He couldn’t believe he’d never noticed that inside the office of Atlas Blakely, Caretaker of the Alexandrian Society’s archives of lost knowledge for which thousands of people had been willing to kill, there was a motherfucking landline. But here it was, ringing; a fact so punishingly absurd it nearly functioned as an epiphany. Remember when you thought you were capable of greatness? Remember when you agreed to open a portal to another world at the behest of someone who did little more than correctly observe that you were both kind of sad and pathetic for grown adult men? Wasn’t that silly of you, bless your little heart. Take a seat, please, have a biscuit.
Tristan raised the phone to his ear with a sense of entitlement he tried very hard (somewhat hard) to repress. “Hello?”
“Dr. Blakely,” replied the crisp masculine voice on the other line, “it’s Ford with Human Resources. Sorry to bother you but you’ve not yet replied to our most recent correspondence. Are you aware th—”
Tristan cut in, prickly with something. Maybe the idea of taking a call with Human Resources. Maybe the idea of a call. It had been a year, two years without much contact with the outside world, and the people he did speak to had all been largely willing to kill him. “Not Dr. Blakely.”
(Also, doctor? Since fucking when? Unless they were all doctors now and nobody had bothered to tell him, which was entirely possible.)
Tristan cleared his throat and explained, “This is Tristan Caine, the new researcher.”
There was a long pause. “Am I to understand Mr. Ellery is no longer in Dr. Blakely’s employ?”
“No, Mr. Ellery is—” Mysteriously absconded. “He’s fulfilled his obligation to the archives.”
“Ah.” A brief sound of irritation, to which Tristan could easily relate. “We’ll have to note that in the file. We ought to have been informed immediately, but I suppose the Caretaker has much on his mind.” Sarcasm! How refreshing that unlike Tristan, not everyone was so caught up in the cerebral, like whether they’d made a terrible error succumbing to the latest iteration of man’s search for meaning. “Have you been given the appropriate paperwork, then?”
“Sorry, did you say this was Human Resources?” asked Tristan foggily. He remembered this, vaguely—the bureaucracy of employment forms and the general logistics of taxation—as if from a distant dream, or a former life. He hadn’t yet considered that the Society might have a department that handled employment contracts, or that he himself was technically an employee.
“Yes,” said Ford, as if he wished Tristan would do them both a favor and expire on the spot. (Also relatable.) “Is Dr. Blakely there?”
“Not at the moment,” obviously. “Can I—” Tristan gritted his teeth at the indignity. “Take a message?”
Hopefully this was not what Dalton had done for Atlas Blakely on a daily basis, though Tristan supposed he ought to have asked in advance before mysteriously agreeing to take on the role of researcher for a man who tended not to leave a note.
“It’s confidential.” On the other end, Ford sounded bothered and then distracted. “You’re sure he’s not available?”
“Not at the moment. I’m unsure when exactly he’ll be back.” He was a mercurial thing, their Caretaker, which Tristan had known and long been suspicious of. But as far as human qualities went, he’d encountered far worse.
From his pocket, Tristan’s mobile phone buzzed. He slipped it into the palm of his hand and glanced at the message, gritting his teeth. Then he shoved it back into his trouser pocket. “You may as well just tell me. I’m going to find out whatever it is anyway.”
There was a brief moment as the HR representative warred Britishly with protocol. “There is a new hire,” Ford conceded. Victory, Tristan’s pulse glumly triumphed. “An archivist.”
“Archivist? Here? In the…” (internal sigh at the redundancy) “… archives?”
“He will have about as much access to the archives themselves as any uninitiated member, Mr.—Apologies, what did you say your name was?”
“Caine. Tristan Caine. So he’s not initiated?”
“I’ll leave this for you to discuss with Dr. Blakely. Please contact the offices if he has any further questions.”
“But—”
“Have a lovely evening, Mr. Caine.” And then, like a disapproving purse of the lips, Ford with Human Resources was gone.
