The Ends of the World

by Maggie Hall

  I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides. That was so opposite how I’d felt for so long. He was right, though. “Okay,” I said.

  Reluctantly, Stellan and Elodie nodded, too. We tiptoed back out. Jack pointed his light at the stairs. They couldn’t be more than a foot wide and six inches deep, cut right into the rock wall, with no handhold, and certainly no railing.

  Elodie pushed to the front and pointed down. Jack lit her way.

  “Be careful,” I breathed, and she swung off the edge and onto the top step a few feet below, so just her head and shoulders stuck up above the ledge.

  Our lights bounced over her, like strobes in a club. Stellan followed her. Trying my best not to think about the sheer drop into darkness inches away, I got on my hands and knees and lowered myself down. Stellan held on to my waist as my toes touched the top step, and, like he knew I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, kept his hand on me while Jack dropped above us until all four of us were in a line again, and down we went, step by narrow step.

  Halfway down, Elodie came to a sudden stop. She brought her arm to her mouth, racked by silent coughs. She bent over—and then suddenly she was slipping, her arms pinwheeling in the air.

  Stellan grabbed her. I grabbed him. My arm was ripped out of Jack’s steadying grasp, but he snagged my waist, leaving the four of us locked together in a precarious chain.

  I could feel Jack’s heart pounding against my back. Stellan leaned on the wall for a second before he looked up, his face inches from mine, and I realized my fingers were digging into his shoulders, right over his scars.

  I jerked them away. “Sorry,” I whispered.

  He shook his head with a bit of a smirk, as if to say, That is the least of our problems.

  Elodie looked back at us. “It’s slippery,” she mouthed, unnecessarily. Stellan put a finger to his lips and we listened for any sign Lydia and Cole had heard us. They were still talking inside. None of us let go of each other the rest of the way down.

  The bottom of the stairs disappeared into water. Jack waded into it as quietly as he could, and where I’d expected to slosh through it at knee height, he sank in all the way to his shoulders, and I could tell it went deeper. He glanced up and shrugged silently. We’d have to swim.

  We all deposited our phones in a plastic baggie Elodie had with her, and I held my bag aloft as we waded down the steps into the cold, murky depths.

  The pyramid was bigger than it had looked from above. It was sticking out of the water at least twenty feet, and who knew how far it went beneath. It was built of silvery-veined white marble that looked like it hadn’t been touched for a very long time. With our flashlights turned on it, it seemed to be glowing in the dark pit.

  “This is actually it, isn’t it?” Elodie breathed, treading water.

  But this wasn’t the time to marvel at history. I gestured around the side of the pyramid.

  When we reached the back, the first thing we saw was another set of steps just like the ones we’d come down. That must have been how Lydia and Cole had gotten in. And nearly at the top of the pyramid, a dim yellow light shined through what looked like an open door. Stellan raised his arm silently and pointed, and we swam to him to find another set of stairs leading up the pyramid’s slanted side.

  At the top of the exposed steps we all paused, dripping and shivering, getting our weapons ready. We’d capture Lydia and Cole. We’d figure out what the cure was and give it to Elodie, just in case. Then we’d destroy the rest of whatever it was so Lydia and Cole had no chance of taking it.

  “Don’t hurt them,” Jack whispered, warning. “We take them alive.”

  He held up a hand, then pointed, and we all burst through the door.

  CHAPTER 13

  The twins were standing on a raised platform with two boxes on it. They looked up, actual surprise registering on their faces. This was the first time I’d seen them in person since my mom died. My hands knotted into tight fists again.

  There were lanterns at their feet, illuminating them and the box they were standing over—which I realized now had to be a casket—in a warm light that shined back from all sides. The entire inside of the pyramid was plated in gold.

  “They’re getting smarter,” Lydia said to Cole.

  “Hands up, Lydia.” Jack pointed his gun at them, and Elodie and Stellan did the same. “Both of you.”

  Lydia smiled. “Though not that smart. We have the cure now, and you don’t.”

  “Easily remedied, as soon as you’re dead.” I couldn’t tell whether Stellan was just threatening, or whether he’d decided to disobey Jack after all. I wasn’t sure which I hoped was true.

  The twins kept their hands up as we came down the stairs. The gleaming gold on the walls and floor reflected our flashlights, giving the space an eerie, shuddering glow. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the walls weren’t bare. They were covered with shelves. And the shelves were stacked with all kinds of things: pots, statues, cylinders that I guessed might contain scrolls. Next to me, Elodie had her gun on the twins, but kept glancing away to stare up at the walls in awe.

  “I’d stop if I were you.” Lydia shook one of her hands, and for the first time, I realized she was holding something. “Cole,” she said, and my brother flicked a lighter. Whatever was in Lydia’s hand went up in flames. She dropped it on the floor. “There went the cure. Oops.”

  Stellan cursed and ran down the stairs, but the piece of papyrus was already ash by the time he reached it.

  The rest of us followed. The golden floor was slick underfoot, but perfectly dry, even though we had to be below water level now.

  Lydia held out her hands. “Shoot us and you’ll never know what it said! It’s only in our heads now.”

