TRISTAN

For a full year, Tristan had had his reflexes tested so often he implicitly understood how to recognize when a threat had entered the room. The moment the door to his father’s office had flown open, his vision began its process of kaleidoscoping the room, taking on the usual modicum of self-defense at the sound of his father disabling the safety on his pistol. Tristan had been about to disarm the gun, whatever it was and however it worked—a witch had made it, so a medeian could easily unmake it—when something dismantled his own reflex for action instead. A glint of something; the metallic arm on a pair of sunglasses that dazzled him for just a moment overlong.

He knew it was Callum the same way he knew he’d recognize Callum in a dream, whatever his face might look like. The energy in the room was Callum’s, the flowering effervescence, the thing that Callum himself might have called a vibe. They were Callum’s shoulders, Callum’s typically unhurried posture, Callum’s preference for loafers, always dressed like a billionaire on holiday. Which, Tristan supposed, was what Callum was, perpetually, because he would never have nothing, would not have to try, would never even have to work, and that had done something to the way he entered the room. It made it so that Callum’s chin was always lifted, held aloft, even when his face was swollen beyond recognition. Even when his illusion charms malfunctioned, and now anyone could see what Tristan could always see: that the blue encased in bloodshot rivulets was closer to ice than to ocean. That his hair was always more ash than it was gold.

For Tristan, Callum had not been beautiful for his optics. Actually, for Tristan, Callum had never technically been beautiful at all. He was attractive—even without the falsity of his enhancements, the elevation of his natural features, which were not necessarily bad to start—but beauty was something for Parisa to wield as a weapon, something Tristan attributed to the struggle of being near Libby. There was a tension inherent in Tristan’s ideation of beauty and Callum had never been it. For Tristan, Callum wasn’t beautiful. He was sleek and refined. Untroubled and cool. He was also tortured in a way that made Tristan’s delusion seem palatable. Looking at Callum was like looking at a version of himself that he could punish. That was being punished, actively, and what seemed to be by choice.

Callum wasn’t effortless. That was the crux of it. Callum tried so much and so hard that Tristan could look at him and relax for half a second, as if in recognizing his own reflection he could find a way to be less cruel to what he saw. It hadn’t started that way, obviously. At first it was just a normal attraction, like being pulled into the orbit of something unimaginably fierce and overwhelmingly vast, but Callum had made the mistake of letting Tristan know him. Letting Tristan see him. Tristan had always understood it, the crime he’d committed, the severity of his betrayal, which was ridiculous, because Callum was not even close to a good person and therefore Tristan’s morality should have been intact. But he knew, in some undeniable part of whatever soul still remained, that what he’d done to Callum was the worst thing he could have done to anyone. It might have been what Callum deserved, but it was still indefensible by Tristan.

And yet here Callum was once again.

Because time had slowed for Tristan in that moment, he was able to see things in Callum’s face that Callum could not have possibly seen in his. Well, more accurately, because Tristan was Tristan, he was able to see things nobody else could see, least of all his own fucking father, who’d picked him up like a stray dog off the side of the road and hauled him back home. Not exactly kicking and screaming, because if Tristan was being honest, he’d admit he hadn’t tried that hard to get away. He wanted his father to see him. He longed for his father to try him, to just fucking have at it, so they could both put down the pretense of paternalism and reckon with the fact that one of them was a man now and the other had never been one at all. But then Callum walked into the office and Tristan, who could see components, saw everything in sequence, though he would intuit it all at once.

Callum was never going to kill him. Callum had recently been injured and hadn’t fought back. Callum was here because he thought Tristan was in trouble, because this was a game for him like everything was a game, except for when it came to the reality of Tristan’s life. Callum was bleeding. Callum’s shirt was stained and he’d just come from wherever Parisa was because he smelled like her, like jasmine perfume and the stain of old textbooks, and they must have just missed each other. Callum was here because he was afraid that Tristan was gone.

Callum’s gaze found his immediately, a white flag of relief erected in what little whites of his eyes Tristan could see. Callum looked, frankly put, like he’d been recently run over and then spat back out again, and apparently Callum, the vainest man Tristan had ever known, did not even seem to care. Streaks of Callum’s perspiration flecked the front of his shirt, pools of it below his arms. Callum was looking at Tristan like he had witnessed a miracle somewhere in the space between opening the office door and meeting Tristan’s eyes.

