The Atlas Six

by Olivie Blake

  Now Callum’s mistake was obvious: he had thought to prove himself strong, but nobody wanted strength. Not like his. Strength was for machines and monsters; the others could not relate to faultlessness or perfection. Humans wanted humanity, and that meant he would have to show evidence of weakness. He could see Tristan failing to meet his eye and knew it, that Parisa had beaten him, but this was only a single round. For his next trick, he would have to let the smokescreen of what he’d been today disappear.

  “Callum, then,” said Dalton, turning to the others. “Would anyone like to review what we saw?”

  “No,” said Reina flatly; speaking, for once, for all the others. She turned to Parisa with something like sympathy, which Callum observed with a grimace.

  He would have to make them believe he could be weak. Perhaps only one person would be willing to believe it of him, but Parisa had already proven that to be considerable enough.

  There was no stopping what one person could believe.

  TRISTAN

  It had started with a question.

  “What do you think we should do?” Tristan had asked, summoning the bottle of absinthe and raising it to his lips.

  He should have known Parisa would have an answer. For every question, but specifically that one. She would not have come to him empty-handed.

  “I say,” she replied, cleverly undoing one of the buttons of his shirt, “we should make our own rules.”

  That night was a blur to consider in retrospect, which was something Tristan wished he could have said at the time. Unfortunately he had been perfectly clear-eyed and conscious when he slid his tongue between Libby’s lips, knowing both who she was and what he ought to have been—which was, ideally, able to prevent himself from stumbling into depravity and, quite probably, doom. Regrettably, he wasn’t.

  Parisa may have been the reason this all started—cleverly, and with what Tristan assumed to be centuries of atavistic female guile—but he had made no attempts to stop, and there was no recovering from what he now understood he craved.

  And truly, it was a craving, nothing so intentional as wanting. Some chemical reaction was responsible, or demonic possession, or some tragic malformation that other people wrote books about surviving. The absinthe had certainly encouraged him, spreading like warmth through his limbs, but whatever it was Tristan suffered, he was faintly aware he’d been suffering it already. The symptoms preempted the condition, or perhaps the condition had existed (blindly, deafly, and dumbly) all along.

  That Libby Rhodes was primarily a physicist was never to be discounted. Even now, her touch rumbled through his bones like the tremors of the earth itself.

  Not that she seemed to be fixating much on what had passed between them.

  “Electrons,” Libby said without preamble, startling Tristan. He had recently begun trying to fiddle with the dials of his magic while listening to music, or otherwise disabling or distracting one of his senses. At the moment, he had been filling his ear canals with ambient noise while thinking about the taste of her mouth.

  “Sorry, what?” he said, relieved that only Parisa could read his mind. (Fortunately, she was not in the room.)

  “How small can you see?” asked Libby.

  That wasn’t much clearer. “What?”

  “Well, you seem to be able to focus on the components of things,” she said, still not addressing any of the more obvious things, like how they had slept together somewhat recently.

  He had woken up in bed with her—with her, not Parisa—and had expected to find something more similar to the usual Libby Rhodes. Apprehension, regret, guilt, any of the above. Instead he’d awoken to Libby reading a manuscript, glancing at him as he sat up with difficulty.

  “We don’t need to talk about it,” had been the first words out of her mouth. “In fact I’d prefer if we didn’t.”

  Tristan had managed somewhat miraculously to straighten, squinting at her. His mouth was inconceivably dry, his head pounding, and he was being treated to merciless flashes of things he’d recently done and felt and tasted.

  “Fine,” he managed, though she paused, clearly hitting some sort of internal snag.

  “What were you doing back here with Parisa last night, anyway?”

  Dehydration wasn’t going to make this conversation any easier. “She asked me to come. Said she had something to discuss.” He could hear the coldness in his voice and paused, unsure whether it was worth getting into what Parisa had revealed about the Society under these uniquely troubling circumstances.

  “Oh.” Libby glanced away. “Well, if you don’t want to tell me—”

  For fuck’s sake. He would have to now, wouldn’t he?

  “Rhodes,” he began, and stopped.

  There was no way she would take it well.

  Though, keeping it from her would be morally quite worse, given how he had spent the previous evening. There was something about waking up naked in someone’s sheets that made Tristan quite unwilling to subject her to secret group homicide.

  Where to start, even if he could? Parisa had told him that in order for five to be initiated, one had to die. They had never been choosing someone to be eliminated; they were responsible for choosing someone to eliminate. The whole time they had been led to believe this was civilized and fair, but really it was primitive and shameful and, if Parisa was right, then they were possibly under the thumb of an organization that killed and had been killing for thousands of years.

  But Tristan expected some form of panic, and so determined perhaps a half-lie would be best.

  “Are you familiar with the trolley problem?” he asked Libby instead. “Where you find yourself at a lever in control of a runaway trolley—”

  “And you either kill five to save one, or kill one to save five. Yes, I know it.”

