REINA
THE REALM OF THOUGHT wasn’t totally uninteresting as a topic of study, but even so, Reina was pleased to move on. The breaks in subject matter were particularly intriguing
because there was always a sense of some invisible,
underlying fabric; that they were being directed by currents they couldn’t necessarily see until they’d already absorbed it, swallowed it whole.
Reina had the benefit of being raised amid Eastern philosophies as opposed to Western, which meant she trusted general policies of oneness. Suchness, as it were. She understood, in a way the others did not, the existence of polarities, a mysticism of opposition: that
acknowledging the presence of life meant accepting the presence of death. That knowledge necessitated ignorance.
That gain meant loss. Ambition suggested contentment, in a sense, because starvation implied the existence of glut.
“Luck is a matter of probability,” said Dalton. He wasn’t always assigned the role of lecturer, which was probably for good reason. He didn’t seem to care for it, as if they had
dragged him away from something more important; he had an air of wanting to be elsewhere, or generally belonging to thoughts a great distance from theirs. Still, they had grown familiar enough with him by then that his presence was less that of an administrator and more like a cook they rarely saw, or a housekeeper. Someone providing them with
sustenance but not interfering much with their daily lives. “Luck,” Dalton continued, “is both a magic and a science
that has been studied in detail, by medeians and mortals alike. It is chance, but with a loaded die: the lean of
likelihood toward a favorable event. For obvious reasons, one’s proclivity for luck is a valuable commodity. Also a common magic, even for the lowest rungs of witches. Now, the issue of unluck—”
“Unluck?” echoed Libby, bewildered.
(Reina had no such confusion. The existence of luck necessarily implied its opposite.)
“Unluck,” Dalton confirmed, “for lack of a better term, is the purposeful disruption of probability. Jinxes, hexes, curses
—”
“Battle magic?” asked Nico, who despite his best intentions had a tendency to be mercilessly literal.
“Unluck,” Dalton repeated. “Hexes are of course the most direct form; intentional bad luck caused to the victim. The other two—”
“Jinxes are inconveniences, entanglements,” said Libby. “And curses are deliberate harm?”
She always seemed to phrase things in the form of a question even when she was certain, ostensibly out of a desire to appear unthreatening. (As if any of them would be threatened by something they were all required to study as first year students at university, if not sooner.)
“Academically, yes,” confirmed Dalton. “But for the Society’s purposes, we are less concerned with the results of such magic than we are with their construction. Which curses have proven most effective and why, that sort of thing. Mostly,” he said, his attention straying, as it often did, to Parisa, “how the disruption of luck can be used to unmake a man, unsettling him from the design—or rather,
the lack of design—his path should naturally take.”
Parisa’s dark eyes held his for a moment. Dalton cleared his throat.
“Nature is chaos, magic is order, but they are not wholly unrelated. Bloodlines,” Dalton continued, “are a common carrier for mechanisms of unluck—genetic continuity. Very common that a curse will follow genealogy in some way or be passed on to progeny. That sort of magic is much more complex than it seems; anything with such lasting
consequences requires a certain degree of sacrifice and loss to the caster.”
Reina’s commentary was rare, but sometimes necessary. “Why?”
The plants beside her slithered with glee, coaxing her to speak further. MotherMother soothe us with your voice it pleases us to hear you!
She crossed one leg over the other, irritated.
“Why?” echoed Dalton at her interruption, looking once again as if he wished he were left alone with his thoughts. “Because although magic and nature have different forms, they are not inseverable: magic has aspects of nature, nature has aspects of magic, and to take one away from either is a corruption to both their forms. It is the disintegration of naturalism itself. A man with a curse will upset the balance of things, warping the universe around
him. Luck magic is a corruption as well; for any corruption to hold, the caster must accept, in some way, a fracture—a
piece of themselves forever broken, in payment for the imbalance they have caused.”
“I don’t want to know why it’s necessary,” Reina said bluntly. “I want to know why it works.”
Dalton fixed her with a narrow glance.
“Sacrifice has magic of its own,” he said. “The decision to do something is itself a change, a rupture to the state of the world’s natural order. Would things happen in the caster’s favor regardless of interference? Yes of course, probability meaning that all outcomes are, conceptually,
possible,” Dalton said, droning on methodically. “But to set one’s sights on one particular outcome is to necessitate a shift in some direction, enduring and irreversible. We study the realm of consciousness because we understand that to decide something, to weigh a cost and accept its consequences, is to forcibly alter the world in some tangible way. That is a magic as true and as real as any other.”
“Are you suggesting magic is some sort of spiritualism?” said Reina.
Mother is telling the truth!, Mother speaks truth!, she is made of it!
“Sometimes,” Reina went on gruffly, “you treat magic like a god, like an energy, and sometimes like a pulse. It’s an unscientific vibration when convenient, but we already know its behaviors can be predicted, and therefore
purposefully changed.”
Dalton said nothing, waiting for her to make her point, so Reina persisted, “You make magic its own entity, but it has no autonomy of choice. No research shows that magic
deliberately chooses how to honor the intentions of the caster—it simply does or doesn’t work, depending on the caster’s abilities.”
“So magic has no sentience of its own, you mean?”
Reina nodded, and beside her, Parisa’s expression took on some degree of contemplation.
“Magic is not a god,” Dalton agreed, “it is a tool. But it does respond discreetly to the distinctions of its user’s intentions, however subtle those may be. It is a matter not unlike general relativity,” he said. “Intent cannot change the foundation of science or magic as a whole, but we know from observation that its outcome can change relative to its use.”
“So whether an arrow hits its target depends on both the skill of the archer and the definable laws of momentum,”
said Libby. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yes and no,” said Dalton. “It is not so simple an equation. The rules of lethality are not limited by one constraint or two, but by many. When it comes to magic, the question is not merely a matter of the archer,” he explained, “but also of the arrow itself. Sometimes the arrow is made of stone, sometimes steel, sometimes paper. If the arrow itself is weak, even an immensity of skill can sometimes fail.”
“Does the archer’s intent forge the arrow in addition to aiming the bow?” asked Nico, frowning.
“Sometimes,” said Dalton. “Other times, the arrow is forged by something else.”
“Does the arrow forge itself?”
Libby again. Dalton turned to her slowly, regarding her for a moment in silence. She seemed to mean one thing—If magic is the arrow and we are the archers, how much control do we have over its flight? —but appeared to have ultimately asked quite another.
Is magic the tool, or are we?
“That,” Dalton said eventually, “is the purpose of this study.”
Callum and Tristan had not spoken yet, which wasn’t entirely unusual, nor was it unusual that they paused to
exchange a glance. At one point it had been Tristan initiating the glances, almost as a measure of security; checking to
see if his left leg still existed, or if he were still wearing the shirt he’d put on before breakfast. Now it was Callum who was doing routine maintenance. Observing the functions on a passenger train; protecting his assets.
Reina turned to look at Nico, who had lost interest in the philosophical underpinnings of the conversation. She wondered if he were still thinking about what Parisa had told him, and then proceeded to wonder what his intentions were.
