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“I’m not trying to be insensitive—”
“No, you’re not trying,” I said.
“I’m just saying—”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands flat against it. “I know what you’re just saying. I know. But there’s too much we don’t know to just decide that he’s—” I didn’t want to say the word. “Have you guys even seen proof that Horizons collapsed?”
They shook their heads.
“But there was still the fire,” Jaime said.
I clenched my jaw. “He wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Then where is he?”
That was what I was going to find out.
Stella shared her tale of woe next. Once upon a time she was a gymnast and a swimmer. Then puberty hit, and her h*ps and br**sts grew, and when she was sixteen, she stopped eating—because of her coach and her mother, her psychologists said. But they didn’t know about the voices.
To her they sounded like other people’s thoughts. But that was impossible, obviously. She grew more and more panicked, and the voices grew louder and louder in response—keeping her awake at night and distracted during the day. She couldn’t swim or train or eat, but then she noticed something curious. The longer she went without eating, the weaker the voices became. She was down to ninety pounds and losing her hair by the time her father finally overrode her mother (who had insisted Stella was just “watching calories”) and forced Stella to get help. And she got it. After months of therapy and several stints in rehab, her doctors finally seemed to settle on a wonder drug that helped her—until it was suddenly recalled by the FDA. She backslid fast, but Dr. Kells contacted her parents just in time.
“Lucky me.” Stella took a bite of pizza. “But I had a feeling there was something up with you guys the moment you walked into the program. Like when we were together for group stuff, I couldn’t hear either of you, even when I could hear everyone else—but my meds make it sort of confusing. They shut out most of the voices most of the time, but when I’m stressed or anxious, it gets worse.”
“Or angry?” Jamie said.
“Is that how it happens with you?” I asked him.
Jamie shrugged and avoided my eyes. “Before I was expelled and shipped off to Crazytown, I would notice sometimes that if I told people to do things, they would actually do them. But not like, ‘Hey, man, would you mind handing me the keys to your Maserati?’ It’s more like, ‘Tell me that secret’ or, ‘Drive me here.’ It seemed so random, and the stuff I was telling people to do wasn’t crazy. Like, it could have been a coincidence,” he said, “except that it didn’t always feel like a coincidence. Sometimes it felt real.” He met my eyes, and I knew he was thinking about Anna.
Anna, our former classmate, who had bullied him since fourth grade, and whom he had told to drive off a cliff. She drove drunk off an overpass after that.
“And I felt crazy for thinking it,” Jamie said.
I looked up at him. “We all have that in common.”
“What in common?” Stella asked.
Jamie got it. “That what’s wrong with us, the gene thing, G1821 or whatever—the symptoms make us look like we’re crazy.”
Or maybe it actually made us crazy. I thought about my reflection. About the way it talked back to me.
“That explains why no one’s discovered the gene,” Jamie said, refocusing my attention. “If someone appears to be hallucinating, or delusional, or is starving themselves, or hurting themselves, the most obvious explanation would be mental illness, not some bizarre genetic mutation—”
“Mutation?” I asked. “We’re mutants now?”
Jamie smirked. “Don’t tell Marvel. They’ll sue us. But listen, though. Genes don’t just appear in a few people. It just doesn’t happen. Genes change over centuries. They degrade, they alter—”
“They evolve,” I said.
“Exactly. So what we have—whatever we are, we’ve evolved into it.”
“Superman or Spider-Man,” I said quietly.
Stella looked back and forth between Jamie and me. “Explain?”
I remembered the conversation I’d had with my brother, when I’d told him I needed to fictionalize my problems for a fake Horizons assignment, so I could get him to help me without knowing he was helping me.
“So she could be a superhero or supervillain,” my brother had said. “Is it a Peter Parker or a Clark Kent situation?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, was your character born with this thing à la Superman or did she acquire it like Spider-Man?”
I didn’t know the answer then, but I knew it now. “Spider-Man acquired his ability from a radioactive spider bite,” I said. “Superman was born with it—”
“Because he’s really Kal-El, an alien,” Jamie said.
I was Superman. Just like I’d thought.
But when I’d told Noah about Daniel’s theory, he’d been convinced that we had to have acquired what was wrong with us.
“How many times have you wished someone dead, Mara? Someone who cuts you off on the highway, et cetera?”
“I’ve probably wished a lot of people dead a lot of times,” I said now, and repeated Noah’s words.
“Everybody does that,” Stella assured me.
“And Noah’s parents would’ve noticed that he healed abnormally fast when they took him to the doctor for shots, right? So why is everything starting to happen now, if it’s something we were born with?”
Jamie slapped his palm on the table. “There’s a trigger. It’s like cancer. They can screen you genetically to see if you’re at risk for developing it, because there are markers. But just because you’re at risk—”
“Doesn’t mean you’ll actually get cancer,” I finished, as the missing puzzle piece clicked into place.
“Exactly. It just means that you’re more at risk than someone else—and the risk factors are biological and environmental.”
“Or chemical,” I said, my mother’s words coming back to me.
“You’ve been through so much, and I know we don’t understand. And I want you to know that this”—she had indicated the room—“isn’t you. It might be chemical or behavioral or even genetic—”
An image had risen up out of the dark water of my mind. A picture. Black. White. Blurry. “What?” I’d asked quickly.
“The way you’re feeling. Everything that’s been going on with you. It isn’t your fault. With the PTSD and everything that’s happened— What you’re going through,” she’d said, clearly avoiding the words “mental illness,” “can be caused by biological and genetic factors.”
