The Retribution of Mara Dyer

“How did you get in?” Jamie asked.

“That’s kind of a long story,” Daniel said.

“Lucky for us,” I said, “we have a bit of time.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes at me. “I bet you do. Follow me, Little Sister.”

Daniel led us up a winding, rickety metal staircase and then down a narrow passageway that led to the back of the building. He pushed open a door to an exposed-brick room with a bare bulb and a drafting table. Several books and files were neatly organized on and around it.

“I think this was a garment factory once,” he said, pulling up a stool. There were a few dusty old sewing tables and crates leaning against the walls of the small room. We each pulled one up and sat on them as Daniel began to talk.

“I first figured out something was wrong after the Horizons retreat,” Daniel said, looking at me. “When Noah didn’t come back.”

My heart skipped a beat when my brother said his name. Everyone at school knew about the Lolita incident, Daniel said. And the fact that Noah had been shipped off to a residential treatment facility for pushing a man into a killer whale tank had been big news. Daniel had suspected that Noah had been sent to Horizons—I’d been there, for one thing—but Daniel hadn’t been able to confirm it; patient privacy laws had prevented the Horizons staff from telling him. So he’d tried the next best thing—Noah’s parents. He had driven up to the house and been let in by Mr. Shaw.

“Wait, you met Noah’s father?” I asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

Daniel nodded. “He said Noah would be at Horizons until he was ‘sorted out,’ and then he asked me very politely to leave. Why isn’t Noah with you, by the way?”

My mouth opened, but I didn’t know what to say, or where to begin.

“He was in Horizons with us,” Jamie said. “And then the whole thing with Jude happened, and I wasn’t there, for the end of it—I was helping Stella because he’d hurt her, and Noah told us to run. I never saw him again after that,” Jamie said.

“Kells told us he died,” Stella said. “In the Horizons collapse.”

“But she’s a liar,” I cut in. “She lied all the time, about everything.”

“So where is he?” Daniel looked at each of us.

“We don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out.”

Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “I got a weird feeling from his dad. Like, I know Noah doesn’t get along with him, but shipping him off for the Lolita thing seemed extreme.”

“Our parents shipped me there,” I said.

“I know. But, Mara, you have . . .”

“What?”

“A history,” Daniel said carefully.

So does Noah.

“Anyway, I started looking into Mr. Shaw.”

“And?” Jamie asked.

“Every publicly filed document seemed legit. And there was no co

“Wait, you were there?” I blurted out. “When?”

“A couple of weeks after you left. I grilled Mom and Dad about Horizons, and your being there, but they were so sensitive about it—Mom especially. She could barely talk about what you—about what she thought you did to yourself,” Daniel amended, glancing at my wrists. “So in the end I just told her me and Sophie were going to go out on Sophie’s dad’s boat for the day, and I went to Horizons instead.”

Daniel told us how he arrived at the island and security wouldn’t let him in to see me, which frustrated him so much that he began skipping his independent study in the afternoons and digging through the last five years of the corporate filings for Horizons LLC.

“And that was my first clue,” Daniel said. “I remembered Mom saying that Horizons had been open for only a year, but there were years of records to sort through—tax filings, a

“Yeah, we met him too,” Jamie said. “So, what did you do?”

“I called him.”

“You just called him?”

“I gave him the name of one of Kells’s employees and said I’d been ordered to acquire documents relating to one of the ‘programs.’ ”

My eyes widened. “And that actually worked?”

“No.”

Oh.

“He told me I needed to give him some access code and follow the appropriate procedure, whatever that was, even if I was calling on Kells’s behalf. I knew I’d have to get to New York to find anything else out, but I didn’t want to go before I knew I’d be able to get what I needed, and at that point I obviously had no idea. So I kept digging through whatever documents I could get at that were publicly available, but there was nothing that told me anything. And then one day I came home exhausted and went to my room to play piano, and this was sitting on top of it.”

Daniel lifted something from one of the crates behind him. A copy of New Theories in Genetics.

“I’d forgotten about it after you left, and when I saw it there, I opened it and started reading. The premise was screwy, but it was so well researched that I couldn’t put it down.”

I made a face. “Only you would find that book captivating.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I did, because this baby is how I got in.”

Daniel told us about his hunch that a series of numbers that kept appearing in the book might be the access key the accountant had told him about. His hunch turned out to be right. He started to tell us more, rattling off incomprehensible jargon, and I had to fight to stay awake, but then I heard him say, “. . . eighteen twenty-one.”

I snapped to attention. “What did you just say?”

Daniel looked at me with a curious expression. “Those numbers I was talking about? The sequence? Lenaurd, the author, kept referring to them as genetic markers—the numbers of the genes that carry the anomaly that makes the subjects different. One of the studies he self-published determined that subjects with the anomaly see those numbers everywhere. The sequences stand out to them. Whenever they see a cluster—any pairing of one, eight, two, or three—they notice. It’s like an obsessive thought, or a form of OCD counting. They start seeing patterns where there are none, but they may not even realize they’re doing it. It’s one of the earliest symptoms.”

I wondered if I’d done it. If so, I hadn’t noticed.

“He talks about the degradation and evolution of these particular markers, claiming to have traced the lineage of some subjects back to before gene sequencing technology even existed. It’s junk science, like the stuff about genetic memory—”

“Like what stuff?” Stella asked.

“Sometimes an additional protein will bind to the gene. He called subjects who had it G1821-3 and claimed the third protein allowed them to retain memories from genetic ancestors, which is ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” I said softly. “It’s true.”

“What?”

I told Daniel about the dreams, the memories, whatever they were—about India, and our grandmother’s doll.

“I don’t know what that means,” Daniel said when I was finished.

“It means that whatever Lenaurd wrote about in there is accurate,” I said. Stella’s eyes lit up with hope.

“He also said subjects with the anomaly had ‘additional greater abilities,’ ” Daniel said, looking at each of us. “Like, superheroish stuff.”

We were silent, until Jamie said, “Not superheroish, exactly.” I kicked his crate.

“But you can . . .” Daniel let his voice trail off, waiting for the rest of us to speak. No one did. “Do things?”

Jamie nodded slowly. “Yup.”

“Just—correct me if I’m wrong, here—so what you’re saying is, you can—”

“Hear your thoughts,” Stella said.

“Make you do what I want you to do,” Jamie said.

“And Noah can heal,” I said, watching the gears turn in Daniel’s mind. I knew what he would ask next, and I wasn’t ready for it. But I didn’t have a choice.