheek to the pavement.
I think of Stella’s last words:
Your move.
I withdraw my mobile. No texts from Mara, no calls from her. About a thousand others I still haven’t returned, though. “What’s the play, here, then?” I ask Jamie, feeling adrift.
“Well, you probably have an army waiting for you at the apartment. I’m going to my aunt’s place.”
“You don’t live there.”
“It’s probably better if I do right now. Speaking of,” he says, looking up at the clock tower.
“Right,” I say slowly. “Catch up later?”
“Yeah,
” Jamie says. “Definitely.”
I don’t need my ability to know that he’s lying.
Part III
“And ever,” says Malory, “Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.”
—T. H. White, The Once and Future King
46
TO LIVE DELIBERATELY
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M expecting to find when I walk into the building, but it isn’t nothing. Which is exactly what I find. Nothing.
No doorman. No detectives. No one.
My stomach drops as the lift rises, and as the doors open, I hesitate. I force myself forward, key the lock.
I feel her in the space even though I can’t see her. My feet carry me toward the room that holds her.
She’s standing in the study, not sitting amongst the trunks and the boxes. Standing at the window.
“I missed you,” she says without turning around.
I mean to say it back, but the words that come out are different. “You vanished, on the bridge.”
“I wanted to get here first.”
“Why?”
She turns around. Her eyes are glassy; she’s been crying. “Because.”
“Because? What did you do?”
She looks startled by the question. “What?”
I’m thinking the words Don’t ask, don’t tell, even as I say, “What. Did. You. Do.”
She swallows. “When?”
“When?”
Her expression hardens. “Yes, when? What did I do today? Five months ago? Before we met?”
“Start with today,” I say, growing more aggravated by the second. I’m the one in the dark, here. She has the advantage, and she knows it.
“Why don’t you just ask me, Noah.” She steps forward. “Ask me.”
“What did you say to Stella, on the bridge?”
“What do you think I said?”
“You told her to let go. That she was giving up,” I say, searching Mara’s face for anything to hold on to, any hint that I’m wrong.
But she says, “Yes.”
Part of me expected her to deny it, and splits off from the half that always knew. I let that one take over. “She’s in a hospital. Her neck is broken and she’s on life support.”