The Ends of the World

by Maggie Hall

  I was standing in front of a rendering of what the inside might have looked like when Elodie coughed again. We all stilled. She stood back up like it was nothing.

  She couldn’t get the virus after this long, could she? What would it look like if she did? Would it be quick? Or slower, since it had taken this long? A tiny nosebleed that got worse?

  Breathe, I told myself. Out out out in.

  We spent another hour at the library, then found a bench in a wide plaza nearby. A vendor cart selling candy trundled up over the sparse grass, and Elodie bought one of everything.

  I knew logically that we shouldn’t start panicking yet, but it was getting late. Especially if Elodie was—no. Don’t. But even if that wasn’t a concern, every time I glanced at the news, things looked worse. And Jack wasn’t the only one looking up and down the street nervously for Circle members. We knew all too well they had ways to track people, and it wouldn’t take them terribly long to figure out there were only a few countries we might have made it to from Israel. We were all keeping hats and sunglasses on, but that would only work for so long.

  Elodie was flipping from web page to web page on her phone, her knee bouncing nervously, munching on a handful of candied peanuts. Stellan was texting, to Anya’s nanny, I was sure, a lollipop dangling from his mouth. A guy with a cart full of dinky plastic toys walked by, and he shook one of those annoying hand-clapper things at us. We all flinched.

  Stellan put his phone away and rested an arm around my shoulders. “Tell me, my darling other half,” he said, with a feigned nonchalance, “how long until we cut our losses and give up?”

  I pulled away so his arm fell back to the bench. “Are you serious?”

  Jack, pacing in front of us with one hand on his concealed gun, stopped. “We’re the only ones who can find the cure before the Saxons do,” he said, like he was explaining something to a child. “Which means we have the responsibility to stop them from doing worse than they already have.”

  Stellan pulled the lollipop out of his mouth with an exaggerated pop. “Duty. Of course, coming from you. How about some logic, though?”

  This was just how they used to bicker when I’d first met them. The threads holding the four of us together were coming closer and closer to snapping.

  Stellan leaned his forearms on his knees. “We’ve been searching for the cure all by ourselves partly because we didn’t want the Circle to know about our blood making the virus. Now they know. What’s stopping us from sending them a package of every clue we have, letting them take over, and washing our hands of it? Why are we still risking our lives?”

  I heaved an irritated sigh. “You know exactly why. To—”

  To stop the Saxons, I almost finished. That was the only reason I’d done anything lately. Stop them. Ruin them.

  But I suddenly realized that, since the bomb in Jerusalem, I’d barely thought about ruining the Saxons at all. Instead, what had come to my mind just now was the tour group crying over their friend in the tunnels. The angry men throwing bottles at each other in the square because each side thought the other had attacked their city.

  I remembered what Stellan had said: the Circle only cared about the Circle, and more specifically, about their own family. The world wasn’t their concern.

  “Because the whole world is in danger now,” I said quietly. “From the virus or from the turmoil that’s following it. Because as much as we didn’t mean to, we started this, and we have to stop it.”

  Jack spread his hands as if to say my point exactly.

  Stellan sat back heavily against the bench and gathered his hair up in the hand not holding the candy. It was long enough now he could have tied it back. He stared off into the middle distance, not acknowledging what I’d said, but not fighting it, either. I knew he agreed. I’d seen his face in the tunnels when we’d realized what had happened. I knew he wouldn’t leave the Saxons with something that could kill Luc and Colette, or any number of other Circle members we cared about.

  “At the least, can we agree that arguing about it is a waste of our time and our sanity?” Elodie gestured to me. “This one’s having panic attacks. The two of you have your pouty faces on. Not that your pouty faces aren’t adorable. But it’s not helping.”

  Stellan leaned across me to Elodie. “I think we can all agree that you’re not allowed to pretend everything’s the same as it always was and that you can joke your way back into us trusting you. You can’t.”

