“What did yours say?”

My hope for him, his mother’s hope for him, was that he would help create a better world. Without you, he can.

“Stuff,” I said slowly. “About me. Yours?”

“Me too. Stuff.” He paused. “Do you believe him?”

Without you, he can.

“I don’t know,” I lied. My mind was crowded with words I hadn’t written, thoughts I didn’t think, memories I’d never experienced, and I couldn’t untangle them yet. “Do you?”

“I want to,” Jamie said. And then he bowed his head and clasped his necklace around his neck before I could say another word. He half-smiled and shrugged one shoulder. “The freaks shall inherit the earth.”

70

I WAITED EXACTLY ONE HOUR before hunting Noah down. I wanted to give him space, but I also wanted to tell him about what I’d read. What I remembered. I wanted to ask him what he thought we should do.

I knew what I thought I should do, but I needed to work up the nerve to do it.

I was not the girl I’d been when Noah had met me. I was not even the girl I’d been before Horizons. I’ve been remade by what happened to me, by the things I’ve done. I’ve become someone new; I feel something, I do it. I want something, I take it. Maybe I haven’t changed to Noah but I have changed. He’d seen pictures, heard words, detailing my crimes, but he didn’t watch me commit them. Part of me was glad. There are some things the people you love should never see you do.

And I did love him. Whatever parts of me had been burned away by what I’d been through, what I’d done, that wasn’t one of them.

But Noah was like the Velveteen Rabbit. I would love his whiskers off, love him until he turned gray, until he lost shape. I would love him to death. And he would let me. Gladly.

I found him hiding out in a different guest bedroom. He had his duffel bag with him, the one Stella had rescued from Horizons after we left the morgue. He’d finished reading the letter from his mother, but he hadn’t come to find me. I wondered what she’d said to him, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

I stood in the doorway, unacknowledged. “Can I come in?” He was reading something, and he nodded over the edge of his book.

“What are you reading?” I asked, then sat on the bed. Whatever it was, he was almost done with it.

“The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.”

My book. He must have taken it with him to Horizons. I hadn’t even noticed it in his bag.

“Did you like it?”

“No.”

“No?”

“The editor never tells you whether the protagonist is mad or was pursued by the devil. He didn’t resolve anything.” Noah set the book down on the nightstand. I moved closer, until I could feel his heat.

We’d been exhausted the night before and had passed out without talking, and when I’d woken up this afternoon, Daniel and Jamie had been there with the Lukumi letters. We needed to talk about what had happened yesterday, last night, and what would happen tomorrow, but the words I needed to say to him wouldn’t come. All I wanted to think about was today. Tonight.

I was not sure I ever really believed that Noah was dead, but I wasn’t sure I really believed he was alive either. I still couldn’t quite adjust to the reality of him. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and his cheeks were rough with stubble. The fading afternoon light from the window behind the bed shone through his hair, turning the strands gold. I never wanted to stop looking at him. I wished I wouldn’t have to.

Maybe I don’t have to yet, I thought. There was so much to say, but maybe I didn’t have to say it now. Noah was alive. Here. Neither of us was in mortal danger. We were sitting next to each other in a bed. I wanted to reach out to him, but my hands stayed knotted in the sheets.

“I let you die,” Noah said casually. “In case you were wondering.”

I wasn’t wondering. “Because I begged you to.”

Noah hesitated before he asked, “Do you want to die?”

“No.” It was the truth. I would have, for my brothers, but I didn’t want that for myself. “Do you want to die?”

I knew the answer, but I asked the question anyway, because he’d asked me. Maybe he wanted to talk about it. Maybe we needed to.

“Yes,” he said.

“Tell me why.”

“I don’t have the words.” His voice was smooth, his expression unreadable, but I knew it masked how worthless he felt, how screwed up and damaged and wrong he thought he was. How he felt responsible for everyone, for me, and how it broke him that he hadn’t saved me.

I didn’t know what to say to him, so I asked, “Are you thinking about your father?”

His jaw tightened; it was the only sign that he’d heard me. After what seemed like forever, he said, “I’m never going back there.”

“To Miami?”

“Wherever he is, I won’t be. He’s dead to me.”

I wondered if that were really true. I hoped, selfishly, that it was.

I remembered the way his father had spoken to him. David Shaw was guilty of many crimes, and the way he’d treated Noah was one of them. I would make sure he suffered for all of them someday. He would be punished, somehow, the way he deserved, before he could hurt anyone else.

But one look at Noah told me this was not the time to mention it. “What about your sister?” I asked. “And Ruth?”

He stared blankly at the opposite wall. “I’ll figure something out, I suppose.”

“What will you do? If you don’t go home?”

He didn’t say anything, just shrugged. I had a bad feeling about where this conversation was going, and changed the subject in fear.

“What do you think about the letter?” I asked him, but he didn’t respond except to say, “I’m tired.”

He had shut down. I couldn’t blame him—he’d had less time to process things than the rest of us, and in a way he had even more to process.

We used to process things together. Before yesterday. Before Horizons.

It was like the life we’d lived before was in some alternate time line. There was something missing in both of us, and when we first met there, we found it in each other. But now, after, everything was different. We’d slipped out of that time line, and that life was lost to us. We were strangers to each other now. We weren’t even a foot apart, but it felt like a thousand miles.

Noah stood up, pulled back the covers and held them until I crawled under. I expected to feel him slide back into the bed behind me, to feel his arms wrap around my chest, my waist, to feel his legs tangle with mine. But he didn’t. He just gently tucked me in.

