Everything spun.
“No . . . no, that’s not right . . . How can it be you?”
“Surprised, are we?” The words were spat with hot malice.
The world had turned upside down. Jack couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Alex was unmistakable but horribly changed. His face was gaunt—thinner and sicklier than Jack had ever seen it before—and his skin had taken on a slightly blue tinge. His hair was unkempt, and he was unshaven, but the eyes were the worst. The emerald spheres had been replaced by ones of fiery gold, glaring out from sunken sockets.
Jack tried to form a sentence. “What . . . How can you . . . Why?”
“How can I what?” Alex looked away dismissively, taking in the four fallen warriors. “You think I wasn’t capable of this? This was child’s play.”
Jack realized it wasn’t just the voice he hadn’t recognized, underlaid as it was by that rumble. It was the way Alex was talking; the kind of words and phrases he was using were different.
“But you’re not a Cultist. You’re one of us!”
“No, I’m not a Cultist. The Cult were weak, pathetic acolytes of a fabricated religion. I survived them. I was stronger.”
A wave of nausea passed over him. “No, this can’t be true . . . What have you done with Alex?”
“What, you don’t trust me?” Alex let out a bark of mirthless laughter. “Well, I suppose that’s fitting. It’s not as though I trusted you. It’s not as though I waited for you, held out for you—for all of you.”
“What do you—?”
“You left me to rot in a dungeon,” Alex shrieked, and a wisp of grey smoke escaped through his teeth.
“No,” Jack appealed, desperate, “we came looking for you. We—”
“I know what you did. And what you didn’t do.” Alex reached into his robe, and in a flash, something clunked to the ground before him. It took Jack a moment to recognize the object. It was battered and charred, but the curvature and clasps of a Golden Turtle egg were still visible.
“You were at Nexus. You were there, and you left me to be consumed by oblivion.”
“But you escaped!” Jack blurted out. “How?”
Alex didn’t reply. His eyes, those infernal globes of gold, were fixed upon Jack, his teeth bared. Smoke encircled his mouth as if bleeding through the chutes of a furnace.
For Jack, shock was giving way to fear. He didn’t see anything in his friend’s face that he recognized—none of the kindness or joviality that had kept them so close over the years. All he saw was burning rage, a hatred that he recognized as the same he bore Icarus.
“Alex, this isn’t right. This isn’t you. There’s something inside you, controlling you. You need to break out of it.”
“Oh, this? You mean this?” He raised his fist and punched the air. A sonic boom of Dark energy burst from his arm.
Jack flinched, but it wasn’t aimed at him. It rippled his hair and clothes as it churned past, colliding with the heap of rubble with a colossal bang.
Rocks were hurled like shrapnel, sending Ruth’s indistinct form reeling. She hit the ground hard, her cry matched by the crunch of breaking bone.
Jack was at her side in an instant, kneeling, cradling her broken body. She was still breathing, her eyes still roving, but blood was bubbling up between her lips.
He could feel his own rage, not long abated, returning. He was dimly conscious of energy crackling around him, but it dissipated as he realized Ruth was trying to speak. When it came, her voice was so soft and rasping he had to lean closer still to hear.
“No . . . there’s too much anger. It’s anger that’s done this . . . No more . . .”
Jack felt the tide ebb. He felt hollow now and brittle, as if everything had seized up inside him. He knew what Ruth was trying to convey. There had been too much of this, too much blame, too much mindlessness. It was time to accept responsibility.
He laid her down softly and stood, turning back to face Alex. His friend had not moved but still just stood, staring with that blind vision that was not his own. Seeing him again generated another stab of remorse. Jack felt his face grow hot, his throat begin to tremble.
He raised his hands and unlooped the Seventh Shard from around his neck, tossing it onto the ground before him. With tears streaming down his face, he sank to his knees.
“I’m sorry. This is all my fault. We went looking for you. We left Earth because of you. We did go to Nexus. Lucy and I joined the Apollonians to find you, but we got . . . sidetracked. We left you alone. I’m so, so sorry.”
His voice broke. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. He was sure he had felt pathetic then, but he was past self-consciousness now. He gave another look to Bál; to Cire; to Dannie; to Ruth, prostrate and spewing crimson. He’d led them all into this. This was his fight, his responsibility, no one else’s. And for the young man standing before him now, Jack realized, he was also partially responsible.
“Do what you want to me”—he glanced over the pile of rubble behind him—“but please, just leave the others out of this.”
He fell silent, staring at Alex through tear-filled eyes. His friend had still not moved, but he could see and feel the tremors. Dark energy collected around the mantle of the cloak, shimmering indigo, compacting inward as if magnetically drawn. It crackled like static electricity, bolts jarring off at angles and raking the stone floor.
