A bottle of red wine, two glasses on the painted room’s side table, Tristan’s face looking so brutally impassive she thought she might actively hate him. I don’t know if this is fixable.
Do you mean us? Or do you mean me?
(Not an ambush, he’d said at the start. Just a thought.)
Doesn’t something feel … wrong?
Libby’s heart hammered in her throat as Nico looked at her.
Wasn’t it always this way? Leaving and returning, always in each other’s orbit. Maybe that meant something. Maybe her gut had been right the first time. Maybe Varona, we need to talk had been the right move all along. Maybe she’d suspected this and tried to fight it; maybe she’d thought it was something she could outrun. It was uncreative, a classic story, the wrong one turning out to be right. Maybe it was okay to figure that out now, right now, when both their cheeks were flushed with hope and humiliation. Twin flames of maybe yes, maybe you, maybe me. Maybe she’d been looking for signs, missing the obvious right in front of her the whole time.
She swallowed and contemplated how to move forward. How to close the distance. She hated his mouth, how strangely sensual it was. That tendency to chew on the pens he borrowed from her, his arrogant smile, the dimples she loathed with a heat she could have easily mistaken for something else. Had it been this all along? Maybe she’d known it. He had pushed her, always, he was at the center of her every accomplishment, standing beside everything she’d ever achieved. Every goal she’d ever reached. He was there in her orbit, and maybe that meant something.
Maybe it was this. Maybe it was now.
Maybe—
“I think there are a solid three universes where we’re together, Rhodes,” Nico said, his mouth moving again just as she felt herself tipping forward, trying invisibly to connect the dots and join them up between her lips and his. “Maybe half of all the parallel worlds, if I’m feeling optimistic.”
He turned to the side and picked up the bottle of wine, and Libby blinked at the sudden disruption of things.
Blinked again, wondering if she’d misheard. “And in the other half?”
“Oh, we’ve killed each other.” He smiled at her, shrugging, inviting her to laugh, though she didn’t. Wanted to, kind of, but at the moment it seemed like it might hurt too much, might rupture an organ. “But we’re definitely both there in all of them,” he said with certainty. “It’s hard to imagine that there’s a world where either of us exists alone.”
She fought the urge to reel backward, to pinch herself awake. “So that’s your multiverse hypothesis—fifty-fifty odds, death or marriage?”
He laughed into the bottle, taking a swig and then toasting her with it. “Maybe forty-nine-forty-nine, with some wiggle room for academic rivals that occasionally split a bottle of wine.”
She waited for her pulse to slow, wondered if he could feel how big and loud it had gotten. She doubted he could miss it, attuned as he was to her every move, her every flaw. She could no longer determine the atmosphere in the room, which she’d thought she understood with perfect clarity five minutes ago, or maybe less. Allies, he’d said. What was that supposed to feel like? “Those odds could be worse.”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “Sometimes I think I’d take that gamble.”
“Sometimes?”
He lowered the bottle. Took a long look at her. She felt an inward plummeting even before he opened his mouth.
“You want me to be your answer, Rhodes,” he said eventually, “but I can’t be. I’m not an answer. Granted, I’m a lot of things,” he qualified with a smirk, “but what you want—absolution or whatever—that’s bigger than me.”
She hated him again. Just like that, it was back. “So is Gideon your answer, then?”
He looked away, and she wondered if he would deny it. She felt certain that if he lied, she would know. He’d told a lot of truths in the past few minutes. She knew enough about him to know that whatever they’d been doing here, she hadn’t been that wrong.
He cleared his throat. “My mother does this thing,” he explained. “She touches my forehead, right here.” He pointed to the spot above his brows. “She blesses me. And I’ve always found it annoying, I don’t really share her beliefs. But then—”
He broke off.
“Now I understand the desire to bless something,” he said eventually. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. I just understand the impulse, that need to acknowledge something precious, to treat it with reverence, to call it things like “beloved” and “cherished” and “dear.” And—” He shrugged, the moment fatally collapsing. “The point is no, Gideon is not an answer, Gideon is Gideon. But I’m not the one asking a question.” His eyes met hers. “You are, Rhodes, and neither Tristan nor I can answer it for you.”
