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.”
“Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the concept of trust,” Tristan pointed out, assuming that she almost certainly was, “but it is very rarely based on nothing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re suggesting that you’d like me to blindly trust your judgment despite having multiple things you’re
unwilling to tell me?”
“I know the inside of your head, Tristan,” Parisa reminded him, the same way he’d commented on his intimacy with her, albeit more confidently. She had actually taken stock of his details, whereas he, with her, had been mostly preoccupied. “You wouldn’t take it well.”
“Ah, wonderful,” Tristan muttered. “You even condescend beautifully.”
When she shifted towards him on the bed he caught a hint of her perfume, only it wasn’t hers entirely. Parisa had a signature scent, a spectrum of florals. At the moment, there were traces of cologne, musks of something masculine and smoky, which, to Eden’s credit, Tristan’s former fiancée had always been very careful to prevent. Eden Wess*x might not have known that Tristan could see through her illusions, but she was a very dutiful adulterer. He had considered it—still considered it, in fact—to be one of her primary strengths.
“This Society,” Parisa said, jolting him back to the point. “It’s not what I thought. They’re telling us at least one lie.”
The restless feeling of resistance bristled again, rearing up in protest. Again, the usual torment: Tristan wanted to
believe the Society was giving him something he could not have gotten otherwise. He was suspicious of what that
something was. Now, Parisa was tipping the scales once again, feeding his inexhaustible doubt.
“I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it,” Parisa remarked curtly. “Not yet. But I think it’s worth knowing who we work for.”
Tristan frowned. “Atlas, you mean?”
“Or is it?” she posed, pursing her lips. “There are some answers I need to dig up, I think, but in the meantime, you need to be careful.”
He hated to continuously express his bewilderment, but there was nothing for it.
“Me?”
“Callum is influencing you,” said Parisa. “I don’t know if he’s doing it magically or otherwise, but he wants
something from you. He’s willing to blind you to accomplish it.”
“I’m not a damsel, Parisa. I don’t need rescuing.”
That, much to the dismay of his vanity, only served to amuse her. “Actually, I think you’re precisely a damsel,
Tristan.” She reached out, touching his cheek. “I know you don’t trust Callum,” she said, murmuring it. “I think that’s precisely what he’s using against you. He’s presenting you with his reality, thinking his candor will appeal to you, but you’re not listening, are you, Tristan? You’re not listening to what he really is, even when he says it to your face.”
Tristan stiffened. “If I don’t trust him, then what does it matter?”
“Because even if you don’t trust him, you believe him. He is influencing your perception by confirming everything you already believe to be true. He’s planting things in you, and I worry.”
Her thumb stroked his jaw, floating over his lips. “I worry,” she said again, quieter.
Tristan’s immediate reflex was to mistrust Parisa’s softness.
“What did he do?” he asked her. “What could have possibly upset you so much?”
“It didn’t upset me. It unsettled me.” She pulled away. “And if you really must know, he convinced the illusionist to kill herself.”
Tristan frowned. “So?”
“So, don’t you see? His weapon is us. Our beliefs, our weaknesses, he can turn them against us.” From the faint light through the window, Tristan could see the tightening of her mouth. “He finds the monsters we keep locked away
and sets them loose, so why would I ever want him to see mine?”
“Fine,” Tristan permitted evasively, “but couldn’t you do the same? You can read minds. Should we regard you with the same suspicion?”
Parisa rose agitatedly to her feet.
“There is a difference between what we are capable of and how we choose to use it,” she snapped.
“Maybe so, but if you want me to trust you, you’ll have to give me a reason,” Tristan pointed out. “Otherwise, how are you any different from Callum?”
She gave him a glare so sharp he could feel it, cutting himself on its edge.
“Callum,” she said, “doesn’t need you, Tristan. He wants you. You should ask yourself why that is.”
Then she slipped out of his room and did not speak to him again for four days.
Not that it bothered him too immensely. The silence of temperamental women was a very common feature in his life, and anyway, he did not know what to make of her… warning? Threat? Unclear what she wanted, though he was privately pleased she hadn’t gotten it. He hated giving
people what they wanted, especially if it was unintentionally done.
He was also extremely distracted. They were covering the many theories about time, beginning with attempts at time travel by witches in the Middle Ages; a conversation which also included, for some reason, the prominent European attempts at extending the mortal lifetime. In Tristan’s mind, the concept of time should have been
covered in the physical magics, not historical or alchemical failures. Perhaps it was just an excuse to give them more access to another magical period in history.
He was beginning to steal away privately more and more, pursuing his own research in the ancient texts they’d been reading about the construction of the universe before
doubling back to the mysteries he felt unsolved. Why hadn’t their wormhole successfully traveled through time? Did it
really require more magic to influence time, or had they
simply not gone about it correctly? He tried to draw it once, scribbling it in his notes while Dalton droned on about Magellan and the Fountain of Youth, but nothing came of it.
Nothing, that is, until Libby sought him out.
It wasn’t clear at first that she’d been intentionally
looking for him. He had assumed she merely stumbled on him in the painted room after dinner and would therefore hastily leave. It became apparent, however, that the
stumbling was really just another side effect of her natural presence, and so he glanced up expectantly.
“I had a thought,” she said. He waited.
“Well, Varona and I both had a thought. I mean, I thought of it,” Libby clarified hurriedly, “but I needed him to test it, and, well, I don’t know if you’re willing to hear it, but I
noticed your drawing the other day and—not that I was prying, I just… oh god, sorry,” she said, mangling what might have been a blissful end to that sentence. “I didn’t mean t- Well, the thing is—”
“Spit it out, Rhodes,” said Tristan. He had just been on the verge of something, maybe. (Probably not, his brain reminded him. Wishful thinking.) “I haven’t got all day.”
“Right, well, alright.” Her cheeks burned furiously, but she came closer. “Can you… try something with me?”
He gave her a look intended to express that he would consider it, if—and only if—it meant she would get to it and leave him alone.
“Right,” she said, clearing her throat. “Watch this.”
She plucked a small rubber ball from her pocket and
tossed it, letting it bounce three times before freezing it in place.
“Now watch while I reverse it,” she said.
It bounced three times backwards and landed snugly in her hand.
“Okay,” Tristan said. “And?”
“I have a theory,” Libby said, “that it looked different to you than it did to me. To me, I did the exact same thing forwards and backwards. I could have gone ten seconds back in time and noticed nothing different from before I threw the ball. But you,” she said, trailing off, and waited.
Tristan thought about it.
“Do it again,” he said, and her face immediately relaxed.
Relief, he suspected, that he might have actually noticed something, or was at least giving her the opportunity to make him notice.
She tossed the ball again, letting it bounce three times, and froze it.
Then she summoned it back, same as before, and caught it in her hand.
“See something?” she said.
Yes. Not something he could explain, but there was some element out of place. A rapid motion around the ball, barely
visible.
“What did you expect me to see?” he asked her.
“Heat,” she said, breath quickening. Clearly she was excited; childishly so. “The thing is,” bubbled from her lips, “according to everything I’ve read, it’s possible time is
measurably no different from gravity. Things moving up and down? Gravity. Things moving backward and forward? Force, of course, depending on the dimension—but also, in some respect, time. If the clocks had been stopped, if nothing had changed, there would be no physical evidence that I hadn’t reversed time itself when I reversed the ball’s motion. The
only real way you could know that we haven’t traveled in
time—aside from trusting your understanding that we
haven’t,” she provided as a caveat, gesturing around the room to her experiment, “is that heat was produced by the ball hitting the ground, and heat can’t be lost. Thermal energy bouncing the ball has to go somewhere, so as long as that hasn’t vanished, then we haven’t moved back in
time.”
“Okay,” Tristan said slowly, “and?” “And—”
She stopped.
“And… nothing,” she concluded, deflating a little. “I just thought—” She broke off again, faltering. “Well, if you can see heat, you could also see time, don’t you think?” she
said, nudging her fringe aside. “If what you’re seeing is even more specific—electrons or something, or quanta itself— then the next step is to manipulate it. I’ve been thinking
about it for ages,” she informed him, again becoming Studious Libby, who temporarily lost her anxious ticks. “With the illusions, with that medeian that I—”
She broke off on the word killed, clearing her throat. “You told me what you saw,” she clarified, “and I used
that information to change my surroundings. So, if you told me what you saw when it came to time—”
“You could use it. Change it.” Tristan chewed the thought for a moment. “Manipulate it?”
“I guess it depends on what you were seeing,” Libby said carefully, “but I think, if I’m right about what you can do, that if you could identify the physical structure of time, then yes. We could maneuver it somehow.” She was breathless with exhilaration; the thrill of a problem nearly solved.
“Though, if you’re busy,” she amended with a
floundering blink, “we could always try it another t-” “Rhodes, shut up,” said Tristan. “Come here.”
She was clearly so pleased that she didn’t bother
opposing his tone, instead bounding over to sit beside him. He stopped her and rose to his feet, gesturing her into his chair.
“You sit,” he said. “I’ll stand behind you.”
She slid into his seat and nodded as he concentrated once again.
Whatever this particular magic was, when he focused it hard enough, things became grainy. When he did the equivalent of squinting, it was like the zooming of a
microscopic lens. Things were blurrier at the edges, but he
could see things, smaller and smaller. Layers upon layers, motion growing more rapid the closer he got.
“When you manipulate gravity,” he said. “What does it feel like?”
Libby closed her eyes, holding out a hand.
With the flat of her palm, she pushed down. The pressure nearly dragged Tristan to his knees.
“Like a wave,” she explained belatedly. “Like things are floating in an invisible current.”
Tristan conjured his understanding of linear time, turning it over in his mind. Where might the misconceptions have
been? That it was linear, he supposed. That it moved forward and backward. That it was ordered. That it was irrelevant to concepts like heat.
There it was; when he dismissed his expectations, he found it. It was the only thing moving at an identifiably constant pace, though it varied from different levels
throughout the room. Faster higher up, slower lower down. Not the same constancy of the clock on the wall, which was close to the ceiling’s apex, but near Libby, it was regular. As regular as a pulse. He could see it, or feel it—or however he was experiencing it—at what he presumed to be sixty beats per minute right where Libby’s hair brushed the tops of her shoulders, flipping girlishly out. It was getting long; it had grown at least an inch since they’d arrived.
