“When did the whole thing with the birds start?” He turns his eyes from the dirt at our feet to the endless blue of the sky.
“I got a bird encyclopedia for my tenth birthday,” I say, stumbling over myself to change the subject. I’d almost forgotten—?that first encyclopedia had been from Juliet. I have a sudden picture of her eyes lighting up, pushing her hair behind her ears. She’d sent me on a treasure hunt to find it. “You would have liked it, actually. I had to follow a series of maps to get it.” Juliet had buried my bird encyclopedia under a tree. I looked at it so much over the years that some of the pages had fallen out of the binding.
I try to brush that memory of her away like an itch.
“Have you heard?” Phineas asks. “About the Stone?”
“No.” I toe the grass. “But I’ve been thinking—?what if the Disappearances could be made into something beneficial? I know you think you caused them, but I’ve been working on something—”
Phineas raises his eyebrows. “Don’t waste time with that. It’s not as important as the Stone. Just get the Stone.”
“Why?” I ask, my annoyance flaring. “Of course what I’m doing is important. Why do you care so much about the damned Stone all of a sudden?”
“Because.” His eyes are calm. “I’m dying, Stefen.” As if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
The air around me shrivels. I gape at him.
“That Stone might be nothing,” he continues, weaving a path back through the graveyard. “Just a piece of meaningless rock. But it might be much more than that. It might have the power to save me.”
As we walk back past my mother’s gravestone, I notice for the first time the space that’s been left there next to it. It is meant for him. My old anger at Juliet suddenly rages up, unchecked. Juliet, hoarding the very thing that could keep Phineas with me.
Phineas is right. The Virtues are secondary. And I am going to get that Stone from her.
Even if I have to rip it from her lily-white fingers myself.
Chapter Thirty-Two
When Miles was five—?young, but still old enough to know better—?he started knocking his drinking glass over. Mother was patient at first. Sopping up his tears first and then the spilled milk.
After a dozen more spills, though, she began to get mad. Made him clean up his own messes. Demanded that he stop being so clumsy. But spills kept seeping across the table as if Miles had brought them to life: rivers of water, moons of milk, paisley splashes of juice. He even broke a glass once when it rolled off the table and shattered in a cacophony of shards on the floor.
Mother became livid. He was clearly doing it on purpose. She’d threatened, in a moment of passion, to cancel his birthday. July 28. His favorite day of the year.
After that he’d gone three days without a single spill. Then Father had come home from work, and Miles, in his eagerness, jumped up from the table, sending his glass sailing. He’d frozen. Turned to Mother, his eyes full of fear. Because even though Miles was Mother’s favorite, there was a line you could not cross with Juliet Cummings Quinn.
But she hadn’t yelled that time. A line had been crossed—?for the first time, he hadn’t actually been trying to spill the glass, and it struck her as incredibly funny. She’d laughed, trying to smother it with a dish towel, and Father had come into the kitchen and loosened his necktie, his eyes crinkling and lighting up the way they did when she laughed like that.
I’m thinking of that when Miles brushes his hand against his glass on New Year’s Day and reaches to catch it just in time. I try to meet his eye, to exchange a smile, but he doesn’t look at me. It makes me wonder if he even remembers those days at all.
Will’s jaw faintly twitches when George pulls out a chair to stay for dinner again and volleys ideas to Dr. Cliffton over the table.
“Perhaps we look at something to do with Linus? Greek mythology?”
“Or the Chinese? Ling Lun?”
“Ah, yes, bamboo pipes?”
“Could you pass the rolls?” Will says.
“Did you see in Father’s letter about the pineapple spigots?” I ask Miles, trying to draw him out. He doesn’t look at me, so I turn to Will. “They stopped at a pineapple factory in Hawaii and filled up glasses of juice in spigots straight from the wall.”
“Hawaii,” Will says, his eyes lightening. “I wonder what it’s like there.”
Miles glares at me. “That letter came weeks ago.”
He bangs his spoon down and leaves the table. I flinch at the distant sound of his door slamming.
“Sorry,” I mutter. He and his moods, just like Mother’s. I stand to follow him, but Mrs. Cliffton says, “Perhaps I should go,” and folds her napkin on the table.
Will turns his attention to George. “Are you doing something for the Sisters Tournament?” he asks, interrupting his father mid-sentence. I pass him the dish of latticed pear tart, and he thrusts it at George without even looking at it.
“Variant Innovation,” George says, his mouth full. He shovels food onto his fork. He’s been talking so much he’s barely touched it. “You’re playing ball?”
Will gives a short nod. “So what did you invent?”
George swallows. “Really I haven’t had much time to work on it. This,” he says, gesturing toward Dr. Cliffton’s library, “seems more important.”
“Yes,” Will says, “I suppose it does.” He abruptly pushes out his chair and leaves the table.
Then it is just me, eating pear tart, silently listening to George and Dr. Cliffton, who don’t seem to notice that everyone else has left. But I understand why the Variant consumes them. I feel it, too—?as though everyone’s attention has turned toward the Clifftons’ house in a spotlight of expectation.
Snow falls quietly beyond the window, blanketing Sterling.
We’ve been back at school for only three days when Mrs. Cliffton draws me aside an hour before dinner. She’s smiling, but there is something in the tightness around her mouth that causes me to tense.
“Aila!” Her voice is bright, but she twirls her wedding ring around on her finger like it is circling a drain. “Can I speak with you? Somewhere private?”
Fear steals my voice. I nod, and lead Mrs. Cliffton to my room.
Mrs. Cliffton closes the door behind us. “What I need to say is a little difficult.”
I sit down on the edge of my bed. “What is it?” My mouth tastes like paper.
Father. Please don’t let it be about Father.
“I met with Miles’s teacher today,” Mrs. Cliffton says. “I’m afraid that he has been . . . causing some trouble at school.”
“Oh,” I breathe, my panic falling from me like a blanket. “This is about Miles.” I take a deep breath to slow my pounding heart, and my alarm shifts to annoyance. “What kind of trouble?”