The Retribution of Mara Dyer (8 page)

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.

13

W
E SLEPT BY THE WATER.
The beach was half sand, half mud and was littered with jagged shells and tree roots, but I felt more dead than tired, so I stuffed Noah’s bag under my head and crashed anyway.

The feeling came back into my legs in a trickle, not a wave. When I woke up, my muscles ached with soreness, my mouth tasted spoiled, and my stomach hurt. I was itchy and filthy and miserable, but when the sun peeked through the trees and I realized that I could stare at it, bask in it, worship it if I wanted to, my mouth curved into a smile. I was free.

Jamie and Stella were still sleeping. Mist crept up from
the gray ocean onto the beach, reaching for their feet, clinging to the tall sea grass. I stood quietly, weak-kneed but able to walk on my own. Seagulls picked over something on the shore. They scattered at my approach.

My papery hospital gown was crusted with blood and sand and dirt. I had no clothes, so I brought Noah’s bag with me, figuring I’d wash myself off in the ocean and change into something of his. But my hand froze on the zipper.

I didn’t know if I could keep it together if I opened his bag and smelled his scent and felt the fabric that had touched his skin. I knew he was alive—knew it—but he wasn’t
here
.

I walked back just as Jamie was waking up, stretching his arms up to touch the tree branch above him.

“I feel like ass,” he said.

Stella yawned loudly. “You look like it too.”

“So, what’s for breakfast?” Jamie asked.

Stella rolled her eyes. “Cute.”

“My gastric juices are dissolving my stomach lining,” Jamie said. Stella made a disgusted face. “My stomach is eating itself. And I’ve never been this sore in my life.”

Stella propped herself up on her elbows. “Maybe there are coconuts or something?”

“We’re not foraging for coconuts,” I said. “We have to get off the island.”

Stella agreed. “I grabbed some files from Kells’s office, but I didn’t really look at what I took. We could go back—she had
to have a way of coming and going. Maybe we can find it.”

“Then what?” Jamie asked.

“There’s a resort on No Name Island,” I said. “If we go back, we might be able to find a phone . . .”

But my voice trailed off as I followed that train of thought. Who would we call?

“And what would we say?” Jamie added, seeing where I was going with it.

“Kells mentioned Phoebe and Tara before—” Before I killed her. “Said that it would look like I was the one who’d killed them.”

“But Jude did it,” Stella said.

“Right in front of us,” Jamie added.

“Dr. Kells—that was self-defense,” Stella said. “We’ll back you up.”

I took a deep breath, steadying myself. “It won’t matter. Everything is already in my file. We can’t count on anyone”—even my parents—“believing any of us.”

Even my brothers.

“If she told anyone about it before she died, showed anyone my file,” I continued, “then, depending on what was in them, people”—my family—“will think we’re crazy and still under her care, or crazy and missing, or crazy and dead. But no matter what, people”—my family—“are going to think we’re”—I’m—“crazy.”

“And dangerous,” Jamie added, giving my bloody hospital gown a long look.

“And dangerous.” I really needed to change.

“So okay,” Stella said. “We don’t call anyone we know to get us out of here. There’s the ferry, though? What about that?”

I looked down at myself. “We look a little—”

“Suspicious,” Jamie said.

“Exactly.”

“Is there anything of Noah’s you can wear?” Stella asked.

“I . . . haven’t looked yet.”

Jamie and Stella were quiet. Then, “Here,” Jamie said, reaching into his bag. He handed me a black T-shirt with the word
TROPE
upside down in white, and a pair of baggy carpenter shorts.

Stella frowned. “I don’t get it.”

“Subverted trope,” Jamie said.

“Wouldn’t that be
in
verted?”

“You’re so literal. Jesus.” He marched off to let me change.

The ocean air chilled my skin as I stripped off my clothes and dipped into the water, the sand slimy between my toes. It felt like a lake, not the ocean. You couldn’t see the bottom, even though the water was shallow. I rinsed my arms and legs, pulling goose bumps from my flesh. A memory of the warmth of Dr. Kells’s blood came to me unbidden, drawing a spike of pleasure in its wake. I felt sick and gleeful at once.

“Oh no. No, no, no,
no
!”

It was Stella. I stumbled into the shorts Jamie had given me and rushed over to see what had happened. She and Jamie were looking out at the water.

No. Not at the water. At a massive column of smoke, rising from No Name Island into the sky.

The three of us looked at one another, thinking the exact same thing.

“All right. Let’s have a vote,” Jamie said. “Jude—misunderstood good guy, or bad guy with unknown motives? I vote bad guy.”

“Bad guy,” Stella said.

I paused before I spoke. “Undecided,” I finally said. “You think he did it?”

“WTF, Mara? Of course he did it.”

“He helped us get out of there.”

“Yeah, but—”

“He said Noah was alive.” But he also said Noah would be waiting for me and he wasn’t. I shook my head to clear it. I needed to believe he was telling the truth. I didn’t forgive him. Far from it. I looked down at my wrists, at the scars from where Jude had made me slit them, faded but not gone, after Noah had healed them. I would never forgive Jude for what he’d done to me, for what he’d done to Joseph, but right now I had to believe him, because I had to believe Noah was alive.

“Hey,” Jamie said softly.

Stella ignored him. “Right now it doesn’t matter
what
he is. How are we supposed to get out of here if we can’t go back to find out how Kells did it herself?”

“Hey!” Jamie said again, snapping his fingers in Stella’s face to get her attention. He pointed at the ocean. “Is that a boat?”

I followed his gaze, shading my eyes.

“That’s convenient,” I said.

“Too convenient,” Jamie said. “What if someone’s been sent to come get us? Like a Horizons person or something?”

“Like one of the counselors?” Stella asked. “Doubt it. Maybe the police?”

“Could they really take us anywhere worse than where we’ve just come from, though?” I asked.

Jamie pretended to think for a moment. “Um, jail?”

I shot him a glare. “Would that be worse?”

He shrugged. “I’d rather not find out. I have plans.”

Stella shaded her eyes and peered out at the water. “It’s a fishing boat, I think.” She bit her lip, thinking. “We could ask it to take us to No Name Key, or Marathon,” Stella said. “But from there?”