But that was just misfirings in my brain, facial recognition neurons trying to complete a missing circuit.
“It’ll be easier without him,” I said. “Have the other families said anything?”
He pulled the shaft of bloodroot from the wildflowers. “At the archery range yesterday, Xavier Lindqvist asked if Peter was culled.”
Sebastian watched me as he said this. Sooner or later, he’d find out it was me. The thought gave me pleasure. Most Mortons didn’t get their first assignment until after graduation.
“He’s trying to get a rise out of you,” I said.
“Like you got a rise out of him?”
I rolled my eyes. Sebastian never let me forget my hookup with Xavier at the interfamily archery competition five years ago.
“He told me if Peter were a Lindqvist, they’d have culled him long ago.”
“Maybe we should have,” I said.
Of the four legacy families, the Lindqvists liked to think they were the most ruthless. The Seths, Wolvaardts, and we Mortons begged to differ.
Sebastian frowned at the bloodroot flower. “When I was little, I imagined a card with my name on it. One demerit, two demerits…until there was no room left.”
“It’s more of a ledger, pluses and minuses. We are, at heart, accountants.”
“That’s comforting.” Sebastian leaned back, the flower still in his hand. “But we wouldn’t have done ithere, right?”
“Don’t kill where you sleep,” I agreed.
“It’s just odd, him climbing solo like that.”
“You think Peter cared about safety?”
“He cared about showing off. Why do something stupid if no one’s watching?”
And who would Peter want to watch him, if not me? Part of me wanted Sebastian to figure it out. To see that I had been chosen as Grandmother’s instrument.
I shrugged. “Maybe he left something in the Physics Lounge.”
“His respect for gravity?”
I tried not to smile, but then Sebastian’s laughter bubbled up. His laugh was unlike any other Mortons’, breathless and unbridled, with a manic edge. At the Dining Commons, he would set off other tables, even when they hadn’t heard the joke.
After a week of making sad expressions, laughing with him was a relief.
When we were done, Sebastian cocked his head. The conversation in the hallway had gone silent. We weren’t melting into the background.
He shrugged. “Grief has many flavors, Mama Olga always says. As long as ordinaries seesomereaction, they fill in the rest.”
“And yet…” This was our laughter, not theirs.
Sebastian stood up. “How about a walk?”
“I’ll make a flask.”
Sometimes I wishedthat Sebastian and I hadn’t fallen into this rivalry. That we were allies—or more. The family wouldn’t stand in our way.
Me, a mingling of two ancient Morton lines. Him, a sharp-edged diamond in the rough, his biological parents imprisoned for crimes of operatic cruelty. On paper, we were only third cousins.
But there would be a price. Whoever made that first move would always think they’d won. Acquiescence was surrender. Consent, sinister.
