Chapter 70
She waited five days before visiting me again.
Five days in this room, reading, climbing, and dreading how I would change without the pills.
I still cried at unexpected times, thinking of Sebastian, his head bleeding, running into the darkness.
Had he made it to our hideaway on the other side of Albany?
I worried about my fellow caretakers, the girls on my hall, even Faraday.
Mostly I thought about the last six months—the clues I would’ve seen, if I hadn’t been such an eager little prodigy.
Culling Peter at Helshire had never made sense. It put the Morton name in the newspapers. It brought police onto campus.
Then came the assignment in New York: taking control of a cult by seducing the founder’s favorite artist. An oblique approach, even by Garrett’s standards. The real goal had been making me care about Hiromi.
So they could shatter me.
Arabella had caught a glimpse: Those sparks in your brain aren’t because of who she is, but what she is.
Sparks in my brain—is that all those feelings were?
Grandmother thought they’d go away, now that she’d cut off my pills. But Hiromi was dead, Sebastian gone, and the sparks were still with me.
After the murders in the Catskills, more clues: Cyrus, letting me sleep in a moving car without a seat belt. The crash, close enough to home to put me in a hospital we controlled. The pills, for seizures I didn’t remember.
The elders hadn’t debriefed me after New York. Hadn’t acknowledged the changes in me, as if the whole family had somehow missed my tears, my shaking hands.
I wondered if Mary was in on the plan, her mors curae another jolt to my reality. Or was Mary just being…Mary?
Not that it mattered. She was Mary either way.
There was only one real question left.
“Why me?” I asked, when Grandmother Elizabeth next came through the door. “I was everything you wanted a Morton to be. Why break me?”
She nodded at this, and placed the jar of cookies she’d brought on my bedside table. “Because of your fault lines. We knew you would break cleanly.”
“Fault lines? I was perfect.”
“Your mother in bed,” she said, and sat in the overstuffed chair. “Your father with an axe.”
“My father,” I repeated, the words landing like a blow—that was the day I’d become the savior of my generation. My true blooding. But for the rest of the family, it had made me a ticking bomb. Something to be disposed of. “You never trusted me?”
Grandmother’s needles began to dance. “We trust you completely, Jessica. We chose you for this assignment because we knew—and still know—that you will come back to us. Sooner or later, you will be one of us again.”
“Because I’m not taking the pills anymore.”
She lifted the lid from the cookie jar. “Because every prodigal returns home in the end, repentant.”
I took a breath, and smelled the fresh cookies, buttery to the touch. I felt the soft cotton against my skin, and knew the dogs were somewhere within a mile or two, tumbling over each other, covered in autumn leaves.
I knew what it smelled like outside—the junipers, the hay bales after last night’s rain, the late-blooming Arkansas Blacks, darkening and sweetening as they ripened.
She was right. I was still a Morton.
“Except now I see what we are,” I said.
“And what is that?”
“Servants of the system. We maintain the world as it is, when it needs to change. We let the Wilbert-Lees make ruin.”
“You haven’t paid attention,” she said. “We’ve shut down their federal prison contracts, and quietly moved their money into renewables. As an eternal family, we care about the future.”
“Renewables? Faraday killed someone. We made her like that.”
For a moment, I heard the storm again. Felt the weight of Crystal’s sodden body, smelled her piss mixed with the spice rack in Faraday’s pantry.
“Speaking of that incident,” Grandmother said, “I have another gift for you.”
From her knitting bag, she pulled a small wooden jewelry box. I stood and crossed the room, took it from her.
She watched my face as I opened it.
It was a mottled brown, with a shiny purple showing through, like a ripe, unpeeled beet. The fingernail was missing, and a tiny spur of bone stuck out from the otherwise clean incision.
“Her pinkie,” I said.
“A light sentence, for a second offense. But it was you who failed to guide her. You should apologize, when you see her again.”
I studied the severed finger in its velvet bed. “This might take more than an apology.”
“You’ll pull the Wilbert-Lees into shape, don’t worry.” Grandmother was still watching me. “Do you care about her?”
I tried to imagine Faraday waking up in a cutting wrack. Eight hands to immobilize her. A weighted blanket to collect her screams and vomit. The cool of metal snippers around her pinkie, the sudden click of flesh, tendons, bone.
Would she blame me? Would she regret signing with us?
Houses. Horses. Paris.
“I’m not sure how I feel about her,” I said, truthfully.
Grandmother was pleased. “She has potential, for an ordinary.”
I closed the box, handed it back. “You must be very worried, to do all this to me.”
“Hardly. The elders of every family know what’s happening. Your new friends have no chance of success. But they betrayed us, and must be punished. It’s the principle of the thing.”
I almost believed her. But as she reached up to put the pinkie box on my bookshelf, her fingers trembled.
She was furious.
This wasn’t about principles. Bianca was wrong about us Mortons. Underneath our accountancy, we were still feasting on our enemy’s hearts.
When we broke, we soaked the woodshed with blood.
The moment passed, and she smiled. “Faraday sends her love, by the way. She understands that you had to rest, but is excited for your return.”
I stared into those lightless eyes, feeling a sliver of hope.
“What do you want from me?”
“The name of the Morton who appointed you. It had to be someone of Arabella’s generation. Hector? Clara?”
After nine days, I was ready for this. “Sebastian picked me.”
“And who picked him? We know how it works.”
“Do you?” I wasn’t going to tell them anything. “How do you know any of this?”
“Because your new friends are sentimental.” She reached into the jar and took a cookie, nibbled. “Some time ago, they tried to recruit a loyal Morton—who rejected them, but promised never to tell. They made the mistake of not killing that person.”
A failure of triage, like mine. Protecting Faraday had put me in this room.
“We decided to be patient,” Elizabeth said. “We waited for Uncle Max’s bottleneck to narrow their options. We waited for you.”
Me, the time bomb.
“Who recruited Sebastian?” she asked again.
I shook my head. “They never really trusted me, not enough to meet the older generation.”
“Then who are the others in your class? One Lindqvist, one Wolvaardt, one Seth.”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“You are,” she said. “Once you become yourself again.”
I walked away from Grandmother and sat down on the bed. “This is me.”
“No, Jessica,” she said, in the singsong voice she used while handing out presents at Quilting Day. “You didn’t fall in love. There is no ‘in love,’ just a hallucination shared by fools. Like empathy, it’s a dream. All you have to do is wake up.”
“I loved Hiromi—before you gave me those pills.”
“Like you love Sebastian now?”
My eyes shut.
Sebastian and I were each other’s oxygen. Who else could understood how we’d been built from dangerous parts, then broken into something new? We were ruined for anyone else—and, worse, we would ruin them. We were entwined from root to crown. Was that love?
When I opened my eyes, a single tear slid down my cheek.
Grandmother watched it with fascination. “How unfortunate he’s gone astray. We would have celebrated you two.”
“Just let him go. He never asked to be a Morton.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “I was there at the boys’ home, when we picked him up. He begged to join us. He answered every question perfectly.”
“You gave him a test?”
Grandmother nodded. “Your Aunt Olga asked, ‘Is it always wrong to kill people?’ And little Sebastian, perhaps thinking about his father, said, ‘Sometimes it’s very necessary.’ ”
“He hasn’t changed his mind about that,” I said.
Only about who needs killing.