Chapter 3
That Sunday, the ancient bell in Main Hall tolled eighteen times, once for every year that Peter had lived.
There were candlelit vigils. Moments of silence in lectures. Flowers clumped around the lamppost that lit the parking lot behind Dewitt. Counselors were made available, for ordinaries who needed to vent their grief, for legacies who needed practice.
Most of all, there were rumors.
Peter had called out a girl’s name as he’d fallen. (Absurd.) He was failing all his classes. (Like he’d care.) He’d landed at the stroke of midnight. (So specific.) He was addicted to a meth hybrid called Twerk. (So déclassé.)
It didn’t matter which rumor congealed into legend. Peter had joined the pantheon of dramatic Helshire deaths, the stories we all knew.
Laney Maxwell, stabbed by a townie the year before I arrived. Anthony Sandino, the violin prodigy, heart failure on the rugby field in 2003. Greta Mastropasqua, sometime in the twentieth century, electrocuted in a manner unclear.
But those were all ordinary Hellions, the fragile offspring of middling financiers and prosperous plastic surgeons. It was strange to see a legacy name among them, especially a Morton. As the mythmaking unfolded, I asked myself a question that I’d pushed aside till now.
Why had Grandmother ordered such a conspicuous end for Peter? It went against my training, our traditions.
She was making a point, perhaps. A measure of poetic justice, to match the bluster of his sins.
Two days before we left campus for the funeral, my cousin Sebastian came to visit.
I was studying, reading ahead in my Forensic Accounting textbook, a blunt instrument in size and prose style. Lost in the mysteries of Benford’s Law, I almost missed his arrival outside.
“Come in, Sebastian,” I said, right before he knocked.
He entered with a frown. “I was so quiet.”
“That was the tell. The hallway chatter cut off, all at once.”
Sebastian has that effect, especially on places full of women. Now in mourning—black shirt and sweater, Uncle Orrin’s gray cashmere coat, a black umbrella—the attentions had only grown.
It’s not so much that Sebastian is handsome, or beautiful, or beddable. He’s all those things, depending on the light. But what draws eyes to him is the way he moves, the certainty with which he stakes out his path, expecting the world to bend around him.
“You heard them, not me,” he argued. “No points for that.”
“A Morton must melt into the background.”
He smiled at that, knowing he would never.
Back on the estate, Sebastian and I had trained together since our family adopted him at the age of eight.
Stealth, lock picking, pain resistance. Etiquette, conversation.
A dozen different fighting and dancing styles—and, yes, climbing.
We were spoken of in the same breath, the prodigies of our generation.
Which meant that, from time to time, we wished each other dead.
I excelled at intimidation, violence, the cold hard accounting at the heart of the family’s power.
Sebastian was better at seduction, at understanding what made ordinaries fawn and flutter.
Each of us thinking ourselves the better Morton, neither of us saying it aloud.
As I’d reminded Peter, our family does not indulge in hubris.
But that doesn’t stop us knowing.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“I weep daily.”
“Droll. With the attention, I mean.”
“It’s like moving through molasses,” I said. “People keep staring.”
If you don’t smile at them, ordinaries stop seeing you. By my third year at Helshire, I’d acquired a certain amount of invisibility. But Peter’s death had trapped me in a spotlight of pity.
Sebastian shrugged. Eyes followed him everywhere at Helshire—girls, boys, teachers.
“Those appeared yesterday.” I waved at the vase of spring wildflowers on my windowsill, my hallmates’ sentiments crowding the little white card.
Sebastian flicked one of the flowers. “Bloodroot? Ominous.”
As children, we’d learned how to distill bloodroot into black salve, a natural necrotic. It smelled lovely in soap or a cream, and left disfiguring scars.
“Do you miss him?” he asked.
I looked away. Only Sebastian would ask this, and only when we were alone.
Missing was caring. Caring was unMorton.
When we pulled him from the foster system, Sebastian spoke a different English from us.
He didn’t move or think like us. It wasn’t that he was Black—our family is sprawling and ancient, with hooks in every continent.
But our usual custom is to adopt newborns, who bring nothing that must be remolded or excised.
For Sebastian, the Mortons made an exception. Sometimes, he speaks our language with an accent.
And yet I kept expecting to see Peter loping across the Quad, or waiting outside my door. Sometimes it felt like he was in the room, my little shadow.
Jess, I have to come back up.
But that was just misfirings in my brain, facial recognition neurons trying to complete a missing circuit.
“It’ll be easier without him,” I said. “Have the other families said anything?”
He pulled the shaft of bloodroot from the wildflowers. “At the archery range yesterday, Xavier Lindqvist asked if Peter was culled.”
Sebastian watched me as he said this. Sooner or later, he’d find out it was me. The thought gave me pleasure. Most Mortons didn’t get their first assignment until after graduation.
“He’s trying to get a rise out of you,” I said.
