· REINA ·
Reina scrolled through the news app on her phone while the crowd around them shuffled this way and that, heat wafting maliciously above the pavement as they walked. Paris was unexpectedly muggy and dense in late October, summer increasingly overstaying its welcome until shades of umber and forthcoming rot were forced to crowd into its torrid space. The streets seemed eternally flooded with tourists, ambling beside locals who dressed disconcertingly like Parisa. Topically, Callum looked like pure evil beside Reina in his crisp white shirt—too shiny to burn, too cool to melt, wearing those outrageous chromatic aviators. If he weren’t currently busy texting his ex she’d hate him for his unimpeachable nonchalance, but he obviously had bigger (dumber) problems.
A message floated onto Reina’s screen. We’ve got pretty much all the preliminary research done, so. Just keeping u updated! Party hat. Three popping champagne bottles. A red flashing siren. Feeling V BUMMED that u have not accepted my zillion apologies. Not quitting tho love u besos
“My god,” said Callum, leaning over Reina’s shoulder and dropping his sunglasses to eye her screen. “How have you not blocked his number? Just throw the whole phone away.”
“You’re one to talk.” She glared at him for good measure. “I take it Tristan’s already told you about the progress with the sinister plot?”
“It’s cute that you’re even using Varona’s pet name for it.” Callum’s reflective lenses were glaring on his face, dazzling Reina with the vision of her own scowl before he gestured to her phone screen with his chin. Nico’s message alert had disappeared, leaving only the browser window she’d been scrolling through. “What are you looking for?”
“New candidates.” She showed him the article from the Texas newspaper about the young potential congresswoman whose numbers were on the rise. “We could check this one out. Or skip to her opposition, if that’s easier.” By that point, Reina could tell based on how much power was pumping through her to Callum that it required less energy to make a crowd hate someone than it did to reroute a mob, or even simply temper one to moderation.
In response, though, Callum made a face, gracefully circumnavigating a group of tourists pausing for a selfie. “No. I don’t like Texas.”
“Why not? It’s not all zealots.” Their stop there last week had been to dismantle a potential bill filing in the state senate that Reina had uncovered as part of a social media call to action. The senator authoring the bill had a change of heart (thanks to Callum and Reina, obviously) but that hadn’t really done much to block progress. One of the other US congressmen simply rallied another party leader in the state senator’s place, and at that point, even swaying public opinion hadn’t changed as much as Reina had expected—for reasons probably related to her unfamiliarity with the American political landscape. Hard to believe, given the predominance of American politics that had led her there in the first place, but Callum explained it as a matter of translation. Governments were like people, and speaking the precise language of any systemic corruption was a necessity. In the United States, influence was a combination of money (expected) and geographical districts (unexpected, annoying, irrational).
The point was that knowing the bill was wildly unpopular with the public didn’t appear to be any sort of threat to the politicians involved. Ultimately, Reina and Callum had been forced to stay overlong, making at least four or five additional drop-ins to really make a mess of things and fully kill the bill. She could tell—he had made it inescapably clear—that Callum hadn’t been happy about it. She understood in a distantly sympathetic way that what Callum took from her (or what nature took when she allowed it) could be replenished faster and more easily than whatever Callum channeled within himself upon Reina’s request.
“It wouldn’t have to be like last time,” she said gamely. He’d been sore and sick for a while afterward and had concealed it, or tried to, with a series of antics—mainly the antagonizing of the Caines, father and son, through the perennial nature of his presence. It was almost believable as a distraction, because Callum’s singular drive to be obnoxious was insuppressible and frankly, a preternatural gift. Still, Callum with a ten-hour nosebleed wasn’t an image Reina was prepared to forget.
He gave her a look of contempt, like he could sense her concern. It was the same face he made whenever they came into contact with the Parisian sewers. “I don’t care for the ants in Texas,” he said, adjusting his collar. “They’re too big and they bite.”
Sure.
They paused at a traffic light, waiting to cross the street. In the spare moments of stillness, Reina looked back at her phone and scrolled again, kept scrolling. Something about the Hong Kong election; she’d have to turn her attention to that as soon as the American campaigns were done, assuming she made it that long. (The alleged six-month deadline approached but it seemed impossible, at least to Reina, that the archives would not consider the work she was doing to be an undertaking on their behalf; if anyone died first for the crime of being undeserving, she guessed it would be Parisa.) A military strike, fuck, she thought she’d already successfully railroaded defense spending, but war was limitless, she supposed. (For now.) Something about internet privacy, medeian statutes on tracking being violated, mother-fuckers. Add that to her list. A listicle called “Ways You Can Help the Victims of the Southern California Wildfires” followed by an article called “Why Nobody Is Talking About the Floods in Bangladesh.”