“You’re doing it again.” She could hear her heart beating in her ears, somewhere behind her temples. “You’re telling me how to feel.”
“Right, sorry, I don’t mean to do that. I don’t mean to … I obviously don’t understand.” He shifted away from her, and with a sudden strike of panic and rage, Libby understood that he intended to leave. “Sorry, I think … I think this got weird, it’s my fault, I didn’t mean t—”
“To what? Lead me on? Lie to me?” She tasted bile, wondering if it was heartbreak or the undrinkable red wine that Nico found so delicious. As if they’d been existing in two very different worlds the whole time.
Nico looked at her squarely. “Do you have feelings for me, Rhodes?”
“I—” She had traveled through time. She’d defied the principles of physics. She didn’t have to back down from a stupid little question like do you have feelings for me from someone who’d been pulling her pigtails since day one. “Maybe I fucking do, Varona. Are you saying you don’t?”
“Of course I’m not saying that. This, we both know it’s … it’s complicated, it’s weird, it’s not the same as anything we have with anyone else—”
“And those aren’t feelings?”
“I’m saying right now that they’re feelings, of course they’re feelings, but I just—I have a lot of feelings, okay?” Nico looked irritated, which made Libby want to strangle him with her bare hands. “I’m in love with Gideon, I’m in love with you, I’m probably a little in love with Parisa and Tristan and, god, maybe Reina. And honestly,” he added with a look of strain, “if Callum asked me to get a drink with him, I can’t even promise I’d say no—”
Helplessly, Libby tasted smoke on the tip of her tongue. “What are you even saying right now?”
“I’m saying that I have feelings and I also make choices, and right now my choice is to go to bed,” Nico muttered, rubbing his neck as he clambered to his feet. “I’m saying that—yes, okay? Yes, obviously I wonder sometimes, Rhodes, because you push me and I need that, and I need you. I want you in my life in a way that fucking bleeds significance, but it isn’t…” He grimaced again. “Maybe it’s not the kind of significance you want it to have.”
“I never said that.” Oh, it was definitely potent, the hatred, the thing she felt for him that was so far off the charts. “I never said I wanted anything from you.”
“Okay, good, great, fantastic.” He sat back down, apparently recognizing the instability he’d created. “So we love each other, Rhodes, so what?”
“So what?” She felt hysterical. “Are you really asking me that?”
“Look,” he sighed, “all I want to do is go to bed, wake up, make a new fucking world with you, maybe have some nachos when we’re finished.” When he looked at her, she could only see a teenager, a child. Like he was offering to hunt the monsters under her bed. “I would love it if you could tell me what’s different, what’s changed about you. What you clearly feel so awful about that you don’t want me to know. But that’s just it—don’t you get it?”
He was staring pleadingly at her.
“Maybe there’s a version where we end up together, Rhodes, but it isn’t this one,” he said. “Maybe that just means not yet, but it definitely means not now. How could it be now?” he pointed out, his voice absent any of its usual playfulness—any of its eviscerating arrogance—though Libby found she could just as easily hate it nonetheless. “You can’t even tell me the truth!”
“You want the truth?” She leapt to her feet then, agitated. “I trusted someone who betrayed me, Varona, who trapped me and forced me to make an untenable choice, so it’s not completely out of the realm of understandable that I don’t want to talk about it, don’t you think?”
“You’re angry at me? Really?” He was standing now, too. “How can you be this angry when I’ve done nothing but tell you how much you matter to me?” His eyes narrowed scornfully. “And don’t act like you’ve been pining for me when you know you went to Tristan for help. Not me.”