Tristan reached forward, resting a hand on Libby’s arm, and started tapping the pattern of the motion.
“Is there something that feels like that in this room?” he asked her.
She closed her eyes again, frowning. Then she reached for his hand, pulling it just below her clavicle, resting it on her breastbone and jarring him slightly out of his rhythm, his fingers brushing bare skin.
“Sorry,” she said. “Need it somewhere I can feel it.” Right. It would ricochet through her chest that way.
Tristan located the precise beat he was looking for and tapped the pattern again, waiting. For another ten, twenty beats, he tapped it out like a metronome, and by the time he reached forty beats or so, Libby’s eyes shot open.
“I found it,” she said, and then, with a motion of her hand, the pattern Tristan had been watching went still.
To his disbelief, everything went still.
The clock on the wall had stopped. Tristan himself, the motion of his breath, had been suspended, and he
suspected the blood in his veins had been, too. Nothing moved, though he could look around somehow, or feel around, experiencing himself newly within the space he’d taken up. His hand was still resting on Libby’s chest, his
thumb below the collar of her shirt, no longer tapping. She had the strangest look on her face; nearly a smile, but
somehow louder. It burned with resilience, with triumph, and then he processed it: she had done this with intention, with skill.
With his help, Libby Rhodes had stopped time.
She blinked and everything fell back into place,
careening into motion. It had been nothing more than a lag, a momentary resistance that had been nearly unidentifiable, but even so, Tristan could see the sweat on her brow. It had not cost her nothing.
She rose to her feet too quickly, spinning to face him in her fervor, and nearly collapsed. He caught her with one arm around her ribs and she struggled upright, grasping his shoulders for leverage.
“I could do more if I had Nico,” she said, staring at nothing. At his chest, but also at nothing; staring down the barrel of her thoughts, rapidly calculating something. How to do it again, or do more, or do better. “I couldn’t hold it alone, but if I had him, or maybe Reina… and you showed
me how to move it first, then maybe we could—Well, maybe if I’d just… drat, I should have—”
“Rhodes,” Tristan sighed. “Listen—”
“Well, I don’t know what we could do, to be honest,” she confessed worriedly. “If this is how time moves, then
everything is a bit different, isn’t it? If time is a force that can be measured like any other—”
“Rhodes, listen—”
“—at very least we could model it, couldn’t we? I mean, if you can see it, then—”
“Rhodes, for fuck’s sake!”
She looked up, startled, to find Tristan staring (exasperatedly, he assumed) down at her.
“Thank you,” he said, and then exhaled, irritated. “Jesus, fuck. I just wanted to say thank you.”
That abysmal fringe of hers was getting outrageously long; it had fallen into her eyes. She brushed it away with one hand, lowering her chin slightly.
“You’re welcome,” she said, her voice soft.
The silence that followed, a rarity indeed, was filled with things Tristan generally hated. Floaty, swollen things, like gratitude, because now he understood that he hadn’t
imagined any of it; she had proven that for him. She had proven that whether what he had was blindness or madness, it could still be put to use somehow. True, he might be little more than a lens through which to view things, but he was a scope, a necessity. Without him she could not see it. Without him, she could not do it.
What a relief it was, being a cog in something that actually turned for once.
“What’s this?” came a voice behind them, and Tristan
immediately released her, taking a jarring step back. “Odd,” remarked Callum, sauntering into the room as Libby felt for the chair behind her, rapidly flustered. “Doing homework, children?”
Tristan said nothing.
“I should go,” Libby mumbled in reply, and dropped her chin, hurrying to the door.
Callum watched her leave, half-laughing to himself. “Can you imagine? Being like that. Born with all that
power and still not good enough, still desperate to flee the
room. Sad, if you think about it.” Callum pulled out one of the free chairs, sinking into it. “Someone really ought to take that power away from her and put it to good use.”
Explaining what she had just done was unlikely to
change Callum’s mind. If anything, it only served to prove his point. “At least she’s relentless,” said Tristan.
“Her? She’s entirely relenting, Caine.” Callum was still smiling; his opinion of Libby, however low it happened to be, wasn’t nearly enough to stifle his mood. “Have any
interest?”
“In her? Not remotely.” Tristan slid into the chair where Libby had been. “But I can certainly see why she was chosen for this.”
“I rather can’t believe that’s still a thing you question,” remarked Callum. “What does the ‘why’ really matter? Aside from your personal taste for intrigue, that is.”
Tristan slid a glance at him. “Don’t you wonder?”
“No.” Callum shrugged. “The Society has its reasons for choosing us. What matters is my choices. Why play their
game,” he added, smile glinting again, “when I can play my own?”
Callum doesn’t need you. He wants you, Parisa’s voice reminded Tristan. You should ask yourself why that is.
“There’s that doubt again,” Callum said, ostensibly
delighted by whatever he could read from Tristan. “It’s so refreshing, really. Everyone else has this irritating frequency, full of jolts and jerks, but then there’s you. A steady, pleasant base.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“It’s like meditation.” Callum closed his eyes, sinking lower in the chair. He inhaled deeply, and then, slowly, opened them. “Your vibes,” he drawled facetiously, “are absolutely resplendent.”
Tristan rolled his eyes. “Want a drink?” he said. “Could use one.”
Callum rose to his feet with a nod. “What are we celebrating?”
“Our fragile mortality,” Tristan said. “The inevitability that we will descend into chaos and dust.”
“Grim,” Callum offered appreciatively, closing a hand around Tristan’s shoulder. “Try not to tell Rhodes that or she’ll start decaying all over the place.”
Because he could not resist, Tristan asked, “What if she’s tougher than you think she is?”
Callum shrugged, dismissive.
“I’m just curious,” Tristan clarified, “whether that would please you or send you into a spiral of existential despair.”
“Me? I never despair,” said Callum. “I am only ever patently unsurprised.”
Not for the first time, Tristan considered how the ability to estimate people to the precise degree of what they were must be a dangerous quality to have. The gift of
understanding a person’s reality, both their lightness and darkness, without the flaws of perception to blur their edges or lend meaning to their existence was… unsettling.
A blessing, or a curse.
“And if I disappoint you?” Tristan prompted.
“You disappoint me all the time, Caine. It’s why I’m so
very fond of you,” Callum mused, beckoning Tristan toward the library and its finer bottles of vintage scotch.
NICO
IT STOOD TO REASON, given Eilif’s appearance in his bathroom sink, that the wards had a hole of some kind. Not that magic was so easily simplified to concrete matters of holes or
solidity or otherwise, but for all intents and purposes, the wards intended to keep people out of the Society must have been faulty on the basis of precisely that: they were
intended for people.
The library’s archives, at least, had seen fit to provide Nico with something of a primer on creatures and their respective magics, for which he had required Reina’s
knowledge of runes and antiquated linguistics to fully grasp. There had been no recent treatises on the subject, owing first to hunting and then to the (not-dissimilar) prospect of
academic study that was hardly distinct from captivity. The practice of “conservation” where it came to magical species had become so mistrusted among the creatures themselves that, according to Gideon, most had either disappeared or chosen to align themselves—as his mother had—with fairly dubious magical sources.
“My father is either dead or hiding,” Gideon had
explained to Nico once, “not that it matters which, as I don’t expect to ever hear from him. I’m quite sure I have siblings all over the world, belonging to any variety of species.
Doubtless he acknowledges none.”
Gideon had said it in a factual manner at the time, wholly unemotional about the prospect, and Nico hadn’t bothered
to question him any further. Gideon already had plenty of psychological trauma without adding a father fixation to the mix, so if anything, the absence of Gideon’s father was
probably a blessing.
Nico’s single concern was, as always, keeping Gideon’s mother out. Once the Society’s perimeter was secured, he
could return his attention to the study of Gideon’s remaining fractures without fearing he’d become responsible for a
massive security breach.
Despite trusting Reina to accurately translate runes for him as he’d requested, Nico had hoped not to have to explain the reasons for his little foray into rare extracurricular study. True to form, Reina required little explanation.
“As far as I can tell, magic is magic,” she said, hardly
looking up from where she scanned the page in the reading room. She sat with her legs curled under herself on the chair, her entire frame defensively enveloping the book as if she feared someone might suddenly snatch it from her hand. “Most creatures’ genetics are no different from a
human’s than an ape’s. Just a matter of evolutionary distinctions, that’s all.”
“Mutations?”
She glanced up, eyes slightly narrowed. “Genetic, you mean?”
Nico bristled at the implication that he might have meant aberrations. “Of course,” he said, perhaps more
passionately than necessary.
“No need to be brutish,” she remarked, expressionless.
Then she returned her attention to the page. “The difference in magical ability appears to lie in the customary form of
usage,” she said, eyes roving over the page with only the slightest break in motion; a sidelong glance to what Nico
guessed was a back-talking plant somewhere in the corridor. “That’s true,” she conceded grumpily, presumably to the plant, though she slid her attention upward to fix Nico with a studious look of contemplation.
“It’s smaller,” she said. He frowned. “What is?”
“The—” She paused, cursing quietly under her breath, or so he assumed. “Output,” she eventually produced from somewhere in her multilingual lexicon. “Usage, power, whatever the word is. Creatures produce less, or rather,
waste less.” “Waste?”
“Ask Tristan,” she said. “Ask Tristan what?”
Nico spun at the sound of Libby’s voice to find her lingering in the doorway, hesitantly half-in, half-out.
“Nothing,” said Nico, at the same moment Reina said, “How much magic humans produce.”
“Humans,” Libby echoed, flitting inside with a flare of interest. “As opposed to what?”
“Nothing,” Nico repeated, more emphatically this time as Reina returned her attention to the book, muttering an unblinking, “Creatures.”
Libby turned to look at Nico, expectant. “Creatures, Varona, really?”
Her brow was arched beneath her mass of fringe, which he positively loathed. It was one thing for her to be nosy,
and another thing entirely for her to regard him with so much palpable doubt.
Just what did she expect him of bollocking up this time? “I wanted to be certain of something,” he supplied
evasively, with the tone of blistering impatience he knew she would find repellant. There was always a chance she’d leave if he pestered her enough.
“Okay, and what does Tristan have to do with it?”