“What’s that?”
“Hm?” Reina looked up to find Callum eyeing the headlines on her screen.
“That.” He pointed with the edge of a pinkie finger, his pale brow furrowed. “I know that face.”
It was a middle-aged woman, unremarkable. Southeast Asian, maybe Filipino or Vietnamese, but it was an American headline. “University lab to close pending investigation over misused public funds.” “This?”
The crowd was moving again. Callum reached blindly for the phone and Reina gave it to him, the two of them pausing below the awning of a nearby brasserie. He read in silence, no more than a paragraph or two, then opened a new tab, searching for something in her browser.
“Something interesting about the lab?” Reina asked, wondering what she could have possibly overlooked.
“No, not the lab. Well, maybe the lab, but—” Callum stopped, apparently lost in thought as he scrolled through a list of academic articles.
Reina craned her neck to read the search inquiry he’d typed in: Dr. J. Araña. “I’ve never heard of her.”
“I met her last year. Well, not really.” Callum’s usual faultless appearance looked no more disturbed than ever, but she thought she caught a thin trickle of sweat from behind his ear, disappearing into the sharpness of his collar. “She was at the gala last year. Atlas spoke to her.” He tapped a link to her Wikipedia page, skimming it.
“And? Is she of any use to us?”
“Hm? Of course not, Mori, she’s being investigated for fraud. And treason, by the looks of it.” He handed the phone back to her, the tab now closed and the browser returned to Reina’s original search. “Oops,” he added, and continued walking, moving to cross the street as Reina hurried to catch up.
“Oops?” she echoed in disbelief. “What does oops mean?”
He didn’t slow down. “We have an errand to run, Mori. Did you not say this was the only Forum event for the month on Nothazai’s public calendar?”
Only about seven hundred times, the first six hundred and ninety-nine of which had been like pointlessly singing an aria. Dragging Callum away from London was like pulling teeth, as if the farther he got from Tristan the more he lost a sense of purpose. Reina had only gotten her way this time by assuring him that surprising Nothazai for purposes of retribution and/or extortion was very much up his alley, and potentially quite fun. “Oh, so now you conveniently care about Nothazai?”
“Of course I care. I’ve always cared.” He was prickly, agitated. Interesting. This was a side of him she rarely saw but knew immediately was worth unraveling.
“What did you do to that woman?” she asked, intrigued. “And don’t say nothing.”
He grunted something in response.
“What?”
“I said, how much longer before you give up and reply to Varona?” he asked loudly. “I know you’re starting to cave.”
Yeah, like that was going to work. “Assuming Parisa lets Dalton off his leash, which she won’t,” said Reina, “then Varona’s going to do his little experiment, fail, and realize he needs my help, end of story. Answer the question.”
“Ah, so you do require groveling.” Callum looked pleased. “I’ve always suspected that about you.”
“Who is she?” Reina pressed again. “If she was at the gala last year, she’s obviously someone important. Is she in the Society?”
“No.”
“The Forum?”
He was silent.
“Callum,” Reina growled, and he came to a sudden stop.
“Remember when I told you that my magic doesn’t have rules?”
Reina paused in a combination of pure surprise and a near run-in with a pedestrian. “What?”
“My magic.” He looked different than usual, even with the characteristic effervescence of illusion. Reina racked her brain for what this particular expression was and couldn’t think of anything. “It doesn’t . . .” Callum hesitated. Intriguing. Very un-Callum. “I can’t control the outcome,” he finally said. “I can push something, or pull it, but I can’t always determine which way it’ll go after I interfere.”
“Wait.” Remorse, that’s what it was. Fascinating. “Are you saying you did something to her?”
“I think so.” He grimaced and looked away, glancing at the building they’d paused beside. It looked like all the other buildings on the high street. “We’re here, by the way.”
Ah, but as far as stealthily plotted ambushes went, this errand could wait five minutes. “What do you mean you think you did something to her? Shouldn’t you know?”
“I was a little compromised,” he said testily.
“You mean drunk?”
He dropped his chin to glare at her. “Fine. Yes. I was drunk. She’d shown up to kill Atlas and decided not to. I could feel her giving up, so I turned the dial up.” He looked away.
Reina stared at him. “What dial?”