Libby was fuming, pushed over the edge by a flood of anger and bitterness and guilt. “Do you even realize how childish you sound—”
“Go ahead and call me a child.” His tone had darkened. “Everyone does. Do you understand that? Everyone but Gideon does,” he said with a layer of warning, “and so maybe that means something to me. Maybe that means more to me than some twisted mirror game we’ve spent six years playing,” he snapped, “chasing each other’s tails over and over only to realize that all we’re ever doing is running away—”
“What do you want me to be? You want me to be perfect Saint Gideon so that you can feel good about loving me instead of trapped? I killed someone, Varona.” The words fell out of her mouth unbidden. “I’m not sorry, I’m not even sad—” She felt like she was wringing the words out of her, cracking every vertebra to let the truth fall out. “I’m not the same person I was, and could you still have loved me, knowing that? Knowing the whole truth of what I am?”
“Yes.” His hands were up now, combatively. “Yes, you fucking idiot. Do you think that’s what I love about you, your morals?” The look on his face was pure exasperation. “Did you really think I could only love you if your hands were clean?”
She blinked.
Blinked again.
Nico’s chest sagged, and he scraped a hand through his hair in frustration.
“I will spend my life orbiting yours,” Nico said, and the exhaustion in his voice, she knew it. She understood it. “I consider it a privilege. Does that mean less if we never sleep together? If we never have babies and hold hands, does that have to mean less? You’re in every world I exist in, your fate is my fate, either you follow me or I follow you, it doesn’t matter which and I don’t care. If that’s not love then maybe I don’t understand love, and that’s fine with me—it doesn’t make me angry to know I’m actually an idiot after all. And if it’s not enough for you, then okay, it’s not enough. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m willing to give it. What you’re willing to accept doesn’t change what I’m willing to give.”
He took a step back. Two steps. He walked to the door and she didn’t stop him.
Then he paused on the threshold, looking back at her where she faced the flames in the hearth, cooling herself on the shapes of them.
“Rhodes,” he said. A question, or a plea.
She closed her eyes, sighing.
“Fine. You’re right,” she said. “I know you’re right. It’s just…” She waved a hand. “Wine.”
He hesitated. “Are you sure you—”
“—even like red wine?” she finished for him. “No.” She shook her head. “That stuff tastes like Jesus.”
Nico managed a laugh, and she almost did. Almost.
“This,” he said, voice cracking with sincerity. “You and me. You can’t escape it. You don’t get an out.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yes. It’s a promise, but menacing.” He lingered a moment longer. “I mean it, Rhodes, I don’t think I’m the answer you’re looking for. You wouldn’t be any more fulfilled with me. You’d just have this, exactly what you feel right now, but with someone who can dance much better than Tristan.”
Nico looked smug, of course he did, but to her benefit—to her great relief—Libby knew he was right. She realized it like engaging a reflex she’d been afraid to test—like finally putting weight on a muscle she’d been routinely, chronically babying. The thing his simulation had said to her—that everything in her life revolved around him, or eventually led back to him—had never been real. Nothing more than Libby offering herself another invisible finish line, another weak and insubstantial solution. Because if that were true, then admitting her feelings for Nico might have given her closure, completing a very simple, very solvable feedback loop—but it didn’t, because it wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t about him at all.
She understood that now, the reason she failed the ritual. Well, presumably she would never have been initiated because there were rules, but the reason she’d lost so spectacularly—the actual, much sharper truth obscured by the convenient romantic one—was that everything in her life was about proving something, but that had begun long before Nico de Varona had entered it. She hadn’t met him and then felt starved, insatiable, unwanted. She had met him already feeling those things—already believing them, building herself unsteadily on top of them—and Nico’s presence as some living embodiment of her shortcomings had gladly stoked the flames.
So she did manage a laugh, albeit a hoarse one. “Stop telling me how I feel, Varona. You don’t get to tell me what I want.”
“No, but I can ask you.” He shrugged. “What do you want?”
She looked back at the flames.
What did she want?
An answer. Fuck it, he was right. That’s what all of this was—had been—for.
She wanted an answer, but not to this.
“I want to do the experiment,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
She wanted to believe it was her decision. That it was rational because it had come from her, and not from half a lifetime’s well of loneliness.
Not that it mattered.
“Okay,” Nico said. “Okay.”
“You always have this dream,” said Gideon.