Evidently her curiosity had been all too successfully piqued.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Nico retorted, though much to his dismay, that was enough to make Reina finally remember to explain herself.
“Tristan can see magic being used,” she said from behind her curtain of black hair.
“How do you know that?” asked Libby, which to Nico’s ear sounded unnecessarily accusing, as if she resentfully suspected Reina and Tristan of having some sort of weekly
brunch wherein they discussed their private lives and secret wishes.
“Observation,” Reina replied, which Nico could have told Libby was the obvious answer. Reina spoke little and saw much, though what Nico liked most about her was that she considered most of what she viewed to be substantially unimportant, and therefore not worth discussion.
Unlike Libby, who felt precisely the opposite.
“Tristan,” Reina continued, “can see magic in use. As I was explaining,” she said, cutting a demonstrative glance to Nico to indicate a return to her previous subject, “creatures have a more refined use of their own magic. They channel it better, more efficiently. It’s—” Another pause for the lexicon. “Thinner. Narrow. Spun like thread, not like—” Another pause. “Fumes.”
“I suppose Tristan has used the word ‘leak’ to describe magic before,” Libby murmured thoughtfully to herself. “Though we could probably ask him to explain it more fully.”
The idea of asking Tristan Caine for anything that was not a scowl or muttered clip of sarcasm was enough to sever what remained of Nico’s limited patience.
“No,” he snapped, and would certainly have summoned the book from Reina’s grasp and stormed out if not for the way she shielded it with her entire body. “This isn’t about you, Rhodes.”
She bristled. “What’s it about, then?” “Nothing. Certainly nothing I need you for.”
Libby’s eyes narrowed, and Reina curled more
determinedly around the book, tacitly assuring them both that she had no interest in what would follow and would
certainly be of no help.
Nico, who had fought often enough with Libby Rhodes to know when a larger explosion was impending, abandoned
the matter of the book and spun to take the stairs, irritated. He had done well enough for himself without a library’s help before. He would simply see to the matter of the wards without further discussion.
Or not. Behind him, Libby’s unshakable footsteps were dogged and crisp.
“Varona, if you’re planning to do something stupid—” “First of all,” Nico said, spinning curtly to address her as
she stumbled into his back, “if I were to elect to do
something stupid, I would not require your opinion on the matter. Secondly—”
“You can’t just run around playing with things
unnecessarily just because you’re bored,” Libby retorted,
sounding matronly and exhausted. As if she were his mother or his keeper, which she resolutely was not. “What if you’re needed for something?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Something.” She glared at him, exasperated. “Perhaps it stands to reason, Varona, that you
shouldn’t do stupid things simply because they’re stupid. Or does that somehow not compute?”
“If I’m bored, you’re certainly bored,” Nico offered in retaliatory accusation. “Just because you won’t admit it doesn’t make it any less true. And following me around to see what I do wrong gives you a bit of a thrill, doesn’t it?”
“I,” Libby replied hotly, “am not following you around.
I’m putting myself to good use. I’m using the research we’re learning and applying it where I can, which is precisely what you should be doing.”
“Oh, truly? How magnificent for you. How scholarly you are,” Nico gushed in plaintive mockery, reaching out to pet her head. “That’s a good girl, Rhodes—”
She swatted his hand away, the air around them
crackling with the sparks of her intemperance. “Just tell me what you’re up to, Varona. We could go about it faster if you just asked me for—”
“For what? For help?” She fell silent.
“Would you have asked me for help, Rhodes?” Nico countered, aware how thinly skeptical his voice sounded. “We aren’t different people now just because we’ve come to a single agreement. Or have you forgotten we’re still
competing?”
He regretted it the moment he said it, as it wasn’t what he meant. He hardly needed to make an enemy of Libby, and certainly did not aspire to waste time on any rivalries
beyond what was necessary for initiation. He did, however,
need her to stay out of his private business, and in this case, he very much did not want to hear the inevitable lecture on how he’d inadvertently allowed a misbehaving mermaid into the house. He doubted it would be brief, and he knew it would be followed extensively with questions, none of which he planned to answer.
“So that’s your idea of an alliance, then.” Libby’s voice was flat with anger.
No, not anger. Something more bitter, less malicious than that.
Brittle sadness.
“Let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t,” Nico said, because the damage had already been done, and it wasn’t as if she’d ever been known to forgive him. “We’re not friends, Rhodes. We never have been, we never will be—
and,” he added, giving in to a burst of frustration that mixed unrelentingly with guilt, “since I can’t simply ask you to
leave me alone—”
She spun away, the last glimpse of her expression one of hollow disappointment. Nico watched her dismount the stairs, taking a sharp turn to disappear from sight as a little echo of Gideon suddenly tutted softly in his head: Are you
being nice to Rhodes?
No, of course not. Because there wasn’t a person in the world who could make him feel less adequate simply by existing, and besides. He had wards to fix.
Nico slid irascibly up the remainder of the stairs, taking a turn at the gallery in the opposite direction of the painted
room and bedrooms. He would need privacy to work uninterrupted, which meant the ground floor was not an option, and upstairs contained plenty of unnecessary stages for empty grandeur where no one ever went. He closed himself into one of the gilded drawing rooms (it had long
ago stopped being a place for aristocratic dances or whatever purpose the British required rooms to draw) and set himself to the task of mindful pacing, once again
engaging the twitchy need for motion he habitually found expelling from his limbs.
Ultimately the wards were gridlike, ordered, and therefore easily surveyed for something out of place, which at first glance was nothing. The six of them had designed
the structure of the security system in a spherical globe, within which a tightly woven fabric of magical defenses cloaked the Society and its archives. Physical entry would be easily repelled by the shell of altered forces surrounding the house, while intangible magical entry was readily
sensed by the internal system of woven, fluid sentience.
How, then, had Eilif managed to slip them in order to wind up in his sink?
Probably best to check the pipes.
Nico closed his eyes with a grimace and examined the house’s plumbing, feeling at the edges for the warps of magic he recognized as his own, or possibly Libby’s. In
terms of magical fingerprints, their signatures were almost identical; a consequence of similar training, perhaps. Nico felt another bristle of guilt or irritation or allergies and
shrugged it away, trying to focus more, or possibly less.
Intuitively it didn’t matter which specific element of magic
belonged to him. Libby’s or his own, it would respond just as obediently, mastered by the skill regardless of the hand that cast it.
Sure enough, upon closer inspection there were numerous bubbles and blemishes, little bastardizations of security from what Nico could feel around the pipes and
then, upon further scrutiny, between the layers of insulation in the walls. Not enough to prevent a person from emerging corporeally through the cracks—compression was a difficult task, requiring enough energy to set off the house’s internal sensory wards before any conceivable success of entry—but for Eilif, or for some other creature attempting entry?
Possibly, if what Reina said about refinement of power was true. It wasn’t as if air ducts or other methods of entry had never been neglected before, and in this case, Nico could feel the way the house’s infrastructure strained beneath their wards, corroded by magic and hard water and whatever else eroded metal over time. He wasn’t much of a mechanic, but perhaps that was precisely the problem. The medeians elected for the Society were academicians, not tradesmen, and they certainly weren’t chosen for their
efficiency at knowing when an old house required maintenance. Sentient though it may have been at times, it was still a physical structure, and Nico’s element was
physicality. Perhaps this was always meant to be his (or Libby’s) responsibility to maintain.
Magic was no different from rot, corrosion, temperature change, overuse. Contractions and expansions and chipping and peeling and movements of time and space. Funny how laughably simple everything was in the end, even when it
belonged to the immeasurable, or the invaluable. Nico
would simply have to repair the areas where the wards were weakened, reinforcing them with custom bandages where
they may have waned and warped.
Whether his remedies would hold would be a matter of adhesion, which was… slightly difficult, but hardly impossible. Nico would simply bend back into shape what he could and then cover up what he could not.
Distantly Nico was aware he was considering something Gideon would deem “irresponsible”—or possibly it was Libby calling it that, and Gideon was standing somewhere over her shoulder in Nico’s head, grimacing in agreement. Max
would not care either way, which Nico foggily pieced together was something he positively adored about Reina. He could go and grab her now, he thought, considering that the extra burst of energy he seemed to consensually borrow from her might be wise to have at present, but at the disastrous implication he might have been behaving
unwisely (“Something stupid,” Libby irked snottily in his head) he promptly nudged the idea away, flicking it aside with a twitch of dismissal.
So what if he overexerted himself, just this once? His power was renewable, easily replenished. He would be sore for a night or three and then the discomfort would pass, and
no one would have to know the mistake he’d made initially by overlooking it. If Libby lorded it over him that he was more tired than usual, so be it. It wasn’t as if he was much use in the realm of time, anyway. He had no interest in fountains, youthful or otherwise.
The bristle of recalling his current uselessness was enough to secure Nico’s decision. He disliked the anxiety of listlessness, which was as constant to him as Libby’s
unrelenting undercurrent of fear. Fear of what? Failure, probably. She was the sort of perfectionist who was so
desperately frightened of being any degree of inadequate that, on occasion, the effort of trying at all was enough to
paralyze her with doubt. Nico, meanwhile, never considered failure an option, and whether that was ultimately to his detriment, at least it did not restrain him.
If Libby made the mistake of thinking herself too small, then Nico would gladly consider himself too vast by contrast. If anything, the opportunity to swell beyond the ceiling of his existing powers ignited him. Why not reach further, for things beyond the limits of his current grasp?
Even when the options were to reach the sun or collide flaming with the sea, safety was a uselessness Nico de Varona couldn’t abide.
So he started with the easiest tasks: unraveling clusters that had formed around the little gapings of the house.
Magic was then thinner at the points of disentanglement, so he reinforced them with his own, sealing them until power flowed smoothly instead of being sucked up into little
vacuums of inefficiency. It was a mix of push and pull,
easing the entropy of decay into orderly avenues of traffic.
The house itself resisted, straining a little, and sweat
dripped in thin rivulets down the notches of Nico’s spine. His neck ached a little from a muscular knot he’d hardly noticed before, but which throbbed now with discomfort and strain.
Evidence, he surmised belatedly, of his weeks of physical misuse while working with space. It wouldn’t be the first time he would be instructed (or berated) to stretch.
