The Ends of the World

by Maggie Hall

  Elodie was nodding along. She pulled us inside and we shared the theory.

  “Avery, have you been putting your blood in my food?” Luc said. It was a little too bright, a little too fake-cheerful. Considering his parents had just died, then he’d nearly died himself, I was shocked he was doing this well.

  Wait. His parents. Monsieur Dauphin. What I would always associate with him was—

  “The wedding,” I said. Luc raised his eyebrows. “When we were supposed to be married. Part of the ceremony was cutting our hands and putting them together, remember? You had my blood all over you. If you accidentally wiped your face, or put your own cut into your mouth, you could have ingested it.”

  Stellan was pacing at the end of the bed, wearing a path on the hardwood floor. “But Elodie was infected—”

  “Maybe I was never infected at all,” Elodie said. “I could have actually been coughing from dust. I’ll have the doctor examine me and see what she thinks.”

  “What about your mother?” Stellan asked me. “If your blood is a vaccine—”

  Wouldn’t I have vaccinated her at some point, too? But I shook my head. “Before I met you guys, I was not covered in blood nearly as often as I am now. If my mom was ever cleaning up a cut for me, I’m sure she would have washed her hands immediately after, and it never would have—”

  I had to stop before that train of thought went too far, or I’d panic again.

  “If it’s really a vaccine, would Luc have gotten slightly sick like he did?” Stellan said, still testing the theory.

  “Sometimes you can get a vaccine for say, the chickenpox, and still get a mild version of the chickenpox, right?” Elodie said. “And it’s not like this virus is normal anyway. Something kept Lucien from dying. That’s the important part. We should get Nisha to start testing it. If it really is a vaccine, we could get it to the Circle. That might even clear our names, and get them to help us against the Saxons. I’ll call her right now.”

  • • •

  An hour later, we’d done all we could for Luc, and left him to handle family things. As I set the table, my thoughts tried to wander. I wasn’t the one who deserved to be upset right now, but being around this much death—

  A shiver passed through me. I really was feeling calmer after that little stairwell rendezvous earlier, or I wasn’t sure I’d be okay. Now I was helping Colette assemble some snacks in one of the Dauphins’ sitting rooms so we could eat and make a plan about where to go from here.

  Elodie came into the room. “Happy news,” she said, spreading her arms. “The doctor says I have bronchitis.”

  I let her take a cookie from my hand. “Are you kidding me? That’s why you’ve been coughing?”

  “I’m supposed to drink lots of fluids and take some cough syrup. She said it’s relatively common in the month after the kind of surgery one gets from being shot in the abdomen, but I swear, it was that bus. Traveling with the masses could kill a person.”

  Colette snorted, and handed me a bowl of fruit I was just setting down when my phone rang. I grabbed it out of my bag, checked the number, frowned. Why was Stellan calling me? Colette had sent him to get coffee mugs just a couple of minutes ago.

  The door swung open and he walked into the room.

  That’s when I remembered. “Your phone,” I told him, showing him my screen. “Maybe Mariam found it.”

  “Answer it,” he said, setting the mugs on the table.

  I picked up. “Hello, sister,” said a girl’s voice on the other end.

  It took me a second longer than it should have. “How do you have this phone?” I said to Lydia. I put the phone on speaker.

  “I found it in the tunnels in Alexandria.” Lydia’s voice sounded entirely too light. Singsong. Creepy. She was up to something. I’d worry she was tracing the call, but she knew where we were already. “I was disappointed, though. There aren’t even sexy text messages on here. How boring you and your husband are.”

  Stellan pulled out the chair next to me and sat. The whole room was listening now.

  “So, have you saved the lives of the poor Dauphin family yet?” She didn’t know that the cure didn’t work. Stellan and Elodie both glanced down the hall to where Luc was, like Lydia might have someone here waiting to kill him.

  “I knew there was a chance you’d avoid my people there, you know,” Lydia went on.

  My throat tightened. “What do you mean by that?”

  “When are you going to understand that I am always one step ahead of you? Finding this phone proved very useful. Say hello, love.”

