The Ends of the World

by Maggie Hall

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Margret Hall.

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  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hall, Maggie, 1982–

  Title: The ends of the world / Maggie Hall.

  Description: New York, NY : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2017] | Series: Conspiracy of us ; [3]

  Summary: “In the final installment in the Conspiracy of Us trilogy, Avery West and her friends must avert a deadly virus—and a murderous family set on ruling the world”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016052363 | ISBN 9780399166525 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Secret societies—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | Voyages and travels—Fiction. | Virus diseases—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.H14616 En 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052363

  Ebook ISBN 9780698174207

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Photos: Michael Frost; Shutterstock Images

  Cover Design by Theresa M. Evangelista + Dana Li

  Version_1

  To all the girls who are stronger at the end of the story than they were at the beginning.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  The rumors spread, wide and fast as a plague.

  Some of them were true: She has the eyes, they said. He has the blood of Alexander.

  Some of them weren’t: He’s invincible. It’s magic.

  The One and the girl with the violet eyes, they whispered. Their fate is the fate of the Circle.

  They didn’t know the real secret of that fate. They didn’t need to. They couldn’t.

  Rumors spread just as quickly outside the Circle of Twelve, but these were different. Terrorist attacks, the newest one a biological weapon in Paris. Conspiracy, they whispered. Something’s happening, they said.

  After the virus had been released in Paris, the world had gone quieter. But it was not the quiet of calm. It was the kind of quiet that held its breath, a bowstring drawn so tightly that it had to be let go soon, or it would snap.

  And under it all was a race. For archaeology’s greatest mystery, Alexander the Great’s tomb, and in it, the cure to the virus that could demolish the Circle, that could start a war. Whoever was first to find it could dictate the Circle’s future, and maybe the world’s.

  It wasn’t this girl and this boy that would decide their fate. It was a long line of history, set in motion thousands of years ago, a line through some of the greatest conquerors the world has ever seen, and through their follies.

  A fate written in the stars.

  CHAPTER 1

  At night, in the dark, were the only times I couldn’t get it to go away.

  The screams, the smirk on Cole Saxon’s face, the sound of my mother’s first cough, when I didn’t understand yet, and the second one, when I did. Her bloodied face. People falling all around me, choking on their own blood because of mine.

  In waking hours—like now—my brain took those same memories and did something different with them.

  The guy I was watching across the party was short, with dark hair, wearing a tuxedo. I could only see his back as he meandered from the bar to the edge of the property, gazing out over the twinkling lights of Jerusalem.

  “Kuklachka,” Stellan said in my ear.

  I squinted. Now that he was closer, I could tell the guy’s hair was curlier than I’d thought. Longer. He finally turned around, taking a sip of his champagne. It wasn’t Cole Saxon. None of them ever were. I should be glad. If the Saxons actually showed up here, it would mean nothing good.

  I turned to Stellan. “What?”

  He rested a hand possessively on my lower back and leaned in close. “I asked if you wanted to go skinny-dipping in the fountain. Liven up this party a little.” I stared up at him blankly. He sighed. “I asked if you’d happened to see the Rajesh family come in while I was talking to Elodie.”

  I should have smiled at the joke. That’s what he was trying to do: loosen me up, make me look like a girl in a cocktail dress at a party should. But my brain no longer remembered how to create that feeling on its own. So I rearranged my features in a way that I hoped from the outside looked more pleasant and less robotic than it felt. “No. I don’t think they’re here yet. Maybe we should start with someone else.”

  He didn’t even attempt a fake smile back.

  A firework burst, loud enough to shake the ground. Nearby, next to the very fountain Stellan had been trying to joke about, Jack and Elodie both glanced up at the sky. Elodie leaned in to whisper to Jack, and she winced almost imperceptibly. She’d been shot and was still healing, which meant she was still at half capacity. She hated it. But she was here tonight, for us. Just like she was every day. For the past month, she and Jack had been with Stellan and me as friends. Tonight, they were here as our Keepers.

  This party was a celebration, and we were the guests of honor. Tomorrow, we were to be initiated as the thirteenth family of the Circle of Twelve.

  It had been almost a month since my mother had died, since Cole Saxon had released the virus in a crowded room at a Fashion Week show in Paris and my world—and the whole world—had been turned upside down. That night, we’d told the rest of the Circle exactly what the Saxons had done. We’d told them about how my half siblings, Lydia and Cole, with the blessing of our father, Alistair, had been murdering Circle members all over the globe, and blaming it on the Circle’s longtime enemies, the Order, trying to scare the Circle into uniting behind them. We told them how the Saxons now had a biological weapon to make any attacks even easier.

