by Olivie Blake
She rolled her eyes and turned to the door, throwing it open and crossing the hallway to her room. She paused beside Tristan’s door, contemplating it, and wondered how he was doing downstairs. She didn’t expect it to be easy. Truthfully, she didn’t even expect it to work. The whole point of choosing Tristan to kill Callum was that Tristan was the least likely to do it, and therefore the whole thing was a gamble.
She thought of Tristan’s mouth, his eyes. The way it had felt to master something with his hand steady on the stillness of her pulse.
Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?
A pity she was so terribly risk averse.
Libby slid into her room and shut the door behind her, falling backwards onto her bed. She considered picking up one of the books on her nightstand but gave up before she even started. Nico was probably onto something, what with giving himself a task to preclude falling into a full-bodied state of waiting, but for Libby, there could be no distraction. Her mind only bounced from Tristan to Callum back to Tristan, and then briefly to herself, which gave her fleeting moments of Ezra.
So it’s over? You’re done?
He had sounded more exhausted than anything.
It’s over, she confirmed. I’m done.
It wasn’t a matter of anything changing between them so much as Libby no longer being the person she had once been. She was so fundamentally altered that she couldn’t remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn’t anymore.
She hardly even suffered guilt for what she’d done with Tristan and Parisa, because whoever Libby had been that night, she was different from that, too. That was some transitional Libby who’d been searching for a cataclysm, seeking something to shatter her a little. Something to wipe the slate clean and start over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She’d found it, decomposed, and moved on.
Whatever Libby was now, she was powerful with possibility. Helpless, too, with the knowledge of her own exceptionalism. Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it. She was enslaved by it. There was so much ego to the concept of fate, but she needed to cling to it. She needed to believe she was meant for enormity; that the fulfillment of a destiny could make for the privilege of salvation, even if it didn’t feel that way right now.
The library still refused her books. The subject of longevity in particular was denied; the question of whether her sister could have lived had Libby been better or more talented was repeatedly denied. It was like the whole structure of the library’s archives feared her in some way, or was repulsed by her. She could sense intangible waves of nausea at the thought that she wanted some knowledge she wasn’t meant to have.
She could feel it breaking, too. She could feel the way it would soon give way beneath her weight. It was just waiting for something, or someone. Waiting for whoever Libby Rhodes would be next.
Conservation of energy meant there must be dozens of people in the world who didn’t exist because she did. Maybe her sister had died because she lived. Maybe her sister had died because Nico lived. Maybe the world had a finite amount of power and therefore the more of it Libby had, the less of it others could reach.
Was it worth it to let that go to waste?
She could feel herself rationalizing. Half of her was full of answers, the other half full of questions, the whole thing subject to the immensity of her guilt. Killing is wrong, it’s immoral, death is unnatural, even if it is the only plausible result of being born. The need to soothe herself with reason buzzed around her head, flies to honey.
What would happen when Callum was gone? It was strange to think the wards around the house were imprints of past Society initiates, and therefore, in a sense, ghosts. One-sixth of the house’s magic belonged to people who had been selected to die.
When Callum had gone, would his influence remain?
It was Callum who had built the most integral defense into their wards. Libby and Nico had been the architects of the spherical shield, of course, but it was Callum who had created what he called the vacuum within the interior fabric of them. A layer of insulation, wherein all human feeling was suspended.
What replaced feelings when there were none to be had? The absence of something was never as effective as the presence of something, or so Libby had thought until then. She had suggested they fill the space with something; a trap of some kind, or possibly something nightmarish if Callum really wanted to build some sort of existential trap, but he disagreed. To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness, which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight.
Libby sat up with sudden discomfort, a little prick of worry. It wasn’t as if Tristan was powerless by any means, but maybe there was a reason Atlas had implied that Callum himself was something that should not exist. Callum’s power was always hazy, indefinable, but the effect of its use was unquestionable. He had taken a piece of Parisa’s mind and driven it to such anguish that she had destroyed herself rather than live with what he’d done.
Suddenly, Libby was aware of the chance they’d taken when they left Tristan and Callum alone together. It was a fight to the death, where only one would come out alive. If Tristan failed, then Callum would know. There was no going backwards, no halting what would come next. Callum would know they had come for him, marked him expendable in their ledgers of who deserved what, and for that there would be consequences. This, the two of them downstairs, was no different from two gladiators meeting in the ring, one of them doomed to failure.
She should not have let Tristan do this alone.
Libby sprang up from her bed and ran for the door, about to jerk it open, when something in the room shifted. The air changed. The molecules rearranged themselves, becoming cool somehow, slowing to a crawl. There was a foreignness to the room now, amnestic. It was as if the room itself no longer recognized her, and therefore hoped to crush her like a malignant tumor.
Was it fear? It wasn’t not fear, but she had been right about one thing in her conversation with Nico.
The air itself was different, and she wasn’t the one who had changed it.
