by V. E. Schwab
But what came next was a delicate maneuver.
“Mr. Shelton,” started Eli, contorting his face with an aspect of tightly controlled defiance. “Your daughter and I—”
The man held up a hand. “Before you play the noble card, and insist you can’t be bought, remember that you are both very young, and love is fickle, and whatever you have with Charlotte might feel real, but it won’t last.”
Eli exhaled, and looked down, as if ashamed. Let his features settle into a semblance of resignation. “What would you have me do, sir?”
“Tonight? Nothing. Enjoy your dinner. In a few days? Break things off. Pick one of those better schools. Chester, or Lockland. Transfer. The tuition won’t be a problem.”
“Boys!” called Mrs. Shelton from the kitchen. “Turkey’s ready.”
Mr. Shelton clapped Eli on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said cheerfully. “I’m starving.”
“Dad,” warned Charlotte when they met her in the dining room. “Did you put him through the wringer?”
“Just a little.” Mr. Shelton kissed his daughter on the cheek. “It’s my duty to put the fear of God into whoever you bring home.”
She turned her warm brown gaze on Eli. “I hope he wasn’t being too rough on you.”
Eli laughed softly and shook his head. “Not at all.”
They took their seats, the table falling to easy conversation—so much spoken, so little said—as they passed platters and bowls.
And as Eli and Charlotte walked back to their car that night, she slipped her arm through his. “Everything okay?”
Eli glanced back at the front door, where Mr. Shelton stood watching. “Yes,” he said, kissing her temple. “Everything’s perfect.”
XIX
TWO YEARS AGO
EON
ELI ran his fingers along the shelf where he kept the old case files. His own black folder sat like a stain at the edge of the row, a punctuation mark shifted to fit the growing sentence. Nineteen EOs tracked, hunted, captured, over a period of less than two years. Not bad, considering his limitations.
Eli had insisted on keeping the old folders, telling Stell that past work would inform future cases.
It was a partial truth—there were indeed patterns between EOs, shared traits, the same shadow cast over different faces. But the larger truth was simple: Eli found the markers satisfying. Not as satisfying as wrapping his hands around an EO’s throat, feeling a pulse falter and still beneath his fingers. But an echo of that old calm still accompanied each closed case, the pleasant sense of things askew being set right.
There was another facet to the collection, a grim truth laid bare in the sheer number of folders.
“What have we done?” Eli muttered to himself.
But it was Victor who answered.
“What makes you think we did anything?”
He looked up and saw the thin blond ghost leaning back against the fiberglass wall.
“The number of EOs,” said Eli, gesturing to the shelf, “it’s skyrocketed over the last decade. What if we did something? What if we tore something in the fabric of the world? What if we set something in motion?”
Victor rolled his eyes. “We are not gods, Eli.”
“But we played God.”
“What if God played God?” Victor pushed off the wall. “What if EOs were part of His plan? What if these people, the ones you’ve spent your life slaughtering, were supposed to come back the way they did? What if you’ve been attempting to undo the very work of that higher power you worship?”
“Don’t you ever wonder if it’s our fault?”
Victor tipped his head. “Tell me, is it blasphemy, or simply arrogance, taking credit for God’s work?”
Eli shook his head. “You’ve never understood.”
Footsteps sounded nearby.
The wall went clear.
“Who are you talking to?” asked Stell.
“Myself,” muttered Eli, waving Victor’s ghost away like a wisp of smoke. “I’ve been thinking more about that electrokinetic teen . . .” He looked up. Stell was dressed for fieldwork, his broad frame cinched into a reinforced black suit.
“How did the extraction go?” asked Eli, managing to keep most of the disdain out of his voice. He’d spent two weeks researching the EO—Helen Andreas, forty-one, with the ability to disassemble and rebuild structures with a single touch. Eli had given EON’s agents as much insight as he could, considering the confines of his situation.
“Not well,” said Stell darkly. “Andreas was dead when we got there.”
