Page 126 of The Circle

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Zander van den Berg’shead explodes as it is impacted by the bullet, and in that same moment, Danny unleashes a primal scream. Something I’ve never heard before and I hope to never hear again.

And out of that scream, he lifts Anton into the air and hurls him off the roof like someone hoisting a kettle bell and throwing it as hard as they can, the momentum almost carrying him over the side as well, but I grab him around the legs and keep him from tumbling. I pull him back from the edge.

I grapple him to the concrete and he lands on his back, splayed out, spent.

It is quiet. It is still.

I wait for long, long moments to see if the sound of gunfire picks up again or someone unaccounted for pops their head from some unseen hiding place, but no one and nothing does.

I look at Danny bleeding on the ground, one eye open and unfocused. But I’m not afraid. I’m not worried that he will not be all right. I don’t know why. I just know I feel at peace.

I sit beside him, bringing his head onto my lap and resting it against my stomach. He reaches up and paws at my belly as I stroke the side of his face.

After a few moments of just sitting there, being, he says, “Alec?”

I smile. Because even though… everything… it is the first word he utters.

I don’t respond with words in kind, just maneuver myself out from under his head and help him to stand so that we can look over the wall together. We see…

The two guards. Dead on the ground.

Anton. Splattered onto the earth below.

Zander van den Berg. Alexei Gorny. Whoever he was. No more. Gone. Ended.

And Alec, our Alec—for better or worse, in murder and in ecstasy, until death tries to do us part but fucking can’t because somehow or another we always find a way not to let it, Alec—holding onto a sobbing, wailing Andra.

All else is silence.

I turn my head to look up. I don’t know why. I just do.

In the sky… the moon. Full. Bright. Shining. Round. Casting an eerie black-blue tint over everything.

Holy shit. We crushed it open.

This world. This life. This… “thing” we share, as Zander called it. We crushed it open.

Time and time again.

That’s what we’ve been doing all along.

Trying to break it, maybe to see what makes it seem so pretty despite all the ways in which it shouldn’t be, especially given who we are and what we’ve done, but…

At the end? The source, the genesis, the thing that explains why we held onto hope and belief and never let go, the beauty that came spilling out of the crushed-open blueness…

Was us.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

… NOW.

The sun is finallyfully extinguished over the edge of the planet and a black-blue darkness has settled. The white tips of the waves come to a splashing conclusion as they lap at the shore just barely visible in the dusky shade that envelopes all.

Danny and I stand there, still holding hands, waiting, taking in the sound and smell of the ocean, the beach, the wonder of it all, when out of the corner of my eye, I see her running over to us.

“Mom! Dad! Hey!”