Tristan set down the phone, frowning, as the sound of lightly padding footsteps materialized from the doorway of Atlas’s office.
“Who was it?”
Tristan turned to find Libby standing there, a mug of tea in her hands, thick woolen socks bunched at the ankles of her bare legs. She wore his jumper, a pair of his boxers. Tristan couldn’t recall what had been done with her belongings or whether they still remained in her room. She hadn’t been in there yet, didn’t seem to want to. She seemed to feel she’d locked a prior version of herself inside it, perhaps didn’t want to let it out.
“Human Resources,” Tristan said, and she rolled her eyes.
“Very funny. Who was it actually?”
“I’m not joking, it was actually Human Resources. Apparently the Alexandrian Society is not exempt from the mundanities of a typical corporation.” He turned to lean against Atlas’s desk, waiting to see if she’d choose to venture any closer. She hadn’t yet. There was a skittishness to her, or maybe something darker. He had the feeling that whatever it was, she didn’t want him to guess.
“God, figures.” She exhaled sharply, annoyed. A new texture for her. She carried around an agitation Tristan attributed most closely to himself. “Did you tell them about Atlas?”
“I didn’t think you’d want me to.”
She idled in the doorway a bit longer before taking a step toward him, her eyes flicking down to the empty space on the floor and back up. “Do you know where the others are?”
“I only know where they went when they left here yesterday.” Tristan’s phone felt heavy in his pocket. “If they’re smart, they’ll have disappeared from there by now.”
“What about Dalton?”
“I’m guessing he went with Parisa.”
Libby’s attention shot up from the floor. “Have you told her I’m back?”
He could. Technically any of them could speak to any of the others at any time, including Reina, who had been reluctant to be included but hadn’t exempted herself from being contacted. Tristan hadn’t even known she owned a phone until she silently inputted her number.
It had been Nico, unsurprisingly, who’d insisted they create a fail-safe among the five of them. “We already know we’re being hunted, so if we’re also being tracked, we’ll need a safer method to communicate,” Nico had explained before expounding at length about the technomancy rabbit hole he’d spiraled down the previous night at 2:00 A.M. “Did you know that nearly all communications now take place across the same medeian signal?” (Parisa had chimed in then, ostensibly to needle Reina, who had mentally remarked that electromagnetic energy was Technomancy 101.) “Some medeian channels of communication are government owned, which is obviously problematic, and most of the privatized ones are owned by Wessex Corp or the Novas,” Nico remarked with a glance at Callum, who toasted him with a breadstick, “so, you know. For obvious reasons I’ve set up our own.”
Still, the possibility of communication with a person did not a willingness make. “Parisa and I are … not exactly on speaking terms.” Tristan massaged the back of his neck, wondering how to explain the circumstances of their rift to Libby, or whether it was worth explaining something about how two people with little more than sex in common inevitably tended to drift apart. “Things changed a lot while you were gone.”
Something dimmed in Libby’s eyes at that.
“Yeah,” she said, and turned away, retreating silently into the hallway as if she’d suddenly remembered she didn’t want to be there at all.
Tristan stared after her, wondering if he ought to push the issue. Nico probably would, but Tristan wasn’t Nico. It was one of his favorite things about himself, actually, that he wasn’t Nico, or at least that’s what he told himself most days. At times like these he rather resented the impulse to wonder what Nico would have done.
Tristan slid his mobile phone from his pocket again, glancing at the latest message. Another picture on the screen, this one an oversized doughnut held up against a backdrop of narrow cobbled stone. Tristan scrolled up to the first in this sadistic series of lifestyle microblogging, which he’d received yesterday.
A shock of golden hair stood out against foggy gray sky, a smirk alighting at the corner of an impossibly perfect mouth. There was a sign to the subject’s left that read Gallows Hill in faded bronze, and beside that a blur of a black hoodie, like someone else had been walking by just as the picture was quickly and effortlessly snapped.
So this was what Callum Nova looked like standing in front of Tristan’s father’s pub.