In the moment that Tristan should have been disarming his father’s pistol, he was instead realizing something he had seen before but never adequately noticed. Hard to say exactly what it was, since this was Tristan’s particularly inexplicable talent, but he observed for the first time that Callum’s eyes went to all the places Tristan’s mind no longer allowed him to see. The burn on his knuckle. The scar on his chest. The one on his brow. Tristan’s components. The love he had been denied. The expression he’d grown into that had always been his father’s. The fate he’d shrugged on like genetics itself. The muscle that had been defined by running, escaping, fleeing as far as he could, leaving behind what little home he’d ever had only to find himself back here, borne up on an inescapable tide.

What had Tristan wanted, what had he needed, what had he chosen? He saw it all when his father pulled the trigger, the realization of every mistake he’d ever made. He was supposed to have seen everything—he was supposed to have seen, but he was the only one who saw nothing at all. He had wanted Libby’s conception of goodness because it felt righteous—her moral rigidity a gift. He had wanted Parisa’s disdain because it felt untrickable, intellectual—her depression more tolerable than his. Eden, that wasn’t worth thinking about, because that was a mad scramble for survival, the choice made by a man with his back to the wall—something Atlas had known. The choice Atlas had saved him from. The choice that became several choices, one of which was Callum Nova after all.

Which wasn’t to say it was wholly romantic, this degree of cosmic irony. Just because it looked star-crossed didn’t mean there were stars in Tristan’s eyes. He hadn’t wanted Callum’s apathy, his selfishness, because it was Tristan’s in its entirety, it was the inside of Tristan’s rot: that amount of condescension, that cynicism, the foundation of shared trauma that luxuriated in its own suffering was incapable of happiness. He knew it. He had always known it. But he did not see until the end that of the two of them, only Callum had actually been brave or stupid enough to try. If Tristan had wanted to be seen, fine, Callum had seen him and Tristan had seen Callum, and by some definition that was love. A bad love. A corruptible love. Poets wouldn’t write about it. But that didn’t undo what had already been done.

It was forceful and inelegant, Callum’s neck snapping his head backward before he hit the floor with a crumpled thud, the sunglasses falling from his hand to land somewhere beneath his unmoving fingers. Bile rose in Tristan’s throat for the second time that day as time rushed back to its usual pace, a blitz of vertigo. He felt the loss cleave from him like a past life or a distant future. Like time itself had fallen away.

“There,” said his father, setting the pistol down without so much as a bat of an eye for the life he’d taken. “Wyn said he might come by. Job done. You can thank me later.”

“Thank you?” Tristan echoed with repulsion, managing to withhold a childish scowl at the impassive look on his father’s face. “What about this makes you think I owe you my gratitude?”

“He came to me, didn’t he? Trying to kill you. There, sorted, no more toffs out for your blood.” The pistol on the desk was smoking with magical residue that Tristan read like fumes, coating the fingers of his father’s filthy hands. “Like I said. Nobody threatens a Caine. And a Caine bargains with no one.” Adrian tossed a look of disgust at Callum’s feet. “Now.” He leaned back in his chair, scrutinizing Tristan. “About that Society of yours.”

Tristan said nothing.

“Told you they were no good, your little toff friends. James Wessex,” Adrian scoffed, spitting a mouthful of derision over the side of his desk. “That fuckin’ prick. He’s out for your blood now, and for what? These cocksuckers think they rule the world, Tris, so let them have it. Give him the rope he needs to hang himself with. There’s plenty to go around down here.”

Adrian leaned across the desk, folding his hands beneath him. Tristan tried to avoid looking at the gun he’d set between them.

“You’ve got no angle here, son,” Adrian said. “Pigs’ve got you on a watch list. You try to leave the country they’ll snatch you up at the borders. Try to disappear, they’ll only track you down. Course, I can help you, can’t I,” he said with a glint of triumph in his eye, “only it’ll cost you. That kind of security detail don’t come for free, not even for my son.”

“This is my punishment, then, I take it.” Tristan tried to recall the complexity of their relationship and came up laughably short, finding only the neat simplicity of hatred. “My choices are to work for you or take a bullet on my way out the door?”

