The Atlas Six

by Olivie Blake

  Her eyes narrowed slightly in calculation.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said, and turned away, but Nico tugged her back, imploring her.

  “How can it not matter? You can see inside his head, Parisa. I can’t.” He released her, but kept the pull of conspiracy between them. “Please. Just tell me what he really is.”

  For a moment when she looked at him, Nico thought he saw uncharacteristic evidence of tension in Parisa’s face. Vestiges of a secret soon to be known; a truth wanting out. She made the decision in the second her eyes met his, but even with the improbability of the conversation they’d just had, he couldn’t have prepared himself for how her answer would shake him.

  “It doesn’t matter whether Callum plans to hurt me,” she said, “because I’ll kill him before he does.”

  Then Parisa had leaned closer and said something that Nico had taken like a blow, still reeling even after hours had passed.

  “What is it?” Reina asked again, startling him back to their conversation. She was normally comfortable without speaking, but presumably he had been silent for too long.

  Nico tugged at a blade of grass, plucking it free. He wondered if Reina could hear it scream when he did so, and flinched at the reminder that the universe had some voice he couldn’t hear. Another detail among many he couldn’t un-know. A blissful piece of foregone ignorance, belonging to a person he would never be again.

  “Would you kill someone to have all of this?” he muttered to Reina, though he regretted having asked the question as soon as it fell out of his mouth. Would she ask him why, and would he be able to answer if she did?

  But he needn’t have worried. She didn’t even spare a breath.

  “Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes, warming silently in the grass.

  VII: INTENT

  REINA

  The realm of thought wasn’t totally uninteresting as a topic of study, but even so, Reina was pleased to move on. The breaks in subject matter were particularly intriguing because there was always a sense of some invisible, underlying fabric; that they were being directed by currents they couldn’t necessarily see until they’d already absorbed it, swallowed it whole.

  Reina had the benefit of being raised amid Eastern philosophies as opposed to Western, which meant she trusted general policies of oneness. Suchness, as it were. She understood, in a way the others did not, the existence of polarities, a mysticism of opposition: that acknowledging the presence of life meant accepting the presence of death. That knowledge necessitated ignorance. That gain meant loss. Ambition suggested contentment, in a sense, because starvation implied the existence of glut.

  “Luck is a matter of probability,” said Dalton. He wasn’t always assigned the role of lecturer, which was probably for good reason. He didn’t seem to care for it, as if they had dragged him away from something more important; he had an air of wanting to be elsewhere, or generally belonging to thoughts a great distance from theirs. Still, they had grown familiar enough with him by then that his presence was less that of an administrator and more like a cook they rarely saw, or a housekeeper. Someone providing them with sustenance but not interfering much with their daily lives.

  “Luck,” Dalton continued, “is both a magic and a science that has been studied in detail, by medeians and mortals alike. It is chance, but with a loaded die: the lean of likelihood toward a favorable event. For obvious reasons, one’s proclivity for luck is a valuable commodity. Also a common magic, even for the lowest rungs of witches. Now, the issue of unluck—”

  “Unluck?” echoed Libby, bewildered.

  (Reina had no such confusion. The existence of luck necessarily implied its opposite.)

  “Unluck,” Dalton confirmed, “for lack of a better term, is the purposeful disruption of probability. Jinxes, hexes, curses—”

  “Battle magic?” asked Nico, who despite his best intentions had a tendency to be mercilessly literal.

  “Unluck,” Dalton repeated. “Hexes are of course the most direct form; intentional bad luck caused to the victim. The other two—”

  “Jinxes are inconveniences, entanglements,” said Libby. “And curses are deliberate harm?”

  She always seemed to phrase things in the form of a question even when she was certain, ostensibly out of a desire to appear unthreatening. (As if any of them would be threatened by something they were all required to study as first year students at university, if not sooner.)

  “Academically, yes,” confirmed Dalton. “But for the Society’s purposes, we are less concerned with the results of such magic than we are with their construction. Which curses have proven most effective and why, that sort of thing. Mostly,” he said, his attention straying, as it often did, to Parisa, “how the disruption of luck can be used to unmake a man, unsettling him from the design—or rather, the lack of design—his path should naturally take.”

  Parisa’s dark eyes held his for a moment. Dalton cleared his throat.

  “Nature is chaos, magic is order, but they are not wholly unrelated. Bloodlines,” Dalton continued, “are a common carrier for mechanisms of unluck—genetic continuity. Very common that a curse will follow genealogy in some way or be passed on to progeny. That sort of magic is much more complex than it seems; anything with such lasting consequences requires a certain degree of sacrifice and loss to the caster.”

  Reina’s commentary was rare, but sometimes necessary. “Why?”

  The plants beside her slithered with glee, coaxing her to speak further. MotherMother soothe us with your voice it pleases us to hear you!

  She crossed one leg over the other, irritated.

  “Why?” echoed Dalton at her interruption, looking once again as if he wished he were left alone with his thoughts. “Because although magic and nature have different forms, they are not inseverable: magic has aspects of nature, nature has aspects of magic, and to take one away from either is a corruption to both their forms. It is the disintegration of naturalism itself. A man with a curse will upset the balance of things, warping the universe around him. Luck magic is a corruption as well; for any corruption to hold, the caster must accept, in some way, a fracture—a piece of themselves forever broken, in payment for the imbalance they have caused.”

