The Ends of the World Page 7

  But he’d also done so much to protect us. To take care of us. So much that it had gotten him killed.

  This was not a path I could let my mind go down right now. My mom, Fitz— I fisted my hands in my hair. Elodie. Concentrate on Elodie.

  “I should have known.” Jack paced the worn floral carpet in front of the door, thumbing his gun at his hip. “I should have at least suspected. About Fitz. Especially about Elodie. I’ve let us be in danger. I’m sorry. We’ll send her away. I’ll make certain she hasn’t bugged our phones, and—”

  I caught his arm. “Wait, stop. Do you really think we’re in danger? She’s been with us the entire time and nothing bad has happened.”

  “We’re Circle. She’s Order. I know it’s Elodie, and I know she’s saying the Order aren’t what we think, but I’m not sure that matters.”

  I glanced at the closed door and lowered my voice. “I understand if you don’t trust her entirely right now, but—”

  He took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him. I startled. Jack hadn’t touched me for so long. It felt both familiar and strange to be inches from his chest like this, his serious gray eyes pleading with me. “Avery. I know you haven’t been with the Circle as long as we have. There are things you don’t understand. Please let me do what I need to to protect you. As your Keeper and—”

  He cut off.

  Being under Jack’s gaze like this, with his hands on me—it was too much. All of today was too much. And as much as I didn’t want to admit it, no matter what Jack had done, when I started feeling this vulnerable, there was a part of me that wished more than anything that I could go back to how things were, melt back into his arms and let him protect me and convince me everything was okay.

  I ducked away from him. If I was going to get through this, I had to turn all that off. “I get it. But we need Elodie.” He started to protest again, and I held up a hand to stop him. “Just like we still needed you, after . . .”

  Jack’s face shuttered and he stepped away from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to—”

  “I understand. What are my orders on how to proceed, then?”

  I studied the worn carpet. I hated treating him like an employee, but maybe at this point, it was the only thing to do. “I really don’t think Elodie is going to put us in danger. We’re not kicking her out,” I said. “You can watch for anything improper, but I don’t expect you to find it. We’re going to continue to treat her like we always have. That’s my decision.”

  I thought he might protest—either as Jack the Keeper or something else—but he just inclined his head.

  Stellan’s voice came up the stairs, obviously on the phone, sounding like he was leaving a message. He emerged from a stairwell to stand by the window at the end of the hall, and I heard the snick of a lighter. Jack and I waited while he lit one cigarette, and a couple minutes later, a second. Then he came back to where we waited in front of the room.

  “We have fake passports, but this is Israel and there has just been a terrorist attack, and we’re the prime suspects. We won’t be able to get on a plane,” he said gruffly.

  I let my brain spin off of Elodie and on to what in the world we were going to do next. “Did you get ahold of Anya?” I said.

  “No,” he answered in a way that declared that the end of the conversation. He ran a hand over his face. His fingers were shaking a little, but even though he’d just had his whole world turned upside down, that was the only indication anything was wrong. I had to admire it. He probably had more control over himself—and as important, how other people saw him—than anyone I’d ever known.

  “We’ll have to get out overland,” Jack said.

  “Nowhere we could get to overland is an easy border with Israel, either,” Stellan said. “This is a terrible place to sneak out of the country on a good day.”

  “I’m saying it will be easier than flying.”

  “Obviously.” The two of them had no reason to be angry with each other, but the relief at seeing each other alive seemed to have evaporated under all this new stress.

  The door opened, and we all turned. “The border with Egypt is sometimes less strict. We could go directly to Alexandria overland,” Elodie said, standing in the doorway.

  We all watched her silently for a second. “How could we get to the border—and across the border—without the Melechs knowing?” I said, signaling to everyone to let the rest go for now.

  “We could hire a small plane. Or a helicopter,” Jack said.

  “We’d have to bribe the pilot to not say anything,” Stellan said.

  “Or threaten him,” Elodie added.

  As Circle, we’d gotten used to getting anything we wanted with a snap of our fingers. Suddenly, we were just regular people again.

  That gave me an idea. “How about we take a bus?”

  Elodie cocked her head to the side.

  “A bus,” I said. “Regular people transportation. We’d disappear in the crowd.”

  “Not a terrible idea,” Jack said. “The border will still be difficult, though, since we won’t be in their system.” I must have looked confused, because he explained, “Israel is different from many countries. When you enter, you get an entry stamp and they check you in to their system, and they have to check you out, as it were, when you leave. We didn’t have to show ID to get into the country, since we came in with the Circle, so the passports we use to get out won’t be registered.”

  “We may be able to convince them that we had the entry stamps on separate pieces of paper and lost them,” Elodie said.

  “If someone can get us into their computer system,” Stellan said. By someone he meant Elodie, but he wouldn’t speak directly to her.

  Elodie gave him a withering look anyway. “It’ll have to be once I’m within range of the computer they’re looking at, so it might be cutting it close at the border, but I can do it.”

  “What about Avery and Stellan?” Jack said. “Will anyone here recognize them? Not Circle, just regular people?”