  What we didn’t tell them was that the biological weapon was made
of our blood.

  Stellan and I were the One and the girl with the violet eyes. The couple foretold in the mandate, a prophecy of sorts that the Circle had believed in for thousands of years. But we’d recently discovered that the union we were to create, which the Circle believed would give them great power, actually meant that if Stellan’s blood and mine got mixed and an unsuspecting Circle member ingested it, they would begin to bleed uncontrollably, and die within minutes.

  Another round of fireworks lit up a bridge in the distance. Closer, the walls of the old quarter of Jerusalem were cast in various shades of purple. I could pick out one that looked just like my eyes. I wondered what kind of celebration the Melechs had made up to explain the display.

  At first, all the on-the-nose, over-the-top Circle business had been dazzling: Living in the Louvre. A ball inside the Eiffel Tower. Fireworks over the city for a private party. Now I saw how it was a smoke screen. The fanfare served to remind them how important they were.

  And now we were at the center of it all.

  I’d spent the last month hoping it wouldn’t come to this.

  Announcing who we were to the Circle had been the only way to hold the Saxons accountable and keep them from hurting anyone else, but as the rage and fear had melted into grief and numbness, I wanted everything that came with it less and less. Being an official Circle family would bring power, yes, and there were certain things that appealed about that. But it would also bring politics and danger and worst of all, being a pretty little symbolic pawn in this world that had taken everything from me.

  Despite our attempts, though, we hadn’t been able to put off the initiation any longer. And it turned out it was a good thing we hadn’t. We needed something from the Circle, and this initiation was the way we were going to get it.

  From across the courtyard, I saw Laila Emir and her little brother staring at us. Stellan saw, too. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and grinned. I leaned into his palm with a coquettish laugh.

  Beyond the Emirs, I glimpsed Daniel Melech in the crowd. He gave us a dirty look. The Melechs, though they’d organized this lavish party since the initiation site was here in Jerusalem, were the Saxons’ most loyal allies. Their son Daniel was especially close with Lydia.

  I wanted nothing more than to hold the knife I had strapped to my leg to Daniel’s throat and force him to reveal where my sister was. Tell him about how I’d dreamed of putting a bullet in my brother’s head every night for weeks, and that by helping them hide, anything they did was his fault, too.

  I knew vaguely that I should be appalled at myself for thinking those things, but all I felt was empty. Ever since that night, it was like I was a robot with only one command programmed: Stop them. Kill them. I could lie and say it was only because I wanted to prevent them from hurting anyone else. Though I did want that, the truth was, the only real emotion that broke through the emptiness was the drive to ruin the Saxons like they’d ruined me.

  A violet firework exploded, gold tendrils arcing from its center and cascading over the city like a weeping willow. An oooooh rose from the crowd.

  I turned us a little more toward Daniel Melech and ran my fingers up and down Stellan’s arm, glancing around at the crowd. Most of the Circle families we’d been waiting for were here now.

  When we’d learned about the virus, we’d also learned something more: there was a remedy. Napoleon had left the remedy buried. I fear it will only make matters worse, he’d written.

  He was right.

  With the virus, the Saxons could manipulate their way into control of the Circle—or take it by force. The ideal, of course, would be to destroy the virus, but that was impossible—we were the virus. And any attempts by the team of scientists we’d hired to try to deactivate it in our blood had been unsuccessful. There was just one safeguard.

  Lydia had called me every day for weeks after my mom had been killed. So had my father. When I finally answered, Lydia had promised that they’d never meant for my mother to be caught in the cross fire. All they’d wanted was to use what we’d found for the good of the family. The virus in Paris was entirely Cole’s doing, and not sanctioned, she’d said. I knew it was true—Lydia and my father were too cautious to release something so deadly without a way to stop it.

  So the Saxons were looking for this remedy. We had to find it before them. And since we couldn’t destroy the virus, we had to destroy the cure instead.

  There were more explosions in the sky, set to music only we at this party could hear. Tendrils of multicolored light twisted through the clouds, and I smiled blandly at something Stellan was saying.

  We’d been following a virtual treasure map of Napoleon Bonaparte’s since I’d come to the Circle. The final clue pointed to Alexandria, Egypt, as the location of Alexander the Great’s tomb, where the cure was hidden. But even though we had the benefit of nearly unlimited Circle resources, we’d found nothing there. Nothing at various excavation sites. Nothing by ground-penetrating radar.

