“They need you.”
They? Dr. Kells and Jude?
Dr. Kells interrupted my racing thoughts. “Your condition has caused pain to the people you love, Mara. Do you want to cause pain to the people you love?”
“No,” I said, and it was the truth.
“I know you don’t,” she said seriously. “And I am truly sorry we weren’t able to help you before now. We had hoped to be able to sedate you before you collapsed the building. We tried very hard to save all of your friends.”
My heart stopped. The room was silent for seconds before the monitor beeped again.
“We didn’t anticipate that things would happen quite the way they did—as it was, we were lucky to be able to extract Jamie Roth, Stella Benicia, and Megan Cannon before they were seriously harmed. We just couldn’t get to Noah Shaw.”
I heard her wrong.
That was it. I calmly, slowly looked back at the board, and forced my mind to turn the letters into words, ones I could understand, ones that made sense. But all I could process when I read them now was:
Deceased.
Written under Noah’s name.
My mind repeated the words of the woman Noah had once called a liar.
“You will love him to ruins.”
All the pain I had ever felt was just practice for this moment.
“The roof caved around you, but not on you, Mara. Noah was too close, and he was crushed.”
“He will die before his time with you by his side, unless you let him go.”
“I’m very, very sorry,” Dr. Kells said.
What she was saying was impossible. Impossible. Noah healed every time he was hurt, always. He swore I couldn’t hurt him again and again and again. Noah didn’t lie. Not to me.
But Dr. Kells did. She lied to me about Jude. She lied to Jude about me. She lied to my parents about Horizons. She lied to everyone, to all of us.
And she was lying to me now.
A tear escaped anyway. Just one. It rolled down my alien cheek.
“We want to make sure nothing like that happens again, Mara, and we think we can, if you consent.”
Dr. Kells waited for my response, as if I had the ability to say anything but yes. She knew I couldn’t consent, which meant this was some kind of display, some kind of show. For someone’s benefit, but not mine.
I was raging.
“We want to help you be better, Mara. Do you want to be better?”
Her words brushed the dirt off of a memory.
“What do you want?” Dr. Kells had asked me, on my first day in her care.
“To be better?” I had answered her.
My answer then had been honest. After the asylum, I was gnawed by grief. After Jude came to the police station, I was tyrannized by fear. Grief and guilt, fear for my family and for myself. Of myself. It ruled me.
Dr. Kells manipulated that. Jude did too. I didn’t know what part he was playing in this, or what Dr. Kells stood to gain by terrorizing and torturing and lying to me. I didn’t know why they needed me or why I’d been brought here or where here even was or whether I was alone. But I was no longer afraid. There were other names on that list, and if they were here with me, I would get them out and we would see the people we loved again.
I would see the boy I loved again. Everything in me knew it.
Dr. Kells repeated her question. “Do you want to be better, Mara?”
Not anymore.
Something dormant kicked to life inside me. It reached up, stood up, and held my hand.
“Yes,” my tongue lied. My answer drew a plastic smile from her painted lips.
This is what I knew: I was trapped in my body, in that bed, at that moment. But even as I looked out through the windows of my eyes, through the bars of my prison, I knew I wouldn’t be trapped forever.
They rattled my cage to see if I’d bite. When they released me, they’d see that the answer was yes.
end of volume two
