“So,” Parisa had said, taking the vacant seat opposite Libby’s at the Shoreditch café where they’d agreed to meet. “You found your way back after all.”
Libby had slathered herself in illusions for the occasion, recognizable only by the paperback copy of Jane Eyre she’d set on the table for Parisa to see. Parisa, however, looked precisely as Libby remembered her, unchanged as a painting. She wore a knit dress in a brilliant cobalt blue that made Libby’s new slip dress look drab and out of season.
Libby took a sip from her cup of coffee, glancing around to see if the two of them had an audience. It was a popular place, the casual atmosphere a shallow din to camouflage the nature of their conversation. Parisa had obviously not come to hide, but even so, it made sense to Libby to try and blend into a crowd.
“Did you doubt that I would?” Libby asked.
In answer, Parisa glanced over her shoulder, then raised a finger in the air. A motion so small it shouldn’t have counted for anything, like the delicate fluttering of a handkerchief, and yet the bartender stepped instantly out from behind the bar to pause beside her at the table.
“Shall we have a drink?” she asked Libby, who fidgeted with her cup of coffee.
“I have one.”
“Come on. We’re celebrating.” Parisa’s voice had its usual touch of casual derision, like everything she did was at least 60 percent ironic.
Libby shrugged. It didn’t matter to her what they drank, or pretended to drink. “Whatever you feel like, then.”
“How about a bottle of—” Parisa paused to consider Libby for a moment as a server nudged the bartender aside, then another restaurant-goer stumbled apologetically into their table, obviously looking for the toilet. “Moscato?”
Libby managed a wan smile. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”
“Nonsense, I like a little sweet.” That was a definite yes to the teasing, but Parisa turned to the bartender in confirmation, dismissing him with a nod.
He disappeared, withdrawing a bottle from the small fridge behind the bar, taking the time to shine up two glasses before loyally returning to Parisa’s side.
“Isn’t it a bit early for wine?” Libby remarked after he’d poured a little into Parisa’s glass.
“Probably.” Parisa leaned forward. Methodically, she swirled the glass. Held it up to her nose. Held it up to the light. Took a sip so effortlessly sensual Libby half wondered if the bartender might be concealing an erection. “Lovely,” Parisa determined. “Thank you.”
He poured more into her glass, then some into Libby’s, as if she hadn’t just mentioned the fact that it was barely afternoon.
“If you need anything,” the bartender began.
“I’m sure we’ll let you know,” Parisa assured him, flashing him a smile Libby could only call businesslike.
He retreated with a glow about him, as if she’d kissed him full on the mouth.
“Well,” said Libby dryly, reaching for her glass. “I see not much has changed for you, then.”
“Oh, look closer, Rhodes.” It wasn’t an actual invitation, as far as Libby could tell. Just a general admonishment. Parisa raised the glass to her lips and took a sip, letting it marinate on her tongue before setting the glass down with a renewed sense of purpose.
“So,” Parisa said. “You set off a nuclear bomb.”
Libby set her glass down on the table. “Thanks for not mincing words,” she murmured, or possibly muttered. She had a feeling she’d possessed adequate levels of cool until she’d set foot within a square mile of Parisa.
“Oh, don’t sulk, Rhodes,” Parisa said with a laugh, “you and I both know I’m not known for my tact. And I think it’s admirable of you, really.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” Parisa was staring at her in her unnerving way, which to Libby felt somewhere between being undressed and flayed open. A subtle but important distinction. “To answer your question,” Parisa finally said, “I knew you were going to be back, yes.”
Libby arched a brow. “Even after you knew what it would take?”
“Especially then.” Parisa crossed one leg over the other, reclining in her seat. Rather than making the restaurant look more cramped, the space only seemed to make way for her. “I’m wondering,” Parisa added, reaching for her wine again, “whether it’s rewritten you or not.”
Libby eyed her own untouched glass with the distinct sense that she was still trying to get a good grade in the conversation, which was both impossible and infuriating. “You’re the one who can read me. Do I seem rewritten?”
“Hard to say. You’ve been through a lot.” It was delivered more factually than sympathetically. “So, listen,” Parisa continued, leaning forward again and deciding, apparently, to do away with further pretense. “I imagine you’ve sorted out what Atlas wants with you.”
“You could say that.” In the end the Moscato was like pure honey, a golden drip.
“The sinister plot,” Parisa said with a charmed laugh, as if Nico were sitting there in the chair beside them, eyes adoringly on her. “You think it can be done?”
Libby licked her lips. “It’s possible.”