Eli frowned. EOs, despite their destructive tendencies, rarely veered toward suicide. Their sense of self-preservation was too strong. “Was it an accident?”
“Not likely,” said Stell, holding a photo up to the fiberglass. In it, Andreas lay on the ground, blood pooling beneath her and a small dark circle burrowed into her forehead.
“Interesting,” said Eli. “Any leads?”
“No . . .” Stell hesitated. There was something he wasn’t saying. Eli waited him out. After a long moment, the man finally went on. “This wasn’t an isolated incident. Two months ago, another suspected EO was found in the same way, in the basement of a club.” Stell slid both pages through the slot. “Will Connelly. We were still monitoring him, since we didn’t have enough data to construe the exact nature of his ability and assess his priority level, but we had suspected it was regenerative. Obviously not a power as efficient as your own, but something like it. At the time we assumed his death was a one-off, a run-in with the wrong people, someone to whom he owed a debt. Now . . .”
“Once is chance, twice, coincidence,” said Eli. “Collect a third, and you have a pattern.” He looked up from the paper. “The weapon?”
“Unregistered.”
“Keep the ballistics on file anyway. If he—or she—is actively hunting EOs, it’s only a matter of time before they strike again. In fact,” continued Eli, “pull every killing that matches this style of execution over the last . . .”—Eli considered—“three years.”
“Three? That’s an oddly specific number.”
And it was. Three years—that was how long Eli had been at EON. That was how long he’d been out of work. If there had been another hunter during his tenure, he would have known.
Which meant someone new had taken his place.
XX
SIXTEEN YEARS AGO
LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY
ELI arrived at Lockland nearly a week before the start of the spring semester.
He hadn’t picked just any school—if Charlotte’s father was picking up the tab, Eli intended to stretch the bill. Lockland was one of the best-ranked programs in the country. Now, he crossed the intimate campus, savoring the quiet stretches of lawn. It was a solid week before classes were due to start, and the place was luxuriously empty.
But his heart sank when he reached the dorms. He’d been hoping for a solo suite. Instead, he found a different setup: two desks, two beds, one window halfway between them. One of the beds was empty. On the other, a lean figure had stretched out, one arm behind his head, the other holding up a book.
At the sound of Eli’s approach, the book fell away, revealing a slim face, wolfish blue eyes, and lank blond hair.
“You must be Eliot.”
“Eli,” he corrected, setting his backpack on the floor.
The other boy swung his legs off the bed and stood. He was an inch or two taller than Eli, but all angles, edges.
“Victor,” he said, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Vale.”
Eli cracked a smile. “Name like that, you should be a superhero.”
Victor gestured down at himself. He was dressed in black jeans and a black polo. “Can you really see me in spandex?” The blue eyes flicked toward Eli’s single suitcase, the box balanced on top. “You travel light.”
Eli nodded at Victor’s own side of the room. “You came early.”
Victor shrugged. “Family is best in small doses.”<
br />
Eli wasn’t sure how to answer that, so he said nothing. The silence stretched between them, and then Victor cocked his head in a lupine way and said, “Are you hungry?”
* * *
VICTOR speared another piece of broccoli.
“So, what are you studying?”
They were sitting in a large dining hall on campus, the restaurant stations along the wall each a capsule of a food culture.
“Pre-med,” answered Eli.
“You too?” Victor stabbed a strip of beef. “And what brings you to the discipline?” His eyes flicked up and Eli felt . . . exposed. It was unsettling, the way that pale gaze bored into him. Not curious so much as cutting.
Eli looked down at his own food. “Same as most,” he said. “I guess I felt a calling. You?”
“It seemed like an obvious fit,” said Victor. “I’ve always been good at math and science, anything that can be distilled down into equations, cause and effect, absolutes.”
Eli twirled pasta on his fork. “But medicine doesn’t adhere to absolutes. Life isn’t an equation. A person is more than the sum of their parts.”