“Stay,” I said. He hesitated for a moment, but then stretched out next to me.

“I dreamed about you, while you were gone,” I said.

That smile appeared again on his lips, just for a moment.

“Was it good?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Yes, it was good.”

He closed his eyes, but I didn’t close mine.

“Noah?”

“Mara?” he asked, without opening them.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“Anything?”

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you. No secrets,” he said. His eyes opened, and he looked at me, finally. “I hope you know that.”

I hadn’t known that. I had never before asked what I was about to, because I’d never felt like I needed to hear his answer. But I needed to hear it now. “Do you love me?”

There was a pause before Noah spoke. He shifted in the bed and rested his hand on my cheek.

“Madly,” he said, and I felt the truth of it in the pressure of his hand.

But when he took it away, the feeling went with it.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

Hopelessly, I thought. “Madly,” I said.

He leaned over me, his long lashes casting shadows on his cheeks, and kissed my forehead. The words “I need you” left my mouth as soon as his lips touched my skin.

I had never said those words to anyone before, and I’d never imagined I would say them now, even—or especially—to him. But it was the truth, and I wanted him to know it, no matter what happened next. No one else would or could do what Noah had done for me. What he did for me even now.

“You have me,” he said back.

But then why did he feel so far away?

71

NOAH

THERE IS SOMETHING DIVINE ABOUT seeing my mother’s faded words incarnated in the girl beside me. Even while sleeping, she looks like a deadly goddess, an iron queen. Mara is anything but peaceful—even in repose she is a silky gray cloud, bright with the promise of lightning. I will not find peace with her. But there will be no greater passion.

She sleeps with her cheek on my chest as my fingers trace the blades of her shoulders below the sheets. I imagine wings cutting through her skin and unfolding around us, blanketing me in velvet darkness before I close my eyes.

But I startle in my sleep, as if I’d dreamed I was falling over and over and over again. I wake up remembering fragments of dreams; Mara bending to smell a flower, watching it die under her breath. Her stepping barefoot into the snow and watching it bleed red beneath her feet.

Her sleep seems untroubled, her breathing deep and even. Peaceful. How could everyone be so wrong about us? It is impossible that she could make me weak. Next to her, I feel invincible.

I don’t know what day it is, or what time; I left the hospital feeling like I could sleep forever, but now I’m restless, so I leave Mara in bed. I descend the stairs. Jamie and Daniel are nowhere to be found. The view beyond the windows is dark, though the sky is edged with gray. They must still be asleep.

I wander the house and end up in what appears to be an apartment converted to a music room. There’s a drum set, a keyboard, and a few guitars lying about, as well as a piano at the opposite end of the room, by the garden doors. I head for the piano and sit at the bench. I want to play, but I can’t think of any music.

“Is there anything you don’t play?”

Mara’s standing at the foot of the stairs. Blocking my exit, I notice.

“The triangle,” I respond.

She manages a smile. “We have to talk.”

“Do we,” I say. I’m caught, I think.

She holds something in her hand. I think it’s my letter, the one from my mother, and I tense, until I realize its hers.

“I don’t care about that,” I say, and mean it.

She shoves it into my face anyway. “Read it,” she says. “Please.”

I know the second I begin what it will say, and what will happen when I finish, and with every word my body slackens and I dissociate. We’re going to have the same fight again, but this time, for the first time, I feel like I deserve to lose.

I look up when I finish. “What do you want me to say?”

“You heard what your father said about us.”

“I’m not deaf.”

“And you read what the professor said.”

I narrow my eyes. “The professor?”

She blinks and gives an almost dreamy shake of that dark, curly head. “Lukumi, I mean.”

I hand the letter back to her. “I’m not illiterate.” I want to provoke her, to taunt her, to distract her so she doesn’t say what I know she’ll say next.

She says my name. It sounds like good-bye.

I want to tear up her letter, pull the words my father spoke, the words Lukumi wrote, out of her brain. Instead I get up from the bench and open the garden doors. It’s drizzling outside. I don’t care.

She would be right to leave me, after everything. But I’m a coward and can’t bear to hear it. She follows me out anyway, of course.

“I’ll love you to ruins,” she says, and my eyes close. “I get what it means now.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say stupidly, because I can’t think of anything else.

“My ability negates yours. With me you’re—”

“Powerless, weak, et cetera. I know.”

She’s quiet for a moment. “It’s real, Noah. That you’ll die if we stay together.”

I don’t respond.

“You died already, once.”

So did you. “And yet, here I am.”

“I need you safe.”

“From what?” I ask.

She takes the bait. “Me.”

I face her then, armed with my argument. I have no defense for what I allowed to happen to her, what I did to her, so like the ass**le I am, I go on offense instead. “You mean you want to protect me from yourself.”

“Yes.”

“The way my father was trying to protect me?”

A shadow passes over her face. “Fuck you.”

A thrill travels down my spine. She’s never said that to me before. “Good,” I say, and take a step toward her. “Get angry. It’s better than listening to you talk in that voice from hell about doing what’s best for me as if I’m a child. As if I don’t have a choice.” I should be screaming. I want to. But the voice that comes out of my mouth is dead and flat. “How could you treat me that way?” I ask, sensing an advantage. “Like him?”

Her nostrils flare. “You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

“Tell me.”

But she doesn’t, so I speak instead. “I have a choice. I can walk away from you anytime I want,” I lie.

“Can you?” she asks. “Can you really?”