Chapter 41

Six months ago, it went like this:

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

In that moment, as the static in her ears reached a climax, or perhaps an end, Libby knew only one thing. She had her own pain. Her own regrets, many of which were impossible and futile, most of which engulfed her whenever she was most vulnerable, waiting for every opportunity to bring her low. She could close her eyes at any moment and destroy herself with them if she wanted to, and because she could do that, she knew that nothing Atlas Blakely had to say to her could be the moral of the story, nor was it even the story. People lived and people died, and the why of it was not enough to make a difference.

Her loss was an ocean, Atlas Blakely a speck in the sand.

Which was why it had been so easy to end it there, to let him be precisely what he said he was. Just a man. They lived and they died. He was the problem, okay, so be it.

She wondered if he knew what she decided in the moment it became clear to her. She felt confident he did—not because he said or did anything, but because he was a fucking telepath. That was the crux of it, really. There would be no strike of reckoning, no sudden bolt of epiphany. No tremors beneath her feet, no realignment in destiny or coagulation of fate, because Atlas Blakely was not a god. He was not a villain, fine, but he certainly wasn’t a hero. Neither was she. He was a telepath, she was a physicist, and they were all just doing their jobs the best they knew how. She had explained all this to Tristan and he had agreed at the time, or seemed to agree, though the rift between them had deepened as the weeks slid by, perhaps because unlike Libby, Tristan was incapable of actually acting on the choices he was given.

He had not killed Callum. Now, because of him, they no longer had the luxury of time.

She looked him in the eye and realized it would not have to be gory. It would not have to be violent. It would not require passion. The sacrifice she’d made to put herself in that room meant that every choice after would be difficult, but at least this one could be rational.

This decision could at least be hers.

He was standing behind his desk. Caretaker. Two years ago he’d held out his hand for hers and offered her a future if only she were dauntless enough to take it. If only she were brave enough to try. He hadn’t mentioned the other things—the price, the way power was not something waiting to be called on like a lover but something to be stolen like a right. Power came at someone else’s loss, and she knew this about Atlas Blakely: he had to lose.

He had to, because if he didn’t, she would let him offer her power all over again, and this time—if she allowed him a this time—she knew it would be different. It would be different because she would not mind the blood.

She had walked into this house unwilling to kill one person. She walked out with a massacre staining her hands. What was one more body?

She watched herself reach out, the motion between her hand and his breath a perfect, unfaltering calculation. It was sudden enough that he could not stop her, or he just didn’t bother to try. She reached out, touched his chest, and felt his pulse fail beneath her palm. Bodies were so faulty already, just moments away from total collapse. The shapes we take—the things housing our souls that we resent and mistreat and yet trust so implicitly—they were just objects of force, constantly acted upon. She was not numb with disbelief, not frozen with shock. She knew what she was doing. She understood the life she was taking.

Afterward, she looked at his lifeless eyes, the way his hand unfurled, and grasped, finally, what power truly cost.

“Why?” Tristan had asked her later, and Libby had told him the obvious answer. The world was capable of ending. If it did, it would be Atlas Blakely’s fault. Tristan himself had subjected her to the trolley problem once—a question of ethics, killing one to save five lives—and so she posed it back to him: kill one to save everything. Was it actually that simple? No, but was it actually that hard? She had come this far and bloodied her hands this much, and now nothing could ever restore her. Nothing could turn things back the way they’d been. Ezra had told her Atlas was the problem, but now, thanks to her, that was impossible.

A dead one, now.

. . .

But she’d miscalculated badly. Just because she killed the man did not mean she had disarmed his weapons.

Libby no longer troubled herself with questions of regret, though if she had one, it would have been this: her quiet desperation to carry out Atlas’s experiment. To let her own search for meaning twine irretrievably with Atlas’s influence, his plans. Atlas had warned her of it long ago, and again when she stood in his office. The trouble with knowledge, Miss Rhodes, is its inexhaustible craving. The problem is your need to know something because, after everything you’ve seen, the pain of not knowing would drive you mad. The madness had started years ago, before she’d ever set foot in this room, when she had named her worth by her power, by the immensity of what she could do. She had been primed for use by Atlas Blakely by her own compulsion to be the best, to be the smartest, the most capable person in the room. The perils of a small existence would be to wonder what she might have done, who she might have been, but she did that—suffered it—every day already. She had tried and failed to explain it to Belen, failed again to explain it to Tristan. That her sister Katherine hadn’t lived long enough to know who she might have been; whether she would have been a hero or a villain, whether she would have lived long and happily or wasted away in obscurity, neither she nor Libby would ever know.