  Away from the phone, there was a whimper, then a little girl’s cry of pain.

  Stellan jumped up so fast his chair fell over. He ripped the phone out of my hand. “Get your hands off my sister!” he roared.

  “Too late!” Lydia chirped. “I have this adorable little girl with me now, and you’ll only get her back if you do exactly what I want you to do.”

  Stellan yelled something in Russian. Jack and Luc and Rocco ran into the room, alarmed.

  I grabbed the phone back. “You crazy bitch. She’s a little kid.”

  “All I want is you, Avery. You and that boy of yours. Is it really worth all these people you supposedly care about getting hurt? Come alone—just you two. I’ll know if you try any of your little tricks. I’m in his hometown. Ciao.”

  She hung up. Stellan was staring at the phone, frozen. Then he blinked half a dozen times, and flipped the table. I recoiled, avoiding a flying loaf of bread. A jar of jam shattered, throwing sticky bits of glass everywhere, and a puddle of coffee spread across the hardwood.

  Stellan walked straight over the mess, his boots leaving a sticky red trail, and ripped his arm away when Elodie touched him, his hands on top of his head like he was trying to physically hold himself together.

  “The virus and the cure,” Elodie murmured. “If they thought they had both, they’d be unstoppable. If they have you—”

  I nodded, watching Stellan pace in the hallway, then storm back inside. Jack approached and Stellan tried to throw him off, but Jack shoved him against the wall. He got in Stellan’s face, murmuring something low and intense. Finally, Stellan stopped struggling. After a few more seconds, he grabbed Jack’s shoulders, touched their foreheads together, and crossed the room to right the table he’d flipped over.

  Colette was standing hesitantly over the mess of food, watching him. Elodie approached cautiously. “You can’t go there. At the very least, she’ll take your blood and lock you up. Or kill you, since there are probably others of the thirteenth bloodline out there who wouldn’t give her so much trouble.”

  Jack nodded.

  “The Order will help you,” Elodie said. “We can send in a team.”

  They were right, of course.

  Stellan set a block of cheese back on the table, then the empty metal coffee pitcher. “No,” he said. “I’m going. Alone. It’s the only way to save her.”

  I crouched by him and picked up pieces of glass. We should let the Order go. Even if it meant Anya might die, which would be very possible if we didn’t obey Lydia’s orders. One little girl’s life for the Circle? Maybe the world? It shouldn’t be a question. Just like it shouldn’t have been a question that my life wasn’t worth the potential for the destruction it could cause. There were so many shoulds.

  Stellan and I locked eyes in the late-afternoon light. All the same things passed between us that had earlier this afternoon on the boat, and in Mariam’s van in Alexandria, and in my room in Egypt. Whatever this meant, whatever we meant, however this ended up, we were on the same side now, for better or worse. “Not alone,” I said. “I’m going, too.”

  CHAPTER 20

  A few hours later, we were on the Dauphins’ plane. I’d left lots of vials of my blood for the scientists to research the vaccine while we were gone. So someone would have th
e vaccine, just in case the worst happened in Russia. But I had to believe we’d be okay. We had a plan—to get Anya back, but maybe something more, too. Jack had come up with a way for us to take advantage of a terrible situation.

  Stellan was wearing a path from window to window. Even when we hit turbulence on the approach to landing, he kept pacing, looking out the window, blazing as bright as the sunset outside. The flirty, half-broken boy was gone. In his place was the version of Stellan who could tear a person in two without blinking. I kept having to remind myself that he contained both those things.

  When we hit a particularly rough patch of air, he looked down to find me watching him, and slowed. “I’m sorry,” he said gruffly. “I’m scaring you.”

  “No,” I said. On the contrary, the glimpse of how he looked when he loosened his grip on his usual restraint—I hadn’t been able to stop watching him. He would do anything for the people he loved. Just like Lydia Saxon would. In his hands, though, I knew that power might burn hot, but it would never turn ugly.

  I was right all along. Power was a knife edge: wanting it, coveting it, getting it.

  Longing was a knife edge. The ache for power, for family, for love.

