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Only one person on earth knows for sure what Callum actually looks like. Unfortunately for Callum, that person wanted him dead. Unfortunately for Tristan, he did not want it badly enough
In the end, the pitfall and the providence of knowing Nico de Varona was that he could not be readily forgotten, nor easily parted from. Missing him was like missing a severed limb. Never quite complete and never whole, though on occasion the vestigial aches proved helpfully informative.
(If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.)
If power is a thing to be had, it must be capable of possession.
Your capacity for power increases exponentially in relation to the actual power you have gained. Thus, to gain power is to be increasingly powerless. If the more power one has, the less one has, then is it the thing or are you?
The moment Ezra Fowler left her behind, two things became clear. The first was that the room—with its sparsely made bed and neatly folded clothing and orderly collection of prepackaged food—was meant for someone to live in for months, perhaps years. The second was that Libby Rhodes herself was the room’s intended occupant.
Without Libby for a counterweight, there was nothing to temper his recklessness. Nothing to anchor him at all.
Reina Mori had not yet realized that people had a maddening tendency to be precisely what they were in the most unpredictable, erratic way possible.
Strangling, of course. Always a bit sexual, that. Poisoning his soup, which was ridiculous. They all knew Tristan had some kind of persisting aversion to broth.
Her hair was matted down, soaked with sweat and grimy with ash, and the real Libby Rhodes would have been exhausted by now. But this was Tristan’s version of her, and in his mind, she was tireless in defiance of her own limitations. So perhaps he deserved, then, to fly through the air concave, like the shape of a crescent moon.
What an omnipotent little idiot. She hadn’t been the only one staring—Atlas’s gaze was fixed on Tristan, a fragment of a thought slipping momentarily through the cracks of his careful preservation. It was something like desperation, only more flavorful, more dangerous. Barbed, so as not to be moved. Light at the end of a dismal tunnel. Something insidiously like hope.
“Do you think they know what it really means to love?” his projection-self mused aloud to him. “That it isn’t the simple joy of fondness, I mean. In fact it’s violent, destructive. It means to cut the heart out of your chest and give it to someone else.”
“I promise,” Gideon sighed, “that I won’t get myself hurt, killed, or otherwise maimed.” “No psychological damage either,” Nico warned. “Takes forever to get trauma out of the drapes.”
Elizabeth Rhodes, destroyer of worlds. The thought alone made her crave a doughnut, or perhaps some sort of custardy pie.
We have a craving for it, that sense of simplicity, but only an idiot would ever chase the past, because our perception of it is false—it was never that the world was simple. Just that in retrospect it could be known, and therefore understood.
“Libs.” Ezra’s voice was gentle and sorry, familiar and soft. “Are you hungry?” Later, Libby’s reasoning would be that she wasn’t even fully awake when her hand shot out to close around her ex-boyfriend’s throat. “Yeah,” she said hoarsely. “Starved.”
“I just don’t understand how you go from needing Varona’s help to suddenly deciding you must somehow be God.”
“But you picked Tristan. Why?” “Because he’s a masochist. And I’m a sadist.” On another day he would have congratulated himself for that remarkable succinctness.
Ezra was dying. Of boredom. Which was, it turned out, a far slower death than asphyxiation, or smoke inhalation.
“Your problem, Ezra,” he began, as Ezra scoffed and turned scornfully away. “Your problem, whether you realize it or not, is that you’re still there in that room while the bullets fly, choosing life and hating yourself for it.”
So. Given every subject matter available to him in the entire world, Tristan had picked a boring topic. How predictable of him.
“It’s not a knife. It’s just an arrangement of atoms, electrons, quanta, whatever you want to call it. It’s just a knife because your brain is telling you it’s a knife, because in this order, it is one. Other people see a knife and it’s just that, a knife, because that’s reality for them. But you.” Nico gave him a look so scalding Tristan nearly felt it. “You don’t have to see it the way anyone else sees it. You could take this—” He held up what remained of the handle. “You could make this a fucking pony. An ice cream cone. An atomic bomb. You can see time, you can use it,
He was still being willfully obtuse about it, not that Reina was surprised. This was what came of choosing a depressed psychopath for a partner. Though again, her choices were limited.
“Do you miss her?” Parisa asked quietly. They didn’t have to say her name aloud. “Sometimes.” He missed Libby Rhodes the way he would miss having electricity. Or his left hand. He did not know how to function without her.
He had yet to release her hand. She was nothing like he had imagined—nothing that was possible to imagine—she was more like a dream. It crushed his chest with yearning, the stupor of infatuation, the idleness and opulence of a memory that had never existed. The velvet softness of her. He missed her already, like she was already gone.
“Was any of it real?” “Who’s to say what is and isn’t real?” She shrugged. Nico felt the odd sensation that he should thank her. Or possibly marry her.
Two things were becoming very clear to Callum. One was that Reina was actively insane.
The contact name was “Asshole (Derogatory)” to distinguish it from Max’s contact, which was “Asshole (Affectionate).”
Tristan Caine’s unsmiling mouth parted and in return, Libby’s heart went frantic. “Hello, Rhodes,” he said.
This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you. This was just what you got. Heartbreak was inevitable. Disappointment assured.
“Libby Rhodes is not your goodness, Tristan,” she cautioned. Steadying him, as if for disappointment. “She’s her own open flame.”
Because Tristan would rather have whatever version of Libby she had become than face the prospect of having no Libby at all.
Ezra Mikhail Fowler looked into the eyes of his death and thought ah, so then this is destiny. So this, then, was fate.
Relief, that no one had put a stop to that arrogant laugh. That Nico de Varona had never learned how fragile Gideon really was. That because Nico believed himself to be invincible, Gideon sometimes believed it, too, right up until the terrifying moments when he didn’t.
