The Atlas Six

by Olivie Blake

  “You have enemies. You mustn’t.”

  “Why not? I always have enemies. It’s unavoidable.”

  “No. Not here. Not—” He broke off. “Find someone somewhere, Parisa. Don’t waste your time on me; find someone in your initiation class, someone reliable. That or make yourself indispensable somehow.”

  “Why,” she said with a laugh, “because you don’t want me to leave?”

  “Because I don’t want you to—”

  He broke off, eyes snapping open.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked her quietly, and before she could open her mouth, he said, “I’ll give it to you if it means you’ll work harder at playing this game.”

  There it was again; the acrid sense of fear.

  “Is it answers?” he pressed her. “Information? What is it? Why me?”

  She slid out of his grip, stroking his hair from his temples.

  “What makes you so sure I want something? Dalton.” She had wanted to say his name, to test it out experimentally, so she did. She could see on his face how viscerally he suffered for it.

  “You do. I know you do.” He inhaled sharply. “Tell me what it is.”

  “What if I tell you I don’t know?” she murmured, maneuvering from behind his chair to position herself against the table, leaning back on her palms. His hands seemed to levitate in a trance, moving of their own accord to find her hips. “Maybe you intrigue me. Maybe I like a puzzle.”

  “Play a game with someone else, then. Nico. Callum.”

  The mention of Callum’s name gave her an involuntary bristle, and Dalton looked up, brows furrowed.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” The room was lit from above, but down here there was only the single desk lamp to cast illumination over Dalton’s features. “I have no interest in Callum.”

  Dalton lips brushed the fabric of her dress; above her sternum, below the hollow of her throat. His eyes closed, then opened.

  “I saw what he did, you know. I watched.” Dalton gestured evasively around. “There are surveillance enchantments, wards everywhere, and I was watching the two of you at the time. I saw it.”

  “So you saw him kill her, then.” The reminder nearly gave Parisa a shiver; or would have, if she were less responsible with her own control.

  “No, Parisa.”

  Dalton reached up, touching her cheek; a single brush of his thumb, right over the bone.

  “I saw her kill herself,” he said softly, and though it was the worst time, surely the wrong one, Parisa instinctively pulled him closer. Impulsively, she wanted him in her grasp.

  She had nursed his affinity for her, making him crave her like an addict. One drop and he would go too far. He gave in easily, readily; perilously, like madness. His hands clutched her hips and he set her roughly at the edge of the table, inciting a burst of heat.

  “People can do unnatural things. Dark things, sometimes.” He sounded hungry, ravenous, desperate. His lips brushed her neck and she sighed; something she’d done countless times before and would do countless times again. Still, it was different even when it was the same, and with him it was unprofessionally persuasive.

  This was the magic of sex, the animation. Something coming alive inside her at his touch.

  “Can’t you strike a deal with the devil if it means getting what you want?” he whispered.

  Her eyes fluttered shut and she thought of Callum.

  Aren’t you tired? All this work, all this running, none of it you can ever escape; I can feel it in you, around you. You feel nothing anymore, do you? Only erosion, fatigue, depletion. Your exhaustion is all you are.

  Parisa shuddered and pulled Dalton closer, so that his pulse aligned with hers. Both were arrhythmic and unsteady.

  What are you fighting for? Do you even know anymore? You can’t leave this behind you. They will chase you, hunt you, follow you to the ends of the earth. You already know this, you know everything. How they will kill you a thousand different ways, bit by bit. Piece by piece. How they will destroy you, little by little, by robbing your life from you.

  Her hands traveled over Dalton’s spine, nails biting into the blades of his shoulders.

  Your death will have to be at their hands, on their terms, not yours. They will have to kill you to keep themselves alive.

  She felt him come closer to breaking, teetering on the edge.

  You have a choice, you know. You have only one true choice in this life: live or die. It is your decision. It is the only thing no one else can take from you.

