“We have unfinished business,” she said after handing Callum the pistol with the gleaming W logo that she’d taken from Eden Wessex, leading him into the transport when the doors obligingly opened. “You’re going to help me take care of it.”
Callum followed warily, glancing over his shoulder like he was sure they were being watched. “You want my help killing Rhodes, then? I doubt I’m the right person to do it,” he hissed, preparing to shove the gun into his waistband like some kind of idiotic cowboy.
“Careful with that thing, which I can see that you do not know how to use. And correct.” As in yes, correct, Callum wasn’t at all the right person to kill Libby Rhodes. Also correct were the variety of doubts floating around in his head about whether Parisa even needed his help given that she’d just single-handedly orchestrated a coup.
If Parisa wanted anyone dead, it really wasn’t a matter of difficulty to achieve it alone. She could probably plant the idea in anyone, even him. Especially him, whether he wanted to acknowledge that or not. As for the matter of the sacrifice, anyone else would have made that particular death more valuable. It would cost Callum nothing to see Libby Rhodes disappear.
Parisa needlessly donned her sunglasses again, listening to his thoughts as he frowned down at the pistol. They were ordinary Callum thoughts for the most part, largely about himself and his own questionable nature. He sidled into the lift beside Parisa with a sigh, wondering internally about when he’d begun to differentiate between her heartbeats.
“Is this thing magical?” he muttered, giving up on stowing the pistol away. Instead he opened her purse beneath her arm, shoving it back in.
“Yes. Some kind of Wessex prototype. And no to killing Rhodes,” she told him, adding a somewhat unenthusiastic “Sorry.”
“Well, I certainly hope you don’t mean Tristan.” Callum folded his arms over his chest, glancing sideways at her. “That’s my thing, which would make this extremely rude.”
“No, not Tristan.” Not that he was getting any closer to accomplishing that.
“Varona, really?” Callum frowned at her. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
“Not Varona.” Callum glanced at her, and Parisa shrugged. “He’s too cute.”
“He’s a normal amount of cute. And if not him—” Callum frowned, having run his process of elimination and come up short. “Then who?”
She tried to consider how to explain her answer and almost instantly gave up. She could entertain his narcissism, at least, so she let it play from the vault of her memories: his own voice. The real reason she’d called him.
You have only one true choice in this life. The only thing no one else can take from you.
“Whether we like it or not, the archives are owed a body,” she reminded him as the lift doors shut, leaving him to hear the unspoken.
It might as well be mine.
If she’d wanted to be taken seriously, she should have chosen someone else. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” was Callum’s immediate assessment, announced with a scoff even before the transport delivered them just outside the wards of the Society’s manor house. “And yes, I’m aware of the irony of me saying that.” He followed her out of the transport lift before catching her arm, pulling her back and frowning up at the manor house’s ostentatious facade. The sun had slipped out of sight just moments prior, lending the house’s face a blend of rosy pinks. “Are we going to be able to get in? I imagine someone should’ve changed the wards by now.”
“Maybe if the Caretaker wasn’t currently dead,” Parisa confirmed. “Or if I hadn’t already arranged to make sure they weren’t.”
“Sharon again?” Callum guessed, so at least he’d been paying attention. “What’d you do to her? She seems abnormally grateful. And not, you know.” He shrugged. “Telepathically undead.”
“Unlike you, I don’t have to rely on turning everyone into zombies. I cured her daughter’s cancer.” Technically Nothazai had, as a stipulation for Parisa’s assistance in seating him at the head of the very Society he claimed to hate.
Interesting who people were willing to side with when it got them what they wanted. Or rather, not interesting at all, because it was such lethal fucking confirmation of everything Parisa already believed about mankind.
“Which you did to be … nice?” Callum asked with visible confusion.
“For obvious purposes of leverage,” Parisa corrected him, making a face. “I think we both know I’m not nice. It is actually very easy to make one person happy,” she pointed out to Callum. “At least until her daughter reaches her teenage years and hates her, and then she realizes her other two children resent her, and they all completely waste and take for granted the time they have together that they otherwise would have treasured. And lost.”
She hadn’t meant to sound so bitter about it, but there wasn’t anything for it. The world simply was what it was.
