Hiromi shook her head. “Garrett and I are headed off soon. An arts festival on the Hudson.”
The buzzing inside me settled, just a little.
“Hope to see you again,” I said. “Maybe in New York.”
“Your Uncle Garrett’s pretty hot,” Faraday said when the three of us had found one another again.
“Not an uncle,” Sebastian said. “Not hot.”
“I thought you were lax with family terms!”
“Uncle and aunt are terms of respect. Garrett hasn’t earned it.”
Garrett was part of the family, but unblooded. After passing his mors curae, he’d never taken an assignment. Art and money were his mayhem.
“Harsh,” Faraday said.
“He was our dexterity teacher,” I said. “When we were little.”
“Dexterity?”
“Eggs,” Sebastian added bitterly.
Faraday looked confused.
Dexterity was the formal name for locks, safes, card play, and pilfery. Before every class, Garrett made us peel a hard-boiled egg in thirty seconds. If we left a nick or tear in the thin membrane between egg and shell, we had to peel another—and another, until we got it right.
When that got too easy, Garrett switched our eggs to soft-boiled. Iloved the daily practice, Sebastian did not, but it had given us both the fingers of Victorian pickpockets.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised when, twenty minutes later, I found the note Garrett had slipped into the breast pocket of my mother’s jacket.
We’re ready for her. Sky Room. 10 a.m.
I leaned close to Faraday. “Before we leave tomorrow, we should chat with someone—about Marlow.”
“The day after a funeral?”
“The best time. I’ll come get you for breakfast. Nine o’clock.”
“No phones, dear. How will we know it’s nine?”
“From clocks,” I said.
“Oh, those.” Faraday looked at me, a little cousin in the old barn’s hayloft, working up the nerve to jump. She was starting to see us Mortons for what we truly were, and to understand that she’d be throwing her family in with mine.
Houses. Horses. Tuition. Paris.
“As long as there’s coffee,” she said at last.
10
The next morning was unkindly sharp.
I’d run before going to bed, the night air an ice-rattle in my chest. But a few miles in the dark wasn’t enough to burn off everything I’d drunk.
I went into Faraday’s room and sat down on the bed, tugging her hair till her eyes opened.
“Oh, hi.” She yawned, looked at me in nothing but my shirt, and frowned. “We didn’t…do anything, did we?”
