Spark (34 page)

I see truth in his eyes, but the impact of the KMH has me reeling. I look to Jamie who stands frozen, colour draining from his face. “You can Harvest from a civ.” He turns his back, bracing his hands on the window frame, lowering his head. “That’s twice I nearly killed the wrong person.”

Leonard goes to him.

Kitty covers her face. “Oh, shit … then it’s Aiden.”

I fumble for my phone, texting rapid fire to Miriam that things have changed and it might not be Richard and hit send.
Please check your phone
.

I grind my fingers into my temple then go to Kitty. I kneel in front of her seat. “Kit, listen.” I detach her hand from her face, bringing it down between mine. “It still might be Richard. Jamie says he was strung-out and acting crazy when he tracked him home. I’m just not a hundred per cent.”

She shakes her head, tears streaming.

“Maybe someone else was waiting for us to leave the governor’s office?” But I feel the emptiness of my words and grit my teeth.

Miriam, please, I need you
.

“Listen to me, Kitty.” I try to sound as brisk and authoritative as my aunt does under pressure. “It was always going to be someone, a person, not some shadow monster. And let’s face it, it was likely to be someone you knew. I hope it’s not Aiden. Really, with all that’s in me, I hope it’s not, but you’re right, the evidence against him for timing and location … it’s not good.”

She doesn’t stop crying.

I stand there, feeling totally useless. “I’m going to try Miriam again.”

I walk out into the foyer, away from the sound of Barb murmuring to her daughter and Leonard speaking softly to his son, a father’s comfort. I sit on the bottom step of the staircase and look up at the chandelier and try to imagine my mother sitting beside me, her arms around me, promising things will work out in the end. The image barely forms, an insubstantial mist that leaves me cold. Someone will die. I shake my head, dig my phone from my pocket and hit redial. It goes straight to Miriam’s voicemail. “Where are you?” I lean, elbows on knees, hand in my hair. “Come home. I need you.”

Thunder rumbles over the house, a deep rolling growl. The front door clicks and Miriam slips in, hair plastered to her face, jogging gear slicked to her body. Relief and anxiety make my legs shaky as I rise to meet her. Miriam leans against the door, drawing ragged breaths, desolate eyes, sheet-white face. “It’s not Richard.”

I stop on the rug, uncertain whether to touch her. “So, you got my message? Where have you been? I Harvested from Leonard.”

The last part breaks her trance. “That’s not possible.”

“Yeah, it is,” I say, confused. “You didn’t get my message?”

She covers her mouth then slides her hand up to her eyes, water dripping from her hair down her forehead.

“What’s going on?” Jamie and the rest of the Gallaghers gather in the entrance to the living room.

“Where have you been?” Barb says.

“I needed to think.” Miriam pushes past me towards the stairs. “I couldn’t think clearly. I needed to check … with Sullivan.”

“You’ve spoken to the doctor?” Jamie joins me beneath the chandelier. “Where the hell is he?”

Miriam leans on the end of the banister. “I need to talk to Evie.”

“Wait. You know who it is?” Kitty breaks away from her mother to stand beside us. “It’s Aiden, isn’t it? Doctor Sullivan told you.”

“I told him.”

“What?” We all seem to say it together.

Miriam sinks on the step. “I need to talk to Evie. Alone.”

I can feel myself recoiling. “You’re not making sense, Miriam. Just spit it out.”

“Doctor Sullivan said he’d meet me here.”

“But it
is
Aiden?” Impatience and frustration burn in my chest. “You’re telling me that Doctor Sullivan has evidence that
proves
it’s him?”

“Yes.”

“See!” Kitty’s voice is high, but the sound seems to reach me from a distance, my own seismic response consuming everything.

Miriam’s “yes” triggers a shadow in my mind, and my breathing becomes short, sharp and shallow. I rub my face, squeeze my eyes and focus on the pull of the tether. Kitty alive beside me. Even through the internal storm, I know there’s no immediate threat; it’s simply a physiological reaction to the news.

Aiden
.

I try to think straight for a minute.

Aiden
.

I fight my way to the niggling feeling in the back.

Aiden
.

It shocks me to find I can feel anything beyond the feral burn of my instinct, but it’s in there – the small piece of rational me not quite swallowed by the Fixation Effect. The sense of regret.