He ignored the pins and needles in the nerves that pricked up the length of his neck, shoving aside the pinch that reverberated upwards, thudding, to his head. A headache; marvelous. Possibly he was dehydrated, too. But stopping now would mean having to start up again later,
and Nico loathed a task unfinished. Call it hyper-focus, but his fixations were what they were.
Finding no further bird-nests or clumps, Nico set himself to the task of metallurgy, purifying the toxicities that were the result of erosion over time. Briefly he became aware of something nagging at his memory, an old half-attended lecture; magic cannot be produced from nothing much as
the case with energy there is no difference Mr de Varona
would you be so kind as to lend us your attention please, and then there was an echo of laughter as Nico must have
replied irreverently and yes, fine, this unit of study belonged to the principles of time, didn’t it? The inconvenience of
knowing his mind had tucked away things for future use, which were in fact too late, because the truth of the matter
—that Nico was a mere human currently trying to power the regeneration of a physical structure vastly more sizable than himself—was hardly helpful now that he’d started. He felt
the rumble of the ground beneath him; something else
slipping out from his control. He may have miscalculated the velocity at which this house would drain him, greedily
suckling at what he had intended to carefully measure out. He’d cut himself open too widely, bleeding magic without being able to keep pace or cauterize the wound.
Hm. What to do, at this point? Keep going was the only answer Nico had ever known. Failure, stopping, ceasing to be or to do was never an option. He gritted his teeth,
shivering with a chill or a shudder of power that left him like an expulsive, painful sneeze. Ouch, fuck, bless you, the sort of burst that could ultimately break a rib or burst a blood vessel, which most people were not aware a sneeze could
do. Funny how that worked; the innocent fragility of being human. There were so many ways to break and so few of them heroic or noble.
At least Libby could use his eulogy as a posthumous lecture, or so he assumed. “Nicolás Ferrer de Varona was an idiot,” she would say, “an idiot who never believed he had limits despite being heartily assured so by me, and did you know it was possible to die from overexertion? He knew, of course, because I told him so plenty of times, but, surprise surprise, he never listened—”
“Varona.” He heard Libby’s voice from somewhere in the pit of his stomach, the chatter of his teeth limiting him to
nothing more than a grunt in reply. “Jesus Christ.”
She sounded as disapproving as she always did, so there was no telling whether she was real or imagined. The
pounding in Nico’s head was deafening now, the ache from his shoulders to his neck enough to blind him with the pressure between his eyes, behind his sinuses. He could feel the fabric of his shirt being peeled from his chest and stomach, probably soaked through with sweat, but there was no stopping, not now, and why waste it? He had fixed
the cystic areas of magical build-up and rot, and so turned his attention to the vacancies and gaps.
He could feel himself being dragged toward heat, waves of it unevenly covering him through flickers of what must
have been flame. The so-called ‘great room’—the room for which there was a drawing room to begin with—had a hearth, so presumably Libby, if she were actually there and not merely in his imagination, was doing her damndest to keep him from a chill. She must have had plans to sweat out the fever of his effort, which was a lovely thought, all things considered, but possibly insufficient. Worst case, it would be no different from the bandages Nico was currently affixing
to the house’s decay; makeshift decoration to slow an eventual demise.
But of course he was only being dramatic. He was not going to die.
“You insufferable manchild. You idiot prince.” Her fondest derivative for him, or at least her most frequent. So much so it felt like something he may have accidentally colonized
and put to use. “You are not going to do something so
utterly unforgivable as to waste your talent and die, I won’t have it,” Libby informed him, jerking his shoulders upright.
He would have mumbled I know that Rhodes shut up had he not been busy focusing on the task of not dying, and more specifically, on aiming what was currently oozing out of him, which was probably something he needed to survive.
“You deplorable little Philistine,” Libby said. “What on earth were you thinking? No, don’t answer that,” she grumbled, shoving him none-too-gently so that his back rested against something hard, like the leg of a Victorian chair. “Just tell me what you’re doing so I can help you—
even though I ought to defenestrate you from that window instead,” she muttered in an afterthought, ostensibly to herself.
Nico grunted something in response, because what
remained to be done would be exceedingly draining and, at the moment, impossible to explain in words. Nearly
everything that could be sealed or reinforced had been
sealed and reinforced, and all that remained were the areas of decomposition, spoiled and thin and requiring less a
bandage than an amputation, reconstruction from the inside out. Reversing damage, asking chaos to be structure, was enough to sap him completely, wringing out what little remained. He could feel it in the convulsions of his intestines, the way magic was now being taken from his kidneys, his heart, his lungs.
“You can’t just give yourself away like this,” Libby scolded, ever the admonishing schoolmarm, but then she
had taken his hand gruffly and laced it with hers. “Just show me.”
Most likely the moment she touched him she could
already feel the direction his power had taken. They’d had a knack for it from the beginning, a way of becoming the other’s beginning and end. They typically declined to do so, of course, because it was invasive. Because him using her or her using him was like temporarily trading limbs,
swapping joints. For the rest of the day he would feel like he was lifting Libby’s hand instead of his own or bending Libby’s knee to take a step, and he knew she felt the same way. He would look up to catch her eye and she would
grimace like he had taken something from her, and yes, whatever she’d taken from him was equal in value as what
she’d had before, and it wasn’t as if either of them had done it on purpose—but still, she was missing something that he now possessed, and vice versa.
They struggled to properly disentwine, or worse. They each became strange, molded copies of the other.
It was only when they had started using their magic to replicate the effects of space that the sense of borrowed power and stolen limbs had stopped feeling like a gruesome, halfhearted s*x act and more like true synchronicity. There was a harmony to it when they were
reaching together, like the gratified spreading of a broader pair of wings. Difficult to explain what the difference was,
except for the sensation of having finally uncovered a proper use, an ideal purpose. They were still inhumanly powerful, yes, but they had been without aim, without direction, so that alone the use of their abilities felt
retroactively clumsier, less refined. Combined it was purified and focused, untarnished and distilled.
Nico took a breath without strain for the first time in several minutes and registered with private relief that the joining of Libby’s power with his own had done more than simply alleviate his task. It left him in a cleaner, more
precise stream, less the leak that Tristan might have called it (and that Nico would not have called it before if not for realizing how un-leak-like it now seemed to be) and more sleek, contoured and smooth.
Within minutes the pipes had been fixed. Seconds later
the wards pulsed without disruption. Nico spent what power remained on a thorough sweep of their spherical perimeter, which left him in an unsteady rush. No faults this time, no
little skips of error. No flaws to snag on the wave of his surveillance.
Libby released him and shifted, dragging slightly as she moved.
“Why?” she said after a moment.
Nico opened his eyes with difficulty, the bleary image of her manifesting at his side. The red of the walls with its gold accents seemed to blur beside her hair, the silhouette of her closed eyes. She wasn’t fully exhausted, not like he was, but
there had definitely been a toll. She had shouldered some of his burden for him.
“I’m sorry.” He managed to croak it out, rasped and insufficient though it was.
“You’d better be.” Libby slid a hand to the floor, pressing her palm flat against it. “Still a little tremor,” she noted.
“Is that—” Fuck, his mouth was unbearably dry. “Is that what brought you here? A tremor?”
“Yes.”
Of course it was. She’d make a big fuss of it, naturally, of the disruption he’d caused and how little control he
possessed over his abilities, when really, she was the only one who could feel it. Per usual it would be his fault, and
inevitably she would lord it over—
“You are unfairly talented. Upsettingly good,” Libby sighed with a tactile hum of envy, and then her eyes fluttered open. “Doing that much magic…” She twisted
around to look at him, fixing him with a scrutinizing glance. “I would never have attempted it alone.”
“I shouldn’t have attempted it alone.” No point denying that now.
“Yes, but you almost managed it. You might have done fine without me.”
“‘Almost’ and ‘might have’ wouldn’t count for much if I’d been wrong.”
“True, but still.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t as if you didn’t know perfectly well I’d come.”
Nico opened his mouth to argue that of course he’d known no such thing, but on second thought, he wondered if she wasn’t a little bit right about that. There was a safety net, whether he acknowledged it to her or not, when she was around. He couldn’t get away with much without her noticing, and surely he’d known that on some level,
consciously or otherwise.
“Thank you,” he said, or possibly mumbled. She looked pleased, or smug.
“Why were you repairing the house on your own?” she said, briskly shoving their repulsive moment of benevolence aside. “Reina could have helped you,” she added as an afterthought.
Nico found it miraculously tactful that she had not
suggested herself, so as a reward, he offered, “If I were
going to ask someone for help, Rhodes, it would have been you.”
“Empty words, Varona,” was her reply, equally accommodating. “You never ask anyone for help.”
“Still, it’s true.”
She rolled her eyes, leaning over to press a thumb to the pulse at his wrist. “Slow,” she observed.
“I’m tired.”
“Anything else?” “Headache.” “Drink water.”
“Yes,” he growled, “I fucking know that, Rhodes—” “Any aches? Swelling?”
“Yes, yes, and yes; yes to all of it—”
“You should probably sleep,” she commented blandly. “For fuck’s sake, I just said I—”
“Why?” she interrupted, and though Nico was exhausted, though he did not want the argument that was sure to follow and though he would have very much preferred to crawl into his bed and sleep for at least the next twelve hours, he still said the one thing he knew she would not accept.
“I can’t tell you.”
His voice sounded dull, even to him.
Predictably, Libby said nothing. He could feel the swell of her tension beside him, anxiety curling defensively around her like Reina’s arms had wrapped around the book.
Something of her own to protect, to keep safe, to keep hidden.
Much as he hated to admit it, Nico resented himself most when he made her feel small.
“Just… please don’t make me tell you,” he amended raggedly, hoping the last-ditch effort at sincerity might persuade her not to suffer more.
She was quiet for a moment.
“You said it was an alliance,” she said.
“It is.” And it was. “It’s an alliance, Rhodes, I promise. I meant what I said.”
“So if you need help…?”
“You,” Nico assured her quickly. “I’ll come to you.” “And if I need anything?”
She was primly juvenile, tit-for-tat. For once, though, he didn’t begrudge her that.
“Me,” he confirmed, relieved to be able to offer something. “I’ve got you, Rhodes. From here on, I swear.”
