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

“It’s not my fault that I’m this thirteenth bloodline, either,” Stellan said, strained. “And it’s not my fault—”

Stellan glanced at me, and then Jack did, too. I wanted to melt into the wall.

“For years you’ve been blaming other people and hating yourself for bad things that happened.” Punctuating his words with shoves against Jack’s chest, Stellan said, “It is not. My. Fault.”

Jack punched him.

Stellan staggered backward, bracing himself against the wall. He worked his jaw back and forth, and then he laughed. Laughed. Jack might actually kill him.

I started forward again, but Elodie grabbed my arm.

“I’m just sorry you’re stuck with us when you’d rather be with a real Circle family who plays by the rules.” Stellan stalked toward Jack again. He might have been laughing, but the fists balled at his sides said something different. “I guess it is my fault that I wanted someone around who I used to trust.”

And then I realized it. As much as all of us had been afraid of losing people we cared about lately, Jack and Stellan thought they’d lost each other years ago. They’d both suppressed the feeling for so long that it only took a spark to make it explode.

Love and hate. They weren’t opposites.

Stellan shook his head slowly. “I thought maybe one day you would wake up and see that blind obedience is not the same as doing the right thing,” he said. “I guess not. But that means you, of all people, cannot talk to me about loyalty.”

Jack flew at him, and slammed him into the wall hard enough that his head bounced.

I sucked in a quick breath, but another sound drowned it out.

A loud crack sounded through the tunnel, and Stellan’s arms pinwheeled—then he fell backward through the wall, pulling Jack with him.

CHAPTER 11

I rushed to the destroyed wall to find Jack scrambling off Stellan, who lay on his back in a pile of bricks, blood trickling down his temple. They had knocked a person-sized hole into what appeared to be an older, mustier tunnel.

Elodie peered over my shoulder as I climbed through the hole. The air was damper in here, and sour. I coughed, and pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose as Stellan stood and brushed dirt off his palms.

“If we’re supposed to go in there, wouldn’t there be some kind of sign?” Elodie said suspiciously. “There’s nothing to indicate we should knock through a piece of the wall and traipse inside.”

Stellan picked up his flashlight and peered into the darkness.

I picked up one of the bricks. They were about the size of modern red bricks, but a good deal thinner, and rough hewn. They could have been two thousand years old. I scratched at the mortar on the edge of the brick with my fingernail, then smacked it against the nearest wall. It shattered easily.

“Why would anyone make a wall of an underground tunnel out of something that’d break so easily?” I wondered out loud. “Unless . . .”

Elodie reached through the hole and plucked a piece of the brick from my hand. “Unless it was meant to be broken.” She thought for a second, then said, “Come here.”

She shined her flashlight on me, picking up my necklace, with its thirteen loops, and studying it. “It’s a Gordian knot,” she said. “I hadn’t realized it before.” Down the tunnel, Stellan’s footsteps stopped.

I picked the necklace up off my chest and held it out. “What’s a Gordian knot?”

“It was one of Alexander’s tests.”

Stellan came back, the hem of his shirt pulled up to wipe his face. He dropped it back onto his chest, and the streaks of blood across it looked eerie in the dark. “Legend said the Gordian knot was impossible to untie.”

“The oracles prophesied that whoever undid it would be the king of the world,” Elodie agreed, with a quick glance at Stellan. He’d spoken directly to her with no animosity in the words. It was a step. “And when Alexander realized that there were no ends to the knot—”

I squeezed my necklace hard. “He undid it by slicing it in half.” I remembered this from history class. I had never connected it to my necklace, or this quest. I looked from my necklace to the hole in the wall. The larger tunnel hadn’t been a circle. “It’s a Gordian knot,” I said. “The whole tunnel is. That’s why we ended up back where we started. There’s no way into the inner chamber—”

“Except to go straight through the wall,” Jack finished. He was flexing his fingers, but dropped the hand to his side when I looked his way, like he didn’t want me to see that he’d hurt himself on Stellan’s face.

“I guess that’s our sign.” Elodie climbed through, and we set off into the mouth of the tunnel.

This passage was much smaller—just wide enough for us to go single file—and cut roughly out of dirt. It was also descending rapidly. Roots snaked down the walls and across the path, and the farther we went, the wetter it got. My cheap sneakers were caked with mud.

At the front of the line, Jack paused. As we caught up to him, we saw why: a drop-off of at least five feet, with a pool of water at the bottom.

“I feel like I need to mention that these old tunnels were sometimes booby-trapped,” Elodie said. It was barely a whisper, but still felt too loud in the confined space.

“Napoleon got through here, and he’s the one who must have sealed it back up,” Jack said. “I don’t think he would have done that.”

“Be careful,” I whispered.

He glanced back at me and nodded, then swung himself down into the pit with a splash, sinking up to his knees in water. On the other side, he pulled himself out using tree roots as handholds and Elodie followed.

Stellan splashed down into the hole. Jack looked back over his shoulder. “Help Avery,” he said.