She was fairly confident Nico wouldn’t kill her. (Her plants slithered back, hissing in distaste at the prospect of anyone doing otherwise.) Of course, practically speaking, Reina was fairly certain no one would; she was neither at the top nor the bottom of anyone’s list, which made her
neither potential target nor potential victim. Beneath it all, they were equally ambitious—individually, they were all
starved for something—but the polarities of the group were the ones whose incongruity couldn’t be rectified. The
presence of Parisa implied the existence of Callum, and that was the tension the others were unable to stand. Unused to the necessity of opposition, they would find it necessary to choose.
Reina turned to look at Parisa, considering her own choices. On the one hand, she would happily be rid of Parisa. On the other, Parisa had played her game well; Reina doubted anyone could convince Tristan or Libby to kill her.
No, scratch Libby from consideration altogether. She wouldn’t actively choose anyone—too skittish. Unless Libby would kill Callum? A possibility. After all, Libby had been the most bothered by Parisa’s astral death.
At the reminder of the incident in question, Reina turned to observe Callum again, more closely this time. The plant
behind him shivered, and Reina frowned in agreement; it was Callum who had unsettled them all, and even the simplest forms of life could feel it. Callum was the obvious choice, only there was one major obstacle to unanimity: Tristan. Would Tristan agree to kill Callum? No, most likely not, and that explained Callum’s need to check on him
regularly.
It seemed the incident between Callum and Parisa had split the remainder of them into factions—people who were bothered by death and people who weren’t—and Tristan was the meridian.
Maybe they should just be rid of Tristan.
Parisa turned to her with one brow arched. (Reina had been careless; settling perhaps a bit too clumsily on the idea.)
Don’t pretend you’ve ever really had a friend, thought Reina in silent reply. You’d turn on him in a moment if it
suited you.
Parisa’s lips twitched up, half-smiling. She gave a small shrug, neither confirmation nor denial, then returned her attention to Dalton, who was just beginning to discuss curses on forms of consciousness when the door opened behind him, revealing the rare appearance of Atlas in the frame.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” said Atlas, though of course he had interrupted, unquestionably. He was dressed in a full suit as always, though he appeared to have come from somewhere; perhaps a meeting. Having never held the
position of Caretaker in an elite secret society, Reina was unsure of his daily activities. She watched him remove the hook of his umbrella from his arm and set it beside the door, leaning it on the frame.
At one point, this had been normal. When they first began their work, Atlas had been present nearly every morning, but, like Dalton, he had taken several steps back once they’d grown comfortable with the Society’s work. His appearance now shifted the chemistry in the room,
noticeably altering its atmosphere.
Dalton nodded in acknowledgement, opening his mouth to continue his list of suggested reading, but before he could, Libby had tentatively raised a hand in the air.
“Sorry, sir,” she said, turning to Atlas, “but since you’re here, I wondered if we were going to discuss the details of initiation at any point.”
The rest of the room froze.
Dalton, Reina observed, had fallen robotically still,
instantly short-circuiting. Nico was mortified, but a very specific kind of mortification: the particular dismay of
having forgotten to do something important, like having left the house with the oven on. Tristan’s gaze was fixed straight ahead as if he had not heard the question (impossible) and Callum was fighting laughter, as if he hoped to replay the moment endlessly until he’d wrung all the amusement out of it that he possibly could.
Parisa was the least startled. Presumably she had known what Libby was going to ask before she had said anything
aloud, given the mind-reading, but surely there was no doubt for anyone in the room that whatever secrets the others were carrying, Parisa held them, too.
Only Libby was patently empty-handed.
“We’ve all been here nearly a year,” Libby pointed out. “And by now we’ve all received visits from members of other organizations, haven’t we?”
No one spoke in confirmation, but that didn’t appear to deter her in the slightest.
“So, it just seems as if we should have been told by now what comes next,” Libby concluded warily, glancing around. “Is there going to be some sort of exam, or—?”
“Forgive my brevity,” said Atlas. “As a group, you are to have selected a member for elimination by the end of the month. As for the details, it’s a bit early to discuss them.”
“Is it?” asked Libby, frowning. “Because it seems as if—” “The Society has done things a very particular way for a
reason,” said Atlas. “This may not seem clear right now, but I cannot permit expediency to outweigh the importance of our methodology. Logistical efficiency is only one among
many concerns, I’m afraid.”
It was clear that Libby wasn’t going to receive any further answers; even more obvious was her discontent with the prospect of continued ignorance.
“Oh.” She folded her arms over her chest, turning back to Dalton. “Sorry.”
Dalton went on, returning half-heartedly to his lecture,
and for the rest of the afternoon, nothing was noticeably out
of place.
As far as Reina was concerned, however, something monumental had been achieved that afternoon. She was certain now that only Libby remained in the dark, which meant that if the rest of them were aware of the terms for initiation and they still hadn’t left, then they must have all secretly come to the same conclusion Reina had.
They were each willing to kill whoever they had to in order to stay. Five out of six arrows were not only sharp, they were lethal, and now they were readily aimed.
Briefly, Reina felt the tug of a smile across her face: Intention.
MotherMotherMother is aliveeeeee!
TRISTAN
“MAYBE WE SHOULD KILL RHODES,” remarked Callum over breakfast.
At which point Tristan stopped chewing, swallowing thickly around his toast.
Callum slid a glance to him, half-shrugging. “It just seems practical,” he said. “She and Varona are a pair, aren’t they? Why keep both?”
Tristan’s response was slow. “Then why not suggest killing Nico?”
“We could, I suppose.” Callum reached for his coffee, taking a sip. “I could be convinced.”
He replaced the cup on the table, glancing at Tristan’s waylaid toast. “Everything alright?”
Tristan grimaced. “We’re discussing which among us to
murder, Callum. I don’t think I’m expected to go on eating.” “Aren’t you? You’re still here,” Callum observed. “I
imagine that means you’re expected to go on doing everything precisely as you normally would.”
“Still.” Tristan’s stomach hurt, or his chest. He felt
nauseated and broken. Was this what Dalton meant about a person being fractured? Perhaps they were being
disintegrated on purpose, morality removed so as to be
stitched back up with less human parts. Maybe in the end his former beliefs would be vestigial, like a foregone tail.
Some little nub at the base of his philosophical spine.
It was astounding how easily he had come around to the idea. Shouldn’t he have balked, recoiled, run away? Instead, it seemed to have settled in like something he’d always suspected, becoming more undeniably obvious each day; of course someone had to die. Immense magic required a power source, and a sacrifice of this nature would be
precisely that: immense.
For him, anyway.
“Maybe it won’t work if you feel nothing,” Tristan murmured, and Callum looked up sharply.
“What?”
“I just meant—”
What had he meant? This was Callum, after all. “Never mind.”
“You had faith in me once.” Callum’s fingers tightened around his cup. “Not anymore, I take it?”
