The Ends of the World

by Maggie Hall

  I wiped my wet hands on my leggings. I had assumed that the attack that had left me bloody and terrified in a ball gown on my first day in Paris was Lydia and Cole, too, before they knew who I was. I remembered running down the stairs, being chased by a guy with a knife. I remembered dead bodies on a checkerboard floor, the black and white streaked with red.

  Outside, there was a salty breeze coming off the sea, and the fresh air should have made me feel better, but didn’t. By the time we got to the front of the line, all of us tense and anxious, my chest had tightened so much, I could barely breathe.

  We were waved to the desk, and handed over the four passports as a group. The official flipped through them, and then frowned. He asked about our entry stamps, and we launched into the dumb tourist act we’d rehearsed. We had entry stamps on another piece of paper, but oops, were you supposed to keep them? Elodie was saying to me.

  I could barely reply with, Oh no, did you throw them away with the brochure for the Dead Sea the hotel gave us?

  While we were arguing, Elodie was letting the program upload. I could see her glancing down at her phone. I met her eyes, and she shook her head slightly, her brow pinched.

  The official’s hand drifted to his gun. It might have been unconscious, but my chest got even tighter, like there was a balloon inside it, expanding and crushing my lungs. He took our passports and went into the booth. We could see the computer screen, and him typing things into it. A red screen came up. He looked back at us, typed something else. Another red screen.

  “Okay?” Jack muttered beside me.

  I nodded.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Maybe there was something wrong. For hours I thought I was just nervous, but it was starting to feel like more than that. “I’m sure it’s nothing. I just feel weird.”

  “Weird how?” Jack sounded alarmed. It didn’t help. I must have looked really bad. He rested a warm hand on my back. “Do you need to sit down?”

  I tried to swallow. It was hard. What if I could catch the virus? What if that was the reason my chest felt tight? Maybe it took longer to kill me because I was the source.

  There was a soldier patrolling, and he stopped in front of me, frowning, his gun held across his chest. “What is wrong with you?”

  “She had too much to drink last night,” Elodie said, shooting me a look that said, What is wrong with you?

  I gave the faintest smile.

  Elodie let out a flirty laugh and pointed at our bus, distracting the soldier with some dumb question about tours. He gave me one last lingering glance, and then moved to talk to her. I could tell Jack was practically buzzing with alarm, mentally searching for what he could use for first aid. “Avery—” he whispered.

  Stellan hadn’t spoken to any of us since we’d gotten off the bus, but now he stepped up and slipped a casual arm around my shoulders.

  “What are you doing? She needs—” Jack started to protest.

  “I don’t think you actually know what she needs.” Stellan drew me out of the line, and I could see Jack deciding whether to follow and make a scene.

  “Leave me alone,” I murmured to Stellan, knowing I should be more annoyed than I was capable of right now. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. You’re shaking and sweating. That’s not good at a border crossing where they’re already on alert.”

  “Can I catch the virus?” I glanced at the back of the soldier with the gun, now walking away from Elodie, and at the official inside the booth, trying our passport numbers one more time. One more red screen. We weren’t going to get through. We were going to get turned over to the Circle.

  Stellan pulled me farther away and drew me close, his head to mine like we were obnoxious tourists who didn’t know that a border crossing was a time to lay off the PDA. “Are you having a hard time breathing?” he murmured.

  I nodded against his forehead.

  “I think you’re having a panic attack.”

  “This isn’t in my head,” I snapped. “I literally can’t breathe.” It felt like a fist was tightening around my sternum. It was getting a lot worse, and fast. I felt my vision starting to swim. I was going to die in the middle of the desert on the hot asphalt. “I’m sorry. I’m going to leave you to deal with all this alone. I’m sorry—”

  Stellan took my face in his hands. “Kuklachka, listen to me.”

