by Olivie Blake
Tristan curled a fist. “I’m not a—”
“Not what? A victim? You are,” Callum interrupted, “but of course you can’t allow the world to call you that.”
“Is that judgment? An accusation?”
“Not at all. Your father is a violent man,” Callum said. “Ruthless and cruel. Demanding, exacting. But the worst of it is that you love him.”
“I hate my father. You know this.”
“It’s not hate,” Callum said. “It’s corrupted love, twisted love. Love with a sickness, a parasite. You need him in order to survive.”
“I am a medeian,” Tristan snapped. “He’s a witch.”
“You are only anything because you came from him,” Callum said. “Had you been raised in a loving home, you would not have been forced to see a different reality. Your magic might have accumulated in some other way, taking some other form. But you needed to see through things, because seeing them as they were was far too painful. Because seeing your father for the whole of what he was—a violent, cruel man whose approval you still need more than anything on earth,” Callum clarified, and Tristan flinched. “That would have killed you.”
“You’re lying. You’re—” Tristan turned away. “You’re doing something to me.”
“Yes, I am,” Callum said, setting aside his glass as he rose to his feet, coming closer. “This is what you would feel if I were manipulating you. I’m doing it now. Do you feel this?” he asked, closing a hand around the back of Tristan’s neck and turning the dials up on Tristan’s sorrow, his emptiness. “Nothing hurts like shame,” Callum murmured, finding the ridges of Tristan’s love, riddled with holes and brittle with corrosion. His many pockets of envy, desire; his madness equating to want.
“You want his approval, Tristan, but he will never give it to you. And you can’t let him die—not the real him, not even the idea of him—because without him, you still have nothing. You are seeing everything as it truly is and still, do you know what you see?”
Tristan’s eyes shut.
“Nothing,” Callum said, as a sound left Tristan’s mouth, bitterly wounded. “You see nothing. Your ability to understand your power requires accepting the world as it is, but you refuse to do it. You gravitate to Parisa because she cannot love you, because her contempt for you and everyone feels familiar, feels like home. You gravitate to me because I remind you of your father, and truthfully, Tristan, you want me to be cruel. You like my cruelty, because you don’t understand what it is, but it entices you, it soothes you to be close to it, just like Rhodes and her proclivity for flame.”
Tristan’s cheeks were moist, probably with torment. Callum did not enjoy this, the destruction of a human psyche. It was ashy, like rubble. Wreckage was so empty and unalluring, even when suffering was overripe. A sense of cusp; not salty, not sweet, but not neither. It was the peril of tilting one way or another, falling too heavily—irreversibly and irreparably—to one unsurvivable side.
“I am the father you didn’t get to have,” Callum observed aloud. “I love you. That’s why you can’t turn your back on me, even if you want to. You know my flaws but crave them; you lust for them. The worse I am, the more desperately you are willing to forgive me.”
“No.” It was no small amount of admirable that Tristan could speak, given what he was going through. “No.”
“The truth is I don’t want to hurt you,” Callum told him softly. “This, what I’m doing to you, I would never have done it if not to save you. To save us. You no longer wish to trust me,” he acknowledged, “I understand that, but I cannot let you keep your distance. You need to know what my magic tastes like, how it feels, so that you will recognize the absence of it. You need to know pain from my hands, Tristan. You need me to hurt you so that you can finally learn the difference between torture and love.”
Whatever remained in Tristan’s chest brought him to his knees, and Callum followed, sinking with him to the floor. He rested his forehead against Tristan’s, holding him upright.
“I won’t break you,” Callum said. “The secret is people want to break. It’s a climax, the breaking point, and everything after that is easier. But when it becomes too easy, people crave it more, they chase it. I won’t do that to you. You would never come back.”
He eased his touch, taking his magic along with him. Tristan shuddered, but it wouldn’t be immediate relief. He would have no release, and the fade was like a muscle cramp. Like a limb gone numb and then waking, pins and needles. Nerves twitching to life again, resurrecting. Pressure finding a place to fill.
“How,” Tristan began, and Callum shrugged.
“Someone in the Society has books on us,” he said. “Predictions.”
Tristan couldn’t lift his head.
“Not like an oracle,” Callum clarified. “More like… probabilities. Likelihood of one behavior or another. Charts and graphs of data, plus volumes of personal history, what drives us. What follows is a narrative arc of our lives, a projection. Most likely outcome.”
Tristan sank against his chest, and Callum pulled him closer, letting him rest his head there, feverishly returning to the stasis of his own soul.
“Yours isn’t the most interesting,” Callum told him regretfully, “but it does have some relevant details. Obviously I paid more attention to it than the others.”
“Why,” Tristan attempted hoarsely.
“Why me? I don’t know. I requested it on a whim, to be honest. To see what the library would give me. I wrote down Parisa’s name first, for obvious reasons.” Callum chuckled. “I should have known she would recruit people to her cause against me, and Rhodes was such an obvious choice. So hideously moral, so tragically insecure. Surprisingly acrobatic, though,” he offered as an afterthought. “Or so I can only assume, given your… encounters.”