Tristan stared hard at the selfie—of all things, a fucking selfie—with his thumb hovering over the option to reply. He sat there in silence, contemplating the best course of action. Delete and forget, never forgive. Definitely a solid choice. All his plausible replies would pale in comparison, though he had several at the ready.
So that’s what your nose looks like to everyone else? Interesting.
Congratulations, you’re clearly still obsessed with me.
I’m going to open up a world where you were never born and then I’m going to come back to this one and kill you. Lol.
Tristan exhaled sharply and stowed the phone back in his pocket before walking quickly out of the office. He shut the door carefully behind him and then took off up the stairs, hastening his pace as he went.
“Rhodes?”
As predicted he found the door ajar to his bedroom, a glimpse of Libby visible inside from where Tristan lingered on the threshold. It wasn’t his old bedroom in the west wing, which wasn’t where he lived anymore. That would be filled in eight years’ time by the next round of potential Society initiates; the people who would inevitably stand where Tristan had stood and be told, as Tristan had been told, how very remarkable they were.
This was Dalton’s old room, in the east wing of the house. It was a bit larger, with a drawing room that was mostly empty, which had once—or so Atlas told him—been filled with books, piles and piles of a decade’s worth of research. It looked oddly skeletal now, and Tristan paused to consider the vacancy.
“I didn’t actually expect him to stay,” Atlas had said to Tristan the day before. “But certainly, if the books are gone, then so is Dalton.”
There had been something in Atlas’s voice. Exhaustion, maybe. He gave the impression of being many things, disappointed or possibly sad—after all, he had coexisted with Dalton in this house for over a decade—but Tristan had the feeling Atlas was not as conflicted as he pretended to be. Sometimes pain was easy, uncomplicated. Betrayal sucked. Time to eat pudding and dissolve into defeat, into self-serving melancholy. Surely even the great Atlas Blakely knew what it felt like to lose.
“I thought you needed him,” Tristan had said, giving Atlas a sidelong glance. He wasn’t used to it, the idea of trusting Atlas Blakely. He wasn’t sure if he ever really could, though this—sympathy or whatever it was—certainly felt like it. If it wasn’t trust, then it was certainly allyship of some critical and unavoidable kind.
He had put his fate in Atlas’s hands. It was his duty not to let Atlas drop it.
Atlas seemed to know as much. “I do need him, yes. But I have his research, which is some of what I need,” he clarified wearily. “Enough to know the answer to my question is yes, and thus perhaps Dalton will return, if my suspicions about his nature prove correct. I suppose it’s optimistic of me, but I’ve yet to be wrong about him so far.”
“You don’t think Parisa might have her own intentions for Dalton’s research?” It was difficult for Tristan to believe she’d ridden off into the sunset with Dalton for anything shy of global domination. She was not, as she’d made clear to Tristan many times, any sort of a romantic. If Parisa Kamali had an endgame in mind, it wasn’t for Dalton the man. Perhaps Dalton the academic offered something more her style.
“I suppose I couldn’t begrudge her the chance,” said Atlas wryly. “She’s far cleverer than I am, though unfortunately I may still know a thing or two more.”
“Will you go after her?” Tristan asked.
The look Atlas gave Tristan then was remarkable for its hollowness. “I’m sorry,” Atlas demurred, toying with something unspoken. Perhaps the thing they both knew would be Parisa’s betrayal in the end. “If you take nothing else away from your time here, Tristan, let it be that. I never wanted it to come to this, with all of you torn apart. I did everything in my power to prevent it.”
“What else did you expect to happen?” asked Tristan seriously. “Parisa is what she is. There’s no changing that. And Callum is—” He broke off, considering that sentence better left unfinished. “I suppose it’s only Reina who’s been legitimately unpredictable, for all that predictability is worth.”
