· TRISTAN ·
It was a bit like drowning. Like being swallowed up by quicksand. His recognition had been lightning, the strike of realization like an epiphany or a thunderclap of fear, but the effects hadn’t happened fast, not instantaneously. More like bath water slowly being drained.
Which meant he’d had several seconds to realize what was happening. Something had failed in the experiment, that was obvious. He had seen them, other worlds, and they didn’t look like doors. Not like particles. It looked like time stretching out over a curvature of vastness, a fun-time mirror warping Tristan’s own image of himself. Like he could yawn outside himself and slowly return in a different form, melting from one world to the next like butter.
Wait, he thought when he felt it; sensed it, the drain starting to come undone. Like a sneeze that wouldn’t come or the seconds before an orgasm. Wait, I’ve almost got it, I’m almost there!
It was true! They had proven it! There were other worlds living on the backs of this one, burrowed into the notches of its spine! Maybe in one of them Tristan was married to Eden, maybe his mother was alive, maybe his father had actually killed him that time over the Thames, whoopsie, though at least in that one nobody needed to coddle his daddy problems.
Maybe in one of the worlds Tristan was happy.
Maybe there was a reason the archives didn’t want him to find out.
The first person in his head wasn’t Libby. He had already known that in a way, that things between them could never be the same, that even if he loved her he also hated her a bit, for giving him yet another reason to hate himself. Because he’d spent a lifetime wondering what am I, who am I, do I matter, am I useful? only to watch himself stand paralyzed in the corridor, tucked out of sight while she reached over and stopped a man’s heartbeat. Tristan had neither offered to help her nor stepped in to make it stop.
The decision, whether someone lived or died, that wasn’t his concern—yes, ultimately this was who Tristan Caine was, a man so morally repugnant that the murder itself was not the issue—but rather, it was his reaction to it that continued to plague him. The impulse to freeze in place, to do nothing. Insert something here about a reservation in the hottest circle in hell (he was familiar with that proverbial outcome), but he wasn’t a good man and he’d already known it. He’d known that. If he were a good man, he wouldn’t still be talking to Callum Nova. He wouldn’t be desperate like this, devastated by the loss of potential omnipotence, because he would care about other things. He didn’t know what, exactly, but maybe there was some other Tristan in some other world who did! Maybe there was a Tristan who enjoyed hobbies and practiced daily meditation, but now he’d never know, and that was what bothered him. That six months ago, Libby Rhodes had proved him to be the kind of man who stood by and did nothing. And now, finally, he had been about to do something. And she took that from him all the same.
But he didn’t think about Libby, not really. He thought, first, of Atlas Blakely, the man who’d stood in Tristan’s office two years ago and told him he was born for something more. At the time, Tristan understood it to be a cheap ploy, a tool of rhetoric. A man had stood there and told him he was special and he had not looked for signs, hadn’t checked for weapons, hadn’t realized the weapon was him. But this feeling, too, was not resentment. Tristan had seen the possibility of other worlds and was now at least in awe enough to feel some form of wonder. To feel the presence of great significance—eureka! He was met with elation and abject stubbornness. It was nobody else’s right to drain the bath.
Because Atlas Blakely was right, they were similar, they were the same. They were dreamers! Not the productive kind, the kind with goals, but sad, empty dreamers. Half-broken men who made plans because they could not make terror—the awestruck kind, like glimpsing an angel with flaming torches for eyes. They were men who made terrible decisions because it was the only way to feel at all. I understand now! Tristan wanted to shout. I understand why you made yourself god, because it was the only way to honor your sadness! The loneliness was so fragile, so human, so pitiful it was almost cute, nearly forgivable. A belief like that, a purpose like that, it could not be shakable. It could not be silenced. You could build castles on certainty like that. You could use it to build brave new worlds.
They’d made a mistake, the Society, choosing a man like Atlas who would in turn choose a man like Tristan. The Alexandrians should have stuck to what they were good at—breeding aristocrats who would not argue, who’d have no trouble with secrecy, who’d kill and kill and kill and never question what would come of that spilled blood. Crusades, the Age of Exploration, the world was built on men knowing how to keep a secret, how to restore order, how to sentence others to ignorance just to keep themselves on top. The Alexandrian Society, what a laugh. Someday someone really would burn it down, destroy it, because eventually the right blood would no longer exist, the right birth would no longer matter—somewhere, someday, not in a parallel world but in this one, there would be a revolution. The comeuppance this world deserved was coming, and then all that would be left were Tristans and Atlases who were born already knowing that this world was broken. Who knew that this library and all its contents had never belonged to the ones who’d been willing to kill to keep themselves alive.
At that moment, Tristan knew: someday this world would end, and in its place would rise a new one. Someday, in a world that did not make its inhabitants this hungry, someone would use this library to read a book and take a goddamn nap.