Tristan said nothing.
“Her book predicts she’ll never come into the full scope of her power. Odds of 1/1, actually. Frustrating thought, isn’t it? She nearly wasn’t chosen for the Society because they couldn’t agree on whether she would, but in the end Atlas Blakely convinced them.”
He felt Tristan shift.
“Blakely hates me, of course. Wants me dead. Wiped out like the plague. Loves you,” he added, shifting to look at Tristan. “If I were you, I’d start wondering why.”
“What did it say—” Tristan swallowed. He could speak normally by then, but probably didn’t want to. “What did it say about—”
“This? The elimination?”
No answer.
“I know we’ve only been left alone this long because they are waiting for you to do it,” Callum said. “I know you chose the dining room because, not long ago, you slid a knife into your pocket. I even know,” he added, glancing down to where Tristan’s hand had disappeared from sight, “that your fingers have wrapped themselves around the handle of that knife right now, and that the distance from there to my ribs is premeditated, carefully measured.”
Tristan stiffened. The hand around the knife was strained, though it had paused.
“I also know it’s insurmountable,” Callum said.
Silence.
“Put the knife down,” Callum told him. “You won’t kill me. It was a good idea,” he added. “Whoever decided it would have to be you—Rhodes, probably,” he answered himself on second thought, and when Tristan didn’t deny it, he shrugged. “It was a good idea,” he said again. “But so deeply unlikely.”
Tristan braced, and Callum waited.
“I could kill you,” Tristan said. “You might deserve to die.”
“Oh, surely,” Callum said. “But will I?”
Silence.
Elsewhere, a clock ticked.
Tristan swallowed.
Then he shoved Callum away and slid the knife from where he’d concealed it in his pocket, tossing it into the space between them.
“You can’t kill Rhodes,” said Tristan hoarsely.
“Fine,” Callum agreed.
“Or Parisa.”
“Fine.”
Tristan’s mouth tightened. “And you’re wrong.”
“About what?” It didn’t matter. He wasn’t wrong.
“Everything.”
Things fell silent between them again. Exhausted, emptied, and probably in need of more healing than he realized, Tristan summoned his glass from the table, draining it in one motion of his head. Callum watched the sheen of wine lingering on Tristan’s lips, slick when they parted.
“So who dies?” Tristan asked.
Finally. For once, he was asking the right questions. Callum reached over to pick up the knife with one hand, observing it in silence. The flicker of the dining room flames danced along its edge.
“As it turns out,” he said quietly, and glanced up, meeting Tristan’s eye. “I kill you.”
Within moments, the silence was punctured by a scream.
VIII: DEATH
LIBBY
“Men, conceptually, are canceled,” Libby said to her knees. “This Society? Founded by men, I guarantee it. Kill someone for initiation? A man’s idea. Totally male.” She pursed her lips. “Theoretically, men are a disaster. As a concept, I unequivocally reject them.”
“If only you meant that,” drawled Nico, who was blindfolded for the moment. He grew easily bored, which Libby had already known, though it was different to have to actually live with it. She was starting to feel a bit of sympathy for Gideon, who had always looked exhausted during their four years at NYUMA. He must have had his hands full having a roommate who wouldn’t stop for anything, least of all the sun.
At present, Nico was throwing knives. Something about being prepared for any possible invasion, which Libby reminded him they already were. More likely he felt agitated about having a situation he couldn’t control, and therefore felt the need to stab it.
He held out a hand, feeling around the forces in the room.
“Levitate it,” he said. “The lamp.”
“Don’t break the lamp, Varona.”
“I’ll fix it.”
“Will you?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently.
Libby rolled her eyes, then focused on the forces of gravity surrounding it. She wished, not for the first time, that she could see things as Tristan saw them. She had never wondered before whether she should question what her eyes were promising her, but now it was all she ever did. She could feel Nico’s magic now like waves, invisible. He was stretching out his range, uncoiling it. He could tell where things were in the room just by filling it, taking up the volume of what he and Libby only saw as emptiness.
Relativity. In reality, there were pieces there, little particles of something that made up all that nothing. Tristan could see them. Libby couldn’t.
She hated that.
“Stop,” said Nico. “You’re changing the air again.”
“I’m not changing the air,” Libby said. “I can’t do that.”
Tristan probably could.
“Stop,” said Nico again, and the vase shattered. The knife remained in his hand.
“Congratulations,” Libby muttered, and Nico tore off his blindfold, giving her a look of total agitation.
“What happened with Fowler?”
She bristled. “Why does everything have to be about Ezra?”
Nico’s shrugged. “I don’t like him.”
“Oh no,” Libby lamented facetiously. “Whatever will I do without your approval?”
“Rhodes. For fuck’s sake.” Nico tossed the knife aside, beckoning her to her feet. “Come on. It’ll be like the NYUMA game.”
“Stop,” she said. “I don’t want to play with you. Go find another toy.”
“What happened?” he asked again.
Nothing. “We broke up.”
“Okay, and…?”
“That’s it.” Like she said. Nothing.