“Are they?” asked Victor. His expression was steady, his voice flat.
It was maddening—Eli was so used to disarming people, coaxing them into feeding him emotional cues, giving him something to play against.
But Victor showed no interest in playing.
“Of course,” pressed Eli. “The parts themselves—muscle, organ, bone, blood—make a body, not a person. Without a divine spark, without a soul, they are only so much meat.”
Victor clicked his tongue in disapproval. “You’re religious, then.”
“I believe in God,” said Eli steadily.
“Well,” said Victor, nudging away his plate. “You can live in the heavens. I’ll take the earthly sphere.”
A girl appeared, dropping into the seat beside Victor. “What have we here?” She mussed his fair hair with an ease clearly born of habit. Interesting. Victor didn’t strike Eli as the type to welcome casual contact, but he didn’t pull away, only favored her with a bored smile.
“Angie,” said Victor, “meet Eli.”
She flashed him a smile, and Eli felt like a mirror turned toward the sun, relieved to have a source of light he could reflect.
“We were just discussing God’s place in medicine,” said Victor. “Care to weigh in?”
“I’ll pass.” She plucked a piece of broccoli from his plate.
“It’s rude to steal food.”
“You never finish anything. Didn’t your parents teach you to eat your vegetables?”
“No,” said Victor blandly, “they told me to tap into my inner psyche and realize the truths of my potential. Vegetables never really came up.”
Angie shot Eli a conspiratorial glance. “Victor’s parents are self-help gurus.”
“Victor’s parents,” said Victor, “are hacks.”
Angie laughed, a small, affectionate sound. “You’re such a weirdo sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?” asked Victor. “I’ll have to try harder.” Those blue eyes flicked to Eli. “Normal is overrated.”
Eli tensed—a small, inward clenching that didn’t reach his face. Normal is overrated. Spoken like someone who didn’t have to work so hard at it. Who hadn’t needed normal to survive.
Victor cleared his throat. “Angie here is the brightest light in our engineering department.”
She rolled her eyes. “Victor’s too proud to fish for praise, but he’s top of the pre-med class.”
“But you haven’t heard,” said Victor soberly. “Eli here is going to give me a run for my money.”
Angie eyed him with newfound interest. “Is that so?”
Eli smiled. “I’ll do my best.”
XXI
TWO YEARS AGO
EON
“YOU were right,” said Stell.
Eli rose from his cot. “Don’t sound so disappointed.”
“We pulled the execution-style killings, then ran those deaths through our system to see if any of them had EO markers.” Stell fed a piece of paper through the slot in the wall. “Meet Justin Gladwell.”
Eli took it, staring down at the sparsely detailed profile, the mug shot of a man in his thirties with a two-day-old shadow. “Gunned down nearly a year ago. Abilities unknown. He wasn’t even on our radar.”
“They’re outpacing you,” said Eli, spreading the three profiles on his table. Justin Gladwell. Will Connelly. Helen Andreas. “Congratulations. You appear to have a new hunter.”
“And you,” said Stell, “appear to have a copycat.”
Eli bristled a little. He didn’t care for the idea of a surrogate. “No,” he said, considering the series of corpses. “I would have tailored their deaths to suit. Would have made it look . . . organic. This person . . .”—he rapped his fingers on the table—“is preoccupied by something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Eli, “that the killer clearly sees the executions as necessary, but I doubt it’s their sole objective.”
“We need to find this person as soon as possible,” said Stell.
“You want me to hunt a hunter.”
Stell raised a brow. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“On the contrary,” said Eli. “I’ve been waiting for a challenge.” He crossed his arms, studying the pictures. “One thing’s almost certain.”
“What’s that?”
“Your hunter is an EO.”