Tristan knew all of this, puzzling it out as he watched particulates of magic, motions and flurries that danced and ricocheted and sought a target, and he knew—like a book he was reading, a plot twist he was expecting, some narrative device he’d already witnessed ten times over—what was coming. He braced himself, waiting for where all that power would land. Not him. He was small and embarrassing, he was nothing, a speck in the sand, and he knew he was never capable of holding it. Morally speaking, ethically speaking, perhaps even in terms of metaphysical intangibles like substance or soul, Tristan was paltry, transparent, riddled with vacancy—if he jumped on a grenade, it would still destroy everything in its path. So then there were only two choices.
No, only one.
He was surprised how much the realization hurt, although he shouldn’t have been. If someone had asked Tristan before he walked into that room to choose one person to carry the weight of the world, he would have said Nico de Varona. He would have said it without hesitation. It would have been in a sardonic tone but he couldn’t help it, that was just his voice. He would have said that Nico de Varona was the only one who could save anyone. He’d already seen him do it. Tristan himself was living proof.
Like a drain, it went faster toward the end. Implosion, that was the word. The reverse of inflation. Tristan felt gravity return to his chest like a gunshot. He stared and stared and it was only a split second, the dance of things, the aurora of life that hovered for a moment before flickering out.
No, he thought. No, this isn’t right.
Someone was screaming, and Tristan wondered if it was him. If he’d stood by once again, helpless as always, or if he never moved because he was never the archer, he was always the arrow. He was someone else’s weapon yet again.
They were all thrown backward by the impact. Dalton was first on his feet, the first to see through the effects of the blow, which had jarred Tristan so hard his vision danced with fluorescence, bright spots of color where Nico had been.
“—ou know what you’ve done, do you have any idea?”
Dalton’s voice came and went, alternating with a piercing shriek in Tristan’s ear.
“—ve to fix it, get out of the way, someone move him—”
Tristan sat up. The room spun this way and that. He turned his head and vomited, vision clearing just enough to see that Libby’s face, pressed to the wooden beams of the floor, was ashen. A small gash on her forehead, tears on her cheeks. She didn’t make a sound, like she had no idea she was crying.
He didn’t not love her. Tristan rolled to his hands and knees, reaching for her, stumbling over a body on the floor.
“—eed to do it quickly, then we can do it again. Out of the way, get out of the way!”
Tristan had never heard Dalton sound like that. It was more than anger, more like childish frustration. A tantrum. “You stupid girl, do you have any idea what you’ve done, what it’ll take to restore him? That’s if he has any magic left in his body that you haven’t killed!”
Tristan shoved Dalton away, wrenching him back until he was mildly sure Dalton wouldn’t compromise the body. Then, sluggishly, he finished the effort of reaching Libby’s side.
Time and circumstance contorted again as Libby shrank away from him, shaking her head. “No,” she was saying to herself, too calmly, like maybe she hadn’t realized she hadn’t simply woken from a dream. “No, no, this is . . . This isn’t— Gideon,” she pleaded, pulling away from Tristan to reach for him. Gideon, fuck, Tristan hadn’t even thought about him, had forgotten him entirely. “Gideon, I’m sorry, I can . . . Somewhere in the archives must be something, a book or something, we can fix it—”
“We?” Gideon snarled at her. Tristan had never heard that tone of voice from Gideon, either. “We can’t fix this, Libby!”
“Atlas can do it,” Dalton was saying in a studious voice. He was warping in and out of rage, reverting to scholarly certainty. “I can bring the physicist back for long enough to reserve whatever’s not broken, and then Atlas can put it in a box like he did before. Or else the archives can—”
“Will you shut the fuck up?” Gideon’s voice again. Tristan was distracted by the feeling in his own mouth, rubbery and thick like paste. “You’re not putting him in a box. You cannot put him in a box, he’s not some science experiment for you to Frankenstein back together—”
“Gideon.” Libby’s voice again. It was still a little chilly, a little numb. “You don’t understand, we couldn’t let it happen. The experiment, it was—”
“Stop saying we.” The words were ice cold. Even Tristan suffered the effects of them like a sudden, dousing migraine. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry, Libby. You made a choice. Fucking own it.”
“I had to.” She was reaching for Nico’s unmoving hand and Tristan’s stomach turned again, bile coating his tongue. “I know what I did and believe me, Gideon, this wasn’t easy for me—”
“I don’t care how hard it was!” There was an expulsion from Gideon, a thin blast of heat that threatened to scorch Libby’s fingertips. She recoiled like a child, stung. “Do you understand that? Do you understand that there is no world where I forgive you for this?”