“You think it should be done?”
Even she could tell that was the answer Parisa was waiting for. “Not necessarily. Maybe.” Libby looked squarely at her, wondering when she’d feel like she’d earned a place in Parisa’s esteem. Probably never.
“You set off a nuclear bomb, Rhodes.” Parisa glanced away, distracted or otherwise uninterested. “I’d stop worrying about things like that.”
Funny how Parisa could render a miracle of physics comparable to routine life achievement. You set off a nuclear bomb to the tune of congratulations, it’s a girl! “Am I boring you?”
Parisa looked at her sharply. “I asked you to come here, didn’t I?”
“Yes, because you want something from me. But I can still bore you even if you’re trying to get what you want.” Libby tried to sound direct, the way Parisa usually did, but she still came off like a whiny child. She was bored with herself, maybe. Maybe that was the problem.
“I met someone while I was gone,” Libby added, eyeing the honey-colored glass. “Someone who reminded me a lot of you.” The glare of a white screen in the dead of night rose to the forefront of her mind, keys typing out an old name. The fleeting glimpse of a bare shoulder on flannel sheets, the pad of one finger tracking the shape of a fine-line spider.
“I know. She’s pretty,” commented Parisa. “Or at least you think so.”
“Yeah.” Libby swallowed, then cleared her throat. “Anyway. What do you want?”
“Well, I asked you here because I want you to do the experiment. But not for Atlas,” Parisa said, meeting Libby’s carefully measured glance with an iron one of her own. “I’m done with Atlas. I just want to see what happens,” Parisa said to the lip of her glass, “when you open up the multiverse, Libby Rhodes, and pluck out a whole new world.”
Libby made a sound that was somewhere in the vicinity of a snort. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“Yes, well. I really don’t give a shit about the science.” Parisa gave her a Mona Lisa half smile in reply, taking another sip of wine and holding it on her tongue. “But you have to admit, it would be impressive. Almost worth setting off a nuclear bomb to do.”
Libby, who had been ready to counter with what was in it for Parisa, felt something in her throat go tight at the miserly accuracy of herself in summary. “Don’t you think I’d deserve to do it, if I wanted to?” was the question she knew better than to ask.
So, instead, Libby picked up her own glass, turning the stem between her fingers. Considering responses. I’m not doing it. She’d said that to Nico enough times, and even he barely believed her. Hypothetically speaking, as she’d put it so often to Tristan. She doubted Parisa would let her get away with that. “I’ve considered it, if I’m being honest.”
Parisa’s eyes flicked over her. “And?”
“And nothing, I’ve considered it, that’s all.” Libby set the glass down again without drinking it. This, she abruptly recalled, was her negotiation, not Parisa’s.
Libby alone had nothing to lose. It was Parisa who needed her. Not the other way around. If anyone was going to answer for something, it would not be Libby, who’d already paid the highest price just to be sitting there. Alive. Unharmed. And more powerful than ever.
(Do you think I was a killer even before I walked into that office?)
(What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes—)
“Why should I do it for you, if I even do it at all?” Libby asked. “It’s not your experiment. Not your research.” It wasn’t Libby’s, either, but if one of them deserved ownership, it certainly wasn’t Parisa. She wasn’t the one who’d suffered for the bare fact of its existence. As far as Libby could tell, Parisa hadn’t changed at all over the year Libby had been gone.
Parisa and Tristan may not have been on speaking terms, but Libby could still feel her between them, opaquely present. As if Parisa’s absence still controlled them both just as much as if she’d lain between them on the bed, one hand on each of their necks.
“You need Reina,” Parisa said without expression. She seemed to know they’d entered the business portion of the meeting. The energy around them shifted, tightening like a cyclone. “She won’t do it for Atlas. But she’ll do it for me.”
“I doubt that,” Libby said warily.
“Oh, by all means, Rhodes, doubt me,” Parisa invited with a gamine laugh into her wineglass. “Try it and see what happens.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Libby put the wineglass aside with a small rankle of agitation, picking up the coffee she’d ordered for herself instead. “I don’t need Reina. Put it your way: I set off a nuclear bomb,” she reminded Parisa, who paused for the first time, the glass hovering on its pathway to her lips. “I don’t need a battery. Or a crutch.”
Parisa’s dark eyes narrowed. “That’s not what Reina is.”
Something had shifted, Libby realized with a tiny thrill. At the mention of Reina, the expression on Parisa’s face had become something new, something more … frustrated. “I thought you didn’t care about the science?”