“Well, it’s just—”
“This is what I do to survive,” Callum said, his voice harsh now with something; betrayal, maybe. Tristan flinched, remembering what Callum had said: Trust, once
dead, cannot be resurrected. “I thought you understood that about me by now.”
“I did. I do,” Tristan corrected himself. “But you just sound so…”
“What, callous? Cold, indifferent, ambivalent?” A pause. “Or do you mean cruel?”
Silence.
Callum turned his head to glance expectantly at Tristan, who didn’t look up. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
Tristan said nothing.
“We are this way because of what we have, not what we lack,” Callum said, suddenly bristling with impatience. “Who would Parisa be if she had not seen her brother’s thoughts? If Reina had not been leached upon from birth?”
“Callum,” Tristan managed to say, “I was only trying to
—”
“To what? To vilify me? In the end we will make the same
choice, Tristan. In fact, we have made it already.” Callum’s mouth was thinly lined; tight with malice, or pain. “Eventually, you and I will both decide to kill someone. Are you less guilty simply because you’ve been the one to unravel more?”
Foggily, Tristan thought to say yes. He thought to argue: This is guilt, it is human, your decisiveness is robotic, like a machine. In the end I could not carry on as I was, I could not become a false version of myself, I have a beating heart
inside my chest and where is yours?
He didn’t.
“You are here,” Callum said, “because you crave
something from this as much as I do. Power, understanding, it doesn’t matter which. Maybe it’s knowledge you want,
maybe not. Maybe you’re here because you plan to walk out of this Society and take over James Wess*x’s company the moment you do. Maybe you’ll bankrupt him, send his daughter into ruin. Maybe this is vengeance for you, reprisal, whether you plan to admit that to yourself or not.”
Tristan swallowed heavily.
“Maybe you can see others, Tristan, but I can see the parts of you that you won’t allow yourself to see. That’s my fucking curse, Tristan!”
Callum slammed a fist against the table, rising to his feet.
“There isn’t a person alive who can see themselves as I see them,” Callum snarled, and it did not sound like a warning. Not a threat. “You want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, makes you better? It doesn’t. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don’t you see it’s because we’re riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn.”
He pivoted as one hand fell to his side, exasperated. “We are medeians because we will never have enough,”
Callum said hoarsely. “We aren’t normal; we are gods born with pain built in. We are incendiary beings and we are
flawed, except the weaknesses we pretend to have are not our true weaknesses at all. We are not soft, we do not suffer impairment or frailty—we imitate it. We tell ourselves we
have it. But our only real weakness is that we know we are bigger, stronger, as close to omnipotence as we can be, and we are hungry, we are aching for it. Other people can see their limits, Tristan, but we have none. We want to find our
impossible edges, to close our fingers around constraints that don’t exist, and that,” Callum exhaled. “That is what will drive us to madness.”
Tristan glanced down at his forgotten toast, suddenly feeling drained.
Callum’s voice didn’t soften. “You don’t want to go mad? Too bad, you are already. If you leave here the madness will only follow you. You have already gone too far, and so have I.”
“I won’t kill Rhodes,” said Tristan. “I can’t do it.”
Callum paused a moment, stiffening, and then he
resumed his seat, waving a hand over his coffee to replenish its warmth.
“Yes,” he said without expression. “Parisa made sure of that.”
For the rest of the day, Tristan felt dazed, as if he’d suffered a wound that hadn’t clotted. The constant
questioning of himself, of others, was viciously acute. It was one thing to be understood by someone else, to be exposed by them, and another (however inevitable it was) to be
misused by them. Both Parisa and Callum had seen pieces
of Tristan that he either didn’t or couldn’t understand; both fundamentally distrusted the other. What, then, had they
seen in him that they could each use to their advantage? He was caving in on himself beneath the weight of his doubt, uncertain.
Nothing was concrete anymore. Time did not exist and neither did infinity. There were other dimensions, other planes, other people who could use them. Maybe Tristan was in love with Callum or Parisa or both or neither, maybe he actually hated them, maybe it meant something that he trusted them both so fucking little and they didn’t mind,
having known it all along. Maybe the only parts Tristan couldn’t see were himself and his place in their game between each other.
What Tristan wanted was to believe in something; to stop staring at the pieces and finally grasp the whole. He wanted to revel in his magic, not wrestle with it. He wanted something, somewhere, that he could understand.
He was pacing while he postured. Movement didn’t help the blur of things half-seen, but sitting still was not an option. He closed his eyes and reached out for something solid, feeling strands in the air. Their wards were gridlike, difficult to disturb, like bars. He paused and tried something different: to be part of them, participant instead of observer.
He felt himself like a flicker of existence, both in place and not. It was meditation, in a sense. A focus on connectedness, and the more embedded in his own thoughts he became, the less he was able to place himself
in any physical reality. In the absence of sight, sense and memory could tell him where he was: hard wooden floors, the smell of kindling burning in the furnace, the air of the Society mansion, occupied by magical contortions he himself had made—but in the interest of unlearning his preconceptions, he discarded them. He was nowhere, everywhere, everything and nothing. He abandoned the necessity of taking a form or a shape.
Bewilderingly, it was Parisa’s voice that spoke to him. “You ought to have a talisman,” she said. “Find one and
keep it with you, and you’ll never have to wonder what’s real.”
Tristan’s eyes snapped open, alarmed, but upon recalling himself in reality, he confirmed that he hadn’t moved from where he’d remembered himself last. He still sat on the floor of the painted room, surrounded by no one and nothing.
Where had he gone in that instant, or had he actually
moved at all? Had Parisa been inside his head somehow, or had it been a memory? Was it her magic or his own?
So much for not wondering what was real.
In the end, Tristan shook himself, rising to his feet. After a pause to think, he took a small scrap of paper, scribbling something on it and tucking it into his pocket.
Callum looked up when he entered, bracing himself for a continuation of their prior argument, but Tristan shook his head.
“I’m not here to have a row,” he said. “You’re right, of course. I know you’re right.”
Callum looked warily unconvinced. “Is that supposed to be concession or a compliment?”
“Neither. A fact. Or rather, a white flag.” “So this is a truce?”
“Or an apology,” Tristan said. “Whichever you prefer.” Callum arched a brow. “I don’t suppose I need either.” “Perhaps not.” Tristan folded his arms over his chest,
leaning against the frame of the reading room. “Drink?” Callum regarded him another moment, then nodded,
shutting the book before him and rising uncomplicatedly to his feet.
The two of them walked in practiced cohesion to the
painted room. Callum summoned a pair of glasses from the corner, glancing over his shoulder to Tristan. “Whisky?”
“Sure.”
Callum poured with a wave of his hand, leaking magic as he always did, and beside him, Tristan took his usual seat.
Their motions were practiced, frequently rehearsed, and Callum set a glass in Tristan’s hand, taking hold of the other. For several moments they were silent, each savoring the drink. It was a smoky, hollow blend, silken with amber and caramel in the light, with the smooth finish they both
tended to prefer.