“We were going too far,” she repeated. “We’d gone too far, all of this was too far, you have no idea what I’ve already seen, Gideon, what I’ve already done just t—”
She stopped when she saw his face. Tristan wiped his mouth, looked up.
He knew that face. It wasn’t rage. Not anger.
It was anguish. Something deeper than pain, more silencing than fury.
It was grief.
“You don’t get to stand on his death and call yourself a hero,” Gideon said. His eyes were dull, lifeless. “Leave.” And then, more firmly, “Now.”
Libby’s mouth tightened. “You weren’t the only one who loved him. You’re not the only one who’s lost him. Don’t be selfish, Gideon, please.” Gideon flinched at the word selfish, and even Tristan wondered if she hadn’t struck too low. “Listen to me, you don’t understand what’s in these archives. What kind of knowledge is in these walls.” Her eyes flicked to the door of the painted room, to what Tristan understood belatedly was Dalton’s absence. The reading room, Tristan realized. Dalton must have gone to the archives. “Gideon, this isn’t over. If Dalton can just find a way t—”
“He’s not doing this. He’s not touching him.” Gideon had curled into Nico’s side, his head on Nico’s unmoving chest. “Whatever mutant you want to bring him back to be, I’m not letting you do it. You have to live with what you’ve done.”
The words were muttered, quiet as a prayer. Devastating as a curse. Tristan felt the waves of consequence and he knew it was over. It was over.
“Gideon.” To her credit, Libby was too righteous to tremble. Good, Tristan thought absurdly. Nico wouldn’t have been pleased to die for anything less than absolute certainty. He could practically hear Nico’s voice—Rhodes, if you’re going to murder me at least be sure about it, second-guessing is just so juvenile, you might as well re-grow your fringe.
“You know what’s funny?” Gideon said in a small voice.
Libby didn’t answer. Tristan didn’t move.
“I never wanted the answers he was looking for. Who I was. What I was.” Gideon sat up from Nico’s body, dazed. “I never needed to know because I was satisfied just being his problem. However long I got, it was enough just being his sidekick, being his friend. Being his shadow, fuck, being his left shoe.” A swallow. “That was always enough for me.”
Libby wet her lips, eyeing her hands. “Gideon, if I could do it over—”
“Yes. Yes, answer that question.” He turned his head to Libby with a sudden feverishness. “Would you do it over?”
Libby paused. She hesitated. Opened her mouth.
“You have to understand, this was—”
“Good. Own that.” Gideon dismissed her with a shake of his head. “Get your redemption somewhere else. Live with this.”
He curled back into Nico’s side and closed his eyes, and Tristan, who was not a religious man nor a sentimental one, understood that there were rites to be performed and this was one of them. He rose to his feet and took Libby by the elbow, guiding her slowly out of the room.
“He wasn’t the only one who loved him.” Her teeth were chattering, her legs shaking. Tristan guessed she was severely dehydrated and probably needed to sleep. “He doesn’t get to make this decision. We can fix it.”
A few hours ago it would have been a blow. Now it was just an insult. “We?”
“We just have to make sure Dalton doesn’t try that experiment again. But he can bring Nico back,” Libby said, “I’m nearly positive he can, or the archives can, and once he’s done that—”
Tristan didn’t realize he’d stopped walking until after she turned to look at him.
“What?” she said, though her tone was flat. She must have known precisely what.
“Why did you do it?” he said.
“What?”
“Atlas.” Tristan was breathing hard. “Why?”
“Tristan. You know why.” She sounded tired, exasperated, like he was wasting her time. “Everything I’ve done has only been to try to save—”
“Why is it only your choice?”
She blinked. Hardened. “Don’t tell me you blame me for this, too.”
“Why wouldn’t I blame you? You did it. I don’t recall you asking for my opinion.” He could feel his pulse speeding near his ears, whizzing like nausea.
“Tristan.” She stared at him. “Are you going to help me or not?”
He wasn’t sure what his problem was, only that he was rapidly approaching it. There was a buzzing in his head, a fly or something, or maybe it was Callum’s voice, or Parisa’s, or maybe it was Atlas saying Tristan, you are more than rare.
Maybe it was the fact that he couldn’t find his own voice in the midst of all that fucking noise. “Help you?” he echoed.
Tristan, help me—
He had already seen what death was. What a body could become. Particulates, granules. Meaningless components that combined could be a miracle. The coexistence of meaning and imperfection. The universe was an accident, a series of accidents, an unknown variable that replicated over and over at astronomical speed. This world was a fucking miracle and she treated it like a maths equation, like a problem to be solved. Her problem. Her solution.
And Tristan, of course. To clean up the mess.
“Did you really think you were so different?” he asked her in disbelief, wanting suddenly to laugh.
“Different from what?” Her eyes had narrowed and god, she had never looked so young.
