The Atlas Six

by Olivie Blake

  “You can’t bring anyone else into the house,” said Dalton, as an apparent amendment. “But as it would be near impossible to accomplish anyway, I don’t bother including it as a caveat.”

  “Do you live here as well?” asked Parisa.

  “On the grounds,” Dalton confirmed evasively.

  “If there’s any sort of problem—” Libby chirped.

  “This is not a school,” Dalton clarified again, “and as such, there is no headmaster to alert in the event that any of you find yourselves dissatisfied. If there is indeed a problem, it belongs to the six of you collectively. Anything else?”

  Nothing.

  “Very well, goodnight,” said Dalton, as the six of them wandered off to find their rooms.

  Much like the house itself, the bedrooms were incredibly English, each room occupied by identical four-poster beds, reasonably sized desks and wardrobes, and a single vacant bookshelf. Nico’s room, which was the first door on the left, was beside Callum’s and across from Reina’s. Libby looked uneasy as she made her way to the end of the hall with Tristan, which Nico supposed was unsurprising. She had a great fear of being disliked, and he doubted Tristan had ever truly liked anyone. Thus far, Nico’s decision to ally himself with Libby wasn’t a promising sign for his popularity in the house, but if the situation ever called for changing teams, he was confident he could manage it. Besides, better to be the most tolerable option of the three physical specialties than to be the hanger-on to the other three.

  Nico wasted little time getting to bed. For one thing, Gideon had promised to visit, and for another, his power was reliant almost entirely on his physical state. In general, magic was a physical exertion; there was a certain degree of sweat involved, and recovery between bouts of use was a necessity. Nico likened it to the mortal Olympics: someone with natural aptitude could manage the fundamentals of their own specialty quite easily, perhaps without even breaking a sweat, but to win a gold medal required extensive training. As for other specialties outside one’s own, more of the same. You could certainly attempt to succeed in every Olympic sport, but you could just as easily kill yourself trying. Only someone very foolish or very talented would attempt as much as Nico de Varona had attempted.

  Luckily, he was both troublingly talented and exceedingly unwise.

  “This was extremely difficult,” remarked Gideon, manifesting in Nico’s head somewhere in the midst of whatever he’d been dreaming before, which he could not now remember. He seemed to be inside some sort of interminable jail cell now, reclining on a narrow cot with Gideon on the other side of the bars.

  “Wherever you’ve gone,” Gideon said, “it’s a fortress.”

  Nico glanced around, frowning. “Is it?”

  “I can’t actually get through,” Gideon said, gesturing to the bars. “And I had to leave Max outside.”

  “Outside where?”

  “Oh, one of the realms.” They had tried mapping them in college, but it was difficult. Realms of thought were hard enough to grasp, and the realms of the subconscious were extensive and labyrinthine, ever-changing. “He’ll be fine. I’m sure he’s sleeping.”

  Nico rose to his feet, approaching the bars. “I didn’t realize it’d be so difficult.” On second thought, though, he probably should have.

  “There are a lot of defensive wards up,” Gideon said. “More than I would expect.”

  “Even mental ones?”

  “Especially mental ones.” Gideon plucked something in the air like a guitar string. “See that? Someone over there is a telepath.”

  Parisa, probably, if what Tristan implied was correct, though Nico doubted that particular ward was her doing. It must have been a thread within a larger shield against telepathy, which made sense. Not every variety of theft required a corporeal form of entry.

  He glanced up, looking for a camera (or the iteration of one), and spotted it in the corner.

  “Well,” Nico said, pointing to it. “Try not to say anything too incriminating.”

  Gideon looked over his shoulder, shrugging. “I haven’t got much to say, to tell you the truth.” A pause, and then, “Avez-vous des problèmes? Tout va bien?”

  “Si, estoy bien, no te preocupes.” Anyone watching could probably translate, but that wasn’t really the point. “I suppose we shouldn’t do this too often, then.”

