The Ends of the World

by Maggie Hall

  Stellan glanced at me again. I wondered whether any part of him was thinking the same thing.

  “So when did you find out about the virus?” I said.

  Fitz shook his head. “I didn’t. All I knew for certain at the point when the Saxons took me is what I’ve told you. It had crossed my mind before, what I’d do if something like that ever happened, and if you, Avery, were ever in danger. I had only minutes to implement that plan, though luckily I’d hidden the diary earlier, and I knew Avery had the necklace. You all took my decades of research and brought it to its end in record time.”

  “What about me?” Jack said quietly to Fitz.

  Fitz turned his chair to face him. “You had nothing to do with it, Charlie.” I’d forgotten that Fitz had actually called him that—it wasn’t just made up for me. “You were around the age of my own grandchild, whose life I couldn’t be a part of. As you got older, and you proved yourself to be smart and loyal, I grew attached to you like you were my own family. I found myself hoping that, one day, I’d be able to introduce you two.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. “You all came to me in different ways, but I consider all of you my grandchildren. And here you are: all together.”

  Jack held his phone in a stranglehold and stared at the table. Elodie looked at each of us in turn. Stellan laced his hands together, chewing his lip. There it was: all of our stories. I felt like in some way, we were all hoping for a miracle in our pasts that would make everything better, or a miracle from the Order to tell us what to do. We’d gotten neither.

  Jack heaved a sigh and set down his phone. He met my eyes across the table with a tiny shrug, like he’d just been thinking the same things I had. I nodded. He turned to Fitz, and so did Elodie.

  Almost unconsciously, I shifted closer to Stellan, and my foot twined around his ankle, just above his boot. He looked down. A few moments later, Jack and Fitz pushed back from the table and made their way to the railing. Elodie pulled out her phone.

  The second no one was looking our way, Stellan murmured, “Are you trying to make it hard to concentrate?”

  Hard to concentrate on the bad stuff? Yes, I guess I was. I shrugged. He smirked. A little of the hopelessness lifted. There were worse things than friends who flirted as stress relief.

  “I’m being supportive. Like you were with petting my hair. I’m not sure how this is any different,” I whispered, and then I thought of something. “Or is it? Does the thing with your blood—” I cut off. That was about to sound different from how I meant it.

  “What?” He shifted closer, so my toes ran up his ankle.

  “Never mind.”

  “Now you have to tell me.”

  Elodie’s phone rang, and she stood to take the call. I watched her go. “I was just going to ask whether, besides making your scars hurt, the thing with your blood makes the rest of your skin more . . . sensitive? In a bad way or a good . . .”

  I trailed off when I glanced over to see Stellan’s eyebrows up at his hairline. He cleared his throat. “So you’re definitely trying to make it harder to concentrate.”

  I elbowed him. “And that’s why I wasn’t going to—”

  I was interrupted by Elodie rushing toward us.

  “How long ago?” she was saying. “No. No, no, no. Get the doctor—well, have him do something more!” She yanked me to my feet, then said into the phone, “We’re on our way.”

  Dread curdled my stomach. “What?” I stumbled after her.

  “Luc,” she said, pulling me down the stairs. “They’ve infected the whole Dauphin family.”

  CHAPTER 19

  It’s a trap,” Jack said. Our boat was cruising as fast as the motor could take it back toward the Louvre. We’d thought about jumping out and getting a cab, but it wouldn’t have been any faster.

  “We know,” Stellan said shortly. He would run through a wall of gunfire for Luc, and right now, our blood was killing him. Nothing was going to stop him from getting in there.

  Monsieur Dauphin had collapsed immediately. He was dead. Luc and his mother weren’t. We’d seen at the sites of the other attacks that there could be a few minutes’ difference in how long it took people to get infected—we could only hope against hope we’d get there in time.

  “The Saxons will have people outside,” Elodie said. “They’ll grab you. They’ll grab Jack if they see him, too, because of Cole. It’ll have to be me. Who has a water bottle?”

