The scream that had torn her attention briefly away from Tristan as he was leaving was enough to awaken her to urgency again.
So Tristan wanted to go. So what? She had known from the beginning that he wasn’t capable of her brand of loyalty, her kind of moral conviction. For a moment she hated him more than she had ever hated anyone, with the glaring exception of herself. It was a long and serious enough moment that she had no trouble letting him leave, especially when she saw his face. The nothingness he wore, the look of relief at passing the buck to someone else. His obligation to her was at an end—and maybe that was actually reassuring, Libby realized, because up until then, everything between them had been a consequence of guilt. If he washed his hands of her then good, she no longer owed him the pretense of apology.
She wasn’t sorry she killed Ezra. Wasn’t sorry she killed Atlas. Wasn’t sorry she killed Nico, either, because everything else she felt about that was so far beyond remorse it could not be calibrated. Could not be measured.
She had killed another piece of her heart, the piece containing everything Nico de Varona had meant to her—every moment of incapacitating inadequacy, every glimpse of impossible, unavoidable admiration, every ounce that every universe contained of something that had to be, could only ever have been love—and the complexity of it, the impossibility of it, it dwarfed whatever longing she currently felt for Tristan. She had been a smaller person when she’d chosen him, someone capable of smaller feelings, so when he turned away from her for the last time, she let him go without a word. She followed the scream instead, because that was who she was. She was the kind of person who had done everything in her power to protect the life she’d chosen, and unlike Tristan Caine, that included the contents of this house. Whatever else she had done to endanger it.
She whirled and took off toward the reading room, following the sounds of struggle. The inarguable presence of a threat, coming from the archives. She half imagined it might have been Nico—just kidding, Rhodes, as if I’d let something as inconsequential as my death stop me from making your life immeasurably worse!—but she knew who it was when she caught a glimpse of him from behind. The judgment she’d been both waiting for and dreading.
“Callum,” Libby realized tightly, entering the room to see Dalton on the floor, foaming at the mouth, with Parisa seizing, unconscious, beside him. Gideon had reached out a hand for Parisa’s shoulder before falling into the gulf between her and an overturned table, a placid look on his face. As if he were merely asleep.
“Oh, fucking great,” Callum said when he clocked Libby’s presence in the doorway, an expression of disgust contorting his features. “Just what the doctor ordered. Haven’t you made enough of a mess yet, Rhodes?”
Yes, she thought. I fucked it all up. You were always right about me, Callum. I’m not capable of power. I’m too weak to bear it gracefully. I exist in this world purely to break everything good I ever touch.
But instead she took a step. Another step. Another, faster and faster, and watched with a sickening pleasure as the look on his face transformed, blanching at the delayed recognition of an oncoming missile, an incoming threat. By the time she reached him he was too surprised to move, and the impact of her fist meeting the bone of his cheek was blissfully shattering. Like hitting the center target with an arrow on her first try.
He went down hard, with almost no resistance. She couldn’t tell right away if it had been a normal punch in the face or if she had used any magic. Something had come loose from Callum’s hands—something metal that crashed to the floor, landing at her feet.
She looked down at the shape of it and wanted to scream with laughter, to shake with tearless sobs. A gun—a fucking gun. Like Chekhov descending from the ceiling. How ridiculous that Atlas had once sat within these walls reading The Tempest when it had been Hamlet all along! Nothing but vengeance to haunt her, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. A tale told by an idiot, with no reason to stop now that she’d already come this far.
Libby bent down and picked up the gun, the little pistol, weighing it in her hands. Be careful with strong emotions, Nico had warned her once, but she no longer worried about Callum’s ability to control her. She no longer worried about Callum at all.
The gun was cold in her hands. Lifeless. Callum was sitting up, one hand pressed to his face, a pair of chromatic sunglasses thrown from the gaping of his now-bloodied shirt. She’d broken his nose, probably cracked his skull. His face was growing more inflamed by the minute, warping his illusion spells so that she could see him, parts of him, at last. She half expected to find cobwebs living beneath false cheekbones, dishwater eyes encased in bloodshot rims. She thought about the fact that she was assigning him, mentally, her own hair color, her own eyes, her own patent unremarkability, and finding they had suited him all along. As if somewhere, she’d quietly known her same inadequacies lived in him.
