The Ends of the World

by Maggie Hall

  Mr. Vasilyev let another drop of blood fall into the box, and handed it off to his right. The next Circle family head, and the next, all the way down the line, did the same. The fire crackled, growing as if fueled by the offerings.

  I had my eyes planted firmly on the box. Stellan pressed closer, his hand over mine at his elbow. He’d seen, too, and by the look in their eyes, so had Jack and Elodie. It might be the same replica box we’d seen last night. It was the same size and shape. But it looked—different, somehow.

  The chanting grew louder. Stellan and I were each handed a knife of our own. By unspoken agreement, we stepped away from each other. The chanting grew frenzied as I came to the edge of the fire. The heat was like a wall this close. I put the tip of the knife to the forearm farthest from Stellan, and drew the blade across my skin. I felt a bead of sweat drip down my chest. I held my arm over the fire, as far in as I could reach, and watched the dark droplets sizzle as they fell.

  I stepped back. The box was placed in my hands.

  I knew immediately that, though it looked just like the one we’d seen last night, it was not the same. This was far older, like the one at the Melechs’ was a toy. I held my arm over it, and let my blood drip inside onto wood already stained red.

  And then I saw it. Etched into the back wall of the box was our symbol.

  If anyone had spotted it, they might have assumed it had been specially engraved for today. But this carving was not new. I looked up. Stellan’s eyes were burning into me like he was trying to read my mind. I tilted the box so he could see, and then glanced back at Jack and Elodie and let my eyes widen a fraction.

  The moderator cleared his throat and gestured Stellan forward. The chanting continued.

  Stellan stepped to the fire, letting his blood drip. He rejoined me, and I reluctantly handed him the box. Once we finished this, the ceremony would be all but done.

  I could see the same thoughts swirl behind Stellan’s eyes. He took the box. His blood dripped inside. The bells chimed like a chorus of heartbeats. Row after row, the Circle members got to their knees.

  That’s when Elodie screamed.

  I jumped so hard, I almost knocked the box out of Stellan’s hands. The chanting cut off abruptly.

  “Run!” she yelled, pointing. “They’re coming for us!”

  It didn’t matter that she was pointing at nothing. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense. This was her version of pulling a fire alarm, and it worked. Keepers were rushing to their families, hustling them toward the exit. People screamed, threw back the hoods on their robes.

  “Get to the exit!” Elodie yelled. She grabbed the back of my robe, and Stellan’s, and shoved us in the opposite direction. I saw what she was looking at. There were a couple of passageways off the back of the cavern. We were still holding the box. We’d take it and find another way out, pretending we’d gotten lost in the chaos.

  I clung to Stellan’s arm as we disappeared into the dark mouth of the tunnel, and we squinted into the box. The flames from the main cavern were the only light we had. I heard Elodie’s voice, and Jack’s, still ushering everyone out. “Look,” I said. “The symbol is etched into some kind of metal strip that goes all the way around—”

  And then there was a bang so loud, it sounded like the world above us had imploded.

  CHAPTER 3

  Before I could react, Stellan had pushed me to the ground against a wall, sheltering me with his body. In the darkness I felt dust rain from the ceiling, and a deepening rumble seemed to be coming from the rocks themselves.

  “Jack!” I screamed, pushing to standing. “Elodie!”

  “Luc’s back there, too,” Stellan said.

  The ground under our feet started shaking, like an earthquake. I grabbed blindly for Stellan to keep from falling—then there was a grating rumble and a crash, and weak light came from a hole where the wall opposite us used to be. It must have led into the main network of tunnels that ran under the Old City. They were a major tourist attraction. A group of shocked sightseers, the cameras around their necks forgotten, screamed and shoved as they fled the blast. A couple of them looked through the hole and did a double take when they saw us. We probably looked like ghosts in our white ceremonial robes.