“Parisa.” Back to the original subject, then. She saw Callum’s mind turning, wrestling with something she knew to be unhelpful to the cause. “You can’t seriously be thinking of killing yourself.”
“Why not? Someone has to die.” A shrug. “You’re the one who realized exactly what happened to Atlas’s class. If I’m going to die anyway because the rest of you’ve decided to be precious about a condition we’ve known about for over a year—”
“I’m going to kill Tristan,” announced Callum idiotically.
“Oh, right, sure,” Parisa replied. “And when will you be doing that, pray tell?”
“Now, if you want.” He was staring at her. “I had a different outfit in mind but believe me, I’m not attached to these trousers.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” She turned to continue walking, though Callum followed doggedly, right on her heels.
“That’s my line. Parisa.” This time he caught her by the tips of her fingers. “Look at me. Listen to me closely. I’m not going to help you with this.”
“Why not? You already killed me once.” She remembered the feeling well. Presumably he did too, as it had been the beginning of his personal disaster.
“That was different. That was—” He broke off, looking frustrated. “I was trying to prove I was better than you.”
“Okay? So do it again.”
“No, this is—is this even a sacrifice?” he countered, golden brow furrowing neatly as he stared. “You can’t just give up on life and call it a day.”
“Callum. Believe me when I tell you this. I love me,” Parisa informed him.
“Okay, but—”
“It’s not life I have a problem with. I’m not choosing to die because death feels better. It’s just that—” She sighed, doubtful he’d understand. “It’s that running is exhausting and my hair is turning gray and all the rest of you have something to live for, but I don’t. All I have is me, and I don’t mind that. I never have. But if someone’s going to lose something, then maybe I want it to be on my terms.”
She wondered if he’d been toying with something, fiddling with the dials inside her chest. Reina was right about at least one thing—Parisa had forgotten what it felt like to be honest. She was a composite of lies, of terrible things and selfish motives, and really, she didn’t resent that about herself. She was a survivor, and surviving was something she was greatly, uncompromisingly proud of in the end. She’d have done it forever if she really felt it was worth it, but she wasn’t an idiot. Reina would do good for this world until it killed her. Nico would make out with his roommate or whatever he would do, which either way he deserved. Callum was never going to kill Tristan and Tristan was never going to kill Callum, and as for Libby Rhodes …
Let Libby take on the burden of survival for a change.
“I’m not sad,” Parisa said. “If I had more time, then yeah, I’d probably take over the Forum. But then what? New shoes? I’ve seen this season’s Manolos.” She’d meant to sound droll but it came out a little bit worse. Not wobbly, of course. Just slightly bitter. “What for, Callum? The world’s full of assholes and monsters.” Reina could fix them. Parisa could gut them and leave them for dead. Did it matter either way? No, not really. The world simply was what it was.
“Parisa.” Callum stared at her. “Before you do this. I really, really—”
“Yes?”
He let out a deep sigh. “—think you should reconsider killing Rhodes.”
Parisa rolled her eyes, turning to the house. “Come on.”
“Wait—” He stopped her with an outstretched hand. “The wards feel different.”
She realized it too, in a similar moment, just a hair too late. “Barely.”
“Barely isn’t the same as not.”
“Shut up.” She pressed a hand to the wards, feeling them greet her in that uncanny way, analyzing her touch. Not like a computer. More like a puppy sniffing her hand. “You’re right. Something’s wrong.”
Callum and Parisa exchanged a glance.
“There’s something off about the fingerprint,” Callum said, which wasn’t a technically accurate term for the house’s sentience, but she agreed there seemed no better way to describe it. There was a massive injection of something, like a foreign substance, or drugs. It felt like it had two years ago—back when the six of them still conjured up various cosmic phenomena just to prove their right to belong—but this degree of output was … less stable. More dangerous, and slightly burnt. “Do you recognize it? That magic in the wards?”
Yes. She did. She knew it well. Intimately, in fact.
Troubling.
“I felt that,” Callum said as gooseflesh rose on Parisa’s arms, his gaze straying warily to hers. “Something I should know?”
No. Well, not fair. Once she’d died, she took that information with her. Which seemed … problematic, to say the least.
“If you can influence Dalton, you should really try,” she said. “It’ll be different this time from the last one. Harder, I expect.”
“Had a bad breakup, then?” asked Callum with a smirk. “So sad.”
