by Maggie Hall
We all nodded, Luc gave a little wave of his fingers I knew was meant for us, and I gave one back. Stellan closed the laptop again. “Another day as a Circle family down,” he said.
After the Vatican, we’d brought the remaining Circle together and made a plan for the near future. We had to rebuild, within the Circle and in the world. We’d be meeting every day, but for the sake of both peace of mind—lots of the families still didn’t trust each other—and each family’s efforts in their own territories, we’d do it remotely for now.
The world had quieted some in the weeks since that night. Once the pope had calmed the crowds, any world leaders left alive in the room assembled, showing not only the half million people in the square, but news cameras streaming around the world that we were a united front. The story, according to the press, was that the politically motivated terrorists responsible for the carnage all over the world had attempted to attack again that night, but had been killed. With all the chaos that had been captured by the news cameras, people believed it. There had been no more attacks since then.
The Circle was trying to recover. Our first order of business had been to make sure the places hardest hit by the Saxons—Jerusalem, and Paris, and Rome, and Beijing—had help putting their cities back together and trying to heal.
The heads of six families had died. Every family had at least one direct heir to take over—except for the Saxons.
The closest Saxon heir still alive was me.
For now, Alistair’s cousin—the father of Sunday Six drummer Noah Day—was second closest, and he was acting head of the family. I wasn’t worried about him trying to overthrow me. Like Noah, he had no love for the Saxons. Plus, he was an influential politician in his own right.
We, the thirteenth family, the Korolev family, had no territory of our own. That would be put to a vote sometime soon, but for now, we were in an “undisclosed location.” Someplace far away from Paris or Rome or Russia, where we could be certain we were safe while everything settled.
Stellan stood up and unbuttoned his crisp, collared shirt. It had looked a bit ridiculous with his orange swim trunks. I took a second to admire our tattoo in the center of his chest. I’d chosen the placement well. It made me want to touch his chest even more than I already did. The cuts across his back from Lydia’s attack in Russia had healed to nothing already. The salve Nisha had made was helping with the pain. She’d given us more, and now we were putting it on Anya every day, too. It didn’t offer much relief to the thicker burn scars on Stellan’s back—but it was something.
And as they worked to learn more about the Great modification, Nisha and the science team were beginning to discover that it might have more uses. It was especially promising in cancer research. And they were still, secretly, working on a way to better distribute the vaccine for the virus, just in case.
I pulled my dress over my head to expose my own neon-yellow bikini. Stellan raised his eyebrows appreciatively. “Have I mentioned that I have the most beautiful girlfriend in the world?”
“About a hundred times a day.”
He scooped me into his arms. “A hundred times is not enough.”
“Cheesy,” I admonished, looping my arms around his neck. “I’m going to get tired of you if you turn into a big cheeseball all the time.” This was a lie. I’d seen him smile more in the past week than I had the whole time I’d known him. I would never get tired of that.
“But cheese tastes good, yes?” He leaned down and kissed the bullet wound on my shoulder. “Healing nicely,” he said, carrying me outside.
“Going to have some weird tan lines,” I mused, picking at the small bandage.
It was an act, the smiles and the flirting and the fun. I didn’t know how long it would be until we felt whole again. But we were safe. The world was okay. We were trying.
Stellan set me down on the porch of our bungalow, and we looked through the row of palm trees out to a wide white sand beach. This little island could only be reached by boat, and even on the mainland, we hadn’t seen a single person in all of Thailand who gave us a second glance. No Circle, no paparazzi.
“Speaking of tan lines,” I said, “when was the last time we put more sunscreen on her?” Anya was crouched in the sand, playing with the nanny she’d grown up with, whom Stellan had tracked down in Russia and brought to live with us. “She’s going to be a lobster.”
Stellan grimaced and shrugged. We might have more to learn about the being responsible for a kid thing than the being part of the Circle thing.
I grabbed the bottle of sunscreen and started down the beach. Anya jumped up when she saw me coming. “Avie!” she screeched, and ran up the beach, kicking up sand and grabbing my hand to drag me back to the water’s edge. She’d started warming to me, finally.
The sun and the sand and the steady diet of mango shakes and green curry had relaxed us all a little. I’d even been sleeping better, and Stellan had, too—though I’d realized now that we were together every night that he had more nightmares than I did. When one of us woke, the other would wrap them up and whisper nonsense until we both fell back to sleep, and if we were up with the sunrise, which we still often were, we had a beautiful beach just outside our door waiting for a morning swim.
Anya dropped beside the pile of wet sand she was sculpting into some kind of creature, and chattered away to me. I still didn’t understand a word, but I smiled at the nanny over her head. Farther away, down the beach, a sheer cliff rose out of the water, craggy and dramatic against the turquoise water. At its base, Elodie was panting and sweaty, just back from a run.
