Chapter 67
I threw my family phone into a dark corner.
Faraday’s text had come twenty-three minutes ago, when she’d spotted Orrin. A few minutes for her to work up the nerve to go outside, then a few minutes of disaster.
Next, Orrin would call Grandmother for orders—and for the location of my blue dot. Faraday’s house was at least a fifteen-minute walk from here, but Orrin never went anywhere without a car.
Which meant he’d be outside the library…five minutes ago.
“We’re not coming back,” Sebastian was saying. “No more Helshire. No more family. You understand that, right, Jess?”
“Yes,” I said, texting Aaliyah to throw my borrowed laptop in the lake. The family would search our rooms.
He smiled. “Okay. We run.”
At the top of the stairs, we turned toward the main entrance. Ancient tapestries hung on either side, capturing the echoes of our footsteps.
We skidded to a halt in the front hall, listening. The library was dark and quiet around us.
My shoes were still in my hand, so I went ahead, padding to the marble-floored entrance, the empty card catalogs hulking on either side.
There was no one outside the glass double doors.
“Maybe he’s waiting for us at Faraday’s,” I whispered.
Sebastian shook his head. “When’s the last time they sent Uncle Orrin out alone?”
I sat down and laced my shoes tight.
We crept toward the entrance, crouching as we passed the checkout desk. I crawled between the sensors, under the turnstiles that kept students from walking out with an unchecked book.
No one was outside. Maybe my estimates were off.
“Come on,” I said, standing up.
As Sebastian stepped over a turnstile, I reached for the push bar on the doors.
Then I saw it—a ripple of shadow on the stairs outside. Someone pressed flat against the wall beside the door.
I pulled back, but Cyrus must have heard us. He stepped into the light and tapped on the glass door.
“Open up, Jessica. We need to talk.”
I looked into his eyes.
The last time we’d faced off like this had been in Peter’s room, with Ziggy in his hand, leveled at my throat. Now, as then, there was a well of emptiness behind his eyes. His care had died twice—once with his rabbit, once with his son.
The old Jessica hadn’t seen it, because she couldn’t see that well.
“Jessica,” Cyrus said through the glass. “None of this is your fault.”
“You can’t blame Faraday,” I said.
“I’m not talking about her. This is on us—we set you up. But it’s time to come home.”
“Jess,” Sebastian said, holding out his hand. “Let’s go.”
As I backed away from the doors, Cyrus pulled a telescoping baton from his coat pocket. With a flick of his wrist, it was thirty inches long.
I turned and ran.
The sound of shattering glass followed.
Sebastian started laughing as we flew down the front hall, a sound of unrestrained joy. We were cast out of our family, disowned, hunted.
Done with the Mortons at last.
“New wing,” I said, grabbing him and veering right. The library extension had broken ground twenty-five years ago, when Cyrus was a senior. He wouldn’t know the layout.
“All-night study room?”
“No,” I said. Bystanders might keep Cyrus in check, but we’d have to leave eventually. A delay would only give our family time to gather forces.
Our Aunt Charlene lived twenty miles from Helshire. The twins were just over the river.
As we ran, the gray stone of the old library gave way to glass bricks and dull orange carpet. We passed a custodian pushing a vacuum cleaner, who only rolled his eyes at us.
“We can take Cyrus,” Sebastian said. “There’s two of us!”
His eyes were alight—the saviors of our generation, fighting side by side. But Cyrus had been in a dozen life-or-death fights. My cousin and I had been in only one.
“Just run.”
We reached the fire exit at the back of the new wing, halfway around the building from the main entrance. I crashed against the push bar.
The doors sagged open a few inches, then caught.
A chain was wrapped around the handles on the other side, half-inch metal, shut with an Abloy padlock.
“Fuck,” Sebastian said. “Any bolt cutters down in Monsters and Related?”
“No,” I said, wondering how Cyrus had found time to lock up the backside of the building.
Orrin was here too. Or someone faster.
Beside the locked exit was a fire alarm. More witnesses seemed like a good thing.
I pulled it. Silence.
Iris, logging in remotely from the estate. All Mortons on deck.
“Back to the old wing,” I said. “Too many exits to lock up.”
“Why’d they bring chains for Faraday?”
I had no answer.
We climbed the stairs, and took the second-floor passage between old building and new. We went at a half run now, trying to stay quiet, listening for Cyrus.
The passage had glass walls, and I scanned the darkness outside for signs of other Mortons closing in. Orrin would be headed over from Faraday’s, if he wasn’t already here.
No cars passing through Main Gate. No figures in the trees below.
We went past the Rare Books Room, then into Geology, where someone had left the sconce lighting on—the gemstones glowed in their little alcoves.
