I shook my head. “They never really trusted me, not enough to meet the older generation.”
“Then who are the others in your class? One Lindqvist, one Wolvaardt, one Seth.”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“You are,” she said. “Once you become yourself again.”
I walked away from Grandmother and sat down on the bed. “This is me.”
“No, Jessica,” she said, in the singsong voice she used while handing out presents at Quilting Day. “You didn’t fall in love. There is no ‘in love,’ just a hallucination shared by fools. Like empathy, it’s a dream. All you have to do is wake up.”
“I loved Hiromi—beforeyou gave me those pills.”
“Like you love Sebastian now?”
My eyes shut.
Sebastian and I were each other’s oxygen. Who else could understood how we’d been built from dangerous parts, then broken into something new? We were ruined for anyone else—and, worse, we would ruin them. We were entwined from root to crown. Was that love?
When I opened my eyes, a single tear slid down my cheek.
Grandmother watched it with fascination. “How unfortunate he’s gone astray. We would have celebrated you two.”
“Just let him go. He never asked to be a Morton.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “I was there at the boys’ home, when we picked him up. He begged to join us. He answered every question perfectly.”
“You gave him a test?”
Grandmother nodded. “Your Aunt Olga asked, ‘Is it always wrong to kill people?’ And little Sebastian, perhaps thinking about his father, said, ‘Sometimes it’s very necessary.’ ”
“He hasn’t changed his mind about that,” I said.
Only about who needs killing.
71
Ten days later, Veronica put a bow in my hand.
The walk from my hideaway to the outside world felt like coming up for air. Veronica had led me down a dark hall and through a cement holding cell, then up a spiral staircase. At the top was a trapdoor that opened into a ramshackle barn.
Outside were the poppy fields, bound on all sides by razor wire and brilliant red and gold forest, the flowers dormant, the stalks blooded with fallen leaves. The mid-November upstate sky, the smell of goldenrod and pine—all of it familiar, but after weeks of isolation, also delicious and strange.
The poppy fields were off-limits to kids, but I’d explored this old barn with Sebastian once or twice. We’d never found the secret door, or the skylight somewhere out among the poppies.
Veronica had brought my fencing shoes and Merwin’s old hunting jacket—my favorite archery outfit. My bow and quiver had returned from Helshire.
As we walked, I tested the bowstring—newly braced. The arrows in the quiver weren’t Helshire standard issue, but Morton product, fletched with wild turkey feathers.
The archery range was empty, which was odd on such a perfect day. Our path had been cleared. I wondered how many eyes were watching from the trees.
Dogs, perimeter sensors, dozens of Mortons on call. Few places were more inescapable.
“Let’s see if your nerves are steadying,” Veronica said.
A test of my withdrawal from the pills, my return to the death of care.
I nocked an arrow, curious myself. Maybe all those strings of empathy had made me unsteady.