“Does everything have to have a name, Mori? It’s fucking magic, I don’t know. Her purpose, her . . . joie de vivre,” he said in a sardonic tone. “It was fading, so I turned it back up.”
Reina felt a sharp stab of annoyance at the outcome of this obviously poor decision. “Is she one of the people hunting us now?”
“Obviously not.” Callum gestured to her phone with an irritated flick of his wrist. “She’s under federal investigation. If she’s not currently in jail, she will be soon.”
“Because you put her there,” Reina realized. “You . . . you made her do things?”
“No, I made her want to continue to do things,” Callum corrected. “How was I supposed to know what those things would be? I didn’t tell her to go out and do crime,” he muttered gruffly. “That was entirely her decision.”
Reina arched a brow. “You really think it’s defensible? You essentially drove her insane.”
“I didn’t drive her insane. She got reckless and stopped being careful. That’s just, I don’t know, a natural feature of her personality regardless of my intervention. She used to be an activist,” he added. “She has a public record.”
“None of which you knew about at the time.” Reina wondered what was happening to her. She felt a stirring of something she couldn’t name. A sensation in her chest that felt a lot like weeds growing higher, bursting up from the cracks in the ground.
“Are you scolding me? You’re the one using those exact powers now. You have been for months. I warned you things wouldn’t always go as planned—”
“Let’s just go inside.” Reina’s heart was hammering in her chest at the prospect of something. Consequences, possibly.
But Callum had been intoxicated when he did that, whatever he’d done to the professor. He had acted alone and impulsively. Reina, however, had a plan. She had many plans. She didn’t run around lighting people on fire without calculating the risk of what went up in flames.
The man at the front desk said something in French, probably asking for their credentials, but he quieted at a glance from Callum, who hadn’t even removed his sunglasses. Reina’s pulse was still a little fast, just enough to make her throat dry. She cleared it and looked at Callum—a long look, for something she wasn’t sure she’d find—until they stepped into the lift side by side.
“I told you,” he said again. Less angrily this time.
The lift rose with a quiet whir, dinging when they reached their intended floor.
Reina let out a reluctant sigh.
“Yeah,” she finally said. “I know.”
They stepped out of the lift in near synchronicity, reaching the landscape of an open-plan floor below a series of glass panes, skylights. The shadows fell over a sea of empty desks in sharp lines, like paper cranes.
“Hello. Welcome to the French offices of the Forum.” A woman at the reception desk greeted them in English, her accent softening the consonants. “Nothazai’s in a meeting. He’ll be with you shortly.”
Nobody was supposed to notice them, much less be aware they intended to speak to Nothazai. Reina balked, glancing at Callum for confirmation that he’d done this. He looked back at her with a tiny shake of his head.
“Have a seat,” the receptionist said warmly. “I’ll bring you some coffee. Unless you prefer tea?”
“No.” Reina would have been more polite if she felt the receptionist was acting of her own volition. Nobody should have known they were coming. This reminded her of Callum’s work, though they’d come at least far enough as a unit that Reina believed him when he said he hadn’t done something.
“Very well, some lemonade instead,” the receptionist said, stepping out from behind the desk to disappear behind an unmarked door.
Reina turned to Callum, eyeing the evidence of confusion furrowed between his brows. “Is she dangerous?”
“Her? No. She’s on autopilot.” Precisely as Reina had guessed. “As far as I can tell she doesn’t even know she’s awake.”
“What about—”
“Nothazai? If he’s a threat, I’d say we’re well-equipped to handle it.” Callum glanced around, then took a seat in one of the leather armchairs. “She said to wait, so let’s wait.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t—”
“Why spoil the surprise, Mori?” He sounded disgruntled, perhaps because it was the second surprise of the day. “Just sit down. If we have to kill someone, then we kill someone. It’s just another fucking Tuesday.” His voice was dull, more perfunctory than wry.
“It’s Monday.” Reina sat warily and he glared at her. “Fine. Point taken.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, clearly planning to ignore her and bother Tristan, or maybe just search for the best sushi nearby, who could say. Reina did the same, reopening the browser tab of news.
“Wessex Corporation acquires latest disruptor in consumer healthcare market.”
“The Forum wins landslide victory in international human rights case.”
“They really think they’re the good guys,” she murmured.
“Everyone does, Mori,” Callum muttered beside her. “Everyone does.”