Jack stood on the hard-packed sand nearby, with a boy named Maxim. He was the son of Sofia, the nanny, and Stellan had known him for years—their family had been friends with the Korolevs when Stellan was a kid. Max was my age, and had been in Russian military training for the past year. When we asked Sofia to come on full-time with us, we’d brought Max, too, since the two of them were the only family either had. We hadn’t said it yet, but we were hoping he could take over as Keeper at some point. So Max had been training with Jack every day, and Jack was impressed so far. We were not at the point to trust anyone we didn’t know with our secrets, but for now he knew he was training to be bodyguard to a family who paid very well while treating him like an actual human being, and that was good enough.
We needed a new Keeper because once Jack and Elodie felt comfortable with his progress, they wouldn’t be staying with us full-time anymore.
Something had happened in the days after the Vatican. Jack wasn’t the same. None of us were, but he had taken it especially hard. Then one day, he and Elodie had asked to talk to us.
They had decided to join the Order. Both of them.
After what had happened, Elodie felt like she’d be more useful with the Order than she would with us. Jack wanted to go with her. He confessed that he’d been secretly considering working with Fitz already, and after what Fitz had done, it only strengthened his resolve. Both of them saw potential to reinvent the Order as a complement to the Circle rather than an adversary. They’d do it aboveboard, and in full collaboration with us.
It took me a few days to wrap my mind around the most faithful Circle member I’d ever met joining the Order, but Jack looked happy with his decision. It might have to do with the fact that he’d been talking to Nisha every day, but I really did think his new path was good for him, too.
The rest of the Order claimed not to have any knowledge of Fitz’s campaign to make the Saxons destroy the Circle, and we believed them. There just weren’t enough of them for it to be a big conspiracy. The Order was going to pull their spies out of Circle households, and there was no more need to prevent purple-eyed girls from being born. In return, the Circle would stop hunting them, and the two sides would communicate regularly, through Jack and Elodie and Nisha.
I heard a laugh and squinted behind where Jack had just knocked M
ax onto his back in the sand. In the shade of the cliff, watching, was Mariam, the driver we’d met in Egypt. She was wearing a sunny yellow hijab and eating a mango.
The idea of offering her a permanent position with us had been Elodie’s. We could have gotten anyone—movie stunt drivers or military or trained bodyguards—but we’d gotten used to being us. We liked the idea of building our family’s crew in a way we could all grow into together. It turned out while we were in Egypt, Mariam had told Elodie how jealous she was of our travel—she had always dreamed of seeing the world, but she couldn’t since her family relied on her earnings from her taxi to pay the bills.
Now her family never had to worry again. Mariam had accepted our offer just as she’d done every strange thing we asked her to on those days in Alexandria, with enthusiasm and without so much as a moment of pause.
Not all of us were here in Thailand. Luc was in Paris, rebuilding the city and his life—though he sent whiny texts at least twice a day about how unfair it was that we were on the beach. Luc hadn’t introduced Rocco to the Circle yet as anything official. Their relationship would be one thing, but Rocco’s past with the Circle would be a bigger deal. They were going to wait until things had settled to address it.
Colette was just starting to film a movie with a director she’d been wanting to work with for years. It was an artsy, awards-bait movie, and Colette couldn’t be happier. Elodie had just gotten back from a few days in Paris helping Luc, and then visiting Colette on set, and we fully expected her to tell us all the gossip over dinner tonight.
Anya put a shovel in my hand. I made some sand into a row of spikes down her creature’s back, and she grinned, pleased. When Stellan came down the beach, she jumped up again and he swung her around until she screamed.
I wasn’t naive. Our personal demons might be locked away for the moment, but they weren’t gone. The temporary tranquility in Circle and Order relations would erupt sooner than we wanted. Eventually we’d have to be grown-ups. But at least the world had something that looked like a fragile peace, and we had something far less fragile than that.
Stellan set Anya down. “Sand castle,” he said in English, pointing to it.
“I think it’s a dragon,” I whispered. He consulted with Anya in Russian.
“Ah, of course,” he said. “Unicorn-dragon.”
“Unco-dagon?” Anya repeated, and I high-fived her.
Stellan reached for my hand and I let him pull me up. He pointed at the cliff. “What do you think?”
That day at the Louvre, he’d said he wanted to jump off a cliff in Thailand with me. I’d been hoping he’d forget. Despite everything, I still wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of heights. But I took a deep breath. I could do this. I wanted to do this. “Yes,” I said. “Okay.”
We had to hike off the beach and around the other side of the cliff to get to the top. When we got there, the salt air blowing our hair, the sun on our cheeks, the smell of lemongrass and garlic cooking in tonight’s dinner wafting from the direction of our bungalows, I looked down at all our friends.
We hadn’t talked much about the worst parts of what had happened. That didn’t mean I didn’t think about it. I sat down on the cliff and looked out over the ocean, picking at the vines growing out of the rocks.
“Do you think Fitz was actually doing it because he cared about us? That’s not—” I shook my head. I was done with the days when people did what they thought was good for me without consulting me about it. “I do believe he loved me, and all of us. But that wasn’t enough. I can’t believe it wasn’t partially about power, and politics, and I know that’s the world we’re in now, but . . .”