No point explaining. Parisa stroked the wards until they purred beneath her touch. “Yeah,” she said, and stepped inside.
It was obvious almost instantly that something was amiss. The house was trembling beneath her, but also, something sinister was missing. The sense she’d had for a year that the walls were draining her, that the brain of the archives was watching her … it was gone. Evaporated. In its place was a low rumble, like oncoming thunder. Storm clouds closing in. Teeth chattering, something on the edge of collapse.
Parisa rested a hand on the threshold of the entry hall.
“Something’s wrong,” she said again, surer of it now. She felt the presence of something fractured, something familiar. Something she should’ve known she’d eventually have to answer for. “In the reading room.”
Callum paused. “Are you sure it’s the reading room? There are multiple people in the house.” His brow creased with what might have been concern. Fair enough, but a multiplicity of threats did not render them equally dangerous. Parisa knew exactly who the problem was.
And she knew she was to blame.
“Don’t do that. Wrinkles.” She walked quickly to the reading room, leaving Callum to follow in her wake.
“Didn’t you hear me? There’s at least one person in the— Oh,” Callum said, as he must have caught wind of the same slightly harrowing instability she’d clocked wafting in from the direction of the archives. “Right, this is more pressing. Fine.”
She could see the familiar flickering light of animation well before they entered the room. Even from the corridor, the reading room, which ought to have been dark as it usually was, looked fluorescent with activity. The pneumatic tube that delivered manuscript requests to and from the archives had been wrenched from the wall. The tables had been overturned, sparks flashing from the outlets torn apart beneath them.
“By influence, did you mean tell him to calm down?” Callum murmured to Parisa.
She pushed the door open wider, catching the familiar silhouette and breathing out. “Dalton.”
Dalton turned with a manic pivot in her direction, something crackling as he moved. “Parisa,” he snapped, striding over to her like she was late for an engagement they’d previously discussed. “I need something from the archives.”
In his head was something; something uncertain. “What is it?”
“He knows.” Dalton jutted his chin toward Callum. “Ask him. I know it’s in there,” he shouted in the direction of the archives. “I know you have it!”
“Dalton.” It seemed a waste of their time to criticize the energy in the room. “What do you need from the archives?”
“She killed him, she fucking killed him. I can’t do this without him, it can’t be done—”
Dalton’s thoughts were their usual mass of fractures and Parisa felt Callum stiffen beside her, looking at the mess. Looking at, feeling, sensing, whatever Callum did, surely it was just as difficult to interpret—Parisa would have done it herself, something to fix for posterity’s sake, but as usual, she couldn’t make sense of Dalton’s mind. It was too illogical, the seeds of lucidity, the humanity it took a lifespan to create, those were too hard to plant in someone so badly severed. She needed something less precise than neurosurgery, less tangible, less machine.
What Callum could see, what he had done to her once, she understood that it was not a science. Goodness, worthiness, morality, right and wrong, those things were fluid and dynamic, they still took root in poor soil. Could pure evil exist? Maybe, but then what was Parisa in a world of polarities? The meaning of life was either unimportant or unknowable, the why of it all a matter of constant change from day to day. Life itself would always be mutable, entropic. It would always be imperfect. But the one thing it was not was absolute.
Which meant that fixing Dalton did not require a surgeon. It needed an artist. Even if that meant asking an artist who cared nothing for the canvas, the medium, or the art.
What does he want? Parisa asked Callum, but Dalton had rounded on her again.
“You know what the library tracks us for, don’t you? It’s modeling us, predicting us, so that we can be re-created. That’s what the rituals are for. Atlas knows, Atlas can explain—I kept your secrets!” Dalton shouted again, raging against the impassive sentience of the house. “I kept them, and now you owe me! I gave you everything—now give me the physicist back!”
“Dalton—”
Callum pulled Parisa aside, speaking in a low voice to her. “What he wants, I’ve pulled it before. I know what he’s looking for, what it is.”
“And?” She scanned Callum’s hesitation for meaning. She couldn’t parse it, not really. Not that Callum’s thoughts were anywhere near the incomprehensiveness of Dalton’s, but he was running through a file in his head. Statistics or something, like gambling odds.