“But then, what’s the trigger?” I asked.
Stella looked at me. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Jamie?”
“Sixteen.”
“I’m also seventeen,” she said to me, “but I’ll be eighteen in a few months. Do you remember what Kells said in that video? She was talking about puberty or something, and the way the teenage brain develops?”
“It makes sense, that age would be the trigger,” I said. Stella first started hearing voices at sixteen. I was sixteen during the Ouija board incident. Rachel and Claire died six months later. “It makes sense that the progressions of our abilities are at different stages, because—”
“Because we’re different ages,” Jamie said. “I’m rhyming,” he added unnecessarily.
So that explained something. But not everything. I told Stella and Jamie about the flashbacks I’d had, of events that I couldn’t possibly have experienced. “I thought it might be genetic memory,” I said, and told them about the book Noah had found on one of his transatlantic flights, the one both of us had tried and failed to read, ostensibly about genetic memory.
“What was it called?” Jamie asked.
“New Theories in Genetics by—holy shit.”
“Is that . . . a pseudonym?”
“Armin Lenaurd,” I said. “The Lenaurd protocol.” I didn’t have to try very hard to remember where I’d heard that before. The list was burned into my memory. We’d just seen it.
J. L.: artificially manifested, Lenaurd protocol, early induction.
“I want to kill myself,” I said calmly. “Like, I actually want to die.”
“I’m missing something.” Stella said.
“You saw the list—with our names on it, what was wrong with us.” They both nodded. “If ‘J.L.’ and ‘C.L.’ are Jude and Claire Lowe,” I explained, “it means that there was some protocol, written by the author of this obscenely boring book, that basically explained what was done to them.”
“â??‘Artificially manifested,’â??” Jamie said quietly. “â??‘Early induction’ . . . that would mean, what? The doctors were trying to cause the effects of the thing we have—in normal people, maybe?”
“Jude is hardly normal,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why,” Stella said quietly.
“Why what?”
“Why he is the way he is,” Stella said. “But wait. If there’s a whole book about this thing that’s wrong with us, maybe we can stop it.” Her voice rose in pitch. “There might be a cure. It might be in that book!” She rounded on me. “Mara, where is it?”
“I gave it to Daniel.”
“Who?”
“My older brother.”
“So if we find Daniel, we find the book, and we find the cure—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up a second here, eager beaver,” Jamie said. “If there even is a cure in that book, which is a huge, massive ‘if.’ I mean, the Lenaurd protocol, whatever it is, was used on Jude, right? And I’d say it’s not working out so well for him. So are we sure we’d even want whatever else might be in that book? Like, Kells kept talking about how she was trying to ‘cure’ us and ‘save’ us and shit, and I don’t know . . . ending up on her side doesn’t feel right.” Stella opened her mouth to speak, but Jamie cut her off before she could. “Also, now that I know what’s actually wrong with me, I’m not sure I’d even want to fix it.” He paused. “Is that crazy?”
No one answered.
“Anyway, whatever. There’s no way to know if what we need is in that book, but there’s another problem.”
“Jude?” I asked.
“No. I mean, yes, he’s a problem, but another one.”
“How we’re going to survive without money?”
“No, another one. Listen,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Kells was a medical researcher. But it takes money to run the kind of facility she was running. Who was funding it? And how many people knew, or know, about it? About us? And are any of them going to be even mildly pissed that their staff was butchered and their research lost?” he went on. “And speaking of research, how many carriers are there? We can’t be the only ones, which means somewhere out there, there are more of us. Do we try to find them? What if they find us?”
“That’s a lot more than one problem,” Stella said.
Jamie wanted answers. Stella wanted a cure. I wanted Noah. And to punish whoever had taken him from me.
Jamie bit his lip. “So. Where do we start?”
16
WE COULDN’T AGREE ON WHICH problem to solve first, so we started by identifying what each of our problems had in common: Horizons. Stella withdrew the file folders she’d culled from Kells’s office and set them down on the table. This was what she’d taken:
Seven pages of patient records for someone we’d never heard of.
Twenty-three pictures of what seemed to be the insides of our throats and other places, and lab results from samples of our hair, spit, and pee.
One drawing of me, by me, with black scribbles over my eyes.
And a too-many-pages-to-count tax return for the Horizons Group, filed by Ira Ginsberg, CPA. The address was in New York.
With what little we had (Stella kept apologizing), Jamie suggested we follow the money. Stella and I agreed. But all of us would have to visit our parents first.
We didn’t know how pressing the parent problem was, which in and of itself was part of the problem. Where did they think we were? What did they know? All three of our families believed in Dr. Kells and had put us into her care—out of ignorance, not malice, but still. We couldn’t exactly show up on their respective doorsteps and explain the situation in good news–bad news format: Hey, Mom, I’ve been tortured and experimented upon, but don’t worry because my tormenters are dead. Because, P.S., I killed them. I didn’t know about Stella and Jamie, but in my experience, telling the truth only led to not being believed.
But Jamie was pretty sure (“Just pretty sure?”) he could manage to convince our parents of our general welfare enough to avoid statewide AMBER Alerts and enough to possibly find out where they thought we were, and with whom. Maybe they’d been contacted by someone other than Kells. Maybe one of the other Horizons employees was in on it (though Stella didn’t think so). We needed to talk to them to find out.
And there was a fourth house we needed to visit, though Stella and Jamie didn’t know it yet. I needed to know what Noah’s parents believed. I needed to know if there’d been a funeral. Just thinking the word made me ill.
