The Atlas Six

by Olivie Blake

  Foggily, he produced an argument, plucking it from somewhere. “Plenty of magical specialties are designed to be used together. Most naturalists work with—”

  “I’m not saying that.” Libby tilted her head, brushing her fringe to one side. She had grown it out; now it was nearly long enough to tuck behind her ear, a fact of which Tristan was troublingly assured. “There’s nothing wrong with it not being yours to use. I simply suspect otherwise.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why suspect otherwise?”

  “Truthfully, it’s really more of a guess than a suspicion. What does Parisa think?”

  “I—” He stopped, taken by surprise yet again. “What?”

  “Actually, speaking of Parisa.” Another abrupt change, just as Tristan thought he’d managed a grasp on the conversation. “Do you suppose she’s changed her mind?”

  Rather than continue asking the same question, Tristan folded his arms over his chest, waiting.

  “About the whole… elimination thing,” Libby clarified, intuiting correctly that he hadn’t the faintest idea where she was going with any of this. “Seems like she might have changed her mind after the whole Callum thing. You know, the trolley problem?”

  “Oh.” Right. The small issue of Parisa’s death by Callum. “Yes.” Tristan fought a sudden chill. “In fairness, I think she always knew that about him.”

  “Well.” Libby cleared her throat. “I suppose there might be some merit to the whole thing.”

  Tristan arched a brow. “Some merit to… killing Callum?”

  “You saw him, Tristan.” Libby’s mouth was a new, grim form of determination he’d never seen from her before. “He didn’t know it wasn’t real, did he? He had no idea he was in some sort of… augmented reality in Varona’s head,” she said with a frown, “so Callum’s reality is that he could be rid of Parisa at any time, and easily. So maybe that’s something to consider in the experiment.”

  “That some people should die?”

  “That some specialties shouldn’t exist,” she said conclusively.

  That, Tristan thought, was certainly a jarring realization to come to.

  “It’s a moral dilemma for a reason, Rhodes.” His mouth was dry again, though for what reason, he wasn’t entirely sure. Perhaps because she’d just unintentionally decided which of them she’d murder, which she might one day actually do.

  Precognition. Terrible. He spared no envy for Cassandra.

  “There isn’t a correct answer,” Tristan said slowly.

  Libby’s smile twisted slightly, eyes drawn up to his.

  “I suppose not,” she observed, mostly to herself, and then, astoundingly, began walking away.

  Suddenly, Tristan felt a bit mad with disbelief at the concept that Libby could wander over, suggest to him that he was capable of doing something utterly impossible, and then wander off again without addressing the thoughts that had been plaguing him for weeks. Could he kill someone? Could she? Had they signed over their souls the very moment they set foot in this building? Had they become something they would not have been otherwise, now contorted beyond recognition from what they’d been? Were they not yet the deformities they would ultimately be? What the fuck was he supposed to do with electrons—how could he possibly use time?—and had she broken it off with her boyfriend or not?

  Tristan’s hand shot out before he could stop himself.

  “Rhodes, listen—”

  “Ah,” came Callum’s voice, cutting in just as Libby whirled around, eyes wide. “I thought I felt some lingering distress. Is Tristan pestering you again, Rhodes?”

  “No, of course not.” She cleared her throat, glancing at Tristan’s hand, which he removed from her arm. “Just think about it,” she said quietly, “would you?”

  Then she gave Callum’s shoes a wordless glance and ducked her head, leaving the room.

  “So skittish, that one,” said Callum, glancing after her and turning back to Tristan. “She doesn’t know, does she?”

  “No.” He still couldn’t bring himself to tell her. “And anyway, suppose it isn’t true?”

  “Suppose it isn’t,” Callum agreed, falling into the chair beside Tristan’s. “How do you imagine they make that announcement, I wonder?”

  “It could be a trick,” Tristan said. “Or a trap. Like—”

  “The installation? And the Forum?”

  Tristan sighed. “Suppose they just want to see what we’re capable of.”

  “Suppose it’s real,” Callum mused alternatively. “I don’t suppose you have a lead, do you?”