  I heard Stellan’s voice that night at the bar in Cannes. You want to be wanted. You want control. Say it.

  I had. I’d wanted it. I’d wanted him. All of it—the power, the wanting, the fact that he’d been the one who had seen that in me—it swirled together into this thing I still felt when I was around him. It was the same reason I felt so comfortable telling him things I’d never tell anyone else.

  Stellan walked back and forth, back and forth. I scooted over to one side of the love seat, deliberately. He hesitated, then sat. I held out my hand. He took it.

  For a second, I was back in the Dauphins’ stairwell, tangled up in him. We’d already made our plans; it would be easy to give in to that pull again right now, allow us a few minutes of respite from thinking. From feeling. Turn to him, kiss him, touch him—that’s what would make sense to do right now in this friends-with-benefits arrangement we seemed to be cultivating.

  But I didn’t. I held his hand tight the rest of the flight. I kept holding on as we touched down on the tarmac. And then, together, we walked down the stairs to his hometown.

  • • •

  It was abandoned.

  Stellan told me he’d grown up in a suburb of the city Elodie had mentioned. He hadn’t been back here in nearly a decade, and he didn’t know it had become a ghost town.

  The car we were in had to drop us at the end of the street because there was too much debris to drive farther. None of the streetlights worked, but the moon was almost full and bright enough to see everything. What looked like construction materials were scattered everywhere, and bushes grew up through cracks in the street, the only spots of life in an otherwise bleak landscape. The paint on all the buildings was peeling like burned skin, most windows broken out and glass scattered over the street. We stepped over a graying pink teddy bear with little sprigs of green growing out of its eye sockets, and I felt Stellan shudder.

  I gripped his hand tighter. We passed a church, spires reaching to the cloudy sky and topped with domes oxidized to green, and then we saw it. There were footsteps in the thick layer of dust. Recent ones, judging by how little dirt had settled back into them.

  Stellan stopped still, staring at the footsteps’ path. “I thought that might be where she’d go.”

  He set off jogging down the street. I caught up. “Where?”

  “My old apartment building. And if I’m right, that means she knew where that was. Which might mean—”

  Which might mean the Saxons were the ones who had set the fires that killed his and Elodie’s families, too.

  The footprints in the dirt outside the apartment complex told us we were right. We turned on the flashlights on our phones.

  “Whatever you do, don’t leave my side,” Stellan said. “What she wants is to capture us. You, particularly.”

  “I know.”

  “If she tries to take you, I’ll kill her.”

  I stared at the foot-tall weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt and felt the weight of my gun in my hand. “I know. If she touches you, I’ll kill her.”

  He glanced at me sideways. “I know.”

  The front door to the complex hung heavy on its hinges, and Stellan gave it a push. It opened into a small lobby with a broken tile floor, a narrow staircase, and a bank of mailboxes covered in what looked like a decade of dust. From either side, a hallway faded into darkness. The dust on the floor was disturbed in every direction, so we couldn’t tell which way she’d gone.

  We crept to the stairs, and I looked up to see them winding around and around. Down here the stairwell was nearly pitch-black, but it got lighter as they went higher. There was a wrongness to it I couldn’t place. I saw a tremor go through Stellan, but we crept up the stairs. Three flights up, I saw where the light was coming from. Off the stairway landing, the building’s front was normal and intact, but the back had been charred to nothing, letting the moonlight in.

  I knew where Stellan had to be leading us. His family’s apartment. There was more left of this floor—the hallway was still here, and some of the apartments still had their doors, and even parts of walls. Many of them, though, opened straight into the night, that ghostly silver light filtering in.

  Stellan stopped in front of one with no door at all, glanced behind us, then tiptoed inside, his gun drawn.

  The room was nothing more than a blackened box. The wall between it and the next apartment over was partially intact, but the outside wall was gone, and the top branches of a tree outside had woven their way in, its leaves snapping in the breeze.

  Stellan stood frozen in the doorway. It was eerily quiet, but Lydia’s voice echoed in my head. Always one step ahead. And to do that, she preyed on our weaknesses. She knew Stellan wouldn’t risk Anya. Apparently she knew before I did that I wouldn’t let him come alone.

