The girl’s cell phone buzzed in my hand.

WALK TOWARD THE END OF THE TRAIN UNTIL YOU PASS IT. GO TO THE THIRD NICHE WITH A DOOR.

The curved walls seemed to stretch into infinity, but I started walking, following a miniature creek between the tracks that was choked with garbage. Air ruffled papers taped to the graffitied, wet-looking walls. My pulse began to race as I neared the end of the train, but not from fear. I believed what I’d told my brother and Jamie. I believed in myself. I would find Noah, and I would punish whoever had taken him from me.

I passed the first niche, and then the second. But before I came to the third, I heard my name shouted behind me.

“Mara?” Daniel’s voice echoed in the tunnel. Panic seized me.

“Wherefore art thou, Mara Dyer?” Jamie’s voice this time.

“That means ‘why’, not ‘where,’ ” I heard my brother say. “Just saying.”

“Go back!” I yelled automatically, then cursed myself. Not for giving away my position to my mystery texter but for giving it away to my brother. Marco Polo used to be his favorite game.

Daniel yelled, “No chance! I’m your big brother. It’s my job to protect you.”

And then a shadow peeled itself from the wall, forming the outline of someone I knew, of the person I’d expected ever since I’d seen that first text. Ever since I’d heard the girl on the subway say my name, really.

“Don’t hurt them,” I said to Jude, and I meant it. “Please.”

“I didn’t want to,” he replied, and punched me in the face.

49

BEFORE

Cambridge, England

THERE WAS NO KNOCK ON the professor’s door before it opened, throwing a shaft of dim, gray light into the room.

A girl stood in the doorway, but did not enter. She was half in shadow, but I did not need to see her to know who she was.

The professor lifted a glass of amber liquid to his lips and sipped as he wrote in his notebook. “Come in, Naomi.”

Naomi Tate hurried in, bringing the scents of rain and nervousness with her. She shut the door forcefully, rattling the shutters, and a few leaves that had clung to her coat scattered to the scratched wooden floor.

“Bit early to be drinking, Professor?” she said casually, as she shrugged off her coat.

“Perhaps it’s a bit late.” He continued to write without looking up.

Naomi’s hair was damp and wild, and she tied what she could into a messy knot at the nape of her neck as she moved in front of the professor’s desk. Fine blond wisps curled around her forehead and temples, framing her face.

That face. With high cheekbones and a long, elegant nose, Naomi was beautiful in a rare, peculiar way, in a way that demands attention. I’d known her for a year and still, I could never quite get used to looking at her.

But there was something different about her today. I shifted in the tufted, battered leather armchair I always sat in, my island amid the chaos that was the professor’s Cambridge office, and sniffed the air. The scents in the room were all familiar: old paper mingling with leather and mold; the coriander and musk that was the professor; the paperwhites and cedar that was Naomi. And something else, something—

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Shaw?” he asked. He took another slow sip of whiskey.

Mrs. Shaw. She was Mrs. Shaw, now. I kept forgetting. She’d married the grandson of Elliot, whom I last saw at eight years old, throwing books and toys about his room, because he couldn’t find the one he wanted. I did not know her husband well, but my impression was that David Shaw was not terribly different.

Naomi refused to answer the professor; she would not fight for his attention. She would make him fight for hers. I loved that about her.

After several seconds, he finally abandoned his notebook and looked up at her. His lips pulled back into a smile. “You’re pregnant,” he finally said.

A sharp intake of breath. Mine. “How far along?”

I hadn’t heard the professor rise from his desk, but he was standing when he spoke. “Early,” he said, approaching Naomi with slow, graceful steps. “About two weeks?”

Naomi didn’t speak, but she nodded. She rubbed at a knot in the ancient desk with her finger—she was nervous, but grinning madly anyway.

I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “It’s too early,” I said to the professor. “She might not be—”

“I am,” she said, in a tone that left no room for argument. “I am.”

The professor ran a hand over his chin and mouth. Then said, “May I?” He indicated her flat stomach. Naomi nodded.

