“But it turned outIwas the best,” Gertie said, giving Uncle Max a long stroke of triumph. White fluff flew. “Better at tricking than you, Jessica, because you don’t understand how people work. Not even your own family! I’ve always known what will and won’t fly. You not telling the elders about Faraday going off the rails?That won’t fly.”
“She won’t do it again.”
A long laugh peeled out of her. “You’re soverysimple, Jessica. Faraday Wilbert-Lee was born and bred to go off the rails!”
I shook my head. “She’s my responsibility, Gertie. Not yours.”
“My point, exactly. You fuck up so rarely that you haven’t learned the rules—you can fail, but you can’t hide your failures. Secrets got Peter killed, not his bones or his bombs. They don’twantto cull any of us. Look at what I get away with! Because I give them what they need.”
“Forging property deeds and signatures,” I said. “Not my forte.”
I had many skills, but the thing that had always come easiest—being a Morton—was gone.
“Then give them something they need even more,” she said. “You and Sebastian, making little Mortons. There’s a shortage lately, or haven’t you noticed?”
“We don’t want the family’s attention.”
“Which is yourrealreason for protecting Faraday—you don’t want elders skulking around Helshire. Why not?”
I glanced at Sebastian. His eyes were wide with warning, but I pulled my hand from his. This had to happen now, not in a year.
We needed everyone.
“Gertie,” I said. “I’m going to ask you a question.”
She heard the change in my voice, and sat up straighter, giving Uncle Max a gentle shove from her lap. He flopped onto the floor and puddled there, content in his pool of sunlight.
“Fire away, Aunt Jessica.”
“When did you first realize,” I asked her, “that our family was wrong?”
57
“Gertie’s right,” Sebastian said as we walked away from Ogden Hall. “You have to report Faraday.”
I didn’t answer. Everything in the tower had exhausted me—the glares of the pod, Gertie’s long-ago manipulations, Sebastian spilling our secret.
But Gertie was one of us now. Another careless, careening scaremonger.
Sebastian took my silence as an argument.
“It doesn’t matter what Faraday says about you, Jess. Ordinaries always talk nonsense.”
I shook my head. “They’ll know it isn’t nonsense. I can’t even shoot an arrow straight.”
“All the more reason to follow the rules. Give them what they want.”
“Does that include us?”
He came to a halt, his eyes showing too much. I wanted to take his hand, but even under this pall of smoke, someone might see us.
“Gertie guessed,” he said. “That’s how she is. But no one else needs to know.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give them Faraday.”
Instead of us. This was ours, not the family’s.
But the thought of Orrin looming behind Faraday on a dark pathway made me sick. Somehow I cared about her too.