  What a miraculous coincidence it was, that he would be having this conversation with her in her bed during the study of thought. Of course, where it came to magic, thought was less about philosophy than it was about the compulsions of it, and how it could be read or toyed with or interpreted.

  In this case, ethics would have to do.

  “Would you?” he asked, and when Libby frowned, he clarified, “Kill one to save five.”

  “Parisa summoned you here for a thought experiment?”

  “What?”

  Libby waited, and he blinked.

  “Oh. No, she was—Well, it was about the Forum. Apparently—” More hesitation. He had never been so hesitant in his entire life, and wished desperately that he were clothed for this. Or that he had not known it to begin with.

  Parisa was right. Thoughts, once planted, could not be forgotten. He could not unthink the way it felt to run his fingers over the bone of Libby’s clavicle, his thumb hovering above her throat like he could slice it or adorn it, or both.

  “Apparently,” he attempted again, “Parisa’s visit from the Forum rather made her… think.”

  “About the Society, you mean?”

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “What does that have to do with the trolley problem?”

  “Well, someone gets eliminated, don’t they? In this case you kill one to save yourself. Not literally, of course,” Tristan rushed to add. “But… conceptually.”

  “I never cared much for thought exercises,” said Libby warily. “And besides, the experiment does hinge a bit on who the people are, in some cases.”

  “Suppose the one person was me, then. Would that change things?”

  He attempted a lightness to the suggestion, though of course the reality of knowing what he knew rendered things immensely more disconcerting than Libby could possibly guess. Then again, she wasn’t exactly Parisa. He doubted Libby would inform him she’d be rid of him while they were still in bed together, and he was right.

  “You don’t really think I’d eliminate you, do you?” she asked, frowning, and went on to say something entirely not what he’d expected: “Your potential is fully unrealized. If anyone needs the Society, Trist
an, it’s you. I think even Atlas can see that.”

  That, Tristan thought, was both extremely helpful while being thoroughly not helpful at all.

  Never had he known someone so positively bewildering. How could someone catastrophize the mundane at every possible turn only to readily assert her stance on such serious moral transgressions? She made him feel mad, insane, unstable. True, she was somewhat uninformed about the details (his fault), but there were markers of sensible logic here: she would not eliminate him because his power retained the most potential. Not because of who he was, or even what he was, but what he could be. That hadn’t been anywhere near the top of his concerns, nor even counted among Parisa’s, as far as he had known. She merely wanted Tristan because she trusted him on some level, he suspected. Perhaps it was a circular sort of thing, the way his usefulness to her was what proved him useful.

  Meanwhile, there was no predicting where Libby Rhodes might find solid intellectual ground. Tristan, naturally, was so unsettled as to topple at every possible juncture. Did he want this so badly he would kill for it? Sometimes the answer was unquestionably yes. What was being human except to crave things unreasonably? Parisa could build worlds inside a person’s mind. Tristan knew now—though he hadn’t then—that Callum, for better or worse, could destroy a person’s soul without lifting a finger. He had thought Libby and Nico were powerful—that Reina was leaking raw magic, overflowing with it to the point of near-irresponsibility—but knew nothing of himself, or where he fit among them. Admittedly, Tristan was not the most useful now, but the return on his investment might be greatest of all.

  Did he even understand what existed at his fingertips? Did any of them?

  Morality, what little Tristan had of it, tugged him between schools of thought, forward and backwards. “I do what’s necessary,” had been Adrian Caine’s take on most of his sins, and while it was (academically speaking) a legitimate philosophical standpoint, it was rather repugnant when left unconstrained by things like ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’ or even ‘guilt.’ Worse, if there was one thing Tristan had always aimed to be, it was well to the left of whatever his father was.

  Of course he could not kill someone; certainly not over access to a few books. (Rare ones. In the hands of the most powerful medeians he’d ever known. As part of a custom that had existed for centuries, so therefore wasn’t it…?)

  (Never mind.)

  In any case, if he did this—or even accepted it as a thing he could do—would he ever be able to forgive himself? Could he live with whatever remained of his conscience? Funny how quickly humans could adapt to things. He had once believed he could marry Eden Wessex and serve her father dutifully, never questioning whether he wanted more; or, as the case may have been, whether he craved it. He was starting to think his solidarity with the person he’d once been had been a much more stable time, and perhaps much healthier. It had been like regular exercise, productive diet habits, broken by a blissful, gorging binge. Now he had everything he could want; power, autonomy. Sex. Christ, the sex. And all it took was killing one person, but who would it even be? It wasn’t as if they could all agree on someone.

  Unless.

  “What if it were Callum?” he asked.

  (Purely for the sake of argument.)

  Libby frowned. “What, you mean kill Callum to save… me? The rest of us?”

  “Yes.” It made Tristan anxious even to think of suggesting it, though luckily Callum wasn’t in the house. Callum’s presence, like Reina’s, was readily identifiable by excess traces of magic. With all Callum’s illusions, though, it was difficult to discern what was actively in use and what wasn’t.