  I’d told him not to call me that. And unlike in the hospital, having his face so close to mine wasn’t helping this time. I pictured it all again—kissing him. An explosion. Screams. Blood. I took gasped breath after gasping breath, but I didn’t push him away. His hands were suddenly the only thing keeping me upright.

  “It’s not just in your head. It’s real. But I do think it’s a panic attack.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a terrible feeling, but it’s not going to hurt you. You’re probably not breathing out all the way, so then you can’t breathe in.”

  I could only hear some of the words. Breathe. Panic. My entire world narrowed to my chest, and to the air I couldn’t get into my lungs.

  “Look at me.” He shook me a little. “Avery. We need to get you looking calm before the border official comes back.”

  I blinked a few times and his face swam into focus.

  Stellan held my face tighter. “Purse your lips like you’re whistling,” he ordered in a whisper. “Now blow out. Push out all the air you can. More.” He pressed a hand into my stomach. There wasn’t any more air. But I contracted my stomach as hard as I could, and pushed out another breath. “More. Good. Now pause.”

  I did, trying to trust him, even though it hurt. My chest hurt. My lungs hurt. A tear slipped down my face. “Now breathe in slowly, through your nose, into your stomach,” he said. “Try to push my hand out.”

  I can’t, I wanted to say, that’s the problem, but I concentrated on his fingers through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, concentrated on my stomach expanding under them. It was at least ninety degrees out, and I was so cold.

  “Good. Now out through the pursed lips again. Slowly. As much air out as you can. More. And in again. Push my hand.”

  It was the third breath before I realized that I was very definitely breathing. It still wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t getting worse. A few more breaths, and I could breathe almost normally again. I blinked up at Stellan, and his eyes searched mine, far more concerned than I had realized.

  “How did you know?” I whispered.

  He rested his chin on the top of my head with a heavy sigh. I leaned my forehead against his beachy tank. His heart was going a mile a minute. His fingers tightened on my stomach and he pulled back, his eyes on the horizon behind me.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  He pulled away. “Get yourself together,” he said roughly. “At least until we get across the border. Keep up those breaths and it shouldn’t get worse.”

  The door to the guard shack banged open and I jumped. Inside, the red screen was still up on the computer. My chest started to tighten again and I breathed, out out out in. I shot a glance at Elodie, and she gave the barest shrug and frantically pushed buttons on her phone.

  “When did you say you came into the country?” the official said. The question sounded innocuous enough, but the three more guards with machine guns behind him made it look less so.

  “Only just yesterday,” Elodie said in her fake, heavy British accent. Breathe into my stomach, then out. Elodie glanced at her phone again, and her face relaxed. “Try one more time?” she asked. “I’d feel so bad about holding up the bus when I’m sure we’re in there. Please?” The rest of the line behind us shifted impatiently.

  The official’s eyes narrowed. “Step out of line,” he said, but he left someone else to deal with the rest of the group while he took our passports back into the booth one more time. This time, mercifully, t
he screen popped up green.

  We all let out a heavy breath at once.

  Elodie turned to me as we were making our way back to the bus. “Are you all right?”

  I glanced up at Stellan. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m—sorry. Let’s get on the bus before they change their minds.”

  CHAPTER 9

  I woke up just as the bus pulled into the station in Alexandria. The kink in my neck suggested I hadn’t moved for too long. I was shocked I’d fallen asleep at all, but the panic attack at the border had left me more exhausted than I already was. Jack and Elodie were blinking awake across the aisle, and Stellan was hunched against the window next to me, his bloodshot eyes suggesting he hadn’t slept at all. We were all still bleary when we climbed off the bus, and Stellan immediately took Jack’s phone to call his sister again.

  “Coffee,” groaned Elodie. “What time is it?”

  “About noon.”

  We wandered out of the bus station and into a grassy plaza filled with palm trees. Across the street was a semicircular bay, and a dock filled with bobbing blue and yellow boats. A lone fisherman in stained robes and a white turban came strolling up the dock, followed by half a dozen hungry-eyed and dirty-faced cats. As he reached the shore, the fisherman stopped and pulled an entire fish out of his bag, tossing it down on the rocks. The cats descended like little furry vultures.

