Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)

Part 8 – Death

“Men, conceptually, are canceled,” Libby said to her knees. “This Society? Founded by men, I guarantee it. Kill someone for initiation? A man’s idea. Totally male.” She pursed her lips. “Theoretically, men are a disaster. As a concept, I unequivocally reject them.”

“If only you meant that,” drawled Nico, who was blindfolded for the moment. He grew easily bored, which Libby had already known, though it was different to have to actually live with it. She was starting to feel a bit of sympathy for Gideon, who had always looked exhausted during their four years at NYUMA. He must have had his hands full having a roommate who wouldn’t stop for anything, least of all the sun.

At present, Nico was throwing knives. Something about being prepared for any possible invasion, which Libby reminded him they already were. More likely he felt agitated about having a situation he couldn’t control, and therefore felt the need to stab it. 

He held out a hand, feeling around the forces in the room. 

“Levitate it,” he said. “The lamp.”

“Don’t break the lamp, Varona.”

“I’ll fix it.”

“Will you?”

“Yes,” he said impatiently. 

Libby rolled her eyes, then focused on the forces of gravity surrounding it. She wished, not for the first time, that she could see things as Tristan saw them. She had never wondered before whether she should question what her eyes were promising her, but now it was all she ever did. She could feel Nico’s magic now like waves, invisible. He was stretching out his range, uncoiling it. He could tell where things were in the room just by filling it, taking up the volume of what he and Libby only saw as emptiness.

Relativity. In reality, there were pieces there, little particles of something that made up all that nothing. Tristan could see them. Libby couldn’t.

She hated that.

“Stop,” said Nico. “You’re changing the air again.”

“I’m not changing the air,” Libby said. “I can’t do that.”

Tristan probably could.

“Stop,” said Nico again, and the vase shattered. The knife remained in his hand.

“Congratulations,” Libby muttered, and Nico tore off his blindfold, giving her a look of total agitation.

“What happened with Fowler?”

She bristled. “Why does everything have to be about Ezra?”

Nico’s shrugged. “I don’t like him.”

“Oh no,” Libby lamented facetiously. “Whatever will I do without your approval?”

“Rhodes. For fuck’s sake.” Nico tossed the knife aside, beckoning her to her feet. “Come on. It’ll be like the NYUMA game.”

“Stop,” she said. “I don’t want to play with you. Go find another toy.”

“What happened?” he asked again.

Nothing. “We broke up.”

“Okay, and…?”

“That’s it.” Like she said. Nothing.

“Uh,” said Nico. He had a particular gift for making one sound mimic an entire musical performance about the interminable nature of suffering. 

“What do you want me to say? That you were right?”

“Yes, Rhodes, of course. Always.” 

Fair. She had walked into that one.

Libby rose to her feet on the basis of her own agitated desire to stand. The significance of it being a response to her own volition and not Nico’s command felt especially relevant at the moment. 

“You weren’t right,” she corrected him sharply, though she was pretty sure it didn’t matter what she said. Nico de Varona lived in his own reality; one that even Tristan couldn’t make sense of, probably. “Ezra’s not… unremarkable. Or whatever it is you always say about him.”

“He’s average,” said Nico bluntly. “You’re not.”

“He’s not av-”

She stopped, realizing she was focusing on the wrong thing.

“You make that sound like a compliment,” she muttered under her breath, and Nico made a face that was equal parts shut up and also, I said what I said.

“The problem with you, Rhodes, is that you refuse to see yourself as dangerous,” he told her. “You want to prove yourself, fine, but this really isn’t the uphill battle you think it is. You’re already on top. And somehow, you don’t seem to see the unfiltered idiocy of choosing someone who makes you…” He paused, considering it. “Duller.”

“Are you finally admitting I’m better than you?”

“You’re not better than me,” Nico replied perfunctorily. “But you’re looking for the wrong things. You’re looking for, I don’t know. The other pieces.”

She made a face. “Other pieces of what?”

“How should I know? Yourself, maybe.” He scoffed under his breath before oppressing her with, “Anyway, there aren’t any other pieces, Rhodes. There’s nothing else. It’s just you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Either you’re complete or you’re not. Stop looking. It’s right fucking there,” he informed her, snatching impatiently at her hand and half-throwing it back into her chest. She glared at him and pulled out of his reach, vandalized. “Either it’s enough for you or nothing ever will be.”

“What is this, a lecture?”

“You’re a fire hazard, Rhodes,” he said. “So stop apologizing for the damage and just let the fucker burn.”