  The rumbling grew louder behind us, in the direction of the Circle ceremony. I spun toward it. “We have to get them—”

  I could tell Stellan didn’t like it, but he said, “They had a way out. We have to save ourselves.” He pulled me to the hole in the wall. The stone scraped at my bare arms as I squeezed through, and then there was a massive crash, and bits of rock and dust slammed into us, throwing us to the floor. I sat up coughing, staring back in the direction of the ruined ceremonial chamber.

  There would be no going back for Jack and Elodie and Luc.

  Stellan stood and hauled me to my feet. I tucked the box under my arm. “We have to get out of here. It might cave in more.”

  We followed the crowd. Tears streamed down my face at the haze in the air. I couldn’t stop coughing, and neither could Stellan.

  We burst into the next chamber just in time to hear someone scream.

  “Merde,” Stellan said under his breath.

  I ran into him, but I would have stopped still anyway. “No,” I whispered, panic swelling in my throat. “Please tell me this isn’t what it looks like.”

  Despite everything, until this very moment I’d assumed this didn’t have to do with us. That it was a random terrorist attack—or even an accident. Cave-ins happened in old tunnels sometimes.

  “This wasn’t just a bomb,” Stellan murmured.

  At a glance, it might look like the girl had been injured by falling debris. Her face was bloodied, and she was limp. But there was another girl next to her, yelling. It was in English, so I could understand. “Elena!” she screamed. She turned to the rest of the tour group huddled around her. “She just started coughing blood, and then she collapsed!”

  And if we needed more proof, on the other side of the cavern, a kid leaned over a man whose face was covered in red. Moments later, the son coughed, spraying blood across his father’s already-stained white shirt.

  They hadn’t been hurt by the cave-in.

  It flashed through my head again. My mom falling to her knees, coughing. The bloody tears seeping from her green eyes, faster and faster, staining the light carpet where she fell. It had happened so fast. It was real—it was too real—but now the images rolled through my head like a movie shot on old, scratched film. I wondered whether it really had happened at all. Whether this all could be just a recurring bad dream, and at some point, I’d figure out how to wake up. I dug one fingernail into my palm as hard as I could. I don’t think that worked in dreams, anyway.

  Stellan put an arm around me and pulled me close, and I let him. “How?” I whispered. The only illumination came from the dim can lights illuminating the passageway, and those were dampened by the swirling yellow dust. My bare feet were covered in dirt, and it streaked my white robes. “They couldn’t have all eaten or drunk something.”

  “Aerosol,” he said. “I wouldn’t have imagined the Saxons would have enough blood left to do it. But maybe it takes even less in this form.”

  “Every Circle family was here,” I said, horror mounting. “The Saxons must have been trying to take them all out at once.”

  Stellan rubbed his face, smearing a clean line through the dust yellowing his skin. “If it got out here, maybe it wasn’t directed into the ceremony chamber. Maybe they were just trying to scare the Circle. Or maybe they did it wrong.”

  I coughed into Stellan’s shoulder, and then had another thought. “Do you think we can get it?”

  “I hope not. I think it’s just whatever’s in the air. We need to get out of here, anyway.”

  As we skirted past the dead and dying, I whispered, “Are these people Circle? Some of the peo
ple who died in Paris were second cousins or something, but . . .”

  Stellan pulled me past the father and son now both on the ground, dead. “Maybe the Saxons mutated it. I don’t know.”

  I didn’t take a wide enough berth, and my bare foot slipped on blood. I tried not to think about how cold and terrible it probably looked that we weren’t stopping to help. We were the only ones who knew there was nothing to be done.

  We rounded a corner and there was a square of sunlight ahead. We joined a clamoring, crying group of people, and I took a huge breath of fresh air when we burst into the evening light. I could tell immediately we were nowhere near where we’d gone into the ceremony, and we had no phones to call Jack and Elodie.

  “Do you think they would have stayed by where we went in?” I said. I refused to consider anything less than them making it out safely. “Ask somebody where that entrance is.”