“Tris, how many chances you think come along in life?” asked Adrian with an air of wisdom, which was of course something else entirely. A vapor of arrogance to toxify the room. “You may not be a believer in destiny, son, but destiny’s shown her hand and it comes up the same as it did the day you were born. You got my blood. My name. I wrote your life onto this earth with my own fucking hands. You think the world gives a fuck what you deserve? It’ll always see you the way James Wessex sees you. A roach crawling around underfoot. Begging for scraps.”

Adrian locked eyes with Tristan. “That smarmy prick,” he said with a flick of a glance to Callum, “was just one of many exterminators.”

“He was never going to kill me. I could have taken care of him myself.” A lie.

“Liar.” Adrian’s expression went smug. “I’m your father, Tris. I know you like the back of my hand. That,” he said with a rough gesture to Callum, “is exactly your weakness. You can’t resist it, the touch of a golden hand. Always ready to be subdued, to be stroked into submission. Always game to be someone’s pet.” A pause. “But not anymore.”

Adrian’s fingers drummed the desk.

“Let’s say fifty-fifty split,” he said. “If what the lads say about you is true.”

“What the lads say about me,” Tristan echoed dully. It was getting hard to concentrate. Magic was leaving Callum’s body, rising up like a fume of sighs. Christ, those sunglasses were gaudy. They were so uniquely Callum’s taste, and Tristan wanted absurdly to cry.

“You dodged enough of my guys. I think I’ve got some idea. Untapped something in that library of yours, did you?”

“You know exactly what I can do and you think it’s fair to offer me half?” This time, Tristan’s echo was tinged with disbelief.

Adrian laughed. “You can have it all when I’m dead and gone, Tris. Half for the prodigal son seems more than fair.”

Fair. What was fair about any of this? Tristan had always been a cynic but he certainly no longer believed in what was fair. He no longer believed the world was any kind of pendulum, some wheel of fortune still to turn. Which wasn’t to say that he knew better. He didn’t know shit, and that was the point. Fate never promised happy endings. Not every story had to be good or even long. Maybe the scales were tipping—maybe the universe took longer than a single mortal lifespan to make things even, to make things right—but Tristan Caine didn’t have that kind of time.

Adrian flicked a cautionary glance at the pistol on the desk in the same moment Tristan did, both of them lunging for it in the space of a single instant. Tristan was farther away, Adrian was quicker, but Tristan had spent a year in the archives of the Alexandrian Society, and for better or worse, matter now worked in his favor.

He closed his hand around the grip and aimed the barrel right between his father’s eyes.

“Fine.” Adrian’s laugh was mirthful, unimpressed. “Sixty-forty.”

“To do what? Bleed for your profit margin? No, thank you.” Tristan’s chest rose and fell and he felt a clock ticking in his chest. Tick. Tick. Tick.

“‘Profit margin’? You spent too long in your posh little cage, son.” Adrian sneered at him. Tick. Tick. Tick.

“I’m not working for you.” Tick.

“If not me, Tris, then someone. That’s all this world is.” Tick. That false wisdom again. Tick. “You got the stones to do what I did? To put yourself here? If you did, you’d already be pulling that trigger.”

Tick. Adrian’s brow, so much like Tristan’s own. Like looking in a mirror at the future. Time traveling in a single fucking glance.

Tick.

“Killing you won’t make me a man. Killing Callum wouldn’t, either. I’m not your fucking gun, Dad.” Tick. “I’m not a weapon for your amusement.”

“Fine. You made your point.” A lick of dry lips. Tick. “What do you want, then?”

“I want—” I want your apology. Tick. I want you to respect me. Tick. I want you to love me. Tick. And I want you to have done it from the moment I was born. Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

TickTickTickTick—

END SCENARIO 1. BEGIN SCENARIO 2.

Callum was never going to kill him. Callum had recently been injured and hadn’t fought back. Callum was here because he thought Tristan was in trouble, because this was a game for him like everything was a game, except for when it came to the reality of Tristan’s life. Callum was bleeding. Callum’s shirt was stained and he’d just come from wherever Parisa was because he smelled like her, like jasmine perfume and the stain of old textbooks, and they must have just missed each other. Callum was here because he was afraid that Tristan was gone.

Callum’s gaze found his immediately, a white flag of relief erected in what little whites of his eyes Tristan could see.

And Callum was looking at Tristan like he had witnessed a miracle somewhere in the space between the office door and Tristan’s eyes.