  Gideon inclined his head in apparent agreement. “You’re not properly sleeping when I’m here,” he pointed out. “And judging by this place’s security, you’re going to need all your energy.”

  “Yes,” Nico sighed, “probably.”

  “Is Libby there?”

  “Yes, somewhere.” He grimaced. “Though you’re not supposed to know that.”

  “Well, it was more of a lucky guess, really.” Gideon tilted his head. “You’re being nice to her, aren’t you?”

  “I’m always nice. And don’t tell me what to do.”

  Gideon’s smile broadened.

  “Tu me manques,” he said. “Max hasn’t noticed you’re gone, of course.”

  “Of course not.” A pause. “Y yo también.”

  “Strange without you around.”

  “I know.” Not really. It didn’t feel real yet, but it would soon. “Is it quiet, at least?”

  “Yes, and I don’t like quiet,” Gideon said. “Makes me suspect my mother’s going to surface from the garbage disposal.”

  “She won’t, we had a talk.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, she surprised me in the bath,” said Nico. “Still, I’d say she’s fairly well persuaded.” Or something close enough, he thought grimly.

  “Nicolás,” Gideon sighed, “déjate.”

  “I’m only trying to h-”

  He broke off as the bars warped, Gideon’s face disappearing. He opened his eyes to jarring darkness, someone shaking him awake.

  “There’s someone here,” said a voice he didn’t recognize for a moment, and Nico groggily struggled to sit upright.

  “What? It’s just my friend, he’s not—”

  “Not in your head.” It was Reina’s voice, he realized, adjusting to make out the general shape of her face in the dark. “There’s someone in the house.”

  “How do you—”

  “There are plants in every room. They woke me.” She was using a tone that sounded like stop talking. “Someone is trying to get inside, if they aren’t here already.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, brows creased. “Something.”

  Nico reached over, pressing a hand to the floor to feel the wood pulse beneath his palm.

  “Vibrations,” he said. “There’s definitely someone here.”

  “I know that. I told you.”

  Well, better if he could take care of it alone, or close to alone. Reina had probably done him a favor waking him first.

  Ah, but he’d said he wouldn’t do things alone.

  “Wake Rhodes,” Nico said on second thought, rising to his feet. “She’s in the last—”

  “The last room on the right, I know.” Reina was gone quickly, without asking questions. Nico crept out into the house, listening for a moment. Libby was better at listening; she was more attuned to waves of things, usually sound and speed, so he gave up and started feeling instead. He could sense the disruption from somewhere downstairs.

  The middle door opened, revealing Parisa in the frame.

  “You’re thinking very loudly,” she informed him with palpable distaste, as Libby emerged from her room.

  “Shouldn’t we wake—”

  “What’s going on?” demanded Callum, bursting from his door.

  “Someone’s in the house,” said Nico.

  “Who?” said Libby and Callum in unison.

  “Someone,” replied Nico and Reina.

  “Many someones,” Parisa corrected. She was holding a hand to the wall. “There are at least three compromised access points.”

  “She’s right,” sa
id Reina.

  “I know I’m right,” Parisa growled.

  “Has anyone woken Tristan?” asked Libby, looking predictably fretful.

  “You do it,” said Parisa, disinterestedly.

  “No,” Nico said. “Rhodes is coming with me.”

  “What?” said Libby, Parisa, and Callum.

  “You heard me,” said Nico, gesturing for Libby to follow. “Reina, wake Tristan and tell him to follow. Rhodes, stay close.”

  She gave him a glare of don’t boss me around, but he had already started moving.

  A good thing he had, too. It was almost immediate from the time they emerged onto the gallery landing.

  “Get down,” Nico hissed, tugging Libby to the floor as something shot overhead, aimed from the entry hall up to the vaulted landing of the second floor. It was much larger than a bullet, so probably not deadly. Something for temporary immobilization, most likely, which most magical weapons tended to be. But they were expensive, and not particularly useful when fired up at an unknown target, which gave Nico pause.