“I’m not talking about the science.” Parisa set the glass down, disregarded. Libby did the same, sliding her cup of coffee away so that nothing stood between them. “You think you can do this without Reina?” Parisa asked, something unidentifiable in her voice.
Was it fear? “I know I can do it without Reina.” There, Libby thought. Now Parisa was seeing it. “You wanted me to know my own power, Parisa? Congratulations. Now I do.”
She met Parisa’s eye with her first truly unflinching glance.
She wasn’t sure what she expected to happen. Not that Parisa would suddenly fall to her knees, but when Parisa’s mouth twisted, what came out of it was like a slap to the face. “Oh, I see. You fucked over your girlfriend and murdered your ex, and now you think you know how to be the bad guy? Cute.”
It took everything in Libby’s power not to feel slighted, but she managed it. “I thought we were in agreement that the nuclear bomb thing wasn’t insignificant.”
“It’s not,” Parisa said. “But you can’t tell me you’ve forgotten about the rest.”
The rest. Nico using Rhodes to mean weakness; Tristan dismissing her with a glance; Reina telling her they had no reason to be friendly; Callum’s effortlessly mocking face. To the forefront of Libby’s thoughts rose an erstwhile guilt, an ever-present anxiety. Against her will, she regressed to the old version of herself that she couldn’t entirely cast off—the eternal whisper in the back of her mind, the feeling of being dwarfed by a better model with bigger potential. The institutional lights of a hospital room.
For a moment she was speechless with it, her own perilous smallness, until her newer voice slipped back in. The angrier one.
Libby Rhodes, the good girl. Wasn’t that what Parisa had always mocked her for?
Her virtue? Her goodness?
“Isn’t that your whole thing? Not giving a fuck about people?” Libby said as coldly as she could manage, which was surprisingly cold. Even she was nearly taken aback by it—the way that all of a sudden, Parisa seemed like a decorative paperweight in a nice dress.
She felt her mind being rearranged, like Parisa was hunting around for something in the back of it. So Libby shut down hard, like a guillotine.
“I don’t need you,” Libby said flatly. “Not your approval, and certainly not your magic. Whether I do this or not, I’m not the one that’s expendable. The only difference between you and Atlas is that you’re more selfish and have less to lose.”
“You think you’ve got a winning team with Tristan?” Parisa asked, arching a single brow. “He’s the match I struck to save you. Now you think he’s your answer?”
“I don’t need an answer. I’m the answer.” Libby considered storming away, only she didn’t feel like it. She was fine right where she fucking was. She was drinking the cup of coffee she’d chosen, and she wasn’t running away from a fight.
“I’m back, Parisa,” Libby said flatly, “and you know exactly what it took to get me here, so maybe now’s the time to remember that I’m not yours to play with anymore.”
She felt a loose corner somewhere in her thoughts, hazy images floating to the surface. Lifeless eyes. A hand unfurled. A pair of unmoving feet.
A weak edge being lifted. What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes—
She smoothed it over. Parisa’s expression remained unchanged.
“You’re the bug,” Parisa murmured, more to herself than to Libby.
It caught Libby off guard. “What?”
It took a moment, but then Parisa shook her head, picking up her wineglass and draining it. After the barest moment’s pause, she said, “You’re compromised. Don’t do this.”
Compromised? Was that how Parisa chose to characterize Libby’s abduction, or was it just the year of being stalked like prey? “What’s that supposed to mean?” Libby snapped.
“You think you’re in control,” Parisa observed, unnervingly stoic. “But I can see the guilt, Rhodes. It isn’t clarity. All you learned how to do was justify a higher price.”
Telepathy or not, it stung. “You think you have any right to talk to me about price?” Libby hissed through her teeth. “You have no idea what I did to get here—”
“No. You have no idea what I did to get here.” Parisa set the glass down empty, her mouth a thin line. “You think validation comes from painful choices, Rhodes? It doesn’t. People do terrible things every day and all it does is make more pain.” She lifted her dark eyes to Libby’s with something close to condemnation. “Didn’t your girlfriend teach you that?”
“Aren’t you the one who told me to take what I wanted?” demanded Libby, flaring so precipitously at the mention of Belen she nearly singed a hole in the tablecloth. “What makes your ambitions so fucking moral?”
“They’re not.” Parisa paused, stilling for a moment as if she’d suddenly malfunctioned. “They never were.”