  Elodie pursed her lips. It’s not like we were real celebrities, but when we’d had lunch with Colette in Paris a few days ago, there had been lots of people taking sneaky photos, and not all of her. I’d been all over the news for a while after Takumi Mikado died in my arms, then both Stellan and I had been all over the papers following the Paris attack. There was one photo in particular. It was a beautiful shot, I admit. My arms were covered in blood; there were smears on my face beneath my wide, haunted eyes. I was clinging to Stellan, and Colette held my other side. I’m sure the paparazzi had meant to get a picture of Colette, but it was me and Stellan the tabloids had picked up on. When it leaked that my mother had died in the attack, I’d become something even more fascinating, deified by tragedy.

  The feelings I’d managed to force down started to build back up into a hard knot in my throat.

  “Once we get to Egypt, it’s less likely they’ll be recognized,” Elodie said. “Here—it’s very possible.” I could see the wheels turning in her head. “Disguises. Just until we get to the border. We’ll be playing tourists anyway. I’ll go get them.”

  “I’ll go get them,” Jack said, casting a suspicious glance at Elodie that she pretended not to notice.

  Half an hour later, we looked like summer tourists in ridiculously loud outfits and sunglasses headed to the beach. The only problem was my hair. “Ironic that I originally did this as a disguise and now it’s the most recognizable thing about me,” I said, pulling at the pink.

  “We don’t have time to dye it again,” Elodie said. She reached up to her own head, the thought plain on her face.

  “You don’t have to—” I said.

  She pulled her wig off. “Just until we get to Egypt,” she said, handing it to me.

  I held it, trying not to stare at her head. We’d only se
en it for a second before. Half of it was scarred badly. The other half was buzzed close to her head.

  Elodie folded her arms across her chest. “What are you looking at? Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The bus was musty and tinged with the smell of someone’s tuna sandwich. We were winding through terrain that had us on switchbacks, the bus shifting into lower gears, jolting over rough pavement.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to get my head in a position that wasn’t killing my neck, and closed my eyes.

  I hoped this worked.

  Getting caught at the border would be as good as admitting guilt, as far as the Circle was concerned. Maybe we should have appealed to someone after all. Begged the Circle to believe us. Maybe I should have just confronted Lydia. I knew she was in Jerusalem.

  In those too-short days between when I’d gotten my mother back and when I lost her forever, we’d argued. It was almost all we’d done.

  We should leave, she’d said. Go somewhere safe.

  Safe no longer existed, I’d countered. Not now that the Circle knew what I was. So we didn’t run. We stayed. I was too confident in the goodness of human beings.

  This time, we’d made the opposite choice. If I was wrong again, it could mean all our heads.

  My eyes flew open.

  Through the gap in the seats, I could see Stellan in the next row up, his head against the streaky window, snacking on a bag of chips from a bus station vending machine. Some weird flavor of Cheetos. All the words on the bag were in Hebrew. He’d used Jack’s phone to call Anya’s nanny twice more, and had finally reached her. I knew he’d told her to go to the safe house and stay there. I wondered if I was the only one who’d noticed his foot was still bouncing nervously anyway.

  Jack was beside me, his arms crossed over his chest, eyes closed. I couldn’t tell whether he was actually asleep. Across the aisle, Elodie was on her phone, working on the program to get us across the border.

  If we got caught, Stellan and I would probably get a trial, as Circle family members. Jack and Elodie—

  My chest got tighter. I closed my eyes again.

  This time, I actually did drift off, because suddenly, I woke with a start. I couldn’t breathe. I sucked in gasp after gasped breath. I was drowning. I was—

  I was on a bus. It was dark and bumpy and dry. I could breathe fine. It didn’t make the tightness in my chest subside. It didn’t make the images in my head—the blood, the screams, the Circle with guns to our heads—go away. Jack opened one eye and looked at me, and I hugged my arms around myself and shivered. Outside, the bus’s headlights illuminated a warning sign. I squinted. It had Hebrew, Arabic, and at the bottom, English: Beware of camels near the road.

  The bus came to a sudden stop. Jack sat up straight and peered over the seats. Ahead of us, Stellan did, too. Two soldiers with guns and sniffing dogs got on. My whole body went cold.

  Jack put a stiff arm around me. “They’re not looking for us,” he murmured into my ear. “They’re checking for bombs, but we don’t want them to see your face anyway. Pretend to be asleep.”

  I leaned my head on his chest, letting Elodie’s blond wig hide my face, and he pulled his cap lower and leaned on my head.

  The soldiers went past us to the back of the bus, then through to the front again. I opened one eye. They hadn’t so much as looked at us. I relaxed, and felt Jack’s arm tighten around my shoulders with the same relief. For just a second, I accidentally leaned into it.

  “You okay?” he murmured. It was not a Keeper asking his charge whether she was safe.

  I nodded.

  “I don’t mean just that little scare. You’ve been—”

  I sat up. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you—”

  “I said fine.”