A shadow shifted. A shape of ebony had detached itself from the boots and slithered across the ground toward him. Twin spheres, phantasmagorical sparks that mirrored those behind it, and fangs, glinting in the purple light. The serpent reared with exquisite languor, twisting its head and widening its jaws. Darkness collected; it seemed to blot out all else, consuming the scene.
Jack closed his eyes and waited for the end.
There was a roar. A human roar.
Jack’s eyes flashed open in time to see the serpent extinguished in a burst of black smoke.
Light returned to his surroundings. Everything was as it had been, except the energy around Alex had dissipated. He was staggering, blinking as if coming out of a deep sleep, blinking with eyes that were not gold but bright emerald.
He caught sight of Jack, horror-struck, and though he only stuttered, it was enough to show that the dual undertone of his voice had vanished. “I . . . I . . .” He shuddered, hands balled into fists, and when his gaze snapped back to Jack, the gold had returned. “I’ll deal with you in due course. We have much greater business to attend to.” He raised his arms, as if to embrace the sky.
Jack became aware of the air stirring around him. Despite the utter stillness of their surroundings, wind was beginning to whip up. It caught the loose pebbles around Ruth, sending them chattering against the stone, ruffling his jacket and hair. The fog was being drawn outward, as if sucked in by a gigantic plug hole into the gaps between the columns. Light seeped from the newly uncovered symbols on the ground, bleeding through the earth like white-hot magma.
Alex barked a syllable, and the light exploded upward.
Jack was knocked flat as the wind took off. Energy surged upward from beneath him, and beyond the circle of columns, the fog was now a roaring vortex, sent spiralling vertically. The light drove a rift through the fog, blasting upward with the intensity of a volcanic eruption, blurring everything around him.
Straining and squinting against the churning force, he reached for Ruth but leaped backward. Something was happening to her body. The Fourth Shard shone amber at her throat, and light of the same hue billowed in tendrils from her stomach, arching through the supernova and feeding into the symbol on one of the columns.
Turning, he saw Ruth was not the only one. Ruby for Bál, sapphire for Cire, emerald for Dannie—even indigo for Alex—streams of energy now plugged them into the pillars like ethereal strings.
Even above the gale, Alex’s dual-tone voice echoed. “Don’t think your little act of self-sacrifice can stop this.”
Jack didn’t realize until too late.
With a flick of Alex’s hand, the Seventh Shard had leaped off the stone and reattached itself to Jack’s neck. The instant the thread came into contact with his skin, a searing pain shot through him. He doubled over, trying to retch, but was unable as the string thickened around his throat. It felt as though something were being wrenched backward out of his rib cage, crushing his internal organs in the process. The Shard burned around his neck, hotter than anything he had ever felt, charring his breastbone. With an agonized twist behind him, he glimpsed the trail of white light running from between his shoulder blades to the fox-inscribed column.
Blinking through the agony, he made out the other strands of light. Something was happening to the columns. They were filling up, almost—he thought in his delirium—like colossal glasses of fruit juice, the symbols brimming with the respective shades of energy. Moreover, the figures they were connected to seemed to weaken. Ruth looked, if possible, more lifeless than before. Only Alex remained standing, arms raised, apparently impervious to his life force being ripped from him.
Against the agony in his chest, against the pressing on his throat, over the roaring of the gale, Jack somehow managed to gasp through the pain. “What are you doing?”
“Achieving cosmic alignment,” Alex purred, without moving or even looking at him. “Returning the universe to its rightful state. Closing the rift between the Light and the Darkness.”
“No, Alex, listen to me. You’re being controlled. You can break out of it again. You can stop this!”
With an immense cracking, light erupted from the columns. Six pillars of energy—red, blue, green, amber, indigo, and white—rocketed into the sky in a circle. They penetrated the rumbling grey mass above, sending prismatic sparks showering across the sky.
“Almost there,” Alex screamed, his tone ecstatic. “So close, after so long!”
Jack’s vision was fading, the scene around him blurring into a vague rainbow watercolor. He could feel consciousness slipping away. So this was it. Everything had come down to this, this ignoble end. They had not rescued Alex, they had failed the Apollonians, and they didn’t even know what was happening. If only . . .
Something rushed passed. Life surged back into him, lessening the pain in his back, stopping his burning throat, clearing his vision. The gale was still roaring, light was still pouring from the columns, strands of energy were still streaming from the others, but he was free.
It took him a moment to see it among the totality of grey.
In front of him, six tails rippling in the wind, was the dim outline of a fox.