Chapter 32
I arrived at the hotel late in the evening, wearing glasses and a broad hat.
A one-time credit card to check in, a state ID with an indistinct photo, courtesy of Gertie. She was in the city too, interning at the Museum of American Finance, taking the A train uptown on weekends to draw the Cloisters, brick by brick.
My suite was full of ill-considered luxuries, the bed too soft, the sheets too slick, a settee blocking the view of Central Park. Even after their recent setback, Faraday’s former business partners had more money than taste.
I set an alarm for three in the morning and lay on the covers, but sleep didn’t come. I was warm in my gloves and head wrap—to leave no fingerprints or hairs in the room.
It felt odd now, being alone in bed.
I wondered what Sebastian was up to. This was the longest we’d gone without seeing each other since he’d arrived at the estate, holding Grandmother’s hand and a borrowed suitcase of clothes that would wind up in the rag baskets.
I’d begun to imagine his face in crowds, the way Peter’s sometimes flashed in the corner of my eye.
Was a summer in Albany curing Sebastian of politics? Or was he soaring to new heights, spinning his charm into unMorton forms of power?
Maybe we were all losing him.
I remembered something that had happened a year after his adoption.
We were out past the Barrow Marsh. I was teaching him, Katie, and Gertie which mushrooms were dinner and which were useful poisons. The chapel bell began to ring—the call to a family meeting.
Sebastian had never heard the bells before. I explained to him that I had to go, and he had to stay with Katie and Gertie. They still had rabbits in their arms; Sebastian hadn’t even chosen Ratface yet.
He pleaded with me to let him come.
“You can’t,” I said. “You aren’t one of us yet.”
He looked like I’d punched him. “Please.”
“They’d just throw you out.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t done a mors curae.” And then, “You’d understand…if you were one of us.”
Sebastian started to plead, to grovel. He began to cry.
I’d seen him lose control a hundred times since he’d arrived. Anger, frustration, sudden violence, but never tears, even in Uncle Cyrus’s pain classes. Crying had always confused me. The blubbering, the hiccups, the snot—it was preposterous.
In that moment, though, some part of me enjoyed watching Sebastian fall apart. It proved that he valued us, and specifically me. It showed that, even though he was already as good a fighter as me, and more resistant to pain than any of us, he was the vulnerable one.
It showed me that I was still the best.
Sebastian cried so hard the dogs came to see what the ruckus was about. But I only gave him my mother’s empty stare. In the end, I left him standing in the field, framed by two confused children and their squirming rabbits.
That night at dinner, I expected him to be ashamed, humiliated.
Maybe Gertie and Katie would tease him, and I would be a good mentor and shut them down.
But they all acted as if nothing had happened.
When I mentioned it to Gertie the next day, she pretended not to know what I was talking about—she had allied herself with Sebastian.
With his charm, his politicking, he had erased his moment of weakness.
Now, in this hotel bed, I realized that Sebastian had been left out again—from knowing what had happened to Peter. I wondered if, this time, he’d decided to erase me.
The alarm dragged me from a thick sleep.
The window was radiant, the city’s machinery framing the dark rectangle of Central Park. From this height, I could name the streets and avenues by sight—all those hours of memorizing maps before my nightwalks.
I stretched out, focusing on my arms, legs, and core. My first wrack had left me hobbling for days.
At 3:20 a.m. precisely, I put on my hat and went out into the hallway.
There was no one in sight, no sound but the low hum of air through the vents.
But when I rounded a corner, Thomas and Uncle Orrin waited at the door of room 1507.
Behind them, Arabella came down the corridor, her ski mask already on.
Uncle Harold arrived last, looking older than the last time I’d seen him.
He wore surgical gloves and carried a weighted blanket.
The wrack was all here.
Orrin handed Arabella a hotel card key, and she crept in first.
The silence held, and the rest of us filed into the darkness.
The target was sleeping on his side, half curled, gently snoring. His luggage was open on the couch, dress shirts splayed across the velvet settee. The suite was the mirror image of mine, but messy, like the dorm rooms of ordinaries at Helshire.
We arranged ourselves around the bed—me at the target’s left arm—and waited for Uncle Orrin to give the nod.
I felt it then, that collective animal of Mortons gathered on a mission. The bonds of training and tradition, of loyalty without care. And then the signal came.
