I took a slow breath. “Yes, cousin. That’s all.”
Our last night in the Physics Lounge, he’d argued that murdering Crystal was justified, because it would make us safer—the same day he’d been blooded for killing a stranger. His flag pin had been in his pocket our last night in the library, and it was still there.
He didn’t understand.
“She was dying anyway, right?”
“Yes. It was triage.” Except it was Bellamy, who loved ampersands and Octopoda. Who was afraid of quicksand and slongers. Who, like Hiromi, had left me defenseless.
“So you did the right thing,” my cousin said.
I couldn’t look at him. The clouds were parting, the sunlight sparkling on the waves, unkindly sharp. I’d left my sunglasses in our cabin.
“Not sure Care will find it convincing,” he added.
My small murder proved nothing, except that I would do what was needed to save myself.
“They don’t need to know about me,” I said. “No one does.”
When we reached land, it took a week for the world to stop swaying. My balance returned, but other things were gone forever.
I no longer felt lonely when Sebastian was away. Whole days went past without me thinking of Hiromi, without smelling the rust and salt of that small room. Mozart became numbers and ratios again.
I wasn’t sure if I could cry anymore.
Empathogens were easy to find—MDMA, psilocybin, mescaline. But I could taste their sharp corners now, like the artificial flavors of cheap candy. Something bigger was missing than a few chemicals in my brain.
I no longer startled at loud noises. Each time Sebastian and I touched each other, fewer nerve endings fired, more strings broke. Hiromi’s self-portrait no longer waited behind my eyelids. One day in a cheap hotel, I tried to make a sculpture from feathers, flowers, and stones I’d found, but it was just a pile of things. Art was optional again.
Sebastian still looked at me with the flirty intensity of a rakish legacy boy, but he was searching for something that wasn’t there—the light Peter had been seeking when he burned the chapel down, or built his bombs, or gazed through a quartz window at the white-hot fire of the kiln.
We find a homein a mountain town, big enough to fade into, small enough to recognize our neighbors by sight. The spiders here are large, the lizards plentiful, and the birds sound oddly angry.
Sebastian and I don’t look like Mortons anymore. We wear synthetic clothes made by machines, bought from thrift stores, barely used.Sebastian’s beard obscures his beautiful jaw, and his curls conceal the scar Cyrus left.
He hides his personality, not making friends, not unleashing his laugh. He shrinks himself down, the way a Morton should while undercover.
He makes himself invisible, even to me sometimes.
We don’t have dogs. We don’t make our own bread.
We own a single piece of family clothing—the Oxford shirt that Sebastian was wearing the night he ran away. We trade it back and forth, whoever needs it most. It still smells faintly of Uncle Merwin’s laundry soap, sage and hard water.
One morning, after a month in our new country, Sebastian gives me a gift. A biscuit tin, full of dried leaves and flowers, finely ground.
“Is this tea?”
“More or less. I’ve been learning about the local plants. This should do the job in fifteen minutes. Painless.”
“But what for?”
“It’s been a year, exactly.”
He waits for me to understand. It’s early March. Back home the cherry trees will bloom soon, and Beatrice’s cows are giving birth. At Helshire, it’s time to study for midterms, the first Primal Scream less than a week away.
“Peter,” I say.
This is a gift to commemorate my blooding. A gift of poison.