  Elodie flopped onto the grass. “Can we just get a hotel for the night?” she said dully.

  “We don’t know how much time we have until this catches up to us. Our pictures might be everywhere on the Internet already.” Right before we’d tried to steal Napoleon’s bracelet from the Cannes Film Festival, the Saxons had wanted to capture me, so they’d named me a person of interest in an assassination. “Our pictures might be on the news already. Have you seen anything?”

  Jack shook his head. “We’re not implicated anywhere. I’ve been watching. That’s almost worse. It means the Circle really thinks we did it and they don’t want the rest of the world involved.”

  Elodie let out a hacking cough. And another, so hard that she sat up and buried her face in her hands. “Must have gotten something in my throat on that bus. I told you I’m allergic to public transportation.”

  I kept staring at her. That was a weird cough. Not that we actually had to worry about the virus, but . . . No. She was fine.

  “Where’s the clue?” I said. Elodie pulled it out of her bag. “My followers will watch over us, at the thirteenth at the center of the twelve. Where Olympias’s followers could watch over her. That’s what we’re looking for. Elodie, you had someone researching whether there was an Order headquarters here in Olympias’s time, right?”

  She nodded. “I’ll call and see what they’ve found.”

  I ran a hand over the scrubby grass as seagulls called overhead. “Can we stop somewhere and get us phones? And a toothbrush? And something besides this tiny knife? Can you even buy guns here?” I added, remembering once again that we no longer had Circle privileges.

  “Black market,” Stellan said shortly. I’d noticed how quiet and tense he’d been since Jerusalem, but it had only gotten worse since my panic attack at the border. He’d barely said a word to anyone the past few hours.

  “We should get a taxi,” I said just as I realized it was weird to have to say that. We’d spent time in Alexandria before. Usually in an area this touristy, there would be dozens of drivers trying to convince us that their air-conditioning was better than the next guy’s. People really must be nervous if even taxi drivers were hiding.

  Finally, I spotted one, a minivan waiting in the actual taxi queue at the bus station. “I’m going to look.” When I approached, I was surprised to see a girl get out of the driver’s seat. She wasn’t too much older than me, wearing a full-length robe and a pretty, rosepatterned hijab.

  “Hi,” I said. “English?” She nodded and smiled, showing dimples and crooked teeth. “Could you take us a few different places around the city?” She nodded again and I motioned everyone over.

  Elodie slammed the van door behind her after we’d clambered inside. She turned to the driver and said something in what I assumed must be Arabic, and the girl grinned.

  Ten minutes later, we’d moved about four blocks. Judging by the number of cars on this freeway, I guess not everyone was staying inside. Lining the road were dingy-looking apartment buildings with swaths of chipped plaster that exposed the brick beneath. There were satellite dishes on every balcony, and a mess of electrical cords snaked between them. This part of the city was not nearly as pretty as the old city.

  No one seemed to care about lane designations, and there were at least six cars across on this three-lane road. A little boy leaned out of the car next to us, waving frantically at the car full of foreigners. I waved back halfheartedly. I could have held hands with him if I’d put my arm out our window. I tried not to think about him contracting the virus.

  I was understanding more and more why I had spent my whole life avoiding getting attached to anything, to any place, to anyone.

  “How far is it to where we’re going?” Jack said from the backseat, and then repeated it in Arabic.

  “Only a few kilometers, but the traffic is bad at this time of day,” our driver answered in perfect English. “Or at any time of day,” she added after a second.

  I tried to shake the thoughts out, and when that didn’t work, I repeated the slow, steady breaths into my stomach to keep from panicking.

