And so five stood where there had once been six.
“I won’t do it,” said Nico de Varona, breaking the silence. “Not unless I have some assurances moving forward.”
Parisa Kamali was first to reply. “Assurances of what?”
“I want Rhodes back. And I want your word you’ll help me find her.” Nico’s expression was determined and grim, his voice steady and unflinching. “I refuse to be part of this Society unless I know I have your support.”
Dalton opted not to contribute things like there is no refusal, because it did not seem relevant.
Instead he sat quietly, waiting for what would come.
“I’m with Nico.” That was Reina Mori.
“As am I.” Callum Nova’s voice was smooth with confidence. Presumably he possessed the cleverness to know that for him, only one answer would be sufficient.
“You?” Nico asked Tristan Caine, who didn’t look up from his hands.
“Of course.” His voice was thin with derision. “Of course.”
“Which leaves you,” Reina observed, turning to Parisa, who glanced askance with irritation.
“Would I really be stupid enough to refuse?”
“Don’t,” Nico cut in before anyone could respond. “This isn’t a fight. It’s not a threat, it’s a fact. Either you’re with me or you’re not.”
Either they were with him or he was not with them, Dalton interpreted in silence. But this was the point of the binding, wasn’t it? They had not suffered this year for nothing.
“Fine,” Parisa said. “If Rhodes can be found—”
“She will be,” Nico said brusquely. “That’s the point.”
“Fine.”
Parisa slid a glance around the room, to the five candidates present alongside the absence that none could ignore. She dared them to contradict her, but when, as predicted, they did not, she said, “You have our word, Varona.”
And so where there had once been six were now, irreversibly, one.
When an ecosystem dies, nature makes a new one. Simple rules for a simple concept, for which the Society was proof itself. It existed on the ashes of its former selves, atop the bones of things abandoned or destroyed. It was a secret buried within a labyrinth, inside a maze. To reach it was only to find a tumor that grew insidiously within itself.
The Society was built upon itself, higher and higher, like Babel reaching for the sky. Invention, progression, the building up of everything had no option but to continue; something put in motion did not, of its own volition, stop. The trouble with knowledge, the idiosyncrasy of its particular addiction, was that it was not the same as other types of vice. Because knowledge was not chemical, was not physical or hormonal or easily within reach, someone given a taste of omniscience could never be satisfied by the contents of a bare reality without it. Life and death as once prescribed would carry no weight, and even the usual temptations of excess would taste unsavory. The lives they might have had would only feel ill-fitting, poorly worn. Someday, perhaps quite soon, they might be able to create entire worlds; to not only reach, but to become like gods.
Dalton Ellery stood before the five initiates of the Alexandrian Society and watched them take their vows, marrying themselves to the inevitability of change and inseverable alteration. Henceforth, things would only be more difficult. Barriers would fall away; the world belonging to those who had not merited entry through the Society’s doors would no longer exist, and the only walls left to contain these five would be the ones they managed to build themselves. What they did not realize yet, Dalton thought in silence, was the safety of a cage, the security of containment. Given a task, even a lab rat could be capable of satisfaction; from a prescribed morality, contentment; from the fulfillment of a purpose, the discovery of a cause. Endless choices, by contrast, would only leave the rat to chase itself in circles, unable to rest or be fulfilled.
For a moment it occurred to Dalton like a seedling of something half-remembered that perhaps he should say something along those lines. That perhaps he should warn them how the access they were soon to have would be too much to allow for any weakness, too little to accommodate for pre-existing strengths. He thought: You are entering the cycle of your own destruction, the wheel of your own fortune, which will rise and fall and so will you. You will deconstruct and resurrect in some other form, and the ashes of yourself will be the rubble from the fall.
Rome falls, he wanted to say. Everything collapses. You will, too.
You will, soon.
But before Dalton could bring himself to speak, he looked up at the mirrored surface of the reading room’s glass and saw, behind him, the face of Atlas Blakely, who was the reason he still existed in any form. He had needed walls, an addict, and Atlas had given them to him in the form of a purpose. It was Atlas who had promised him that there would be an end, a conclusion to the hunger, completion of the cycle. He had taken away the chains of Dalton’s invulnerability and given him what he needed most; the one thing the others might not find on their own: an answer.
Was there such a thing as too much power?
In the glass, a little manic glimmer flashed behind Dalton’s eyes; a glimpse of who he’d once been. Past lives, ill-fitting. But this answer Dalton Ellery knew, as the initiates would soon learn, because it was the only answer even if it was the worst one, the least comforting, the most limitless:
Yes.
But as the world itself will tell you, something put in motion will not stop.