  Elodie’s face fell. I sighed and pushed up from the bench, wandering a few feet away to lean on a lightpost. The crinkle in my back pocket reminded me that I’d taken a pamphlet from the first little museum. I pulled it out and perused it absently. I flipped it over to the back, where it talked about the museum courtyard, which we hadn’t even realized was there. There was a close-up of flowers, and then a shot from above.

  I froze.

  The courtyard contained ruins from circa 300 BC, the brochure said. The ruins were just bits of stone, now made into a garden. I picked up my locket, and rubbed my thumb over the symbol there. The symbol had thirteen loops, with the thirteenth at the center.

  So did the garden.

  The ruins in the courtyard were in the exact shape of the locket around my neck.

  CHAPTER 10

  The museum was closed. A heavy iron gate had been pulled down over the entrance we’d used just a couple of hours earlier. We peered around the back and saw a drive gate, but it was locked, too, and guarded.

  “We could bribe the guards,” Elodie murmured.

  “Wouldn’t it be better if no one knew we were in there?” I whispered. “This museum is state run. It probably wouldn’t get back to the Circle, but anywhere that has guards at a gate cares if random people traipse in and attempt an archaeological dig in their garden.”

  As we watched, a tall, brightly painted truck rumbled up to the entrance. The guards opened the gate, and he drove right through.

  “Maybe we could sneak through when he drives out,” I whispered, but realized as I was saying it that there would be no possible way for us to get through unseen.

  Unless . . .

  Jack thought of it at the same time. “A delivery truck,” he said. “Them we’d be able to bribe.”

  We hurried to a major road a couple of blocks away and surveyed our options. Cars would be too obvious. A pickup truck piled high with melons wasn’t ideal for camouflage. And then I saw it.

  Like a lot of the places we’d been, this city was a mix of the modern and the far less modern.

  A donkey stood placidly, chewing on a piece of straw. He was attached to a flat-bottomed cart carrying a pile of something covered in cloth tarps. The driver was bantering with a taxi driver and spit some kind of dark liquid out of the corner of his mouth into the gutter.

  “The donkey cart,” I said.

  Elodie sighed. “Why do these plans always involve ruining my clothes?”

  Jack spoke to the driver, and when he said I could, I peered under the drop cloth, relieved to find baskets instead of raw fish or garbage.

  I looked back to see the driver grinning widely at the bills in his hand, and gesturing for us to do whatever we wanted.

  Stellan held up the cloth, and we all wedged ourselves in among the baskets. When Stellan had draped the cloth over us and gotten in on the far side, I felt the driver climb onto the seat over our heads and click his tongue at the donkey.

  We jolted violently when the back wheel came off the curb. Jack’s arm wrapped tight around me, and I clung to the edge of the cart, wincing when I heard a spitting noise and something hit the cloth just over my head. A dark stain spread, and with it, the smell of what had to be some kind of chewing tobacco. Gross. Luckily we weren’t far from the museum at all, and I could tell when we turned into the dirt alley. Now we just had to hope the guard wouldn’t look under the cloth. But when we rolled to a sto
p, the voices were joking, and no one approached where we hid.

  There was a screech of the gate opening, and it was only a couple minutes before we stopped and the driver swept the cloth off of us. He chattered nervously in Arabic, and Jack jumped up. “He says to hurry.” We righted the baskets we’d knocked off, and huddled behind a truck parked against a far wall until the drive gate slid shut.

  I peered around the truck’s rear fender. We were in what looked like the museum’s loading area. I could see the gardens ahead. They were far more impressive than the inside of the museum was—all those bits of stone inside were pieces of the rubble, I realized. These ruins could have been a whole building, with each of the loops in the symbol being a room. There were no guards inside the walls.

  We crept out and made our way carefully across the ruins. Elodie leaned down and touched the stone reverently. Now we knew why she’d always been so interested in Olympias.