“Uh,” said Nico. He had a particular gift for making one sound mimic an entire musical performance about the interminable nature of suffering.
“What do you want me to say? That you were right?”
“Yes, Rhodes, of course. Always.”
Fair. She had walked into that one.
Libby rose to her feet on the basis of her own agitated desire to stand. The significance of it being a response to her own volition and not Nico’s command felt especially relevant at the moment.
“You weren’t right,” she corrected him sharply, though she was pretty sure it didn’t matter what she said. Nico de Varona lived in his own reality; one that even Tristan couldn’t make sense of, probably. “Ezra’s not… unremarkable. Or whatever it is you always say about him.”
“He’s average,” said Nico bluntly. “You’re not.”
“He’s not av-”
She stopped, realizing she was focusing on the wrong thing.
“You make that sound like a compliment,” she muttered under her breath, and Nico made a face that was equal parts shut up and also, I said what I said.
“The problem with you, Rhodes, is that you refuse to see yourself as dangerous,” he told her. “You want to prove yourself, fine, but this really isn’t the uphill battle you think it is. You’re already on top. And somehow, you don’t seem to see the unfiltered idiocy of choosing someone who makes you…” He paused, considering it. “Duller.”
“Are you finally admitting I’m better than you?”
“You’re not better than me,” Nico replied perfunctorily. “But you’re looking for the wrong things. You’re looking for, I don’t know. The other pieces.”
She made a face. “Other pieces of what?”
“How should I know? Yourself, maybe.” He scoffed under his breath before oppressing her with, “Anyway, there aren’t any other pieces, Rhodes. There’s nothing else. It’s just you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Either you’re complete or you’re not. Stop looking. It’s right fucking there,” he informed her, snatching impatiently at her hand and half-throwing it back into her chest. She glared at him and pulled out of his reach, vandalized. “Either it’s enough for you or nothing ever will be.”
“What is this, a lecture?”
“You’re a fire hazard, Rhodes,” he said. “So stop apologizing for the damage and just let the fucker burn.”
Part of her was annoyed beyond recognition.
The other part of her didn’t want to walk into the trap of taking Nico de Varona at his word.
So, lacking a conceivable response, Libby glanced askance at the broken lamp and reconstructed it, replacing it on the desk.
Nico, in answer, turned the desk into a box.
Whenever Nico did any magic, it always unsettled her. He was vast, somehow. She never saw the details of what he was doing; if the world’s materials were strings with Nico as the puppeteer, they were unidentifiable. Things simply were and then they weren’t, just like that. She never remembered it happening, even if she stared. It was a desk, now it was a box, soon it might be a chair or a swamp. Probably the desk didn’t even know what it had once been.
“What are you, then?” she asked him. “If I’m a fire hazard.”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe.” She returned the box to the form of a desk.
“It’s funny,” Nico said. “I wouldn’t have done any of this if they hadn’t come for both of us.”
“Why’s that funny?”
“Because of this place I’m a murderer,” he said. “Complicitly,” he amended after another moment’s consideration. “Soon to be.” The last was a conclusive mutter.
“Get to the funny part,” Libby suggested drily.
“Well there’s a stain on me now, isn’t there? A mark. ‘Would kill for _____,’ followed by a blank space.” Nico summoned the knife back to his palm, only of course it didn’t register that way. One moment the knife was cast aside, the next it was in his hand. “I wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t come here. And I wouldn’t have come here at all if it weren’t for you.”
She wondered if he blamed her. He didn’t sound accusatory, but it was hard not to assume that he was. “You were going to do it regardless, remember?”
“Yeah, but only because they asked you.”
He glanced down at the knife in his hand, turning it over to inspect the blade.
“Inseverable,” he said, neither to himself nor to her.
“What?”
“Inseverable,” he repeated, louder this time. He glanced up at her, shrugging. “One of those if-then calculations, right? We met, so now we can’t detach. We’re just going to always play a weird game of… what’s the word? The thing, espejo, the game. The mirror game.”
“Mirror game?”
“Yeah, you do one thing, I do it too. Mirror.”
“But who does it first?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Do you resent it?”
He looked down at the knife, and then back up at her.
“Apparently I’d kill to protect it,” he said, “so yeah.”
Libby summoned the knife from his palm, which in practice was more like it had always been hers.
“Same,” she said quietly.
She set the knife down on his desk that had briefly been something else.
“We could stop,” she suggested. “Stop playing the game.”
“Stop where? Stop here? No,” Nico said with a shake of his head, fingers tapping at his side. “This isn’t far enough.”
“But what if it’s too far?”
“It is,” he agreed. “Too far to stop.”
“Paradox,” Libby observed aloud, and Nico’s mouth twisted with wry acknowledgement.
“Isn’t it? The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me.”
They stood there a few seconds longer until Libby plucked the knife from his desk, stabbing it into the wood. The beams of the desk grew around it, securing it in place.
“We broke up,” she said. “Ezra and me. It’s over. The end.”
“Tragic.” Nico looked smug. “So sad.”
“You could at least pretend to be sorry.”
“Could,” he agreed. “Won’t, though.”