In that moment, Tristan disassembled the blast that left his father’s pistol, the shrapnel floating weightlessly, like dust. Callum sneezed, then swore, one hand rising to his broken face. Tristan’s father rose to his feet for a second try and Tristan dragged time to a halt, existing in Callum’s narrowly bypassed doom alongside all the moments to come, trying to decide what he really wanted, what he really needed.

It’s not a gun, he heard Nico saying in his ear. It’s not a gun unless you say it’s a gun.

It’s not a gun, it’s a pipe bomb, Tristan thought, grabbing Callum by the shoulder and turning away from the heat of the blast, shielding himself in the knowledge that none of this was final, none of it was real.

Nothing was over unless he said so.

SCENARIO 5.

The house was a familiar sort of dark when Tristan returned, almost as if he’d time traveled to be there. He walked through the great hall, about to climb the stairs and retrieve his things and leave—to what end, he didn’t yet know—when he suddenly paused, hearing something from the painted room.

He walked in to find Libby there, sitting on the floor in front of the sofa. Staring into the fire, drinking a glass of white wine. She looked up and a flicker of something passed over her features. Not surprise, exactly. Not disappointment, either.

“I’m not drinking red wine,” she told him. “I’m sorry, but it tastes like Jesus.”

Tristan chuckled to himself and shrugged, then sat beside her, reaching over for her glass. She handed it to him as he made himself comfortable, leaning his head back against the sofa cushions, staring blankly into the fire.

“I’m just here for the night,” Libby said.

“I’m just getting my things,” Tristan replied.

They nodded without looking at each other. The silence was more companionable than it had previously been, which was ironic given the state of things when they’d parted. Perhaps they’d both seen enough to realize that even the sins they’d committed with and against each other somehow paled in comparison now.

“I just want to say—”

“Rhodes, I—”

They stopped. Looked at each other.

She seemed healthier, somehow. Like maybe she’d been eating and sleeping more, a little rested, less hollow around the cheeks. She’d had another haircut and her latest fringe was long, skating her cheekbones, fashionable without changing her face. She still felt magical to him, like impossibility floating beneath his fingers, even if he understood now that magic did not mean goodness. Did not mean the timing was, or had ever been, right.

“Maybe someday,” he said quietly to the silence that stretched out between them.

Libby took the glass of wine from him and set it aside. He realized he had not actually taken a sip; had simply been holding it, watching it catch the light.

“Maybe someday,” she replied.

They both leaned forward to rise to their feet, him standing first, then reaching a hand down for hers. She took it, allowing him to pull her up.

“I heard about—”

“Make sure you—”

They stopped.

From the mantel, the clock ticked.

“I hate that thing,” said Tristan as Libby said, “Fuck it.”

Then the two of them collided in the same moment; as one.

On some level Tristan knew this was a matter of need, an itch worth scratching, no different than the other times had been. It didn’t have to be different—didn’t have to mean anything—and perhaps that’s why it was different after all. A fumble up the stairs, her legs around his waist, a thundering pulse they shared like a secret. It wasn’t forever and it was sweeter that way, ripe on the edge of rotten. Loss they passed back and forth between them, illuminated like a torch. Capitulation, acquiescence, rest. No longer burning just to burn.

He let her have the bed. Fate was no longer so critical, destiny unguessable but irrelevant, someone else’s business to plan. He closed the door behind him quietly, leaving her to sleep.

Maybe someday. Not a promise. More like an offer, or a dream.

Maybe someday, or maybe not. Sometimes uncertainty was a blessing, knowledge a burden, foresight a fucking curse.

Maybe someday.

SCENARIO 16.

Tristan stood over the body of his father and bent down to scrutinize the trickle of blood from his hairline, traversing the map of furrowed brows and sardonic laughter on the landscape of the forehead that would inevitably become Tristan’s own. He felt a sharp prickle of irritation, the knowledge of his father’s expression, the way it had looked so cloddish and unrefined. As if he’d been taken by surprise, which he should not have been. For haunting Tristan’s life, he ought to have known. He ought to have seen it coming, or at least had the dignity not to look so frightened by the prospect of his doom.

“Seriously?” Tristan asked, rising to his feet and looking at the weapon in Callum’s hand. “Is that a Wessex logo?”

“Maybe a little,” said Callum inanely.