Each of us grabbed one limb and pulled, splaying the target out on his back. He stared up at the ceiling with startled eyes.
Before the man could scream, Uncle Harold dropped the weighted blanket over his face. A thin sound rose up through the layers of Kevlar and glass beads, as muffled as a TV in the next room.
As the target struggled, I leaned back on my haunches, my gloved hands firm around his wrist. He was strong, but my weight pulled his arm straight.
We kept him like that for a while—long enough that time became uncertain in the dark, marked only by the hum of the city, a few stifled cries and threats. I’d been part of a wrack only once before, my freshman year, a newly hired adjunct asking the wrong questions at Helshire.
It was hard work, keeping my grip, waiting for the next thrash of limbs. Fire began to build in my muscles, and pain along the arc of Sebastian’s stitch marks. Thomas, on his first wrack at only seventeen, was sweating through his mask.
Every few minutes, Uncle Harold checked the pulse oximeter on the target’s finger, to make sure the man hadn’t gone hypoxic. Once, Harold signaled Tom to wrangle a blood pressure cuff onto the right arm. As the cuff hummed, expanded, sighed, the target remained oddly still, as if cooperating.
Everything was within parameters. The six of us had become one mechanism, Mortons and target joined in perfect clockwork. My heart was steady, like in pain resistance class on sparking lamp day, feeling the milliamps course through my body, eyes locked with Sebastian’s.
Time suspended, until Orrin gave the next signal.
Harold pulled out a metal cylinder, a foot long, an inch wide, and came around to my side. He squeezed in beside me, moving with gentle certainty, like the time he’d pulled my shoulder back into its socket after a fall in the old barn.
The metal tube slid onto the left pinkie, and the man grew still, as if he knew the rest. Harold turned to Uncle Orrin.
We steadied our grips.
Orrin gave a nod.
In one swift motion, Harold turned the metal tube over, like throwing a switch. The pop of the finger bone was audible, and I felt it in the man’s wrist muscles, like plucked strings. An infinitesimal scream pierced the weighted blanket.
When Harold pulled the tube off, the pinkie lay lifeless for a moment, pale in the dark, turned over backward. Then it squirmed a little, wriggling halfway back into place, muscles without bone.
There was no renewed struggle, just a series of convulsions, the scents of puke under the blanket, piss in the bed. Harold felt for a pulse again, eyes closed.
We held the target for another thirty minutes. He no longer fought us, except for an occasional spasm. Every time I looked at the pinkie, it had swollen more, puffing up around the nail like fresh bread.
Thomas held on bravely, but by this point he was on his knees beside the bed.
Finally, Uncle Harold tapped his watch. Half past four—the next security camera blackout was in ten minutes.
Harold unzipped a leather case, took out a syringe. He swabbed and injected the left arm. The rest of us held on for five more minutes as the paralytic took hold.
At last, we let go.
Groans and grunts slipped out from everyone. The muscles of my hands were burning, my knees sore from an hour of crouching. Uncle Orrin was pacing stiffly around the room, hands on his lower back. Tom sat on the floor, his back against the wall.
Push it under your feet. You’re just meat.
Arabella lifted the blanket to clear the target’s mouth of vomit. His eyes stared up at her ski-masked face, full of tears, agony, and a silent, curious measure of gratitude.
Orrin took out a small paper bag and sprinkled its contents over the bed. In the haze of reflected city lights spilling through the windows, it glittered like gold dust.
The dust was from Grandpa Dwight’s collection—samples of skin and hair from various murderers.
He’d once dreamed of scrying the secrets of their DNA, but Elizabeth had put a stop to such nonsense.
So we’d found another use, scattering the scrapings wherever Mortons gathered to commit a crime.
They created legal doubt about our presence, and left a message for anyone investigating—we are many; more than you can know.
Soon we were out the door, leaving the Do Not Disturb sign swinging on the handle. We had six minutes before the hallway cameras came on again. I was on the street in five.
It had rained at some point, fresh air after the bodily smells of the wrack. The shiny asphalt reminded me of the target’s face, glassy with sweat and stomach acid.
Five blocks south, I tossed my hat, ski mask, and glasses straight into the snarling rear end of a sanitation truck. Three blocks after that, I turned on my phone.
There was a message from Arabella.
Look up, prodigy. You’re being followed.