  “Say it was Callum on one side of the tracks, and the rest of us on the other.”

  “Oh.” Libby blinked, and her eyes widened. “Well, I—”

  Tristan waited, bracing himself. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted her answer to be. It was, to her, a hypothetical question, so it wasn’t as if this was enough to really determine her stance.

  Still, he was rather taken aback when she said, “I’m not doing that.”

  “What?” had been his gut response, delivered so sharply it rattled his entire aching brain from the depths of his many upsetting thoughts. “What do you mean you’re not doing that?”

  “I’m not killing someone,” she said, shrugging. “I won’t do it.”

  “Well, suppose you won’t have a choice,” he said.

  “In the thought experiment, you mean?”

  He hesitated, and then said, “Yes, in the thought experiment.”

  “Everyone always has a choice.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, tapping the manuscript in her lap to the wave of something he probably couldn’t hear. “Would you?”

  “Would I what?”

  “Kill Callum.”

  “I—” He blinked. “Well, I—”

  “Or me.” She glanced at him sideways. “Would you kill me?”

  “No.” No, not her. What a waste it would be for anyone to rid the world of her power, her capability. What an absolute crime against humanity. That was an easy conclusion, even if sex were not part of the equation. “No, of course not, but—”

  “What did Parisa say?”

  It occurred to him that Parisa had said something precisely the same, only drastically different: I’m not doing that.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “Parisa would plot some sort of mutiny. Take over the train.” He managed a grim laugh that hurt his throat, stinging. “Kill three and save three, somehow, just so she didn’t have to do precisely as she was instructed.”

  “Well, there’s that for choices,” said Libby, shrugging, as if anything he’d said were a plausible option. Tristan blinked, attempting to formulate thought, but was interrupted by the motion of Libby carefully marking her place in the manuscript, turning to face him.

  “I should probably talk to—” A pause. “I need to, um. My boyfriend is,” she began, and then faded into silence. “I should probably tell him.”

  “You aren’t going to…” Fuck. “What are you going to tell him?”

  She chewed her lip. “I haven’t decided.”

  “You’re not going to—” Stay.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” A pause. “No.”

  “So…”

  The fact that Tristan could neither fully speak nor fully keep from speaking was a rather upsetting one. He longed for the presence of mind to say nothing, to wander out of here like someone who did this sort of thing all the time, but at the moment he suffered only pinpricks of dehydration and total, unfettered stupidity.

  “So you’re just going to tell him, then? Straight out?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think about it,” she said.

  Clearly she meant alone, which was fair. This thought exercise, unlike the previous one, was not designed for peer review. The impulse to ask think about what? temporarily flooded Tristan’s consciousness, but muscle memory kept him from lingering overlong. Bad enough that he’d done what he’d done; he did not want to suddenly become the sort of person who lingered. He had limbs accustomed to impassive distance, and to his relief, he put it between him and Libby Rhodes with ease.

  Weeks later, he had still heard nothing from her. Their first few interactions had been slightly awkward, with occasional averted glances and one truly precarious collision that involved his palm inadvertently skating her hip as they passed each other between tables in the reading room, but there had been no further discussion. There had been no deliberate contact of any kind, nor anything outside of hello or good evening or please pass the bread.

  Until, of course, “Electrons.”

  “What do you mean electrons?” Tristan asked, feeling groggy and stupid. Ironic that the research spent on thought would leave him so utterly bereft of any, even after nearly two months. Their current topic of precognition (and its study of history’s most famous precognitors, like Cassandra and Nostradamus) had done absolutely fuck-all to prepare him for
this sort of interaction, which could only be described as nightmarishly unexpected.

  “If you could break things down as small as an electron, you could alter them chemically,” Libby said. “Conceivably, that is.”

  “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Well, it seems a bit more of a… later topic, doesn’t it?”

  “What, chemistry?”

  “We’re still on psychokinesis.”

  “Well, that’s not unrelated to thought in general,” she said. “I actually thought of it when we were discussing the mechanics of the future. By the way, have you thought any further about time?”

  She had such a ceaseless way of making him wonder what on earth she was talking about.

  “About… time?”

  “About whether you can use it.” She, unlike him, seemed blissfully unaware that this was the first time they were speaking to each other privately since he had woken up in her bed. “Precognition is proof the future can be accessed through thought, so why not physically as well? Not to mention that time is a dimension none of the rest of us can even imagine the shape of, much less see.” She fixed him with a direct, unnerving glance. “Unlike you.”

  “What, you think I can—?” His misdiagnosed illusionist training was failing him. Magically speaking, he hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of language could be used to describe what she was suggesting. “Traverse time?”

  “I have absolutely no idea, Tristan,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking you. It just seems as if you probably have some way to use it, don’t you?”

  “Use what?”

  “Your specialty.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it’s yours, isn’t it? So presumably you’re the one who should be using it, not me.”