  Across the aisle, Elodie peered after the soldiers. Stellan glanced back at us, and I saw his eyes flick to Jack’s arm still resting around my shoulders.

  The second the soldiers stepped off the bus, I scooted away from Jack, and he folded his hands in his lap.

  The bus started back up and rattled on. My chest didn’t feel any less tight.

  “If you’re not fine, it’s understandable,” Jack said quietly. “You’re allowed to be sad. You don’t have to pretend you feel nothing. I know you don’t want to talk to me about it, but keep it in mind.”

  I wasn’t pretending. I was doing it on purpose, and this was exactly why. In the past couple of days a few emotions had snuck in, and now they were all rushing back at once. That was probably why kissing Stellan at the party had triggered those flashbacks, too, and all of it together meant I was having a really hard time functioning as well as I should. Hence turning it off.

  It wasn’t cold at all in here—in fact, it was stuffy—but I couldn’t stop shivering.

  When Jack realized I wasn’t going to answer, he began thumbing through his phone. He cursed under his breath.

  “What?”

  He handed me his phone.

  Rome. The Vatican. At the head of the story was a photo of dozens of emergency vehicles assembled in the iconic columned square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, their blue lights garishly illuminating the church’s façade. The same mystery virus had struck there just hours after it had hit in Jerusalem, killing half a dozen priests.

  Stellan turned, and I handed him the phone. This was just what we’d talked about as we hurried through the streets in Jerusalem. His bet on exactly where the Saxons would hit next was wrong, but the sentiment was right.

  “Religious extremism,” he said. “So that’s their strategy. Two of the world’s most important religious cities hit. Get ready for a lot more chaos in the world.”

  I felt sick.

  Elodie crossed the aisle and sat next to Stellan, who scowled at her. She snatched the phone.

  “And we’ve just been at the Vatican retrieving the Alexander relic,” Jack said. “It’ll be easy to blame this on us within the Circle, as if they needed more evidence. How long do we think before the Circle go to desperate measures to stop it?”

  “Because being out to kill us isn’t desperate enough?” Stellan retorted.

  Jack frowned. “That’s not what—”

  “Desperate measures like uniting behind a dictator,” Elodie said. The two of them ignored her, scowling at each other.

  “They had almost none of our blood left,” I said, changing the subject. “They must have found a way to use just a tiny bit when they aerosolized it, which means they could do it again.”

  I flipped through more news on Jack’s phone.

  He was right. With the virus now showing up halfway around the world, no one knew who and what to be afraid of, so they were afraid of everything. It was a disease, brought in by foreigners, some were saying. The “biological weapon” theory was still popular. It really didn’t help that the virus killed in such quick and spectacular fashion, or that grisly cell phone videos of it happening had showed up on social media after every attack. In some countries people were fleeing the big cities, causing hours of gridlock on the freeways. In others, there were lines outside hospitals—like they could really do anything.

  “Is it really just about power?” I couldn’t stop thinking it. “Lydia keeps saying it’s about how much they love their family, but I don’t think she really knows what love means.”

  Jack sat back in his seat. “I don’t know. Love can cause people to do some pretty ugly things.”

  Elodie reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears until she realized the hair wasn’t there. “Anyone who thinks love and hate have to be opposites is wrong.” She darted a glance at Stellan, then at Jack.

  “The border will be even harder to get through if people are this nervous,” Stellan said, ignoring her.

  Every time I took a breath, my lungs seemed to shrink. As the sun came up, I
watched the landscape go by. It was dry. Stubby trees and sunbaked greenery, pastel in the morning light. The occasional stand of palm trees. It looked like the more desert-y parts of Southern California. Soon, we’d gone through a resort town on the sea and the bus stopped for immigration procedures.

  Elodie had finished the program that would upload when we were within range of the immigration computer. She’d handed out our fake passports—I was Brittany Barnes, from Michigan—and we’d rehearsed the story. In the concrete box that passed for the bathroom where we got off the bus, I had to give Elodie her wig back, to match our passport photos.

  She adjusted it in the mirror. I could tell she didn’t want me to see it, but the tension that had built up in her during the bus ride loosened the second she had it back on.

  “Thank you for letting me use it,” I said. She looked at me warily, like she wasn’t sure whether the friendliness was real. Neither Jack nor Stellan had said a word directly to her the whole bus ride. I could see why they were upset with her, but from her side, it must have been terrible keeping this secret from every friend she had. And their reaction now must have been exactly what she was afraid of. It wasn’t even my stress and it was making my chest tighter. “I understand why you didn’t tell us. They do, too, even if they’re not acting like it. I’m sorry.”

  She glanced at me in the cloudy mirror and sighed. “It’s okay. I almost had you murdered once, so I guess we’re even.”

  I turned off the single faucet and the pipes screeched in protest. “Do you mean Prada? That was you?”

  “It was an accident. I only meant for them to get some information out of you. It was very suspicious having you show up like you did, you know. But they were new to the Order, and they got overzealous. And then Luc and Stellan killed them, and that was such a pretty dress that got ruined . . . Not my best plan.”