I sat up. “Isn’t that your…”
He shivered with triumph, like after his curae, covered in rabbit blood, and placed the flag pin on the table beside the crow skull.
I should congratulate him, but my stomach twisted. “Who?”
“Upper Falls needs a new mayor.”
My panic slowed. Not someone who would haunt him. “Why? He’s always been so cooperative.”
“I was careful to make it look like an accident.”
It took me a moment:careful.My impatient cousin had performed his first assignment for Care.Make mine a big one.
The mayor, whose great-great-grandfather had signed a blank piece of paper. Who approved Morton construction projects, delighted in the blueberries we sent him every summer, and made sure that the Upper Falls police never crossed our property line.
His successor, the deputy mayor, was a sworn enemy. Uncle Cyrus had dispossessed her family of their land before I was born. The Mortons hated nothing more than conflict in our own backyard.
If they ever found out it was Sebastian…“Very careful, I hope.”
He beamed. “It was so easy, Jess. I knocked on his door and invited him for a walk—straight to the nearest cliff. He couldn’t say no. Not to a Morton. This is going to work.”
“What is?”
Sebastian reached out, snagged a bottle of Physics party wine from a side table crowded with plastic cups and molecular models. “Grandmother will never let me run for office. No Morton politicians.”
“Too much exposure.”
“That’s our weakness—we’re so afraid of being seen, all our power flows through the incorporated. Without them, we’re paralyzed.”
“So the plan is to push them off cliffs, one by one?”
He drank. “Think like an accountant, Jess. How would you burn down the Wilbert-Lees?”
I pondered everything we’d collected—bank accounts, property deeds, trusts. Copies of keys to houses, cars, safe-deposit boxes. Even her mother’s diary.
“I’d sell off their assets, empty the accounts. Set their houses on fire, after canceling the insurance.”
“What Arabella did to the Belmonts, more or less.”
I shut my eyes—the warehouse fire, the missing money, the brakes failing on the family car. The Belmonts’ disasters had been acts of Care.
Arabella had only stopped when our family started to suspect.
“But she didn’t ruin them,” I said. “You can’t empty every account without a bank employee picking up the phone.”
“Details.” Sebastian pulled away from me, stood, and walked to the windows. The lights on the footpaths below filtered up through the smoke, gleaming on his body. On his thigh was the old scar from crawling beneath the barbed wire in the poppy field. “That’s why we need you, and all the other young Mortons we can get. Uncle Max created a shortage of accountants, people who understand the system.”
He lifted one of the wooden molecular models from the side table.
Ms. Delicato was humming in my ear. Automate the transfers, divide them into smaller amounts for fewer security alerts. Get the money offshore, into shell companies only we caretakers could access.
We moved their money all the time—why not simply make it…disappear?
“Only Grandmother can access the Morton Trust,” I said. “We can’t steal from ourselves.”
“What do we bury in our basement? Gold?” Sebastian quoted, and dropped the wooden molecule on the floor, where it shattered into atoms that skittered in all directions. “The Mortons aren’t merely money. We are empire.”
“We’d rebuild,” I said. “But, yeah, it might take years, a whole generation. Do you think that fixes the world?”
