The Evolution of Mara Dyer

68

AFTER

I AWOKE ON THE MORNING OF SOME DAY IN SOME hospital to find Dr. Kells sitting in my room.

Everything was clear: the IV stand towering over my bed. The rough, bleached cotton sheets. The commercial ceiling tiles and the embedded fluorescent lights. I could hear them hum. But it was as if I was looking at the antiseptic room and everything in it through glass.

And then, in a flood, everything came back.

Jude, limp while I drained the life out of him with my hands.

Stella and Jamie, hurt and bruised and dragging Megan away from the torture garden.

And Noah, watching him die inside while I lied to him, when I told him that I would be okay.

But it wasn’t a lie. I broke out of Jude’s arms and Noah was near me, beside me, before I blacked out. He called my name. I heard it. I remembered it.

Where was he now? Where were they? Where was I?

I tried to sit up, to get out of bed, but something held me back. I looked down at my hands, which rested on top of the light blue cotton blanket covering the bed and tucked in over my feet, expecting to see restraints.

But there were none. My hands still wouldn’t move.

“Good morning, Mara,” Dr. Kells said. “Do you know where you are?”

I felt a splintering fear that I would look up and see words on the wall informing me that I was in a psychiatric unit somewhere. That I had never left. That none of the past two weeks, six weeks, six months, had happened. That was the one thing she could say to me, after everything I survived, that would make me break.

But I was able to turn my head both ways and look around. There were no windows in this room. No signs. There was nothing except the IV stand, and a large mirror on the wall behind Dr. Kells’s head.

I may not have known where I was but I remembered what she did. I watched her sit there placidly in the plastic chair next to the bed and flipped through memory after memory of her lying to my face. I saw images of Jude in my room, watching me as I slept while Dr. Kells recorded it. She had known he was alive. She knew what he was doing to me. She let him into Horizons and she put all of us through hell.

Her expression hadn’t changed, but I saw her with new eyes.

“Do you know who I am?” Dr. Kells asked.

You’re the person who betrayed my trust. You’re the person who fed me lies and drugs pretending to make me better when all you really wanted was to make me worse. I know exactly who you are, I tried to say. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was the word, “Yes.”

It was like I was pressed between two panes of glass. I could see everything, I could hear everything, but I was removed from myself. Detached. Not paralyzed—I could feel my legs and the scratchy sheets that brushed my skin. I could lick my lips and I did. I could speak, but not the words I wanted to say. And when I tried to order my mouth to scream and my legs to kick, it was like the desire was impossible to reach.

“I have some things I’d like to talk with you about, but first, I want to let you know that you’ve been given an infusion of a variant of sodium amytal. Have you heard of sodium amytal?”

“No,” my poisoned tongue replied.

“Colloquially, they call it truth serum. That’s not entirely accurate—but it can be used to help relieve certain types of suffering. We sometimes use it in experimental psychiatry to give patients a respite from a manic or catatonic episode.” She leaned in closer to me, and said in a softer tone of voice, “You’ve been suffering, Mara, haven’t you?”

I seethed in that bed, in my body, and I wanted to spit in her face. But I couldn’t. I said, “Yes.”

She nodded. “We think the variant we’ve developed will help with your . . . unique issues. We’re on your side. We want to help you,” she said evenly. “Will you let us help you?” She glanced over her shoulder at the mirror.

No, my mind screamed. “Yes.”

“I’m glad.” She smiled, and reached down to the floor. When she raised her hand, there was a remote in it. “Let me show you something,” she said, and then called out to the air. “Screen.”

A thin white screen lowered mechanically from the ceiling while a portion of the wall near the mirror retracted, exposing a whiteboard that bore a scrawled list.

“Monitors,” Dr. Kells called out before I could read it. I heard something beep beside my head, matching the pace of my heartbeat.

“Lights,” she said again, and the room went dark. Then she raised her hand and the remote, and pressed play.

I watched shaky footage from Claire’s camera as she swung and panned over the asylum, over Rachel. I watched the scene that Jude left for me in my bedroom for me to watch before.

The image went dark. I heard myself laugh.

But where the video stopped before, the image now shook. Jude’s footage was spliced. On this footage, this screen, I now saw that someone was lifting the camera. And just before the image cut out, there was a flash of light.

Illuminating the face of Dr. Kells.

She had been at the asylum. She was there.

My mind wanted to throw up, but my body was perfectly still as the lights came on.

Dr. Kells pointed at the whiteboard. “Mara, can you read what’s written there?” I skimmed the words as my blood pounded in my ears. The machine, the monitor, beeped faster.

Double-Blind

S. Benicia, manifested (G1821 carrier, origin unknown). Side effects(?): anorexia, bulimia, self-harm. Responsive to administered pharmaceuticals. Contraindications suspected but unknown.

T. Burrows, non-carrier, deceased.

M. Cannon, non-carrier, sedated.

M. Dyer, manifesting (G1821 carrier, original). Side effects: co-occurring PTSD, hallucinations, self-harm, poss. schizophrenia/paranoid subtype. Responsive to midazolam. Contraindications: suspected n.e.s.s.?

J. Roth, manifesting (G1821 carrier, suspected original), induced. Side effects: poss. borderline personality disorder, poss. mood disorder. Contraindications suspected but unknown.

A. Kendall: non-carrier, deceased.

J. L.: artificially manifested, Lenaurd protocol, early induction. Side effects: multiple personality disorder (unresponsive), antisocial personality disorder (unresponsive); migraines, extreme aggression (unresponsive). No known contraindications.

C. L.: artificially manifested, Lenaurd protocol, early induction, deceased.

P. Reynard: non-carrier, deceased.

N. Shaw: manifested (G1821 original carrier). Side effects(?): self-harm, poss. oppositional defiant disorder (unresponsive), conduct disorder? (unresponsive); tested: class a barbiturates (unresponsive), class b (unresponsive), class c (unresponsive); unresponsive to all classes; (test m.a.d.), deceased.

Generalized side effects: nausea, elevated temp., insomnia, night terrors

“You’ve been a participant in a blind study, Mara,” Dr. Kells said. “That means most of your treating doctors and counselors have been unaware of your participation. Your parents are unaware as well. The reason you’ve been selected for this study is because you have a condition, a gene that is harming you.”

Carrier.

“It makes you act in a way that is causing you to be a danger to yourself and others.”

Side effects.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” my traitor tongue responded. I understood.

“Some of your friends are also carriers of this gene, which has been disrupting your normal lives.”

Stella. Jamie. Noah. Their names were on that list, right by mine.

And by J. L. Jude Lowe.

I had wanted to know what we were and now I did. We weren’t students. We weren’t patients.

We were subjects. Victims, and perfect ones. If we cried wolf, Dr. Kells would cry crazy, and there were hundreds of pages of psychological records to back her up. If any of us told the truth, the world would call it fiction.

The asylum, Jude, Miami—the people I’d killed, the brother Jude had taken. It all led to this moment.

Because it had been calculated that way. It was planned.

I wasn’t sent to Horizons—I’d been brought. My parents had no idea what this place was; they just wanted to help me get better and Dr. Kells made them believe I would. When they thought I was getting better, they decided not to make me go to the retreat; they would eventually pull me out of the program entirely.

And the day they decided not to make me go was the night when Jude made me slit my wrists. But not to kill myself.

To get me sent back.

I heard Stella’s voice, just a whisper in my mind.

“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