Here is where one world ends, and another world has to begin.
Here is where a girl must make a difficult choice.
Here is where a girl stands on a half-sinking pier, as the last of her enemies fall to the makeshift staff she fashioned out of the debris of a dead world. Several feet away, the Revenant queenpin does glorious, gritting battle of her own. Out on the water, an overlooked son takes control of a boat. Up on the deck of a crumbling ship, the Historian will be fine. Theo is the best protector she could ask for.
• • •
Three things, Tair knows now:
• • •
One. Another world is possible.
A world where gladiators can be set free with the single push of a button.
The key to that world is a tablet sitting in her bag.
• • •
Two. Alexander Kleios was right.
Too many people have their own ideas about what to do with the Stone. Too many people would want to use it for their own personal power. And Tair doesn’t know who to trust.
• • •
Three. Selah loves her.
She loves her, and in the moment between hearing those words and the violence that followed, Tair thought her skin might catch fire, because she loves Selah, too, more than she ever thought it was possible to love a person.
Through all the days of Tair’s life, love has had to be earned—that is, if it’s come at all. It has always come with a cost, and the cost was making herself small. So no one prepared her for this. For the way it feels to have someone creep into the narrow crevices of your soul, for the overwhelming desire to know every inch of them in return. For a person to grow and change for you without asking for anything in return. To witness you in all your mess and darkness, and affirm that you still and will always matter.
Tair loves Selah so much, the thought of what needs to happen next might break her in two. Because no one prepared her for this, and they didn’t prepare her for the fact that sometimes, maybe, love just isn’t enough.
• • •
By now, Tair is good at disappearing.
• • •
In the dark and crumbling underground bunker deep beneath the Third Ward, Griff busies herself making tazine. Theo sits across the way, wringing water out of their hair, eyes alight with fire now Selah’s explained everything that the message from her father contained. Arran drops a heavy blanket around Selah, cold and dripping from the sea, and she doesn’t let him take her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She doesn’t look at him. She can’t. She doesn’t know where she could have gone so wrong.
“The good news,” he tries again, and Selah wishes that he would just stop, “is that she has to come back for you. If she ever wants to actually use the Stone.”
At long last Selah looks at him, and the salt tracks that run down her cheeks are not the lingering remnants of the Sargasso Sea. “It’s my fault,” she whispers into the dark, and here’s the thing. Selah is not just heartbroken. She’s ashamed. She’s afraid. “I made a mistake.”
• • •
Two girls sit in the catacombs beneath a city, waiting for the dawn. The city is old, but more ancient than they know. Even further beneath their feet, a battle rages in an abandoned subway station, dozens on dozens of men, women, and thremed taking back their lives.
Here, the world is quiet, and dark, and Selah brushes a finger lightly over Tair’s eyelid. The scar there is faded, lit with silver, and she does not ask where it came from. She ghosts a gentle kiss against it, and Tair smiles, more relaxed than she has ever been in her life.
So she chooses this because she wants to.
She chooses this because she can.
Selah wants her, and she wants Selah, and they move together in the dark. A thrumming in Tair’s spine that shoots all the way down, and her heart has never beat so fast. She has never been touched like this, like she is mortal made divine. Like each press of Selah’s mouth on her throat her breasts her belly her lips is an act of tribute, an offering of lapis lazuli and gold.
“You look like starlight,” Selah whispers, tracing the heavenly bodies beading across Tair’s brow.
She takes Selah hard, against the reliquary to someone’s forgotten ancestor, and the familia should consider themselves lucky to be consecrated with such an act. Selah sucks a purpling bruise into the soft skin beneath her ear, and the mourning vespers rise around them as she hisses into Selah’s hair. There is no space between them, now, no place where one ends and the other begins, and Tair did not know it was possible to have someone else under your skin. Did not know it was possible to leave your body for pleasure, not just to escape the pain. Did not know she could be this, a hurricane colliding with a rainstorm, sticking together into one great destroyer of worlds.
Thank you, she says to no one, after.