She seemed agitated for a second, then shook it off. “But I’m just the villain, Rhodes. It’s my job to lose.” Parisa smiled grimly, then uncrossed her legs to stand. “You think you’re okay,” she said with an air of finality, “but you’re not. And believe me when I tell you you’ll regret whatever you do next.”
Oh, so that was how Parisa wanted to play it? Libby had been warned about the end of the world before. She was no longer taking such things under advisement.
“Stay out of my way,” Libby said, making sure Parisa understood that she meant it. That whatever Parisa thought to gain from her, she wouldn’t get it. Libby Rhodes wasn’t a gun for hire. She wasn’t one of Atlas Blakely’s toys, and she wasn’t Parisa Kamali’s, either.
“Oh, Rhodes.” Parisa shook her head, rising coolly to her feet. “I’m not interested in your way. I want nothing to do with it.”
Right. Like Libby had never heard her use that exact same tone on Callum. “You really think that’s going to work?” Libby scoffed, wondering how she had ever been so easily manipulated. It seemed so obvious now, so blatant, like finally recognizing a well-concealed tell. “Even if you walk away, Parisa, you’re walking away with nothing. You called me here because you need me.”
“I thought I did, yes. But I was wrong, and so are you.” Parisa looked quizzically at her, and for a moment before Parisa reached for her sunglasses, Libby could see that she was considering something, a show of her hand. A confession, probably. The real reason Parisa had wanted to have this little chat.
It would be a power play, of course, because everything with Parisa was a power play, but it didn’t matter. Libby understood her now. She understood that Parisa’s purpose in the world was to destabilize people because she couldn’t find her own footing. Because no matter where Parisa went, bartenders would fall over themselves to serve her, but nobody would ever give her what she actually wanted. Nobody would ever see her for what she actually was.
But Libby knew. Parisa Kamali had been left on her own to survive, and there was nothing Libby understood more fully. If the two of them were defined by nothing more than the ways they’d been wronged then there would be nothing left to say about it, but Parisa was at the end of her rope. Libby’s was just beginning.
The difference between them was obvious, and maybe it was cruel to say it aloud, but Libby had recently learned a thing or two about cruelty.
“I can make new worlds,” Libby said. “But all you have is this one.”
That was it, really. All there was to be said. Libby looked up from her cup of coffee while Parisa slid her sunglasses onto her face, and they both knew that this would be the end.
“Whatever happens,” Parisa said, eyes unreadable. “Live with it.”
Then she walked out of the restaurant and was gone.
In an ideal world, nothing Parisa said carried any further weight.
Instead, though, Libby lived in an antiquated manor house where the moral indictments of snide ex-lovers followed her around like grim hallucinations. That afternoon, Belen’s face blurred with Parisa’s, accusations punctuating mental images of lifeless eyes, archival taunts.
REQUEST DENIED.
She’d thought it would make her feel better to do something productive, to read something new and worthwhile. Instead, it was as if the house had joined the mockery, taunting her like a beating heart beneath the floorboards.
“If it helps,” remarked Gideon over her shoulder, startling her out of her momentary reverie from where he’d been fitting books into a box, “I can barely summon an airport paperback.”
That’s because you’re not an initiate, Libby wanted to say, before the obvious reply hit her as if it had been said in a silk dress, swirled around in a sweet honeyed wine:
Neither are you.
She lay awake in bed for hours, cursed with sleeplessness. Not that she was the only insomniac. Tristan tossed beside Libby in the dark, his phone screen lighting up against the black. He reached over for it, the glow reflecting on his features as he scowled, then typed something back.
“Who was it?”
He looked at her, startled to find her awake, then leaned over and kissed her shoulder.
“Varona. Apparently we’re out of hummus.” He set the phone on his nightstand again, turning to face her. “I told him to bring it up with our new archivist, since I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have an actual job. And besides, they’re in the same room.”
“Mm.” Libby exhaled slowly, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t really like Gideon being here,” she admitted after a second.
She felt Tristan position himself on his side, tracing light patterns over her forearm. “I thought he was your friend?”
“He was. Is.” She shook her head. “It’s … I don’t know, complicated. I feel like he’s watching me or something. Like he—”
Like he knows.
Lifeless eyes. The stillness of an unfurled hand. Was I a killer even before I walked into that office?
(What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes—?)
Tristan was quiet for a few moments longer.
“I told you,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was my fault. I did what I did. You don’t get to absolve me by rewriting it.” She regretted the choice of phrasing almost instantly. Parisa’s face in her mind was dismissive and pitying, or maybe she only remembered it that way. You’ve been rewritten.