Annoyed, Reina gave up on the news, instead choosing to open her social media app of choice. She had zero followers and followed only a dozen accounts herself, mostly news outlets, but right away there was a picture that reassured her. A dog and a baby curled up together, both wearing matching bonnets. The caption was the snoozing face, with the zzzz.
“Bae again?” asked Callum.
Reina looked up to find that he was watching her. “What?”
“Nothing.” He was smiling faintly.
She sighed internally. How easily he could transition from fear and despair to suddenly possessing the upper hand. “His name is Baek, not Bae.”
“Right, well, you’ll forgive me for forgetting.”
The account belonged to Congressman Charlie Baek-Maeda, an American politician up for reelection. He was young and beloved, handsome and well-spoken and the son of immigrant parents of modest means rather than the usual product of nepotism like the incumbent he’d ousted to win his district’s congressional seat. Baek-Maeda’s daughter Nora was ten months old, his rescue dog Mochi a constant fixture on the campaign trail. His social media followers—including Reina—numbered in the hundred thousands as a direct result of both.
“His puppy and his baby.” Callum peered over admiringly. “Is that him playing guitar?”
Below the top three photos was a video from the campaign trail, in which Baek-Maeda played guitar while baby Nora, wearing headphones, was perched facing out in the harness he wore across his chest. “Is there a woman alive whose ovaries haven’t exploded at this point?” Callum mused. “Minus yours, I suppose.”
“Please don’t discuss my ovaries,” Reina muttered, scrolling.
“Do you have a crush on him? Tell me the truth.” Callum sounded gleeful.
“I’m keeping an eye on him for political reasons. He’s on the money committee.”
“Appropriations committee,” Callum corrected. “They’re all money committees.”
“Whatever. It’s vocational.”
“You like him.” Callum’s voice had taken on a wretched element of whimsy.
“I can use him.”
“Both can be true.”
Fine, Reina thought internally. Callum wasn’t wrong. Baek-Maeda’s supporters were idealistic enough to succumb to occasional glimmers of hope—truthfully, most people watching his press conferences could be convinced even without Callum and Reina’s help—but she had a streak of benevolence toward Baek-Maeda himself. Possibly because his baby was cute, but more likely because his values aligned so beautifully with hers.
“He’s your chosen one,” Callum said sympathetically.
“Stop it.”
“The gods all have favorites,” Callum noted. “Why shouldn’t you?”
She sighed heavily. “You’re mocking me again.”
“Yes, Mori, always. But am I wrong?”
No. Callum was right—she did have favorites. Baek-Maeda had come so far on his own, with no help from Reina or anyone. And it wasn’t like she was asking him to slaughter his firstborn or build an ark. “Is it so bad for me to want to help him?”
“Of course not.”
She glanced at Callum again, checking for a smirk. “It’s not the same as you interfering with some war criminal,” she warned.
“She wasn’t a war criminal until I interfered,” Callum said.
Reina frowned. “I assume you know that’s not a defense.”
“I,” Callum said, “am generally undefendable. You already know that.”
The office was eerily quiet. No plants, Reina realized, glancing at the floor beside her. There was a ring of something that must have at one point been a potted tree. It had obviously been removed recently—she could see traces of dirt.
In the resounding silence, Reina looked around, spotting more evidence of plants that had been removed. A decorative watering can on the receptionist’s desk. Empty spaces on empty desks where sun would be most advantageous. “Are we in danger?”
“Nothing I can sense.” Callum kicked one leg out, crossing it over the other.
“Could someone have tipped him off, somehow?”
“You haven’t made a secret of your movements, Mori, but I doubt Nothazai could follow the threads just from watching. Just relax,” Callum advised. “Don’t waste your energy. You might need it later.”
Fine. True. Reina sat back with a sigh. “Maybe I should start carrying around a small succulent.”
“Don’t they annoy you?”
“You annoy me.”
Callum’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out, glanced at it, then returned it. Obvious who it was, as Callum only had one real correspondent.
“Are you going to reply?” Reina asked.
“Later.” He looked at her. “Are you?”
He meant to Nico, possibly, or more generally to Parisa. Not that Reina had heard from her since the last message, which had been months ago.
Still, she kept asking herself the same thing. “Me? I’m busy.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Agreed, it wasn’t. “I don’t owe you an answer.”
“And yet I’ve been so generous with answers today, have I not?”
Reina turned to face him. “Why was she there to kill Atlas?” she asked tangentially. “The war criminal doctor.”
“She’s a professor. And he’s the head of a secret society guarding an infamous magic library, so.” Callum flicked a glance at her. “Kind of a no-brainer, Mori.”
