“What do you mean?”
No more secrets. “Peter had a way to balance his ledger: putting Ashton Hale in his debt.”
“Grandmother would have been delighted,” Sebastian said slowly.
I unbuttoned my raincoat.
He reached out, his fingertips brushing my collarbone inside my mother’s jacket. A gout of flame arced into the sky behind him, but our eyes stayed locked. All the noise and fury of that brilliant night wrapped around us.
He tugged the jacket open, revealing the lining underneath. Morton red. “You wore this at his funeral.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He didn’t fall.”
“No.”
There was a long silence, except for the rain, the distant screaming,the explosions. The angry machine, tearing itself apart, burning down the past.
Anger. Vengeance. Hefnd.
“Bianca will guess,” he said.
“I want her to. Peter’s dead because of their bullshit games.”
Sebastian started to tremble in the cold. “But what if I’m next?”
“You’ll always be safe with us, cousin. You’re a prodigy.”
He turned toward the fire, his expression grim. Flares shot up through the holes in the roof, sputtering in the sky. He handed the umbrella back to me, buttoning his raincoat.
“No, Jess. That was always you.”
Part 3
Knife-Thrower
23
As the year drew to a close, we upperclassmen of Helshire gathered on the grassy slopes of the amphitheater for Spring Convocation.
The ceremony was full of Latin proverbs and oblique references to Peter—the inseparable skeins of tragedy and joy. But no mention of how the Old Campus had burned, a lightning strike on a recent rainy night.
A flock of starlings drifted from tree to tree as the provost spoke, restless observers. Faraday sat beside me, holding my hand and pressing iced coffee to her forehead. The Daisy Singers performed the alma mater, its martial lilt turned slow and tender, an elegy for those soon to depart, and one never to return.
That night, Faraday and I went to the Terrace Burn, to watch old textbooks, broken furniture, and thesis notes disappear into an ever-growing bonfire. It was wasteful and exhilarating, the heat pushing us back until the circle was a hundred feet across.
I shared the celebratory flask Aunt Veronica had sent: milk-washed gin and nocino, like burned walnut pie with ice cream. Dessert after a year-long meal.
“Hey, look,” Faraday said, late in the night. “Your long-lost cousin.”
Sebastian walked toward us carefully, as if very drunk. He wore a crisp new suit, already more like a plucky intern than a Morton.
“I have to pee,” Faraday said, disappearing into the dark.
Sebastian hadn’t spoken to me for two weeks, since my confession inthe rain. He and I had promised no more secrets, and I’d kept the only one that mattered.
Now he didn’t trust me not to kill him, if the order came.