“You look shit,” added Tristan. Callum did not look cool, not even a little bit. He looked slightly green and a bit like he wanted to throw up, which was new and interesting. Tristan supposed that Callum’s experience with death had always been decidedly hands-off, so this must have been unsettling.

“Yep,” said Callum.

At which point Tristan rose from his father’s body and the spreading pool of blood to stand before Callum, breaths away, and say, “This doesn’t mean I’ve ruled out killing you.”

He watched Callum’s throat jump with a heady swallow.

“Save the pillow talk,” he said. “I’ve got to have a shower first.”

SCENARIO 17.

Tristan stood over the body of his father and bent down to scrutinize the trickle of blood from his hairline.

“I can feel your heart beating,” said Callum.

Tristan rose to his feet, carefully concealing the letter opener he’d slid from his father’s arsenal of hidden weapons. The one Adrian Caine had needed in the end, but hadn’t quite been quick enough to reach.

“How does it feel?” asked Tristan.

Callum rested a hand over Tristan’s pulse, fingers stretching out like the wings of a dove.

“Like madness,” he said, tongue slipping over his lips.

Tristan’s fingertips brushed the loop of Callum’s trousers. Dropped to the top of his thigh.

They both felt the presence of the blade at the same moment, reaching for inevitability like a climax.

Femoral artery. “Just a nick would do it, yeah?” said Tristan, voice gravelly with effort.

Callum’s laughing mouth caught Tristan’s just before he fell to the ground.

SCENARIO 25.

“Get the fuck out of my office,” said Tristan. “Fuck your offers. Fuck my potential. Tell my dad to fuck off, too, while you’re at it. Don’t think he’ll care to see you, though, so mind the desk. It’s where he keeps the knives.”

Atlas Blakely looked disappointed, but not surprised. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind.”

“Perhaps fuck off and die,” replied Tristan.

From his desk, his phone buzzed with messages from Eden. Within a week he would be promoted by James Wessex a second time. The wedding would be lovely. Tasteful. Grand. His eventual eulogy, read by a weeping Eden, would describe his scandalous death by balcony-leaping as the desperate act of a beloved husband and son. Rupesh—Tristan’s best friend Rupesh—would become Eden’s second husband after a generous mourning period of five or so years, give or take a few moon cycles. His father would toss the obituary into the kindling. Atlas Blakely would find someone else. There would always be someone else. Libby Rhodes would stab Callum Nova twenty-three times on the painted room floor.

End simulation. Begin again.

SCENARIO 71.

“What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes, and who will you betray to do it?”

He saw it on her face. A new expression, one that must have always lived there in secret, in hiding, or maybe it was just a secret to him, having failed for so long to see the truth. Her anguish, it was never his goodness. Her sorrow, the glint of it that he routinely took for virtue, it was always so compelling because it stood in contrast to her anger, to what had always been shadowed with fury. Lit by the presence of flame.

“I don’t know,” she replied dully, “and I don’t—”

“Rhodes.” Tristan emerged from his hiding place outside the door, too late to save Ezra, too wise in the moments since then to stand idly by. “Rhodes, it won’t help. It won’t save you. The path you’re on, it only ends when you end it. Rhodes.” The only brave thing he ever did was touch her then, dousing her pain with a clumsy, forced embrace. “Rhodes, let it stop now. Let it end with you.”

SCENARIO 76.

She killed him, obviously. Don’t play with matches. Don’t startle physicists who’ve traveled here on a fucking nuclear bomb.

SCENARIO 87.

At age seventeen, Tristan Caine choked on hot soup and died.

SCENARIO 141.

“Ready the starship, Captain Blakely!” called Tristan from the ship’s hull.

“Right you are, Lieutenant Caine,” Atlas jovially returned.

SCENARIO 196.

“Maybe someday,” Libby said quietly to the silence that stretched out between them.

She took the glass of wine from him and set it aside. He realized he had not actually taken a sip; had simply been holding it, watching it catch the light.

“Then I pick today,” Tristan replied.

SCENARIO 201.

There’s a hairline fracture, a sliver of silence that lives in the motion of a trigger pull. Tristan heard it like a roar, an echo of consequence throughout the cavern of time and space, and the debilitating quiet was almost like a prayer. Father, forgive me; grant me the serenity to live with what I’ve done.

