I still cried at unexpected times, thinking of Sebastian, his head bleeding, running into the darkness. Had he made it to our hideaway on the other side of Albany? I worried about my fellow caretakers, the girls on my hall, even Faraday. Mostly I thought about the last six months—the clues I would’ve seen, if I hadn’t been such an eager little prodigy.
Culling Peter at Helshire had never made sense. It put the Morton name in the newspapers. It brought police onto campus.
Then came the assignment in New York: taking control of a cult by seducing the founder’s favorite artist. An oblique approach, even by Garrett’s standards. The real goal had been making me care about Hiromi.
So they could shatter me.
Arabella had caught a glimpse:Those sparks in your brain aren’t because of who she is, butwhatshe is.
Sparks in my brain—is that all those feelings were?
Grandmother thought they’d go away, now that she’d cut off my pills. But Hiromi was dead, Sebastian gone, and the sparks were still with me.
After the murders in the Catskills, more clues: Cyrus, letting me sleep in a moving car without a seat belt. The crash, close enough to home to put me in a hospital we controlled. The pills, for seizures I didn’t remember.
The elders hadn’t debriefed me after New York. Hadn’t acknowledgedthe changes in me, as if the whole family had somehow missed my tears, my shaking hands.
I wondered if Mary was in on the plan, her mors curae another jolt to my reality. Or was Mary just being…Mary?
Not that it mattered. She was Mary either way.
There was only one real question left.
“Why me?” I asked, when Grandmother Elizabeth next came through the door. “I was everything you wanted a Morton to be. Why break me?”
She nodded at this, and placed the jar of cookies she’d brought on my bedside table. “Because of your fault lines. We knew you would break cleanly.”
“Fault lines? I was perfect.”
“Your mother in bed,” she said, and sat in the overstuffed chair. “Your father with an axe.”
“My father,” I repeated, the words landing like a blow—that was the day I’d become the savior of my generation. My true blooding. But for the rest of the family, it had made me a ticking bomb. Something to be disposed of. “You never trusted me?”
Grandmother’s needles began to dance. “We trust you completely, Jessica. We chose you for this assignment because we knew—and still know—that you will come back to us. Sooner or later, you will be one of us again.”
“Because I’m not taking the pills anymore.”
She lifted the lid from the cookie jar. “Because every prodigal returns home in the end, repentant.”
I took a breath, and smelled the fresh cookies, buttery to the touch. I felt the soft cotton against my skin, and knew the dogs were somewhere within a mile or two, tumbling over each other, covered in autumn leaves.
I knew what it smelled like outside—the junipers, the hay bales after last night’s rain, the late-blooming Arkansas Blacks, darkening and sweetening as they ripened.
She was right. I was still a Morton.
“Except now I see what we are,” I said.
“And what is that?”
“Servants of the system. We maintain the world as it is, when it needs to change. We let the Wilbert-Lees make ruin.”
“You haven’t paid attention,” she said. “We’ve shut down their federal prison contracts, and quietly moved their money into renewables. As an eternal family, we care about the future.”
“Renewables?Faraday killed someone.Wemade her like that.”
For a moment, I heard the storm again. Felt the weight of Crystal’s sodden body, smelled her piss mixed with the spice rack in Faraday’s pantry.
“Speaking of that incident,” Grandmother said, “I have another gift for you.”