  Dalton’s lips, when they met hers, were spiced with something; brandy and abandon. She slid her fingers through his hair, reveling in his shiver that tugged her closer, like a reflex from a fall. She reached behind her, shoving the books aside; Dalton slid his hands under her dress, wrapping his hands around her thighs.

  That gun you’re pointing at us… Do you even know who we are? Do you know why you’re here?

  “Promise me,” Dalton said. “Promise me you’ll do something.”

  Turn the gun around.

  “Dalton, I—”

  Pull the trigger.

  Parisa gasped, blood and madness coursing through her when he shoved the dress up her legs, drawing her closer. In her mind, she watched the assassin’s death again, over and over. Turn the gun around. The smell of fire, a woman’s blood spraying at her feet. Pull the trigger. Callum hadn’t even lifted a finger. He’d barely drawn breath. Turn the gun around. He had looked that woman in the eye and convinced her to die. Pull the trigger. Her death had cost him nothing; not even a second thought.

  Was that the kind of devil Dalton meant?

  “I am not good,” Dalton told her, rasping it into her mouth. “No one here is good. Knowledge is carnage. You can’t have it without sacrifice.”

  She kissed him hard; he fumbled with her dress and dropped to his knees, tugging her hips towards him. She felt the hard edge of a book stabbing into the base of her spine, then the indelible sweetness of Dalton’s mouth; his kiss, his tongue and his lips. Her back arched off the wood, accommodating her quiet sigh. Somewhere in Dalton’s mind things were coming loose; a door was opening. She slid inside and sealed it shut behind her, tugging at the roots of his hair.

  What was in here? Nothing much. Even now, even in his head, he was careful. She could only find fragments, remnants of things. Fear, still. Traces of guilt. He needed to come untied, come undone. She could pull a few strings and glimpse his insides, find the source of it, if she could set him on a path bound for destruction. She tugged him to his feet, hastily flaying open the zipper of his trousers. There wasn’t a man alive who couldn’t sink into her with the blankness, the blindness of ecstasy. Satisfaction was obstructive that way. She yanked at his hips, clawed into his spine, bit into the muscle of his shoulder. If they were caught like this, so be it. They’d be caught.

  He had imagined this before; she could watch the evidence of it like a flipbook in his mind. He had already had her a hundred different times, a thousand ways, and that she could see them now was promising. There was a weakness in his defenses, and it was her. Poor thing, poor little academic, trying to study his books and keep his distance when really, he was fucking her on her hands and knees in the abscesses of his tired mind. Even this—taking her here, on the table covered with his notes—he had seen before: prophecy. It was like he had spirited this very vision to life.

  They both gasped. He wanted the two of them close, her securely fastened in his arms, and so did she. From here she could taste the burning edges of his thoughts. He wasn’t just afraid of something; he was afraid of everything. He hated this house, the memories in it. The memories themselves were knives, glinting in the light. They pricked her fingers, warning her away. Turn the gun around. Pull the trigger. There were demons in here; devils. Can’t you strike a deal with the devil if it means getting what you want? There was boyhood in here too, juvenile and furious and small. Once, he had brought a dead sapling back to life, onl
y to watch it wither away and die regardless.

  The taste of him on her tongue, real and imagined, was burnt sugar, wild adoration, tender rage. Poor thing, poor desperate thing. Parisa recalled the thoughts in Reina’s head, which the naturalist couldn’t quite control; Dalton is something, he’s something important, he knows something we don’t.

  I know that, you stupid girl, thought Parisa, and I never miss my mark.

  “Dalton,” she whispered, and this would have to be the first of many times, because as much as she would have liked to lose herself in him, that was the one thing she couldn’t do right now. He wanted to tell her something; something he felt was desperately important, something he couldn’t say aloud, and if she didn’t take it now, he might lock it further inside him. He might seal it away. She said his name again, twisting it around her tongue, fitting it to the shape of her indelicate longings: “Dalton.”