“And I’m not normally one to comment on the shoulds of any given situation, but this one feels troubling,” Callum said with a look of something Parisa might have called disdain had she not already been aware that his range of facial expressions was limited.
“Oh, so now you grow a conscience,” Parisa muttered as Dalton stormed up to her in a rage, seizing her by the hand.
“I need his magic,” Dalton said. “I don’t need his body.”
“Whose body?” Callum asked, and Parisa saw it in Dalton’s mind.
She saw it lying still.
“No.” She reeled back, temporarily legless. “No, not—” Her stomach turned. “Tell me you didn’t, Dalton—”
“Of course I didn’t. I need him!” He was shouting at her now, and she flinched in spite of herself. She had known too many men like this, and it was always ugly, this place of no return. This anger, the kind that Parisa herself was not allowed to have, and certainly not allowed to show. “I need him,” Dalton snarled, shifting to grip her tightly by the shoulders, “and either I will revive him or I will remake him, and the traveler will simply have t—”
There was a sudden blare of red light from the corner that caught her attention from behind Dalton’s head. It was like a flashback to another crisis, many worlds and lives away. For the second time that Parisa had witnessed, the wards of the house had been breached by something unknown.
“What now?” Callum hissed in her ear as Dalton whipped around without releasing her, registering the presence of the threat only half a beat after she had.
Parisa, torn between the mess she’d helped make of Dalton and the forthcoming necessity of violence, blistered with sudden impatience. “For fuck’s sake, you know what that light means, Callum—”
“There’s someone in the house,” came a ragged voice behind them, startling all three of them into sudden silence.
The doors had banged open, a staggering set of footprints reaching them from the hall. In the same moment, Dalton let out a scream, nails biting into Parisa’s skin from a jolt of something.
Pain. She felt it too, gritting her teeth through the sudden roll of thunder in her mind.
Yes, there was someone—many someones—in the house, but not via the physical grounds. It was the telepathic wards that had been breached. Her wards.
And unless she was very much mistaken, they had broken into their secrets the same way she once had—via Dalton Ellery’s subconscious.
“What is that?” Callum had turned toward the reading room door as if the threat to them were corporeal. As if the problem were the young man stumbling half-dead into the reading room behind them.
Parisa recognized him immediately, even through the muddiness of her vision, the abstractness of the telepathic pain. It was like someone slowly flaying her thoughts, peeling away her lucidity like layers of skin, gradually traversing the cerebral down to the animal, the primordial; down to the spark in her mind that told her to live. Which yes, she did possess, thank you very much to Callum. It was there at the core of her, the reflex to continue without actually knowing how or why. Because that was survival, one step in front of the other—leave the burning building, struggle to the surface, take the hard-fought breath. It was difficult and it was worthy. At the core of her, she knew that, knew it above all else. That pain was not a symptom of existence, not a condition, but a fundamental particle, an unavoidable component of the design. Without it there could be no love, which Parisa avoided not because it was meaningless, but because the cost was too high. She understood it one way and one way alone: that to love was to feel another’s pain as if it were your own.
Dalton collapsed against her with a roar clenched between his teeth, spittle flying as he went down. She stumbled blindly, nearly taken down with him, when someone reached her side, fumbling to prop her up by the arm. Callum was still there, then, still incorrectly assessing the wrong threat, and Parisa leaned against him with one hand, the other pressed to her temple. The pain was increasingly searing, like staring too long into the sun.
“What’s going on?” Callum’s voice grew faint, and ever fainter. The louder the pain in Parisa’s head, the farther away Callum sounded, like he was calling to her through sinking miles of ocean depths. She closed her eyes, the pressure of his hand beneath her elbow slowly falling away, the echo of his voice increasingly distant.
When she opened her eyes, the reading room was gone. In its place was the wreckage of a castle, piles of broken stone beyond miles of brushfire cypress. She pivoted swiftly, looking for Callum, or Dalton.
“Your telepathic wards have been breached,” came a low voice beside her.
She turned to find Gideon Drake standing there. Waiting. She wondered if she should have been surprised. He handed something to her, something heavy. She closed her fingers around the familiar weight.
“Telepath,” Gideon greeted her tonelessly.
Parisa lifted the sword in her hand. The one she’d nearly killed him with.
Fine, so she wouldn’t be dying today. Not this way.
“Dreamer,” she replied.