The next morning Mara wakes up all goopy and romantic and twitterpated over Noah, because of course. I mean, when I find out I have superpowers, that’s just nothing next to cute boys, you know? Totally easy to get distracted. They get up and go out to breakfast (Mara’s parents assume Noah had a sleepover with Daniel, not Mara) and everyone is just all happy-sappy and normal and fluff.

You know, right after realizing you killed your best friend, your brother really was kidnapped, and your boyfriend has superpowers along with you. But, psh, such easy things to overlook.

“Where are we really going?” I asked as Noah drove, knowing full well that it couldn’t be school. It wasn’t safe there for me. Because I wasn’t safe around anyone else.

But they’re heading down to Little Havana and the drug-drink guy anyway, because she’s not safe around anyone…except all the people who live and work there? Yeah, keep her away from the rich white kids, but anyone else, fuck em.

There’s a festival going on, blocking them from getting to the junk shop in a timely manner. Unfortunately, when they do arrive, the shop is gone. The building, the street number, everything. The shops jump from 1819 to 1823. I don’t even know what to do with that. I mean, have we jumped to straight up Grimmauld Place style magic, or did the two of them hallucinate the entire event?

Our two leads will not bother to investigate the literally, physically missing building, though. Instead they go to the zoo. I mean, what did you expect? Proactive investigation? Continuity? Hah.

Apparently they are going to the zoo in order to experiment with their powers. I’m so resistant to the first thing that popped into my head that I’m stubbornly pretending like it’s not really an option and reading on.

“I wish I had your thing, though.”

“I wish you did, too.” Then after a pause, “Healing’s for girls.”

“You’re awful,” I said, and shook my head. An obnoxious grin curved Noah’s mouth. “It’s not funny,” I said, but smiled anyway.

Fuck everyone and everything.

They’re heading in after hours, because apparently the only reason for Noah’s wealth is so that they can do whatever they want without having to think up actual good excuses for it, they just get to say “Noah got us access somehow.” Money ex machina.

Well. It’s true. They’re going to be practicing Mara’s kill powers on zoo animals. I…I just don’t even know how to handle this. It just refuses to compute in my brain. There are too many things about this that don’t make the least bit of sense. Why? Why would anyone do this?

Okay, they are in an unfinished “Insects of the World” exhibit and Noah does steer her away from endangered bugs and try to get her to kill leeches, but still. These bugs were not brought here on a lark. Someone organized all this, someone picked these bugs in particular to take to a zoo, they’re probably not something you can just walk outside and pick up extras of. Why would you go to a fucking zoo to get animals to practice your kill powers on?

If you think you absolutely must practice your kill powers on something (and, admittedly, that is a power you need to get under control and preferably not by practicing on people) why not go to a pet store? You can buy crickets and mice that are specifically sold as food. They’re cheap and going to die anyway. There is no need to break in to a zoo exhibit and kill something that you have no idea how rare or delicate it is, or how much effort went into obtaining/transporting/caring for it.

Like, I literally do not understand the thought process that went into this decision. No part of it makes sense to me, so I don’t understand any part of how someone else came up with it.

Noah tries to convince her to work with leeches, but Mara is stringently against that because the leeches gross her out in particular. Noah pushes the matter anyway, and until Mara gets legitimately scared and then…spontaneously kills everything in the room. How? Well…

“No.” I could only croak this in a hoarse whisper. I couldn’t breathe. Multicolored spots appeared behind my eyelids that I couldn’t blink away.

Noah scooped up a leech in his hand and I felt myself sink. Then …

Nothing.

“Mara.”

My eyes fluttered open.

“It’s dead. Unbelievable,” he said. “You did it.”

Well, that clears everything up so well, doesn’t it?

Also, congratulations, your insistence on going into a zoo for this experiment means that all of the endangered insects that were also kept in that room are now kaput. Your idiocy truly knows no bounds.

Mara panics and flees the room. Noah comes out to comfort her, but she won’t have any of it, she’s too lost in self-loathing and interprets everything he does through that lens. She becomes convinced that he’s disgusted with her, that he was just humoring her before and now ‘really gets it,’ that he’s going to dump her, etc. I quite like it. I wish more first person narrators could be this emotional and slanted; it’s a refreshing turn from the ‘totally detached for the sake of narrating what’s going on’ types.

Noah takes her to his house and up to his room, where instead of dumping her he apologizes profusely for pushing her with the leeches. He thought that he had to scare her to make the murder come out, but now thinks he scared her too much and that’s what made the effect so big and so fast. He also explains that he can sense when she’s killing someone, except he didn’t realize that’s what it was before her first two kills. But it ‘sounds’ different when she magicmurders out of anger and out of fear, so he wasn’t prepared. (They were going to see if Noah’s healing magic could counteract hers; he didn’t have time to try because she was too sudden and fast.)

They spend a while talking about the incident and alternately blaming and reassuring each other until each realizes that the other isn’t full of disgust. Which is fine and all, but something notable is missing from the entire conversation: any conversation about what Mara actually did or her level of conscious control over it. They keep going on about “I did that” and “you didn’t do this” as if the technical aspects of her murdermagic are a complete afterthought. They’re not. Unless/until they can determine Mara’s willful control over her magic, there’s no point speculating over anything else. So she killed everything in the room except Noah, so? Maybe next time she hiccups and murders the entire city but leaves all the bugs alive. As long as this is happening with vagueness and “it just happened” style BS, then all further conversation is beside the point.

Eventually Mara dumps Noah, because he keeps going on about “I can warn you before you murder people so it doesn’t happen by accident again” and she worries that if he takes up that role and fails he’ll blame himself for it. See, on the one hand, I understand her reasoning and she’s very emotional right now and not prone to making well-reasoned choices. On the other hand, she prioritizes her boyfriend’s sense of guilt over the lives of other people, so I kind of hate her.

Yeah, it’s a sucky situation all around and the outcome she details is both likely and terrible, but also we’re talking about the fact that you’ve murdered five people in less than six months; wouldn’t you want to do whatever you can to minimize that sort of danger? At least you could call it a temporary fix and keep trying to work out better control.

Noah refuses to accept her dumping of him, and somehow the whole conversation moves away from the argument over whether or not they should be trying to put stopgaps on Mara’s accidental murder powers and instead moves over to the fact that they’re just so tots in lust. You know, as if that’s actually a relevant argument right now.

But hey, these two have never passed up an opportunity to fuck off the plot and make sexual innuendos instead, so why start now.