“I’m not rewriting it. He was going to kill you, kill all of us. I’m not downplaying it, I’m saying it wasn’t your fault. He made the choices that put him in that room. Not you.”
“I still made a choice.” That mattered. Lately, that was the only thing that mattered. “I’m not saying I regret it. I’m just—” She shrugged. “Owning it.”
“You’re carrying it around,” Tristan said.
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“I don’t know, is it?”
They were both quiet for a while.
Tristan rolled onto his back, sighing. “I made a choice, too.”
She nodded though she knew he couldn’t see it. “I know.”
“I chose you.”
“I know.” She reached blindly for his hand, drawing it up to her mouth. She buried a kiss in his palm, closing his fingers lightly around it.
“Will it always be between us?” Libby said to the dark.
The house was so quiet—no sound but the low tick of a nearby clock. From the window came a rustle of leaves, the haze of crickets. The sighs of summer unfurling like a lifeless hand toward fall.
Tristan snaked an arm beneath her, rolling her over until she was pressed against his chest, arranging the two of them face-to-face. She could see a thousand projections of tomorrows that all played out like this.
“I know what I chose,” Tristan said.
She shook her head. “That’s not what I asked.”
“I’m just saying, I know what I chose.”
She rested her head against his chest, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. “Why do you want to do it? The experiment.” The sinister plot. No matter what she did, Nico was there, insufferably dimpled.
Tristan’s fingers traced her spine. “Why do you?”
Because if I have come this far, it has to have been for a reason. Because if I choose now to settle for ordinary, I’m spitting in the face of every life I traded for my own. Because I paid an impossible price to be here, and now I have to answer for my choices.
Because if I was given this much power, I have to let the fucker burn.
Because it wasn’t just this particular experiment. It was everything she’d be after she finally said yes. Life was a choice, a series of choices, destiny was saying yes, yes, yes until eventually, something happened. Something would have to happen. If nothing happened, then there was no meaning, no purpose. If nothing happened, then life was just a dead sister and some cheap high; five seconds of being valedictorian. It was just fucking over your girlfriend and setting off a pointless bomb and seeing yourself reflected, in all your spineless glory, in the mirrored sunglasses of a woman you’ll never speak to again.
“Because I can,” Libby finally said.
“Because I can,” Tristan replied, like a sung refrain. A common chorus. And then he kissed her, and Libby waited for his breath to steady in peaceful slumber before she made her way downstairs.
In retrospect it might have been too simple. Too easy. How many times over the course of her residence had Libby sunk proverbially to her knees before the almighty archives, debasing herself in supplication, only to be met with an almost hostile indifference?
Only one other time in her life had Libby desired something so basely, so carnally, that careless acquiescence seemed borderline cruel. (It was no wonder, she thought, that she’d begun to personify the archives in her head as Parisa Kamali, mentally rendering them effortless, tactile, and cold.)
So. She had not expected an answer, and yet there it was. It took the form of a page of careless, fractionally legible notes, in handwriting she recognized at first glance; two spindly initials she’d glimpsed on very spare occasions. Like an answer from a ghost or a breathless rush of time travel, two letters seemed to leap from the page, catching her eye:
AB.
If only she could say she mistrusted the circumstances more instead of less. If only she’d properly schooled herself to associate Atlas Blakely with danger instead of relief. This is all your fault, Libby thought in practiced repetition, running her fingers gently over the page of his voice; trying—or so her internal narrative would craftily amend itself to read—to remind herself that everything currently in her hands was rightfully, deservedly hers.
The initiation ritual was ceremoniously underlined partway down the page in Atlas’s academician’s scrawl. He must have written it years ago, perhaps when he was a researcher in the position that was once Dalton’s, now Tristan’s. Libby shivered briefly with the realization that Tristan would later hold this in his hands, consult it.
Not a shiver of fear. One of possession. Of envy.
Rhodes, Nico taunted in her head, either you’re enough or you never will be—
She read the page uncarefully, as if the faster she read, the more convincingly she could deny having ever read it. Like skimming the dirty bits of a bodice ripper smuggled home from the library; the feeling she’d soon be caught in a compromised position, the doorknob sharply turning as she hovered breathless, on the edge.
Bad news for horny teens: an inattentive read wasn’t enough to secure plausible deniability. Atlas’s lethargic cursive may have sprawled rhapsodically across the page, but the contents of the ritual were remarkably, even worryingly, uncomplicated. Like telling every conveniently braless blond girl in a horror film to run.