  “A lead?”

  “A target would be the less sensitive term,” Callum said. “Or a mark.”

  Tristan bristled a little, and Callum’s perpetual smile thinned.

  “Do you find me callous now, too, Tristan?”

  “A cactus would find you callous,” mumbled Tristan, and Callum chuckled.

  “And yet here we are,” he said, summoning a pair of glasses, “two peas in a pod.”

  He set one glass in front of Tristan, pouring a bit of brandy he procured from the flask in his jacket pocket.

  “You know, I don’t remember the first time I realized I could feel things other people couldn’t,” Callum commented anecdotally, not looking up from the liquid in the glass. “It’s just… always been there. I knew, of course, right from the start that my mother didn’t love me. She said it, ‘I love you,’ just as often to me as she did to my sisters,” he continued, shifting to pour himself a glass, “but I could feel the way it lacked warmth when she said it to me.”

  Callum paused. “She hated my father. Still does,” he mused in an afterthought, picking up his glass and giving it a testing sniff. “I have a guess that I was conceived under less than admirable circumstances.”

  He glanced up at Tristan, who raised his own glass numbly to his lips. Like always, there was a blur of magic around Callum, but nothing identifiable. Nothing outside of the ordinary, whatever Callum’s ordinary even was.

  “Anyway,” Callum went on, “I noticed that if I did certain things; said things a certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her… soften towards me.” The brandy burned in Tristan’s mouth, more fumes than flavor. “I suppose I was ten when I realized I had made my mother love me. Then I realized I could make her do other things, too. Put the glass down. Put the knife down. Unpack the suitcase. Step away from the balcony.” Callum’s smile was grim. “Now she’s perfectly content. The matriarch of the most successful media conglomerate in the world, happily satisfied by one of the many boyfriends half her age. My father hasn’t bothered her in over a decade. But she still loves me differently; falsely. She loves me because I put it there. Because I made myself her anchor to this life, and therefore she loves me only as much as she can love any sort of chain. She loves me like a prisoner of war.”

  Callum took a sip.

  “I feel,” he said, blue eyes meeting Tristan’s. “I feel immensely. But I must, by necessity, do it differently than other people.”

  That, Tristan supposed, was an understatement. He wondered again if Callum were using anything to influence him and determined, grudgingly, that he did not know.

  Could not know.

  “I,” Tristan began, and cleared his throat, taking another sip. “I would not wish to have your curse.”

  “We all have our own curses. Our own blessings.” Callum’s smile faltered. “We are the gods of our own universes, aren’t we? Destructive ones.” He raised his glass, toasting Tristan where he sat, and slid lower in his chair. “You’re angry with me.”

  “Angry?”

  “There’s not a word for what you are,” Callum corrected himself, “though I suppose anger is close enough. There is bitterness now, resentment. A bit of tarnish, or rust I suppose, on what we were.”

  “You killed her.” Even now it felt silly, inconceivable to say. Tristan had been numb at the time, only half-believing. Now it felt li
ke a distant dream; something he’d invented when his mind had wandered one day. The call of the void, that sort of thing. Gruesome ugliness that danced into his thoughts and back out, too fleeting and horrid to be true.

  “It seemed like the honorable thing at the time,” said Callum.

  It took drastic measures not to gape at him. “How?”

  Callum shrugged. “When you feel someone’s pain, Tristan, it is difficult not to want to put them out of it. Do we not do the same for physical pain, for terminal suffering? Under other circumstances it’s called mercy.” He took another sip from his glass. “Sometimes, when I suffer someone else’s anguish, I want what they want: for all of it to end. Parisa’s condition is lifelong, eternal. Degenerative.”

  He set the glass on the table, empty now.

  “It will consume her,” he said, “one way or another. Do I want her to die? No. But—”

  Another shrug.

  “Some people suffer bravely. Some clumsily.” He glanced up, catching Tristan’s look of uncertainty. “Some do so quietly, poetically. Parisa does it stubbornly and pointlessly, going on just to go on. Just to avoid defeat; to feel something more than nothing. It is, above all, vanity,” Callum said with a dry laugh. “She is like all beautiful things: they cannot bear the idea of not existing. I wonder whether her pain will grow sharper or more dull after her beauty fades away.”