“You’d better.” She sounded satisfied with that, or at the very least relieved. “You owe me big time after this little jaunt of idiocy.”
“I knew you’d eventually get self-righteous about it.” He added a little groan, just to maintain some semblance of decorum. No need to frighten either of them with too brisk a departure from their usual animosity.
“Still,” she sighed. “You’d tell me if you were in any real danger?”
“We’re not anymore.”
“That’s not an answer, Varona.”
“Fine, yes.” Another groan. “I’d tell you if we were, but for what’s worth, we’re not.”
“But we were?”
“Not danger, exactly. But there were some… oversights.” “And now?”
“Check the wards yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“I already did.” She paused again anyway. “The pipes, really?”
“What, you don’t grasp the fundamentals of home ownership, Rhodes?”
“God, I hate you.” Ah, normalcy.
“Likewise,” Nico agreed, struggling to his feet. Libby, true to form, did not attempt to help him, instead merely watching with amusement as he dragged himself upright from the foot of the chair.
Instantly, Nico suffered the swift retribution of a muscle contraction in his thigh, a stab of pain that reverberated through his leg while he struggled unsuccessfully to remain aloft, stifling a whimper.
“Charlie horse?” Libby guessed tonelessly.
“Shut up,” Nico gritted through his teeth, eyes supremely watering.
“Don’t be such a baby.”
She waved a hand and the ground slid out from beneath him, sending him sprawling forward with an unsteady lurch.
The heels of his hands hit the sheets of his bed, the room tilting to deposit him fully within the walls of his bedroom until he collapsed there in a fit of throbbing limbs, not
bothering to protest.
“Thanks,” Nico managed to slur into his mass of pillows, tumbling headfirst into bed without any effort to fully undress. His shirt, he realized with faint but fading awareness, remained resolutely elsewhere, probably still soaked with sweat, and worse, he still hadn’t drunk any—
Nico blinked as a glass of water surfaced pointedly atop his nightstand.
“Fucking Rhodes,” he muttered to himself.
“I heard that,” came Libby’s reply outside his door.
But by then Nico was already well on his way to sleep, dreamlessly out like a light.
PARISA
SO IT WAS NOT A GAME, then. That, or it was a highly sadistic one.
It was only in retrospect that Parisa realized Atlas and Dalton had never specified that one of the six would be sent home; only that one of the six would be eliminated in a decision made by the others. Five would choose one to go, but the conditions of their departure had never been made clear. She had thought, initially, that it was a rather arbitrary
—albeit civilized—method of ensuring that only the best and most dedicated moved on.
Now, though, everything made a twisted sort of sense.
Why would the world’s most exclusive society of academics ever permit one of its potential members to leave? It would be a security risk at best; even if the eliminated medeian
parted amicably from the others—already a significant if— people were reliable only for being careless with information.
Only the dead kept secrets. The moment she realized it— tripping over it in Dalton’s mind—everything else fell into
place.
“One of us has to die,” Parisa had said aloud, testing it out to see how it would feel against the backdrop of reality. That Dalton was still inside her at the time was a secondary concern, until he went rigid.
“What?”
“That’s why you don’t want me to lose. You don’t want me to be the one who dies.” She pulled away to look at him. “A bit drastic, don’t you think?”
He looked neither relieved nor undone by her knowing. At best, he was resigned to it, and though he tried to pull away, she locked him in place, still processing.
“You killed someone, then.” She registered it with a blink. “Is that what you keep locked away? Your guilt?”
“You used me,” he observed tangentially, confirming his suspicions for himself.
Which was quite obviously sufficient for a yes.
“But what possible reason could there be for killing an
initiate?” Parisa pressed him, uninterested for the moment in the task of soothing his ego. As if a woman could not
enjoy s*x and read minds at the same time! They had not even disentangled and already, Dalton was looking for ways to make her the villain of his femme fatale narrative, which was hardly something she had time or patience for. “Ridding the world of a medeian, and for what?”
Dalton drew back, fumbling with his trousers. “You’re not supposed to know about this,” he muttered. “I should have been more careful.”
Liar. He’d clearly wanted her to know it. “Perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on things we’re not supposed to know,” Parisa remarked, and Dalton slid a glance at her, the taste of her so idly sweet on his tongue that even she could see him curl his thoughts around it. “Are you going to tell me
why,” she pressed him, “or should I just run off and tell the others how this is all an elaborate fight to the death?”
“That’s not what it is,” Dalton said mechanically. That was the company line, it seemed. She wondered if he were capable of delivering any other explanation, contractually or otherwise.
“Magic comes only at a price, Parisa. You know that.
Some subjects require sacrifice. Blood. Pain. The only way to create such magic is to destroy it.”
His thoughts were cloudier than that; less finite. “That’s not why,” Parisa observed.
“Of course it is.” Now he was impatient, jittery. Possibly
he simply disliked being contradicted, though she suspected there was more to it than that. “The subjects contained in
the library are not for everyone. They are rare, requiring immense power and unimaginable restraint. There’s a reason only six are chosen—”
“Five,” Parisa corrected him. “Five are chosen. One is slaughtered.”
His mouth tightened. “Don’t call it a slaughter. It isn’t a slaughter. It’s—”
“A willing sacrifice? I highly doubt that.” She gave a
sharp laugh. “Tell me which of us would have agreed to this
if we knew one would have to die for it, hm? And besides, I can see there’s more to it.” She peered at him carefully,
waiting to see if he would reveal anything, but he had sealed himself into a vault again. He had already given
away too much, or simply wanted her to believe he had. Whether that had been his intention or not remained unclear.
“You wanted me to know, Dalton,” she reminded him,
deciding to accuse him openly and see where that went. “I don’t think you’re careless enough to let me get close to you otherwise. But if you want me to act on your warning, then you’ll have to explain to me why it exists. Otherwise,” she scoffed, “what reason would I have to stay?”
“You can’t leave, Parisa. You’ve seen too much.”
That, and he did not seem to think she would do it even if she could. There was no panic, no frenzied concern as he said it; entirely fact.
It was unfortunate his certainty was so merited. After all, what life could she possibly go back to after this?
She straightened her skirt, adjusting her undergarments, and rose to her feet.
“Dalton,” she said, and took hold of his collar. “You know I did more than use you, don’t you?”
His tongue slid over his lips. “More than?”
“I enjoyed you,” she assured him, and tugged him closer. “But I’m afraid I’ll have quite a few more questions when
I’ve thought this all through.”
His hands found her waist blindly. They would itch for her now, she was sure. He would wake in the middle of the night to find the shape of her formed between his vacant palms.
“Perhaps I’ll give you nothing,” he said. “Perhaps you will,” she agreed.
It would be a matter of weeks before they found themselves in a compromising situation once again.
By that point they had moved into time theories, and Parisa, who specialized in cognizance, was able to do far more than she had with the predominantly physical magics. Most theories of time and its motion were quietly psychological; that a person’s experience of time could be shaped by thought or memory. Pieces of the past seemed
closer, while the future seemed at once nonexistent, distant, and rapidly approaching. Tristan was clearly intent on
proving the significance of quantum time theory (or something), but Parisa was focused on the obvious: that the actual function of time was not a matter of its construction, but the way it was experienced by others.
It was the first time the library had begun revealing things exclusively to her, giving her its usual pseudo- sentient tug in one direction or another, and she had begun to venture into the historical texts she’d thought so little of at first. Not Freud, of course; Western mortal psychology as a self-conscious mode of study was, unsurprisingly, several centuries too late. Rather, Parisa immersed herself in the scrolls from the Islamic golden age, nipping at a half-formed hunch and uncovering that the Arabic astronomer Ibn al-
Haytham had observed about optical illusions the same
thing Parisa had observed about the human experience in general—namely, that time was an illusion of itself. Nearly every theory of time was rooted in a fallacy, and manipulation of it as a concept was largely accomplished through the mechanism of thought or emotion. Callum was
much too lazy to focus on the latter, but Parisa dove into the early psychological medeian arts—Islamic and Buddhist, mostly— with a fervor that surprised all of the others.
All of them, that is, but Dalton.
“I told you,” he said, finding her alone in the reading room one night.
She allowed him to think he’d surprised her. “Hm?” she said, playing at startled.
He slid a chair over to sit beside her at the table. “Is this al-Biruni’s manuscript?”
“Yes.”
“Are you studying reaction time?” It was Biruni who had first begun experimenting with mental chronometry, which in this case was the lag between stimulus and response; how long it took for the eyes to see something and the brain to react.
“How do you know what I’m studying?” Parisa asked, though she didn’t need to.
Because they both knew he could not take his eyes off her, of course.
“I can see you’re working a theory,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might want to discuss it.”
She permitted a half-smile. “Should we whisper about differential psychology? How salacious.”
“There is an intimacy to intensive study that even I find unsettling,” he said, shifting towards her. “The expression of an unformed thought.”
“Who says my thoughts remain unformed?”
“You share nothing with any of the others,” he noted. “And I advised you to find an ally.”
She brushed his knee with hers. “And haven’t I found one?”
“Not me.” He looked wryly amused, though he didn’t pull away. “I told you, it can’t be me.”
“What makes you think I need an ally? Or that I would allow myself to be killed?”
Dalton glanced around, though it was unlikely they’d be overheard. Parisa could feel no other active cognition in the house, except perhaps for Nico. He had a somewhat frequent visitor, a telepathic one of sorts, though he was never fully conscious when it happened.
“Still,” Dalton said. An appeal; believe me, listen to me. Crave me, fuck me, love me.
“What is it about me? You don’t trust me, clearly,” Parisa observed. “I don’t even think you’d want to trust me if you could.”
He gave her a curt, telling smile. “I do not want to, no.” “Have I seduced you, then?”
“I think conventionally you have.” “And unconventionally?”
Her hair had slipped over one shoulder, catching his eye. “You torment me a bit,” he said.
“Because you think I might not want you?”
“Because I think you might,” he said, “and that would be disastrous. Calamitous.”
“Having me, you mean?” It would fit the archetype of her. Seduce and destroy. The world was filled with poets who thought a woman’s love had unmade them.
“No.” His lips twitched ironically. “Because you would have me.”
