The biggest tapestry showed a tenth-century longboat beached on the coast of Newfoundland—Lindqvist propaganda. They had in fact arrived with all the other Swedes: in Minnesota, less than two hundred years ago.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“The Senior Uncommons,” came a voice. Bianca Lindqvist sat in one of the armchairs, facing away.
“Didn’t you graduate?” I asked.
“Once a Hellion, always a Hellion,” she said, turning her chair around. “Tradition demands my presence.”
I looked at Sebastian. He gestured toward a couch in a dark corner, where three more alums sat, wineglasses in their hands. Hendrik Wolvaardt, Divya Seth, and my cousin Arabella.
One graduate from each family. An assembly of Care.
“You have your own fuckinglounge?”
Bianca laughed. “Just don’t burn this one down.”
I wondered how she was part of this—the petty vengeance of herHefnd didn’t seem very careful. Divya Seth was another surprise: When she’d broken her cousin Kumar’s wrist in Disruptive Anatomy, she’d barely shrugged. Only Hendrik Wolvaardt, with his fascination for ordinary history, made sense here.
That left Arabella, the last Morton to graduate from Helshire.
She put her wineglass aside and came closer. The others watched in silence, as if some kind of ritual had begun.
“Jessica Morton,” she began. “When did you first realize?”
It was like Cyrus asking Peter’s riddle—I had no idea what she meant.
“When did you first realize,” Arabella repeated, “that our family was wrong?”
Wrong…the Mortons were wrong.
We stripped our kids of empathy. We made them kill their pets. We put butterfly clips on their fingertips, and cayenne water in their eyes.
Mortons went to bed and never got up again. We staggered into the woodshed and slaughtered.
We raised up the worst of the powerful. We hoarded our treasure instead of feeding the hungry. We let the world burn, when if anyone could put out the fires, it was us.
My birthright was horror, and I had embraced it.
“When did you know?” Arabella asked again.
“When Grandmother told me to kill”—my voice faded, but the name breathed out—“Hiromi Kennedy.”
“Why was that wrong?”
“Because she wasn’t prey.”
“What was she?”
Her hands in my hair. The scent of strange candy on her lips. “She was someone I loved, and Grandmother made me pretend that didn’t matter.”
“Our family taught you that a lot of things didn’t matter.”
I thought of my namesakes in the Little Graveyard. Of Rabbit, sniffing the naked blade of the razor. His trusting eyes.
I thought of Peter.
“Yes. All of them mattered.”
