PROLOGUE
The world ended in eleven days.
Elliot had counted every one of them, the way one would count breaths when drowning.
On the first day the lights went out across the western ring. On the third, the screaming started, and then stopped, all at once, like a door slamming. By the sixth, the streets were full of people who stood and stared and didn't blink. By the ninth, the birds had fallen out of the sky, and the dogs, and the fish in the Aldermere canals, floating belly-up in black water. Everything with a pulse gave something up, a thin bright thread of itself that rose into the air and streamed toward the center of the city.
Now the Van Del estate was burning, and Elliot was on his knees in the ash of it.
His mother had been the first. He'd found her at the foot of the stairs, unmarked, her eyes open and slack. His father was in the lab, one hand still on the console, the half-finished countermeasure scrolling uselessly across a dead screen. His aunts, his cousins, the engineers who'd served the family for thirty years, all of them emptied out like shells. They'd been three days from a solution. Three days.
And Elias.
His brother hung in the air at the center of the courtyard, his toes an inch off the stone, his head thrown back. Threads of pale light were tearing out of his chest, out of his mouth, out of his open, silent eyes, and flowing into the man standing before him.
"No," Elliot whispered. "Elias."
His brother's gaze slid toward him. Even now, even as the light poured out of him, there was something in it, bewildered and betrayed, the look of someone who had been promised a seat at the table and found out it was the menu.
"You said..." Elias rasped. "You promised me..."
"I did," said Dante Valois, pleasantly. "You were very useful."
He opened his hand. Elias dropped like cut string and did not move again.
Dante turned.
He was beautiful still, and that was the obscene part. Black hair unmarked, white shirt untouched by the ash. But his eyes had gone to a color Elliot had no word for, and the energy of a thousand dead people crawled over his skin like lightning looking for somewhere to land. When he smiled, the air bent toward him.
"Elliot." The same warm voice. Almost. It had been scraped raw, ruined, the voice of a man who'd screamed his way through every kind of hunger and found none of them full. "You came all this way."
"Why?" Elliot's throat tore on the word. "Why are you doing this? Everything's gone. Everyone's gone. Can't you see? If you keep going, you'll be all alone. There'll be nobody left."
Dante laughed.
It went on far too long. It echoed off the burning walls, cracked in the middle, and kept going.
"Who cares?" he said at last, wiping his eye. "I never wanted company. I want to be sovereign, Elliot. I want every living thing to know my name. And it feels good to be feared." He tilted his head, almost tender. "You of all people should understand. Your family gave me the means."
Something in Elliot broke, cleanly, the way a bone does.
The serum.The vial in the safe, the password he'd whispered to the one person he trusted most in the world. His brother's hands. Dante's smile. He'd called it love. He'd called it trust.
He bent over until his forehead touched the ash and sobbed. There was no dignity in it. It came out of him in great ugly heaves, for his mother, for his father, for a boy who had believed in a voice.
"Ah," Dante sighed. "Don't. It's so tiresome."
Footsteps behind him.
Elliot didn't look up until he heard the shout, hoarse and furious and so familiar.
"Get away from him!"
Arthur.
Arthur, who'd been missing for six days. Arthur, who'd gone to ground in the old cellars when the first wave hit and drained him nearly dry, who should have been too weak to stand. He came across the courtyard anyway, gray-faced and shaking, a broken length of pipe in one hand, and he had never looked so terribly alive.
"Arthur, no..."
Dante barely turned his head. "brother. I wondered where you were hiding."
Arthur swung the pipe.
It never landed. Dante caught it with two fingers and folded it like paper, and the same hand closed around Arthur's throat and lifted him off the ground. Light surged up Arthur's arm, a pale, impossible flare, power Elliot had never known he had, and Dante's eyes widened with something close to joy.
"There it is. I knew it. All those years, I knew you had some tricks up your sleeves."
"Let... him go..." Arthur choked out.
"No," said Dante, and drove his other hand through Arthur's chest.
The sound was wet and short. Arthur's whole body jerked. The light poured out of him all at once and into Dante, and the courtyard shook with it, and when Dante opened his fingers, Arthur fell without a sound, face turned toward Elliot, eyes still open.
Elliot screamed.
He crawled. He didn't remember crossing the stone, only that Arthur's blood was hot under his palms and that the eyes looking at him were already emptying. "No, no, no, stay, please, please stay, please..."
"Say your last words," Dante said behind him, gently, like a man offering a cigarette. "I'll allow it. For old times' sake."
Elliot lifted his head.
He looked at the body in his arms. At Elias in the ash. At the burning house where his mother had read to him as a child. When he finally turned his face to Dante, there were no tears left in it, only something hard, cold and clear as ice.
"If I get a second chance," he said, "if there is any way to change this..." His voice was firm. "I will never let our paths cross again."
Dante smiled.
"How sweet," he said, and reached down.
The light left Elliot's body like a tide going out. His heartbeat stuttered, slowed, thinned to a thread, and the last thing he saw was the burning sky, white and enormous and empty.
Never again.