  “And what about those of us who don’t suffer?” asked Tristan, fingering the lip of his glass. “What worth do we have to you?”

  Callum scrutinized him a moment.

  “We all have the exact curses we deserve,” he said. “What would I have been, had the sins that made me been somehow different? You, I think, have a condition of smallness, invisibility.” He sat up, leaning forward. “You are forced to see everything as it is, Tristan,” Callum murmured, “because you think you cannot be seen at all.”

  Callum slid the glass from Tristan’s fingers, leaning across the table. He smoothed one hand over the bone of Tristan’s cheek, his thumb resting in the imprint of Tristan’s chin. There was a moment just before it happened where Tristan thought perhaps he had wanted it: touch. Tenderness.

  Callum would have known what he wanted, so perhaps he had.

  “I feel,” said Callum, “immensely.”

  Then he rose to his feet, long-legged and lean, leaving only the glass where he had been.

  It went without saying that for days after, Tristan was quietly in torment. Callum, at least, was no different in his intimacy. They were friends primarily, same as ever, accustomed to their evening digestifs by the fire. There was a companionship to Callum, an ease. There were moments when it seemed Callum’s fingers twitched towards Tristan’s shoulder, or skated reassuringly between the traps of Tristan’s scapulae. But they were only moments.

  Libby, meanwhile, kept coolly away, and Tristan’s thoughts of time with her meandered inevitably to the matter of time itself.

  As spring began to break unseasonably early, creeping out from beneath the winter chill, Tristan found himself repeatedly outside, approaching the wards that surrounded the Society’s estate. Magic at its edges was thick and full, identifiable in strands as voluminous as rope. There were threads of it from other classes, other initiates, which made for a fun, sleepless puzzle. Tristan would toy with the pieces, pulling at their ends like fraying thread, and watch for any disruption in the pulse of constancy.

  Time. The easiest way to see it—or whatever of it Tristan could identify—was to stand there, nearly out to the street, and to exist in many stages of it at once. It wasn’t a normal activity, per se, but none of this was. Their supervision seemed to have decreased over time; coincidentally or not, none of them had seen much of Atlas since they had each been confronted by the Forum, which led to an odd sort of tiptoeing among the Society’s residents. Each had developed their own odd habits, and this was Tristan’s. He stood in silence, twisting dials he only partially knew how to use, and hoped—or, rather, assumed—that something would happen if he only looked long enough.

  The trouble was his imagination. Libby had said it: hers was too small. Tristan knew the falseness of geometry, the idea that the world contained other dimensions that they were not yet programmed to understand. But he had learned shapes as a child, so naturally he looked for them now. To stare into the familiar and somehow expect to see something new felt so frustrating as to be thoroughly impossible. Yes, Tristan could see things other people could not, but he didn’t believe his own eyes when he saw them. A child told habitually of his worthlessness was now a man bereft of fantasy, lacking the inventiveness to lend him a broader scope. Ironically, it was his own nature that crippled him most.

  Only once did Tristan run into someone while he did this. He looked up, startled, to suddenly see a young man facing him, staring at the house as if he couldn’t quite see it, or perhaps like he was looking at something entirely else.

  “Yes?” asked Tristan, and the man blinked, adjusting his attention. He wasn’t particularly old, probably Tristan’s same age or a bit younger, and had slightly overlong black hair, plus a general look of rare untidiness. As if he were the sort of person who didn’t usually spill coffee on his collar, but he had done so today.

  “You can see me?” asked the man, incredulous. Tristan supposed he might have been using a cloaking illusion, but was interrupted before he could ask. “Well, never mind, that’s obvious,” the man sighed, mostly to himself. He was not British; he was extremely American, in fact, albeit different from whatever sort of American that Libby happened to be.

  (Tristan wondered why she had come to mind, but hastily dismissed it.)

