Текст книги "The Retribution of Mara Dyer"

Автор книги: Michelle Hodkin

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

10

BEFORE

Atlantic Ocean

I RESTED MY CHEEK AGAINST the ship’s railing, breathing in air that smelled of salt and rain. It was night; the deck was nearly empty. Two young men jostled and joked with each other as they worked to tie ropes, arrange sails. Sailors—that was it. They paid me no mind, and I watched them out of the corner of my eye. They were familiar with each other, family perhaps. They moved and worked together the way Sister and I had when we’d used to cook. Though she and I were never sisters, which is why I was here and she was dead.

I spent every night wondering why that was, why I was here to stare out at the black sea that seemed to have no end to it, when Sister and Uncle and so many others were rotting beneath the earth half a world away. I wondered why my benefactor, as he had been called by everyone I ever knew, wanted me enough to provide for me even after his death. I wondered of what value he thought I might be to him.

It was my final night at sea, and I was too restless to spend it belowdecks. I hardly ever spent time in my quarters, preferring to watch as sailors strung the ropes from the masts into a giant web, to watch the sails breathe with wind. On past nights, when my presence had been noticed and I was chased below by a man with spectacles like Mr. Barbary’s and shiny gold buttons on his coat, I would creep along the corridors, sneak behind doors, listen to conversations no one guessed I could understand.

But that morning I watched as dawn broke, crisp and clear over the horizon, before a dark cloud enveloped us as the sea narrowed into a river. Iron smoke swallowed every scrap of blue sky, and when the ship docked, I was jostled aside as it crawled with people the way the waters below it teemed with fish.

The river was clotted with other ships, the banks crowded by docks, and buildings with domes and arches and spires that scraped the sky. Pipes spit black smoke into the air, and my ears filled with the sounds of the city, with shouting and whistling and chiming and creaking and other sounds so foreign I could not even name them.

I went back to my quarters to fetch my things, only to find that someone was waiting for me.

The man wore black clothing to match his dark eyes, which crinkled at the corners. His face was kind, his voice rich and deep. “I am Mr. Grimsby,” the man said. “I believe we have a mutual connection through Mr. Barbary?”

I did not answer.

“He sent word to my mistress that I should escort you to the London home. Are you ready, miss?”

I was.

He lifted my trunk from the ground, and I stiffened. He noticed. “May I take your things?”

No, I wanted to say. I nodded instead.

I followed Mr. Grimsby off the ship, watching the way my trunk bobbed with his steps. From the sounds of hooves and wheels and canes and feet, I picked out the clop, clop of my new shoes on the stone street. I counted my steps to calm myself.

The air clawed at my too-thin dress, and I huddled into it as Mr. Grimsby wound his way to a grand carriage that awaited us. The ink-black horse shied at my approach.

“Whoa, girl,” the driver said, patting her neck.

I took a cautious step forward, and the horse snorted and stamped. I didn’t understand. I had a way with animals; my mind was filled with hazy memories of feeding monkeys from the palm of my hand, of riding an elephant with Sister as it swam across a river.

The horse seemed to shriek, and it strained at the straps that bound its head and body to the carriage.

The driver apologized to Mr. Grimsby. “Don’t know what’s gotten into ’er, sir.”

I reached out my hand to calm her.

Just then she reared. Her liquid black eyes rolled up into her head, showing the whites, and then without warning she bolted.

Mr. Grimsby looked in disbelief after the carriage now tearing down the crowded street, drawing shouts and screams in its wake. We heard the crash before we saw it.

Mr. Grimsby nearly forgot me and took off at a run. I was as close on his heels as my legs would allow, but then I wished I hadn’t been.

The carriage had turned over, and its wheels were spinning in the air. The horse had tried to jump an iron gate tipped with spikes.

She hadn’t made it.

My throat tightened with an ache that threatened to become a scream. I never cried. Not when Uncle had been burned, not when Sister had been stoned. But when I saw the once-perfect black body of the horse now mangled, her coat slick with blood, and I heard the gunshot that ended her pain and misery, my eyes stung as they filled with tears. I wiped them away before anyone could see.

11

MY EYES FLUTTERED OPEN. IT felt like I was being rocked, like I was swaying in the air.

“I am so, so sorry, Mara.” The voice was muffled, distorted. It came from a creature with huge, dark, empty eyes and a hole-punched snout. It whuffed as it leaned over me, pried open my mouth. I wanted to scream, but my lips and teeth were numb.

When I opened my eyes again, the world was white and the creature was gone. My nostrils stung, invaded by chemical smells, and the ground beneath me was hard and unyielding.

Because it wasn’t the ground, I realized as the room came into view. It was a table. A gurney. I was cold, so cold, and I couldn’t feel my limbs.

“I wish we could have avoided this.” The voice belonged to Dr. Kells, and she appeared out of the corner of my vision. I’d never seen her without makeup before. She looked startlingly young, except for the deep lines that bracketed her mouth. Wisps of hair escaped from a loose bun at the nape of her neck. She smelled like sweat and bleach.

“I wanted to fix you. I thought I could save you.” She shook her head, like she couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid. “I thought, given regular infusions of Anemosyne and Amylethe, we would eventually be able to release you back to your family. I actually thought you might be able to go back to school!” She laughed then, the sound thin and panicked. She wasn’t looking at me—I wasn’t sure if she was even talking to me. And—was she crying?

“I’m sorry I made you believe Noah was alive. I am sorry for that. I know how difficult it must have been, hearing recordings of his voice. But Jude gave me no choice, you understand? He’s . . . not well. I had no idea he would take things as far as he did at the Tamerlane. No idea. Sometimes even I can’t predict him.” She laughed again. “Claire was the only one who could. And no one can bring her back.”

Kells swiped at her red-rimmed eyes with the back of her hand. “When he let you out and you . . . What happened in the examination room, with Wayne? My God, Mara. What if something like that happened again? I know you must think I’m the villain here. No doubt you’ve killed me a thousand times in your head since you’ve been conscious, and who knows how many times while you were unconscious. But think about what you’ve done today. Think about what you’ve done before. The people you’ve hurt? The lives you’ve ended?” She stared at nothing, her eyes wide and afraid. “I tried so hard, but you’re just not safe.”

Then she moved over to a row of steel cabinets and removed something from them. I heard the click of plastic as she fitted a cap onto a syringe.

“I’m going to give you an injection that will stop your heart. I promise you, Mara, you won’t feel a thing.”

But I could feel something. I could feel my fingers, and the way the stiff fabric of the hospital gown settled and stretched over my chest. I should have been more frightened than I was. I should have been terrified. But I just felt like I was watching all of this happen to someone else.

“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.