“From Atlas. From Ezra. From anyone. Did you really think you were doing something different, making a different choice?”
She reeled backward, lurching away from him like he’d struck her. “Are you joking?”
“The irony is that I don’t think Atlas could see it. That after everything he tried to do, he was never making a new world. He was only re-creating himself.” So much for playing god! Imagine a god who did nothing but make smaller, worse gods. Well, that was mythology, Tristan supposed. Maybe Atlas thought he was Yahweh or Allah when he was actually just Cronus eating rocks, missing the evidence of his progeny as his own unavoidable doom. “If you keep going like this, Rhodes, you’re just going to dig yourself deeper. You’re just going to mutate along the way.” That’s what Gideon was talking about. Nothing comes back the same. Libby Rhodes was not the same, she could never be the same, and whatever Nico de Varona had been, they had already lost him. They had lost him.
Nico was dead. It settled like a stone in Tristan’s chest.
Grief, oh god, the weight of it. Depression was hollow, sadness was vacant. Neither was anything like this.
“Just tell me one thing,” he managed to say, as if one right answer might still salvage everything. “Could it have been you instead?”
He understood the betrayal he’d committed by asking, but surely she had to know. Surely she knew he had to ask.
She looked stunned for a moment. Only one.
“Should it have been me?” she snarled in lieu of confessing the obvious. That Tristan had asked her to choose herself last time, and now how could he blame her for doing it again? He couldn’t, of course. Not fairly.
But what about any of this had been fair?
By then, Libby had set her jaw, determined. Even in anger, in frustration, Tristan didn’t belittle her pain; he knew she was feeling it, that she would have to live with it and that was her curse, whether Gideon levied it or not, and Tristan didn’t have to wish suffering upon her to know that it was coming. He cared enough about her to understand that the outcome of her choice had damaged her irreparably. He loved her enough to know that she was hurting unimaginably.
He just didn’t want to help her do it anymore.
“From day one we knew there’d be a sacrifice,” she said, lifting her chin. “This was the only one that would have saved us all.”
Oh, so she thought she loved Nico more than Tristan loved anyone? Interesting. Salt in the wound. This much salt, though, and he could fill an ocean.
“We all wanted to be the best,” he said eventually. “Congratulations, Rhodes. Now you are.”
He kept walking until he passed her. She followed him, footsteps quickening to keep up with him as he went.
“Tristan.” Her voice was worried at first. “Where are you going?”
“Upstairs.”
“Tristan, we have t—”
“We do not have to do anything. We are done now, Rhodes. We’ve been dead for a long time.” He continued up the stairs, faster, her anger magnifying in peals of smoke as he went.
“So what was any of this, then? You’re saying it doesn’t matter?”
He ignored her. He could hear the panic rising in her voice and he wanted to say something, anything, but he didn’t think she’d understand. He didn’t think either of them were in a place to understand what she’d done wrong, which was either everything or nothing.
“I listened to you,” she reminded him, stopping in the doorway when he reached his room. He glanced around, looking for a bag, a clean shirt. This one had vomit and stardust on it. He picked one up, half listening to her rant. “You’re the one who told me how to get back. What did you think was going to happen?”
She was still standing there when he returned, having swapped his previous shirt for a new one, having decided the trousers could stay. What else did he need?
For what?
“Where are you going?”
Away, his brain said. Anywhere, just not here.
He took the stairs quickly, but not hastily. He wasn’t fleeing. He was leaving.
There was a difference.
“Don’t worry, Rhodes. I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“I—” She sounded shaken. “You said yes to this, Tristan. You knew blood was the price. You knew it just as much as I did, and if you think—”
He turned. Took her face in both hands and kissed her.
“It mattered,” he said. “All of it.”
From her stricken face he knew she’d heard the unspoken goodbye.
“Tristan,” she croaked. Unclear whether it was stay or go.
Whatever it was, it didn’t matter.
Just as Tristan turned to leave, he heard a scream from somewhere down the corridor. The reading room. The archives. The light in the corner was red, signaling a problem in the wards, and he and Libby both glanced at it, frozen. Both of them registering the threat.
But Tristan wasn’t the archives’ Caretaker. He was a researcher whose paperwork hadn’t even been filed, who had done nothing in his capacity beyond covering up another man’s death, and frankly, enough was enough. He’d said yes to all of this once, true, but that yes was no longer applicable. What good had anything inside this damned house actually done?
Tristan turned and kept walking. Libby disappeared from sight, a shrinking image in his mind. He finally stepped outside the wards of the house, the setting sun meeting his eye at an angle.
He thought it would feel . . . different.
“Oi, now, now!” came a voice behind him, followed by the sudden blackness of absolutely no thoughts at all.