  “I don’t want to know why it’s necessary,” Reina said bluntly. “I want to know why it works.”

  Dalton fixed her with a narrow glance.

  “Sacrifice has magic of its own,” he said. “The decision to do something is itself a change, a rupture to the state of the world’s natural order. Would things happen in the caster’s favor regardless of interference? Yes of course, probability meaning that all outcomes are, conceptually, possible,” Dalton said, droning on methodically. “But to set one’s sights on one particular outcome is to necessitate a shift in some direction, enduring and irreversible. We study the realm of consciousness because we understand that to decide something, to weigh a cost and accept its consequences, is to forcibly alter the world in some tangible way. That is a magic as true and as real as any other.”

  “Are you suggesting magic is some sort of spiritualism?” said Reina.

  Mother is telling the truth!, Mother speaks truth!, she is made of it!

  “Sometimes,” Reina went on gruffly, “you treat magic like a god, like an energy, and sometimes like a pulse. It’s an unscientific vibration when convenient, but we already know its behaviors can be predicted, and therefore purposefully changed.”

  Dalton said nothing, waiting for her to make her point, so Reina persisted, “You make magic its own entity, but it has no autonomy of choice. No research shows that magic deliberately chooses how to honor the intentions of the caster—it simply does or doesn’t work, depending on the caster’s abilities.”

  “So magic has no sentience of its own, you mean?”

  Reina nodded, and beside her, Parisa’s expression took on some degree of contemplation.

  “Magic is not a god,” Dalton agreed, “it is a tool. But it does respond discreetly
to the distinctions of its user’s intentions, however subtle those may be. It is a matter not unlike general relativity,” he said. “Intent cannot change the foundation of science or magic as a whole, but we know from observation that its outcome can change relative to its use.”

  “So whether an arrow hits its target depends on both the skill of the archer and the definable laws of momentum,” said Libby. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes and no,” said Dalton. “It is not so simple an equation. The rules of lethality are not limited by one constraint or two, but by many. When it comes to magic, the question is not merely a matter of the archer,” he explained, “but also of the arrow itself. Sometimes the arrow is made of stone, sometimes steel, sometimes paper. If the arrow itself is weak, even an immensity of skill can sometimes fail.”

  “Does the archer’s intent forge the arrow in addition to aiming the bow?” asked Nico, frowning.

  “Sometimes,” said Dalton. “Other times, the arrow is forged by something else.”

  “Does the arrow forge itself?”

  Libby again. Dalton turned to her slowly, regarding her for a moment in silence. She seemed to mean one thing—If magic is the arrow and we are the archers, how much control do we have over its flight? —but appeared to have ultimately asked quite another.

  Is magic the tool, or are we?

  “That,” Dalton said eventually, “is the purpose of this study.”

  Callum and Tristan had not spoken yet, which wasn’t entirely unusual, nor was it unusual that they paused to exchange a glance. At one point it had been Tristan initiating the glances, almost as a measure of security; checking to see if his left leg still existed, or if he were still wearing the shirt he’d put on before breakfast. Now it was Callum who was doing routine maintenance. Observing the functions on a passenger train; protecting his assets.

  Reina turned to look at Nico, who had lost interest in the philosophical underpinnings of the conversation. She wondered if he were still thinking about what Parisa had told him, and then proceeded to wonder what his intentions were.

  She was fairly confident Nico wouldn’t kill her. (Her plants slithered back, hissing in distaste at the prospect of anyone doing otherwise.) Of course, practically speaking, Reina was fairly certain no one would; she was neither at the top nor the bottom of anyone’s list, which made her neither potential target nor potential victim. Beneath it all, they were equally ambitious—individually, they were all starved for something—but the polarities of the group were the ones whose incongruity couldn’t be rectified. The presence of Parisa implied the existence of Callum, and that was the tension the others were unable to stand. Unused to the necessity of opposition, they would find it necessary to choose.

  Reina turned to look at Parisa, considering her own choices. On the one hand, she would happily be rid of Parisa. On the other, Parisa had played her game well; Reina doubted anyone could convince Tristan or Libby to kill her. No, scratch Libby from consideration altogether. She wouldn’t actively choose anyone—too skittish. Unless Libby would kill Callum? A possibility. After all, Libby had been the most bothered by Parisa’s astral death.

  At the reminder of the incident in question, Reina turned to observe Callum again, more closely this time. The plant behind him shivered, and Reina frowned in agreement; it was Callum who had unsettled them all, and even the simplest forms of life could feel it. Callum was the obvious choice, only there was one major obstacle to unanimity: Tristan. Would Tristan agree to kill Callum? No, most likely not, and that explained Callum’s need to check on him regularly.

  It seemed the incident between Callum and Parisa had split the remainder of them into factions—people who were bothered by death and people who weren’t—and Tristan was the meridian.

  Maybe they should just be rid of Tristan.