  As he did, I remembered the little box under my arm. Out here in the light, the strip of metal around the top of it was far more obvious. It was the most likely candidate for this “map” we were looking for. Just in case someone took the box back from us once we found the Circle again, I pried at it. One end popped off easily, and I yanked until the other came free. The back of the metal strip was bright gold, and it had writing etched into it. In spite of everything, my heart jumped.

  Glancing around, I tucked the strip of metal into the sports bra I had on under the ceremonial robe.

  Stellan pulled me out of the crowd. We were in some kind of alley, with tall, straight walls rising on either side and a stone street down the middle, cars parked on one side of it. It was hot, with a bit of a dry wind that flapped our robes. “The main entrance to the tunnels is in the plaza at the Western Wall, but I don’t think that’s where we went in.” He glanced down the alley, chewing his lip. “Elodie and Jack will be looking for us, too. Assuming—”

  “They’re okay,” I said, suddenly feeling more nervous when I saw that he was nervous. “They have to be. Right?”

  Stellan peered over my head, and then he stiffened. I wheeled around.

  There was a machine gun pointed at my face.

  The soldier on the other end of the gun barked something, and Stellan raised his hands over his head. I did the same. I saw a crowd of people behind him, one woman chattering excitedly, pointing at us. Two more soldiers joined the first.

  Stellan argued with the soldier. He yelled something angry, gesturing with his gun.

  “Turn around,” Stellan said quietly. “Hands on the wall.”

  I guess I wasn’t quick enough, because I felt the barrel of a gun jabbing me in the middle of my back until I stumbled forward into the stone. I spread my dusty hands, one still holding the box, on either side of my head like Stellan had. “Don’t try anything,” he murmured as another soldier kicked my feet farther apart. “They will kill us. They think we did this.”

  “What?” I said it too loud, and earned another jab from the gun and one of the soldiers yelling in my ear, so close I could smell the sourness on his breath. He ripped the little box out of my hand, and I cringed as close to Stellan as I could.

  “They got a tip, and then multiple tourists pointed you out,” he murmured. “They said they saw you setting a backpack down and running away. A short girl in a white robe, with dark hair pulled up on her head.”

  “What?” I whispered again. That made no sense—then, suddenly, it did.

  I had a sister who looked just like me, and who would know exactly what I was wearing today. “Lydia,” I whispered.

  My head started to spin. Lydia had set us up. The Saxons had blamed the Order for their attacks for so long, and now they were shifting that blame to us. The Circle would think we’d brought them to the initiation to kill them. The whole world would think we were terrorists.

  Lydia was here.

  She wouldn’t be able to capture us in front of the Circle—the Saxons were persona non grata. But like this? She’d know where the military would take us. She’d be waiting. The Melechs were almost certainly in on it. And if they happened to fail in capturing us, the Circle would still think we’d tried to kill them, and the Saxons would be exonerated. It was the perfect plan.

  Our hands were cuffed behind our backs, and we were thrown into the partially open back of a truck.

  I glanced at the soldiers. The two guarding us looked younger than me. They couldn’t have known the truth of what was happening; they were just following orders. If we were going to escape, we had to do it before we were taken to anyone who was in on the Saxons’ plan.

  But we couldn’t use Circle influence now. The best thing to do would be to look like tourists who had stumbled into a very unfortunate case of mistaken identity.

  “Our friends are in there!” I tried. “They might be hurt—”

  The gun in my face made me close my mouth.

  The cut on my arm from the ceremony was still bleeding. It gave me an idea. I surreptitiously took some blood from it and wiped it under my nose. And then I nudged Stellan, hoped he understood the plan, and let my eyes roll back in my head.

  CHAPTER 4

  An hour later, we were in a sterile, sparse room somewhere inside a military hospital.