“Here,” Selah says to her. She parses the instructions left inside, Sargassan Latin mixed in just enough to follow, and presses Tair’s thumbprint to a cool Stone. It will open for both of them now. Just her and Tair and no one else. “Whatever comes next, we face it together.”
• • •
“No,” she tells her brother, Theodora Nix holding his hand. “She doesn’t need me. She doesn’t need me for anything at all.”
There’s a clang at the makeshift kitchen sink, and Griff is holding the remnants of a broken ceramic mug, eyes closed, breathing in heavily through her nose.
There was a time, not very long ago, when Selah used to define herself by her duty to other people. Paterfamilias of the Kleios familia. The caretaker of the world’s knowledge. Naevia and Alexander’s daughter. Arran’s sister. Tair’s . . . something. But that time is over. The time for shaping something new has come.
Dropping the blanket behind her on the chair, Selah stands. “I’ll find her,” she says.
Griff doesn’t look at her. It’s Theo who answers, instead. “She won’t go back to the Sisters,” they tell her gently. “How do you—”
“I’ll find her,” Selah repeats, louder this time, and it comes out a snap.
Because this isn’t about Tair. Not anymore. Tair ripped her heart out, and stomped on it for good measure, but Tair also has something that doesn’t belong to her. It’s not about duty, and it’s not about Dad leaving what he knows to Selah and Selah alone. It’s about what they can make with it when they get it back.
“I meant what I said.” She moves to meet Griff where the older woman stands. “Up in the Regio, I meant it.”
Finally, she meets her eyes. “I know you meant it,” she says. Then—“Go home.”
“But—”
“Go home. Cry to your mother. People will have seen you in the pits, no point pretending otherwise. I hear you’re a pretty actress, so here’s what you’re going to do: You’re going to go home. You’re going to be traumatized. You’re going to miss your brother but accept that he’s a criminal on the run for an egregious offense all the same. And then you’re going to get to work.”
The steadiness of Griff’s voice beats nearly in tandem with the thump of Selah’s heart, so much so that she nearly doesn’t notice as Arran moves to her side. She straightens up. “What do I do?”
“Spread the right story,” Griff answers with a small smile. “Whatever happened in the massacre down in the fighting pits, the Revenants weren’t involved. You spread that story, and you have a look around to see if there’s anything else your father was keeping from us. Meanwhile, we’ll look for Tair. But if you happen to use your advantage of position to find her first, then I’d appreciate it if you bring her to me.”
A shudder ripples down her spine. But Tair made her choice, and she didn’t choose her.
“We’ll see each other again soon, Selah Kleios,” says Griff, and at their perch across the room, Theo sheathes their knives. “We’re partners in this now.”
• • •
A girl crouches low in the dripping allées of Amphitheater Messalina, arms wound tight around her satchel, pressing the hard and solid weight of the Iveroa Stone within to her erratic beating heart.
Tair can’t go back to the Kirnaval. She can’t go back to the little apartment she shares with Ibdi, or the headquarters at Naqvi Row, or the Watchers’ warehouse by the Tenant’s Gate. She can’t go back to Gil’s tired smile, or the warm flush of Selah’s cheek against her own. Once again, Tair is well and truly alone.
But the thin tablet pressed against her chest is a miracle. It is wondrous, opportune creation. It’s dangerous, of course, but isn’t any shift in the status quo? A chance either for catastrophe or change. And that’s the old promise. That at the crux of catastrophe and change, rage brings the former and focus brings the latter, and that she will always choose change.
Tair meant what she said to Selah in the catacombs beneath the city. This power scares her. But it also does not belong to her alone. Maybe Griff thinks people need to wait to know the truth. Maybe she’s no better than anyone else who thinks they know better than others, and have to tell them what to do. Tair knows better than that. The truth is in her arms, and the time for people to know about it is now. One person alone shouldn’t get to hold this kind of power. One person alone shouldn’t get to decide what to do with it. Not even two, together.
Maybe she’ll pay Artemide and Ibdi and the Sisters of the First a visit after all. Maybe it’s time to stop running away.
So Tair stands, bag heavy at her hip, and walks out into the rising sun.