  “Probably a test,” said Callum, in something of a low drawl. “Some tactic to scare us into working together.”

  Possible, Nico thought, though he didn’t particularly want to agree with Callum aloud.

  “Cover me,” he said to Libby.

  “Fine,” she said, grimacing. “Keep your head down.”

  Every year, NYUMA held a tournament for the physical specialties; something akin to a game of capture the flag, but with fewer rules and more allowances. He and Libby had never been on the same team, almost always facing off in the final round, but all the games were essentially the same: someone attacked while someone else covered.

  Nico rose to his feet while Libby conjured a thin bubble of protection around him, manipulating the molecular structure of the air in their immediate vicinity. The world was mostly entropy and chaos; magic, then, was order, because it was control. Nico and Libby could change the materials around them; they could take the universe’s compulsion to fill a vacuum and bend it, warp it, alter it. The fact that they were natural energy sources, twin storage units for massive electrical charge, meant they could not only harness the energy required for an explosion, but they could clear a path of least resistance for it, too.

  Still, even batteries had their limits. Single combat was an excellent way to waste a lot of time and energy, so Nico opted to cast a wider net. He altered the direction of friction in the room, sending the entry room’s occupants into the furthest wall; helpfully, a thin tendril of plants crept out to twine around them, holding fast.

  “Thanks Reina,” said Nico, exhaling as he returned the balance of force in the room.

  Libby’s shield bubble dissipated.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “No,” said Parisa. “There’s someone in the east wing—”

  “And the library,” said Reina, before amending irritably, “the painted room.”

  “Which one?” demanded Callum.

  “Are you planning to be useful at all?” Reina countered, glaring.

  “If I felt there was any need to be concerned, I probably would be,” replied Callum. “As it is, why waste the effort?”

  “What’s going on?” asked Tristan, who had apparently managed the decency to join them.

  “Blakely’s testing us,” said Callum.

  “You don’t know that,” Libby said. Beneath the gallery corridor, the sound of further entry was imminent, and she had her brows knitted in concentration. “It might be real.”

  “What do you want me to do with these?” Reina asked, pointing to the men wriggling within the vines of their captivity.

  “Well,” Parisa said, impatient, “seeing as we don’t want them in the house—”

  “Varona, do you hear that?”

  Before Nico could retort that yes, Rhodes, if she could hear it, he could obviously hear it just as well, there was a strange, disorienting ringing from inside his ears; it filled his mind with a vacant whiteness, blinding him behind closed eyes.

  He vaguely felt a sharp sting of some kind, like the entry wound of a needle. Something stung his shoulder and he wanted to swat it away, only the screech of white that somehow filled his ears and eyes was debilitating; paralyzing. He felt a pressure inside his head that threatened to fill the space, like a rapidly expanding tumor.

  Then the ringing faded, just enough that he could open his eyes, and he saw that Libby was speaking, or trying to. Varona, her mouth was saying, Varona, it’s a way!

  Way? No, not a way.

  He blinked, his vision clearing.

  A wave.

  That helped. He tried to raise his right hand and faltered from pain, switching to the left to take hold of the particle of sound and aim it, like a whip, until it cracked. Libby, now freed the effort of dragging him from the sound wave’s immobilizing effect, extinguished it with a spark.

  “—can’t be a test,” she finished, and Nico realized the pain in his shoulder was much more than a sting. The wound was slick with blood, and as far as he could tell, that didn’t typically happen with magical weapons.

  “That,” Libby was saying with horror, “is not a fake injury!”

  “It’s a gunshot wound,” observed Parisa. “Whoever they are, they must not be magical.”

  Made sense, even if the first shot had been some type of magic; certain forms could be easily provided to a buyer with enough money, and medeians were rare enough that sending in a group of them would probably be a waste. Guns were cheaper and perfectly effective; case in point. Nico growled with annoyance, clotting his blood with a wave of his hand.

  “But this can’t be the Society’s doing,” Libby protested. “Surely we’re supposed to do something!”