  It was almost accidental how we came across the clue that finally pointed us in the right direction. I’d been reading Napoleon’s diaries over again, combing through story after story that had nothing to do with our quest—battles and strategy and marriages and affairs. And I’d come across something that caught my eye—an entry that referred to returning an unnamed body to its rightful rest. The entry just before it had been torn out. Through some research, we’d discovered that Napoleon had been in Venice at that time.

  Jack, with his seemingly endless memory for random facts, was the one who made the connection. There was a theory that linked Venice with Alexander’s body. An archaeological rumor, started by a researcher who had never been able to prove it. Most of the community of historians scoffed at it. The theory said that in the ninth century AD, Alexander’s bones had been mistaken for those of St. Mark, and had been taken to Venice, where they rested for centuries in San Marco Basilica. That Alexander’s body had never been in his own tomb at all.

  It was a ridiculous, desperate idea, but we were desperate people. We traveled to San Marco Basilica and, after some tests, found that “St. Mark’s” bones weren’t his at all—but they also weren’t Alexander’s. They dated from the early 1800s. “That’s right when Napoleon wrote that diary entry,” Elodie had said, finally excited about the idea. “He could have moved Alexander’s body back to his real tomb and left some other body in Venice to cover it up.”

  But if Alexander’s body wasn’t there, it didn’t help us. We would have been at the end of the road if Elodie hadn’t remembered that the Catholic Church preserved relics of some of their most important saints at the Vatican.

  Being Circle did come with some useful privileges, and one of those was that we were able to get into the Vatican and check. It turned out they did have a relic of “St. Mark’s.” A femur. We took it. We tested it.

  Despite the evidence we’d seen, we were still shocked when the bone dated to somewhere around 350 BC. Alexander’s time.

  “There was a prophecy just after Alexander died that said whoever possessed his body would never be defeated. That was a major cause of the early Diadochi wars,” Jack had remembered. “Is it possible that this bone could be the cure somehow?” But that hope was put on the back burner when our team of scientists discovered something else: a message, etched into a crevice in the bone.

  From whence our queen made the twelve, our king’s bone unlocks a map to the place of eternal rest.

  Our king, we surmised, was Alexander, and the bone the one in our hands. Our queen appeared to refer to Olympias, Alexander’s mother. She was the one who had created the virus as a way to bring her own line back to power. She’d done the modifications on the Diadochi—Alexander’s twelve generals, who had split his kingdom between them to become the twelve families of the Circle—that both made them susceptible to the virus and gave them the violet eye gene. The ceremony when she’d d
one this had been the first and only initiation ritual the Circle had done.

  Tomorrow, our initiation would be the second.

  Ironic that I’d been pushing back against my “fate” with the Circle for so long, and now it was exactly where we needed to be. That didn’t mean we weren’t going to make a last-ditch effort to find whatever it was the bone unlocked before we had to go through with the ceremony itself.

  Once we’d realized the clue had to do with the initiation ceremony, we’d gathered as much intel as we could. Jack and Stellan and Elodie knew a little about the original ceremony from the Circle history they’d been taught. Our friends Luc and Colette knew more as members of the Dauphin family, and Luc was able to snag some old texts from the Dauphins’ library to fill in some gaps. There would probably be fire, we found. There would probably be chanting and invocations and some form of accepting us in. But we needed specifics. We assumed we were looking for an object. Something concrete that could be unlocked.

  So tonight, we needed two things: to find out what this object that contained the next clue was, and to get hold of it before the initiation tomorrow, without the Circle knowing.

  Stellan cleared his throat. I brought my attention back from scanning the crowd to find his hand extended to me. “Dance?” he said.

  “Why?” I said through my forced smile.

  “Because we appear to be on a dance floor, and it would look strange not to.”

  He was right. While I hadn’t been paying attention, we’d ended up in the middle of a group of dancing couples.

  I glanced behind him, saw Jack’s eyes on us. With what I hoped wasn’t too obvious a sigh, I put my hand in Stellan’s.

  “Have you seen Lucien?” he said, looping one arm around my waist. So that’s why he’d had us wandering the party. Even though Stellan was technically the head of his own Circle family now, I wasn’t sure he’d ever stop protecting Luc. “He was going to take Colette and see if they could find anything, but they’ve disappeared.”