Maybe we were all losing him.
I remembered something that had happened a year after his adoption.
We were out past the Barrow Marsh. I was teaching him, Katie, andGertie which mushrooms were dinner and which were useful poisons. The chapel bell began to ring—the call to a family meeting.
Sebastian had never heard the bells before. I explained to him that I had to go, and he had to stay with Katie and Gertie. They still had rabbits in their arms; Sebastian hadn’t even chosen Ratface yet.
He pleaded with me to let him come.
“You can’t,” I said. “You aren’t one of us yet.”
He looked like I’d punched him. “Please.”
“They’d just throw you out.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t done a mors curae.” And then, “You’d understand…if you were one of us.”
Sebastian started to plead, to grovel. He began to cry.
I’d seen him lose control a hundred times since he’d arrived. Anger, frustration, sudden violence, but never tears, even in Uncle Cyrus’s pain classes. Crying had always confused me. The blubbering, the hiccups, the snot—it was preposterous.
In that moment, though, some part of me enjoyed watching Sebastian fall apart. It proved that he valued us, and specifically me. It showed that, even though he was already as good a fighter as me, and more resistant to pain than any of us, he was the vulnerable one.
It showed me that I was still the best.
Sebastian cried so hard the dogs came to see what the ruckus was about. But I only gave him my mother’s empty stare. In the end, I left him standing in the field, framed by two confused children and their squirming rabbits.
That night at dinner, I expected him to be ashamed, humiliated. Maybe Gertie and Katie would tease him, and I would be a good mentor and shut them down. But they all acted as if nothing had happened. When I mentioned it to Gertie the next day, she pretended not to know what I was talking about—she had allied herself with Sebastian. With his charm, his politicking, he had erased his moment of weakness.
Now, in this hotel bed, I realized that Sebastian had been left out again—from knowing what had happened to Peter. I wondered if, this time, he’d decided to erase me.
The alarmdragged me from a thick sleep.
The window was radiant, the city’s machinery framing the dark rectangle of Central Park. From this height, I could name the streets and avenues by sight—all those hours of memorizing maps before my nightwalks.
I stretched out, focusing on my arms, legs, and core. My first wrack had left me hobbling for days.
At 3:20 a.m. precisely, I put on my hat and went out into the hallway.
There was no one in sight, no sound but the low hum of air through the vents. But when I rounded a corner, Thomas and Uncle Orrin waited at the door of room 1507. Behind them, Arabella came down the corridor, her ski mask already on. Uncle Harold arrived last, looking older than the last time I’d seen him. He wore surgical gloves and carried a weighted blanket.
The wrack was all here.
Orrin handed Arabella a hotel card key, and she crept in first.
The silence held, and the rest of us filed into the darkness.
The target was sleeping on his side, half curled, gently snoring. His luggage was open on the couch, dress shirts splayed across the velvet settee. The suite was the mirror image of mine, but messy, like the dorm rooms of ordinaries at Helshire.
We arranged ourselves around the bed—me at the target’s left arm—and waited for Uncle Orrin to give the nod.
I felt it then, that collective animal of Mortons gathered on a mission. The bonds of training and tradition, of loyalty without care. And then the signal came.
Each of us grabbed one limb and pulled, splaying the target out on his back. He stared up at the ceiling with startled eyes.
Before the man could scream, Uncle Harold dropped the weighted blanket over his face. A thin sound rose up through the layers of Kevlar and glass beads, as muffled as a TV in the next room.
