Chapter 125.
The others are waiting for Alek in the lobby of Burj Khalifa an hour later. The plan is for them all to go to one of Dubai’s finest restaurants for dinner and then to feel like normal humans again.
Even Tipton is slowly turning back into himself, for better or worse.
Alone in the boardroom, Alek uses her phone—the one that had kept her connected to Jimmy—to call her mother.
Once she answers, Alek tries to sum up the crazy events of this day—of the past few days. She tells her the truth, but not all of it, choosing to leave out the parts about the horrors inside her chamber.
When she finishes, her mother says, “Are you still certain this is what you want?”
“Yes,” Alek says without hesitation. “And not just for me. For you, too, maty.”
Then Alek adds:
“This is for everyone under attack the way we have been.”
“So you’re ready for whatever comes next?” her mother asks.
Alek looks out over Dubai like she can already see the future moving.
“Yes,” Alek says again. “I’m ready. We all are.”
Then, surprising even herself, Alek Andrich puts her phone down on the table, leans back in her chair, and screams her head off in the empty conference room.
On the other end, her mother’s voice cracks through. “Alek? Is everything okay?”
Alek laughs, breathless and disbelieving.
“Okay?” she says. “Okay?”
She wipes her face.
“I won, maty,” she says. “Me. Your daughter. I won.”
She says it again, softer this time, careful, almost afraid.
“I won.”
Then she can’t help herself, she really is laughing at the sheer improbability of it all.
She tells her mother she loves her and ends the call.
Alek sits for a minute and thinks about the journey here from Ohio, the one that really began for her in the freezing water of Antarctica. That was the first time she nearly died.
She closes her eyes and remembers those who did lose their lives.
She thinks about the child they’d saved from fire, picturing Wyatt and the girl falling out of the sky one more time.
Now the whole world seems on fire.
Now we’re the ones who have to take a leap of faith.
The entire time, she’d had one question she couldn’t shake: Can one person really save the world?
That was the story The Host sold them. What the board treated as religion. Find The One. Crown The One. Let The One do whatever needs to be done.
The end justifies the means.
Alek understands now why people want to believe that story. How it could even come from the right place. When the world is burning, you want somebody to put it out. But she’s seen what that story becomes when you push it far enough.
That story buys you one thing: permission. And once you have permission, you’ll call anything “necessary.”
You can call cruelty “necessary” and feel proud of it.
Alek thinks about the duels. The rooms. The dead. The way they tried to turn fear into a weapon.
That wasn’t leadership.
That was control.
And the “one” wasn’t a person.
It was an excuse.
Alek closes her eyes and sees Reg again. Sees Hannah’s face. Sees Jack crawling out of his own hell. Sees Zhi forcing himself to breathe through his terror. Sees Jimmy showing up bruised and smiling like the whole world can still be fixed.
And she thinks of Tipton, too—shaking in that room, finally learning what it feels like to be powerless. A man who’d told himself he’d do anything, right up until “anything” meant losing the last piece of himself.
There are lines you don’t cross. Not for money. Not for power. Not even to save the world.
Because if you win by becoming the thing you’re fighting . . . you didn’t win.
Alek opens her eyes and looks out at the city again. Maybe the truth is simpler than all of them wanted it to be.
Nobody saves the world alone.
You save it the only way it’s ever been saved.
Together.
With loyalty. With courage. With care.
With people who refuse to surrender their souls, even when they’re terrified, even when they’re hurting, even when it would be easier to go numb and call it “strength.”
And then you make that group bigger.
At last she stands. Time to go to dinner and celebrate with her friends. Her team.
Jimmy had a phrase for moments like this. Not heroic. Practical. Okay. Now we work.
Quietly she says, “Let’s do this.”
Patrick Arrasmith