The soundlessness that followed screamed with significance, with condemnation. Tristan felt a hand on his shoulder—the careful, calculated weight of a palm. When he didn’t move, he felt the pistol eased from his hands, slipped out from the stagnation of his knuckles. From the corner of his eye, he caught the glint of a pair of sunglasses.

“Who am I supposed to be now?” Tristan asked the room, the office that had once contained the beating heart of his father. What he meant was: How do I go on without a reason to move forward, without something to run from, without the fate I know I’m doomed to chase?

“Whoever it is, I won’t turn away,” said Callum in his ear.

Elsewhere, a clock ticked.

SCENARIO 203.

“I want—” I want your apology. Tick. I want you to respect me. Tick. I want you to love me. Tick. And I want you to have done it from the moment I was born. Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

TickTickTickTick—

“Time to quit daydreaming, son,” said Adrian Caine, the letter opener glinting pointedly in his hand before he lunged.

SCENARIO 211–243.

None of it mattered because Callum died.

SCENARIO 244–269.

None of it mattered because Callum lived.

SCENARIO 312.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife,” said Nico happily, tossing a handful of rice in the air as Tristan lifted the veil from Parisa’s eyes and smiled the smile of the perpetually exultant.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he said, and she gave him a look of insouciant but undeniably compelling amusement.

“Who else would it be?” she replied with a shrug, lifting her chin for a kiss.

SCENARIO 413.

It’s not a gun, it’s a knife, Tristan thought, plunging it sensually into Callum’s sternum.

SCENARIO 444.

“This was your grand idea?” Tristan panted, fighting the urge to vomit as he doubled over in the street. “Rob my dad in plain sight—and for what? It’s cursed, almost definitely. More importantly, what are we supposed to do with the money?”

“Have sex on top of it,” said an equally winded Callum, aviators shielding the falseness Tristan had never known of his blue eyes. He tossed a grin over at Tristan, who stood there staring at him, vacant, not nearly as filled with hatred as he should have been. He knew it was somewhere, reserves of it, huge vats of it, but it all seemed so distant. So unhelpfully less hot.

“Oh.” Tristan considered that a moment before nudging Callum’s arm, persuading him to keep running. “Yeah,” he coughed up, leading them around the next corner. “Yeah, all right then, fine.”

SCENARIO 457.

“But the damn books—”

“Kill me,” Atlas said urgently. “You can have the books. All the fucking books. I don’t even want to be here, I don’t want any of this, just trust me, believe me.” I came all this way just to tell you, just to carry the message. “I’m the one that needs to die.”

Ezra looked at him blankly. Or what Atlas thought was blankly until he realized Ezra did not look confused, did not look angry, did not look sad. Did not look at all like the man who had once stood in his office and died for the cause of being young and reckless, and righteous.

He looked like the man Atlas Blakely had been a few seconds ago. A man who had opened a door.

“I already tried this, Atlas,” Ezra said after a moment. “It doesn’t work. It doesn’t help.”

Silence.

“Do you know what it really means to starve?” asked Ezra.

SCENARIO 499.

“Atlas,” said Tristan, poking his head into the office. “Sharon from the offices is asking if you’ve had any problems with the new kitchen staff.”

“Hm? No, none.” Atlas was rubbing his temple, wearing the pair of spectacles he devotedly made sure the others did not see, as if it were critical to his personal mythology that his vision suffered no impairment. “Have you looked at this?”

“Varona’s notes? Only a thousand times.” Tristan stepped into the office and reached over for the diagram in Atlas’s hand. “It looks right to me, not that I’d ever tell him so.”

“We’ll still need Mr. Ellery. And Miss Mori.” Atlas’s voice was its usual exhausted rumble. “Have you spoken to Miss Rhodes?”

Tristan shook his head. “She’s not been back to the stone circle at Callanish. She’s either on her way here now, or she’s—” Something locked in his throat over the words not coming back at all and Atlas peered over the rim of his spectacles with something like a look of sympathy.

“And Mr. Drake?” Atlas prompted. “How are the two of you getting on?”

The house did not need an archivist. Particularly not one that Tristan felt oddly certain he’d once dreamed. At the same time, though, it was nice to have another body in the house, and Gideon’s presence did mean Nico was a frequent visitor. Which was of no special interest to Tristan, of course. The last year spent with Nico’s blades to his throat and Nico’s hands on his chest was …

Of no special interest to Tristan, who coughed politely into his fist. “Fine.”

