Page 73 of The World Undone

Bishop’s nostrils flared slightly, but he didn’t bite back. He’d come expecting a bit of a fight, and he was settling in for the long road of winning right now.

Ignoring Darius, he focused on me, knowing I was the one who’d have to ultimately decide. “I watched you all last night. You’re all incredible, making huge strides, and quickly. A few more days, maybe a week or two—they’ll have your powers down. You feed on each other, you get stronger at an exponential rate when you’re together. They’ll be able to teleport soon, and then, they’ll get strong enough to carry others with them when they do.”

I sensed Haley’s stare on me before I saw it. “You want them to separate. To do a tandem attack, and siphon Max’s power as needed.”

She sounded surprised, impressed—something I had a feeling she rarely broadcasted. And between Ralph and Bishop’s plan, she’d done so twice in five minutes.

“We hit them all at once, no guess work.” Jace snorted and slapped a hand down on the table. “That’s bloody brilliant, Bishop.”

Honestly, I agreed.

“It wouldn’t be perfectly in tandem, but it’ll be close. We’d need a few minutes between each mission. Only one of us can use the powers at a time. And we haven’t tested their success rate with distance in mind,” I said, feeling excitement—hope—for once, now that a plan was finally settling into place, “but yeah, with a bit more training, pushing the limits, this could work. Maybe even succeed.”

We’d been stuck since I took down The Guild, biding our time. This could be it. We could finish this thing.

Of course, that hope was layered with the realization that getting closer to finishing this thing also meant getting closer to my own death.

I took a deep breath, pushing that wave of fear down, down, down, where the others couldn’t find it.

“We are not splitting up.” Wade’s voice held an edge of finality, and I felt the flutter of his incubus influence push over the room—something he was clearly unaware of harnessing to such a degree. I wondered if that had grown stronger too, with the bonds solidifying.

“Look, we don’t have many options.” Bishop ran his hand roughly over his face, pinching the bridge of his nose. He cut his gaze to Jace, then Charlie, before meeting mine. “We’ve been trying to keep outside news to a minimum when you’re around. We know you’re under an impossible amount of pressure. But things are bad. Getting worse every day. Human news has no idea what to do with the shit that’s happening, and The Guild is trying to get a hold on it, to calm them down, but they only have so much power. We’re running out of time. We need to move quickly if we want there to be a world left to save. Right now, this isn’t just the best option we have—it’s the only one.”

My stomach lurched at the statement. We had been in a bit of a bubble here—on the outskirts of the real world, in a lot of ways.

Silence settled over us all, before my team started arguing again.

“We’ll try it,” I said, silencing the barrage of dissents waving over me through the bonds. “If we can make this work, this is the safest and smartest option we have. We don’t have time to keep picking at air, hoping some perfect solution will make itself known.”

Between Lucifer’s disappearance, and Ralph’s sudden appearance, who knew how much longer we had before it was too late.

I felt everyone’s eyes on me, felt the truth of my words hit my team, felt them reluctantly fight it, try to poke holes and anticipate problems, before, finally, Atlas nodded.

“There needs to be at least two of us present at each site,” he said. The fire in his focus, the rigidity of his voice, it was like he was the old Atlas for a moment—donning the familiar, but dusty posture of the Team Six leader. “If we do this, we do it quickly, and we’re smart about it. We get in, we find the council members, the stone, we get out. And we’ll need to prepare for any contingencies. Nobody plays hero, this is going to need to be precise.”

“You can’t be serious?” Wade bit out, jaw tight.

“I’m going with Max,” Darius said, the steel in his voice daring any of them to argue.

None of them did.

“You’re the strongest, the most indestructible.” Dec nodded. “I’d feel better about it knowing you were with her.”

“Fucking hell,” Eli grumbled, his fingers biting into the edge of the table. “We’re seriously going to do this? What if there’s a better option?”

“We still have a lot of training to do,” Atlas said, his stare boring into Bishop’s. “We train for this mission, but if we come up with a better—with a safer—option before then, we abandon this. Deal?”

Bishop considered him for a long moment before breaking their thick battle and turning his focus to me. “That’s up to her, I think.”

I nodded. “Deal.”

Weeks flew by, but there was no improvement in Seamus or Sarah. Though the latter case seemed to be a good thing, because, since she wasn’t getting any worse, it meant that she wasn’t spiraling into the same oblivion as the others had, that my healing was helping her, if not entirely. But with Seamus, his condition seemed to only be worsening.

And Eli’s mood was worsening with it, his anger hardening into an incomprehensible grief. He didn’t know how to mourn a man who was still technically with us, didn’t know how to fight an illness we had no rule books for, or how to hope for an outcome none of us fully understood.

Hunger seemed to rule every ounce of Seamus’s focus. There were no longer those brief glimpses of the man we knew shining through. He didn’t seem to recognize any of us, not even Eli. Not even Levi.

And the only way to control his screaming even slightly, was to let him peel the skin back from whatever animal the guys could hunt for him to gnaw on relentlessly.

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