Descending to the ground floor, we drew our knives.
“You throw something heavy,” Sebastian whispered. “I’ll cut the hamstrings.”
“Nostalgia, cousin?”
“It worked last time.”
Cyrus was waiting for us at the fire exit in the T–Z section of English Lit. He stood with his back against the door, the baton extended in his right hand, a canister of Mace in his left.
“Jessica,” he said. “This isn’t your fight.”
The door wasn’t chained—a lure to make us fight him.
“Come home with me,” he said. “The world will make sense again.”
“I recommend Thackeray,” Sebastian whispered, then moved away from me, giving Cyrus more angles to cover.
“What about Sebastian?” I asked. “Does he get amnesty too?”
“He’s lost,” Cyrus said. “They all are, except you. But you can go back to your old self.”
I hesitated, as if considering this offer.
Sebastian made a half feint, drawing Cyrus’s eyes to him, and I reached for the nearest shelf. A thick, squat volume of poetry.
I threw it hard at Cyrus’s head.
His hand came up too late, and the book smacked against his face. It was nothing like a padlock—no teeth flew—but he lost track of Sebastian for a split second.
My cousin darted in and sliced a hand; the canister of mace clattered to the ground. Cyrus swung the baton, and Sebastian blocked it with his forearm—a horrible crack. The baton came up again.
I threw my knife, wishing it was bigger, wishing it was Ziggy.
It stuck in Cyrus’s open flank, two inches deep—drawing a breathless grunt, a spurt of blood. He wasn’t wearing body armor.
The baton came down too slow, and Sebastian was inside Cyrus’s guard, stabbing randomly and fast. I grabbed the biggest book within reach and closed in.
Blood was spattering now, the knife flashing in the half dark, the butt of the baton connecting with Sebastian’s shoulder.
I swung the book crosswise, to the chin. Cyrus’s head jerked back, his eyes glassy for a moment.
That’s when my cousin found his mark—the knife plunging deep into a lower calf. The first real shriek of pain from Cyrus, the snap of his Achilles tendon.
But he brought the baton down one last time, clipping the back of Sebastian’s head. Blood flew as Sebastian staggered past him, crashing into the fire door and through.
“Go!” I called.
Cyrus smiled, picking up the canister of Mace. He raised himself on one leg, his back against the fire doors again, and shoved the baton through the handles.
They shook, but Sebastian was trapped outside.
Cyrus aimed the Mace at me. “Give up, Jessica.”
I stepped back, pulled another book from the shelf, ready to throw. But no rain of poetry was going to take Peter’s father down. He could hold the door till reinforcements came.
But he couldn’t walk, and Orrin’s top speed was a slow jog.
I turned and ran toward the front entrance.
“Jessica!” he called after me. “Remember who you are!”
I sprinted though the darkness, past the basements steps, between the faded tapestries and card catalogs, the heavy book my only weapon. But no one was waiting for me.
The front hall stood empty, the shattered entry door unguarded. Even if Orrin was lurking outside, at top speed I’d fly right past him.
I ran for the turnstiles, bracing myself to crash through—
But the book in my hand was not checked out.
The sensors beeped; the turnstile locked, a solid metal arm across my stomach. I flipped over it, crashing flat on my back against the marble floor.
I stared up at the fresco on the ceiling: Prometheus descending from the clouds, torch in hand. I hadn’t looked at it since first semester, freshman year. I tried to suck in a breath—and failed.
The front door opened, and soft steps crunched through the shattered glass. A kindly face looked down at me.
“Grandmother,” I wheezed.
“Jessica,” she said. “You’ve done very well.”
“You’re here?”
“I suspected Faraday’s punishment might prove revealing.” She smiled. “But I wasn’t expecting such a show.”
I stared, blinking to make her go away.
“Don’t worry, Granddaughter. You’ve done nothing wrong. It was all in service of the family.”
Painfully, I managed my first real breath and reached for the corner of the checkout desk. If I could pull myself up and run, Elizabeth couldn’t catch me.
She grasped my wrist, and held it tight. “You’ve saved your generation once again, Jessica. We’re so proud of you.”
With her free hand, she stuck a needle into my bicep.
“Oh,” I said, watching the plunger sink into the barrel, something clear flowing into my arm.
Grandmother dropped my wrist, and my hand fell onto the marble floor. It hurt, but in a distant, irrelevant way.
“We’re going to fix you,” she said. “We love you.”
I closed my eyes against her smile, against those words she’d never said before. My own breathing sounded like someone in another room.
“Has your cousin left already?”
I nodded, or tried to. The ache in my ribs was fading with merciful speed.
And then reality—my pain, my fear, everything I’d lost—was carried swiftly into the distance.