Atlas’s mouth twisted with wry and unforgivable amusement.

“I see,” he said, turning politely back to the diagram at hand.

SCENARIO 556.

“Do you realize we’ve never actually talked?” said Tristan, stepping away from Nico’s door to the open frame of Reina’s. “Seems weird. Like maybe we have a thing or two in common but we’d never actually know.” The champagne from the evening’s Society gala seemed to be hitting him funny. He felt an odd, paranoid sense that he should have this conversation now. That he should have it now, right now, before it was too late.

Reina didn’t seem to agree, perhaps lacking an interest in converging multiverse strands or the probability of existing in multiplicity. “I don’t know who my father is, so I doubt it,” she said.

“Lucky you,” said Tristan. “And your mum?”

“Dead.”

“So’s mine.”

“Siblings?”

“Half sisters. You?”

“Same.” An awkward silence. “I think I might be a god,” Reina commented with a stilted, armored tone, like someone testing the waters and expecting to find a pool of blood.

“Is that why you’re pissed at Varona?” asked Tristan. “Because you’re a god and he’s too hyperactive to properly worship you?”

Reina opened her mouth. Then closed it. “Kind of, I guess,” she mumbled, with a moment’s afterthought. The look of a heady revelation.

“Forgive him,” Tristan advised. “He knows not what he does.”

Behind them, Nico’s door opened, the floor vibrating with the energy of a small child traversing the high of a sugar rush. “Okay, I’m ready—”

“See?” said Tristan, gesturing to Nico, who bounced a look of joyful bewilderment between Reina and Tristan.

In response, Reina looked both repulsed and contemplative. “Try therapy,” she suggested to Tristan, an apparent transaction for his sage advice. “It’ll save us all a lot of time.”

“Well, no problem there, we’ve got plenty of that,” said Tristan as Nico saluted her, permitting himself to be corralled toward the stairs.

SCENARIO 615.

“Alexis.” Atlas took her by the elbow and she was startled, a touch annoyed, busy with other things, with other thoughts. “We have to kill someone.”

She frowned at him. “What?”

“Me,” he clarified. “You have to kill me. One of you has to kill me or the rest of you will die one by one. It has to be me, Alexis, please.” He put the gun in her hand, curled her fingers around it, and she stared at him.

“Why are you asking me?”

Because, because of everything we have yet to share, because of all the secrets I have yet to tell you, the ones I will never get to tell you. The ones I gave to you once that now, blessedly, you will never have to know.

“Please,” he said again.

She looked at the gun. At his face. Don’t waste it.

She looked at him again, a long look. A pitying one.

“Fine,” Atlas said hysterically, snatching the pistol back from her. “Fine, then I’ll do it myself.”

SCENARIO 616.

“I want a divorce,” Tristan panted into Eden’s mouth.

“Sure you do,” she replied, coquettishly slapping his arse.

SCENARIO 733.

“Oh, shit,” muttered Callum, who, from what Tristan could see at this angle, appeared to be examining his undercarriage.

“Woke up dickless again?” called Tristan. (Who should not have joked about such things, as they would only be less fun for everyone involved.)

“Lucky for you, no,” Callum knowingly replied, without looking up. “Just, ah.” A pause. “Nothing.”

Tristan sat up from the bed, observing the fragment of Callum’s face that he could see from the bathroom mirror. The furrowed brow framing pale blue eyes. The set of his mouth, which was thinner now, less sneering with age. The hair that was distinctly grayer than it had been once, less gold and more silver. Which, Tristan realized, was a pigment issue likely to become a problem in other corporeal hemispheres, too.

Ah, mortality. How sad to know the nether regions also aged.

“You know,” said Tristan casually, “I don’t mind watching you get older.”

He watched the motion of Callum’s shoulders shifting firmly into place, caught between bracing and running. “Don’t you?”

“No. Personally I feel I’m aging into my personality.” Tristan settled himself back against the pillows with a sudden flame of fondness, an excruciating sense that his contentment in the moment was absurd and horrifically unearned. On the nightstand beside him sat Callum’s sunglasses, his keys. “I wouldn’t mind doing a bit more of it.”

“What, aging?”

“Growing old with you,” Tristan said, and closed his eyes so that he would not have to see Callum’s smile, which Tristan would tell himself was a smirk and therefore something he could walk away from. If he wanted to. When he did.