  She didn’t know that she had a weakness, too, even now that Cole was dead. She didn’t know we’d exploit it. We just had to get through this.

  I rested my hand on Stellan’s forearm. “She brought you here because she knew it would bother you,” I murmured.

  He nodded hard and kept going. The next room was slightly less burned. In the corner I could make out what looked like an armchair, facing a huge box of a TV on a dresser. Closer, a charred baby’s crib, covered in bright green moss, half the wall between the rooms collapsed over it. The far half of the room was gone. It was like time had stopped the night of the fire, leaving everything in this building untouched.

  Stellan whispered something in Russian that could have been a curse or a prayer. We picked our way over burned debris into a bathroom where inches of brackish water sat in an unburned claw-foot tub, and exposed electrical wires rained from the ceiling.

  “She’s not here,” he said under his breath. “She has to be here.” Then, “Lydia!” he shouted.

  So much for trying to sneak up on her. I grabbed him, his face in my hands. He tried to push past me, and I shook him, like he’d done to me at the border crossing. “Stop,” I ordered in a whisper. “She’s doing this on purpose to make you panic so you’ll make a mistake.”

  His eyes flicked from me, to the door, to me. “Okay, yes. I’m—”

  Finally, there was a sound. But it wasn’t my sister. It was his.

  Stellan’s whole body tensed. He shook my hands off. “Anya!” he yelled.

  The scream came again, its echo bouncing against Stellan’s voice.

  Stellan took off running. “Lydia!” he bellowed.

  I chased him until he came to a sudden halt in a dim vestibule. Another set of stairs led down in one direction and up in the other, where otherworldly light filtered inside. I could see Stellan shaking with the effort to hold hims
elf back, but he waited for me and gestured: up or down? Anya screamed again, and both our heads shot up.

  Halfway up the stairs, everything went to hell.

  There was a bang, and the wall next to me exploded. Stellan ducked, yanking me with him. I hit the filthy stairs on my hands and knees, looking up to see four shadows on the landing above us. We knew Lydia likely wouldn’t have a huge security force with her.

  Stellan plowed forward into them. He grabbed one, throwing him over the banister. He hit the ground two stories below with a thud, and didn’t move. Stellan grappled with the second one, holding his body between himself and the third, who looked frantically for a clear shot, and a fourth, in a black baseball cap, who hung back. I hoped Stellan remembered the plan in his current state.

  Anya’s voice rang out again in frantic Russian.

  “Lydia!” Stellan bellowed. “Let her go!”

  I hunkered against the wall, waiting for an opening where I might be able to help, but Stellan didn’t need it. He snapped the neck of the guy he was holding with a quick twist. As he yelled a string of something in Russian—calling to Anya or cursing at the men, I wasn’t sure—he shoved the body into the third guy and, grabbing the barrel of his gun, wrenched it from his hands and smacked him in the head with the butt of it, felling him immediately.

  I jumped up and grabbed the back of his shirt before he could attack the fourth guy. He was wearing a black baseball cap with a bandana under it, just like Rocco had said he would be.

  While we were in the air, Rocco had been communicating with the one member of Lydia’s team he trusted. We couldn’t be certain of his loyalty, but it was the best chance we had. Now he dropped his gun to his side and raised his folded hands to his forehead in the Circle’s gesture of respect. “Omar?” I mouthed. He nodded. “Are there any more with you?” I whispered. He shook his head.

  “Lydia!” I yelled. “All your guys are dead. Give us Anya and we’ll let you live.”

  She didn’t answer. I pushed on with the plan, still holding on to Stellan. He was barely holding back from charging up the stairs right now. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and flipped on the recorder. “What is this even about, Lydia?” I called. She didn’t answer. We crept slowly up the stairs. “You kidnapped Stellan’s sister to get us here for our blood. That I understand. But I still don’t understand why you’re doing any of it.” Still nothing. I went on, “Why attack the Circle, first with all those assassinations, then with the virus? Why blame it on us? Is it all really just for power?”