Chapter 77
My family was still invisible.
When we reached California in the new year, I stole a phone and searched for them. Peter’s fall was still the first hit, but then Garrett’s name popped up. His gallery was mounting a new show, a retrospective of a promising artist who’d died tragically young.
I recognized most of the pieces. A bust carved by thrown knives, still unfinished.
A set of killing, cutting, and rending machines—the “disassembly line” of a robot abattoir.
Tombstones with half-remembered quotes from Martin Luther King, including my own contribution from the day of Peter’s funeral.
But the centerpiece of the show was a dozen sketches called The Lost Girlfriend.
Sketches of me.
I recalled my first night with Hiromi, heat and wet and nerves thrumming, surrender at last. Consent, exquisite. She’d made a drawing of me while I’d slept, which I’d stolen and burned.
And yet here I was—sleeping, dancing, eating breakfast, throwing a knife, lounging on her studio roof. There were close-ups of my face, my hands, my eyes.
How had she hidden these from me?
Then I spotted something in one of the breakfast sketches: I was drinking from an antique teacup decorated with a picture.
Icarus, falling from the sky.
The winged figure was barely legible, a smattering of lines. But somehow Gertie had captured the cup I’d shattered the last time I’d visited her pod.
Going through the images again, I saw other marks of my cousin’s style. She crowded the page too much, just a few extra pen strokes, and in one sketch she’d drawn my new nose, which Hiromi had never seen.
Doing what the family asked, but also leaving a message for me.
Would Hiromi consider these forgeries an homage? They’d probably make her laugh.
There were other pieces I didn’t remember. I wondered how many had been forged or extruded by software. How many times would Garrett profit from my famous murder?
But this show wasn’t about money—the sketches had been sent into the world to find me. Elizabeth, still furious. On the gallery website was a comment box, inviting people to share sightings of “the lost girlfriend.”
There weren’t many responses, and none took the prompt literally. There was a rumination on cults. A poem about someone lost. Appreciations of Hiromi’s life.
But one comment stood out.
My brother knew this girl.
I will find her, and end her.
—B
Bianca knew I’d sacrificed Xavier. Likely, she understood; she did not forgive. Some nights, I dreamed of blood eagles, red against a dark sky.
Another reason to keep moving.
We left the country on a container ship, slow and anonymous. No company for a month except six crewmen; only two spoke English.
We climbed the containers every day. The precarious metal city swayed beneath us, stuffed with the dross of a hundred factories, a thousand spreadsheets.
“We should tell Care about you,” Sebastian said, halfway across the Pacific. We were on top of the tallest stack on a cloudy day, the breeze stinging with salt. It was the first time he’d said the name, a thousand miles from anything. “You haven’t stabbed me yet. They might trust you now.”
I nodded. I had so many plans to end my family.
“But first you’ll have to explain,” he said.
“Explain what?”
“Why Grandmother let you walk away. Why you’re alive. You never told me.”
I nodded again, but it took a while to start talking.
The ship had begun a course correction. The containers shifted and groaned beneath us, threatening to tumble into flotsam as I explained about Bellamy. Her cancer, our time together in the hospital. Our goodbye, the unsent letters left on my desk for the family to find.
The hug. The snap.
“Is that all?” he said when I was done.
I took a slow breath. “Yes, cousin. That’s all.”
Our last night in the Physics Lounge, he’d argued that murdering Crystal was justified, because it would make us safer—the same day he’d been blooded for killing a stranger. His flag pin had been in his pocket our last night in the library, and it was still there.
He didn’t understand.
“She was dying anyway, right?”
“Yes. It was triage.” Except it was Bellamy, who loved ampersands and Octopoda. Who was afraid of quicksand and slongers. Who, like Hiromi, had left me defenseless.
“So you did the right thing,” my cousin said.
I couldn’t look at him. The clouds were parting, the sunlight sparkling on the waves, unkindly sharp. I’d left my sunglasses in our cabin.
“Not sure Care will find it convincing,” he added.
My small murder proved nothing, except that I would do what was needed to save myself.
“They don’t need to know about me,” I said. “No one does.”
