It was, unfortunately, exactly as Iris had expected.
The Director was no saint looking to start a utopia free of money. No, he was a demon looking to assert himself as the sole ruler of a new society where everybody obeyed his will without question.
It was a lot to take in after everything Iris had seen over the years. She’d suspected the man might be a hypocrite, unwilling to part with his material possessions, but she hadn’t expected it to be this bad. But people had a way of letting you down. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out Gideon’s true motivations, either. The truth was that they were both terrible options because, at the end of the day, everyone was terrible in their own way.
Iris had finally seen enough to know what she had to do. Now standing in her rose garden to think straight, Iris could see as clearly as ever – being surrounded by beautiful climbing roses tended to do that.
The roses told her that she had to put a stop to it. Not just the Zircon Clan. Not just Gideon. She had to end it all. Visions appeared in the petals, showing her the way. That was the beautiful thing about Iris’s life the others didn’t know about; she hadn’t just been a spy. She had also been a gardener, and even before the magic had come to her, the petals had shown her visions of things to come; the Collapse, the roaches, the new society just as corrupt as the old one. Like a weed, it needed to be pulled up by the roots.
Now with her magic, Iris didn’t have to buy seeds online and wait for them to grow. It was much simpler now that she could summon the seeds and grow them in mere seconds, then listen as the plants whispered to her.
When they had first told her that it all needed to end, she’d hoped there could be another way. If she could just prove that someone out there truly had good in their heart, maybe it could all be spared. But the Director was just like the rest of them. And that meant the roses were right.
It all had to burn.