The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

I DON’T LOOK AT MARA and Jamie, but I’ve no doubt they’ve got FUUUUUCCKKK written all over their faces, because, well. That’s the expression I’m trying to keep from mine.

“Stella told us about what happened to her. What the guy, Jude, did, to her, to you—” He nods in Mara’s direction. “She told us about the gene—1821? That gets switched on in some of us and not in others, and she told us how Kells set out to try and create someone like you.” Leo looks at me.

“All true,” I say, ever so calm. “But how, precisely, does that help find Stella, exactly?”

“We don’t know who was experimented on and who wasn’t.”

I offer a general-purpose smile. “Neither do we.”

He falls back into the chair, rolls up his sleeve to scratch his arm, exposing the edge of a tattoo.

“What’s that?” Mara asks.

He rolls the sleeve up the rest of the way. On his biceps, curling over his shoulder, is a black image of a sword, curved, sprouting feathers on each side, as if the sword is the spine of it.

I seize on it immediately. “Where’d you get that?”

“The tattoo? Pen and Ink—”

“No. The idea for it.”

He shrugs like it’s nothing. “They’re symbols of justice—the feather and the sword.”

All roads lead to him. My blood is electric, and there’s an acrid taste in my mouth. “Who told you about it?” I ask Leo.

“Why?”

I round my hands into fists to keep myself still, even. In control. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

“Look, most of us here? We don’t really have what you’d call a happy home life, okay? Some of us don’t have homes at all. Or families. Some have one dead parent, one abusive one. Others come from places, backgrounds, where they’re shunned for who they are—not in the Gifted sense, but in every other sense. For being gay. For being Latina or black or Asian. For liking the wrong music, the wrong clothes, for being depressed, for being anxious, or angry, or scared. For being who we are. Anyone who walks through those doors knows that they’re not going to be persecuted or harassed or told they’re broken. They come here because they want what we want—to use the Gifts we have to make the world a better place.”

Familiar words, those.

“And most of us tattoo ourselves as a reminder to use our Gifts for good.”

More familiar by the second.

“And it’s become kind of a symbol of who we are—a family. This house?” He gestures to the room. “This is our home now. And I’m the only one left in it.”

I can’t get a read on him—my sodding brain is split between here and now and this afternoon and before, but Mara, dear girl, takes over for me.

“Who designed it?” Mara asks him. “The tattoo?”

“I don’t know,” Leo says.

“How do you not know?” Jamie asks, which shocks me a bit, honestly.

“Because I wasn’t the first person to have it. Isaac—one of our friends—was. He told me what it meant to him, and that meant something to me.”

“And where is Isaac now?” I ask.

A half shrug from Leo. “He’s a bit older, graduated from high school a couple of years ago. I think he’s travelling in Asia, now? India maybe? I don’t know—does it matter?”

To me it does. Because the feather, the sword—the design might be different, but the symbol—that’s the professor’s.

And this is what he does. He wrote to Mara:

My particular Gift allows me to draft a vision for that better world—but my curse is that I lack the tools to build it.

My Gift is useless on its own. And so I have found others to help me.

Uses others to help him, more like. Finds them and uses them, the way he found Mara, me, my parents, Jamie and Stella and now Leo. And every second I devote to thinking about him helps him, gives him what he wants.

So I scrape one of the folding chairs in the opposite direction, toward the map, and give Leo one command.

“Talk.”© 2024 Nôv/el/Dram/a.Org.

There are over thirty Carriers who have crossed paths with Leo in person, he says, twenty he was able to get to New York, at a point. Some came because they wanted to get rid of their abilities, others because they wanted to strengthen them. Leo was the second sort. Stella, of course, belonged to the first. Mostly, they reported the same stories: Their lives started to go tits up as early as sixteen, for some, which, Jamie notes, given that not everyone develops at the same rate, makes sense (“Fuck puberty.”). By seventeen, many, if not all, were diagnosed with some sort of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual mental disorder. Which, as I know quite personally, means fuck all. But Leo and his friends—Stella and Felix and Felicity, at least—they began to catalogue them. Names, birthdays, hometowns, abilities.

Some could manipulate dreams, induce sleep, wipe memories. Others could cloak the abilities of others (different from cancelling them out, apparently), and something Leo said made it seem like they knew someone who could predict events.

“We all wondered why this was happening to us,” Leo says. “But no one we came across had any idea how they got their Gift.” No memories of having been experimented on, though many had been in treatment for their particular diagnoses or involuntarily or voluntarily committed at various points.

So, wanting answers and finding none, they took to the Internet. As one does.

Leo walks over to a different table, stacked haphazardly with file folders, pictures, medical charts. “Here’s some of what we found that we thought might . . . mean something. I don’t know.” He rubs the bridge of his nose. “It seems ridiculous now, but what were we supposed to do? We didn’t even know where to start.”

Jamie’s eyes narrow. “Well, wait. You actually said you started by trying to strengthen your Gifts, right?”

Leo catches himself. “Some of us.”

“Like you.”

He nods once.

Daniel walks over to the pile. “So who collected this?”

“We all did. You know Stella,” he says to Jamie. “She didn’t want to be able to do . . . what she could do.”

“Yeah, the cure thing was her idea.” Jamie moves over to the table. “She’s the one who—whoa.”

“What?” I’m at his side immediately, but I don’t—

“These are from Horizons,” Mara says, looking between our shoulders. Then, to Leo: “Stella gave you these?”

I watch him mentally edit, which for me, confirms it: Stella took the files from the archives. Files that anyone who’s ever been here could’ve looked at, copied, to be used on us or against us. Either way.

And now she’s missing.

“Can we copy this stuff?” Daniel seems to be the only one with the presence of mind to deal with the clusterfuck this presents. Leo reluctantly assents, and everyone’s got their mobiles out, snapping away at files, the map, all of it. Before we leave Leo’s, someone promises to be in touch about the little archives party—not me. I’m thinking about arson, explosions, flooding—burying it all forever.

“So!” Mara says, closing the door of the flat behind us. “Stella stole from us.”

Jamie, on his way to the kitchen, says, “Technically, she stole from Noah.” He reaches up, grabs a glass from the cabinet. “Technically, we all did when we brought the Kells crap to my aunt’s house—”

Now I’m barely clinging on. “You what?”

“We couldn’t exactly go back there every day and use the place like a library,” Jamie says.

I’m wordless, iced over, frozen with the knowledge that this toxic, radioactive mess has already been leaching out into the world.

“It shouldn’t exist,” I say. “None of it should.”

“But it does,” Daniel interrupts. “And Leo might be right—there could be something in here that we didn’t catch before.”

“You’ve seen it all before, no?”

“We weren’t asking the same questions then,” he says as Mara hands over her mobile. I follow, as does Jamie, and Daniel begins to scroll through each of our pictures, quick as anything. In just over a minute, he freezes, and my phone in his hand seems to grow in density, weighing him down like a stone. His lips part, eyes glaze over in shock, so much that his heartbeat becomes arrhythmic.

“What?” I ask, switching over to his other side, worried he might faint, and also desperate to know what’s got him so unnerved.

“Daniel,” Mara says, and her voice brings him out of it, prompts a swallow. His eyes meet hers, still dazed, unfocused. “What?”

“Sophie,” he says, handing the phone to me without looking at it.

“Your girlfriend?” Jamie asks, checking my face, Mara’s, for confirmation. “What about her?”

Daniel takes the phone back from me, swipes the screen to zoom in. Holds it up. “This is her handwriting.” He turns to Mara. “On your file.”