The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #3)(63)

We put the next DVD in, riveted.

“The psychiatrist has returned with a diagnosis of conduct disorder,” she said, clearly shaken. “And the behavior of Subject J continues to deteriorate. He has become antisocial and extremely aggressive. Claire reported that she caught her brother pulling the feathers off a sparrow fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. We’ve been administering Amylethe to try to arrest the . . . side effects . . . of the manifestation.”

“That’s why,” Daniel said quietly.

“Why what?”

“Why they lied about his age. If he started undergoing puberty at ten, he would have looked too old to pass for seventeen.” Daniel picked up a handful of paper and spoke while reading it. “She kept testing all kinds of drugs on him, not just the typical antipsychotics—hormones, experimental stuff.” And then Daniel looked at each of us. “This is why you guys look older than you are. There was something about rapid maturation in New Theories. It started at age eighteen in subjects, and continued to twenty-one.”

“Except none of us are eighteen,” Stella said aloud.

Jamie looked skeptical. “And people always think I’m younger than I am. Maybe it’s like that thing where growth hormones in milk make you go through puberty earlier?”

I wished Noah could have been there to hear that. “She gave me Amylethe too,” I said to Daniel, remembering Kells’s words in Horizons. “She said it would make me better.”

Daniel looked at me then. “Did it work? Do you feel better?”

I did feel better, but it wasn’t because of the drugs, or the implants. How could I describe what I’d gone through just to get here? How I’d felt beyond sick and not myself every day since waking up in Horizons? Until I’d gotten those things inside me out?

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it worked.”

“What about your, um . . . power?”

Jamie cringed. “It sounds cheesy when you put it like that.”

I didn’t answer my brother, because the truth was, I didn’t know if it still worked or didn’t. I hadn’t tried it, not since— “Wait right here,” I said, and threw off my blanket. I took the stairs two at a time and pushed open the door to the bedroom I would sleep in for as long as we were here. I spotted what I was looking for on a chair in the corner.

I looked through the small gray duffel bag until I found them. The implants, the capsules or whatever, that had been inside me until Stella cut them out. I closed my fist around them and brought them downstairs. Daniel examined one of them under the light.

“These were inside you?”

“Yup.”

“Where?”

“In my stomach, I think.”

“They couldn’t have actually been in your stomach, or you would have died taking them out.”

“Fine,” I said. “They were forty-two degrees south of my right fibia and seventh metatarsal.”

“You don’t have a fibia. That’s not a real bone.”

I gave my brother the finger.

“No need to get snippy,” Daniel said prissily. “Okay, so, these were inside you when you left Horizons, right?”

“Right.”

“And your ability didn’t work after you left there, right?”

“Correct.”

“You tried?”

I thought about Mr. Ernst. About what I’d done to him after what he’d tried to do to Stella and me. “Yes.” I did try.

“What happened?” Daniel prodded. “Who did you try to . . .” His voice trailed off. “Who hurt you?”

Jamie almost literally began to whistle and twiddle his thumbs. Stella looked at the floor.

“It was nothing,” I said, falsely calm. “It was fine in the end.”

Daniel handed me back the implants and then looked down at the mess of papers. “All right. We know the anomaly is triggered by fear and stress. So, what if anytime your nervous system was flooded with adrenaline, or cortisol, those things reacted, negating your ability? Like a fail-safe to make you safer, better, in case you ever left Horizons.”

But they hadn’t made me safer, I thought. My mind conjured an image of Mr. Ernst, what I did to him, and I blinked, hoping it would disappear.

Daniel chose his words carefully. “But you were actually safer in the sense that you couldn’t accidentally . . . hurt someone. You couldn’t protect yourself, but you were safer for other people to be around.”

I wondered if that were true.

“Anyway, Dr. Kells thought of herself as a scientist, a researcher. She had plans to send you back home, right?”

“That’s what she said.”

“So those implants must have been part of her plan to do it. She thought she’d have time to tweak the effects, figure out how to counteract the anomaly, before you guys escaped.”

Before I killed her. But Daniel had a point. Everything Kells had done to us, done to me, had been in pursuit of a cure. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And when she hadn’t succeeded, and Jude had let me out, she’d decided to put me down like an animal before I could be set loose and hurt anyone else.

As we watched the interviews, we realized Daniel had been right. Jude got worse, no matter what Kells did to try to fix him. She attempted to hide her distress as he grew older, more dangerous, but the drugs she pumped into him didn’t always mitigate his behavior. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know who he was; he was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and when someone “else” emerged, Claire was the only one who could get him, the real him, to break through, which Daniel guessed was why Kells had been willing to foster her, gender notwithstanding.