Chapter 74
It was a week before they let me try again.
This was my last chance to keep things simple. I’d been off the empathogens for more than a month. If I was still incapable of following orders, there were other treatments. Empathy-reducing drugs to reverse the process. Even surgeries.
What everyone wanted, though, was for me to fix myself.
I sat in my room, preparing with math.
Mary was going to be culled either way. Grandmother wouldn’t have put a knife in my hand unless that die was already cast. Her insubordination, her obsession with Uncle Max, the rabbit droppings in the dance studio. Her bizarre mors curae.
Even with our generation’s depleted numbers—because of them—Mary wasn’t worth the risk of another Peter, another Uncle Max. I was more valuable than her, even in my current trembling state. Sacrificing her to fix me solved two problems.
All I had to do was go along with the plan.
Sebastian was out there waiting for me. If I was trapped here too long, he would move on from our safe house in Albany and go deep underground. I’d never find him.
Again and again, I ran the numbers, and got the same result. A dangerous Morton, erased. My freedom gained. A chance to rejoin Sebastian and help him destroy the levers of an unjust world. This was triage.
I could see the math of it clearly, but this kind of math had no music.
I spent a week visualizing the kill, teaching my muscles what they had to do, and wondering what sign I should give the elders to show my readiness.
Then they did something unexpected.
They sent Tom.
“You can do it,” he said, eating one of the sandwiches he’d brought.
I was eating too. Beatrice’s cheddar cheese and pickles on sourdough. Roasted acorn squash with maple syrup and cinnamon glaze, oven warm. A batch of cookies rattling in an antique tin.
The perfect meal for a pep talk.
“You culled Peter, after all.”
“Sure,” I said. “Same thing.”
Tom smiled, happy that I was on board. He wanted me fixed and back at Helshire, mentoring him. He wanted everything back to normal.
Things had never been normal.
“It sucks that some of us don’t make it,” he said. “But it’s always been that way. No reason to turn against your own family.”
I nodded, not explaining that killing Peter hadn’t been enough to change me. Peter had been almost nothing.
Tom bit into his sandwich, chewed. “I felt guilty too.”
“Why?”
“The week before he died, Grandma Elizabeth called me to her room. She asked if he was still bullying me.”
“Peter bullied all the little kids.”
“Not as bad as me—because I left Doctor Pickle behind in the woodshed. Peter said second rabbits don’t count, and my mors curae wasn’t real, and they should have culled me. He said I was pathetic for not helping kill Uncle Max. I just stood there and watched while you three did it.”
“Gertie didn’t help either.”
“She ran to get Arabella, and she didn’t leave her rabbit behind.”
“You were seven years old, Tom.”
“I was a Morton. Anyway, Grandma asked if it was okay if Peter never came home from Helshire. I said it was fine with me.”
I heard my mother’s words: Grandmother chooses her counselors. Four of us.
Tom was the one I’d never guessed.
“I had no idea what was going to happen,” he said. “But I don’t regret what I said—Peter was fucked up.”
I locked eyes with him. “And why do you think that was?”
Tom looked away. “He was weird from the start. He liked fires too much. But, yeah, that day with Uncle Max changed him.”
“It changed all of us.”
“Not you, Aunt Jessica. You were exactly the same. I decided to be like you.”
I closed my eyes. I had been Tom’s model, so he’d become a model Morton. No room for uncertainty or rebellion.
Next year, Ezekiel, Leona, and Clyde would be even harder to convince. They’d known Uncle Max, but hadn’t been in the woodshed that day to see him turn into a monster.
The Morton line of Care couldn’t fizzle out. Ms. Delicato always said that criminal organizations without accountants were doomed. Surely the same held for revolutions.
I had to keep trying. “Do you know why Uncle Max didn’t change me?
Tom shrugged. “Because you’re a Morton.”
“Because I had to prove I wasn’t like him.” Because he was my father. Because my mother had taken to her bed. Being a prodigy was an escape from myself.
“You’d never be like Uncle Max,” Tom said. “Peter never bullied me when you were around. He didn’t dare.”
“He shouldn’t have bullied you anywhere.”
“Aunt Minerva said I made the logical choice, leaving Doctor Pickle behind—one less thing to slow me down. It’ll be so easy, Jess. She’s right outside, unarmed.”
The last bite of sandwich in my mouth turned to sawdust. I kept chewing, and managed to swallow.
“She’s going to die anyway,” Tom said.
“Can I have a cookie?”
He opened the metal tin, and the air bloomed with spices. Gingersnaps, in the shape of Gertie’s autumn-leaf cookie cutter.
I took one. “Oh, right. Pumpkin Pageant.”
“Can’t believe you guys ran off and made me go alone. The food was pretty good, though.”
He leaned back in the chair, chewing slowly, staring up at the skylight. A raptor was wheeling overhead, a dark shape against the cloudless blue. Maybe a falcon. Maybe a rough-legged hawk.
The estate was so beautiful, it hurt my eyes sometimes.
He took another cookie. “Come back to us, Aunt Jessica. I miss you.”
I saw it then. He wasn’t like Grandmother—there was light behind his eyes, but it was the light of certainty. He hadn’t closed himself off from choice.
He’d simply chosen.
It took everything for me not to cry. I didn’t want Tom to see that. It still felt like weakness, like failure. Push it under your feet.
I took a bite of my gingersnap cookie.
“Did you bring a knife?”
The exit door wasn’t locked.
I told Tom to stay where he was and went alone into the dark hallway. Peter’s old throwing knife felt alien in my hand, something from another life.
I’d known that Garrett had gone to Hiromi’s studio after she was dead. He’d sold the self-portrait and must have gathered up the rest of her work as well. But it had never occurred to me that he would rescue Ziggy.
Maybe he’d seen this moment coming.
Ziggy was battered by those long sessions with Hiromi’s robot arm, the blade loose, the bolster rattling. A blunt, unwieldy weapon. Like they wanted Mary’s death to be ugly.
Maybe they just wanted a fair fight.
I went softly in the dark. She’d be more dangerous this time, perhaps planning to spring out with an axe and give me forty whacks. And bring my head to Grandmother, like some mors curae of old.
Blooded at age ten.
She was waiting for me in the holding cell, in the same folding chair, even wearing the same purple raincoat as Mary, though it wasn’t raining outside. Her walker was beside her, aluminum shining in the gloom.
She looked up, immensely pleased to see me.
It was Bellamy.