“Like you got a rise out of him?”
I rolled my eyes. Sebastian never let me forget my hookup with Xavier at the interfamily archery competition five years ago.
“He told me if Peter were a Lindqvist, they’d have culled him long ago.”
“Maybe we should have,” I said.
Of the four legacy families, the Lindqvists liked to think they were the most ruthless. The Seths, Wolvaardts, and we Mortons begged to differ.
Sebastian frowned at the bloodroot flower. “When I was little, I imagined a card with my name on it. One demerit, two demerits…until there was no room left.”
“It’s more of a ledger, pluses and minuses. We are, at heart, accountants.”
“That’s comforting.” Sebastian leaned back, the flower still in his hand. “But we wouldn’t have done it here, right?”
“Don’t kill where you sleep,” I agreed.
“It’s just odd, him climbing solo like that.”
“You think Peter cared about safety?”
“He cared about showing off. Why do something stupid if no one’s watching?”
And who would Peter want to watch him, if not me? Part of me wanted Sebastian to figure it out. To see that I had been chosen as Grandmother’s instrument.
I shrugged. “Maybe he left something in the Physics Lounge.”
“His respect for gravity?”
I tried not to smile, but then Sebastian’s laughter bubbled up. His laugh was unlike any other Mortons’, breathless and unbridled, with a manic edge. At the Dining Commons, he would set off other tables, even when they hadn’t heard the joke.
After a week of making sad expressions, laughing with him was a relief.
When we were done, Sebastian cocked his head. The conversation in the hallway had gone silent. We weren’t melting into the background.
He shrugged. “Grief has many flavors, Mama Olga always says. As long as ordinaries see some reaction, they fill in the rest.”
“And yet…” This was our laughter, not theirs.
Sebastian stood up. “How about a walk?”
“I’ll make a flask.”
Sometimes I wished that Sebastian and I hadn’t fallen into this rivalry. That we were allies—or more. The family wouldn’t stand in our way.
Me, a mingling of two ancient Morton lines. Him, a sharp-edged diamond in the rough, his biological parents imprisoned for crimes of operatic cruelty. On paper, we were only third cousins.
But there would be a price. Whoever made that first move would always think they’d won. Acquiescence was surrender. Consent, sinister.
Sebastian was more valuable as someone to keep me on my toes, to be better than. Had he been adopted younger, he would see it too, the impossibility of us.
We brushed past the curious glances in my hallway and went down onto the Quad. The sky was sharp, the air cold enough that I could blow rings with my breath.
“Almost time,” Sebastian said.
We came to a halt. Midnight came and went in silence.
“Fucking Peter,” I said.
During midterms at Helshire, everyone opens their window at midnight and shrieks into the void—the Primal Scream. An exhalation of stress, a symphony of fury. But out of respect for our dead cousin, the tradition had been canceled this term.
“He would not approve of this quiet,” Sebastian said.
I took a drink. “We were on this very spot for his first one.”
Another Helshire tradition was not to warn freshmen about the Scream. Last term, Sebastian and I had lured Peter onto the Quad with this same flask.
“He didn’t ask what was happening. Just joined in.”
“To hell with it, then.” Sebastian lifted his head, and let out a bellowing cry.
Like his laughter, Sebastian’s scream was rampant, uninhibited, going until he ran out of breath. Ragged as a battle flag.
There was a campus-wide shudder of silence, a collective intake of breath—a thousand Hellions wondering how unseemly it would be to scream their lungs out, only a week after one of us had fallen to his death.
“Do it,” I whispered.
A moment later, they did.
The cries spilled from the Quad dorms first—Lavernick, Ridermore, Banner, and King—then spread, quick as lit kerosene, to the outer ring of Ogden, Manor, and the Terraces.
The great wedding cake of Main Hall began to flicker, the residents turning their lights on and off, a splinter tradition that other dorms never dared copy.
Finally a lone voice from Dewitt itself, someone in a lab late at night, letting out a hyena laugh as the rest subsided.
The silence rushed back from the darkness, satisfied at last.
“You should’ve joined in,” Sebastian said, hoarse.
“I prefer to listen. You get scarier every year, cousin.”
He coughed, snapping for my flask. He took a swig—and scowled.
“What is this stuff, the devil’s licorice?”
“Sure,” I said, taking the flask back. It was my most pagan cocktail: rye, an amaro called Braulio, a splash of Underberg. Pine and pitch, like some ur-Christmas tree, burned on the winter solstice to make the sun return.
“It clarifies,” Sebastian said and coughed again, his breath a tentacle of mist in the dark. “I do miss him. After what happened when we were little, him dying this way feels like a bad joke.”
“He wouldn’t miss you. He didn’t like you.”
An arch smile. “Rivals for your attention.”
“I’m all yours now, cousin.”
Sebastian’s laugh was ragged from the screaming.
I raised the flask. “To Peter. Always an explosion.”