  I started to say some things I’d probably regret, but Jack cut me off. “What happened to you?” he said.

  Lydia’s big, dark eyes shifted to him. She had her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, and she and Cole looked more alike than I remembered. “Excuse me?”

  “How did you become these people?”

  “Us?” Lydia asked incredulously. “The traitor is asking what happened to us?”

  “Jack has always been loyal to you,” I protested. Even at the expense of his relationship with me. Somehow, that made me want to defend him more, even though I wasn’t sure why he’d chosen right now to bring it up.

  Lydia ignored me, her eyes still on Jack. “I thought you might be coming back to the right side, but you weren’t. It was all for her in the end,” she said, inclining her head at me. “Of course it was. Everything revolves around her.”

  Jack took a step closer, toward Lydia’s side of the casket, pulling her gaze with him. “Avery has nothing to do with you killing people.”

  Cole was still peering into the casket, his hands still above his head like he was barely interested in the proceedings around him. I wondered not for the first time just how much of this he actually cared about, and how much was simply an excuse to blow things up and kill people. I suspected there was more of the latter than any of us wanted to know.

  “What was it that made you into this?” Jack said again, holding Lydia’s gaze, his gun trained on her forehead.

  There was a subtle movement from the other direction, and suddenly, I understood. Jack hadn’t just picked this moment to point out the twins’ moral failings because he was upset. He was distracting them. Without a word passing between them, he and Stellan had made a plan.

  “I’ve defended you for so long because I thought that, despite everything, you were a good person,” Jack went on. I wondered how much he believed what he was saying. I didn’t think he was this good an actor. “I wanted you to be a good person.”

  Lydia’s shoulders fell, just a little, and she gave Jack a sad smile. “No, you didn’t. You never actually cared.”

  Just then, there was a scuffle and Stella
n was holding Cole, one arm around his neck, the other pointing a gun at his head.

  Lydia whipped around. “No!” she screeched. “Cole!”

  “Tell us about the cure or he dies,” Stellan said. “I think you know I will have no problem at all shooting this idiot.”

  “How do we know you’ll let me go once we tell you?” Cole choked out over Stellan’s arm.

  “My word,” Jack said, and then looked at Stellan. “You will let him go. We’re Circle. It means something. It means we’re not them. We don’t kill our own.”

  Lydia’s eyes were glued to Jack’s. I thought I saw tears in them. “I believe him,” she whispered.

  Stellan shoved the gun harder into Cole’s head. “Then what is it?”

  “It’s her,” Lydia blurted out, gesturing to me. “Avery, the cure is you.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I scowled at her. “You mean I’m the virus. My blood. We already know that.”

  “No.” She started to lower her hands, but a gesture with Jack’s gun made her change her mind. “The virus, as we know, is both of you, together.” She glanced between Stellan and me. “But your blood alone is the cure.”

  “What? That makes no sense.”

  “Because everything else about the virus is so scientifically explicable?” Elodie said. I guess she had a point.

  “Poetic, really,” Lydia said shakily, her eyes darting from me to her brother, still held prisoner by Stellan. “We should have known Olympias would do something like that. She makes her son’s line important, and makes sure that a girl has just as much power. And then she gives the girl the ace in the hole. She knew how little the Diadochi valued women, so she made a woman the most important piece of the puzzle. You’re the key to everything.”

  She turned to Stellan. “I told you. Now let my brother go.”

  “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Jack said.

  “I think she is,” I answered. She was crafty, but she wouldn’t risk Cole’s life. I knew that much. “That’s all it said?”

  Lydia nodded.

  I held up my hand, and my knife. I never understood why, on TV, people who needed blood always cut straight across their palms. I made a tiny cut on the back of my hand, and the blood welled up.

  Elodie was standing beside me. “Um.” I held my hand out to her.

  “This is not weird or unsanitary at all,” Elodie murmured, but she dragged her finger across my hand and put it to her lips. We all watched her. After a second, she shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”

  I crossed to Jack and held my hand out to him, just in case. He took a drop of blood, too. I looked down at the cut welling up on my hand. My blood was death—and it was life. The cure we’d been planning to destroy to end this was me.

  “Please,” Lydia said. She was still watching Cole fearfully. “Jack. You promised.”

  I wiped the blood on my wet jeans.

  “Let him go,” Jack said.

  Stellan paused for a second, then shoved Cole away from him so that he smacked into the casket. “Hands in the air,” Stellan growled.

  Lydia sagged with relief, turning to Jack with tears in her eyes. I’d noticed it before, but it punched me in the gut now: she was completely in love with him. He was looking at her like he wanted to let her rot in jail forever, but she absolutely worshipped him. She probably had for a long time. I wondered if he’d realized the power he had over her.

  And then I’d come along. As much as the family member and the help thing was a worry, Jack had been mine immediately in a way he had never been hers. In the way she’d always wanted. And our father had paid the kind of attention to me that she’d never get. I was the one the Circle treated like a celebrity. I got everything she’d ever wanted without even trying. Without even wanting it.

  And still, for a long time she’d just wished I’d be her sister. I did believe that.