To that Atlas inclined his head; posh affectation in lieu of a bitterer laugh. “I suppose I’d hoped that all of this could prove useful to you, one day. All the research, the discussions, the potency of your potential, living alongside the knowledge in these walls. The magic I believed each of you to be capable of creating. I thought it would be meaningful, the things you could accomplish among the six of you. That it might … change things, in the end.” Atlas shook his head. “It’s my fault,” he finished with a quiet gravity. “It was all a terrible mistake.”
“Which part?” Tristan had been joking when he said it, but Atlas clearly wasn’t. It took a moment, several moments, for his gaze to settle with any clarity on Tristan’s.
“I’m not sure,” Atlas said. He didn’t seem immediately self-pitying, though it was hard to rule it out. “I keep replaying everything, over and over. I said yes to a lot of things I shouldn’t have. But then again, when could I have stopped?”
Tristan hadn’t known what to say, and Atlas had laughed, guessing as much. “Don’t burden yourself with my errors, Tristan. It’s my mistake, but it’s one I have every intention to fix.” He opened his mouth, then stopped, shaking his head as if to casually dismiss his better judgment.
Then Atlas had given Tristan an empty, distracted smile and left the room to return to his office, departing as if there was nothing more to be said.
But there should have been more. Much more, in the form of everything that came after, in the time between Atlas being there and leaving, in the difference between Atlas being honest and being gone. Because Tristan would walk into Atlas’s office only hours, minutes later to find that everything was different now, a sudden tilting of the axis of his world. But Tristan shook away the memory and stepped farther into the room to glance expectantly at Libby, who was still sitting on his bed with her back to him.
She stared into nothing for a few more seconds without looking at him.
“I think I killed people,” she remarked in a toneless voice. “Maybe not that day. Maybe not in the blast. But people died, or they’re dying now, or they will die. And at least some of that is because of me.”
The blast that had taken her home, she meant. The pure fusion weapon, the nuclear explosion that had opened a wormhole through time, which only Libby Rhodes could have created on her own. The one that Wessex Corporation had been trying to re-create since 1990, the very year that an abducted Elizabeth Rhodes had found herself trapped in, which was information that Tristan—thanks to Parisa, and apparently to Reina—had framed specifically for purposes of convincing Libby Rhodes to do the one thing a former version of her would never have done. The blast that Tristan knew had led to a generation or more of medical ailments, radiation in the soil, genetic anomalies, shortened lifespans and higher mortality in a region where privatized healthcare meant that money alone decided who received the right to live. People died, and it was because of her, because of something that Tristan had told her. But the fallout, the possibility of death—that was only an idea. A concept without any proof.
The freckles by her eyes. The sound of her voice. They were real. They had been so real to Tristan even then that he had thought surely, whatever decision she made, it would be the right one. Rightness, goodness, it had a certain unambiguous quality to it.
Or at least it had once.
“Do you think I was a killer even before I walked into that office?” Libby asked in a low voice.
Tristan leaned against his door frame and pondered the possibility of comforting her. Unfortunately, neither of them were quite stupid enough for that kind of exercise. He wished he could have been just a little bit more ignorant, a touch more blithely daft. Maybe as stupid as he’d been the month or so ago when he’d first found her, before he’d reached through time to see her. Maybe the message he’d relayed to her should have been something else.
“Do you blame me?” Tristan asked instead.
She glanced at him and away so quickly it was near dismissal, as if he’d done the unthinkable just by making it even remotely about him. “I was the one who gave you a reason to do it,” he explained, preemptively defensive. “If I hadn’t put it to you in those terms, as a foregone conclusion—”
Libby lifted a hand to scratch the back of her neck, then finally turned to face him. “I would have done it either way. Eventually I would have run out of alternatives.” She shook her head. “You just gave me the option of ignoring the consequences.”
“I wanted you back,” Tristan reminded her simply, striding forward to sit beside her on the bed. At first she froze, then shifted, gradually making room for him beside her. “And I didn’t lie to you,” he said quietly. More quietly.
He watched the motion of her throat as she swallowed and parted her lips. He wondered what it would be—whether it would be an apology next, or some confession of guilt. Whether she’d be sorry or sad, or if possibly, selfishly, the thing on her tongue was something that matched the flame still burning in his chest.