She frowned. “What would killing him have done?”
“I don’t owe you an answer,” Callum replied. She glared at him, and he laughed. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Nothing, I guess. It felt personal.”
He didn’t answer. She was about to push him, to prod him along like the stubborn cow he was, when the unmarked door opened again and Reina jumped.
“Miss Mori? Mr. Nova?” said the receptionist, holding a glass of sparkling lemonade in each hand. She shouldn’t have known who they were, as they were both more illusioned than usual for the task of entering the serpent’s den, but by then it was obvious something had interfered with their best laid plans. How nefarious that interference would ultimately be remained to be seen, though, as none of their previous assassins had offered them refreshments. “Right this way, please.”
Reina glanced at Callum again, wondering if she should be more concerned. He stood with a shrug, taking the glass of lemonade, then gestured for Reina to go first. “No,” she hissed at him, pointedly refusing the proffered glass, because no one practical consumed food from one’s enemies, or the Underworld.
“Fine.” Callum strode forward, following the receptionist, whose high heels clacked against the marble floor. “If it’s booby-trapped, I’ll scream ‘ahhhhh.’ That can be the signal.”
“Shut up.” The receptionist gave no indication of hearing them, leading them first through a corridor at the end of the bright, airy lobby, then taking a left to pause before an office door that had been left ajar.
She didn’t enter, merely gesturing them in. “Nothazai will see you now,” she said with a smile, before turning around and retreating the way she’d come, Reina’s lemonade still clutched in one hand.
When the receptionist had disappeared around the corner, Callum pushed the door farther open, revealing another sun-filled room. An office, glass panes, elegant leather furniture, a desk.
“Oh,” Callum said, pausing so abruptly Reina nearly crashed into his back.
“Oh indeed,” came a voice behind the desk, and Reina groaned aloud.
“You.” The figure behind the desk wasn’t the man who’d once tried recruiting Reina to the Forum.
It was a woman.
A specific woman.
“Surprise,” said Parisa Kamali, lifting a pair of gold high heels onto the desk one by one, propping one delicate ankle atop the other. Her dark hair was pushed back by a pair of sunglasses remarkably similar to the ones resting in Callum’s breast pocket, and her dress, a blue so pale it might have been gray, was as immaculate as ever.
She looked unchanged. Reina could think of no reason for the thud in her chest aside from some belated pulse of fear, or a renewed one of loathing.
“Where’s Nothazai?” asked Reina with a growl. Callum set down his glass and pulled out a chair, falling into it. Reina did not do the same. She had no plans to make herself comfortable, something she hadn’t been for months and certainly wouldn’t be now, even though she struggled to imagine somewhere safer than wherever Parisa Kamali was. She struggled, in fact, to imagine Parisa Kamali nervous or scared or even properly threatened by anyone who wasn’t Reina herself, who’d once stabbed her in a projection that felt like a dream. Still, Reina’s pulse had yet to slow.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, sit down,” said Parisa, glancing at Reina.
She hadn’t realized that she could forget how beautiful Parisa actually was until the surprise of it landed like a blow. “Fuck you,” said Reina.
“Ladies, please,” said Callum.
“Fuck you,” said Reina and Parisa in unison, to Callum’s apparent delight.
“Works every time,” he chuckled to himself, earning a glare.
“Sit,” said Parisa.
Reina, much to her displeasure, sat. “Where is he?”
“Nothazai? He cleared out a few hours ago, not long after we had some words. Pâté?” Parisa offered, sliding a plate across the desk. Callum sat up for a bite, which Reina obviously ignored.
“Did you really make us wait in the lobby for no reason?” she growled.
“No,” Parisa corrected. “I made you wait in the lobby for one very important reason, which was my amusement.”
“Don’t antagonize her, Parisa, you’ll only make her more difficult to persuade,” Callum warned, sampling a spot of liver from the edge of his thumb.
“Fuck you,” Parisa assured him once again, cordially nudging a plate of frites his way. “Anyway, you really should learn your lesson from this. You’re incredibly easy to predict and even easier to follow.” She zeroed in on Reina. “What exactly was your plan here?”
“He’s trying to kill us,” Reina said bluntly. “My plan was to ask him—” Callum snickered, and Reina glared at him. “—to stop.”
“Ah. Well, you don’t have to worry about Nothazai anymore,” Parisa said with a shrug. “I have a feeling he’s seen the light.”