Stellan came to sit behind me, cocooning me against his bare chest. He smelled like sunscreen and salt water, and I nestled back into his arms. “I will promise you something right now,” he said. “I will always love you more than I care about the Circle.”
I leaned my head back on his shoulder. “We’ve been together for about five minutes,” I said, because one of the first things we’d promised each other was to try to talk our worries out, even if it was awkward. “How can you be so sure?”
“It has been only a short time since I’ve been able to do this whenever I wanted,” he said, kissing my neck in a way that brought goose bumps up on my arms despite the scorching sun, “but we’ve been a lot more than that for a lot longer than that. Jack and Elodie and Anya have been my family for a long time, but I can’t remember anymore what it was like not to have you as part of it, too. And I will always put our family, and the people we love, first. I guess nobody can be sure about anything, but I’d say I’m as sure as I can be that I’ll feel this way for the foreseeable future. Is that rational and boring and uncheesy enough for you?”
I craned my neck around and pulled his lips to mine. He tasted like the sea, too.
“It was earlier than the train,” I murmured.
“What?”
“When I started falling in love with you. Maybe in the water in Greece, like you? No, earlier than that. When we were standing on that balcony in Venice. Or maybe when you let me stab you at Notre-Dame so we could escape.”
He grinned and touched his shoulder, where the wound had hardly left a scar. “I find it hard to believe you were in love with me then. You enjoyed stabbing me a little too much.”
“Okay, I didn’t realize how I felt at the time,” I said, giggling. “I thought you were obnoxious.”
He laughed, low and rough. “To be fair, I was. So what we’re saying is we’ve both been falling in love with each other for a very, very long time.”
“Yeah, I think that’s right,” I whispered, and I kissed him again. Mint tea and honey weren’t going to be the only things I’d associate with kissing him from now on. It was the Louvre, and looking up through the pyramid. It was candlelight on a white wall. It was a sea breeze and the hammock on the porch of our bungalow and cool, crisp water and a whole lifetime of things we had yet to experience. It was all that and more, to the ends of the world.
“Come on,” I said, standing up.
We held hands, and stood back from the edge, and on the count of three, we ran forward and jumped. For a few seconds, we were flying, the whole world stretching in front of us. And as we plummeted toward the aqua water, I laughed—and I screamed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Finishing a trilogy (!) is a task that requires a whole team, and I have the best team around.
Katherine Perkins—you are Superwoman. How much you did for this book in how short a time is mind-boggling. Thank you so much for getting Avery (and me!) to the end of this story—I will be forever grateful for your intelligent, patient edits. Arianne Lewin—your astute guidance has been instrumental in making this series what it is. It’s been such a privilege to work with you! Thank you a million times over for believing in Avery and the crew and helping me tell their story. To the Penguin team: Theresa Evangelista for the gorgeous covers of the first two books, Dana Li for the third, and Marikka Tamura for the lovely interiors. Marisa Novello and the Speak team for all you’ve done for the paperbacks. Lauren Donovan, Katie Quinn, Anna Jarzab, Rachel Lodi, Madison Killen, Tara Shanahan, and the rest of the marketing and publicity team for your hard work and clever ideas. Amalia Frick for all your help. The crew who produces the Conspiracy series audiobooks, and especially to the inimitable Julia Whelan, who narrates them.
To the WME folks: My agent Claudia Ballard—thank you so much for championing these books from the beginning. Caitlin Landuyt for being so on top of things this year. Laura Bonner for sending the trilogy abroad. To my foreign publishers for letting the books travel as much as Avery does, and especially to everyone at my French publisher, Collection R, for being so lovely and welcoming. So glad I got to meet you all this year!
To all the indie booksellers out there who have championed the Conspiracy series—thank you. And especially to Bookworks
, my wonderful local indie. To bloggers and reviewers—thanks for doing so much for the bookish community!
To the friends who are always available to talk me through story problems or writing freak-outs—and for this book, especially Dahlia Adler, Sofia Embid, and Kim Liggett, who have dealt with my whiny emails over and over. To a whole lot of other bookish friends—the ones I’ve met during events and travel this year, and the ones I talk to online—you make this whole publishing thing fun. I want to list all of you, but if I did, these acknowledgments would be as long as the book. To my family—my parents, my brothers, my in-laws, my cousins-in-law . . . Thank you for being endlessly excited about the books! To Andrew—as always, thank you for putting up with my book stress and especially for always being willing to brainstorm and help me with story problems.
And last, to the Conspiracy fandom—your emails and tweets and Instagram posts and fan art and general excitement about the series are truly the best thing about this job. I am such a lucky author to have you guys, and I’m so glad to have shared this story with you all. These books are yours as much as they’re mine.
© ANDREW HALL
MAGGIE HALL i’ndulges her obsession with distant lands and far-flung adventures as often as she can. She has played with baby tigers in Thailand, learned to make homemade pasta in Italy, and taken thousands of miles of trains through the vibrant countryside of India.
She graduated from the University of Southern California and worked as a bookstore events and marketing manager before making the switch to writing. When she’s not on the other side of the world, she lives with her husband and their cats in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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