“It doesn’t have to be Rhodes,” Callum said eventually. “But you have to admit she’s unpopular.”
Tristan sipped his whisky. “I know.” “Unpopular doesn’t mean valueless.” “I know.”
“And if your attachment to her is…”
“It isn’t.” Again, Tristan sipped his glass. “I don’t think.” “Ah.” Callum turned his head, looking at him. “For the
record, she has been trying to research her dead sister.” Tristan blinked. “What?”
“Her sister died of a degenerative disease. I suppose I might have mentioned that before.”
He hadn’t, though Tristan remained undecided as to whether or not he should have.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know,” said Callum simply. “Someone who has seen another person waste away is easy to spot. They are haunted differently.” He paused, and then added, “And she is also requesting books on human degeneration, which the library is currently denying her.”
“And that you know because of…?” “Coincidence. We do live in the same house.”
“Ah.” Tristan cleared his throat. “How do I know you’re being honest with me?”
“What reason would I have to lie?”
“Well, it’s not as if it doesn’t benefit you. Having someone.”
“Having someone, or having you?”
“You tell me.” Tristan slid him a glance, and Callum sighed.
“You are not accustomed to being desired, are you?” Callum prompted, and before Tristan could manage his
surely uncomfortable reply, Callum clarified, “As a friend, I mean. As a person.” A pause. “As anything.”
“Please don’t psychoanalyze me today,” Tristan said. “Fine, fine.” Callum’s smile quirked. “Daddy issues.” Tristan glared at him, and Callum laughed.
“Well, the whisky’s good, and so is the company,” said Callum. “Astoundingly, that is the primary extent of your worth to me, Tristan. Ample conversation, at the very least.”
“I don’t know about ample.”
“That,” Callum said, “is the best part. The silences are particularly engaging.”
Aptly, they sat in silence for a moment, saturating themselves in the relief of conflict resolution.
After a few minutes of quiet coexistence, Callum glanced at the clock.
“Well,” he said. “I suppose I’m for bed, then.” He rose to his feet, setting his empty glass on the table. “Are you
staying up?”
“For a bit,” Tristan said, and Callum nodded.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, clapping a hand on Tristan’s shoulder, “the parts of you that you seem to loathe are hardly abhorrent at all.”
“Thanks,” said Tristan pithily, and Callum let out another hearty laugh. He strode through the doors and disappeared, the warmth of his magic swallowed up by the dark and gone with him.
Tristan, left alone in the light of the painted room’s fireplace, set his glass on the table, reaching into his pocket.
He removed the note he’d scrawled to himself earlier, unfurling it to read the script written inside.
A glass of wine. Vintage. Old World.
Tristan looked up at the sweat on his glass of whisky, watching it fall to the table below.
“Fuck,” he swore aloud, crumpling the piece of paper in his hands.
LIBBY
“MISS RHODES,” SAID ATLAS PLEASANTLY, “what a surprise.”
She paused in the doorway, frowning.
“It’s not actually a surprise, though,” she determined aloud, “is it?”
Atlas glanced up, half-smiling. “What gave it away?”
A lack of disturbance, mostly. There was no magic to that, aside from observation.
“Just a hunch,” she said, and Atlas beckoned for her to take a seat.
“How did you know I was here?”
Surveillance wards. “I heard Dalton mention it.”
“Mm,” said Atlas. “I take it you have further questions about initiation?”
If you could call them questions. “Yes,” said Libby, “several.”
So many, in fact, that she hardly knew where to start.
Libby had been doing a variety of things over the past
couple of days. Research, as always. Following her visit from the Forum, she had been looking primarily for anything to
do with Kitty, to no particular results. All the library would
give her—or, in any case, all the library was programmed by someone else to give her—were subjects pertinent to their task at hand: degenerative curses, longevity and its opposites. The decay that was a process of natural entropy was currently off limits unless it had something to do with
the study of intentional corruption.
Libby had just begun to wonder who was actually
keeping them from the contents of the library when Nico had pulled her aside for another conversation entirely,
looking unusually distressed.
“I have to tell you something,” he said. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Apropos of nothing? I assume not.” Libby had never
liked anything Nico had to say to her uninvited and certainly wasn’t expecting to start now. She opened her mouth to tell him she had other things on her mind, but hastily he
stopped her.
“Just… try not to Rhodes this,” he said. “Okay?” “Once again, my name is not a verb, Varona.”
“Whatever.” He rubbed his temple. “Look, definitely don’t tell Fowler—”
“I don’t tell Ezra anything,” she snapped, preemptively irritated. “Certainly not anymore.”
Nico blinked. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” Nothing she wanted to say to him, anyway. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine, just—” Nico exhaled, dropping his voice. “I think,” he murmured, “when they say we have to eliminate someone, they mean it… literally.”
That wasn’t what Libby had been expecting at all. “What?”
“The sixth person, the person who doesn’t get initiated. I think they get—” An agitated pause.
“Get what?”
“Jesus.” Nico tousled his hair with one hand. “Killed.”
“No,” said Libby. “That’s ridiculous. That’s impossible.”
“I mean, I’m sure it is,” said Nico reflexively. “But also, is it?”
“That’s nonsensical.”
She glared at him, frowning. “Who told you that?” “Parisa, but—”
That was slightly more troubling, given the mind-reading. “Then she must have misinterpreted or something. Or
maybe she’s lying.”
Nico was surprisingly hesitant. “I don’t think so, Rhodes.” “Well, it’s outrageous,” said Libby caustically. “There’s no
way we’re part of… of some kind of…” She fumbled, flustered. “Some sort of murder competition—”
“Maybe we’re not,” Nico agreed. “Maybe it’s a trick or something. Or maybe it’s the whole intent thing Dalton was going on about,” he said, waving a hand in reference to the lesson he had probably only half-listened to. “Maybe we just have to be willing to do it in order for it to work, but—”
“What do you mean ‘work’?”
“Well, Parisa says—”
“Parisa doesn’t know shit,” said Libby staunchly. “Okay, great, maybe not, but that’s the information I
have, so that’s what I’m giving you. Christ,” Nico suddenly swore loudly, “you’re fucking impossible.”
“Me?” She glared at him. “Who else knows, then?” He winced. “Everyone, I think.”
“Everyone ‘you think’?”
“I—” He faltered. “Fine, I know.” “Seriously. Everyone?”
“Yes, Rhodes, everyone.” “That’s impossible.”
She was aware she was repeating herself, but it seemed unlikely she could bring herself to respond another way.
“Has anyone bothered to ask Atlas?” she demanded, suddenly infuriated. “Is any of this even remotely confirmed?”
“I don’t know, but—” “You don’t know?”
“Elizabeth, would you listen to me?” “Of course not, this is absurd.”
“Fine,” said Nico, throwing his hands up. “For what it’s worth, I hate it too, but—”
“But what?” Libby demanded. “What could possibly be the but, Varona? What about this would you kill for?”
“Jesus, Rhodes, which part of this wouldn’t you kill for?”