She’d come to him, after all. He’d been the one to murmur to her It’s all right, Rhodes, you’re safe now. It’s all right now, Rhodes, you’re home.
He’d also gotten rid of the body for her.
Things like that were easy now, thanks to Nico de Varona. Thanks to the last year of testing and stretching Tristan’s every instinct, everything and everyone that had ever breathed or laughed or lied or betrayed was nothing now but meaningless quanta, some amalgam of particulate motion at Tristan’s liberty to move. And after Libby had gone, rushing out to find whatever was out there for her to find, she’d come back here—to him. She had shown up that morning in the doorway of Tristan’s bedroom where he’d lain awake, alone, and he’d made no demands of her, offered no promises. Merely poured her a cup of tea. Told her to have a nap, a shower. Whatever grime she had on her was now his by association, by the closeness for which he had given his total and unambiguous consent.
It should have been easy. Straightforward. Shouldn’t it? He had missed her and now she was here. What in life had ever been more simple? Either his mistake was in failing to push her as Nico would have pushed her or his mistake was much, much earlier, but that was no longer an option. Atlas was right: Tristan, too, had made a terrible mistake, but one that was his now to own, to fix, or to live with. Conflict, hesitation, it was too late for the noncommittal cynicism that was Tristan Caine’s personal brand. The miserly impulse to be right when others were wrong was no longer his isolated privilege. Tristan had handed her the instruction manual, written her the ending, lit the match, and walked away. For all that he’d joined his future with Atlas, his faith would have to be equally Libby’s. Either way, doubt was no longer something Tristan had the luxury to feel.
He leaned closer, tucking Libby’s hair behind her ear and watching the heat rise in her cheeks. An old tell. He stroked the bone of her jaw and she turned her head so her lips touched the tips of his fingers.
He felt the pulse of the room like the tick of a clock, counting down to something coming. Something looming. He brushed her cheek and she caught his hand, swift with sudden certainty. Their eyes met and he knew, he understood what was happening between them, what she wanted.
She didn’t need to ask.
This time, dragging time to a halt was easy, like naming where in his chest his lungs were situated, where was the steady thrum of his heart. She couldn’t see it, the way the room’s new form took shape—she couldn’t see the way he changed it, or they did, the energy between them now the only true reality left. They were like stars in the endless sky, like grains of distant sand, burning galaxies in some eternal funhouse mirror. No bigger than a glint of shine from the corner of his eye—and still, somehow, the only thing with meaning.
Still, somehow, the only thing.
She couldn’t see it; everything he could see. The gleam of possibility like the auroras he’d once found her beneath. She could feel it, the way time dissolved under their tongues like spun sugar, like their shared lies of omission—but to her, the power itself was still unfathomable. Magic imaginable only as a sensation, or possibly a dream.
Maybe that was why he didn’t know how to tell her. To convince her, Cassandra witnessing the fall of Troy, that somehow Atlas was right—that together they still meant something. That the magic they made was meaningful, and what they hadn’t yet done still mattered. It was a fundamental truth that just by joining the Society—just by entering this house—they had all silently, collectively confessed.
Ends, beginnings, here it was all insubstantial nothingness; pointless, nonexistent pieces of an eternal answer, of eternalism itself. What was time without a place to start, a place to finish? It was nothing. Or it was everything, which was also nothing. It was a question that only Tristan could ever answer. It was a question that Tristan could now not help but ask.
Holding them there was like holding a pose, the flow of a sun salutation. Eventually time raced again; it slowed. It existed again, calling him back to the world, to the version of reality created by the sound of her breathing, in and out and impossible—impossible to fight. Not with the closeness of her. The way she had nearly been taken from him, but not yet, not really. Not quite.
“Do you worry much about your soul, Caine?” Libby’s voice was heady with something. She was staring below her palms at the heart banging in his chest like she could see it. Like she knew the way it felt, could trace its motions.