Absurdly, Parisa killing one of Reina’s would-be assassins on Reina’s behalf made Reina want to have killed Parisa’s first. Or potentially Parisa herself. The balance of power was all amok again. Was Reina supposed to now grovel in thanks? She considered what would make Parisa angriest and decided it was choosing not to play. So, Parisa had taken the time to meet them here? That could only mean she wanted something.
Whatever it was, she wouldn’t get it.
“Fine. Enjoy.” Reina rose to her feet. “We’re leaving.”
Callum, unfortunately, did not take the cue. He raised a small handful of frites, examining them. “You don’t happen to have any—?”
“Here.” Parisa pushed a small saucer of aioli toward him. “Reina, sit down.”
“Whatever you want, I’m not interested,” Reina said.
“That’s an outright lie. You’re so interested you can barely think. Sit.” Parisa’s dark eyes met Reina’s expressionlessly. “I need to talk to you about Rhodes.”
“I’m offended you’re not including me in this conversation,” remarked an idly chewing Callum.
“Only because I already know your stance on the matter. We need to kill her,” Parisa continued to Reina, tonally unchanged. “I don’t like it, but it has to be done.”
“Oh, fine,” said Callum, as Reina let a beat of confusion pass.
“I’m sorry, what?” Reina felt herself sit down again. “I thought this was about something else.”
When she’d first read Parisa’s messages—the ones she had not bothered to respond to and had not thought about—had not thought about that much, anyway—Reina had assumed Parisa’s game centered around the experiment Dalton had been researching, Nico’s so-called Sinister Plot. The one about cosmic inflation, creating new worlds, the spark of life that Reina had already proven she could make. At first, Reina had foolishly allowed herself to believe it might have been Atlas reaching out to her, admitting at last the nature of his ambitions for which Reina had been carefully selected, and she had been fully prepared to say no. Or, in moments of total fantasy, to be gently and luridly flattered in a way that would still—probably—end with no.
But now, knowing it was Parisa, even the fantasy was out of the question. Creating worlds for someone so fundamentally uninterested in the contents of this one did not feel wise, nor particularly responsible. Parisa had not accepted the Society’s invitation to save the world or even fix it; like Callum, Parisa did not believe it could be fixed. Unlike Callum, however, Parisa was motivated, competent, and angry.
Not a chance that Parisa’s endgame was anything short of personal tyranny.
“Says the woman who is actively manipulating public elections,” remarked Parisa.
“I have my reasons,” Reina muttered.
“So do I.” Parisa considered her for another long moment. “Look, I changed my mind,” she said in a tone Reina might have called honest if she believed that to be within the realm of possibility. From Parisa, honesty could only ever be tactical. “The experiment is a bad idea. And regardless, we have more pressing concerns.”
“We?” Unbelievable.
“Has Atlas tried contacting you yet?” Parisa asked, sitting upright and folding her hands beneath her chin.
Reina knew Parisa already knew the answer and loathed her powerfully, anew. Reina resented that in arranging this meeting, Parisa had intentionally placed them like this, hierarchically, as if only her opinion mattered. As if only her voice had a right to be heard. “Why should Atlas contact me? Our time at the archives is finished. I have other plans, none of which include him. And if you’re trying to dissuade me from the sinister plot” (damn it, Nico) “there’s no need to worry about it. The pieces are incomplete whether Rhodes suddenly becomes amenable to it or not. They still need me, and they definitely need Dalton. Atlas will never convince me. The others will never convince you to let Dalton do it for anyone but you. As far as I can tell, we’re at an impasse,” Reina concluded, “so the experiment is already dead.”
“So to summarize, your answer is ‘no,’ which I find very troubling,” Parisa observed aloud, turning to Callum. “Don’t you think so?”
He shrugged in tacit agreement. “I had my suspicions we’d be subjected to further philosophical posturing from Atlas by now, but Reina’s still doing well on her own, so maybe not.”
This again. Callum had already warned Reina that Atlas would come to persuade her to his side—to be a weapon deployed at his bidding, just as everyone had always expected of Reina, who could do so little on her own without the (usually shrill, plant-speaking) demands of someone else—only at the moment she’d lost all hope. Parisa had made the same offer, and come to think of it, so had Nothazai, once.
Maybe the mistake everyone else had made was in assuming that Reina would ultimately fail, which she had not. She would not, and of course she wouldn’t. She had gone so far as to align herself with Callum Nova just to make sure that apparent destiny would never come to pass.