Part of her was annoyed beyond recognition.

The other part of her didn’t want to walk into the trap of taking Nico de Varona at his word.

So, lacking a conceivable response, Libby glanced askance at the broken lamp and reconstructed it, replacing it on the desk. 

Nico, in answer, turned the desk into a box. 

Whenever Nico did any magic, it always unsettled her. He was vast, somehow. She never saw the details of what he was doing; if the world’s materials were strings with Nico as the puppeteer, they were unidentifiable. Things simply were and then they weren’t, just like that. She never remembered it happening, even if she stared. It was a desk, now it was a box, soon it might be a chair or a swamp. Probably the desk didn’t even know what it had once been.

“What are you, then?” she asked him. “If I’m a fire hazard.”

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe.” She returned the box to the form of a desk.

“It’s funny,” Nico said. “I wouldn’t have done any of this if they hadn’t come for both of us.”

“Why’s that funny?” 

“Because of this place I’m a murderer,” he said. “Complicitly,” he amended after another moment’s consideration. “Soon to be.” The last was a conclusive mutter.

“Get to the funny part,” Libby suggested drily.

“Well there’s a stain on me now, isn’t there? A mark. ‘Would kill for _____,’ followed by a blank space.” Nico summoned the knife back to his palm, only of course it didn’t register that way. One moment the knife was cast aside, the next it was in his hand. “I wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t come here. And I wouldn’t have come here at all if it weren’t for you.”

She wondered if he blamed her. He didn’t sound accusatory, but it was hard not to assume that he was. “You were going to do it regardless, remember?”

“Yeah, but only because they asked you.”

He glanced down at the knife in his hand, turning it over to inspect the blade.

“Inseverable,” he said, neither to himself nor to her.

“What?”

“Inseverable,” he repeated, louder this time. He glanced up at her, shrugging. “One of those if-then calculations, right? We met, so now we can’t detach. We’re just going to always play a weird game of… what’s the word? The thing, espejo, the game. The mirror game.”

“Mirror game?”

“Yeah, you do one thing, I do it too. Mirror.”

“But who does it first?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Do you resent it?”

He looked down at the knife, and then back up at her.

“Apparently I’d kill to protect it,” he said, “so yeah.”

Libby summoned the knife from his palm, which in practice was more like it had always been hers.

“Same,” she said quietly.

She set the knife down on his desk that had briefly been something else. 

“We could stop,” she suggested. “Stop playing the game.”

“Stop where? Stop here? No,” Nico said with a shake of his head, fingers tapping at his side. “This isn’t far enough.”

“But what if it’s too far?”

“It is,” he agreed. “Too far to stop.”

“Paradox,” Libby observed aloud, and Nico’s mouth twisted with wry acknowledgement.

“Isn’t it? The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me.”

They stood there a few seconds longer until Libby plucked the knife from his desk, stabbing it into the wood. The beams of the desk grew around it, securing it in place. 

“We broke up,” she said. “Ezra and me. It’s over. The end.”

“Tragic.” Nico looked smug. “So sad.”

“You could at least pretend to be sorry.”

“Could,” he agreed. “Won’t, though.”

She rolled her eyes and turned to the door, throwing it open and crossing the hallway to her room. She paused beside Tristan’s door, contemplating it, and wondered how he was doing downstairs. She didn’t expect it to be easy. Truthfully, she didn’t even expect it to work. The whole point of choosing Tristan to kill Callum was that Tristan was the least likely to do it, and therefore the whole thing was a gamble.

She thought of Tristan’s mouth, his eyes. The way it had felt to master something with his hand steady on the stillness of her pulse. 

Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?

A pity she was so terribly risk averse.

Libby slid into her room and shut the door behind her, falling backwards onto her bed. She considered picking up one of the books on her nightstand but gave up before she even started. Nico was probably onto something, what with giving himself a task to preclude falling into a full-bodied state of waiting, but for Libby, there could be no distraction. Her mind only bounced from Tristan to Callum back to Tristan, and then briefly to herself, which gave her fleeting moments of Ezra.

So it’s over? You’re done? 

He had sounded more exhausted than anything. 

It’s over, she confirmed. I’m done.

It wasn’t a matter of anything changing between them so much as Libby no longer being the person she had once been. She was so fundamentally altered that she couldn’t remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn’t anymore.