Equally as pointless, too. After her first read, when it became clear it was not a set of instructions, but a letter—then Libby scanned the page twice, hungrily, and a third time. Then, with a flutter low in her belly, a fourth. She glanced at the door to the reading room, pondered it, and then thought, wildly and hormonally: let them catch me if they want.
If there was more to the beginning of the letter, that was not for her to know. It began somewhere in the middle of a thought, perhaps even the middle of a sentence.
purpose of the ritual not technically known but guessable by certain nuanced intellectuals (me). It’s not the original ritual, can’t be, given that nobody mentions it in any text until the eighteenth century. (I want to be surprised by this information but am obviously not—this sort of philosophical transition from craftsmanship to manufacturing can only be industrial in nature. Not to be overimaginatively halcyonic but the flying shuttle—is that what it’s called, the thing that automated weaving?—can progressively suck my dick, end quote.)
WHAT IS KNOWN—the archives have no body: they want our blood. As far as rituals go, remedial, elementary, slightly complimentary (ha), carnivorous. Equally known, this—the archives have no soul: they want ours. Why? To re-create us is my guess. Or torture us. Not mutually exclusive. Is the ritual a matter of showcasing thought, or pain, or magical capability? Yes and yes, probably, and also yes. Or maybe it doesn’t care what we think or feel, it’s very possible I’m projecting, but why should we be deconstructed by the archives if not for them to witness our materials, to see the viscera of which we’re made? The trick to all of this, as you and I have so cleverly sorted out, is very simple: there is no genius behind any of this. No magic. This is the Society, haven’t you been paying attention! It is only ever about ownership and control. Close your eyes and pretend you see none of it. Bow when they ask you to bow, break when they tell you to break. If only I could continue my conspiratorial tones of antiestablishment magniloquence but even I have to admit that sitting here with a sentient library—a brain almost the entirety of human history in the making—it is not without its reward.
Shut up, Ezra, I can hear you mocking me from here and it’s not funny. Anyway, here’s the entire logistical form of the initiation ritual—are you sitting down? Ask the archives to let you in and they will answer. We gave them a brain (not you and me we, we as in the metaphorical thousands who’ve shed their blood and taken their oaths) (so technically not us at all, which I say with admiration and my usual panache) (yes I’ve been smoking, what of it?) and as some fraction of the specialties already know, the archives are always listening. Somewhere there’s the usual leather-bound tome (a la Medici grimoire) detailing exceptional holiness etc etc but that’s the gist of it. By the way, did you know I faced you in the ritual? I killed you this time because it wasn’t real and anyway I couldn’t very well let the archives know the truth about your doors or what would be the point? What is the point, indeed. Possibly that I am a frankly marvellous pretender.
Hm. Better left unsent I think. I’ll tell you some version of this when I see you next as it is so easily summarized. Why am I still writing, then? Good question, Ezra, perhaps because it’s day 57 alone in a very creepy house and shy of spoon-feeding my mother I’m left with little else. In what has become a mad exercise in isolation I bid myself adieu.
In the story Libby would later tell if she had to, her legs collapsed under her in shock. In shock! Certainly there were no witnesses to say she summoned a glass of water (no need to be stupid) or rearranged the tables of the reading room to leave an open space. Nobody could attest to her sneaking fears that it would be Callum she faced, or more likely Parisa. Or even, perhaps in a fit of poetic justice, Atlas himself.
Nobody would hear her say to the house, “I want to do the ritual,” and then, when it did not answer, nobody would hear her add, “You gave me the letter.” And also, “You can’t say I haven’t earned it. You can’t say I don’t deserve the right to try.”
Then, finally, after five more ticks of silence, nobody would witness Libby Rhodes saying to the Alexandrian Society’s palatial manor house: “Just let me in, you fucking fuck.”
The lights went out. The reading room was always less illuminated than the rest of the house for the sake of the archives’ contents, but even so. There was a difference between dim and darkness, tantamount to being swallowed up.
Libby scrambled to her feet, listening for something. A long-legged stride or the tap of a thin stiletto heel. Her eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness—identifying the hazy outlines of a sofa, a mantel, a chair—before she remembered she wasn’t an idiot and turned on the lights.
She didn’t hear her opponent. She felt him out of instinct, like the throbbing presence of a bruise.
The painted room at night. Without looking, she knew a lone figure stood smirking at her from the doorway.
“Rhodes, don’t hurt yourself.”
She spun with a whirl of force, aiming a blind—but not uninformed—wave of energy in his direction. Nico dismantled it like a toy, swatting it lazily down. What information would the ritual take from her, then? That Nico had always been better, faster, more natural?