Nico she would forgive when the time was right; someday, when thinking of the year without him hurt her less. Eventually, her disappointment in his underestimation of her friendship would no longer be relevant, and it would pass. But she had already made good on everything Atlas had promised her the day he walked into her Osaka café, and if he had not found her worthy of confiding in before now, then she had no plans to reroute her design for his benefit. Her powers may not have always felt like hers to use, but they were hers to ally if and when she chose to.
She had already taken what she needed from Atlas. There was no further value to being his choice.
“The merit of Reina’s success or failure is a theoretical exercise for another day. Presently, we all have a very real problem. I talked to Rhodes,” Parisa continued, turning her attention to Reina again. “She’s back.”
“I know.” Reina could feel herself muttering again.
“She’s not the same,” Parisa said, before reconsidering. “Or maybe she’s exactly the same and that simply wasn’t a problem before. Moral inflexibility can look like virtue in certain lights. But it is very much a problem now.”
“What changed your mind?” Callum asked, ostensibly pleased by the turn of events. “You’re the one who went out of your way to make sure your little lamb stayed out of trouble when the requisite murder-plotting was afoot. If you hadn’t, she’d be dead already.”
Arguably false, even in Reina’s mind. Perhaps for that reason Parisa was still looking at Reina when she answered Callum’s question. “Maybe Rhodes changed my mind. Maybe the fact that you’re still alive and of apparent use to society changed my mind. Does it matter? I’m complex, Callum, it happens. I’m capable of changing my path when circumstances are no longer applicable. Rhodes, however, is not.” Parisa reached daintily for a fry. “She knows something, something bad, and even Varona knows that someone has to die,” she said quietly, as if Reina might have forgotten. “It’s either one of them or one of us.”
“We’re not an us,” Reina said at the same time Callum said, “I had a thought I might kill Tristan. You know, for fun.”
“Please don’t waste my time,” Parisa said to Callum before turning back to Reina, saying, “We’re an ‘us’ insofar as we’re the people most at risk. The other three went back to the Society for a reason. The archives can still use them; the house can still drain them. They might have longer before our collective breach of contract strikes, but the farther we travel from the archives, the more danger we’re in. Not to mention the very many other threats that are tracking us everywhere we go.”
“I thought you solved the Nothazai problem?” Reina said dryly, being intentionally difficult, which unfortunately Parisa already knew, because it no longer seemed to land.
“We already know that Atlas didn’t fulfill his ritual and it killed everyone else in his cohort,” Parisa said. “All six of us are alive. The archives are owed a body.”
“I can kill you right now,” suggested Reina. “Save us a lot of mess.”
“Yes, you could,” Parisa agreed. “It’d be a waste of this dress, but fine.”
Their momentary standoff was disrupted by Callum, who had returned his attention to the plate of frites.
“What changed?” he asked again. “Why Rhodes?”
“I always told you she was dangerous.” Parisa drummed her fingers on the desk. “Of course, previously I meant it in the sense that she ought to live and you shouldn’t, because she had potential she hadn’t yet reached and yours had a ceiling we already knew. I can see now that I was wrong to trust the scale of that potential. And clearly,” she said with pointed deliberation, “if someone should die for the crime of being dangerous, you were always the absolute worst choice.”
“Insult taken,” Callum said. “And I’m telling you, I’m going to kill Tristan.”
“When?” Parisa asked with obvious exasperation.
He doused a fry in aioli. “I’m getting around to it.”
“Murder threats,” Parisa said tartly, “are not an appropriate seduction.”
“Have you tried?” Callum said through a mouthful of food.
“Yes, Nova, I’m not an amateur—”
Something else was bothering Reina. Something flimsy, but something nonetheless.
“Why are you asking me?” she cut in, interrupting Callum and Parisa’s argument.
She felt Parisa in her thoughts, probably moving things around in her brain. “I asked you a question,” Reina said irritably. “Just answer it, and maybe I’ll answer yours.”
Parisa’s glare was impatient. “I don’t understand the relevance of your question.”
“The relevance? No relevance. It’s just a question. You put in all this effort to find me, to contact me—to convince me—when you’re the only one of us who’s actually seen Rhodes, and therefore you could have killed her on the spot. Unless you didn’t because you couldn’t,” Reina realized, “in which case there is someone less dangerous than Callum, and it’s you.”
“Zing,” said Callum in an appreciative whisper.
“Shut up,” said Reina and Parisa in unison, at which point Parisa rose to her feet.
