by Abbie Lyons
Violet pressed on, her lips set in a firm line. “You're human,” she said. “Totally human. The thing that happened to you at the game? That was Chaos. I've been doing a ton of research on it—that’s what I’ve been doing instead of going out. I don't have a lot of tests and quizzes. I made all that up. I've been trying to figure you out. How to help you.”
“You have?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I didn't want you to know because I wasn't sure what I was finding yet. And I didn't want you to be afraid. And I didn't want you to know that Marius—”
“That Marius had told you my secret.”
She hung her head. “He had a good reason, believe me.” She looked back up. “I know you don’t know him well, but you have to understand. If Marius does something like this, it’s a big fucking deal. Honor is...his thing. It’s non-negotiable. I don’t know how to prove it, but...all I can say is you can trust me too.”
Violet wrung her hands, looking nervous. And really, I had no reason not to.
“No, no, of course,” I said. “Honestly, I'm kind of glad to hear it.”
I blew out a breath and sank onto the bed, folding my hands in the lap of my skirt.
If I was leaving anyway, what was the harm?
“My brother was supposed to be in the Order of Eden.” There. I said it out loud. “I'm here by mistake. It was Aidan's fault. I ended up with a letter after Scott died, some kind of mix-up, and now I'm here.”
“And the only reason I haven't left is you want to find out what happened to your brother,” Violet said. “Right?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “But I feel like it’s getting too dangerous. And I don’t have any powers to learn here. So there’s really no reason for me to stay—”
“There’s your friends.”
I stared at her. Violet smiled a bit.
“Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. You have Lucy and Steve. They follow you around like ducklings. Always asking your opinion, trying to impress you. It’s cute.”
A cold feeling settled in my stomach. “Yeah, not anymore. I had a fight with them. Both of them.”
Violet came to the side of my bed and sat. “Well, you have me. I know I’ve been kind of distant, but...it’s because I didn’t want you figuring out what I was doing. Marius said—”
“And that’s the other thing,” I said. “Even if I did stay to investigate, your boyfriend won't exactly tell me what the Order is all about. And the times I’ve accidentally stumbled on anything, it’s been a shitshow. I’m just not going to find anything out. And it’s great that you want to be my friend—seriously, it is—but you’re not going to tell me what the Order’s doing, are you?”
Violet shook her head. “But if I knew, I would.”
I squinted at her. “Really? Marius hasn’t told you?”
“Like I said,” Violet said, sighing. “Marius believes what he believes and he doesn’t step out of line. It’s his whole worldview. So he hasn’t told me. Not because he doesn't trust me,” she added. “At least I don't think he doesn’t. It's just...okay.” She looked around, as if anyone else might be spying on us in our dorm room. “He did tell me one thing. But it was a big deal. Our biggest fight yet just to get it out of him. That was right before I almost dumped him.”
“Oh. Whoa.”
“But I’ll tell you what I know, okay?” She blew out a breath. “He can’t tell anyone the purpose of the Order. Not unless they’re joining the Order. Only seven people at a time can know the purpose of the Order—ever. If any more find out, it throws off the balance. It's weird and metaphysical, I know, but that's the truth.” She grimaced. “Trust me, the blowup we had over it made it very clear that he wasn’t lying to me. But that’s the thing. If their purpose is known by more than seven people...”
She trailed off and made a kind of kabloom sound with her mouth, spreading her fingers wide like a firework. Somehow, I managed to chuckle.
“So what does it all mean? If my brother was supposed to be in the Order, then what happened when he died?”
“That's what I don't know,” she said.
Suddenly my chest felt very tight, the room too stuffy, my vision swimming.
“I just want to know what happens,” I said, my voice tiny and pathetic. “What happens when we die. Why people die. Why they die when they die.” I looked up at Violet, my eyes watering. She shook her head gently.
“So does everyone else.”
She squeezed my shoulder.
“You want to know what I think?” she asked, after a moment.
My eyes were fixated on Meladryne in my fingertips. Looking at her tiny plastic self was the only thing keeping me grounded in the real world.
“I think it’s all a bigass roll of the dice,” she said. “All this metaphysical whatever, balance and Chaos and demons and angels, we’re all just players in a game without a rulebook. At least not one that we can read. I mean, I don’t know, maybe that’s the Order’s big secret.”
“They’ve got the manual?” I said, joking in spite of myself.
“Maybe,” she said lightly. “But for the rest of us, we just have to fight the battles as they come up. We have to duck and weave. We—”
“We have to roll for initiative,” I said.
Violet smiled warmly, and for the first time in a long time, I felt the guilt lift just the tiniest, tiniest bit. “I think we do.”
I stood up.
“Tell me everything you know. Everything,” I said. “I’ll do the same. At least about my own crazy situation. And we’re going to figure this out tonight. Or...”
“Or die trying,” Violet finished. She set her jaw. “I’m in.”
