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“She is the embodiment of the Shadow archetype—destructive, harmful to herself and others. She embodies Freud’s death drive.”
“How dramatic.” I glance at Mara but she doesn’t meet my eyes.
“Mara can will what she wants,” my father continues, “and her desires become reality. But the nature of her affliction is that she will never create anything good.”
Even if what he says is true, I am simply out of f**ks to give. I had few to spare to begin with. But I watch Mara as he speaks these nonsense words—“carrier,” “anomaly,” “manifestation,” et cetera. What they mean doesn’t matter to me, but what they mean to her does matter. I haven’t seen one flicker of hate or fear in her eyes—if I had, we would be gone already. Instead I see something else. Understanding.
“Reluctant though you may be, Noah, you are the embodiment of the Hero. You don’t have to learn to become good at anything. You simply are the best at everything. Your telomeres don’t stop replicating. If you aren’t killed, you might actually live forever. You have every gift, Noah.”
I don’t want them.
“But once she has fully manifested, if you are near her, you’ll be powerless. Vulnerable. Weak. She can’t help what she does to you. She is your weakness, as you are hers.”
54
I HADN’T REALLY BEEN WORRIED until I heard those words. Noah’s father wasn’t going to kill him. He most likely couldn’t kill me, or I wouldn’t be alive. So I simply sat back and enjoyed watching Noah arrogantly swat away his father’s grave warnings, his dire predictions. He was the boy I loved, still. He couldn’t have cared less. But then.
She is your weakness.
Contraindication: Mara Amitra Dyer
As you are hers.
Contraindication: Noah Elliot Simon Shaw.
“When she evolves fully, you will be at risk every day you spend with her. Your cells will not regenerate. Your telomeres will not replicate. If she exceeds her threshold—if she is in pain, or afraid, or under severe stress, and you are close? You will not be able to heal yourself. Her ability is dominant; it negates yours. Which is why I made sure she was told you had died. Your propensity for self-harm, a side effect of the gene that makes you different, makes Mara irresistible to you. It isn’t your fault, but being with her isn’t your choice.” And then David Shaw gave me this look, a mixture of pity and contempt. “He wouldn’t love you if you weren’t what you are.”
I remembered kissing Noah in his bedroom during a thunderstorm, watching his lips turn blue. I remembered facing him in a midnight-colored dress on a silent beach after I’d read something I shouldn’t have, and thought I understood what it meant.
“I won’t be what you want,” I’d said to Noah then.
“And what do you think that is?”
“Your weapon of self-destruction.”
Noah had said that I wasn’t, that I couldn’t be, and I’d wanted so badly to believe it. But hearing those words issue from his father’s mouth sliced me open with the truth.
“I don’t want to be here,” Noah’s father said. “Whatever you think of me, I loved your mother. She was my life. She was my reason for existing. And I promised her that I would keep you safe. I may have failed her in every other way, but I cannot fail at that. Look at Jude,” he said, gesturing to him. “A project of Deborah’s, one that has not paid off.”
If Jude minded being spoken about as if he were a thing, as if he weren’t there, he didn’t show it. His expression was flat, his eyes empty.
“He is unpredictable and unstable, despite Deborah’s efforts to control him. It could be said that he is responsible for her death, since he is the one who let Mara out.”
“It was a mistake,” Jude said then, in a firm, alien voice.
David regarded him warily. “Yes. It was.” Then he refocused on me. “What is happening to Jude will happen to you, too, Mara. You hallucinate. You are violent in response to pain. You show signs of dissociative personality disorder. You are on your way.”
Maybe I was already there.
“I knew your grandmother, once upon a time. Not well, not well enough at all, but she haunted my wife in the guise of a friend, a confidant. She was unpredictable. She was unstable. She was a liar, like you, and a murderer, like you. She led my wife to her death, and you would lead my son to his.”
Noah interrupted his father. “You think I care if I’m powerless? That’s what I want.”