“How bold of you.” Unlikely, too. She had yet to identify his nature. Was he humble or boasting? Had he been
recklessly led astray, or was she the one being led somewhere with intention? The idea he might be toying with her precisely the way she toyed with him was brutally
intoxicating, and she twisted to face him. “What would happen if I wanted you?”
“You would have me.” “And?”
“And nothing. That’s it.” “Do I not have you now?”
“If you did, wouldn’t you find it dull?” “So you’re playing a game, then.”
“I would never insult you with a game.” He glanced down. “What is your theory?”
“Who did you kill?” she asked.
There was a brief stalemate between them; tension unsettled.
“The others,” Dalton observed, “have suggested we focus on the mechanics of time. Loops.”
Parisa shrugged. “I have no need to rebuild the universe like blocks.”
“Why not? Isn’t that power?”
“Why, simply because no one else has done it? I don’t need a new world.”
“Because you want this one?”
“Because,” Parisa said impatiently, “the power it would take to create one would only destroy countless things in its path. Magic has costs. Didn’t you say it yourself?”
“So you agree, then.” “With what?”
“The Society’s rules. Its elimination process.”
“Its murder game, you mean,” corrected Parisa, “which is itself insulting.”
“And yet you remain, don’t you?”
Unwillingly, she felt her eyes travel askance to her notes. “I told you.” This time, Dalton’s smile broadened. “I told
you. Even knowing the truth, you would not say no.”
“Who did you kill?” Parisa asked him. “And how did you do it?”
He tugged the page from below her arm, glancing over
it.
She sighed, remembering what he said about the
intimacy of academia. He liked her most when she was vulnerable, didn’t he? When he had a piece of her that she
had not wished to give up. Pleasure unadulterated, or knowledge unshared.
“Memory,” she said, and Dalton glanced up. “The experience of time through memory.”
He arched a brow.
“Time travel,” Parisa explained, “is simple, provided you are traveling through one person’s perception of time.
Perhaps,” she demurred, agitated in anticipation of
inevitable misunderstanding, “that might be considered less interesting to my unsubtle associates—”
“They study what they specialize in, as do you. Go on,” Dalton said.
“It’s not very complex,” she told him; surprised but not displeased by his dismissal. “Intelligent people respond more quickly to stimuli, therefore intelligent people
experience time faster, and may be perceived to have more of it. Intelligence is, in some senses, also an illness—genius is frequently a side effect of mania. Perhaps some would
have such an excess of time that they are experiencing it differently. Also, if time could be consumed differently, it could also be preserved. And if a person had an excess of time—”
“They could travel throughout their own experience of time differently,” Dalton concluded.
“Yes,” Parisa said, “in essence.”
He curled a hand around his mouth in thought, contemplating it.
“How would you measure intelligence? Or would it be magic, in this case?”
“Who did you kill?” asked Parisa.
“He was not well liked,” said Dalton, surprising her again.
She had not expected an answer. “Not that it’s an excuse,” Dalton added.
“Was he dangerous?”
Dalton’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“Was he dangerous,” Parisa repeated. “To either you or the Society?”
“He—” Dalton blinked, retreating slightly. “The Society did not determine whether he lived or died.”
“Didn’t they? In a sense,” Parisa said. “They selected six candidates knowing that one would be eliminated. Don’t you think they have an idea which one they find expendable?”
Dalton blinked again. And again.
His thoughts went cloudy and reformed; a different shape this time.
“How did you kill him?” Parisa asked. “Knife,” said Dalton.
“Ambush?”
“Yes. A bit.”
“How Roman of you.”
“We were heavily intoxicated.” He scrubbed wearily at his jaw. “It is not easy, taking a life. Even when we knew it was required.”
Compulsory anything was not a concept Parisa enjoyed. “What if you had not done it?”
“What?”
“What if you had chosen not to kill someone,” Parisa repeated, clarifying as Dalton’s thoughts unraveled a
second time. “Would the Society have stepped in?”
“He knew,” Dalton said, which was not an answer. “He knew it would be him.”
“So?”
“So he would have killed one of us instead, if he could have.” A pause. “Probably me.”
Ah, so that explained his fear, or at least part of it.
Parisa reached out, brushing Dalton’s hair from his forehead.
“Have me in your bed tonight,” she said. “I find I’m besieged by curiosity.”
His sheets were crisply white, cleanly tucked. She took great pleasure in unmaking them.
There were other times.
Once, she found him in the gardens. It was early, cold, and damp.
“The English,” she said, “over-romanticize their own dreary winters.”
“Anglophilia,” said Dalton, turning towards her. His cheeks were bright, spot lit by twin buds of cold, and she
reached for him, taking his face between her hands to warm them.
“Careful,” he warned. “I may take this for tenderness.”
“You think I’m not tender? Seduction is not all lethality,” said Parisa impatiently. “Most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I’d get nowhere at all.”
“And where do you want to go this morning?” “Nowhere you cannot take me,” she said.
“Flattery is part of seduction,” he said, “isn’t it?” “Inescapably, yes.”
“Ah. I regret being such a straightforward case.” “No one is ever straightforward.”
He half-smiled. “So we’re not simple, we’re just… all the same?”
“A flaw of humanity,” said Parisa, shrugging. “The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness.”
They were out of sight already, up too early for anyone else to stir, but he pulled her into the nearby grove of birch trees anyway, concealing them.
“You make me so common,” he said. “Do I?”
“Think how interesting I could be to someone else,” he suggested. “A homicidal academic.”
“You’re not uninteresting,” she said. “Why did he want to kill you?”
“Who?” The pretense was so very tiresome, but apparently necessary.
“How many people have wanted to kill you, Dalton?” “Probably very many.”
“How deliciously uncommon,” she offered evasively.
He drew her into his arms, hips flush against hers. “Tell me something,” he said. “Would you have wanted
me more if I had denied you longer?”
“No,” Parisa said. “I’d have found you a considerable idiot if you had.”
She toyed with loop of his trousers, turning over stones in her thoughts.
“Tell me about the Forum,” she said, pleased to see the evidence of momentary startlement. “I find I’ve been
wondering about this Society’s enemies. Specifically, whether they may be right.” She hadn’t forgotten that the Forum’s agents alone had been able to escape after slipping the Society’s wards during the installation.
Despite his initial flicker of surprise, Dalton seemed
relatively unfazed. “Why should I know anything about the Forum?”
“Fine,” she sighed, disappointed but unsurprised, “then tell me why he wanted to kill you.”
“He had to kill someone,” Dalton said with an air of repetition, “before they killed him.”
“Were you too weak or too strong?” “What?”
“Either he chose you as a target because you were too weak,” she clarified, “or because you were too strong.”
“What do you think?”
She glanced up to find Dalton watching her closely. “You must have chosen me for a reason yourself,” he
remarked, shrugging. “Was it because I was weak, or
strong?”
“Are you making yourself a parable?” “Maybe.”
“Why,” Parisa countered, “did you think it would be dangerous for me to have you? Who would it be dangerous for?”
“Me,” said Dalton. “Among others.”
“And yet you lack quite a bit of self-preservation, don’t you?”
“Most likely.”
“Is that why he wanted to kill you?”
She’d meant it as a joke, pushing him to see what might come to light even if she aimed blindly, but he seemed to regard her with new severity.
“I want to try something,” he said. “Meet me tonight.” “Where?”
“My room. I want to see how good you are.”
“We’ve already tried that,” she said drily, “and I believe we both rose admirably to the occasion.”
“Not that,” he said, though he was obviously not opposed. “I only meant I’m going to spend the day burying something. A thought.”
“An answer?” “Yes.”
A little thrill coursed through her.
“I thought you wouldn’t play games with me?” “This isn’t a game. It’s a test.”
“What do I get if I pass?”
“An answer.” “The answer?”
“Yes, fine.” A pause. “It will drain you.” “Good,” she said invitingly.
“I already know what you can do without trying. I want to see what happens when you try.”
She shivered with anticipation. She had missed the sensation of operating in her element.
“Alright,” she said, flexing her fingers. “Then I’ll try.”
By the time she reached his private chambers, slipping in quietly when the others had gone to bed, Dalton was
already sleeping. There was an hourglass beside the bed, with the implication clear enough: there was a time limit to this test. She flipped it, closing her eyes, and lay on her back beside Dalton, finding the rhythm of his pulse. It would be a matter of sinking into her own consciousness to locate the edges of his, then the effort of seeking out the most difficult doors to open.
When she opened her eyes, it was to a tangle of thorns. “How very cliché,” she sighed, spotting the labyrinth that
led to the castle. “I have an hour to reach the princess in the tower, is that it?”
An hour of his experience, that is, and all indications suggested he was particularly brilliant. She turned to the
side, glimpsing a handful of non-native fungi sprouting along the path of thorns.
“Subtle,” she said drily, and plucked one, letting it turn to sand in her palm.
Mental chronometry. She was playing with his concept of time, collecting it for her use. She conjured, for purposes of allusion, a fashionable set of thin-plated armor, tucking the grains of excess time away.
The process of traversing the thorns was merely
designed to waste her energy. Working her own magic inside his head was exponentially more effort than doing it in the physical universe; power worked like a traffic jam that way.
One car slowing down meant a wave of amplified delay, and likewise, the use of magic outside Dalton’s mind
compounded to a phantom degree of effort inside it. If she used the extra time she collected, she would exhaust
herself. If she did not, she would run out. It was a clumsy set of rules, but clever enough, particularly for someone who was not primarily telepathic.
Not that any of this was primitive in the least; the kingdom Dalton had built in his head could not have been erected in a day, not when a lesser medeian would not have managed it in a lifetime. The labyrinth was unstable,
constantly shifting, but grandiose and complex. Whatever
the secret was that Dalton Ellery had locked away, it did not want to be found, and he must have had extraordinary capabilities to be so capable of keeping it from her.
She expected, given the sophistication of his mental defenses, something to force her out; flame was easy for
the mind to conjure, and small brush fires leapt up through cracks, incandescent tongues to light her path. When she was attacked by spectral guards, she wasn’t surprised. They
had been hastily cloned from one conception, and all fought mechanically—the same pattern of blows, over and over.
Again, impressive for the work of an amateur, but this was only a test. Dalton had already made it clear he didn’t want her to die, so perhaps that was why his mind could not truly bring itself to threaten her. It was only designed to give her something to prove.