When we reached land, it took a week for the world to stop swaying. My balance returned, but other things were gone forever.
I no longer felt lonely when Sebastian was away. Whole days went past without me thinking of Hiromi, without smelling the rust and salt of that small room. Mozart became numbers and ratios again.
I wasn’t sure if I could cry anymore.
Empathogens were easy to find—MDMA, psilocybin, mescaline. But I could taste their sharp corners now, like the artificial flavors of cheap candy. Something bigger was missing than a few chemicals in my brain.
I no longer startled at loud noises. Each time Sebastian and I touched each other, fewer nerve endings fired, more strings broke.
Hiromi’s self-portrait no longer waited behind my eyelids.
One day in a cheap hotel, I tried to make a sculpture from feathers, flowers, and stones I’d found, but it was just a pile of things. Art was optional again.
Sebastian still looked at me with the flirty intensity of a rakish legacy boy, but he was searching for something that wasn’t there—the light Peter had been seeking when he burned the chapel down, or built his bombs, or gazed through a quartz window at the white-hot fire of the kiln.
We find a home in a mountain town, big enough to fade into, small enough to recognize our neighbors by sight. The spiders here are large, the lizards plentiful, and the birds sound oddly angry.
Sebastian and I don’t look like Mortons anymore. We wear synthetic clothes made by machines, bought from thrift stores, barely used. Sebastian’s beard obscures his beautiful jaw, and his curls conceal the scar Cyrus left.
He hides his personality, not making friends, not unleashing his laugh. He shrinks himself down, the way a Morton should while undercover.
He makes himself invisible, even to me sometimes.
We don’t have dogs. We don’t make our own bread.
We own a single piece of family clothing—the Oxford shirt that Sebastian was wearing the night he ran away. We trade it back and forth, whoever needs it most. It still smells faintly of Uncle Merwin’s laundry soap, sage and hard water.
One morning, after a month in our new country, Sebastian gives me a gift. A biscuit tin, full of dried leaves and flowers, finely ground.
“Is this tea?”
“More or less. I’ve been learning about the local plants. This should do the job in fifteen minutes. Painless.”
“But what for?”
“It’s been a year, exactly.”
He waits for me to understand. It’s early March. Back home the cherry trees will bloom soon, and Beatrice’s cows are giving birth. At Helshire, it’s time to study for midterms, the first Primal Scream less than a week away.
“Peter,” I say.
This is a gift to commemorate my blooding. A gift of poison.
Sebastian smiles. “They’ll let you back in, as long as you bring them something. Like my head.”
“Cousin.”
“It’s okay, as long as they don’t take me alive. Don’t tell me ahead of time. Just put it in my morning tea.”
He doesn’t drink coffee anymore. He has trouble sleeping.
“You’re being dramatic,” I say. “What would I do without you?”
“You’d go home. Play with the dogs. Teach the kids.”
“They wouldn’t have me.”
Except that’s not true. Without Sebastian, the last remaining changes in me will unravel. I’ll become a true Morton again, cold and fearless.
That’s why he can’t abandon me and rejoin Care. I know too much and care too little. I’ll tell my family everything, betraying Regina, Bianca, Gertie, and Arabella; Sebastian will have nothing left but enemies.
Neither Mortons nor revolutions can tolerate loose ends. Neither of us can leave the other without destroying them.
I push the poison toward him.
“I’ll never use this, cousin. Maybe you should.”
“Maybe,” he says. The look he gives me is measuring—I am not afraid. “But we’ll both breathe easier, knowing it’s here.”
We keep it on the shelf beside the electric kettle.
Every morning, I make him tea before we work odd jobs, or research how to burn down the freeports, or go on a hike in the national park nearby.
And every morning I make a decision.
Do I remain with this beautiful man in this small, homely existence, well fed, aloof from the neighbors, always unmoored? Or do I choose today to go back to the embrace of my ancient, gracious, broken, glorious, cruel, everlasting family?
Every day, Sebastian looks at the tea I make him, then smiles, closing his eyes.
With all the recklessness of hope, he drinks the tea.