  I pulled one out of my purse, and Elodie dumped the water over the side. “Give me some of your blood. I’ll go in the front. You guys go in one of the side museum entrances. I doubt they have enough people to watch them all.”

  Elodie pricked the inside of my arm with her knife, and I let the red drops slide down the inside of the bottle.

  We leapt off the boat before it had fully stopped and sprinted up the stairs to street level. Elodie ripped off her wig and stuffed it into her bag to throw the Saxon people off, and took off across the courtyard.

  Stellan started to run across the street himself, but Jack grabbed his shirt. “Elodie has the blood. It’ll be worse if they catch you two. Walk calmly. Blend in.”

  We joined a crowd of tourists crossing the street, and then Stellan steered us down one of the arms of the museum and to a service entrance, where a security guard stopped us. Stellan barked a few words in French, and surprised, he opened the door. Once we got inside, we dropped the pretense and ran, through a corridor of offices, some loading docks, and what looked like an art preservation lab. When we hit the Dauphins’ suite of rooms, Stellan bounded ahead up the stairs, and Jack and I followed.

  I burst into Luc’s bedroom to find Stellan stopped short and Luc sitting on his bed, blinking at us, Elodie beside him.

  I grabbed Stellan’s arm, my legs going weak with relief. We weren’t too late. Stellan ran across the room to kneel by Luc, speaking to him low in French.

  Elodie got up. “I gave them both your blood.” It had been less than ten minutes since we’d gotten the phone call. “Madame Dauphin is in the other room. They didn’t infect the baby. I saw what I thought were a few Saxon guards outside. I got past them, and I told the Dauphin security to be on the lookout.”

  I let Stellan speak to Luc alone for a few minutes before I staggered across the room and dropped onto his bed. “Hello, chérie,” he said, his eyes haunted, voice strained. “This is exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Luc, I’m so sorry—”

  The door burst open. A woman who must have been the Dauphins’ doctor, judging by the stethoscope around her neck, said something in frantic-sounding French. The whole room froze, then turned wide eyes on Luc.

  “What?” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Elodie ran to us, dropping onto Luc’s other side. “Madame Dauphin,” she said. “She’s dead.”

  • • •

  We all crowded around Luc: the doctor, stethoscope in her ears, listening to his heart. Elodie clinging to his hand. Jack pacing at the foot of the bed, chewing a thumbnail. Stellan stood next to me, silent, rigid. I slipped my hand into his, and he squeezed it so tightly I winced. It had only been ten minutes since we’d heard that Madame Dauphin had died, but it felt like a lifetime.

  “Why isn’t the cure working?” Elodie barked at the frightened doctor. It was the third time she’d asked.

  For the third time, the doctor stammered something in French that I could tell meant I have no idea.

  Suddenly Luc blinked a few times fast, then swayed like he was dizzy. He caught himself before falling onto the bed, his eyes rolling back and slipping closed. We all froze.

  “More blood,” Elodie said, frantically grabbing for my arm.

  “We must have missed something,” Jack said. “Could Lydia have lied? Or could it be that you have to inject the cure rather than ingest it? Or—”

  Luc coughed. Everyone went s
ilent. We all knew what came after the coughing.

  Stellan fell to his knees, his hand ripping from mine. “No,” he whispered.

  Elodie’s hand clapped over her mouth, her face frozen in a mask of shock.

  No, I echoed in my head. We’d found the cure. Please, please no—

  Luc coughed again, harder this time, rattling in his chest. A sob escaped around Elodie’s hand. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I’d seen this a thousand times in my nightmares. I stared at Luc’s slim, angular face, just waiting for blood to stream down his cheeks. For the next cough to be red.

  His eyes fluttered, and I stared, horrified.

  And then he blinked—and opened his eyes. He looked at Elodie and squinted, then pulled himself to sitting. He coughed again, and it turned into clearing his throat. He shook his head like he’d just woken up. “What happened?” he said.

  He wasn’t bleeding. That wasn’t how this worked. Once any symptoms hit, it was over. It didn’t ever reverse. Not in the cases we’d seen personally, and not in any of Nisha’s research.