Her mouth was tight with something. Annoyance, probably, that Reina had made a salient point—which Reina was always doing, for anyone properly keeping score. It was everyone else who didn’t make any sense.
“The ritual is arcane, not merely contractual,” said Parisa tightly. “There’s a reason we studied intent. The purpose of the elimination is to derive a sacrifice worthy of the knowledge provided to us.” Her lovely mouth was uncharacteristically thin. “We all chose Callum. That choice was significant. We should all choose Rhodes. The arrow is most deadly only when it’s most righteous. If that sacrifice is going to save the rest of us this late in the game, then it has to be done right.”
Interesting. Very interesting. The analysis was sound—Parisa wasn’t an idiot, nor was she inadequate as a medeian or a scholar—but that wasn’t the interesting part.
“You’re lying,” Reina deduced with a sense of triumph, and when Callum did not contradict her—he didn’t agree with her, either, but Reina was going to take her wins where she could get them—she felt a smile cross her face. “You can’t do it, can you? Because you’re afraid of Rhodes.”
Parisa’s face went motionless.
“Maybe I am. Maybe you should be.” Reina understood from experience that Parisa would leave soon. She would leave because Reina had gotten close, too close to the truth for comfort. Reina knew something now that she shouldn’t, which was that Parisa wasn’t capable of taking care of this on her own. Because Reina was supposed to be the useless one, the pointless one, the one who wasn’t in control of her own magic—but in the end, it was Parisa who had come out of the Society house more powerless than she had been before.
She had walked in capable of murder. She had walked out full of softness and regret.
“You came to beseech me. To petition me like an actual god.” Reina couldn’t keep laughter out of her voice. “You tried to make me think I was crazy for even trying to change things, but I wasn’t. I’m not. I can make this world different. I chose to change this world, but you can’t do that. You aren’t capable. You never were.”
It all seemed so ridiculous now. Reina’s rivalry with Parisa, or whatever it was that had made her care so much for so long about what Parisa felt, what Parisa thought. It was a game that Reina had been playing for over two years, but now she understood that she had always been winning it. She had already won.
Parisa’s face was drawn. Callum was silent.
“Is that what you think?” Parisa asked.
“You know what I think,” Reina replied.
There was a moment when the pulse in her chest fumbled. When there should have been some sardonic reply, some cutting remark, and there wasn’t one. Parisa was silent for a long time, too long, and eventually Callum rose to his feet.
“Come on, Mori.” He nudged Reina with his shoulder.
No, Reina thought, staring at Parisa. Say something. Have the last word, I know you want it. Try to take it from me.
Fight back.
Parisa didn’t answer. She looked tired.
She looked—
“Mori.” Callum beckoned her with another motion of his chin. “We’re done here. Let’s go.”
Parisa didn’t stop him. She said nothing. Victory was Reina’s, or something like that, but it wasn’t satisfying. It felt more like a forfeit.
No, it felt like an ending—that was the word. Everything was over now, finished, the end. There had been no latent threats, no promise of danger, no warnings to dog her around, no further games to be played. No fear me, Reina to keep her company in the dark. The last look on Parisa Kamali’s face had been one that Reina had seen her wear only once, just before stepping off a manor house roof.
And now Reina would never have to see her again.
Reina ambled after Callum warily, nearly pausing twice, a third time, to leave some final comment, to win the game more, to make it harder, escalate it. To uncover a new level, something else to fight for. Not that Reina didn’t have enough on her plate as it was. Injustice would take a lifetime to fight. This world would take far more than six months to fix. Reina had a to-do list the length of which could span the full diameter of the globe, and she did not need Parisa Kamali to give her a reason to stay in this room.
But she waited for one, just in case.
Still, the office was a finite space. It had limits, and eventually Reina crossed the threshold, leaving Parisa motionless behind her. Reina’s footsteps echoed beside Callum’s as they exited the lobby. Parted ways with the receptionist, sweat glistening now on Reina’s forgone glass of lemonade.
“I’m not wrong,” Reina said, stepping into the lift. She meant, of course, that nothing she’d said had been inaccurate, and it wasn’t. Parisa was afraid of Libby Rhodes. She had come to Reina only because she had no other options. Reina’s criticisms of Parisa’s motivations were tactile, definable, real, and Reina had not been mistaken.
Callum’s sunglasses were already on, his shrug nearly imperceptible beside her.
“To err is human,” he commented ambiguously as the lift doors shut, eclipsing the brightness of the office and swallowing them up.