She considered, again, the same thing that she had once considered within these very walls, which was that some specialties should not exist. Some people should not exist. She had already raised the gun in her hand before she knew what she was doing, before she had fully decided what she wanted to do next. Her pulse rushed in her ears. Parisa was convulsing off the floor. Dalton’s eyelids were fluttering. Gideon looked as if he would never wake again.
She had started this two years ago and she would finish it.
“Go ahead,” croaked Callum with a thin smile, and Libby felt a quick trigger-pull of hesitation from somewhere in her chest.
“You’re influencing me.”
“Why? You want me dead all on your own. You don’t need my help with that.” He was smiling at her now, garishly. His face had never been beautiful to her, but now it was an almost sympathetic ugliness, like staring at her own reflection and clocking all the blemishes that everyone else could surely see. “Rhodes, honestly, I respect you as much as I hate you right now, and that’s just a fact.”
“I don’t need your respect.” She had never needed it, never wanted it. Callum was the physical embodiment of everything wrong with the world. Apathy, falseness, privilege—for fuck’s sake, he was the literal product of colonialism and genocide. The equivalent of a bomb.
She waited for him to argue or lure her, persuade her, to do that slippery thing Callum did and had always done, but he only laughed again, laid his head back. Reached for his sunglasses. Closed his eyes. “Rhodes,” he said, “you realize I’ve always known your emotions, don’t you? You’ve always been dangerous.”
“Don’t lie to me right now,” she scoffed, finger lightly testing the weight of the trigger. “You’ve always thought I was useless—”
“Of course. Because danger and power aren’t the same thing.” He cracked one eye to look at her, and already his face was ballooning up from the impact of her fist, disfiguring him entirely. “You have always been capable of destruction. You have always been capable of horrifying things. Forgive me for not considering that alone to be impressive.” He closed his eyes again, folding his hands over his chest like fucking Count Dracula holding a pair of aviators. “Killing me will be the least of it, as long as you realize it will also be of completely no help.”
Libby begged to differ. She felt that the absence of Callum Nova would be of significant and noteworthy help. For one thing, it would mean no longer seeing his too-perfect face in all her moments of insignificance. No longer imagining his smirk from the periphery of her helplessness. She would be able to live her life knowing that he had built their relationship on the falsity of his belief that he was superior to her, that he was stronger, when in actuality he would crumble in the palm of her hand like nothing. Like the immateriality of an illusion. The inconsequence of a single grain of sand.
But he did not look beautiful now. This house, this room, it no longer felt sacred. She remembered the red light in the corner, the violation of everything she’d fought so hard to protect. The things she had allowed to give her meaning. The person she had allowed so many times to make her feel small.
How easily a puncture gave way to fatality. The moment she saw it, she couldn’t unsee it. Callum’s death would change nothing. Atlas’s death, arguably bigger, grander in the scheme of Libby’s design, had also changed nothing. Nico—
She felt overcome by a wave of her own triviality. By the childlike desperation that had taken residency in her chest since it had followed her home from her sister’s hospital room, half a lifetime ago. She lowered the gun, then let it fall from her hand and drop to the floor with a hollow thud.
Callum’s face was unrecognizable. Blood had stained the crevices of his lips, beginning to dry in patches beneath his nose. If he tried to smirk at her now it would hurt him, and she took only that. A small selfish pleasure to carry out the door with her as she turned and fled.
The leaves on the trees were almost gone now. The flowers had long since dropped their petals and drifted away. A season of rot was approaching, and with it the unavoidable sense that life would go on unhindered. The world would not be destroyed, and it would not change. Not for Libby. She could power the stars, unmake universes, leave a trail of destruction in her wake—and still, she would be nothing more than a speck in the universe. A single grain of sand.
She didn’t know where she was going until she arrived there, numbly passing through the transport lifts, away from the oyster bar, through the turnstile, across the street, past the lobby and beyond a set of unmarked doors. One more lie, this time to an orderly, to finally bring herself to tell the truth.
The woman in the hospital bed turned her head at Libby’s entry. Blinked. Stared blankly for a moment. Then turned away.
“Took you long enough,” said the woman Belen Jiménez had become.