  Something weird had happened to Luc—but it hadn’t turned into the full force of the virus. He was alert now. Alive.

  Somehow, the cure had worked for him when it hadn’t for his mother, even though Luc had more Circle blood.

  A sob tore out of Elodie’s throat, and she threw herself on Luc. My legs were shaking, and only then did I realize Stellan was holding me against him as he kneeled, his arm around my waist. My knees gave out, and I fell into his lap on the hardwood floor.

  He hadn’t died. We hadn’t killed Luc.

  The door to the room burst open, and Colette came in, her voice frantic in French. She ran to Luc and Elodie soothed her, telling her what had happened. We all waited a few more minutes, making sure Luc didn’t relapse, but he seemed to feel fine. We had no idea why. The din built as everyone threw out theories. It turned into a wall of noise until all I could hear was the rasping of my breaths and the shaking in Stellan’s, his chest rising and falling against me. Neither of us was contributing to the conversation. It kept playing in my head—Luc’s cough. The second his eyes cleared again. One of my hands had Stellan’s wrist in a death grip, and his thumb was stroking mine. I turned to him, and the anguish on his face made my other hand clench in his shirt.

  Luc was okay, but we weren’t. The way I’d been feeling on the boat earlier washed back over me.

  Luc cleared his throat. “Water?” he said.

  “I’ll get it,” I heard myself say. My eyes didn’t leave Stellan’s.

  I must have been telegraphing exactly what I was thinking, because he said, “I’ll show you how to get to the kitchen.”

  We got to our feet and strolled out of the room and silently down the carpeted hallway.

  As soon as the stairwell door shut behind us, plunging us into darkness cut only by the weak green light of the SORTIE sign, Stellan spun and pinned me to the wall. We hadn’t said a word, but that made it even more explosive, setting a match to every nerve in my body at once.

  This kiss was the opposite of sweet and careful. There wasn’t enough of his mouth to keep mine happy, my hands couldn’t find enough of his skin. It was the physical manifestation of panic and terror and relief so bone-deep it made us feverish and wild.

  I didn’t know what was wrong with us. This was an absurd thing to be doing.

  I didn’t care.

  My head fell back against the wall and every rational thought— every worry I had wanted to forget earlier, every bit of the horror show of the past hour—fled my mind.

  I came back to my senses some time later, when a breeze made me shiver. I was propped on the handrail, my legs locked around Stellan’s waist. I pulled away and he gave me a dazed smile that was a world away from his earlier distress.

  This was like a drug.

  I shivered again and he rubbed my arms. “Cold?”

  I looked down. My tank top was drooping off one of my shoulders, Stellan’s hands warm on my skin. “Where’d my sweatshirt go?” I whispered. I looked over his shoulder to find it in a heap on the next landing down. “How . . . ?”

  He shrugged and laughed, low and rough.

  I blinked myself back to reality. I felt so much clearer, more alert. I’d been upset with myself about being distracted after Cannes, but this was the type of distraction that would help me concentrate and calm down and feel like a human being. That was helpful. “We should probably go back. Make sure everything’s still okay.”

  “They would have let us know if it wasn’t,” Stellan said, but he dropped one last kiss on my lips and then set me back on the floor. I reached up to smooth his hair, and he loped down the stairs to grab my discarded hoodie. He held it out with a teasing eyebrow raise.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I whispered, shrugging it on. “You’re the one who took it off me. And you’re the one who told me to do something for stress-relief. This is as good a hobby as anything. A temporary hobby at that, if you’re leaving.”

  If I hadn’t been watching him closely, I might not have seen his face change. Just as quickly, he went back to normal. “I’m flattered you’d choose me over knitting,” he whispered.

  We ran down to the kitchen and grabbed an armload of water bottles. Maybe I hadn’t really seen that pause. This whole time, Stellan and I had been a story for the Circle, and now we were a distraction for ourselves. That was what this was. It was not—

  It wasn’t. Not least because that wasn’t something my heart could handle right now. The occasional instance of kissing-for-fun-and-stress-relief was one thing. Liking somebody was another, especially under these circumstances. Especially him. It wasn’t that.

