Page 104 of The Circle

“What?” Eliza says in return.

“I asked whose is it? The child? That Christine is carrying? To whom does this miracle belong?”

It’s dripping with a poisonous sarcasm. I see, vaguely, him look at Alec.

“Is it yours, my seun? Have you once again managed to make new van den Berg life with young Christine here? Will my granddaughter, Alexandria, have a new playmate?”

It’s impressive that in three short sentences, he can trigger everybody who matters.

I can’t really see now. The blood is flowing freely and filling up the reservoir around the one functioning eyeball I have left. But what I can hear is… very little. Some click-clack of hands on rifles; the squeak of a boot on the cold, centuries-old, cement floor; breathing. Mostly Christine’s.

Then, after a long moment, I hear Zander say, “Ah. I see.”

I blink away the blood just enough that I can focus on Zander and Alec, but it’s not what I can observe so much that makes me jerk. It’s what I hear. The sound of the rifle Zander has in his hands shinking into an actionable, firing position.

“Well, then I’m not certain it all has much to do with me,” Zander sighs, lazily.

And the next thing I hear is the click of the trigger and the explosion of a bullet exiting the barrel at high velocity, charging like a lightning bolt toward the back of Christine’s body, still wrapped around mine.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

As we approachedthis place and my suspicions about what or who might be waiting for us played in my mind—Mr. Gorny tickling at my brain, monkeys scampering all about, memories, recollections, ideas—I had determined that I would be the one to sacrifice myself so that others might survive.

Even as my father was making his cruel, petty, nonsensical, and yet so completely like him demands of Christine and Danny, I was fully prepared to make the sacrifice still. Let them… no, encourage them to go. To leave and live a life without me, happy and safe together. I would, of course, humor my father. At least humor him long enough that I could ensure Christine and Danny would be safe. Or as safe as is possible for them to be. At which point, I would deal with Zander van den Berg personally.

That is presuming he didn’t try to have me dealt with first.

The problem with this situation and situations like it is that until and unless everyone involved in creating it is resolved (by which I mean dead), there is never rest. There is never peace. And all those in this room know it.

I don’t know if my father’s absurd “offer” is based exclusively on retribution or if there’s some hint of sincerity behind it, but I do know that he never intended it as a real proposal. I know because I am him and he is me. I know much of what I know because I learned it from him. Give someone hope and belief and then take it away. That’s the formula for maintaining power. Control. Not just over others but over yourself.

It is how you convince yourself time and again that you are indestructible and untouchable. You engender an irrational self-belief in your own invincibility and fear in others that you might be all the things you project yourself to be. It is a vicious and exhausting cycle that requires constantly feeding on the destabilizing energy of chaos.

It’s fokken tiring, man.

I counted on my defeat to be enough. Just moments ago, when I let my bravado fall and handed the rifle back over to dear old Dad, I counted on him seeing that I was beaten to be sufficient. I thought there was a chance he would simply give Christine and Danny their last, fair chance at retreat. I thought he would revel in his victory, allow them safe passage, return the child, Andra, to her mother, and wash his hands clean of the matter in the waters of my disgrace. But I miscalculated. Badly. And now…

When he shot at Danny, I was surprised. Not shocked, but definitely not prepared for it. Now, in this moment, as he fires upon Christine, having just found out—as I did—that she is pregnant with Danny’s child, I am beyond shocked.

I am gutted. Dashed. Torn perhaps beyond repair.

Because her pregnancy is what I have wanted. What I have hoped for. It is what I have been trying so hard to negotiate. To compel them further together without being away from them all at the same time. To redraw the lines of the triangle. To make myself the shortest side. To find a way to honor their first, true, primary love for one another while not excluding myself from the love we share.

To try to do something, if not selfless exactly, then at least a bit generous perhaps.

But the transgressions of the past have kept pace and will not allow us to escape.

That he has fired into my two true loves—the two people I’ve ever known who have shown me what it means to love honestly and without regard for self—is not to make them pay a price.

It is to make me pay one.

By taking their lives, it is Zander’s ultimate intention that he will take mine. Or at least the part of it that matters.

I hear a scream. A loud, prolonged, “Nooooooooooo!”

And I realize, suddenly, that it is I who am screaming.

There is nothing I can do. I am too far away from them to intercede. I am too stifled by my own disbelief to reach out and swat the rifle away. I am not sharp, present, or nimble enough to snap to action. Nor am I the superman I once, not so very long ago at all, perceived myself to be, that I can stop a speeding bullet.

But someone is.

Someone whose nimbleness is historically well known.

Someone whose strength in the face of crisis is well established.

Someone who understands sacrifice for the sake of another better than I have yet learned for myself. Because there are instincts inside some people that are borne of having known literal birth.

And someone who had the presence of mind to be able to see the inevitable before it happened and was already moving to intercede.

Faster than a blink—or the pull on a trigger of a Kalashnikov—Eliza throws herself between Christine huddled on the ground and the streaking bullet headed her way.

And as it strikes her in the stomach and she falls violently back and to the side of my two true allies and intimates, I swear there’s a moment where I can see her smile.