Uncle Max tried to bolt from Gertie’s lap, but she was ready for him. Her fingers dug into his fleshy sides.
A long, greedy moan unspooled from the cat’s mouth. A sound that could have passed, in a dark room, for human.
The mouse squirmed, swung.
“Take care, cousin,” Gertie said as I turned away. “With Peter gone, there’s only three of us left.”
There were, in fact, only three Mortons at Helshire now.
The small size of my generation sometimes led the other families to think we were in decline. But it was only a passing shortfall, the result of events a decade earlier—one of our family secrets.
Sebastian and I were ten years old. It was the dead of winter, a week after an ancient family tradition, Quilting Day.
Uncle Max was coming home from an assignment, something to do with children, gone messy. He was about to turn forty. In Psych 101, we learned that ordinaries find round-numbered birthdays stressful. Uncle Max was no ordinary, but he turned out to be very unMorton as well.
He didn’t tell anyone he’d arrived in Upper Falls, just walked from the train station to the estate in the January cold. He came straight to the woodshed, where we kids were learning how to pick locks from Aunt Agnes.
Uncle Max came in, calmly took one of the axes from the wall, and killed Agnes with a blow to the back of her head.
The woodshed has only one door, no windows. My cousins Yvonne and Tobias tried to get past Uncle Max, but he stopped them both with a single swing. Tobias was dead instantly, and Yvonne sunk down in the doorway, staring at her left hand on the floor. At some point she crawled off into the woods to bleed out.
The rest of us crowded into the back of the shed, yelling for help, trying to barricade ourselves behind the long tables covered with locks and clockwork. Peter was frozen, his arms tight around Mister Fluffernutter, so I took the throwing knife from his boot. But Sebastian told me we needed something bigger.
I handed him the knife and looked at the padlocks on the table.
The two biggest were grade-four Abloys, their stainless steel as shiny as mirrors. I clicked their shackles together and picked them up.
Three pounds of metal.
By this time, five more of our cousins were dead—Zachary, Tillie, Ramsey, Katie, Olive—and Uncle Max had lost his stone-cold calm. Blood covered his axe, his arms, his bared teeth, the walls, the wooden floor.
He was coming at the five of us.
I’d spent the autumn practicing with a sling, and took a full wind up before I threw the padlocks at Uncle Max’s face.
They shattered his mouth, flattened his nose. A handful of teeth skittered across the floor like dice.
We rushed the door, Gertie in the lead, Peter still holding Mister Fluffernutter. Then Thomas, who left Doctor Pickle behind and had to start over with a new rabbit. Sebastian and I came last, with him pausing to stab Uncle Max’s hamstrings.
Uncle Max limped after us to the archery range, where Arabella, only fifteen, became the first Morton blooded with a bow in half a century.
The next day, Garrett came back from New York to teach us how to pick locks and peel eggs, and the woodshed smelled like sulfur for a year.
That was when Sebastian and I began to be spoken of in the same breath. We were not only the prodigies of our generation but its saviors. Me with my perfect throw, Sebastian covering our retreat. After that day, however, I had to work even harder to prove myself.
Uncle Max was my father, you see.
We Mortons can be quite lax with family terms.
13
Sebastian was missing that afternoon, not at the archery range, nor in the Commons. My texts went unread.
I didn’t like my cousins knowing more about Peter than I did, not with his blood on my hands.You’re such a simple girl. That’s why no one tells you anything.
I wound up back at Lavernick, reading borrowed Behavioral Econ notes in the Sun Parlor, letting the reassuring math sink into me—impulsive behavior in a crisis. The neuroeconomics of childhood hunger. Optimal consumption in addicts.
Human beings weren’t always rational, but their disarray could be predicted. Any pattern, observed enough times, gained its own logic, like a certainty forged in the muscles by throwing a knife a thousand times.