The professor drew nearer, until he was close enough to touch her. I noticed the way her muscles tightened in apprehension, the way her aqua eyes dropped to the floor as he reached out to her. When he placed his hand low on her belly, Naomi flinched. A tiny movement, one she tried to disguise. If it bothered him, he didn’t show it.

“Three fifteen,” he said, and withdrew his hand. Naomi relaxed. “What does it mean to you?”

Her cheeks flushed, and she began rubbing at the pockmarked desk again. “The day I conceived, I think. March fifteenth.”

“Does David know?” I asked quickly.

Naomi shook her head. “Not yet,” she said, and swallowed. She glanced up at the professor. “I wanted to tell you first.”

“Thank you.” The professor inclined his head. He leaned over his desk and began to write. “For now, I’d prefer you didn’t mention it to him. Can you do that, Naomi?”

“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“You’ll be having a boy, you know.”

All traces of her earlier irritation vanished. A smile lifted the corner of her mouth. “A boy,” she repeated, as if saying the word for the first time. “You’ve seen him?”

The professor hesitated for a moment, then said, “Yes.”

“Tell me everything,” she said, her face lit with excitement.

“I don’t know everything,” the professor said, “but I do know he has your smile.”

Her hands drifted down to her lower belly. “I can’t believe this is really happening.”

“It is happening.” The professor had counted on this, on her, and I had too. “The boy is destined for greatness. Because of you, he will change the world.”

And because of him, Naomi would die. It was a sacrifice she was willing to make. It cost the professor nothing; but I was the one who had convinced her to make it. I needed her child too, and her death was easy to accept when Naomi was just an abstraction, a stranger. But now I knew her, and I was haunted by guilt. I had befriended her, persuaded her, knowing that there was no time line in which she would have this child and live, and over the months, the specter of her someday-death haunted me. I dreamed of her hanging by a rope from the rafters in a stable, her feet bare, her body swinging after the tension in the rope snapped her spine. I dreamed that a shard of glass pierced her chest after in a car accident, and she died choking on her own blood. I dreamed of her murder, her drowning, her being buried alive beneath a collapsing building. I didn’t know when it would happen, but I knew that it would.

Before her wedding, I couldn’t help but warn her again. She would be a martyr for this child, I told her.

Every gift has its cost, she had said back.

I could see the beginnings of that cost today. There was none of a new mother’s emotion in her expression, no awe or wonder, or even love. Instead she looked like a child who’d been told she’d be setting off on a great adventure soon, and she couldn’t wait to begin.

She nearly bounced on her heels. “I wish I didn’t have to wait nine months to meet him,” she said.

“He will be born in a good hour. Be patient.”

“When should I tell David?”

“I’ll let you know the next time we meet.”

“And when will that be?”

“Next Thursday. You, Mara and I shall meet at the lab, and we’ll see how everything is progressing. All right, then?”

“If you say so.”

“Very good. Then I shall see you then. Good day, Mrs. Shaw,” he said, as Naomi turned to leave. “And congratulations.”

She looked over her shoulder at him. “Don’t call me Mrs. Shaw,” she added petulantly. “Makes me feel ancient.”

A hint of a smile touched the professor’s mouth, and then the door closed behind her.

“This pregnancy will be difficult for her,” the professor said, staring after her.

“The child will live, yes?”

“Yes. Of course.”

I paused for a moment. Then asked, “And Naomi?”

“She will not die in childbirth.”

But that wasn’t what I asked, and we both knew it.

50

I OPENED MY EYES TO darkness. I saw nothing but felt like a small thing alone in a wide, cavernous space. And high—I felt high up, which made me want to tuck my limbs in, tight and close to my body. I tried to but couldn’t. My arms and legs were bound. But I wasn’t afraid; I felt removed, distant. Where I should have felt frightened and terrified, I just felt clinical and calculating.

Until I remembered my brother, calling for me in the dark.