  Parisa turned to her with one brow arched. (Reina had been careless; settling perhaps a bit too clumsily on the idea.)

  Don’t pretend you’ve ever really had a friend, thought Reina in silent reply. You’d turn on him in a moment if it suited you.

  Parisa’s lips twitched up, half-smiling. She gave a small shrug, neither confirmation nor denial, then returned her attention to Dalton, who was just beginning to discuss curses on forms of consciousness when the door opened behind him, revealing the rare appearance of Atlas in the frame.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” said Atlas, though of course he had interrupted, unquestionably. He was dressed in a full suit as always, though he appeared to have come from somewhere; perhaps a meeting. Having never held the position of Caretaker in an elite secret society, Reina was unsure of his daily activities. She watched him remove the hook of his umbrella from his arm and set it beside the door, leaning it on the frame.

  At one point, this had been normal. When they first began their work, Atlas had been present nearly every morning, but, like Dalton, he had taken several steps back once they’d grown comfortable with the Society’s work. His appearance now shifted the chemistry in the room, noticeably altering its atmosphere.

  Dalton nodded in acknowledgement, opening his mouth to continue his list of suggested reading, but before he could, Libby had tentatively raised a hand in the air.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said, turning to Atlas, “but since you’re here, I wondered if we were going to discuss the details of initiation at any point.”

  The rest of the room froze.

  Dalton, Reina observed, had fallen robotically still, instantly short-circuiting. Nico was mortified, but a very specific kind of mortification: the particular dismay of having forgotten to do something important, like having left the house with the oven on. Tristan’s gaze was fixed straight ahead as if he had not heard the question (impossible) and Callum was fighting laughter, as if he hoped to replay the moment endlessly until he’d wrung all the amusement out of it that he possibly could.

  Parisa was the least startled. Presumably she had known what Libby was going to ask before she had said anything aloud, given the mind-reading, but surely there was no doubt for anyone in the room that whatever secrets the others were carrying, Parisa held them, too.

  Only Libby was patently empty-handed.

  “We’ve all been here nearly a year,” Libby pointed out. “And by now we’ve all received visits from members of other organizations, haven’t we?”

  No one spoke in confirmation, but that didn’t appear to deter her in the slightest.

  “So, it just seems as if we should have been told by now what comes next,” Libby concluded warily, glancing around. “Is there going to be some sort of exam, or—?”

  “Forgive my brevity,” said Atlas. “As a group, you are to have selected a member for elimination by the end of the month. As for the details, it’s a bit early to discuss them.”

  “Is it?” asked Libby, frowning. “Because it seems as if—”

  “The Society has done things a very particular way for a reason,” said Atlas. “This may not seem clear right now, but I cannot permit expediency to outweigh the importance of our methodology. Logistical efficiency is only one among many concerns, I’m afraid.”

  It was clear that Libby wasn’t going to receive any further answers; even more obvious was her discontent with the prospect of continued ignorance.

  “Oh.” She folded her arms over her chest, turning back to Dalton. “Sorry.”

  Dalton went on, returning half-heartedly to his lecture, and for the rest of the afternoon, nothing was noticeably out of place.

  As far as Reina was concerned, however, something monumental had been achieved that afternoon. She was certain now that only Libby remained in the dark, which meant that if the rest of them were aware of the terms for initiation and they still hadn’t left, then they must have all secretly come to the same conclusion Reina had.

  They were each willing to kill whoever they had to in order to stay. Five out of six arrows were not only sharp, they were lethal, and now they were readily aimed.

  Briefly, Reina felt
the tug of a smile across her face: Intention.

  MotherMotherMother is aliveeeeee!

  TRISTAN

  “Maybe we should kill Rhodes,” remarked Callum over breakfast.

  At which point Tristan stopped chewing, swallowing thickly around his toast.

  Callum slid a glance to him, half-shrugging. “It just seems practical,” he said. “She and Varona are a pair, aren’t they? Why keep both?”

  Tristan’s response was slow. “Then why not suggest killing Nico?”

  “We could, I suppose.” Callum reached for his coffee, taking a sip. “I could be convinced.”

  He replaced the cup on the table, glancing at Tristan’s waylaid toast. “Everything alright?”

  Tristan grimaced. “We’re discussing which among us to murder, Callum. I don’t think I’m expected to go on eating.”

  “Aren’t you? You’re still here,” Callum observed. “I imagine that means you’re expected to go on doing everything precisely as you normally would.”

  “Still.” Tristan’s stomach hurt, or his chest. He felt nauseated and broken. Was this what Dalton meant about a person being fractured? Perhaps they were being disintegrated on purpose, morality removed so as to be stitched back up with less human parts. Maybe in the end his former beliefs would be vestigial, like a foregone tail. Some little nub at the base of his philosophical spine.

  It was astounding how easily he had come around to the idea. Shouldn’t he have balked, recoiled, run away? Instead, it seemed to have settled in like something he’d always suspected, becoming more undeniably obvious each day; of course someone had to die. Immense magic required a power source, and a sacrifice of this nature would be precisely that: immense.

  For him, anyway.

  “Maybe it won’t work if you feel nothing,” Tristan murmured, and Callum looked up sharply.