Libby spun, or tried to. She felt her pulse suspend again, a thing that didn’t belong. Just to exist in the room was terrible enough, because she wasn’t meant to be there. There was no way to explain the sensation; only to feel it as a lack, an absence. She suffered it, her alienness, with the way her own lungs didn’t want to expand.
If she had caught it sooner she could have stopped it. If she knew where to find its source now, she could drag it to a halt. This was the trouble with her, a weakness she would never have known she had if she had never met Tristan. She could have all the power in the world, enough to rid the global population twice over, and still, she couldn’t fight something if she couldn’t see clearly what it was.
But it wasn’t total emptiness. Distantly, she could hear something.
Do you really even know what you’ve said yes to?
An arm wrapped around her waist, dragging her backwards, and the air in the room rushed back into her lungs at the moment she finally found the voice to scream.
TRISTAN
He almost didn’t hear her over the sound of his blood rushing, but it had been enough to make Callum blink. Enough for him to glance down at the knife in his hand and toss it away after looking at Tristan with visible disgust.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” he said, but Tristan’s adrenaline said otherwise. The knowledge of Callum’s face unmasked said otherwise. The reality of their circumstances said, quite firmly, otherwise. Tristan’s muscles ached, his entire body slow to reconvene its usual rituals of survival.
How would Caesar have made Brutus pay if he had lived?
“I’m sorry.” The words left Tristan’s mouth numbly, unevenly.
“Apology accepted,” said Callum
, his voice cool and unaltered. “Forgiveness, however, declined.”
The red light in the corner flashed, attracting both their attention.
“No one could have gotten through the vacuum,” said Callum. “It’s nothing.”
“Is it?” Tristan’s breath had yet to slow. “That’s not what it sounds like.”
“No.” Callum’s brow furrowed slightly. “No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t sound like that.”
He rose to his feet, exiting the dining room, and Tristan glanced at the discarded knife before shuddering, stumbling upright in Callum’s wake.
Callum’s stride was long and surprisingly urgent as Tristan followed him up the stairs.
“What is it?”
“Someone’s here,” said Callum without pausing. “Someone’s in the house.”
“No shit,” came Parisa’s voice around the corner. She was hurrying after them from somewhere else in the house, lovely and disorderly and wearing a man’s shirt over bare legs.
Tristan arched a brow in response to her appearance, and she gave him a silencing glare.
“I don’t understand how it happened,” she said. “The house’s sentience usually alerts me when someone tries to enter. I see he’s still alive.”
It took Tristan a moment to register that the last line had been said in his thoughts.
“Obviously,” he mumbled, and Callum’s eyes slid to his. Tristan didn’t have to look to know that Callum had understood perfectly well what Parisa had asked him, even without words. Even without magic, Callum knew.
He knew they had agreed on him to die, and now none of them would ever be forgiven.
They rounded the gallery corner to the rooms. Nico was forcing open the door to Libby’s bedroom, Reina at his heels.
“Did you—”
“No,” Reina answered Parisa blandly. “I heard nothing.”
“Who could have—”
There was a blast of something inconceivable from Nico’s palm as Tristan thought for the thousandth time, my god—marveling at the power they had, Libby and Nico; individually and apart.
Imagine having something so wild in your bloodstream. Imagine feeling something, anything, and seeing it manifest without the blink of an eye. Even at Tristan’s angriest he was nothing, only of any use to anyone when he was thinking clearly, seeing sense. No bombs exploded at the whims of his frustration, which made him ordinary. It made him normal; something he had tried his whole life not to be.
It was Nico who entered the room first, letting out a sound like a wounded dog in answer to the fading sound of Libby’s scream. The bitterness on Tristan’s tongue at the sound, however mystifying and incongruous it was to feel, was envy, because of course. Of course one pseudo-twin would suffer the other’s pain, the two of them in orbit to something Tristan would never grasp or understand. It was the same reaction as always: brittle unsurprise.
But what startled him properly were the others.
The sound from Parisa’s tongue had to be Farsi, though it was the first time Tristan had ever heard her use it. It morphed rapidly into French, but by the time her color had fully drained, she had fallen silent again. Reina, too, was speechless and pale, though she was often speechless. More alarmingly, it was the first time Tristan had ever observed her forcing her gaze away from something rather than boring holes in it, unrelenting.
Callum stared loudly. His expression was vocal, even if his mouth was not. He was saying things like how could this be happening and also, somehow, I told you. It was as if the hard look in his eyes was saying something to all of them that the rest of him could not: See? I was never your enemy after all.
Nico fell to his knees, shoulders folding in around his torso like he’d lost an organ.
“This can’t be real,” he said, and swore softly under his breath. “No. No.”
The four of them, one by one, had turned to Tristan, expectant. His brow furrowed, lips tight.
“Do we think it was the Forum?” asked Parisa after a moment, her voice like sandpaper. “They got in and out last time, didn’t they?”
“Could have been someone like Wessex Corp,” said Reina darkly.
“Someone should tell Atlas. Or Dalton.”
“Whoever did this, are they still here? In the house?”
“No.” Parisa glanced at Callum, who shook his head. “No. Not anymore.”