“So you can finally kill yourself?”
I held my breath, waiting for Noah to answer. He never did.
“You are sick, Noah. The consequences of your affliction could destroy you, the way they have destroyed other sick children, and I will die before I let that happen,” David said.
Maybe I could help him with that.
“The more time passes, the stronger she’ll become, until she fully manifests, and I can’t predict when that will happen.” David turned to me. “After that stunt you pulled on the subway platform, I figured you must be close.”
So he knew about that. Hmm.
“We can’t afford to wait any longer,” David said to Noah. “Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s a bomb ticking inside of her, waiting to go off. With one thought, one wrong thought, she could end millions of lives.” He took a cautious step forward.
“If you don’t stop it, your mother will have died for nothing. You would exist for nothing,” David said, his voice cracking. “I loved your mother, and she died to save you so you could be the answer to illness, to aging, possibly even to death. I couldn’t have cared less—all I wanted was her. But I wasn’t given a choice. However, I will give you one.”
David Shaw drew in a shaky breath composing himself. Then he lifted the leather bag and opened it. He withdrew a gun and a syringe and set them on a table in front of me next to the knife.
Jude wasn’t here to hurt me, and Noah wasn’t here to save me. I knew that now.
“I didn’t know how you and she would prefer to do it.”
“Do what?” Noah shouted.
I waited until the echo faded before I answered for his father. “Kill me.”
An obscene laugh bubbled up from Noah’s throat. “If you could think that there is anything in the world that could possibly make me do this,” he said to his father, “you have no idea who I am.”
“I don’t need to know who you are. I know her.”
David withdrew something else from his bag. A laptop. He typed something, and then propped the laptop up on an empty cardboard box, positioning it so I could see.
My brother lay in a bed, in a room, hooked up to a thousand machines. Jamie sat next to him in a chair. He was tied to it, and conscious. My brother was not.
55
NOAH
IT ISN’T REAL,” I SAY. I try to sound certain, and fail.
“It is very real,” my father replies. “Daniel has been given a variant of a venom that will cause him to go into shock, and then his organs will fail in an hour or two unless he receives the antivenin. He’s being monitored very carefully right now, but I will need to make a phone call to make sure he gets it, once Mara has expired.”
“Mara?” Jamie says, squinting through the laptop screen. A bruise shadows the left side of his face.
“Jamie,” she whispers. Then, “Jamie, is Daniel—”
“He’s alive,” Jamie says. “We got whacked in the subway tunnel or something, woke up here. He’s sick, though.” Jamie flicks a glance at Mara’s brother, wincing at the movement. “He’s—he was foaming at the mouth before. These people, they came in and used a crash cart on him. I saw everything. I tried to make them listen to me, but . . .” He shakes his head. “It was like they couldn’t hear me. Like I was on mute.”
Mara is silent. I used to be able to read her thoughts on her face, but now, nothing.
“Where are you?” she asks him. Clever girl.
Jamie tips his face to the ceiling. “Generically bland room, as always. I woke up with a hood over my face. I don’t know.” Jamie’s eyebrows furrow, and he tries to lean forward in the chair. “Wait—is that f**king—is that Jude with you? And Noah?”
Jude doesn’t respond. I do.
“We’ll find you,” I say to him.
Jamie looks over at Daniel, whose lips are pale and chapped. Daniel has a cannula beneath his nose, and there are IVs attached to the backs of both wrists. Then Jamie says, “Whatever you guys are being told to do, you should do it.”
My father watches me. Jude watches me. Jamie watches me. Mara does not.
She watches her brother. Her eyes never leave him, even as I reach for the gun.
56
I COULDN’T TEAR MY EYES away from my brother, and so I didn’t notice at first when Noah pointed the gun at his father.
“You could kill me,” David said. His words drew my eyes up. “That is certainly an option.”
“It certainly is,” Noah said. The gun looked familiar, like one I’d held before.