I could see only what was above me and on either side of my head, and not well at that. I was in some kind of warehouse; there was a source of light somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. I blinked and blinked again. A crumbling, pockmarked concrete ceiling materialized above me, framed by casement windows fogged with grime. And to my left and right were the shadows of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people.

No. Not people. Mannequins. Or parts of them, anyway. An army of headless torsos standing at attention, extending farther back than I could see. Dingy resin hands and arms, cloth torsos and plastic eyes, were heaped and scattered on the ground.

But Daniel wasn’t there, not that I could see. I knew I wasn’t alone, but maybe I was the only one Jude had taken. I prayed to a God I did not believe in that I was right.

“You’re wondering where we are,” a voice said. A strangely familiar voice, resonant and compelling, even though I’d never heard it before. My ears were ringing and my head was cloudy, and everything, including my thoughts, seemed distorted.

“You’re wondering why we’re here.” I heard the sound of slow, purposeful footsteps but didn’t see anyone at first. Then, slowly, my eyes detected movement. A figure moved between the bodies, as tall and narrow as they were. I discerned the outline of a black suit among them, and as the footsteps grew nearer, the outline became a person.

He had Noah’s blue-gray eyes, but he wasn’t Noah. And behind him stood Jude.

“I’m afraid we’ve never been formally introduced,” the man said to me. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled, the slight curve of his mouth emphasizing the hollows beneath his sculpted cheekbones. “My name is David Shaw.”

My tongue was thick in my mouth, and my thoughts dissolved before they could reach it. I had heard about Noah’s father but had never met him, and now, now he was here. He was here, and I had been brought here by him.

By him.

He stood there looking at me kindly, sympathetically, as if Jude, my tormenter, were not standing beside him. As if he hadn’t been the orchestrator of my torment, using Horizons and Wayne and Kells as tools.

Struck dumb by shock or drugs, all I could do was stare at him and Jude, who scarcely resembled the creature I remembered. Gone was the smooth conviction he’d displayed at the dock when he’d forced me to cut my own wrists. I saw none of the anger he’d shown in the garden at Horizons, when he’d tortured my friends and Noah and me. He was whispering to himself. Mumbling. I couldn’t make out the words.

“You’re afraid,” David Shaw said to me.

I wasn’t. Not anymore.

“I am truly sorry for this. I wish things could be different.”

They would be. I wasn’t going to kill him like I’d killed everyone else. I would torture him, the way he had tortured me.

I didn’t need him to tell me why he had done it. I didn’t care. I only cared about only one thing, but my mouth wouldn’t form the words until David Shaw gave it permission to. I recognized the sensation. I was on Anemosyne, Kells’s drug of choice.

“Did Noah know?” My voice was scratchy and hoarse, and I wasn’t sure he heard me, until his eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“You’re wondering if he betrayed you?” David’s eyes narrowed a bit. “How little you trust him.” His sentence was punctuated by the ringing metallic clang of metal on metal and the sound of approaching footsteps. “Speak of the devil,” David said, and then Noah appeared behind him.

51

NOAH

I DULLY STALK BEHIND MY father, briefly noting the fiberglass army of armless, headless mannequins that surround us. They seem to stiffen at my arrival, to cringe at my too loud steps. So sinister. Lovely touch.

Walking feels like an effort, as does thinking, unfortunately. My vision is oddly tunneled; we appear to be in a large, probably condemned warehouse of standard decrepitude; the plaster is peeling off of the dingy once-white walls, the casement windows are thick with grime, et cetera. I notice a sign just outside one of the windows with the words STORAGE WAREHOUSE: FIREPROOF painted on it, except someone had blackened out the letters so that it read, RAGE WAREHOUSE: IREPROOF. Mara would love that so much.

Thinking her name cuts through something in my brain, steals the laughter from my throat. And then I see her.

But it isn’t Mara—or at least it isn’t the Mara I remember. The one with quick, smudged fingers, lips that couldn’t decide whether to swear or smile, with eyes that told me nothing about her and everything about me.