  “Promise me,” he said again, and he was ragged this time, wretched and weak, and she was struggling to maintain her thoughts. What did he want her to know? It was something powerful, almost explosive, but it warped and waned. He wanted her to know, but couldn’t tell her. He wanted something, something he couldn’t confess aloud; something that could devastate them both.

  What was it? He was close now, closer, and she had her legs snaked around his waist, her arms locked around his neck. What did Callum have to do with it? Turn the gun around. Pull the trigger. The knot inside her tightened, swelling up and pulsing in her veins. Her heart was quick, too quick, her muscles straining. Dalton, Dalton, Dalton. He was as good as she wanted him to be; traumatically so. This was a torment she would seek again and again. The trauma of him was exquisite, the vice of his intimacy combative and honeyed. Oh, he was full of lies and secrets, only some of which he wanted to keep. What had he done, what did he know, what did he want?

  She only saw it in the moment she let go, soundlessly crying out between his lips. So it was her intimacy he wanted, then; only when she was vulnerable, taking pleasure at his hands, could he forget what she was long enough to let her see. She came and his mind went with her, eruptive in relief.

  It was a fragment of an idea; the fractured sliver of a larger truth. So small and so sharp she almost missed it, like a thorn on a root underfoot. She stumbled on it: he wanted her not to die. Parisa. The small voice she’d heard, it was part of that same thought, the same fear. Parisa, don’t go. Parisa, please, be safe.

  It slid into her mind like a splinter, a sliver. It was such a tiny thought, so innocuous, buried indiscreetly in a shallow grave of apprehension. He had countless worries, jagged little aches of thought, but this one was so easy to find she could trip over it, and she had.

  She reached up, clawing a hand around his jaw.

  “Who’s going to kill me?”

  She had asked quickly enough that there would be no time to prevent his answer. Already he was exposed for her—enraptured, undone. Remorse would set in later, maybe resentment, maybe regret. For now, though, he would never be more hers.

  The words had left her lips for him to swallow; aptly, he gulped them down his throat.

  “Everyone,” he choked aloud, and then she understood it.

  They will have to kill you to keep themselves alive.

  V: TIME

  TRISTAN

  There were times when Tristan’s natural inclination towards cynicism served some larger, more enduring toxicity; a vast, chronic paranoia. Any rare glimpses of optimism were swiftly dealt with, a virus his mind and body leapt to attack, and thus were ultimately beaten into submission. Feelings of hope? Cancerous. There was a constant sensation for Tristan that if things seemed to be going well, half of him was sure he was in the process of being mightily tricked.

  Which was why the possibility he could do more with his magic than he had ever been aware of before joining the Society was so stupendously upsetting. Were there logical reasons this might be true? Yes, of course. All skills became more refined when they were properly trained, particularly magical ones, and since Tristan had been either unidentifiable or misclassified for the majority of his education, it followed that he might not have experienced the true spectrum of his abilities until now.

  Did that stop him from wondering if he were slowly going mad instead? No, absolutely not, because the possibility remained that he and the others were being quietly but effectively poisoned. (It would be a complex con, but a good one. If this was how he died, so be it. Whoever planned it would obviously deserve their intended result.)

  It was difficult to explain, which was why he hadn’t. To anyone. He sensed he was letting off certain undercurrents of agitation, though, which was a suspicion Callum served to reinforce, always glancing over at Tristan reassuringly when he was feeling most unhinged. It was the conflict of the thing; the tension. The difficulty of seeing one thing and knowing another. Strangely, it had been something Libby said that did it; she had commented on Tristan’s ability as if it were notable that he couldn’t see her version of reality, and from there it had been a tumble of deduction.

  It all hinged on a basic, undeniable fact: that what Tristan could see and what others could see were different. Other people, according to both Callum and Parisa, saw things based on their experiences, on what they were taught, on what they were told was true and what wasn’t. Einstein himself (surprisingly not a medeian; almost certainly a witch, though) had said there was no reality at all except in the relations between systems. What everyone else was seeing—illusions, perceptions, interpretations—were not an objective form of reality at all, which meant that, conversely, what Tristan could see… was.