She didn’t know when he’d gotten there, or how. There was smoke coming from somewhere over the hills, just out of sight. At first she thought it was the neighbors barbecuing, the sizzle of burgers, her father’s silly apron that Libby had made at school in fifth grade. Katherine with the eye roll. Dad, you look stupid. Normal things. Normal life.
But now Gideon was here, and Libby understood that for whatever reason, she now connected him with this, the intersection of dream and nightmare.
She glimpsed something, a blemish on what had been her nostalgic suburban idyll. A familiar pair of shoes sticking out from underneath the neighbor’s chaise lounge. An unmoving pair of legs. A pool of blood seeping into the cracks in the pavement.
Lifeless eyes. A hand unfurled.
She shaded her eyes from the red-burning sun, saying nothing.
“I can’t find him,” Gideon remarked mildly, not looking at her, and Libby closed her eyes.
The world can end one of two ways, Ezra reminded her with his legs folded into his chest, next to the heart he used to say beat for her. Fire or ice. I saw both.
He used to say a lot of things. I love you. I can kill her.
Lifeless eyes. A hand unfurled.
Wake up, she thought. Wake up.
She had forgotten the particulars of this bedroom. The way that, for a year, the sun had poured in too early from the east side of the house unless she pulled the drapes tightly shut.
She was supposed to be sleeping—resting. She turned on her side and the door opened behind her, then fell gently shut.
She felt him climb into bed with her, curving around her with his usual grace.
“Maybe it’ll be different,” said Tristan’s voice in her ear. “After we do this. Maybe it’s something about the house, or the archives, or maybe we just have to shake something loose. I don’t know.” Then again, quietly, “I don’t know.”
She reached behind her to take his hand, toying with his knuckles.
“Maybe,” she agreed, which had the flavor of an apology. Top notes of a wish.
When they made their way down to the painted room, Nico was levitating a large planter outside through one of the windows surrounding the apse. Tristan glanced out the window, observing the small garden Nico seemed to be constructing of potted houseplants, then looked questioningly at Gideon, who shrugged.
“Neither of us know which one the fig plant is,” he explained.
Tristan and Libby exchanged a glance of mutual bemusement, but were interrupted by the sound of entry behind them before either could reply.
“This would be easier,” came Dalton’s voice, “if we had the naturalist.”
Tristan didn’t turn, but Libby did, surveying Dalton with a glance. He was less poised than usual, or perhaps needed a haircut, or a shave. She and Tristan had not exchanged much more than a few words with Dalton in greeting upon his arrival the previous day, though for obvious reasons Libby had worried whether his presence might represent an unknown variable of Parisa’s agenda. (Not as related to the experiment, necessarily, but some other, more furtive motivation Libby would not understand until she woke up hungover, divested of her scruples and clothes.) Then again, maybe when Parisa had warned Libby to leave the experiment alone, what she meant was that she was washing her hands of all of it. Or maybe she just wanted Dalton gone. Neither would have surprised Libby, who was coming to think of Parisa in retrospect as an insignificant piece of the equation.
“Believe me, I tried,” came Nico’s chipper voice, absent any emotional damage or fraught psychological torment from the previous night’s discussion. He emerged through the window with an easy sweep of the room’s occupants, Libby included, as if nothing of concern had recently been done or said. Probably true. Probably reasonable. “Reina’s not having it. But I think she’s hoping I’ll fail and then she can gloat a bit and call me an idiot. No harm, no foul,” he added, and if that was meant for Libby in any way, she decided to simply accept it.
“I don’t expect to fail.” Dalton glanced sideways at Gideon, who was frowning at him with a sense of unease, possibly recognition. “What are you contributing to the experiment?”
Gideon opened his mouth warily, then closed it. “Just the audience.”
Dalton’s gaze narrowed. “We don’t need an audience.”
“Emotional support,” Nico offered quickly, manifesting again at Libby’s elbow. “Fetcher of snacks, master of hydration. You don’t mind, do you?” he asked in a murmured aside to Libby as Tristan turned away, conspicuously fixing his attention on his coffee cup. “It just seemed weird to make Gideon wait outside.”