She hardly even suffered guilt for what she’d done with Tristan and Parisa, because whoever Libby had been that night, she was different from that, too. That was some transitional Libby who’d been searching for a cataclysm, seeking something to shatter her a little. Something to wipe the slate clean and start over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She’d found it, decomposed, and moved on.

Whatever Libby was now, she was powerful with possibility. Helpless, too, with the knowledge of her own exceptionalism. Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it. She was enslaved by it. There was so much ego to the concept of fate, but she needed to cling to it. She needed to believe she was meant for enormity; that the fulfillment of a destiny could make for the privilege of salvation, even if it didn’t feel that way right now. 

The library still refused her books. The subject of longevity in particular was denied; the question of whether her sister could have lived had Libby been better or more talented was repeatedly denied. It was like the whole structure of the library’s archives feared her in some way, or was repulsed by her. She could sense intangible waves of nausea at the thought that she wanted some knowledge she wasn’t meant to have. 

She could feel it breaking, too. She could feel the way it would soon give way beneath her weight. It was just waiting for something, or someone. Waiting for whoever Libby Rhodes would be next.

Conservation of energy meant there must be dozens of people in the world who didn’t exist because she did. Maybe her sister had died because she lived. Maybe her sister had died because Nico lived. Maybe the world had a finite amount of power and therefore the more of it Libby had, the less of it others could reach. 

Was it worth it to let that go to waste?

She could feel herself rationalizing. Half of her was full of answers, the other half full of questions, the whole thing subject to the immensity of her guilt. Killing is wrong, it’s immoral, death is unnatural, even if it is the only plausible result of being born. The need to soothe herself with reason buzzed around her head, flies to honey. 

What would happen when Callum was gone? It was strange to think the wards around the house were imprints of past Society initiates, and therefore, in a sense, ghosts. One-sixth of the house’s magic belonged to people who had been selected to die. 

When Callum had gone, would his influence remain?

It was Callum who had built the most integral defense into their wards. Libby and Nico had been the architects of the spherical shield, of course, but it was Callum who had created what he called the vacuum within the interior fabric of them. A layer of insulation, wherein all human feeling was suspended. 

What replaced feelings when there were none to be had? The absence of something was never as effective as the presence of something, or so Libby had thought until then. She had suggested they fill the space with something; a trap of some kind, or possibly something nightmarish if Callum really wanted to build some sort of existential trap, but he disagreed. To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness, which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight. 

Libby sat up with sudden discomfort, a little prick of worry. It wasn’t as if Tristan was powerless by any means, but maybe there was a reason Atlas had implied that Callum himself was something that should not exist. Callum’s power was always hazy, indefinable, but the effect of its use was unquestionable. He had taken a piece of Parisa’s mind and driven it to such anguish that she had destroyed herself rather than live with what he’d done. 

Suddenly, Libby was aware of the chance they’d taken when they left Tristan and Callum alone together. It was a fight to the death, where only one would come out alive. If Tristan failed, then Callum would know. There was no going backwards, no halting what would come next. Callum would know they had come for him, marked him expendable in their ledgers of who deserved what, and for that there would be consequences. This, the two of them downstairs, was no different from two gladiators meeting in the ring, one of them doomed to failure. 

She should not have let Tristan do this alone.

Libby sprang up from her bed and ran for the door, about to jerk it open, when something in the room shifted. The air changed. The molecules rearranged themselves, becoming cool somehow, slowing to a crawl. There was a foreignness to the room now, amnestic. It was as if the room itself no longer recognized her, and therefore hoped to crush her like a malignant tumor.

Was it fear? It wasn’t not fear, but she had been right about one thing in her conversation with Nico.

The air itself was different, and she wasn’t the one who had changed it. 

Libby spun, or tried to. She felt her pulse suspend again, a thing that didn’t belong. Just to exist in the room was terrible enough, because she wasn’t meant to be there. There was no way to explain the sensation; only to feel it as a lack, an absence. She suffered it, her alienness, with the way her own lungs didn’t want to expand.

If she had caught it sooner she could have stopped it. If she knew where to find its source now, she could drag it to a halt. This was the trouble with her, a weakness she would never have known she had if she had never met Tristan. She could have all the power in the world, enough to rid the global population twice over, and still, she couldn’t fight something if she couldn’t see clearly what it was.

But it wasn’t total emptiness. Distantly, she could hear something.

Do you really even know what you’ve said yes to?

An arm wrapped around her waist, dragging her backwards, and the air in the room rushed back into her lungs at the moment she finally found the voice to scream.