He had shouted it at her, his mouth snapping shut with alarm. She blinked, taken aback.
“I only meant,” Nico began hastily, and then shook his head, grimacing. “No, never mind. Talk to me when you’re ready, when you’ve processed. I can’t explain this right now.”
“Varona,” Libby growled, but he was already walking away, shaking her off like a chill.
So Libby had checked the surveillance wards to discover that Atlas Blakely, who had offered them a position beyond their wildest imaginations without ever mentioning the cost, was alone in the reading room.
“You must have known there would be something,” Atlas said, jarring her from her momentary stumble.
She didn’t bother asking how he knew what she was thinking about. “So it’s true?”
“It’s not as gruesome as it sounds,” said Atlas placidly. “But yes, one of you will have to die.”
Part of her was convinced she was imagining this. Was it a dream? Surely not, and yet not a thread of her had ever believed, even for a moment, that Atlas would ever confirm Nico’s suspicions as truth.
“But—”
“Sometimes it is a conspiracy,” Atlas admitted, mercifully keeping her from spluttering any further. “On occasion it bears some resemblance to the Ides of March. But often it is a sacrifice, and therefore beholden to great sorrow.”
“But,” Libby attempted again, and hesitated, finding herself unable to begin. “But how—”
“How can we ask it of you? Not easily,” said Atlas. “It is, I’m afraid, an ancient practice. As old as the Library itself.
With each generation of initiates we learn more, we expand the breadth and use of our knowledge, but the primary
principle of magic remains unfailingly true: It always comes at a cost.”
“But we were not informed,” Libby said flatly, and Atlas nodded.
“No one ever is, Miss Rhodes.” “Would you have told us?”
“Yes, of course, eventually. Secrets are difficult to keep, and the Forum often interferes.”
Libby gritted her teeth. “How do they know about it?” “The Society is ancient, Miss Rhodes, and therefore so
are its enemies. Humans are fallible creatures. Better the Forum’s interference than the Wess*x Corporation, at least. Capitalism has a terrible tendency to abandon its principles altogether.”
“And somehow your principles remain?”
“If there were another way,” Atlas said simply, “we would use it.”
Libby fidgeted a moment, both wanting and not wanting to ask.
“You want to know how,” Atlas guessed, and she glanced up, resentful of his sympathy. “It’s a reasonable question, Miss Rhodes. You may ask it.”
“Is it—?” She broke off. “Is it… some sort of full moon sacrifice, some customary ritual? Each year on the solstice
or the equinox or something?”
“No, nothing like that. It is a sacrifice, the sliver of a whole.”
“That’s it?”
“It?” he echoed, and she blinked. “There is no small matter of it, Miss Rhodes. You are all bound to each other by your experience here, whether you like it or not,” Atlas informed her, suddenly more adamant than she had ever heard him. “There is nothing forgettable or small about the way you have all embedded yourselves in each other.
Without exception, you become more deeply inextricable from each other with every passing day. The purpose of the elimination is not to rid yourself of something you can lose, but rather to remove something which makes you what you are.”
“So we just have to kill someone,” Libby summarized bitterly. “That’s it? No particular method, no ceremony, no specific day?”
Atlas shook his head.
“And every few years you simply stand there and watch someone die?”
“Yes,” said Atlas. “But—”
“Consider, Miss Rhodes, the scope of power,” Atlas cut in gently. “Which specialties benefit the world, and which do not. This is not always a matter of personal allegiances.”
“Why would an unbeneficial specialty be chosen to begin with?” Libby demanded. “Didn’t you say yourself that each
initiate is the best the world has to offer?”
“Of course. However, each initiation cycle, there is one member who will not return, and the Society is cognizant of this,” Atlas said. “This must always be a factor in discussion among the board’s members when nominating which candidates to submit for consideration.”
“Are you saying someone is… intentionally chosen for death?”
The idea itself was astounding. Libby could hear her blood rushing in opposition, a deafening tide of disbelief.
“Of course not.” Atlas smiled. “Just something to think about.”
They sat there in a long, unwavering silence until Libby rose clumsily to her feet. She stopped, halfway to the door, and pivoted around.
“The archives,” she said, belatedly remembering her sister once again. “Who controls what we can see?”
Atlas glanced up, fixing her with a long moment of scrutiny. “The library itself.”
“Why should I believe that?” she asked, and then, frustration igniting, she pushed him more vehemently. “Why should I believe anything you say?”
His expression didn’t change. “I do not control the archives, Miss Rhodes, if that is your question. There are numerous subjects denied to me as well.”
“But this is your Society!”
“No,” Atlas corrected. “I am one of this Society’s Caretakers. I do not own it, I do not control it.”
“Then who does?” she demanded.
He gave her a small, impassive shrug. “Does the arrow aim itself?” he asked.
Libby, rather than answer, turned frustratedly on her heel, launching herself toward the stairs and making her way back to her room.
On the landing of the gallery she collided with someone who’d been turning the corner simultaneously, the two of them barreling into one another. Had she been more able to focus on anything outside her thoughts, she might have heard him coming. As it was, though—
Tristan steadied her, hands around her shoulders. “Have you seen Parisa?” he asked her, and because
Libby was distraught—because she was fucking human—she glared up at him.
“Fuck you,” she said venomously. Tristan blinked, taken aback. “What?”
“You knew.” Ah, so that was why. In a fit of delayed recognition, Libby suddenly understood the force of her resentment. “You knew this whole time, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell me.”
“Knew—” He stopped, contemplating her face. “You mean—?”
“Yes. The death. The fucking murder.”
He flinched, and for a moment, she hated him. She
loathed him.
“I can’t—” She broke off, agonized or anguished, unable to tell the difference and unwilling to locate the divide. “I
can’t, I won’t—”
“Rhodes.” Tristan’s hands were still tight around her shoulders. “I should have told you, I know. I know you’re angry—”
“Angry?” She wasn’t not, though that hardly seemed the proper word for it. She was feeling something that festered, true, and it could easily have been rage. She had learned
long ago to control her magical impulses, restraining them, but at the moment she could feel it spark, smelling smoke.
“Believe me, Tristan, angry,” she seethed, “doesn’t even begin to describe it—”
“None of us actually knows how much this Society controls,” Tristan reminded her, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial hush. “Do you really think anyone can walk away from this? Believe me, I know recruitment, I know the difference between institutions and cults, and there is no
innocence to this one. You do not get to walk away.”
He may have quieted, but she refused. “Then why? Why do it?”
“You know why.” His mouth tightened.
“No.” The thought sickened her. “Tell me why anyone would do this, tell me why—”
“Rhodes—”
“No. No.” She wasn’t entirely sure what had inflamed her so maniacally, but she beat a fist against his chest, letting her delirium take over. “No, you’re one of them, aren’t you?” Her lips felt cold, impassive, the words tumbling out like debris, retching from her unfeeling mouth. “It means
nothing to you, because of course it doesn’t. S*x is nothing to you, this is all a game—Everything is just a game!—so what’s murder? What is a life, compared to all of this? This Society is just a poison,” she spat, her fury so rapidly spent her head fell heavily against Tristan’s chest, fearful and exhausted.