Which was not, as it turned out, today.

SCENARIO 734–890.

Atlas Blakely opened his eyes to a throbbing head, the blurred shape of a familiar face, a pair of necromancer’s hands. He heard his own voice, his mother’s voices, the voice he was born with, the restless one that spoke to him inside his head. You can’t stop choosing death, Atlas Blakely, and for that, death will not reward you.

“If you don’t kill me,” he croaked, “the world will end.”

Ezra leaned into Atlas’s line of sight, a crooked smile on his face.

“The world ends every day, Atlas Blakely,” said Ezra Fowler, who would know. “That doesn’t mean you can escape your fate.”

SCENARIO 891.

Tristan stood by the headstone in the Nova family plot and wondered how the fuck it had ever seemed reasonable to spend this much money just to lie in the ground in a box. Surely it would be better to become useful to the world in some way. Fertilize the soil, feed the trees. Anything but this.

“Roses, really?” asked Parisa with a sigh, as if roses were not the obvious choice by every conceivable standard. Tristan glanced over his shoulder at Reina, who shrugged at him as if to say I cannot control her, I never have.

Tristan set the flowers down in the usual vase and straightened, his phone buzzing in his pocket. Three quick vibrations. Libby again. She’d been popping up more and more these days at random intervals. At first it was funny memes. Then the occasional how are you. Then the unavoidable midnight ponderings of what it looked like when he touched eternity, did he think he saw God and if so, was She pretty?

Judging by the time, she was likely sending a picture of her lunch. But there was no ruling out the possibility it was something else. Something wonderfully unguessable.

Tristan smiled to himself, feeling the world continue, slipping out from under him, a blissful freedom stretching out into the wild unknown.

“For fuck’s sake, Caine, we don’t have all day,” said Parisa. “Are you going to help us or not?”

“Aren’t you two tired of philanthropy yet?” asked Tristan, adjusting the petals in Callum’s vase.

“Well, you know what we always say,” said Reina, in something Tristan was coming to recognize as the tone of her voice that most closely resembled humor. “The best time to plant a tree is yesterday. Second best time is today.”

Tristan fought a scoff. “That’s not even close to what you two say.” Not that he knew for sure, but he had a sense his guess was inaccurate. Their actual motto was probably more aligned with their initial message to him, sent several weeks ago from Parisa’s new number:

Want to feel powerful today?

How powerful?

Depends how erotic you find it to watch a white man beg.

“Eh, close enough,” said Parisa, lowering her sunglasses to warm her face in the afternoon sun.

SCENARIO 1A-426.02.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

TickTickTickTick—

“I don’t want anything you can give me.” Tristan realized it slowly, then all at once. Like swallowing a vat of poison, letting it flood the vessels of his brain. He lowered the gun and Adrian exhaled, tongue slipping contemptuously between his lips.

“So he’s a big man, then. Noble.” Adrian spat it out. “That what you learned from your bluebloods, then? Your posh prince down there on the floor teach you that? Enjoy it, Tris,” Adrian sneered. “Be saintly, then. See if that puts food on the table or men in your ranks.”

Tristan flexed a hand. The ticking in his chest was gone. The only thing beating in there was his heart, which was blithely unaffected by the resurgence of his father’s mockery. If there was anything left for his father to give him, it was no longer of any particular use.

“You’ve never had it in you, Tristan. You’ve always been useless, always been weak. You think I couldn’t see it right from the start?”

Tristan bent down, running a finger gently over Callum’s brow. Fixing his hair. Reconfiguring an illusion—giving Callum back his preferred nose, which was somehow less patrician than his actual one—and obscuring the stains on his shirt, pressing the fabric back to perfection. Picking up the sunglasses with two fingers, considering himself in the frames.

“Hope you like the taste of mercy, Tris. It’ll rot in your mouth the day someone makes you pay for your weakness, mark my words—”

His father ranted on while Tristan’s world kaleidoscoped with possibilities, the cosmic inflation of his careful, recalcitrant pulse. Running the scenarios. Trying to project a version of the future that came from some other version of this room. Tried, but couldn’t find the happily ever after within the limits of his dull imagination. Couldn’t make it. Couldn’t see it.

Didn’t make it not real, though, so Tristan took aim and pulled the trigger.

The end.