She took the tower steps two at a time, sprinkling sand as she went. The armor she’d made had begun to rust. She, corporeally, was fading. Time was running out.
The castle itself was well formed, uncreatively imagined.
Based, most likely, on somewhere Dalton had once been, though there were details she hadn’t expected: each individual torch was lit upon the wall with a flame that
responded uniquely to changes in the air, and the colors in the tapestries must have been selected, not recalled. She took the central staircase, following the path set for her, but could see that the rooms flanking it were furnished and filled; they were crafted, not copied.
The corridors narrowed, leading her upwards from
landing to landing until she stepped onto a winding, circular staircase. At the top of the stairs were three tower rooms; these, unlike the others, were shut. She had time to open all three, but only long enough for a glimpse. If she wanted to
fully search their contents, she would have to choose one. Inside the first door was herself. That Parisa—Dalton’s
Parisa—turned in Dalton’s arms to look at where the real Parisa stood in the corridor, expectant. Ah, so he had given
her the opportunity to see what he truly felt about her, then. Uninteresting.
She opened the second door, finding a memory. A stranger, and Dalton with a knife in his hand. So that was what had happened. Tempting.
The third door contained only a locked chest. To break it might require more time than she currently had, though she paused when she realized the setting. It was a Roman plaza; a forum. The Forum.
She hesitated, stepping inside, but then stopped. This could wait. That, or it was an answer she could find on her own.
So she turned, darting back into the hallway to thrust open the second door.
Almost immediately, she was hurled into Dalton’s consciousness, living it from his memory, though it had not begun where she thought.
“—you sure?”
It was a whisper from a young man to a young Dalton, who was nearly unrecognizable. His hair was the same, his appearance as meticulous as always, but there was
something about his face that was distinct. A decade younger, true, but filled with something.
No. Absent something.
“Once we do this, we can’t go back.” It was a tawny- skinned young man who spoke with an unfamiliar accent. “Can you live with it?”
Dalton was only half-listening. He was charming
something idly; the air surrounding his open book flickered and twisted, a small storm forming above the page.
“I wouldn’t have to,” Dalton said. Eerily, he turned to Parisa. “People think it’s the meaning of life that matters,” he said, and she blinked. She wasn’t sure how he was
manipulating his memory to speak with her, but there was no doubt that he was. “It’s not the meaning. Everyone
wants a purpose, but there is no purpose. There is only alive and not alive. Do you like this?” he asked, abruptly shifting in tone. “I made it for you.”
He turned back to the other young man before Parisa could answer.
“I could bring you back,” he suggested.
Even Parisa could see that this younger Dalton did not sound genuine.
“I thought you said you couldn’t do that?” the young man asked.
“I said I don’t. But of course I can.” Dalton twisted again for another sidelong glance, giving Parisa an unnerving smile. “I’m an animator,” he told her, which the other young man did not appear to hear. “Death does not register for me with any sort of permanence. Except my own, which I
suppose explains what I did next.”
He turned back to the young man. “There is nothing to say we can’t bring you back,” he said. “Maybe it’s an additional test? Maybe there’s always an animator, and therefore no one actually dies.”
There was a flash of something; a knife. It glinted in Parisa’s own hand.
Then she felt a lurch; the unmistakable entry of the blade into flesh.
Then, without warning, she was sitting alone.
“I shouldn’t be doing this, but you have to listen to me.” It was Atlas Blakely, pacing, and Parisa glanced down,
recognizing Dalton’s clasped fingers as her own. “It’s you they want to kill, Dalton. The others have agreed on you.”
“How do you know?” came out of Parisa’s mouth, which was Dalton’s.
“They’re afraid of you. You unnerve them.”
“Rather small of them,” said Dalton irreverently, before conceding, “Fine. Let them try.”
“No.” Atlas spun. “You must change their minds. You
must survive.” “Why?”
“The Society needs you, whether they see it or not. What can they do with him? There have been others like him before. Men like him become wealthy, become rich, that’s all. They contribute to the global oligarchy and that’s it, that’s the end. You are necessary in other ways.”
There was a rip, a small tear, and then Dalton was sitting before her again like a sunspot Parisa tried fruitlessly to blink away, returning to her armored form within his mental tower’s small room. They were alone this time, and Dalton— this young version of him—was leaning forward, inches from her.
“They got used to me,” he said. “And I didn’t like killing. I’m an animator,” he added, as if that explained everything. She supposed it did, in part.
“You bring life,” she remarked. “I bring life,” he agreed.
She could see the evidence that he had been tampered with, the jerks of his motions so unlike the fastidious Dalton she knew. It was unclear how honest he was being with her; his memories had clearly been altered, either by the corruption of his past experience or by the clever hand of his present self.
“Are you using me?” she asked him, wondering if she might have permitted herself to be lured somewhere unwise.
His younger self smiled brilliantly.
“I wish you’d seen the other room,” he told her. “We’d have both enjoyed it immensely. This one is dull.”
“You lied to him,” she observed. “You told him you would bring him back?”
“He never actually agreed to do it,” said Dalton. “I think he knew I wouldn’t.”
“Kill him, or bring him back?” “Neither, I suspect.”
“So he told the others to kill you?” “Yes.”
“And you persuaded them otherwise?” “Yes.”
“Was it difficult?”
“No. They were just happy it wasn’t them.” “And why didn’t you bring him back?”
“Too much work,” said Dalton, shrugging. “And anyway, I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“About everything.” Another shrug. “Someone always dies. They have to.”
This version of him wasn’t at all what she imagined. “What’s the Forum?” she asked him.
“Boring,” said Dalton. “Society rejects.” “You don’t find that interesting?”
“Everyone has enemies.”
She couldn’t help feeling a mismatch; some glitch of something, details that didn’t follow.
“Why are you still here?” she asked him.
He stole forward, prowling towards her sleekly, and in that moment, she registered what he was. He flickered slightly, moving in bursts.
“Are you an animation?” she asked, forgetting her previous question.
Dalton’s mouth twisted wryly. His lips parted.
Then Parisa felt a hand on her collar, dragging her backwards.
“Get out,” said a deep voice. “Now.”
She jolted upright, or tried to, but found that the return
to her own consciousness had left her lying paralyzed on her side. The real Dalton was holding her head, and gradually, as she resumed occupation in her body, she realized she
had been seizing. She was choking, half-retching on what she registered belatedly was her tongue.
She had overexerted herself; the hourglass beside her had long since run out, and by the look on Dalton’s face, it had taken a significant amount of effort to wake her.
She scrambled away from him, blinking. “What was that?”
He frowned. “What was what?” “That voice at the end, was that—?” She stopped, blinking.
There was something about Dalton’s face now; not that it was older, which it was. He must have been in his early twenties in his memory, but this was more than that. The expression he wore was different now, more steeped in concern. She had not tried to read his younger self’s thoughts at the time, thinking she was speaking directly with them—they were, after all, both inside his head—but retroactively, she could see she’d been wrong.
Whatever he had been then, his current self did not contain any trace of it. It was a loose thread fraying;
something that had come undone, and then been severed. “You’re not whole,” she realized aloud, “are you?”
He stared at her. “What?”
“That thing, the animation, it was—”
“You never started the test,” he cut in slowly, and then it was her turn to stare at him.
“What?”
“Where were you?” he pressed her, concerned now. “I could feel you, but—”
She felt a shudder of uncertainty. “What was it?” she asked. “Your test.”
“A bank vault,” he said. “With a combination lock. A puzzle, in essence.”
So what had she broken into inside his head, then? Strange. More than strange. The situation he described sounded straightforward, even elementary. In short,
something she would expect from someone who was not a telepath, unlike the thing she’d found.
“What did your bank vault contain?” she asked warily. “A bit of parchment, nothing important… It was only
supposed to take a few minutes to find. Where were you?” Dalton said again, more urgently, but this time, Parisa didn’t answer.
Wherever she had been, she was growing increasingly certain that Atlas Blakely had been the one to pull her out.
REINA
THEY WERE GIVEN LEAVE around the December holidays to return home if they wished, which Reina firmly did not.
“Shouldn’t someone stay behind to tend the wards?” she asked Dalton privately.
“Atlas and I will be here,” he said. “It’s only a weekend.” “I don’t celebrate Christmas,” she said, displeased with
the inconvenience.
“Most medeians don’t,” he agreed, “but the Society hosts its annual events during the mortal holidays.”
Reina frowned. “We’re not invited to the Society events?” “You’re potential initiates, not members.”
“But we’re the ones who live here.”
“Yes, and one of you,” Dalton said neutrally, “will not remain by the end of the year, so no. You’re not invited.”
The idea of going home (a meaningless concept by now) was unfathomable. Detestable, even. She was currently in
the middle of a fascinating manuscript she had seen Parisa with; a medeian work on the mystical study of dreams by Ibn Sirin, which led Reina to a curiosity about the concept of
realms within the subconscious. Nico had expressed some interest in it as well, which she considered a point of distinct significance. As with the runes he had asked her to translate, there was no telling what he wanted a book on dreams for; he had no interest in historical psychology, or in anything he couldn’t turn into a miracle of physics (Nico was very sulky when he was not permitted to be
incomprehensibly astounding), but regardless, it was nice to have someone to discuss it with. The others were usually
very private about their research, guarding their theories as secrets.
Nico was always the most open with her, going so far as to invite her to New York for their winter recess. “You’ll
loathe Max,” he said happily while they were sparring, referring to someone Reina gathered to be one of his flat mates. “You’ll want to kill him and then five minutes after
you’ve left you’ll realize you actually love him. Gideon is the opposite,” he added. “He’ll be the best person you’ve ever met, and then you’ll notice he’s nicked your favorite sweater.”
Reina faked a hard right, which Nico read like a book. He slid backwards, one hand on his cheek, the other falling with inconceivable arrogance to match the quirk of his smile, and gave her a little beckon of uh huh, try again.
The idea of staying in a place occupied by boys in their early twenties gave Reina an unpleasant itch. “No thanks,” she said.