  “Obviously you can see me or you wouldn’t have said anything,” the man remarked in something of a continued amiability, “only I’ve never actually encountered another traveler before.”

  “Another… traveler?” asked Tristan.

  “Usually when I do it everything’s a bit frozen,” said the man. “I knew there were other kinds, of course. I just always thought I was existing on a plane that other people couldn’t see.”

  “A plane of what?” asked Tristan.

  The man gave him a bemused half-frown. “Well, never mind, I… suppose I’m wrong.” He cleared his throat. “In any case—”

  “What are you looking at?” asked Tristan, who was academically stuck on the point at hand. “Your surroundings, I mean.” He hoped to determine whether they stood in the same place physically, or only temporally. Or perhaps neither, or both.

  “Oh.” The man glanced around. “Well, my apartment. I’m just deciding whether to go inside.”

  “I don’t think I’m on the plane you’re on, then. I think I can just see it.” Tristan paused, and then, because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted the encounter to end, “What are you deciding?”

  “Well, I’ve just not entirely made my mind up about something I’ve got to do,” said the man. “Actually no, it’s worse. I think I’ve already decided what I’m going to do, and I just hope it’s the right thing. But it isn’t, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn’t matter,” he sighed, “because I’ve already started, and looking back won’t help.”

  That, Tristan thought, was certainly relatable.

  “I won’t keep you,” Tristan said. “I’m just… playing around a bit, I think.”

  Calculations had started, albeit unhelpfully. It seemed they were both on the same plane of something—time was the only plausible explanation— but how had Tristan arrived there? Either it had happened so subtly he didn’t know how he was doing it (and therefore he might have done it before, or might do it accidentally again) or he had done something to initiate the mechanism and failed to write it down. He ought to start cataloguing his meals, his socks. Every step he took differently, just in case something he did managed to drag him to another corner of reality.

  “Yes, well, play responsibly.” The man gave Tristan a lopsided grimace. “I’m Ezra, by the way.”

  “Tristan,�
�� said Tristan, offering Ezra a hand to shake.

  “Tristan,” echoed Ezra, brows twitching as he accepted Tristan’s grip. “But you’re not—?”

  Tristan waited, but Ezra stopped, clearing his throat.

  “Never mind. Best of luck, Tristan,” he said, and strode forward, gradually disappearing into the thick fog that covered the house’s lawn.

  Once Ezra had disappeared, it occurred to Tristan that he had done something. What it was he hadn’t the slightest idea, but he had done it, and so he turned on his heel and marched himself into the house, launching up the stairs.

  He could tell Libby. She would probably exceed him in enthusiasm, meaning that he would have the freedom to derisively say things like ‘calm down it’s nothing’ even if he did not feel them. Unfortunately she would also ask several questions, trying to unpuzzle things as she always did. She was an architect of details, constantly in the trenches of construction. She would want to see how things moved, what parts were in play, and of course Tristan would have no answers to any of it. She would look up at him, wide-eyed, and say anything else? and he would say no, that’s all he knew, sorry he even brought it up at… three.

  In the morning.

  Tristan sighed, stepping back from Libby’s door and shifting to face the frame beside his own instead, knocking once.

  Callum arrived at the door shirtless, his hair mussed. Behind him, Tristan could see the rumpled sheets, still warm from where Callum had lain there moments before, breathing deeply in solemn slumber.

  It was strange how Tristan did not know how Callum looked to the others. He wished sometimes that he could venture inside someone else’s head the way Parisa could, just to see. It was a curiosity now. He knew Callum did something to his hair, to his nose. He could see that enchantments were used there, but could not piece together their effect. Instead, Callum appeared to Tristan as he always did, with hair that wasn’t quite blond and the forehead that was noticeably high; the jaw that was so square it looked perpetually tensed. There were things available to fix, if one were in the business of fixing. Callum’s eyes were close-set and not as blue as he could make them if he tried. Possibly Callum could even afford the enchantments that made them permanent; even mortal technology could fix a person’s eyesight. Medeian charms afforded to the son of an agency of illusionists meant that even Callum might not remember the way his face looked undone.