“Damn it.”

In a flashflood of memory, I see all my suspicions confirmed: Aiden’s tension, the white knuckles, the agitation, the shadowed eyes. It makes me ashamed, how willing I was to cast Richard as the villain – not for Richard’s sake but for the lapse in my duty to Kitty. Am I so unreliable? Is my frequency so weak that I can’t even discern friend from foe? My failings crash in on me and I ball my fists, appalled at myself. He’s come so close, time and again.

Kitty whimpers. “He saved Kaylee.”

“He’s a killer,” Jamie says, a compassionless monotone. “You can’t fight DNA.”

“You told Sullivan?” I say to Miriam. “How did you know?”

“I guessed at the governor’s office.”

“That’s why you freaked out?” I gape at her. “Why didn’t you say? You know what nearly happened?”

“I didn’t know Jamie would go after Richard. I wasn’t completely sure …”

“You sensed something?” Jamie says.

“I recognised him,” she says. “Look, Evie–”

“How?” My ears pop and roar. “You
know
him?”

Miriam unzips her windbreaker and digs inside, pulling out a rolled-up sheaf of paper, dog-eared and faded to yellow. Her hands shake as she flattens it out. I try to see what’s written on the top sheet. It looks like an official document: heavy paper, a governmental stamp and date marks. “He’s my son.”

The high-pitched hum builds in my head, making me nauseated. I stare blankly at the paper. “What?”

“I have birth certificates.” She holds them out.

“A child?” Barb, her voice weak as a wisp.

“Twins.” Miriam looks up at me. “I adopted the boy out and April took you.”

Lights flicker above me and I stare at her hollow eyes. “Is this a joke?”

Miriam says nothing.

My head swims. “It is a joke.”

A tinkling sound sings above our heads.

Miriam looks up at the chandelier.

“Jamie.” Barb’s anxious voice.

“It’s not true,” I say.

A light bulb flickers out, then a second and third.

“Jamie!” Leonard, that time.

“Easy, love.” Jamie looms in front of me, his hands either side of my face, but the hum rises and the droplets dance, the whole foyer shimmering with moving light. “Listen to me.” Jamie crushes me to him then lifts me from the ground. The foyer blurs and he carries me, shoulder barging the doors to his father’s office. “Everton, listen to me. Hey, hey, come on.” He kisses my face, presses his forehead to mine. “Easy, love. Stay with me.”

“Jamie, she’s lying. Why would she lie?”

The door swings slowly back and Kitty stands at the threshold. “Doctor Sullivan’s pulled up.” She holds Miriam’s papers in her hand. “Evs, you need to look at these.”

“I am legally obligated to turn this evidence over to the police.” Doctor Sullivan wipes raindrops from his spectacles before adjusting them on his nose. “I can hold it overnight, perhaps give you a head start, but the authorities will have to be informed by morning or I’ll be in breach of my oath.”

“Give us the bullet points.” I sound brittle. I feel brittle. Kitty sits next to me at the dining table, stroking my arm. Jamie’s on my left, his body so tense I imagine if I tapped him with a tuning fork, his skin would ring. Grey-faced, Miriam sits opposite me, Leonard and Barb either side of her. I can tell Barb is holding Miriam’s hand beneath the table, like moms have to stick together.

It took me a good hour to calm down, look at Miriam’s papers and agree to hear what the doctor said, and now I regret the waste of those minutes. We might only have the night to act.

“I took your blood samples as a reference point to help me map the markers of the original sample from Kitty’s attack. Extremely useful exercise. The synthetic gene is wonderfully complex, overlaying the unmodified genome in a marvellous …” he looks up from his folder at our cold faces and clears his throat. “However, due to the complexity of the markers, it took me much longer to map than regular DNA. I had Jamie’s two weeks before yours and Miriam’s, and had a fair idea of the patterns I should expect. But the Stray anomaly maps differently. I was eager to see how your two samples compared with Jamie’s and the original sample, to see how the patterns played out.”

My eyes dry from staring at the sheen on Sullivan’s nose. “And Richard’s?”

“I didn’t get very far with it, my dear, but my initial findings would indicate he has unmodified DNA.”

“But you’re not certain.” I can feel what everyone’s thinking: I’m grasping at straws.