Nico was not the type to be insulted by these things, and predictably, he wasn’t. “Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug, ducking a wide hook as Reina caught Libby glancing over at them, a little half-frown on her lips. She was looking forward to seeing her boyfriend, or so she said, though Reina wasn’t convinced. Libby’s boyfriend (none of them could remember his name, or perhaps Libby had never actually told them what it was) seemed to exclusively call at unwelcome times, leading Libby to make a face of irritation when she glanced at her screen. She denied her annoyance, of course, most
vehemently to Nico, but as far as Reina could tell, Libby’s Pavlovian response to any mention of her boyfriend was to quickly stifle a grimace.
In anticipation of their brief leave, the others mostly shared Reina’s reluctance. Tristan appeared to dread the prospect of leaving, probably because he had burned such a wide variety of bridges in order to come in the first place; Parisa was irritated about being temporarily deposed, prissy as always; Callum, true to form, didn’t seem to care much either way. Only Nico seemed to have any genuine interest
in going home; then again, Nico was so adaptable in general that Reina suspected he could make anything comfortable enough to stand it for a time.
The past few months had been relatively peaceful ones. They had all fallen into a rhythm of sorts, and the disruption of their fragile peace felt especially inconvenient, even troubling. True, they hadn’t bonded, per se, but they had at least warmed enough to exist in each other’s physical space
without persisting tension. Timing, Reina thought, was a sensitive thing, and the house plants made no secret of mourning her impending absence.
In the end, Reina decided to stay in London. She had never ventured beyond the grounds of the Society’s manor house, so now she was ostensibly a tourist in her own city. On her first day, she toured the Globe Theatre, then wandered the Tower. On the second day, she took a brisk morning walk through the Kyoto Garden (the trees shivered cheerfully, thrumming with frosted whispers as they
recounted their origins), followed by a visit to the British Museum.
She had been looking at the Utamaro painting of the Japanese courtesan when someone cleared his throat
behind her, causing her to bristle with impatience.
“Purchased,” said a South Asian gentleman with thinning hair, addressing her in English.
“What?” asked Reina.
“Purchased,” the gentleman repeated. “Not stolen.”
His accent didn’t sound entirely English; it had a mix of origins.
“Apologies,” he amended, “I believe the technical term is ‘acquired.’ The British do hate to be accused of theft.”
“As do most people, I assume,” Reina said, hoping that would be that.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
“There is some service to it, at least,” the gentleman continued. “Here the treasures of the world are on display,
not hidden away.”
Reina nodded vacantly, turning to leave, but the gentleman turned after her, falling into step at her side.
“Every five years, six of the world’s most talented medeians disappear,” he remarked, and Reina’s mouth tightened. “A few of them emerge two years later in positions of power and privilege. I don’t suppose you have any theories?”
“What do you want?” Reina asked impatiently. If that was considered rude, so be it. She didn’t feel any particular need to be polite.
“We expected you to be in Tokyo,” said the man. A continuation of his earlier thought, as if she had not
interjected at all. “We’d have been here sooner, in fact, but you’re not easy to track down. With a family like yours—”
“I am not in contact with my family,” Reina said. “Nor do I wish to be bothered.”
“Miss Mori, if you would indulge me for just a moment—” “You clearly know who I am,” said Reina. “So shouldn’t
you know, then, that I have turned down every offer I
receive? Whatever you imagine I accepted, I did not. And whatever it is you plan to offer me, I decline it as well.”
“Surely you must feel some obligation,” said the man. “A scholar like yourself, you must think it valuable to have access to the Alexandrian records.”
Reina stiffened; Atlas had always said the Society was known among certain groups, but still, she hated to think
the place she prized so mightily could be referenced with such open disregard.
“What good are the archives,” the man pressed, catching the look on her face, “when only a small percentage of the world’s magical population can ever learn from them? At least the artifacts contained in this museum are offered to
the whole of the mortal world.”
“Knowledge requires caretakers,” said Reina flatly. “And if that’s all—”
“There are better ways to care for knowledge than to hide it away.”
Another version of her might have agreed with him. As it was, though, she spared him half a glance.
“Who are you?”
“It’s not who I am, but what I stand for,” said the man. “Which is?”
“Freedom of information. Equality. Diversity. New ideas.” “And what do you think you will gain from me?”
“The Society is inherently classist,” said the man. “Only
the highest trained medeians will ever reach its rank, and its archives only serve to secure an elitist system which has no oversight. All the world’s treasures under one roof,” he prompted, “with only a single organization to control its
distribution?”
“I,” Reina said, “have no knowledge of anything you speak.”
“True, you are not a member yet,” the man agreed, dropping his voice. “You still have time to make other
choices. You are not bound to the Society’s rules, nor to its secrets.”
“Even assuming any of this were true,” Reina muttered, “what would you want from me?”
“It is not what we want from you, Miss Mori, but what we can offer you.” The man slid a card from his inside pocket, handing it to her. “Someday, should you find you are
trapped by the choice you’ve made, you may contact us. We will see to it that your voice is heard.”
The card read Nothazai, either the man’s name or his pseudonym, and on the back, THE FORUM. A reference, of course, to a subversion of everything the Society was. The Roman Forum was a marketplace of ideas, the most
celebrated meeting place in the world. It was the center of commerce, politics, and civility. In short, where the Society cloistered itself behind closed doors, the Forum was open to all.
But there was a reason the Library of Alexandria had been forced to hide in the first place.
“Are you truly the Forum?” Reina asked neutrally. “Or are you simply the mob?”
When she glanced up, he—Nothazai—had not looked
away. “It is no secret what you can do, Reina Mori,” he said, before amending, “At least, it is no secret what you could
do. We are citizens not of a hidden world, but of a global economy; an entire human race. It is a troubled world we live in, ever on the brink of progress and regression, and very few are given the opportunity to make true changes.
Power like the Society’s does not elevate this world; it only changes hands, continuing to isolate its advantages.”
It was an old argument. Why have empires and not democracies? The Society’s version of an answer was
obvious: because some things were unfit to rule themselves. “You think I can contribute nothing from where I stand, I
take it?” Reina prompted.
“I think it is obvious you are a blend of broad dissatisfactions, Miss Mori,” said Nothazai. “You resent
privilege in all its forms, including your own, yet you show no desire to unmake the present system. I think someday you will awaken to your own conviction, and when you do, something will compel you forward. Whoever’s cause that will be, I hope you will consider ours.”
“Do you mean to accuse me of some sort of tyranny by proxy?” Reina asked. “Or is that an unintended consequence of your recruitment tactics?”
The man shrugged. “Is it not a proven fact of history that power is not meant to exist in the hands of the very few?”
“For every tyrant, there is a ‘free’ society which destroys itself,” said Reina, who knew enough ancient history to
grasp the faults of hubris. “Power is not meant for those who misuse it.”
“Is not the worst tyranny that which perceives itself to be noble?”
“Greed is greed,” said Reina flatly. “Even if I accepted your perception of the Society’s flaws, why should I believe your intentions any different?”
Nothazai smiled. “I only suspect, Miss Mori, that you will soon change your position on the matter, and when you do, know that you will not be left to your own devices. Should you require an ally, you have one,” he offered, and bowed low.
The symmetry of the moment reminded her of something.
“Are you some sort of Caretaker?” she asked him, thinking of Atlas Blakely’s card. Inexplicably, she
remembered what Atlas had said about the others who might have taken her place; a traveler, as he had specifically mentioned, whatever that meant.
Were the members of the Forum merely Society castoffs?
“No, I am nothing important. The Forum cares for itself,” said Nothazai, and turned away before pausing, doubling back half a step. “By the way,” he added in an undertone, “perhaps you know already? The Tokyo billionaire Sato has just won parliament’s special election, displacing the incumbent candidate.”
The mention of Aiya was startling, though Reina tried not to let it show. “Why should Aiya Sato matter to me?”
“Oh, she doesn’t, I’m sure. But it’s very interesting—she was the one who uncovered the incumbent councilor’s corruption. Almost as if she had information the government itself did not. The incumbent denies it, of course, but who to believe? There is no other evidence aside from Sato’s own dossier, so perhaps we’ll never know.”
Briefly, Reina recalled what Aiya had summoned during their brief interaction in the reading room: an unmarked book. Reina quickly blinked it away, obscuring it. Even if this man were not a telepath, there were other ways to prod
inside her head.
“Assassinations,” Nothazai said. “Development of new technology that enters mortal copyrights, but never public domain. New weaponry sold only to the elite. Space programs developed in secret for warmongering nations.
Biological warfare that goes unreported; illness that wipes out the unmentionables, left to the fringes of poverty.”
“You blame this on the Society?” Broad claims, and as far as Reina considered feasible, unknowable ones.
“I blame the Society,” Nothazai clarified, “because if it is not its job to cause such atrocities, then why not undertake the effort to prevent them? Inevitably, it must stand to
gain.”
Somewhere in the administrative offices, a small fern dying of thirst let out a thin, wailing scream.
“Someone always gains,” said Reina. “Just as someone always loses.”
Nothazai gave her a brisk look of disappointment.
“Yes, I imagine so. Good day, then,” he said, and slipped back into the museum’s flow of traffic, leaving Reina to look down at his card.
An odd thing, timing. She’d had a feeling, hadn’t she?
That something would disrupt the peace she’d found within the Society the moment she stepped outside its walls. It was
a narrow window to reach her without the Society’s wards; only a matter of hours remained before her return, which was much too specific to guess.
Could this, like the installment, have been another test?
The idea that anything would keep Reina from initiation into the Society was enough to reflexively curl her fingers, crumpling the card within them to a stiff, unwelcome ball.
The others could do with power what they wished. She tossed the card into the bin and strode out into the cold,
ignoring the seedlings that sprouted up between cracks in the sidewalk. The argument itself, that she should turn on the Society in order to save the world, was ludicrous. Look at her talents, for instance. Wouldn’t the Forum be the first to have her sacrifice her autonomy, all to sustain a planet
that had irresponsibly overpopulated itself? There was such a thing as asking too much, and she had known the demands of others all her life.
Depending who viewed it, Persephone had either been stolen or she had run from Demeter. Either way, she had made herself queen. The Forum, whatever they were, had misjudged Reina poorly for being free of principle, when in fact her principles were clear: she would not bleed out for nothing.
If this world felt it could take from Reina, so be it. She would gladly take from it.
