Atlas Shrugged [410]
"You will. But not on your knees."
He was looking at her, as if he were seeing her body as she stood before him, even though his eyes were directed at her face, and his glance told her what form of atonement and surrender he was seeing in the future. She saw the effort he made to look away, his hope that she had not seen his glance or understood it, his silent struggle, betrayed by the tension of a few muscles under the skin of his face-the face she knew so well, "Until then, Dagny, remember that we're enemies. I didn't want to tell you this, but you're the first person who almost stepped into heaven and came back to earth. You've glimpsed too much, so you have to know this clearly. It's you that I'm fighting, not your brother James or Wesley Mouch. It's you that I have to defeat. I am out to end all the things that are most precious to you right now. While you'll struggle to save Taggart Transcontinental, I will be working to destroy it. Don't ever ask me for help or money. You know my reasons. Now you may hate me-as, from your stand, you should."
She raised her head a little, there was no perceptible change in her posture, it was no more than her awareness of her own body and of its meaning to him, but for the length of one sentence she stood as a woman, the suggestion of defiance coming only from the faintly stressed spacing of her words: "And what will it do to you?"
He looked at her, in full understanding, but neither admitting nor denying the confession she wanted to tear from him. "That is no one's concern but mine," he answered.
It was she who weakened, but realized, while saying it, that this was still more cruel: "I don't hate you. I've tried to, for years, but I never will, no matter what we do, either one of us."
"I know it," he said, his voice low, so that she did not hear the pain, but felt it within herself as if by direct reflection from him.
"Francisco!" she cried, in desperate defense of him against herself.
"How can you do what you're doing?"
"By the grace of my love"-for you, said his eyes-"for the man,"
said his voice, "who did not perish in your catastrophe and who will never perish,"
She stood silently still for a moment, as if in respectful acknowledgment.
"I wish I could spare you what you're going to go through," he said, the gentleness of his voice saying: It's not me that you should pity.
"But I can't. Every one of us has to travel that road by his own steps.
But it's the same road."
"Where does it lead?"
He smiled, as if softly closing a door on the questions that he would not answer. "To Atlantis," he said.
"What?" she asked, startled.
"Don't you remember?-the lost city that only the spirits of heroes can enter."
The connection that struck her suddenly had been struggling in her mind since morning, like a dim anxiety she had had no time to identify.
She had known it, but she had thought only of his own fate and his personal decision, she had thought of him as acting alone. Now she remembered a wider danger and sensed the vast, undefined shape of the enemy she was facing.
"You're one of them," she said slowly, "aren't you?"
"Of whom?"
"Was it you in Ken Danagger's office?"
He smiled. "No." But she noted that he did not ask what she meant.
"Is there-you would know it-is there actually a destroyer loose in the world?"
"Of course."
"Who is it?"
"You."
She shrugged; her face was growing hard. "The men who've quit, are they still alive or dead?"
"They're dead-as far as you're concerned. But there's to be a Second Renaissance in the world. I'll wait for it."
"No!" The sudden violence of her voice was in personal answer to him, to one of the two things he had wanted her to hear in his words.
"No, don't wait for me!"
"I'll always wait for you, no matter what we do, either one of us."
The sound they heard was the turning of a key in the lock of the entrance door. The door opened and Hank Rearden came in.
He stopped briefly on the threshold,