I followed him through the mines, every blast of the miners’ magic making me jump as I struggled to come up with a solution for what I had done. For the unintended consequences.

But there was none.

Before long, Marc’s swift walk turned into a run, and even though his crooked legs made his stride uneven and strange, it still took everything I had to keep up with him. He was taller and faster, and the distance between us began to grow. Scenario after scenario ran through my head, each worse than the last. I’d only seen him like this once, and I’d fixed him before I’d had the chance to see how far madness would drive him. I didn’t know Marc like this. I could not guess what he was capable of.

“Marc, stop!” I shouted between gulps of breath.

He ran faster.

“Marc! Marc, listen to me!”

I might as well have been howling into the wind. We were very nearly at the base of the shaft where the lift would be waiting to take us up. I had to stop him, speak to him, try to contain him, because fixing him was no longer within my power. Desperate, I flung out a rope of magic, catching him around the ankle seconds before he rounded a bend. I heard a thud and a string of curses, then silence. Sliding to a halt, I walked cautiously around the bend.

Marc stood in the middle of the tunnel, sword drawn. “What makes you think I want to listen to a word you say?”

I stopped, keeping a wary eye on his sword. My fingers itched to draw my own blade, but my gut stayed my hand.

“Why did you do it?” he demanded.

“As a show of trust,” I said. “And to put everyone on equal footing.”

“As if any of us could ever be your equals.” He spat the words, the tip of his sword shaking. “And you know that isn’t what I meant.”

“I know.” I inhaled deeply, trying to find some measure of calm. This had little to do with my choice to relinquish power over names and everything to do with the choices I’d made two years ago. “There is no grand explanation. I didn’t want Pénélope’s death to kill you. So I did the only thing I could think of to keep it from happening.” I pressed a weary hand to my face, blocking out the light of the girders lining the walls and remembering the black day when Pénélope had died.

“Whether I lived or died wasn’t your choice to make.” He lifted his sword, tensing as he readied to strike. “It wasn’t your choice!” His voice echoed, repeating over and over as though the tunnels themselves desired to have their point made. He looked feral, eyes red and muscles pulling his deformed face into the mask of madness that I remembered so well because I had been its instigator. Forcing a promise from him that set his mind to battling itself, half desperate to die and the other compelled to live.

“I know,” I said. “I didn’t understand then what forcing you to make the promise to live would do.”

At least not until it was too late. And then it had been a wild scramble to correct what I’d done, ordering him by name not to think of his loss, of his pain, or his misery. It took days to carefully craft the layers of commands needed to maintain his sanity without being so cruel as to eliminate Pénélope from his thoughts entirely. Orders that had remained in place until I’d relinquished control over the names of him and the half-bloods. And now all that remained was that ill-thought promise that could not be undone by anything but death and a mind once again at war with itself.

“I do not know myself.” He flung his sword against the ground and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples, squeezing hard. “Two years I’ve lived under your control. Two years I’ve been not who I am, but who you wanted me to be. I should have died with her. I should have died with her.” He kept repeating himself, and his words made me shake with sudden fury.

Heedless of the spikes skewering my wrists, I swung hard, catching him in the jaw. He stumbled back, and I bent double, swearing as blood splattered the floor. “Why should you have died?” I shouted through the pain. “To prove that you loved her? Because you thought you’d betray her by living? Because you thought that was what she wanted?” I straightened slowly, the stench of blood and iron thick in the air. “She wanted you to survive her death – I know that, because she told me herself!”

“I have no reason to live without her.”

I spat on the floor. “Nothing to live for? What of your family? Your friends? Your cause? Does none of that matter to you anymore?” I stormed forward until we were eye to eye, inches apart. “Before Anaïs. Before the twins. Before the half-bloods, there existed an idea between you and me about how we could change our world for the better. This has always been as much your cause as mine.”

He looked away first. “Don’t stand there and pretend you’d be any better if Cécile died. I watched you throw away everything to save her.”

“Because she could be saved! I’ll not claim that what I did was right, but at least it had purpose. Your death has none. It won’t bring Pénélope back. And if Cécile were to die and I survived long enough to listen, I’d hope you’d say the same thing to me.”

I balled my fists until my wrists screamed and forced me to relax them. “There is more to my life than just her. There are other people I care for. Causes that matter.” I drew in a deep breath. “She walks as close to the line of death as Pénélope ever did, and there are times I question why we do this to ourselves. Why we tie our fate so closely to one person that everything we are, everything we do, hangs upon them. It seems a cruel thing that we lose not only the one we love most, but also the opportunity to endure. To finish the things we’ve started.”