As the target struggled, I leaned back on my haunches, my gloved hands firm around his wrist. He was strong, but my weight pulled his arm straight.
We kept him like that for a while—long enough that time became uncertain in the dark, marked only by the hum of the city, a few stifled cries and threats. I’d been part of a wrack only once before, my freshman year, a newly hired adjunct asking the wrong questions at Helshire.
It was hard work, keeping my grip, waiting for the next thrash of limbs. Fire began to build in my muscles, and pain along the arc of Sebastian’s stitch marks. Thomas, on his first wrack at only seventeen, was sweating through his mask.
Every few minutes, Uncle Harold checked the pulse oximeter on the target’s finger, to make sure the man hadn’t gone hypoxic. Once, Harold signaled Tom to wrangle a blood pressure cuff onto the right arm. As the cuff hummed, expanded, sighed, the target remained oddly still, as if cooperating.
Everything was within parameters. The six of us had become one mechanism, Mortons and target joined in perfect clockwork. My heart was steady, like in pain resistance class on sparking lamp day, feeling the milliamps course through my body, eyes locked with Sebastian’s.
Time suspended, until Orrin gave the next signal.
Harold pulled out a metal cylinder, a foot long, an inch wide, and came around to my side. He squeezed in beside me, moving with gentle certainty, like the time he’d pulled my shoulder back into its socket after a fall in the old barn.
The metal tube slid onto the left pinkie, and the man grew still, as if he knew the rest. Harold turned to Uncle Orrin.
We steadied our grips.
Orrin gave a nod.
In one swift motion, Harold turned the metal tube over, like throwing a switch. Thepopof the finger bone was audible, and I felt it in the man’s wrist muscles, like plucked strings. An infinitesimal scream pierced the weighted blanket.
When Harold pulled the tube off, the pinkie lay lifeless for a moment, pale in the dark, turned over backward. Then it squirmed a little, wriggling halfway back into place, muscles without bone.
There was no renewed struggle, just a series of convulsions, the scents of puke under the blanket, piss in the bed. Harold felt for a pulse again, eyes closed.
We held the target for another thirty minutes. He no longer fought us, except for an occasional spasm. Every time I looked at the pinkie, it had swollen more, puffing up around the nail like fresh bread.
Thomas held on bravely, but by this point he was on his knees beside the bed.
Finally, Uncle Harold tapped his watch. Half past four—the next security camera blackout was in ten minutes.
Harold unzipped a leather case, took out a syringe. He swabbed and injected the left arm. The rest of us held on for five more minutes as the paralytic took hold.
At last, we let go.
Groans and grunts slipped out from everyone. The muscles of my hands were burning, my knees sore from an hour of crouching. Uncle Orrin was pacing stiffly around the room, hands on his lower back. Tom sat on the floor, his back against the wall.
Push it under your feet. You’re just meat.
Arabella lifted the blanket to clear the target’s mouth of vomit. His eyes stared up at her ski-masked face, full of tears, agony, and a silent, curious measure of gratitude.
Orrin took out a small paper bag and sprinkled its contents over thebed. In the haze of reflected city lights spilling through the windows, it glittered like gold dust.
The dust was from Grandpa Dwight’s collection—samples of skin and hair from various murderers. He’d once dreamed of scrying the secrets of their DNA, but Elizabeth had put a stop to such nonsense. So we’d found another use, scattering the scrapings wherever Mortons gathered to commit a crime. They created legal doubt about our presence, and left a message for anyone investigating—we are many; more than you can know.
Soon we were out the door, leaving theDo Not Disturbsign swinging on the handle. We had six minutes before the hallway cameras came on again. I was on the street in five.
It had rained at some point, fresh air after the bodily smells of the wrack. The shiny asphalt reminded me of the target’s face, glassy with sweat and stomach acid.
Five blocks south, I tossed my hat, ski mask, and glasses straight into the snarling rear end of a sanitation truck. Three blocks after that, I turned on my phone.
There was a message from Arabella.
Look up, prodigy. You’re being followed.
33
I kept walking, eyes straight ahead.
