1
14 MY CREATION
The sight of her breaks my heart. It’s been less than a day. Minutes, really, since I watched her through the glass. It feels like an era, like I’ve seen civilisations rise and fall in the time we’ve been apart, and now I’m left, staring at the ashes. That’s what she looks like since Kells told her I died. Like the ashes. I breathe her name from the doorway of the same room I last saw her in, newly unshackled but testing my steps. She doesn’t respond. I can’t even tell if she knows I’m here. I turn to Kells. “Is she awake?” Dr. Kells looks at a tablet. “Seems to be.” “What did you do to her?” “Only what you saw.” I look back at Mara, lying in a metal bed in the centre of the room, dwarfed by negative space. Her eyes are open, looking at nothing. She doesn’t respond to my voice. It’s as if by telling Mara I no longer exist, I’ve stopped existing for her, and I am close to breaking. “Is she paralysed?” I ask Kells, who pauses before answering. “No. The medication helps her be . . . present, as I explained. She’s likely experiencing strong emotions, which have triggered stress responses. They’ll come and go like waves, and she’ll be able to ride them out. She could move. She chooses not to.”
2
I take a step toward her, and when Kells doesn’t stop me, I take more until I’m by her side. Her features don’t look relaxed, just . . . slack. She looks uninhabited. Like an abandoned house. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to bring her back. Nothing. There’s an IV running into her arm, and a few monitors, but nothing else I can see, nothing I can use, to get us out. All of Kells’s words reverberate in my skull—about my father. About Mara. “What will it take,” I begin to say, “for you to let us go?” “Your honest answers to my questions, for a start, beginning with how you first discovered your ability. Then we’ll reevaluate from there. But if you prove to me that I can trust you, I will prove that you can trust me. Your mind is the key, Noah. I need you to let me in.” I’ve sworn at her. I’ve threatened her. I haven’t begged yet—I could try that, I suppose. But invoking my father has done something nothing else has managed to, yet. His power has opened doors for me my entire life, but for the first time, I’m now on the other side of it, that power. Nothing I’ve ever done has been any match for it. Nothing I could do could match it. “You promised me a moment alone with her,” I say to Kells. “Give me that, and I’ll give you what you want.” She inclines her head, with the good grace not to smile, at least, and leaves the room. A wave of sadness threatens to choke me. Sadness tightens your chest and throat and lungs—you can’t breathe for it. You can only turn your grief over and over. Anger, though—anger can be used. If you can swallow the ache in your chest and let bitterness rise in your throat, you can burn it like fuel.
3
I choose anger over sadness. I reach out to Mara’s face. She doesn’t react when I sweep the hair back from her pale forehead. Her eyes are fixed and staring, even as I lean in, until my lips are at her ear. “Get out,” I purr. “Then kill them. Kill them all.”