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“Rhodes, come on, I know you’re a heartless monster but please, I’m just a human man—”
It’ll crush me inside, but I’ll be quiet, I swear.”
Do you mean us? Or do you mean me? (Not an ambush, he’d said at the start. Just a thought.) Doesn’t something feel … wrong?
Had it been this all along? Maybe she’d known it. He had pushed her, always, he was at the center of her every accomplishment, standing beside everything she’d ever achieved. Every goal she’d ever reached. He was there in her orbit, and maybe that meant something. Maybe it was this. Maybe it was now. Maybe—
“So that’s your multiverse hypothesis—fifty-fifty odds, death or marriage?”
“I’m saying that—yes, okay? Yes, obviously I wonder sometimes, Rhodes, because you push me and I need that, and I need you. I want you in my life in a way that fucking bleeds significance, but it isn’t…” He grimaced again. “Maybe it’s not the kind of significance you want it to have.”
“Maybe there’s a version where we end up together, Rhodes, but it isn’t this one,” he said. “Maybe that just means not yet, but it definitely means not now. How could it be now?”
“Did you really think I could only love you if your hands were clean?”
“I will spend my life orbiting yours,” Nico said, and the exhaustion in his voice, she knew it. She understood it. “I consider it a privilege. Does that mean less if we never sleep together? If we never have babies and hold hands, does that have to mean less? You’re in every world I exist in, your fate is my fate, either you follow me or I follow you, it doesn’t matter which and I don’t care. If that’s not love then maybe I don’t understand love, and that’s fine with me—it doesn’t make me angry to know I’m actually an idiot after all. And if it’s not enough for you, then okay, it’s not enough.
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“I mean it, Rhodes, I don’t think I’m the answer you’re looking for. You wouldn’t be any more fulfilled with me. You’d just have this, exactly what you feel right now, but with someone who can dance much better than Tristan.”
This was the Varona she knew and did not love.
Before him had been grief and after him had come guilt.
Cosmic significance could go and hang.
she was enough or she never would be. Either this choice was hers, too, or nothing was, and who could ever be satisfied with that—with having power only to waste it?
What else is left to ask? What can be made of nature or nurture? There is only choice. There are only ends.
Atlas, plausible denier that he is, says that’s ridiculous, he has an alibi which is that he was several countries away and not a murderer,
but as we know, Atlas is not and has never been the paragon of virtue we all want him to be.
(Ironic, isn’t it? The powers we have and the ones we don’t. The people we can save and the ones we can’t.)
Even at twenty-six, Atlas Blakely knows he’s going to make a new world. He just doesn’t mean it literally yet.
How many times can a woman look you dead in the eye and dare you to change her mind before you finally realize you’re kind of in love with her? Three, it turns out.
Cassandra can’t save Troy and Atlas can’t save Alexis.
“I’m going to need to run an errand for the empire,”
She wondered what drove him to his version of filial piety. Perhaps whatever it was that drove her to the opposite of such things.
“Bring back his pectorals.” “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’re disgusting,” Callum informed her admiringly,
Reina had considered reaching out to him to ask if his field trip was going well, but then narrowly managed to remember at the last second that 1) it didn’t matter and 2) she didn’t care.
what loss was Reina to anyone?
I’m sorry I didn’t just tell you that even though you’re an idiot, it’s still a hell of a lot easier to miss you than to hate you. I’m sorry I wasted a whole year trying to live a stupid lie.
Still, Callum supposed he should be getting back to Reina, on the off chance that someone had finally noticed she was far more dangerous than Callum, purely because she still cared what happened next.
“I’m growing tired of running for my life. Truthfully, I’m finding your part in that to be something of an inconvenience.”
“Counteroffer. None of that comes to pass.”
“Just another Tuesday, right, Rhodes?” “It’s Wednesday.”
Like the dots of a message still typing, an answer yet to come.
he felt fear that tasted like sunrise, he understood what he was born for.
it was something terrible, something worse. Dread. Hope. Two sides of the same desperation.
There was so much joy. There was also so much fear.
Known was not the same as caught, but Gideon understood the line was growing thinner.
Varona and Rhodes, duality and synchronicity. Beginnings and endings, stardust and stars.
It was straightforward, can you save the world? And her answer had been yes. Yes, I can.
Not just obvious. It was the only thing. There was nothing else. “I don’t know,” Libby said, “and I don’t care.”
Either she was enough or she never would be.
She had always known it. She had always been right. She had always been wrong.
Listen to me, Libby, you’re a weapon, I saw to it myself.
Well, Callum was very pretty, so there was that.
Think, Parisa thought. Emotions were for losers.
Probably bad news, but possibly good.
You, of all people, must understand.
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.
But she’d miscalculated badly. Just because she killed the man did not mean she had disarmed his weapons.
Libby understood, finally, that the price of knowledge was too high.