  I wasn’t sure we’d be able to tell when we’d gotten to the center, but moments later, it became obvious. Right in the middle of the courtyard, there was a fountain. It had three tiers, all intricately carved with scenes of people, leading to a woman at the top, presiding over them.

  “Could that be Olympias?” I said.

  “No one knows exactly what she looked like,” Elodie answered.

  I gazed up at her, and then squinted. “Is that—” I climbed onto the fountain’s rim to look more closely, and sure enough, carved around the woman’s neck was a necklace just like mine.

  Jack climbed onto the fountain’s edge with me. “There’s a crack here. It’s man-made, not natural.” He touched where the woman connected to the fountain. “I wonder whether we have to remove the statue.”

  “Be careful,” I said.

  He pulled on the top, and nothing happened. Then he twisted.

  There was a click, and a groan. And then a screech from the far side of the fountain. We all hurried to it to find a trapdoor opened to a set of rough-hewn steps into the ground.

  “Merde,” Elodie said in a hushed voice. The rest of our faces reflected the same sentiment.

  “Do you really think it’s possible that the tomb of Alexander the Great has just been sitting right under here this whole time? Right in the middle of this huge city?” I whispered.

  “If it’s this close to the water, that might be why radar hasn’t found it,” Jack said.

  “If it’s this close to the water, whatever was under there might have been washed away,” Stellan countered, but he peered inside. He and Jack and Elodie had put aside their argument in the square when I made the discovery about the gardens, but I could still feel the hair trigger.

  Stellan started down the steps. Elodie stopped him. “We’re still your Keepers. At least let the two of us go first. It could be dangerous.”

  Stellan’s jaw twitched. I wasn’t sure whether it was because he was still annoyed at anything Elodie said, or because he still wasn’t used to being the protected rather than the protector. But he stepped back and gestured expansively toward the hole.

  Jack and Elodie clicked on their flashlights and disappeared down the stairs.

  “Anything?” I called after a minute.

  “Not dead yet,” Elodie replied, her voice reverberating out of the tunnel.

  Stellan glanced at me and I nodded, then slung my bag around my back. We took the first step down into what might very well be the biggest archaeological discovery of all time.

  We assembled at the bottom of the stairs. I skirted a mud pit, and looked around as Jack shined his flashlight on the walls. We were in a wide dirt tunnel, stretching as far as we could see in either direction.

  Elodie jogged off far enough that I couldn’t see her flashlight anymore, and came back reporting more of the same.

  I scraped my feet along a patch of dry ground to dislodge some of the mud, and clicked on the flashlight app on my phone. “Should we split up?” I said. “Cover more ground?”

  Elodie shined her flashlight on the walls. “Splitting up in the creepy underground tomb is how horror movies start.” We set out together, the only sound the tramping of our feet on packed earth.

  I wondered how long this tunnel had been here. Had Napoleon left it just as he’d found it, from Alexander’s time? Was the dirt we were walking on first packed down by Order members two thousand years ago? I touched the cool, damp wall and rubbed the soil between my fingers..

  Jack had walked ahead, running his light over the walls and ceiling of the tunnel. Stellan followed his lead. Elodie and I brought up the back, watching for anything they might have missed.

  Elodie coughed again, and I couldn’t help but swing my flashlight onto her. “There’s two thousand years of mold down here,” she said, squinting against my light. I lowered it. “Stop looking at me like that.”

  I fell into step beside her. “You’re not feeling any different, though? I know we thought—”

  “If I have some strain of the virus that takes nearly a day to manifest, there’s nothing to be done other than finding the cure. So as I said outside, less worrying, more questing.”

  “I’m just trying— Never mind.” I was trying to not feel like we were running out of time, in one way or another. Breathe, I reminded myself.

  Elodie glanced down at me and sighed. “Listen. Everyone’s tense.”

  “I know. You all have as much reason to panic as I do, and you’re not and I need to get it together.”

  Elodie held up a finger. “No. I’m saying we’ve had years to learn to deal with all this. You’re new at it, and you’re doing fine.”

