Sebastian held me tighter. “She shouldn’t be dead. That’s why we can’t be their instruments anymore.”
I shook my head, but didn’t pull away. “What are you talking about?”
“The world is run by fools,” he said. “People we would’ve culled when they were ten years old, except weput them in charge. Without us, the Belmonts and Wilbert-Lees would all be swept away. Our families prop them up, when they deserve to die. That’s why the world keeps getting worse.”
As I gazed at him, Sebastian’s words began to spill and tumble.
“He must have realized. He just picked the wrong targets—the kids are the ones who get it. Even you can see it now, Jess. He wasn’t mad. He figured out thatweare the root of the problem!”
“Who did?” I pleaded.
Sebastian took a deep breath against me, gathering himself.
“Uncle Max,” he said. “We built this system. We have to be the ones to burn itdown.”
Part 5
Hellion
51
Senior year began with forest fires.
They burned hundreds of miles away, in some remote corner of Canada, but covered our campus in a pall of smoke. The usual outdoor parties were canceled, and we wore masks walking between classes. Dead birds were found on the lawns and hockey fields. A rugby player fainted at practice.
“The world burns,” Sebastian told me on the fifth day of the blighted sky, “because we stoke the fires.”
I could see it now—our estates ran on renewables and rainwater, but the incorporated families traveled first class. We might float outside the law, but we maintained its systems of plunder with our strong hands, our sharp knives. We had the power to fix the world, and didn’t.
Care was the solution. Sebastian couldn’t tell me much more.
“How many of us are there?”
“More than you’d think. All legacies.”
“Who started it?”
“We Hellions. During the Cold War.”
Of course. With all four families sending their offspring here, the younger legacies had bonded and begun to question their elders.
“Is Hefnd part of it?”
Sebastian shook his head. “We don’t do random murders.”
So who did we kill? Corrupt politicians? Rampant industrialists?
What about our own elders? I’d gone from believing everythingElizabeth told me to wondering if the world would be better off without her. But slitting her throat was unimaginable.
Change of plan.
Sebastian wouldn’t tell me who our targets were, or who was in charge. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if Care was real, like he’d willed a revolution into existence as an excuse not to cull me. Or we’d invented it, a folie à deux, like everything that had unfolded since he’d seen me weep for Hiromi.
“When did you become careful?” I asked. It felt too dangerous to say the name aloud. Any word that contained those four letters would do.
Careworn, careen, caress.
“They recruited me in Albany. The epitome of a broken system.”