Or that she still believed as much of him?
“I earned my place here,” she reminded him, before striking him from afar. He parried or something with a laugh, as if he were merely sparring with Reina. In real life, Nico was asleep, or possibly gone again with Max, she never listened when he offered explanations of his absences. (Yes, she did. He now explained it, his whereabouts, with painstaking detail and a not-insignificant measure of kindness, as if she’d once been lost to time and space and thus he did not want her to worry, did not want her to feel alone, an unsolicited reassurance that he was always safely within reach.)
“Five members were already initiated, Rhodes.” His eyes were different. The usual gleam of boyish wrongdoing felt malicious, or maybe that was just the archives taunting her with qualities that Libby herself had falsely ascribed. (Was the ritual a game, a dream, an exercise in torment, what?) She walked briskly up to Nico with half-considered aims of slapping him and he caught her hand before she raised it, or maybe she had placed it deliberately within his reach.
“Five,” he repeated, “were already initiated. Which means you,” he added with a salacious wink, “are redundancy in its dullest, most pointless form.”
She yanked her wrist from his hand. “You don’t actually believe that.” Oh, but this was her brain, not his. She fed the simulation, not him; hadn’t Atlas said as much? “I don’t believe that,” she corrected herself. “I’ve earned my right to initiation.” She pivoted sharply, addressing the bones of the house, the apse beside the painted room window, the ash in the hearth. “It’s Callum we decided to kill. Intention means something.” Lethal arrows, luck and unluck. “The sacrifice was already made the moment we picked him.”
Magical significance. Atlas’s voice in her head, then Ezra’s. You’re his weapon. (Who is the arrow, who the archer?) Was I a killer even before I walked into that office?
(What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes—?)
It mounted in her head, pressing inward, tender and excruciating, erupting like entrails. Heartsick and ashen with rage, Libby snarled at the house’s faceless walls. “Don’t tell me I didn’t bleed for you!”
“Ah, but alas—a philosophical divergence,” interrupted Nico’s simulation, prompting Libby to spin back toward him. “You didn’t do any of that for the archives.”
She swallowed around the presence of something bitter. “Of course I did—”
Nico lifted a finger, silencing her with a roll of his eyes. “The archives never needed you to return, Rhodes. Why would they, when they already have me? You only came back to prove something to yourself. Something you’re still trying to prove.”
Libby could feel her secrets being robbed from her then. An unsophisticated pain, like a charley horse in her gut, and she responded with a blow to Nico’s face, which he dissipated with a blink.
“Honestly, Rhodes? Congratulations,” Nico said with a laugh. “So, you’re finally willing to burn this world down, but only to prove that you personally matter—”
“I’m not burning it down,” she hissed through gritted teeth, reminded again that this was all a trick of her own mind. (The world can end in two ways, Ezra whispered into nothing, fire or ice—) “I’m obviously not, seeing as that’s the one thing I’m very purposely not doing—”
“And the sad thing, Rhodes, is that even if you did, you still wouldn’t believe it.” Nico inspected his nails, the whisper of smoke around their heads the only evidence she’d tried to disintegrate him with a homemade flamethrower.
“Believe what?” she snapped at him, realizing with a tiresome jolt how handsome he was, an added sting to salt the wound. A thing she’d always known and resented, how naturally, how unfailingly he pleased the eye, a trick no amount of mascara or illusion charms had ever accomplished.
He looked, for a moment, almost like Callum—
Until, with a gleam so bright she forcibly turned away, he was.
“Oh, Rhodes. You’re still chasing a finish line you’ll never get to see.” Callum looked smug and beautiful, just like he’d been in her dreams. As if he’d been personally tutored in condescension by Parisa while Libby had been lost, and alone, and away. “You thought once you were recruited, you’d feel valuable. You thought once you brought yourself back home, you’d feel powerful. You thought once you got initiated, you’d finally feel worthy. Now you think sure, if you can open a door to a new fucking world, then you’ll—”
“I’m not going to do it,” Libby hissed. (Belen’s face warped in her mind: You’re going to do it, aren’t you?) “Why would I do something I already know to have catastrophic results?”
To her dismay, Callum smiled.
(I can see it there, on your stupid fucking face!)
And then, all of a sudden, he was Nico again.