The moment went on too long. He was supposed to say something, do something, but what might have been intended as a joke struck him square in the chest. “Not nearly as much as I should.”
He tasted it again, the old tannins of craving, the way it left his mouth dry. He cradled her head in his hands, drawing her chin up to ghost a breath along the column of her throat. She let out a quiet sigh, lips softening around the shape of something he knew could be his name.
Tristan. Her stagnant eyes. Her ragged breaths. The stillness of the scene he’d encountered in Atlas Blakely’s office, the conspicuous lack of motion from the body on the floor. The man he’d once known. The explanation he hadn’t requested. The things he’d so dutifully ignored because she hadn’t been ready, not then, but she’d have to tell someone eventually. She’d have to tell someone, and it would have to be him. Was she a killer even before she walked in the room?
Tristan, help me, please.
Below his lips he felt her hesitation, the tremors of her need warring with the presence of her fears. You can trust me, he channeled into his touch, and he could feel her softening. He could feel the capitulation, a little more with every breath. I was yours then. I’m yours now.
You can trust me.
She turned her head, brushing his mouth with hers. “Tristan,” she said to the tension between them. He felt the possibilities crackling like static, the dissonance of a minor chord.
“Rhodes,” he said in a rasp, “I need you to tell me why you came back to me.”
He didn’t bother asking why she ran. He understood that; had no need for clarity. There had been blood on her hands, now on his; the wounds were too fresh, too raw. They couldn’t have spent last night together. There would have been too much guilt to share the bed.
But now—
She swallowed, her eyes on his lips. “You know why.”
The words were sweet, gentle. Flimsy.
Inadequate. “Tell me.”
“Tristan.” A sigh. “I want…”
“I know what you want. That’s not what I asked.” But it was exquisite, the torment living between them. This thing they’d pointlessly resisted, that they’d both so long and desperately denied.
“Rhodes,” he whispered, so close he could taste her, temptation burning idly on his tongue. “Just say it.”
“I wanted you,” she murmured.
Excruciating, the waiting. “Because?”
“Because you know me. Because you see me.” The words were rough, hard-won, the gasp that followed heavy with significance, with promises unfulfilled. “And because I…”
He tugged her chin up, fingers coiling tightly in her hair. “Yes?”
Her eyes searched his, hazy with something. “Because—” She broke off, spellbound, lost. “Fuck, Tristan, I—”
He heard it then, the unspoken admission. Tasted it, impossibly, somewhere on his tongue. Destabilizing, dizzying. Whatever was in his chest, it came alive, undone; the whole of it was swift and bruising. If either of them chose to bend, he knew it would be rapture. If either of them breathed, it would be agony, elation itself.
Only when the moment was strung tight like a bow, both of them aching, did Tristan finally give in.
Breathlessly, he touched her face. “Rhodes—”
He saw her again, alight this time with rage, particulates of ash afloat in the smoldering air to crown her. The sheen of her so bright, gone dark.
Atlas’s face, in a blur. His unspoken parting, the weight of his sudden absence.
It’s my mistake to fix—
“Rhodes—”
Tell me. Trust me.
The question Tristan couldn’t yet ask.
What really happened in that room yesterday?
Her kiss, her touch. Molten, metamorphic. Perilous and waiting. He counted the breaths between them; the pulse of a waiting clock.
Tick—
Tick—
Tick—
“Tristan.” Not a whisper. Not this time. Impossible to say what might come next. “Tristan, I—”
“OI,” sounded abruptly from downstairs, “asshole! Daddy’s home,” was the unwelcome proclamation, followed absurdly by, “You’re welcome.”
The closeness, if it had ever existed, was gone. Dead. Erupted. Libby had shut down again, far enough away that no bend of time or space could reach her, and Tristan, swearing under his breath, pulled sharply out of reach. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Was that actually—?”
“Yes.” Libby folded her arms tightly over her chest, the moment’s plausibility lost. “Sounds like Varona’s here.”