“They dose us,” she muttered, “a little at a time with it, a little more each round, until we can’t feel anything anymore
—until we’re blind and deaf and numb to everything—” Tristan took her hand and tugged her around the corner,
pulling her wordlessly into his room. She nearly flung herself inside, swaying unbalanced beside the hearth, and he
sealed the door shut behind them, staring at the handle. “What’s really going on, Rhodes?”
She shut her eyes.
Ask yourself where power comes from, Ezra said in her head. If you can’t see the source, don’t trust it—
Don’t tell me who to trust!
“Rhodes.”
Tristan came no closer, and she couldn’t decide whether she wanted him to.
“Why would we have done this?” Her voice sounded thin, girlish. “Why?”
“Because, Rhodes. Because look around you.” “At who? At what?”
He didn’t answer. Bitterly, she conceded that he didn’t need to.
She had more power now than she had ever possessed.
It wasn’t a matter of what she was born with or what she was given; being here, among them, with access to the library’s materials, she had every opportunity to travel miles beyond herself. She could feel the outer edges of her power more distantly than ever, further than the tips of her fingers or the soles of her shoes. She could feel herself in waves, pulsing. She could feel herself expanding, and there was no end to it, no beginning. Who she had been once was as distant and unrecognizable as what she would, inevitably, become.
“Whose side are you on, Tristan?” Libby choked from the depths of her remorse. She was dismayed with herself for even asking, but it was making her nauseated, flooding her with bile. The not knowing was making her physically unstable, and she shivered, suddenly sick with it.
“I don’t know.” Tristan’s voice, by contrast, was mechanical and measured. “Yours, maybe. I don’t know.” He gave a little off-color laugh, sounding precisely as unhinged as she felt. “Did you know Callum’s been influencing me? I don’t know how much, or how strongly, or how lingering its effects have been, but he has. Did you know that?”
Yes. It was obvious. “No.”
“I thought I had control of myself but I don’t.” He turned to look at her. “Do you?”
No. Even now she didn’t.
Tristan’s lips parted and she swallowed. Especially not now.
“I’m not being influenced by Callum, if that’s the
question,” she managed to snap at him, incensed by the desperation of her longing. It wasn’t what he’d asked, but selfishly she couldn’t bear to tell him the truth, not even a sliver of it. There were only so many pieces of herself she was willing to lose.
Tristan faced away from her again, turning his back. Libby wanted to sob, or to vomit.
Fine. “I want it.” Her voice was small when she confessed it to his spine. “This life, this power, Tristan, I want it. I want it so badly it hurts me. I’m in such terrible, disgusting pain.”
He brought one hand up, leaning his forearm against the door and sagging against it.
“When Atlas was telling me about it,” she continued slowly, “it almost made sense: Of course there is a cost. Of course we all have to pay a price. And maybe there is one person I could stand to lose.”
She inhaled deeply; exhaled.
“And for a moment, I thought… maybe I could kill him. Maybe I could do it. Maybe he shouldn’t even exist; maybe the world would be better without him. But my god,” she gasped, “who am I to decide that?”
Silence.
“Who am I to place value on someone else’s life, Tristan? This isn’t self-defense, this is greed! This is… it’s wrong, and
—”
Before she could continue, dissolving into a puddle of her own incoherent babbling, Tristan had turned away from the
door, pivoting to face her.
“Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?” In another world he might have touched her.
In another world, she would have welcomed it.
“Always.” All it would take was a step. “Constantly.” His hands could be on her jeans, stroking a line down her navel, tucking her hair behind one ear. She recalled the sting of his sigh on her skin, the tremors of his wanting. “It terrifies me how easily I can watch it corrupt.”
Whatever was in motion—whether Parisa had started it willfully or if it had always been Libby, if she had manifested this somehow after viewing herself in projections, in visions, in daydreams disguised as phantoms—it was already too
late to stop. Still they hung in idle paralysis, precariously balanced.
One more step could break it. She could have him, this, all of it, in one fatal swoop. Whatever corruption of herself she might become next, it was all within arm’s reach. It
pulsed in her head, throbbed in her chest, static and blistering,
this could all
be
“I should go,” said Libby, exhaling.
—mine.
Tristan didn’t move until after she was gone.
PARISA
“YOU’RE AVOIDING ME,” murmured Dalton.
“Yes,” Parisa agreed, not bothering to stiffen
performatively at his approach. Anyone who sat too calmly
—like, say, a highly skilled telepath—had an eeriness to them that instinctively set the teeth of others on edge. Callum was a perfect example of off-putting magical peculiarity, which Parisa typically took care not to be.
Normality, and its necessary imitation, was king.
But as Dalton hadn’t prevented any indication of his approach, she discarded the reflexes people usually wanted to see from her.
“For what it’s worth, it’s not for lack of interest.” She simply had other things on the mind, like whether the
collision that was Tristan Caine and Libby Rhodes was about to finally come to fruition.
Dalton shifted to lean against her table in the reading room, folding his arms over his chest.
“Ask,” said Parisa, flipping the page in her book. Blood curses. Not very complex in the end, except for the costs to
the caster. Those who cast a blood curse almost always went mad, and those who received them almost always broke them eventually, or at least bore progeny who would.
Nature craved balance that way: with destruction always came rebirth.
“We knew about your husband,” said Dalton, evidently speaking for the Society on high. “Not your brother or your sister.”
That wasn’t the question in his head, but Parisa wasn’t surprised he had to work up to it. There were clouds of
discomfort hovering around in Dalton’s mind, thick layers of stratosphere to reach through.
“That,” said Parisa, “is because nothing happened with my brother.” She flipped another page, scanning it. “There would have been nothing worthwhile to discover.”
Dalton sat in silence a moment. “Callum seemed to find quite a bit.”
In Parisa’s mind, which thankfully Dalton could not read, Amin was always soft, Mehr always hard.
You are the jewel of the family; so precious to me, to us.
Kindness that was actually weakness: I admire you enough to want to possess you, control you.
You are a whore, a bitch, you corrupted this family!
Cruelty that was actually pain: I despise you for making me see my own ugliness, the value I lack.
Parisa closed her book, glancing up.
“Warfare is like compromise. Both parties must lose a
little in order to win,” she said impatiently. “If Callum gained
access to my secrets, it is only because I saw the purpose in him doing so.”
Dalton frowned. “You think I blame you?”
“I think you think me weak and now hope to comfort me, yes.”
“Weak? No, never. But would I be wrong to try for comfort?”
When Parisa didn’t answer, Dalton remarked, “He killed you with those secrets.”
“No,” Parisa said. “He didn’t. I did.”
Dalton cast a glance to his hands, his folded arms. A tacit
if you say so.