  What I couldn’t believe was that I was feeling in any way sympathetic toward Lydia. All those cracks opening in me in the past few days were letting in things I would never have expected, and I understood her better than I should. Especially now that I knew that feeling of responsibility for the people I cared about.

  My sister and I were so much alike in some ways.

  Stellan shoved his gun into Cole’s back. I didn’t have the same almost-lukewarm feelings about Cole.

  “You’re going to answer for what you’ve done,” Stellan said. “Whether it’s me who puts a bullet in your head or someone else in the Circle, it will happen.” He started to shove Cole off the platform, but then he grabbed his arm again, pulling him along so he could glance into the open casket, and then at the other, still-closed one next to it.

  For just a second, he met my eyes. The open casket was Olympias. The closed one was, if we were right, Alexander.

  I took the few steps up to the platform. Inside the open casket was a human shape, covered entirely in gold. Obviously the twins thought this was Alexander. Anyone would, if they didn’t know.

  Elodie came up beside me, stared at the gold shape for a moment, then turned to the second casket. I did, too. Jack and Stellan each pushed a Saxon twin ahead of them to stand at its foot.

  Elodie and I looked at each other, then pushed it open.

  Inside was a wooden box. And in the box was a jumble of desiccated bones, arranged into a vaguely human shape, missing one femur. That must have been all Napoleon was able to do when he returned the bones here. This was the body of the world’s greatest conqueror, decayed the same as any normal man. Fought over for so long, desecrated so many times, and finally returned to rest.

  Cole wrinkled his nose. “Who’s that?”

  The four of us glanced at one another. Elodie closed the top of the casket gently.

  Jack and Stellan steered the twins off the platform. Lydia squinted back over her shoulder like she understood something had happened but wasn’t quite sure what. Elodie and I ignored her and turned back to Olympias.

  Her arms were crossed over her chest, and the tube that must have held the scroll with the cure lay beside her, open and empty. Scattered around her body were jewels and baubles of all colors and shapes, shimmering in our flashlights, and on her head rested a gold diadem, its center, above her brow, forming a sharp point.

  Elodie pulled out her phone to take pictures from every angle. “There is so much history here.” She gingerly picked up a piece of jewelry from the casket, and looked around. “The Circle’s been looking for this their whole existence.” She stood up accusingly, and turned to the twins. “How did you find it?”

  Lydia just shook her head. Cole laughed.

  “It doesn’t matter right now,” Jack said. “They’re not going to tell us. Let’s get them out of here before they have a chance to call backup.”

  Cole laughed again, then spit right on Jack’s shoes. “You’ll never get out of here alive. We have people waiting outside. They’ll kill you.” He turned to Lydia. “I don’t know how we ever got a Keeper who was so gullible.”

  “Walk,” Jack said, obviously trying to hold his temper. They pushed the twins up the stairs. I started to follow. Elodie lingered on the pyramid floor, taking in as much as she could in the short time we had. I knew we’d send people back to look—and come back to look ourselves—when we could, but it was hard to see all this and just leave.

  “It’s true,” Cole went on from partway up the stairs. “Just the fact that you think we changed. We didn’t change. We’ve always done what had to be done, haven’t we? You were too stupid to see it. We even used you to do it.”

  “Cole,” Lydia warned. “No.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack said.

  “I bet you still, after all this time, believe that what happened to Oliver was your fault. Well,” he said, correcting himself, “it was, technically. Instead of doing your job, you were ki
ssing my sister. This one,” he clarified, nodding at Lydia, “since there are enough of my sisters you’ve kissed that we have to specify.”

  I remembered that, too. On top of the drama with Elodie and Stellan, Lydia had kissed Jack the day Oliver Saxon died.

  Jack was rigid. “Keep moving,” he snapped. We had stopped at the top of the stairs, at the small platform just inside the door, and he pushed them out and down the stairs, toward the water.

  “We could have terminated you for that. I was all for it. Lydia was nice enough not to, since she’d done it on purpose. You’ve always been too soft when it comes to the Keeper,” he chided Lydia. “You’re just lucky he’s even softer.”

  “Wait.” I came up behind Jack and squinted into the dark at Cole. “What do you mean Lydia did it on purpose?”

  “Only because I wasn’t told what was going to happen,” Lydia said under her breath. And then, louder, “Cole, that’s enough.”

  Jack was blinking down at them. Below, Stellan had stopped, too, so we all waited just above the water. “Are you telling me . . . You’re not saying you killed your brother.”

  “Of course we didn’t kill him. We—” Cole rolled his eyes at Lydia’s intake of breath. “Fine, I just let it happen, but everyone later realized it was for the best. We’d been in an alliance with some other families for years. Our brother wanted to stop it, so instead, he was a martyr. It primed the Circle for what’s happening now. And it just happened to work out that Lydia wanted to make sure the Keeper stayed around. She didn’t have him under her thumb anymore. It was easy enough to let him believe it was all his fault, then act like we forgave him so he’d have to be loyal to us.”

  Jack just stared at Cole. “You killed Oliver and let me think it was my fault. You killed Avery’s mother. You killed Fitz.”