“I want answers.” The words, when they left Nico’s mouth, were explosive, juvenile with demand. “I want an explanation.”
“Does it count?”
To that, the others glared at Reina, who sighed loudly.
“Look, we were all thinking it,” she said. “Rhodes is gone. So that means—”
“The elimination is about sacrifice,” Tristan spat. “Death.”
The room fell silent.
“Is this not death enough for you?” Nico’s voice shook with outrage. The ground beneath them rumbled with it, but in answer, there was little Tristan could do but stare.
“How dare you,” Nico suddenly snarled at Tristan from the floor, leaking with toxicity that sparked mid-air. “How dare you—”
“Wait,” Tristan said. “What are you seeing?”
The others froze, stiffening.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
“It’s Rhodes,” Callum supplied, and the others flinched at her name, revulsed. “Her body on the ground.”
“What?” Tristan’s pulse quickened. “No. No, it can’t be—”
He felt the cool traces of Parisa’s presence in his head and shivered.
“He doesn’t see it,” Parisa said, sounding bewildered at first, and then astounded. “He doesn’t see anything.”
“Wait.” Nico scrambled to his feet, taking Tristan brusquely by the shoulder. “What’s there, then?”
“Nothing.” Not entirely true. There was an excess of magic in the room—volumes of it, impossibly swollen—but the air was empty of her. It was vacant of Libby herself, and that was the only thing Tristan could see or feel: her absence.
Libby was gone, clearly. Even her magic was gone from the room.
“She’s not there.”
“But she’s here,” Nico insisted raggedly, while Parisa, the first to manage a response, hastily bent down, brushing her fingers over nothing.
“This is… uncanny.” She stared down in awe. “The blood, it’s—” real.
Blood. No wonder they were all repulsed.
“There’s no blood,” Tristan said.
“No blood?”
He could feel their eyes on him, waiting.
“I told you, nothing.” Only emptiness. Only absence. Magic unrecognizable, belonging to no one. “But she’s definitely not here.”
“So it’s an illusion,” Parisa said, as Nico’s expression turned to a ghastly mix of concern and relief. “A really excellent one.”
“Professionally done,” Reina said, glancing at Callum.
It took a moment for Callum to process what she’d said.
“You honestly think I would abduct Rhodes and leave an illusion in her place?” he demanded.
“Your family is famous for their illusions,” Reina said. “Aren’t they?”
“I also know Tristan would see through it,” Callum snapped. “I’m not an idiot.”
“So someone outside the Society must have done it,” Parisa inserted quickly, rising to her feet again. She was barefoot, Tristan registered, and still thoroughly unconcerned with her appearance. “Only someone who wouldn’t know what Tristan’s specialty is could have done it.”
“Does anyone know—?”
“No,” Tristan said. Only Atlas had ever guessed the details, though he must have had to discuss it with the Society’s board. “I mean, maybe. But I don’t think so.”
“Could still be the Forum,” Reina said. “Or one of the other groups.” She glanced at Nico, whose face was pale.
“But why?” he asked, swallowing. “Why Rhodes?”
Reina glanced at Pari
sa. “Victim of circumstance?”
“No. This was planned,” said Parisa with abject certainty, just as Atlas entered the room behind them, Dalton trailing in his wake.
“What’s this? Wh-” Atlas broke off, staring. “Miss Kamali, your hands—”
Parisa glanced down, scrubbing them with disgust onto the shirt that was clearly not her own. It was comical, really, how Tristan wanted so desperately to see the carnage the others were seeing, even if they obviously wished to put it out of their minds.
For him there were only the traces left behind, which was oppressive. There were no fingerprints, no clear signature. Only the enormity of what was missing.
“It’s an illusion,” said Tristan. “It’s not real.”
Atlas frowned, glancing at him without conviction. “An illusion that powerful would take—”
“I know what it would take,” Tristan snarled, rapidly losing his patience with repetition, “and I promise you, it’s not there.”
It was the harshest tone any of them had ever taken with Atlas, though at the moment Tristan didn’t much care. That someone who could break into this house and take something inside it did not mean Libby Rhodes was still alive. The fact that she had not been killed in this room, or that this was not her body, was not, for Tristan, a comforting piece of information. Particularly not if whoever had taken her had the resources to do it in a way that could successfully trick all but one of the most talented medeians alive.
The look on Atlas’ face in response was carefully measured.
“I will have to contact the board,” he said. “They will need to know about this immediately.”
Then he disappeared, leaving Dalton standing alone in the doorway.
None of them particularly expected him to speak, though he did. “It’s not an illusion,” Dalton said, his tone blank and perfunctory, and Tristan gave a loud growl.
“For fuck’s sake, I’m telling you, it’s not r-”
“It’s not real, no,” Dalton confirmed quickly, “but it’s not an illusion.”
He waved a hand and whatever the others saw, they leapt back from the sight of it, Parisa stifling a scream as the traces of magic rose up in a thick blur, like heavy fog. Nico looked like he was going to be sick.