  We made stops at a huge shopping center for a couple of changes of clothes and new phones, and at a smaller, seedier market for weapons. I didn’t know when I’d become a person who felt better carrying a weapon, but somehow I had.

  I flipped on my new phone. I meant to look through the news, but I found myself searching Napoleon Book of Fates. I found the same website I’d seen before, and the list of questions again. My eye was immediately drawn to one: Shall I be successful in my current endeavor? I clicked on it, then on a set of stars.

  The map to one’s fate is seldom straightforward; that deemed adversity may be but a fork in the road toward what is longed for, it read. I wrinkled my nose. Seriously? The map to one’s fate?

  I clicked off it and pulled up a news site. I didn’t like what I saw. “The UK just closed their borders,” I said. There were curses around the car. “That’s a huge overreaction. All that’s going to do is make the whole Western world panic even more.”

  Jack held up another news article. “The United States has made a statement that no one needs to be alarmed and that the CDC is working on isolating the cause of the virus right away. The Fredericks are trying to calm this hysteria before it gets out of control.”

  “And the Saxons are doing all they can to fan the flames right back up,” I said. “Closing borders sends even more of a message than a government statement. Do you think maybe people will be reasonable, though? The death toll from the virus is maybe a couple dozen right now. That’s terrible, but it’s not enough for worldwide panic, is it?”

  “Unfortunately, the world pays more attention to frightened hyperbole than reason,” Elodie murmured.

  Our driver, Mariam, pulled over to the curb. We piled out, and Jack pulled a twenty-euro bill out of his wallet. I leaned back in the window. “We have to change money, but here’s this for now. Can you wait for us?”

  She nodded, then called after me as I started to walk away. “Miss?”

  I turned back.

  “Are you a spy?”

  I cast a worried glance at Jack. We shouldn’t have said so much in front of her. “We were just talking about the news,” I said quickly. “You’re not going to get in trouble, I promise.”

  She nodded again. “My sister loves the James Bond,” she whispered solemnly.

  Okay. We could worry about that later. For now, I thought we could trust Mariam. “We’ll be back,” I said, and followed the o
thers inside.

  Elodie had talked to her Order contacts. This museum was near the coordinates of what they believed to be a major Order headquarters in Olympias’s time. We hoped it might have some history of the area that could help us.

  “Look for references to twelves,” Elodie said. “The ‘thirteenth at the center of the twelve’ could mean twelve columns on a building that was destroyed thousands of years ago, or statues, or anything.”

  But the museum was tiny, with nothing but a few display cases of stone shards and a couple old coins and bits of tarnished jewelry. No history of the area at all. I grabbed a brochure and we left.

  Mariam drove us to one more museum and two sites with ruins that Elodie thought were connected to the Order. No twelve, no symbol from my locket. Hours of searching, and we’d found nothing.

  The next site was the new Library of Alexandria. It didn’t have much to do with the ancient library, but it was on the same site, and the ancient one was important to the Order. Plus, we hadn’t searched this area of the city closely last time we were here.

  I could tell by a freshening breeze that we were back near the water. We trudged down a dirty sidewalk, and I dodged a shop owner desperately trying to get us to buy some of the fish laid out on ice in front of his shop, and another waving aromatic flatbreads at us. Jack hurried us past them like they might be Circle, lying in wait to catch us.

  “Do we really think anyone could have made a tomb here?” Stellan’s hands were shoved rigidly into his pockets. All this failure certainly hadn’t made any of us less tense. “It’s too close to the bay. The ground is too wet. This is going to be another dead end.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Elodie asked. “Because I’d love to hear it.”

  “The library was dedicated to the Muses,” I said wearily, but loudly enough to speak over whatever Stellan might throw back at her. “Which is not the same, but similar to the Fates—the Moirai—whom Napoleon based the clues he left on. Maybe there are statues of the Muses.”

  Here, at least, there were mock-ups of how the old library might have looked, and we did our best to count any statues we saw and to find what might have been at the center of the buildings.