Chapter Eighteen
Getting ready for the ball felt like getting prepped for my execution. This must have been how Joan of Arc felt before she was burned at the stake, I thought, adjusting the straps of my dress onto my shoulders. I wonder if she got all glammed up for it too. I bent my arms around back, trying to catch the little hook and eye that was at the top of the zipper, but I couldn't reach it.
I tried again, limbering up my shoulders, but it was no use until—
“Here.” Violet appeared behind me and slid it into place. “All good?”
I combed my fingers through my hair and looked in the mirror to check my makeup. Violet appeared in the mirror behind me.
“Perfect.”
I turned around to face the real Violet.
“You think this isn’t crazy?”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no, I think it’s totally crazy. I want that to be clear. It’s. Nuts.” She smiled. “But I like it. I’m tired of reading theory. I want to take some action.”
With just minutes to go before the ball started, we hustled toward the temple. The campus was aglow with lights, music streaming everywhere, and excited voices of guardians and demons alike swelling as we all drew toward the massive steps of the temple. Someone had enchanted (if that was the word) the giant archangel pillars so that they were alive with color, and it was actually a bit unsettling to see those once-blank eyes glowing, glowing, glowing.
I swallowed hard at the bottom of the steps. Violet paused a few steps away.
“You okay?”
I nodded. As long as I could stop from going pyrotechnic before I got into that ball, everything would be fine.
Or fine-ish.
I stuck my hand in my dress pocket and felt for Meladryne. She was there, safe and sound.
Lucy was right. I did want pockets.
IT HAD TAKEN JUST TWENTY minutes to piece it all together.
Violet listened to my story, from Scott’s death to the funeral with Aidan showing up to the hobo, the fire, the letter, and finally the reveal.
As I told it out loud, something struck me. “The one thing I’ve never been able to figure out,” I said, “is that hobo guy. Like, I get it, I maybe was just hallucinating from smoke inhalation or whatever. But then for him to also be the one to give me the letter? It just fe
lt...too random to be random, you know?”
Violet chewed a piece of purple hair, then spat it out. “Bad habit.” She shook her head. “You said you first saw him at the corner shop in your neighborhood?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “He was panhandling.”
“Did you give him anything?”
“I’m not a monster,” I said. “Yeah. A sandwich, some cash—”
“So you helped him.”
“If a sandwich counts as help, then...yes,” I said. “Why?”
“Balance,” she said. “You helped him, so he helped you. That’s the cycle of what happens when we...aren’t you in Professor Kennedy’s class? She’s been covering this all semester.”
I shuffled. “Yeah, but I’m not paying a lot of attention.”
Violet sighed. “Okay, well, since I assume you don’t want to read out all my notes”—she gestured at her desk—“I’ll try to put it in a nutshell. When one of us—a guardian—fulfills our duty, it imbues the human with a kind of supernatural goodness. That’s the force that balances things. Not the act of whatever we do ourselves—the soul-power it engenders in humans. With me so far?”
“Kind of,” I said. Something in my memory was pinging—a spell Meladryne could cast to temporarily boost everyone else’s stats. “Like a buff? Never mind. I get you.”
“So we sort of transfer some of the power from our soul to theirs, and then they have the power to go do something extra-good. But only for a short period of time. And the boost they give the other person is diminishing returns. It’s not an endless supply—there’s friction. A transaction cost.”
Now this was starting to sound like when Scott tried to teach me about distributed systems. “Okay.”
“So you helped this guy,” she said. “And he was able to help you back. In a way that was, if I’m understanding you right, basically superhuman. And he must have passed some of it back onto you.”
“I...” I thought about how the fire hadn’t seemed too hot, how I could breathe okay. Even those annoying EMTs had tested my oxygen five times, too sure that it should be lower.
And then there was this stupid reappearing figurine.
“Yeah,” I said. “But wait. I’m not a guardian, though. Because if I were, Elysium would have known and invited me, not Scott. So it shouldn’t matter if I helped someone and they helped me back.”
“Right. But it did.” Violet was tense with concentration. “So doing that, passing along that soul-power boost, and setting up that cycle...well, that affects balance in the universe, right? So if you kept living your life, then the more you helped people, the more out of balance it would get. Or,” she added, “that’s what someone might think.”
“What?”
“That you’re a threat. That it was too dangerous that you’d just wander around in the world on your own.”
“Wait.” I rubbed my temples, pacing our dorm room. Outside, the sun was flaring deep red as it set beyond our stained-glass window. “You’re saying that the possibility that I might be living in the world, occasionally being a nice person, or whatever, meant that someone wanted to corral me here so they could, I don’t know, watch me blow up?”
“It’s not ‘being a nice person,’” Violet said. “It’s sharing your soul.”
I plopped onto my bed. “O...kay.”
“The exact...chemistry or whatever of it doesn’t matter,” she said briskly. “What matters is that you might have the kind of ability that can make things...”
“Chaotic?” I offered.
Violet nodded. “In a word, yes.”
“So just get a demon to do more demon things,” I said. “If I do good, they do bad. Wouldn’t that balance it out? Isn’t that the whole system? Seems simple enough.”