“Because Ezra’s a liar and an idiot and you don’t believe him,” Nico informed her gaily, as if nothing had ever brought him so much pleasure to say aloud. “A thing I’ve told you many times, by the way, and something you’ve always secretly half believed, because ironically”—quick pause for laughter, as if to charmingly debauch a society toast or outshine her at her own birthday party—“if I had liked or even marginally respected him, you probably wouldn’t have dated him, because everything in your life has always been about proving something to me.”
“That’s not even remotely true—that’s—I can’t believe you’d even—” Faintly, she felt aware there was a very real, very reachable possibility of argument, and yet somehow, it seemed to dissipate the closer she got.
“It gets worse, doesn’t it?” Nico leaned toward her, stepping in close enough to reach her. Or kiss her. He morphed, then, and was Callum. Morphed again, and was Tristan.
Then Parisa. “You love me, fine, terrible but manageable.”
Nico again. She could feel his breath in the air between them. “Somewhere in that moralizing, catastrophizing brain of yours you already know this warped somewhere between us along the way, but that’s not the thing that kills you after all. That’s not the real fatality here, because part of you knows I could love you back—I could do it. But you’re not as good a person as I think you are, are you?” His stupid eyes were framed by lashes so long they nearly brushed his cheek.
“Because the real banger of a truth,” said Nico, his voice dropping just above a whisper, “is that if you were actually a good person, you would have just stayed lost.”
Shock cantered painfully across her chest when his eyes slipped to her lips. “What?”
“Admit it.” He danced back with a grin, flicking a wave of force so abruptly in her direction that she staggered over it, like snagging her toe in the carpet. “You’ve already done the math, Rhodes. You already know the cost to bring you here was indefensible. It was one life for possible thousands. Maybe generational. Maybe worse. With how incessantly you worry, there’s no way you didn’t know.”
“That’s—” Libby felt dazed. “That’s purely theoretical, and—”
“Oh, sure, so it already happened,” Nico said with a dismissive wave. “Time is a closed loop, so arguably the damage was already done. But that wasn’t the question, was it? The question was what is the right thing to do, and you chose—ding ding ding!” He was Callum again, so briefly it stung her eyes, like looking directly into the sun. “The wrong answer.”
Nico returned. Libby felt herself lifting from the floor before hastily rerouting the force of gravity, her feet meeting the floorboards with a sudden, painful crash.
“Which is how I know you’re going to do the experiment,” Nico added, reentering the span of her reach to brush a kiss to her cheek, knocking her reeling to the floor. “Because you burned the world down once and walked away unscathed, and you’re dumb enough to think that means something.”
She scrambled to her feet, eyes on his, and set fire to his pant leg. He let it burn, like it didn’t hurt. Like she could never truly, actually hurt him.
“Because simply knowing the experiment exists already means that nothing else you live to accomplish will ever be enough,” Nico said, this time with a softer look. A look she knew, because she had seen him give it to Gideon. Because it was a look he gave Gideon all the time. “Because it’s another finish line you have to cross, or you will always be a failure.”
Flames rose from the floor at her bidding, licking devotedly at his T-shirt. He raised the material from his skin and watched the flesh of his stomach redden in welts, then gradually blacken.
Nico leaned closer to speak in her ear, sweat dripping from his cheeks to her shoulders like carefully unshed tears. “Because successfully completing that experiment is the only thing you have left to prove that anxious, annoying, unlovable you is worth the price you forced everyone else to pay,” Nico whispered, “all so you could believe for one fucking second that you matter at all.”
He stepped away, finished, and it occurred to Libby that she had ample evidence in contradiction. That if her jaw dropped, it was only circumstantial; because it was hard to breathe through so much smoke, and the Nico her mind had made for her would burn if she allowed it.
Understandably, she chose a less admirable path.
“Shut the fuck up,” replied Libby, punching him in the face.
Parrying the impact of the blow, if she’d ever had a chance at landing one, was so squarely within his talents he barely blinked. Then, abruptly, he was Reina.
“Oh, Rhodes,” Reina offered, with the utterly psychotic look of indifference she seemed to reserve for Libby alone.
A tendril of something reached out, a jolt of force or nature sending Libby flying backward. She crashed through the bookcase to land on her back, hissing through the pain. She felt exhausted, broken, spent; a vine reached tenderly around her throat, stroking her jaw.
Then a shadow crossed her face, blocking the light like a sudden eclipse.
Dizzied, Libby blinked.
Standing over her was herself, her hands dripping with blood.
“What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes?” Libby asked in a whisper.
There was a flash of pain, a blinding light. Then Libby calmly woke to the dim light of the reading room, understanding two things: that this had been the ritual, and she had failed.