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

She nodded again. “My sister loves the James Bond,” she whispered solemnly.

Okay. We could worry about that later. For now, I thought we could trust Mariam. “We’ll be back,” I said, and followed the others inside.

Elodie had talked to her Order contacts. This museum was near the coordinates of what they believed to be a major Order headquarters in Olympias’s time. We hoped it might have some history of the area that could help us.

“Look for references to twelves,” Elodie said. “The ‘thirteenth at the center of the twelve’ could mean twelve columns on a building that was destroyed thousands of years ago, or statues, or anything.”

But the museum was tiny, with nothing but a few display cases of stone shards and a couple old coins and bits of tarnished jewelry. No history of the area at all. I grabbed a brochure and we left.

Mariam drove us to one more museum and two sites with ruins that Elodie thought were connected to the Order. No twelve, no symbol from my locket. Hours of searching, and we’d found nothing.

The next site was the new Library of Alexandria. It didn’t have much to do with the ancient library, but it was on the same site, and the ancient one was important to the Order. Plus, we hadn’t searched this area of the city closely last time we were here.

I could tell by a freshening breeze that we were back near the water. We trudged down a dirty sidewalk, and I dodged a shop owner desperately trying to get us to buy some of the fish laid out on ice in front of his shop, and another waving aromatic flatbreads at us. Jack hurried us past them like they might be Circle, lying in wait to catch us.

“Do we really think anyone could have made a tomb here?” Stellan’s hands were shoved rigidly into his pockets. All this failure certainly hadn’t made any of us less tense. “It’s too close to the bay. The ground is too wet. This is going to be another dead end.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Elodie asked. “Because I’d love to hear it.”

“The library was dedicated to the Muses,” I said wearily, but loudly enough to speak over whatever Stellan might throw back at her. “Which is not the same, but similar to the Fates—the Moirai—whom Napoleon based the clues he left on. Maybe there are statues of the Muses.”

Here, at least, there were mock-ups of how the old library might have looked, and we did our best to count any statues we saw and to find what might have been at the center of the buildings.

I was standing in front of a rendering of what the inside might have looked like when Elodie coughed again. We all stilled. She stood back up like it was nothing.

She couldn’t get the virus after this long, could she? What would it look like if she did? Would it be quick? Or slower, since it had taken this long? A tiny nosebleed that got worse?

Breathe, I told myself. Out out out in.

We spent another hour at the library, then found a bench in a wide plaza nearby. A vendor cart selling candy trundled up over the sparse grass, and Elodie bought one of everything.

I knew logically that we shouldn’t start panicking yet, but it was getting late. Especially if Elodie was—no. Don’t. But even if that wasn’t a concern, every time I glanced at the news, things looked worse. And Jack wasn’t the only one looking up and down the street nervously for Circle members. We knew all too well they had ways to track people, and it wouldn’t take them terribly long to figure out there were only a few countries we might have made it to from Israel. We were all keeping hats and sunglasses on, but that would only work for so long.

Elodie was flipping from web page to web page on her phone, her knee bouncing nervously, munching on a handful of candied peanuts. Stellan was texting, to Anya’s nanny, I was sure, a lollipop dangling from his mouth. A guy with a cart full of dinky plastic toys walked by, and he shook one of those annoying hand-clapper things at us. We all flinched.

Stellan put his phone away and rested an arm around my shoulders. “Tell me, my darling other half,” he said, with a feigned nonchalance, “how long until we cut our losses and give up?”

I pulled away so his arm fell back to the bench. “Are you serious?”

Jack, pacing in front of us with one hand on his concealed gun, stopped. “We’re the only ones who can find the cure before the Saxons do,” he said, like he was explaining something to a child. “Which means we have the responsibility to stop them from doing worse than they already have.”

Stellan pulled the lollipop out of his mouth with an exaggerated pop. “Duty. Of course, coming from you. How about some logic, though?”

This was just how they used to bicker when I’d first met them. The threads holding the four of us together were coming closer and closer to snapping.

Stellan leaned his forearms on his knees. “We’ve been searching for the cure all by ourselves partly because we didn’t want the Circle to know about our blood making the virus. Now they know. What’s stopping us from sending them a package of every clue we have, letting them take over, and washing our hands of it? Why are we still risking our lives?”

I heaved an irritated sigh. “You know exactly why. To—”

To stop the Saxons, I almost finished. That was the only reason I’d done anything lately. Stop them. Ruin them.

But I suddenly realized that, since the bomb in Jerusalem, I’d barely thought about ruining the Saxons at all. Instead, what had come to my mind just now was the tour group crying over their friend in the tunnels. The angry men throwing bottles at each other in the square because each side thought the other had attacked their city.

I remembered what Stellan had said: the Circle only cared about the Circle, and more specifically, about their own family. The world wasn’t their concern.

“Because the whole world is in danger now,” I said quietly. “From the virus or from the turmoil that’s following it. Because as much as we didn’t mean to, we started this, and we have to stop it.”