  I was a little shocked at the compassion of these soldiers, actually. I had hoped my stunt would cause some confusion and we might be able to escape, but even though they thought I’d set off a bomb laced with a biological weapon in their city—in one of the most volatile regions in the world—they had let me get medical attention.

  There were no Circle members at this hospital, and no one seemed to know who we were. This wasn’t where we were meant to have ended up. We had to get out of here before the confusion cleared.

  This room was nothing but three stone walls and a chain-link gate across the front, with a soldier on guard. I didn’t let myself look down the hall. The last time I’d been in a hospital was in a basement, on my way to the morgue to officially identify my mom’s body. I wondered whether the people who had died today would be brought here—

  I shook myself. How were we going to get out of here? Assuming Jack and Elodie were okay, they had no way to find us.

  They had to be okay.

  I blinked that thought away, too. I hadn’t gotten through the last month by letting things like that in.

  Next to me, Stellan stared straight ahead. His white robe was torn at the collar, his face streaked with dirt and sweat. I thought he’d been quiet while the doctor was checking me for head injuries so as to not draw extra attention to us, but now I noticed that his toes were tapping out a nervous beat on the concrete floor.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered.

  He gave half a nod at the far wall.

  I listened to the restless tap tap tap of his foot and remembered him telling me about waking up in a hospital with most of his family dead and burns across his whole body.

  A shudder went through me. My gaze slid out of our cell, down the hallway, and I felt the tenuous control I’d had on my thoughts since the bomb went off slipping.

  That last hospital I’d been in had had the same anemic hospital light, the same speckled tile and dingy walls, the same sterile, cold smell like metal instruments and cleaning solution. I wondered if Stellan’s had, too. In mine, my mother’s usually smiling eyes had been lifeless, her hair matted with blood. They’d told me I could touch her, but I didn’t. I signed the forms to identify her. They asked me about funerals and autopsies, and I wanted to scream at them that they were vultures, that my mother had died just a few hours earlier. But those words—my mother died—couldn’t have been true, so I couldn’t say them. I don’t know, I said instead. Jack had asked me a couple more times in the past weeks, whenever the morgue called. I don’t know, I said, over and over. I’ll think about it later. I don’t know.

  Stellan’s foot was still tapping. Now, so was mine.
>
  The next time I had to identify a body—how had it become my life that I could say a phrase like that?—the next time, it could be Jack’s or Elodie’s.

  Tap tap tap tap went our feet. Stop it, I told myself. We had to make a plan. We had to—Images flashed like a jerky movie reel in my brain: Jack glancing back as he and Elodie pushed Circle members out of the ceremony chamber. The dead girl, and her friend screaming her name. Elena!

  When I started to lose control in the middle of the night, I got up and punched things. That wasn’t going to happen now. The only possible distraction in here was sitting right next to me, and he wasn’t doing so great himself.

  One of my legs was cuffed to my rolling chair, but the other was free. I very quietly rolled my chair close enough to reach out and touch Stellan’s foot with mine.

  He stiffened. “No one’s watching. We don’t have to pretend in here.”

  I heard the echo of myself outside the initiation. I didn’t move my foot.

  Stellan let his head fall forward, his hair hanging in his eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t like hospitals.”

  “I know. I’m sorry I had us brought here.”

  “Not like the alternative was better.”

  The soldier turned around. “Sheket!” he barked. It wasn’t hard to grasp the meaning of that. I shut my mouth until he turned back around.

  When he did, Stellan inched his own chair closer. With a glance at the soldier, he leaned in like he was going to whisper something to me. I inclined my ear to him, but he just sat there, his breath uneven. Our cheeks were almost touching. Stellan’s skin was warm and he smelled like blood and dirt, but under it, enough like him that it cut through the sad, sterile hospital smell. Except for the fake canoodling at the party, this was the closest we’d been in a long time. The closest I’d been to anyone in a long time. I remembered what had happened at the Melechs’: the flashbacks to when we’d kissed at Cannes, the flashbacks to the attack in Paris.