“Ask,” Parisa said again, impatiently this time, and Dalton’s attention slid to hers. Every now and then she saw glimpses of his insidious fractures, the memory of him she’d found locked away. She always found them in the most interesting places. Never academia; Dalton never resembled his spectral self when discussing books or thoughts. It was
only ever in moments like this, when he looked at her with an intensity he didn’t realize was hunger. When he was searching for something blindly in the dark.
“You told me not to interfere,” he began, and Parisa stopped him with a shake of her head.
“Yes, and it was a good thing you didn’t. Someone— Callum, for example—might have noticed where we were if you had, and then I might have lost.”
Dalton applied a manufactured tone of amusement. “I thought you said he won?”
“He did. But I did not lose.” “Ah.”
He turned to stare straight ahead, and Parisa paused to look at him.
“Why stay here?” she asked him. “You had the world at your feet.”
“I have the world here,” he said without looking at her. “More than.”
“You have only that which the library chooses to give you,” she corrected him.
“Better that than what I must take from the world.” “Is it better?”
At that he finally met her eye, casting his attention to hers like a weight.
“What did you find in my head?” Finally. The real question.
“Something very interesting,” she said. “How interesting?”
“Enough to compel me to stay, don’t you think?” “Would you have left otherwise?”
“Would I? Maybe. It is barbaric, this Society.” If it required death purely for entry, it would surely require more. Even if this was the extent of their sacrifice, they were contributing to something incomprehensibly vast; a tradition that had
lasted centuries, millennia. Principles of magic bound them
to someone’s intent, and there was no telling if those origins were the philosophers of Alexandria or the administrators of the library itself. Perhaps it was the same someone who
determined which pieces of the library they were able to receive; perhaps they were all indebted to the magic which bound them.
Gods demanded blood in almost every culture. Was magic any different?
If it was, Dalton wouldn’t tell her. Not this Dalton, anyway.
“Let me go back in,” Parisa suggested, and Dalton’s brow furrowed. “I would understand better what’s there if you let me.”
“You say that like it’s a minotaur,” Dalton said wryly. “Some monster inside a labyrinth.”
“A princess in a tower,” Parisa corrected, reaching up to brush the fabric of his collar. An intimate gesture, to remind him of their intimacy. “But princesses can be monstrous at times.”
“You say that like a compliment.”
He leaned into her touch, perhaps instinctively.
“Of course.” She offered up a delicate smile. “I want you to let me in again.”
“So you’re seducing me?”
“Always.” Her smile broadened. “There are times when I think I may enjoy your seduction most of all.”
“Mine, among so many others?” He sounded languid, unbeguiled.
She arched a brow. “Is that jealousy?”
“No. Disbelief.” His smile in reply was thin. “There is only so much to gain from me.”
“Nonsense, I have plenty. But I wouldn’t say no to more,” she said, rising to her feet.
She stepped in front of him, pairing their feet like corresponding pieces and matching her hips to his. He set his hands on her waist, gingerly. With the sense that he
could retract them if necessary, only she doubted he would. “Everyone has blind spots,” she said. “Things others can
see that they can’t.”
She slid his dark hair from his forehead, brushing his temples, and he closed his eyes.
“Five minutes,” he finally said.
She leaned forward, touching her lips lightly to his in compensation.
“Five minutes,” she agreed, and his hands tightened on her hips, anchoring her in place.
Entering his mind with permission was both easier and more difficult than before. She opened her eyes to a lobby, somewhere sterile and glassily white. There was an empty receptionist desk, a lift. She pushed the button, waiting. The doors opened with a ding, revealing nothing. Parisa watched her own reflection from the elevator walls as she stepped inside, facing the buttons.
There were countless. She grimaced; unfortunate. She could guess a numeric floor (and then another and another and several into perpetuity, rapidly deteriorating her frothy five minutes) but this was not the way to find herself back where Dalton’s subconscious had brought her before.
Here he was neatly organized, which meant these were his accessible thoughts. He was the usual occupant in the lift, hitting buttons to access various levels of memory and thought.
She hit a random floor—2,037—and felt the lift lurch to use.
Then she pried the doors brutishly open, slipping through the narrowest possible crevice. Magic could keep her from falling, but she didn’t bother to secure her footing. The construction of this part of him was deliberate, the result of survival techniques and psychological coping mechanisms, like anyone’s mind. Cognitive thought looked different from person to person; Dalton’s was more organized than most, but it was still nothing more than a carefully manufactured illusion. If she intended to get where she was going, she
would invariably have to fall.
She tipped backwards from the lift, closing her eyes to collapse into empty air. It would only feel like falling to her,
registering more like a headache to Dalton. She would pulse somewhere behind his brow, mounting pressure below his sinuses. With his permission she would be met with fewer guards, less opposition, but as to whether she would find her destination—
She slowed suddenly, paralyzed mid-fall, and opened her eyes.
“You’re back,” said the younger version of Dalton, rising greedily to his feet at the sight of her. She was suspended
midair, Snow White in her invisible coffin, and he stroked
two fingers over her cheeks, her lips. “I knew you would be.”
Parisa jerked out of stillness, falling onto the hard wooden floors of the castle where she had been before, and turned her head to find Dalton’s shoes beside her. He wore motorcycle boots with black jeans, like a caricature of his external academic, and she looked up, cataloguing him
piece by piece. The crown jewel was a fitted t-shirt, so white and crisp it gleamed.
He knelt down beside her, observing her through narrowed eyes.
“What’s he doing?” asked Dalton. “Nothing,” she said. “Research.”
“Not him,” Dalton said, waving a hand. “I know what he does. I meant him.”
She braced herself. “Atlas?”
Dalton rose to his feet, suddenly irritable. He was prickly, agitated by something.
“He’s coming,” he said. “I can feel him getting closer.” “Who?”
Dalton glared at her. “You’re here for the wrong reasons.” Parisa sat up on her elbows, watching him pace.
“What are the right reasons?”
“You want answers. I don’t have answers. I have questions, I have research unfinished, I WANT OUT,” Dalton’s spectral self suddenly shouted, pivoting to slam a fist into the castle wall.
Parisa winced, expecting stone, but the appearance of it only warped; revealing cool, finished steel before smoothing over, the castle image rippling back into view.
She blinked, wondering if she’d imagined it, but then Dalton was at her side again, crouching down to take her face in one hand.
“I made the castle for you,” Dalton said, eyes wide and manic, his voice soft.
Then she felt a lurch, something dragging her backwards until she was in the reading room again, the real Dalton’s fingers painfully tight on her waist.
Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead, condensation around the surface of his temples. “You were difficult to remove.”
She was panting a little herself, drained by the effort. “Painful?”
“Very. Like a barb.”
“I’m sorry.” She stroked his brow, soothing it, and he leaned gratefully against her shoulder.
Their breaths syncopated, pulses gradually finding common ground. It took a few moments to slow, to loosen
the magic coursing through both their veins, finally allowing their separate parts to settle. Easier to exist in reality, corporeal among the usual dimensions. Nothing to fight with her in his arms, her fingers coiled in his hair.
Eventually the effort at being other faded away, settling into stillness.
