The Retribution of Mara Dyer (16 page)

“What day is it today?”

“The twenty-first,” Stella said.

I counted. Huh. That was weird. I hadn’t had a period since—since before Horizons. More than a month ago.

Or wait, I couldn’t
remember
having one. That didn’t mean I hadn’t had one.

But what if—what if I hadn’t?

The thought unsettled me. I’d never been late before. But
I also had never been experimented on before. First time for everything?

I stared ahead at the road and asked Stella, “When did you have your period last?”

Jamie crossed his arms, looking smug. “Called it.” I flicked his ear.

“Um, three weeks ago? I think.” She glanced at me. “When was yours?”

“A month ago,” I lied. She shot me a look. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She turned back to the road, then swore. “I don’t think I packed any tampons. Did you?”

I shook my head. “Forgot.”

“As delightful as this conversation is,” Jamie said, “can I ask why we’re having it?”

I had no good answer to that question, but as I struggled to come up with some excuse, I realized Stella was pulling off toward an exit.

“I thought we were stopping in Savannah?” Jamie asked. “We’re still an hour away.”

“We have only a quarter of a tank left,” she explained. “And I need a bathroom.”

That liar. She thought
I
needed a bathroom, and that I was embarrassed about it, so she was covering for me so we could stop. Which was actually extremely sweet.

Thank you,
I mouthed to her. And I
was
grateful. When we
stopped, I could ask Stella the question I wanted to ask, just not in front of Jamie.

At the gas station Stella decided she really did have to use the restroom, thankfully, so the two of us went inside while Jamie filled the tank. I bought tampons I unfortunately didn’t need and followed Stella into the bathroom. She was about to walk into a stall when I stopped her.

“Are you sure it was three weeks ago?”

“Yeah. I remember having to ask Wayne for tampons. His face turned so red, I actually thought steam might start coming out of his ears.” She grinned, but it quickly faded. “Why? What’s wrong?”

I bit my lip. “I’m late.”

“How late?”

“I don’t—I don’t really know. Time is sort of screwed up for me—maybe, maybe two weeks?” Or three.

“That’s pretty late,” Stella said quietly.

I said nothing.

“I’ve never been that late.”

I still said nothing. Apparently, whatever was going on with me wasn’t going on with her.

Stella’s expression quickly changed from curious to concerned. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” But I wasn’t fine. I was a lot of things, but definitely not fine.

“You look weird . . . ,” she said.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked awful, was how I looked. My face was nearly white, and my lips were gray, and the shadows under my eyes were like bruises.

Stella didn’t look like this. Stella looked healthy. Normal. If she was different, like me, why didn’t I look more like
her
?

“You look like you’re going to pass out.” She glanced back at the door. “Should I get Jamie? I’ll get Jamie.”

I started to protest but the room began to spin, and I couldn’t speak and stand at the same time. I grabbed the sink, but my knees felt shaky, and I slid down to the floor.

24

BEFORE

London, England

A
UNT SARAH KEPT HER PROMISE.
She treated me as if I were her own child. Better, perhaps. She had always secretly wanted a daughter, she said, a girl who would be docile and gentle, unlike Elliot and Simon, rough young boys, always tumbling in the dirt and battling each other with sticks.

I dined with her at nearly every meal. She would brush and braid my hair, though I had a lady’s maid to do it for me. I was her Indian princess, she said, a gift her husband didn’t even know he had given her, to keep her company after his death. I spent nearly every moment with her as she taught me every rule.

Rules about what to eat and when and how. What to wear and how to dress. How to behave. How to address women, how to address men, how to address men of title, the differences among the servants, among the butler and valet and the different types of maids. She taught me whom I could be seen with, and what I could be seen doing.

We dined together in the morning, took calls together in the afternoon, and she taught me to dance and play cards in the evening before she retired for bed. I could never have imagined a life like this. I became accustomed to the tastes of rich foods prepared painstakingly, of clean linens that I did not myself have to clean. I took long walks with Aunt Sarah. I spent time with the little boys. And three times per week, in secret, the professor came to me during the day.

The first time I met him, I was startled by how familiar he seemed. He was dark and handsome, and I could have sworn I had seen his face before, but he made no mention of it, and it would have been rude if I had.

Mr. Grimsby  ushered him into the house without ceremony, and he bowed when I arrived. I bobbed a curtsy, and he smiled. We were to study in the library, Mr. Grimsby said, and showed the professor the way.

It was my favorite room in the house. I loved the smell, and the quiet, and the way shafts of light trapped little motes of dust. It felt like another world.

We sat down. “Well, Mara,” he said to me in English with
just the faintest trace of a foreign accent. “Tell me everything you know.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Ask the wrong questions, and you will get the wrong answers. I will let you ask three of them before we begin our lessons.”

I had never been challenged so directly, not since arriving in London, at least, and I was perturbed by it. “Who are you?” I asked warily.

The professor smiled, exposing all of his white teeth. “I am a person. A human. A man. I have been a father and a son, a husband and a brother, and now I am your teacher. Is that really what you want to ask me?”

Frustrated, I blurted out, “Why do you look familiar?”

“Because we have met before. That is three. Now—”

“Wait! You never answered my first question,” I said as I crossed my arms over my chest.

The professor smiled again. “I know your name,” he said, “because Mr. Grimsby announced you before you walked in.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What’s your name?”

“There is power in a name. That is four questions, and three was our agreement, but for practical purposes, I shall answer. You may call me Professor. Now, let us begin.”