“In light of these results, it’s unnecessary to investigate Mr Dean’s sample any further.” He pauses to let it sink in then presses on. “It was only in the last two days that I started to suspect the familial links. When Miriam came to me last night with her suspicions about the original sample belonging to her son, I adjusted my analysis to map for twin markers. It took most of the night and day but this is what I found.”

He picks up two transparencies covered in lines of code. “This is the original sample from the skin I took from under Kitty’s nails.” He lays it on the white cover of his folder. “This is your sample.” He lays the second sheet over the top, aligning the edges, revealing the matches. “This is Miriam’s.” He places a third transparency on top. “There are slight differences in the maternal code but the key markers remain the same.”

I can feel everybody looking at me. I stare at the official papers spread across the table: Miriam’s faded certificates, an adoption file, a xeroxed black-and-white photo from a school yearbook; Aiden looks about five. His startling eyes stand out and the spray of freckles across his nose. A newspaper cutout details the death of Aiden’s parents, Bailey and Kendy Templar, in a home invasion. Aiden was seven. He escaped through his bedroom window.

Each proof winds me: same birth date, same blood type, same DNA.

“If you would like, I could talk you through the twin markers and how they–”

“No, thank you. I don’t need to see anything else.” I sense the quiet exhale of relief from everyone. I’ve given in.

Doctor Sullivan squints at me through his glasses. “I could check your arm?”

I shake my head, even though the wound aches. “I’m fine and we don’t have a lot of time.”

Leonard gets up. “Thank you, Doctor Sullivan, your help has been …”

I don’t hear the rest.

The doctor gets to his feet, speaking rapidly, waving his hand at the documents. They go out into the foyer and I hear the front door open and close.

I stare at Miriam as though I don’t recognise her. The angles of her face, the shape of her mouth, the curve of her cheekbones, the ghost of my mom, of April. It’s like the parts don’t add up.

“Um, could Miriam and I …”

“Of course.” Kitty rises quickly to her feet, gesturing for her brother and mother to follow. Barb rises up, her hand on Miriam’s shoulder, a gentle squeeze before she steps away. Jamie waits for the others to exit and turns to look at me before closing the doors.

“You never needed to hear this,” Miriam’s voice crackles. “I’m so sorry.”

“We better be quick.”

She lowers her eyes. “I met your father when
they
took me in for orientation.”

Your father
.

Two words put together becoming a foreign, inconceivable thing.

April had told me he was a boy she met at a college party, she didn’t even know his name … too much drink. She pitched it as the best-worst night of her life because I was the greatest gift she had ever been given. Of course, that last part now seems like a bit of a hint.

“Your Synergist.”

She nods.

“What’s his name?”

“I can’t tell you.” She brings her hands up on the table and clasps them together. “It wouldn’t be safe.”

“What?”

“An unsanctioned affiliation between Synergists producing unsanctioned offspring?” She presses her lips together.

I read horrible things into the silence.

“They’re much stricter now,” she says, “keeping male and female operatives apart.”

“How did you keep it from them at all?”

“Your father got me an assignment that allowed me to go off-radar. I went to the UK, April came with me. She returned home with you and the boy went to the Templars.”

“Mom knew what you were?”

“I told her everything.”

“That I might be like you?”

“She wanted you very much, Evie. She wanted you like I wanted you.”

The questions back up; the confronting sense memory of the moving lump I had Harvested from Miriam, misinterpreting it as Mom’s, as April’s. “Was she even a gene carrier?”

“She was. She had a fifty-fifty chance of producing offspring with AFS. Your mother was far more sensible and careful than me. Once I told her about everything, she would never have gotten herself – she knew she would never have children of her own, so she took you without a second thought.”

“Why not keep Aiden?”

“Boys are more likely to be
Strays
.” Miriam whispers the illegal term and lowers her head. “Exposure to active frequencies can activate
Priming
. It would have been too dangerous for Aiden to be near me at all.”

“Giving him up didn’t do him any favours.”

She winces. “I took Fretizine throughout the whole pregnancy. We hoped it would neutralise the synthetic gene, that you would simply be carriers.”

“Why bother? You could have had an abortion.”

“No, no, I could never …” She closes her eyes. “I couldn’t live with myself.”