Stell stiffened. “How do you know?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Eli. “I can only hypothesize. But what are the odds of an ordinary human successfully executing three distinct EOs without the slightest signs of resistance?” Eli held Gladwell’s photograph up to the fiberglass. “A single, consistently positioned, point-blank headshot, in all three cases. A level of accuracy that means one of two things—either the shooter is an expert marksman, or the victims didn’t put up a fight. Blood spray suggests they were conscious and upright when they were shot. Which means they simply stood there. Do you know many ordinary people who could convince or compel a person to go so willingly to their death?”
Eli didn’t wait for an answer. He shook his head, studying the pictures, his thoughts turning. One week. Two months. Nine months.
“These killings are far apart,” he mused. “Which suggests that either your hunter isn’t very good at finding EOs, or they’re not looking for all EOs.”
“You think they’re targeting specific people?”
“Or specific abilities,” said Eli.
“Any ideas?”
Eli steepled his fingers.
Determining an EO’s abilities postmortem was an impossible task. Abilities were hyperspecific, informed not only by the way in which the EO died, but also by their reason for wanting to live. He could speculate—but Eli hated speculating. It was dangerous, and inefficient. Educated guesswork was still guesswork, not a substitute for firsthand experience. Paper clues could only tell you so much—look at Sydney and Serena Clarke. The same near-death experience—a deep plunge in a frozen lake—resulting in two wildly disparate abilities. People were individual. Their psychology was specific. The trick, then, was to aim for vague shapes. Focus only on the outlines, the broadest conditions, and collect enough of those that he could find the pattern, the picture.
“Give me everything you can on these three,” he said, sweeping his hand over the photos. “They may be dead, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have secrets to tell.”
Eli pointed at a box by Stell’s feet. “What are those?”
Stell nudged it with his shoe. “These,” he said, “are all the execution-style killings that fit the hunter’s MO, but not the EO profile.”
Humans. Of course. He hadn’t considered that the hunter’s scope might go beyond EOs. But that was because his own hadn’t. What a careless assumption. “Can I see them?”
The box was too big for the fiberglas
s cubby, so Stell had to feed the papers through, a handful at a time. “What are you thinking?” Stell asked as Eli set the ream of paper on the table.
The dots floated in his mind, shifting as he tried to find the lines between them. “There’s a pattern here,” said Eli. “I haven’t found it yet, but I will.”
XXII
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY
“TO see a world in a grain of sand . . .”
Thunder rumbled in the distance, the clouds flushing blue. It was the start of senior year, and after unpacking, they’d gone up on the roof to watch the storm roll in.
“. . . and Heaven in a wildflower,” continued Eli.
He lifted his palm until it seemed to rest just beneath the lightning.
“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand . . .”
“Honestly, Eli,” said Victor, perching on one of the folding chairs that scattered the makeshift patio, “spare me the scripture.”
Eli’s hand fell away. “It’s not the Bible,” he said testily. “It’s Blake. Get some culture.” He swept the bottle of scotch away from Victor. “And the point holds. There is no harm in seeing a creator behind the creation.”
“There is when you purport to study science.”
Eli shook his head. Victor didn’t understand—would never understand—that it wasn’t a matter of faith or science. The two were inextricable.
Eli took a cautious sip from the stolen bottle and sank into a second chair as the storm crept closer. It was their first night back, the first night in their new shared apartment. Victor had spent his summer avoiding his parents on some remote family vacation while getting a head start on organic chemistry. Eli had spent his at Lockland, interning under Professor Lyne. He cut a sideways glance at his friend, who was sitting forward, elbows on his knees, his attention seemingly transfixed on the distant lightning.
Initially, Victor had presented a dilemma. Eli Cardale’s persona, so carefully constructed over the last decade, found little audience with his sober new roommate. There was no need for a steady smile, affability, the practiced ease. There was no point to them, not when Victor seemed so utterly disinterested. No, disinterested was the wrong word—Victor’s attention was constant, acute—but the more charming Eli tried to be, the less Victor responded to it. In fact, he seemed annoyed by the effort. As if Victor knew it was just that. An effort. A show. Eli found himself culling the unnecessary trappings, trimming his persona down to the essentials.