  “I—” It had almost sounded like respect in her voice. “Still.”

  Elodie sighed again, like the conversation pained her. “I heard what you said up there. None of this is your fault. Not the virus. Not what happened to your mother. I thought you should hear someone say it out loud, just in case that’s what the panic attacks are about.”

  I winced and tried to hide it. “Besides that it’s my blood, I’m the one who had the chance to kill Lydia and Cole, and I was stupid and let them go. And then I spent the next few days not concentrating hard enough on protecting my mom. She wanted to leave. If we’d left, she’d still be alive. But I didn’t see what was coming. Probably because half my brain was too busy thinking about—” I glanced up at Stellan’s back, and past him, barely visible in the dark, Jack’s. I shivered with disgust at myself and lowered my voice more, even though they were far enough ahead they wouldn’t be able to make out what we were saying. “So yeah. It’s nice of you to say, but everything that happened is pretty directly my fault.”

  Elodie touched tree roots snaking across the wall next to us. “You want to know why your mom died? Because Cole Saxon killed her.”

  Our lights danced ahead of us. My hand felt sweaty around my phone. “Yeah, because I—”

  “No.” Her voice was firm. “Because you nothing. It was because. He. Killed. Her. It was not your fault. You let the Saxons go because despite it all, you wanted to see the good in them. You spent some time brooding over which of those two you’d rather kiss because you’re human and your brain was exhausted thinking about dying all the time when up until now the only thing you’ve had to worry about is school exams. I mean—” She gestured ahead at Stellan. He bent to inspect something then stood again, his lanky form in a white shirt and his blond hair bright spots in the dark. “Whose brain wouldn’t prefer that to sorting out who your psycho family is planning to kill next?”

  “Shh,” I hissed.

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t forget, I’ve been with both of them, too. I get it.”

  I sniffed. “You guys have the weirdest relationship.”

  “Us guys? Do you prefer the term judgy or hypocrite?”

  Fair. “Why didn’t it work out between you and either of them?” I said quietly.

 
“Because sometimes something is fun for a while and not true love forever. And sometimes things change. People change.” I had just a moment to wonder which boy went with which comment when she went on, “Stop distracting me. I’m trying to be kind or sympathetic or whatever this unfamiliar sentiment is. You’re making it even harder than it already is.” Her snarky tone vanished. “I used to do this same thing, you know. I would go over and over the night my family died. If I’d stayed up late reading, maybe I would have noticed the fire in time to save them. If my dad hadn’t tried to get into business, maybe . . . But no matter how many scenarios might have made things different, none of them mean it’s the fault of anyone besides the people who did it. Full stop. You can pout over other things, but you can’t pout over that, because it’s not true.”

  I scuffed my shoe on the packed dirt. “Has anyone ever told you you’re the worst at pep talks?” I mumbled.

  Elodie raised her light to see farther down the passage. “You know what I used to tell myself when it would get bad?” she said. “You made it through this, and you survived. It’s way more than most people have been through. That means you can do anything.”

  I clutched the strap of my bag tight.

  “You’re a survivor. I’d never wish it on anyone, but you’re just like the rest of us now. Welcome to the world’s worst club.”

  I turned away from her, pretending to look at something on the wall. I blinked a few dozen times, dissipating the heat behind my eyes.

  Just ahead, Stellan stopped short. When I saw what he was looking at, my heart jumped, and my head cleared.

  There was faint orange light coming from the tunnel ahead. If this was it, I didn’t have to panic anymore. If this was it—

  I realized halfway there what it was.

  “We’re back to where we started.” Stellan’s voice was a mask of calm.

  “How is that possible?” We hadn’t been going in one big circle. We’d made a bunch of turns, some sharper than others. And yet, here we were. The afternoon sun outside reflected in the water pooled beneath the fountain. “We must have missed something.” I headed back down the corridor, my light bouncing erratically around the endless smooth dirt. “A turnoff. A door.”