If Libby was granted longevity and chose to ignore it, then her curse would be worse than blindness. It would be the unforgivable crime of living her life with her eyes shut tight.

Which was why the signs piled up and she ignored them. Tristan and the wine, Nico and his demurral, Gideon and his presence in her dreams. Parisa and her warnings. The appearance of Dalton Ellery. Two years had gone by with no thought to who he was or what he studied. How had Libby never wondered? She had trusted him, and that was her problem. When she trusted other people, things always went awry.

She looked at the scope of magic in the room and understood that Atlas Blakely was still alive in her, in everyone in this room, and knew that he could never die, not really. Not until she destroyed the framework of his grand design.

That much energy, that degree of entropy, it had to go somewhere. Just as it could not come from nothing, it could not simply disappear. This was the calculation she had not done, that Tristan and Nico had ignored, because they had not anticipated a reason to move backward; to let a moment of greatness—of monstrousness—fail.

Unlike her, they still believed in what magic could do without knowing what it could cost. How many lives had she destroyed just to come here, just to stand in this room and play god? Her mistake was letting any of it happen, or maybe her mistake was coming back at all, but Atlas was right, he was right, it wasn’t too late to change her path. To change all of their paths. There was only one way to rewrite Ezra’s ending, and it wasn’t the safeguard of Atlas’s death. Whatever world they might have found, whoever controlled the experiment, whichever personal ethics took the wheel—it still would have cost them this one, and Libby understood, finally, that the price of knowledge was too high.

There was such a thing as too much power. Such a thing as too much knowledge. Atlas Blakely was a speck in the universe, a single grain of sand, but his failure meant a ripple of consequence. The edges of his control stretched out to the precipice of this moment. Only Libby could see it. They weren’t gods. Just specks in the universe. This wasn’t their door to open.

Only she could change their fate.

She knew what the cost would be to make it stop. If Reina had been there . . . Parisa was right, and Libby hadn’t listened. There was no spare battery, no external generator to help absorb the reversing charge. (If Parisa had been there, a voice in Libby’s head whispered, maybe she would have stopped the whole thing sooner. Even Callum might have known they’d all been compromised, that certain things should not be done.)

Too late for what-ifs, for would’ves and could’ves. All that mattered now were ends. The rest of the story was simple: they couldn’t move forward. Everything they’d conjured so far would have to come to a screeching halt. But physics had rules, and so did magic: something set in motion would not stop. If she pulled them back now, all of this power would have to go somewhere. Like stars in the sky, they would have to find somewhere to die.

Once again, Libby Rhodes faced down the barrel of the unthinkable. She locked eyes with the unbearable. If this would finally be the thing to prove unendurable, so be it.

She had lived through the unlivable before.

So there they were again. Same problem. Same so-called solution. Kill one to save everything. Life was nothing but giving pieces of yourself away, little crumbs of joy to anesthetize the constancy of pain. Would it always be this, loving things only to lose them? She felt two hearts in her chest, twin pulses. Two souls in one orbit.

One beginning. One end.

It’s an alliance, Rhodes, I promise—

I’ve got you, Rhodes, from here on, I swear—

I trust you, Rhodes—

I trust you—

Gideon’s scream was piercing.

Then, finally, the dust settled, and for a moment, everything went still.

Libby closed her eyes.

Inhaled.

Exhaled.

Her hands shook. Her teeth chattered. Without warning, her knees collapsed.

“What have you done?” Dalton’s voice was snarling in her ear, his true colors finally showing. “You realize you’re pointless without him, we need him, I need him—”

Her cheek was pressed to the floor, her vision blurry when her eyes finally opened. It took her several blinks. She counted them. One. Two. Gideon hunched over. Tristan wrestling Dalton away from the uncanny stillness on the ground.

She’d never seen him not fidgeting.

Three. Four.

I trust you, Rhodes.

She closed her eyes again. The world cleaved open and she succumbed to it gladly, willing the darkness to swallow her up until finally, the earth fell still.