  I made a point to walk a couple feet farther away from him than I otherwise would have.

  When we got back to Luc’s room, Elodie grabbed the water out of our arms with a frown. “I was starting to get worried you wandered into the clutches of the Saxons.”

  I was about to reply, but then I looked behind her and did a double take.

  “Oh. Right. Rocco’s here,” Elodie said. “I’ll explain in a minute.”

  Rocco was crouched by Luc’s bed. Holding Luc’s hand. Luc looked around self-consciously.

  Elodie took the water to Luc, and Stellan and I were left gaping. “But Rocco had a thing with the Emirs’ daughter,” I whispered.

  “And that means he couldn’t be interested in Luc? How . . . limiting,” Stellan whispered tightly. “That’s not what confuses me about this situation.”

  “Remember when Luc was talking to Rocco without us and we all thought it was weird?” I whispered. Stellan nodded. Elodie gestured, and the two of us followed her to the balcony, where Jack was already waiting. We weren’t far from the balcony of the room I’d stayed in when I first got to France. Below us, the Louvre courtyard and the Tuileries Gardens spread in either direction.

  Stellan wouldn’t take his eyes off Luc and Rocco just inside the French doors.

  “Lucien only just told me on the phone last night,” Elodie whispered. “It wasn’t the Emirs’ daughter Rocco had a relationship with after all. It was Malik.”

  Malik Emir had been the first to die in the string of assassinations the Saxons blamed on the Order. It had happened before I even knew the Circle existed. “Everyone thinks the Emir Keeper and their daughter got caught and Laila had to terminate him herself, right?” Elodie said. “That is what happened with Rocco and Malik—but Malik promised Rocco he’d let him escape. Rocco loved him, and he believed him. But Malik decided he couldn’t let what happened between them get out for the sake of his reputation, and tried to kill him instead. Rocco fought back, and in the scuffle, Malik was accidentally killed. Rocco ran.”

  “That’s where Rocco got the scar,” I whispered.

  Elodie nodded. “The Emirs covered it up, but the Circle was suspicious. Th
e Saxons found Rocco somehow, learned the real story, and it seems like that was where they got the idea to commit these assassinations and blame them on the Order. The Circle was primed for it. For a while, Rocco thought the Saxons were good-guy vigilantes. It didn’t take him long to realize he was wrong. And then we found him.”

  I stared at them through the glass doors.

  A lot of things went through my head: Rocco had faced just as much tragedy as any of us. But was there any chance he could be using Luc? Could he hurt him if he got that close? And I realized suddenly why relationships between family members and staff were forbidden. And I also remembered how recently I was in that exact position.

  I glanced up at Stellan, and he just shrugged. It’d be pretty hypocritical for us to police Rocco and Luc having a secret relationship, even if Rocco was working for us. “Okay?” I said.

  Elodie sighed. “I told Lucien you’d be fine with it. I thought he was going to have a heart attack when he admitted it to me, but I reminded him that you two, of all people—”

  “So what now?” I cut her off.

  Elodie had spoken with the Dauphins’ security, and they were tightening their safety measures around the Louvre. There would also be a lot to deal with regarding the Dauphins’ deaths. We still had no idea why the cure had worked for Luc and not Madame Dauphin.

  Jack leaned back on the railing. “About that. Earlier, Nisha told me more about what they’ve been researching. Seeing what happened with the cure, I had a thought. We never saw the original wording. We just know Lydia translated it as that your blood is the cure. But there are rather a lot of shades of the idea of remedy, or treatment. What if this one didn’t mean antidote, like she thought? What if it was . . . vaccine?”

  The idea rolled around in my head. It only took a second for it to make sense. “Nisha said my blood is the one that has the virus, and Stellan’s just makes it replicate out of control. So that could make sense. Aren’t a lot of vaccines essentially a mild version of the disease to prime the body against it?”