Chapter 52
Sebastian’s text said he was waiting for me on the second floor of Main Hall.
Main had been the first building of the new campus.
It contained everything a college needed—classrooms, offices, commons, dorm rooms—a world unto itself.
The residents flaunted the convenience of living there, lounging in the Lesser Tea Room or the Hellion Café in pajamas and bathrobes, especially on winter days.
I went in through the front doors, past Admissions and the Bursar’s, their frosted windows darkened this late. Up a flight of stairs to the still buzzing Senior Commons, where I was permitted at last. But I didn’t linger, heading down an empty hallway toward the locked Faculty Lounge.
I knocked three times, Sebastian cracked the door, and I slipped through.
We folded into each other, a seamless fit, like the teeth of a zipper. I breathed in his heat, the scents of whiskey and brush-fire smoke. The familiar feel of his Oxford shirt, one that I’d worn freshman year.
Sebastian still felt new in my arms—almost my height, muscles honed by fighting and climbing. His body was like mine in all the ways that Hiromi’s had been a contrast.
When he felt my tears, he pulled away. “Smoke getting to you?”
“Sometimes it just happens.”
He stared into my eyes, like Frankie when I was bluffing. “I never thought I’d see you cry.”
“It’s pathetic,” I said.
“No, Jess. It’s what I always hoped—that you weren’t like them.”
“Them? You were one of us. A prodigy.”
“At hiding,” he said. “I missed my sister every day. I thought maybe you were hiding something too.”
“But then you found out different.” A wave hit me—the kind of pain Cyrus’s butterfly clips could never have prepared me for. “For me, Peter was a triumph.”
I couldn’t hold his gaze.
The lounge was full of leather chairs, couches, a grand piano, its curved wing splayed open. We could only meet in places like this: darkened, locked, ours alone. The pottery classrooms, the storage closets in the experimental theater, the library stacks after midnight.
Sebastian and I had wordlessly agreed to stay a secret. I was a danger to him, my mask slipping every day. He’d been hiding his whole life. I was a beginner.
But the risk was worth it. I took his hand, pulling him toward the leather armchair in the darkest corner.
His feet stayed planted. “Do you have your family phone?”
“No.” I didn’t want our little blue dots to intersect too much.
“Good. I’m taking you to another mysterious location.”
A tremor went through me—that drive to Jersey in darkness.
“Poor choice of words.” Sebastian held me closer. “There are some people you need to meet.”
Sebastian led me away from the exit stairs, along a stretch of empty offices, their glass-fronted doors labeled Purchasing, Transportation, Facilities. Reminders that Helshire had a logistical side: payrolls, power bills, walls to paint.
The hallway ended at a door marked Storage. He took a loose key from his pocket and fitted it uncertainly.
“Are we burgling?” I whispered.
“Not burglary. Rebellion.” The door opened.
A crowded darkness, stacks of folding tables, bed frames, and the old roller desks that you only saw in Main. We moved carefully, Sebastian feeling his way to another door in the corner.
No signage. A different key.
It opened on another world.
The large room was appointed with red velvet chairs and couches, antimacassars tasseled with gold. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of old volumes with knobbled spines, like leather vertebrae.
As Sebastian secured the door behind us, I took in the tapestries—a tall ship docking at Pearl Street Pier, the Mortons’ arrival in the New World.
The signing of the Treaty of Alinagar, the Seths in the shadows.
The Wolvaardts’ first incorporation outside of Holland, the Fort de Goede Hoop in Cape Town.
The biggest tapestry showed a tenth-century longboat beached on the coast of Newfoundland—Lindqvist propaganda. They had in fact arrived with all the other Swedes: in Minnesota, less than two hundred years ago.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“The Senior Uncommons,” came a voice. Bianca Lindqvist sat in one of the armchairs, facing away.
“Didn’t you graduate?” I asked.
“Once a Hellion, always a Hellion,” she said, turning her chair around. “Tradition demands my presence.”
I looked at Sebastian. He gestured toward a couch in a dark corner, where three more alums sat, wineglasses in their hands. Hendrik Wolvaardt, Divya Seth, and my cousin Arabella.
One graduate from each family. An assembly of Care.
“You have your own fucking lounge?”
Bianca laughed. “Just don’t burn this one down.”
I wondered how she was part of this—the petty vengeance of her Hefnd didn’t seem very careful.
Divya Seth was another surprise: When she’d broken her cousin Kumar’s wrist in Disruptive Anatomy, she’d barely shrugged.
Only Hendrik Wolvaardt, with his fascination for ordinary history, made sense here.
That left Arabella, the last Morton to graduate from Helshire.
She put her wineglass aside and came closer. The others watched in silence, as if some kind of ritual had begun.
“Jessica Morton,” she began. “When did you first realize?”
It was like Cyrus asking Peter’s riddle—I had no idea what she meant.
“When did you first realize,” Arabella repeated, “that our family was wrong?”
Wrong…the Mortons were wrong.
We stripped our kids of empathy. We made them kill their pets. We put butterfly clips on their fingertips, and cayenne water in their eyes.
Mortons went to bed and never got up again. We staggered into the woodshed and slaughtered.
We raised up the worst of the powerful. We hoarded our treasure instead of feeding the hungry. We let the world burn, when if anyone could put out the fires, it was us.
My birthright was horror, and I had embraced it.
“When did you know?” Arabella asked again.
“When Grandmother told me to kill”—my voice faded, but the name breathed out—“Hiromi Kennedy.”
“Why was that wrong?”
“Because she wasn’t prey.”
“What was she?”
Her hands in my hair. The scent of strange candy on her lips. “She was someone I loved, and Grandmother made me pretend that didn’t matter.”
“Our family taught you that a lot of things didn’t matter.”
I thought of my namesakes in the Little Graveyard. Of Rabbit, sniffing the naked blade of the razor. His trusting eyes.
I thought of Peter.
“Yes. All of them mattered.”
My tears made small dark circles on the crimson carpet at my feet.
“I believe you,” Arabella said, and put a hand on my shoulder. “Be careful.”
That last word was all it took—I was one of them now.
As she stepped back, Sebastian was already reaching for me, and I expected an embrace. But it was a gentle hug from a proud cousin—we were a secret within a secret.
Over his shoulder, Bianca was entranced by my tears. She wore the same expression she had that night in Halcyon Hall, when she’d watched me bleed on the ordinaries below.