“I’ve been expecting to die because of you someday. I wouldn’t have revealed myself if I weren’t expecting that. Though I did assume she would be the one to do it.” His father smiled slightly, and met my eyes. He didn’t once look at the gun.
“Maybe I’ll save her the trouble,” Noah said.
“Well then, I should warn you that you would be ending four lives with one bullet.”
“How do you figure?”
“Your death will not prevent Mara’s. If you don’t take responsibility and end her, then Jude will.” He caught Jude’s eye. “For Claire, yes?”
“For Claire,” Jude repeated robotically.
David sighed. “If an original carrier is killed by anyone besides its foil, the anomaly will manifest again along the affected bloodline. In this case, Joseph Dyer; he is a carrier as well. And then he would eventually either kill himself or be killed by someone else. That’s the pattern of the afflicted.”
“And of course Daniel would die, because I would not be able to make the call to save his life. So, four.”
Noah was silent, and I was stunned.
“And I should probably mention that if you miss, and I don’t die instantly, you could trigger Jude’s ability, which seems to make him rather . . . unpredictable. I honestly don’t know what he might do if that happens. Noah, please listen to me.” His father met Noah’s stare head-on, unflinchingly. “Whether it happens today or tomorrow or some other day, like the archetypes you parallel, you will play out your roles whether you want to or not. You don’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” Noah said, and clicked the safety back.
David turned his blue-gray eyes on me. “Are you willing to let him bet Daniel’s life on it?”
I tore my gaze away from them and looked at the laptop. At my brother in the bed, at Jamie in the chair. “Don’t,” I said to Noah. “Please.”
“You’re not a murderer, Noah,” his father said. “The only person you’ve ever really wanted to hurt is yourself.”
Noah let out a small chuckle. “You’re right,” he said, then turned the gun on himself.
57
NOAH
I PRESS THE GUN TO my temple. I almost literally can’t wait to do it.
There’s this damned push and pull with my father. I feel complete disdain for the man standing before me, who looks nothing like me and is nothing like me and is disgusting to me. Yet at the same time I feel the senseless obedience of a child toward him. I want him to admire me, to be proud of me. To find me worthy. It is truly pathetic.
Mara sits on the table, her legs askew, her body trembling slightly, from the drugs or something else, I don’t know. Something about her, a restrained physicality, carries an implicit threat, like a cobra the second before it strikes. She looks tigerish, a wild animal trapped and cornered. I want to unleash her, and I think this is how. Maybe she’ll be able to save her brother then.
“I would rather die for her than live without her,” I say to my father.
A smile twists his face. “You just love to play the martyr, don’t you. You can lie to her but not to me. You would do it to spare yourself the sight of watching her die, the burden of guilt that her death and her brother’s would bring you. Let’s not pretend.”
“Oh, I’m not pretending.”
“Good. Then let me tell you, as clearly and precisely as I can, what you will be doing if you pull that trigger. You will unleash a Shadow upon the world. She will trail sickness and death behind her, wherever she goes, and it will start today, with her brother. She will burn like wildfire through her family, through everyone she cares about, leaving nothing but darkness and ashes in her wake. And you will be denying the world the answer to diseases that torment children and adults alike. If you choose to live, however, you could save millions. Billions, perhaps. You could usher in a new era of humanity. All it will cost you is one life.”
Mara’s life. The price is too high.
Fuck it. I press the barrel harder against my skull. The metal is warm from my skin, and the pressure is shamefully satisfying.
“Do it then, if you’re that selfish,” my father says.
“Don’t you dare,” Mara hisses, but I barely hear her.
“If I am, it’s because you made me that way.”
“Spoken like a true spoiled brat.” The disgust is evident in my father’s voice. “No, Noah, I think the shitty childhood excuse is played out. You don’t want to be protected like a child anymore? Because you’re seventeen? Then take responsibility for your own decisions. Own your own choices. It’s more than past time for you to grow the f**k up, Son.”
