The Ends of the World (The Conspiracy of Us 3)

I watched him. “Fine. You?”

“Not bad.” He glanced up from the bread he’d just put on his plate, and a smile pulled at his lips. He reached out a thumb to graze the spot on my collarbone that I must not have covered as well as I thought. “Oops,” he whispered, but there was no remorse behind it at all.

I took a quick look to make sure Jack’s back was still turned. “If you did it on purpose, that’s obnoxious,” I whispered. He held up his hands to proclaim his innocence.

The tension left my shoulders. We were going to be okay. Which was good, because it was nothing. I was attracted to Stellan, and I had been for a long time—I could no longer deny that. The feeling was obviously mutual. And in times of extreme stress, it seemed to boil over. Which was fine. It wouldn’t be a big deal.

He sat down next to me and bit into a slice of cucumber. “Can I use your phone?” He couldn’t find his. Mariam thought she remembered seeing it in the van, but apparently it had been lost between some cushions, or maybe it had fallen out when we’d stopped at the doctor’s office last night. I handed him my phone and walked away to give him privacy while he talked to Anya. I couldn’t help but watch him, though. Talking to her was the only time I ever saw him smile in a way I knew for sure wasn’t fake.

• • •

A couple of hours later, we got out of the van on the tarmac of a private airport near Alexandria. We all hugged Mariam good-bye and sent her off to her family with enough money for them to live on for a year.

As we climbed the steps into the plane, ready to head back to the place closest to home for all of us, I asked Stellan, “So if you left, where would you go? Does Anya want to live at the beach or in the mountains? Or maybe a big city?”

I said it jokingly, but he didn’t smile. He drummed his fingers on the railing. “It seems like to stay away from them, you always have to keep moving.”

He was right. Even if we were no longer wanted criminals, the Circle doesn’t let you leave. It wouldn’t be easy. And that meant learning not to call any one place home. “Yeah. That’s what my mom thought, too.”

I fell into a seat. Stellan sat across the aisle.

“What about you? Would you think about leaving again?” he said. It sounded casual, but I could tell he’d been thinking about it as much as I had.

I looked out the window at Jack and Elodie, who were still on the tarmac talking to the pilot. “I don’t know. If the scientists can’t do anything with the virus and the cure, I guess it might come down to killing myself or hiding for the rest of my life. Hiding doesn’t sound so bad when you think of it that way.”

I saw Stellan wince a little at that. “Would you would want to leave, though?”

I remembered that night at a bar in Cannes again. You want to be wanted, he’d said. He’d been right. You want control. Right about that, too.

I remembered further back: washing my hands in the sink at Prada. Blood on my hands, the first time of many. “I don’t think it matters anymore what I want.”

“It’s not the only thing that matters, but it’ll always matter. It’s your life.”

Was that really even true anymore? “Would you want to leave if what you wanted was all that mattered? If you didn’t have to think about things like safety and duty?”

Stellan thumbed open an air-conditioning vent by his seat. “My father . . .” he said. I tensed. Stories of family were seldom good with this group. “He made the best gingerbread. Families in our neighborhood actually bought it from him around the holidays.”

“Gingerbread?” I said incredulously.

“Gingerbread.” Stellan settled back, crossing one ankle over the opposite knee. “He did all the cooking and cleaning and sewing, and taught me.”

“You sew?”

“What, you don’t?” He smirked, but then he turned to look out the window. “That’s what I want, eventually. What I used to have with my family. That’s what—”

“That’s what aches,” I said quietly. Toska. The ache. That dull sense that something’s missing.

“Yes.”

Outside, Jack and Elodie started up the steps. “Gingerbread and sewing,” I said. “So what you’re telling me is that you want to be somebody’s grandma.”

“Luc’s grandmother carries a tiny dog and a flask of scotch everywhere she goes. I think I could handle that.”

Jack and Elodie came down the aisle and settled into seats nearby and told us what they’d just heard. Rocco had found out where Fitz was. It looked like this was actually going to work. Suddenly, I felt nervous again.

As the plane took off, I checked the news. Lots of countries were working to calm the panic, and it was obvious which news outlets were Circle-controlled by the kinds of headlines they had up. Non-Circle outlets weren’t interested in being reasonable. The whole Internet seemed to be sharing some article speculating that the virus was actually the result of government testing, a disease that had reacted with GMO foods to become deadly or something like that. It linked to another article about how vaccines were designed to make us susceptible to it, and a million other conspiracy theories, most still not as crazy as the truth.

We thought it might start World War Three if the Circle took sides between us and the Saxons. Turned out the only side being taken was against us, but there was plenty of chaos anyway.

I put my phone away and watched a movie in French with subtitles I didn’t actually pay attention to. Jack and Stellan both stared out the windows of the plane. Maybe everyone else was more nervous than I realized, too, because we all jumped when Jack’s phone rang halfway through the flight.

Rocco had broken Fitz out. Fitz was on his way to Paris safely.

It was done.

• • •