Most days the professor taught me about the world and its people. Which countries were at rest and which cities were at war. He taught me the history of the world and of the
universe, about mathematics and science. But every now and then we would do something different. He would play cards with me, and not the way Aunt Sarah did. I never understood the rules of the game. He would have me cut the deck, and then he would lay out his cards, with strange numbers and pictures on them. Sometimes he would give me objects, like bird feathers or stones or, one time, even a sword, which he withdrew from his cane, and he would tell me to write stories about them. Other times he would give me pretend problems and ask how I would solve them. He never answered my questions, about the objects or cards or their purposes. He said I had asked my three questions, and had wasted them. In the future I would be more careful. On those days I hated him.

Every other day I was Aunt Sarah’s doll, to be dressed and played with and entertained. My own doll lay buried but not quite forgotten in the trunk I still kept beneath the skirts of my bed. I scarcely remembered the
befores
—my days spent with Sister beneath the hot sun, or nights with Uncle as he’d showed me the stars. I became an indoor creature, like Dash, the late Master Shaw’s foxhound, who had been relegated to the servants’ quarters since he’d taken an immediate disliking to me.

I watched my reflection change in the mirror above the marble fireplace as the seasons changed outside. The garden bloomed with roses, and I bloomed into womanhood. After Aunt Sarah’s year of full mourning ended, she began to talk
of presenting me at court, so that she might begin her search for a suitable match for me.

She would not hear that I might not be considered by the greatest families in London because of my skin, or my lack of family and property. “You are fair enough, and your face is so lovely! With your full lips, your raven hair—and your eyes, so exotic! You are a rare beauty, Mara, and I will ensure that you have the grandest dowry—any man would be lucky to have you.” She fingered the locket of her husband’s hair that hung around her neck.

But the professor discouraged this idea. In fact he discouraged any mention or proposal of my being brought out into society. Aunt Sarah was not a meek woman, but he was persuasive, and he persuaded her for a time. But he could not talk her out of marriage.

I told him I did not mind. I saw ladies and gentlemen paired off together, sitting sweetly in Hyde Park. Why not me? I dared not say it to the professor, of course. He was not married himself. He did not believe it natural to have one partner for an entire lifetime.
“Animals do not mate for life, and we are animals, no matter what anyone pretends,”
he told me more than once.

But I was presented at court anyway, and engaged six months later. My fiancé was sweet and shy, and he loved me. Our engagement lasted three months. He died on our wedding night, just before dawn.

25

J
AMIE’S EYES WIDENED AS HE
saw me and Stella approach. I was too shaky to stand on my own. Stella cut him off before he could ask any questions.

“Mara’s sick,” she said, “and you’re driving.” She tossed Jamie the keys and helped me into the backseat.

I was grateful for the help, but I hated it. I couldn’t even muster up a proper amount of self-loathing about it, though. I was too tired and too scared and too sick to do anything but lean back in the seat and close my eyes as Jamie drove.

It was early in the afternoon when we reached Savannah an hour later. We pulled into a hotel parking lot not far from the highway.

After we got our keys, Stella said to Jamie, “I need to talk to Mara. You go ahead.”

“Can it wait?” I asked. “I have to go to the bathroom.” I didn’t need to, actually, but I wasn’t up to talking about what she would want to talk about. I just wanted to sleep. Really sleep. In a real bed.

“Didn’t you just go?” Jamie asked.

I threw him a look, and he handed me a key to my room.

Stella followed me in, but I escaped into the bathroom immediately and turned on the faucet to hide the fact that I wasn’t peeing. But I soon heard voices outside—Jamie was in our room too, for some reason. Damn it.

After I could no longer justify hiding, I washed my face, took a few deep breaths, and opened the door.

“My key’s not working,” Jamie said. He looked from me to Stella. “Um, am I interrupting something?”

“Yes,” Stella said as I said, “No.”

“We have to talk about this, Mara,” Stella said.

Now I was just angry. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Mara’s period is three weeks late,” Stella said to Jamie.

“Awkward,” Jamie mumbled as he backed up toward the door. “I’m, uh, going—elsewhere.”

“We can’t ignore this, especially not if—”

“I’m not pregnant,” I said to her, answering the question she was going to ask eventually.

She raised her eyebrows. “You’ve been feeling dizzy.
Emotional.” She ticked off each word with a finger. “Nauseous—”

“Jamie’s nauseous. We’re all fucking nauseous. And we’re all fucking emotional.”

“Not like you,” Stella said. “When I was first—when I first noticed what was happening to me, when I first started hearing voices, I thought I was crazy. I didn’t know what was going on but I knew something wasn’t right. I was confused all the time, my body felt weird, like it belonged to someone else. I stopped eating because it was the only thing that helped. But then I started taking drugs. And the drugs
helped
. I stopped hearing voices. I started eating again. And even at my worst—and my worst was pretty bad—I wasn’t like you.”

She didn’t say it, but I knew she was thinking about what I’d done to Dr. Kells. To Wayne. To Mr. Ernst.

I had nothing to say to that, so all I said was, “I’m not pregnant, Stella. I’m a virgin! Jesus.”

“As far as you know,” she muttered.

“What was that, Stella?” I asked sharply.

“As far as you know,” she said, louder this time. “You were out of it at Horizons. We all were. They did all kinds of tests in that place. What if—”

No. “No, Stella.”

“But
what if
—”

“Noah wasn’t there,” Jamie cut in.

“He was at one point,” Stella said. “But what if—”

No.

Stella swallowed hard before she spoke. “What if it’s not Noah’s?”

It felt like her words had sucked all of the oxygen out of the room. One look at Jamie told me he felt exactly the same way.