  “There’s at least one medeian here,” Nico gritted through his teeth, struggling to rise. He wasn’t going to bother with easing the pain, as that would only require more energy than he could spare at the moment. It wasn’t a lethal wound by any means, and he would heal it later. “We should split up, I think. I can take care of the rest if Rhodes looks for the medeian.”

  “The rest?” echoed Callum, doubtful. “That’s a mess you’ve got on your shoulder. It’s not a pistol, it’s an automatic rifle. You could be dealing with military special ops.”

  “Thank you ever so,” replied Nico crassly, as another round was fired from below. He knew perfectly well what he was dealing with, which was precisely the point. “They wouldn’t bother arming a bunch of medeians with AKs,” he shouted over the sound of weaponry, “just like they wouldn’t send in mortals without magical oversight.” If it was a military task force of some sort, they were probably being commanded by a medeian. “And if he’s good at waves, Rhodes will hear him coming.”

  “Then we should split up,” said Parisa, who was at least very coolheaded.

  “Yes, good idea. You stay with me,” Nico suggested to her, “Rhodes can take Tristan, and Reina can go with—”

  “I’ll stay,” said Reina.

  “What?” said Callum and Libby.

  Reina seemed undeterred. “Nico’s the one taking on more people. I have combat experience.”

  Nico glanced at her. “You do?”

  “Well, I trained in hand to hand combat,” she amended, which sounded an awful lot as if she had merely read a lot of books on the subject. “Besides, you lot seem to think I’m useless at my specialty, don’t you?”

  “We don’t really have a lot of time to argue,” Libby pointed out, cutting in before anyone else could speak. “Parisa, take Callum,” she said; anything, Nico guessed, to get out of going with Callum herself, “and Varona’s right, Tristan can come with me.”

  “Fine,” said Parisa flatly. “I can find the medeian in the house.”

  “Good, and we’ll check the access points—”

  That was about as much Nico had the patience to discuss when it came to logistics. By then his arm had gone a little numb, probably because his mind was leaping ahead
to the prospect of fending off intruders.

  He had been very, very good at the physicist tournament. Voted MVP four years running, in fact, and as good as Libby may or may not have been (fine—she was, but still), she had never once beaten him. Nico had a taste for adrenaline, and besides, he had to see someone about a bullet wound. In his not-so-humble opinion, he was rather richly owed.

  “Come on,” Nico called to Reina, leaping atop the gallery’s bannister and beckoning her after him into the hail of gunfire below, shielding himself with a hand outstretched. “Meet you down there.”

  “Varona,” Libby sighed, “you do realize there are stairs—”

  He wasn’t listening. Shots were fired, surprise surprise, but he was ready for them now. He slipped one as easily as he might have ducked a punch, catching the uniform that suggested he’d been right; this was some sort of military task force. Fun! Exciting. All of them against him; how terribly unfortunate they hadn’t thought to bring a party twice as large. He curled the floor in slightly, funneling them all into an invisible drain. Better that way, to see how many. He counted six and smiled to himself, returning the floors to how they’d been. The gunmen stumbled, then shot towards him.

  It was Reina, to Nico’s surprise, who took aim first, sending a bolt of something very crude but very fast into the chest of an oncoming gunman. It knocked the wind out of the gunman, sending the butt of his rifle flying into the face of his comrade. By the sound of his swearing, Nico guessed American, maybe CIA. That, he thought with a shiver of anticipation, would be very exciting indeed. He had never been important enough to merit assassination before.

  More shots were fired, which certainly wouldn’t do; one bullet wound was plenty. After waiting a moment to take the impact through a temporary shield of his making, Nico took hold of the nearest gunman and aimed him in a circle, prompting the others to launch themselves behind the aristocratic furniture for cover. A little tug of gravity out from under them sent them floating in slow motion, the rifles drifting from their hands. Nico summoned their weapons and disassembled them with a single, explosive blow, sending the components flying like shrapnel as the ordinary forces in the room returned.