Dalton appeared to have disregarded this as a matter of concern, instead signaling Tristan over. Libby watched as Tristan braced, irritated at being summoned, but gave in, wandering over while Dalton produced a thick notebook full of maniacally scribbled notes.
Libby and Nico were alone in the corner. Gideon pointedly busied himself with the readjustment of the books on a shelf across the room.
“Gideon can do something in dreams, can’t he?” Libby said in an undertone as Nico looked at her with surprise.
“Of course. Didn’t you realize that last year? He’s the one who found you.”
“I know that, but we never actually talked about what that meant.” She realized her voice sounded guarded when Nico’s forehead creased with apparent concern.
“You’re not mad, are you? I guess it feels invasive at first,” he acknowledged in a troubled voice, “but we needed him if we were ever going to find you—and anyway, he’s not going to interfere with the experiment, so don’t worry about that,” he added hastily. “If anything, I’m a little—”
Nico stopped, his mouth still forming words.
“Just say it, Varona,” Libby murmured, and he turned to her with a look of something not quite apologetic enough. This, she reminded herself. This was the Varona she knew and did not love. He was right, he was the same, and maybe she craved that sameness, or needed it or clung to it or something. Before him had been grief and after him had come guilt.
It was not rejection, she told herself.
“Do we think it’s odd?” Nico said. “The messages we got from Parisa. Dalton being here without her.”
“It’s his research, not hers.” Libby didn’t want to call it a relief. That was too strong a word. She knew what she was capable of alone; knew, too, what she was capable of doing with Nico. Wasn’t that the trouble, knowing what she’d always known? She resented it, being tied to him, but the real weight to carry around was the irony, the unassailable significance, the ease of picking up where the other left off.
The horror of knowing what it meant to be a soulmate. Not quite as romantic as the stories made it seem.
“I know, I know, I just—I’ve never seen him do any magic before, not really. And it’s … another variable,” Nico said. His hair was askew and he seemed about to explain something to Libby that she already knew, like the definition of a variable.
“We’ve all conjured together before,” she pointed out.
“Not without Reina. Not with Dalton.” Nico was speaking quickly and quietly now, like he worried Dalton might overhear.
“Aren’t you the one insisting we should do this?” Libby glanced at him with more admonishment than she intended.
“Well, right, the circumstances are just—” He shook his head. “But you’re right, we need him. It’s fine.”
She hadn’t technically said it was fine, just that he’d been in a rush. Before she could point it out, though, he assured her, “I trust you, Rhodes.”
At that precise moment, Tristan looked over.
Do you trust me?
Libby shook herself, annoyed, counting the signs and then choosing to discard them. That was an old reflex, looking for things that could go wrong. Searching for evidence of failure. She was tired of it, she was no longer that person, she wanted this. Cosmic significance could go and hang.
Gideon’s eyes met hers across the room and she felt a flare of something. Certainty. Envy. If anyone didn’t belong in the room—if anyone had not made adequately humbling choices to exist within these walls—it was Gideon, and Libby tried not to call that feeling rage. Callum wasn’t here, so she didn’t have to put a name to it. She knew what she did not feel, which was doubt.
She’d forfeited the right to doubt a long time ago now. Not that it didn’t linger now and then. In her dreams. In her mind. In her search history. The redundancy of typing Belen Jiménez only to produce exactly what Libby had expected and no more than that. No less.
She didn’t have to sit around and wait for meaning. Significance was heavy, like the weight of the stars on her back. No amount of questioning it would lighten the burden. No grief had ever brought the dead back to life.
What Belen had believed of Libby couldn’t diminish her now. What Tristan had seen of her couldn’t compromise her. Nico trusted her, and Nico was right, had always been right. Either she was enough or she never would be. Either this choice was hers, too, or nothing was, and who could ever be satisfied with that—with having power only to waste it? Belen Jiménez had all but disappeared into the annals of time. All that was left was clarity, and that voice, the one Libby had chosen, had never been Belen’s.
What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes—
“Make sure to stretch,” Libby told Nico. “It’s time to make a new fucking world.”
—and who will you betray to do it?