She shook her head. “Yes, but no. I’m thinking...I’m thinking the issue isn’t that you’d break the system so much as you’d just always exist outside it. If a guardian does something good, it’s knowable, recordable, able to be checked by a demon, and vice versa. But if someone else can do it, that’s an unknown unknown. The system wouldn’t be able to anticipate you. And then the system would gradually become untrustworthy—if it couldn’t be relied on. And for the ones in power, who need the system to be all-encompassing to stay in power...”
I thought of Scott behind his dungeon master screen, cackling over the map only he could see.
“They’d want me under their control,” I said. “Or want me gone.”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
We both had the same thought at the same time. Obsessed with order and systems, with decorum and doing things the right way, with rules and not breaking tradition?
That had Order of Eden written all over it.
Specifically, Marius. But—
“But Marius broke rules to try to help me,” I said. “This couldn’t all be him.”
I let the statement rest, the unspoken rebuttal floating in the air between us: could it?
Violet breathed out hard. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I really don’t think so.” Her eyes flashed. “I know you think I’m just saying that because I love him, but...” Her lids fluttered closed, then open. “I’m starting to think it’s a different kind of love than it was before. Maybe that sounds crazy, but—”
I thought about Silvestri’s class, about Steve reciting the reading word for word. I thought about the different kinds of love in my own life. The love I had for Scott, really the only person I had ever loved consistently. The love I was just starting to feel for my friends—because Violet was right. I did have friends. Her included.
I didn't think Marius liked me. He definitely didn't love me in any sort of philia and definitely not eros way. But the sense of protection he felt, him healing my cut at the practice field, him sending me out from Casablanca with the tiny flame in my palm, even the tears in his eyes before he did whatever he did to Aidan...I couldn't think of a better example of agape.
He was so dedicated to protecting people, to protecting the world. And I was in the world. So, for him, that was enough.
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” I said. “I believe you. Maybe it’s just not, you know. Eros anymore.”
She nodded, shoulders hunched, then swallowed. “Drama later. Focus now. It’s not Marius. So then who?”
I wound and rewound the images in my mind. All I could think of was the pain in his face when he’d had to punish Aidan.
Wait.
“It’s Aidan,” I said.
Violet went ashen. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Chapter Nineteen
Did I know what it was going to mean to fight a supernatural being hell-bent on controlling, if not destroying, me, and to do it wearing a ball gown?
Absolutely not.
But time was running out. The ball had already started.
“Come on,” Violet said. She extended a hand and tugged me the rest of the way up the stairs, my skirt flying behind me. Inside, the temple was lit with a combination of icy blue and blood red uplighting—symbolic, I guessed, of the difference between demons and angels. All of Elysium was gathered on the right side of the center with Dean Serathiel smiling in the middle of the room next to a stately woman with elegant black curls.
We stopped, just barely. “Are you sure?” Violet said. “You don’t know what will happen.”
I nodded, and shrugged. “I’ll roll the dice.”
She nodded back, hesitated, then gave me a quick hug before darting into place in line.
As Dean Serathiel and the Dean of Hades talked about balance, friendship and a bunch of other generic messages, I slunk to the back of the demon line, where, thanks to my red gown, I blended it pretty well. Turns out red works for any kind of supernatural occasion. The demons were too chatty and excited to notice an interloper.
I scanned up and down the Elysium line. Across the room, I saw Violet doing the same. We were both thinking the same thing: where is Aidan?
It all made sens
e. His story about how he managed to get me here was incredibly sketchy. The details didn't add up even the day at Fisherman's Wharf when I talked to Professor Kennedy. It seemed off. Marius knew more than he could let on, presumably, but whatever Aidan had done to merit the punishment he’d doled out...it had to have been for something big.
The question was: what was the Order of Eden trying to do?
But on second thought, maybe that was a question for another time.
Across the way, Violet was frantically mouthing something and pointing. There! She nodded forward. With the second years.
I spotted him, decked out in a fine cut suit, his white-blonde hair slicked back.
He looked as sleek as the day I saw him at Scott’s funeral.
He figured that I would come here, either because I’d assume I was a guardian or because I’d have nowhere else to go. Then, once I got here, I’d slowly waste away. Be destroyed by the overwhelming power that was centered here. And tonight was supposed to be it.
The music switched to something slow and stately, some kind of march, and the demon at the head of one line and the angel at the head of our line slowly made their way to each other, did a bow and curtsy, and took each other's hands to walk a slow circle around the obelisk.
So that was the ritual, a balance thing.
It was almost a little anticlimactic, but then again, that was just in comparison with what felt like it was going to be the end of the world.
I did some quick calculations, slipping in between demons until I was lined up at the equivalent place as Aidan, but on this side. Just then, as the second couple paired up and began their walk, Aidan saw me—where I shouldn’t be. His eyes narrowed.
You.
I wasn't close enough to hear him say it out loud, but there was no mistaking what he was saying.
When he turned to whisper to something else, to someone in line, though, I couldn't make it out. And the other person was Marius.
If Aidan looked polished in a suit, Marius looked like he was born for it.