  He could see, in some sense, reality itself: a true, unbiased state of it.

  But the closer he looked, the fuzzier it got.

  It was late one night when he couldn’t sleep, sitting cross-legged in the center of his mattress to test his eyesight again. Of course, it wasn’t his actual eyes he was using; it was some other form of looking, which he supposed was his magic, though he hadn’t progressed to knowing what to call it yet. Mostly, if he concentrated, he could see little particles of things. Like dust, almost, where if he focused in on one thing, he could watch its trajectory, follow its path. Sometimes he could identify something from it; a mood, which took the form of a color, like an aurora, which was still somehow none of those things, because of course he hadn’t honed the sense required to name it. He wasn’t hearing or smelling reality, and he certainly wasn’t tasting it. It was more like he was dismantling it layer by layer, observing it as a model instead.

  It had the same logical progression most other things possessed. Take the fire that had been burning in the hearth, for instance. The weather was getting colder now, moving briskly into autumn, and so Tristan had fallen asleep to the light dancing, shadows falling, the smell of flames warming the air as flakes of ash floated down to the base of the wood. He knew it was fire because it looked like fire, smelled like fire. He knew from experience, from his personal history, that if he touched it, he would burn. He knew it was fire because he had been told it was fire; that much had been proven countless times.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  That was the question Tristan was struggling with. Not about the fire specifically, but about everything else. A very existential crisis, really, that he no longer knew the difference between what was true, objectively, and what he merely believed to be true because it had been told to him that way. Was that what happened to everyone? The world had been flat once; it was believed to be flat, so in the collective consciousness it was, or had been, even if it wasn’t.

  Or was it?

  It was giving Tristan such a monumental headache that he didn’t even stop to question why someone would be knocking on his door at this hour. He simply waved a hand and summoned it open.

  “What?” he said, Tristan-ly.

  “Turn down the cataclysm, would you? It’s the middle of the night,” said Parisa, Parisa-ly. She, he noted, was fully dressed, if a bit�
�� rumpled. He frowned at her, and she shut the door behind her, leaning against it.

  “I obviously didn’t wake you,” Tristan commented in observation, wondering if she would take the bait and explain.

  Unsurprisingly, she did not. “No, you didn’t wake me. But as a general rule, you could stand to calm down,” she said, and then stepped further into the room.

  Moonlight fell on her from the window in a panel; just narrow enough that he could see the little furrow of concern in her brow. Each of Parisa’s expressions were so artful they could hang in the Louvre, and not for the first time, Tristan wondered what on earth her parents must have looked like to achieve such outrageous genetic symmetry.

  “Actually, my parents aren’t particularly attractive,” said Parisa blandly. “And my face isn’t technically symmetrical.” She paused, and then, “My breasts certainly aren’t.”

  “I know.” He hadn’t specifically noticed, but it felt like the right thing to remind her; that he had been in a position to know, at least. Several positions. “And is that supposed to be self-deprecation? Or humility?”

  “Neither. Beauty is nothing.” She waved it away and stole towards him, settling herself on the edge of his bed. “Everyone’s perception is flawed. They have standards drilled into them by cultural propaganda. Nothing anyone sees is real; only how they perceive it.”

  How very topical, Tristan thought grimly. Which might have been intentional on her part, though at the moment he didn’t care to dwell on which of his thoughts she was or wasn’t using.

  “What is it?” he asked her. “Clearly something’s bothering you.”

  “I’ve just discovered something. I think.” She toyed with her fingers, tapping them mindlessly in her lap. “I’m not sure yet whether it will be in your best interest to tell you.”

  “In my best interest?”

  “Well, you’re right, it wouldn’t be in yours. You wouldn’t take it well at all.” She glanced at him, eyes narrowing. “No, I can’t tell you,” she determined after a moment. “But regrettably, I do want you to trust me.”