Dalton’s voice, when he spoke, was coarse with confession. “What did you find?”
Nothing.
No, not nothing. Nothing she could explain, which was worse. Always difficult to admit when something remained out of reach.
“What does the library show you?” asked Parisa instead, easing away to look at him. “There’s something here that
only you can access.”
She could see immediately that he wasn’t going to tell her.
“Dalton,” she began, but was promptly interrupted. “Miss Kamali,” came Atlas’ buttery baritone. “I was
hoping to find you.”
Dalton moved to release her, stepping away with an
averted glance as Parisa revolved in place, finding Atlas in the doorway of the reading room. He beckoned her with a barely perceptible motion, not bothering to acknowledge Dalton.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”
There was a tug to her thoughts, lassoed like a command. She would clearly be walking whether she wished to or not.
She pursed her lips, displeased.
“Fine,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Dalton, who stood with his arms folded again. Lacking any reaction
from him, she plucked her book from the table and followed Atlas, who led her into the corridor.
“Am I being scolded for my misbehavior?”
“No,” Atlas said. “You’re free to pursue whatever recreation you wish.”
She glanced up at him, suspicious. “Is that supposed to feel like freedom?”
“I know where you were, what you were doing.” He slid a pointed look at her. “You can’t use that much magic and expect me not to notice.”
“Is your surveillance a personal favor, or do you watch all of us equally?”
“Miss Kamali.” Atlas slowed to a halt, pausing before
they reached the door to the garden. “Surely you don’t need me to tell you the uniqueness of your gift. You will have
observed several times by now, I’m sure, that your skills far exceed those of other telepaths.”
“I have observed it, yes.” She wasn’t Libby. She did not need to be informed of her talent. She was clever enough to sort it out for herself.
“But surely you must also understand that you are not the first to possess such ability.”
He left the remainder of his intentions unspoken.
“So I should consider you my equal?” she prompted him, half-daring him to argue.
“I had thought us kindred spirits. Or rather, I suppose I’d hoped it.” Atlas lingered in the doorframe, casting a glance over the greenery outside.
“Do you think me an enemy?” he asked her, directing the question outward.
“I think your presence much too reliable to be
coincidence,” she replied, adding, “You pulled me out of Dalton’s head once before.”
“You shouldn’t have been there.”
She bristled. “But your presence in his thoughts is acceptable?”
“Miss Kamali, there is no point pretending we are not the same,” Atlas told her, finally conceding to arrive at his point. “We are both telepaths, talented ones. Rarities.” A pause. “What we do is not unlawful surveillance so much as
unwilling access. I feel disruptions in thought, just as you must feel them yourself.”
Surely there was more to it. “And?”
“And,” he confirmed, “you are a frequent disruption.” “Is that what being a Caretaker means?” she mused.
“Quieting disruptions?”
Atlas faced her fully now, his effort at languor cast aside. “I care for the Society,” he said. “Of which you are not
currently a member.”
“Not until I conspire to kill someone,” Parisa said.
“Yes.” Atlas’ confirmation was stony, unflinching. “Not until then.”
She felt her mouth tighten, curiosity warring with her more mutinous impulses.
“You interfered with the outcome of Dalton’s class, didn’t you?” she asked. “You intervened to save him.”
“Dalton has also intervened,” Atlas pointed out. “It’s human nature.”
“Yes, but your intervention was purposeful, intentional.
His was—”
“His was no less intentional.”
She thought of Atlas’ desperation and compared it to Dalton’s, measuring them against each other.
“Why Dalton?” “Why you?”
They were squared off defensively, which was unwise. A seductress by nature, Parisa understood the fruitlessness of combat compared to subtler methods of resolution. She
eased her posture, leaning against the wall behind her to relieve the tension between them.
“You don’t like me,” Parisa guessed aloud, and Atlas’ mouth tightened.
“I neither like nor dislike any of you. I know nothing of who you are,” he said with a rare glimpse of impatience, “only of that which you are capable.”
“Do my capabilities threaten yours?”
“You do not threaten me,” he assured her.
She eyed him for a moment, transitioning to thought.
What is this Society?
His reply was perfunctory and clipped. Defenders of all human knowledge.
Do you really believe that?
It was difficult to lie via telepathy. Thoughts consisted of various materials, and lies were flimsy, easy to see through. The flaws in them were always tactile, either like gauze for the inept or like glass from the proficient: unnaturally still.
“No one who takes the initiation oath does so in vain,” said Atlas.
Answer the question.
He fixed her with a glance, mouth twisting. Not a smile, but wry enough.
I would not have spilled blood except for something I believed unquestionably.
It was not the answer she expected, though she had little time to consider it.
“Go to the library,” Atlas said, unsteadying her for a moment.
“What, now?” she asked, taken aback.
“Yes, now.” Atlas ducked his head in something half-bow, half-tip of a hat.
He turned, retreating to the corridor that served as the house’s primary artery, but paused after a step, turning over his shoulder.
“Whatever you hope to find in Dalton, Miss Kamali, it will only be to your detriment,” he said. “Seek it if you wish, but as with all knowledge, whatever follows will be yours to bear alone.”
Then he departed, leaving her to take to the stairs, still buried in her thoughts.
It wasn’t a long walk. By now it was one she took
frequently. She paused to brush the walls, strumming the wards like harp strings. Nothing amiss.
She stepped into the library, unsure what she would find, and discovered upon entry…
Nothing.
Certainly nothing terribly out of the ordinary. Tristan sat at the table, sipping tea. Libby was on the sofa, staring into the flames in the hearth. Nico and Reina were standing near the window, glancing outside. The roses were beginning to bloom.
Parisa paused to reconsider the contents of the room, and then conjured thoughts of its opposite: what the room
did not contain. Perhaps it was clear after all, if one merely grasped that Atlas was not the neutral party he pretended to be.
Parisa waved the doors closed behind her, prompting the others to look up.
“Someone has to die,” she said, and added in silence: I nominate Callum.
Reina didn’t even turn. If the others agree, she thought in reply, glancing irritably at a fern across the room.
Libby lifted her head, slate eyes darting around apprehensively. “Where is he?”
“Wherever he is, he won’t be gone long,” Parisa said with a shrug, impassive. “He’ll feel the discussion and come soon, within minutes.”
At the window, Nico was fidgeting, his fingers tapping relentlessly at his sides. “Are we sure this has to be done?”
“It will be done,” Parisa reminded him. “And we can either decide on someone as a group or wait to see who comes for each of us in the night.”
They all exchanged mistrusting glances at that, though a small sensation of distaste was reserved for her specifically.
“I merely said it aloud,” Parisa told Reina. “Everyone would have come to the same conclusion eventually.”
“You think we’ll turn on each other?” asked Nico, disbelieving.
“We could be easily split into factions,” Parisa confirmed, “in which case it would become a race.”
That seemed to ring true without exception. Already, none of them trusted the others enough to believe they wouldn’t turn assassin once things got dire.
“Who would do it? If we actually chose someone.” Nico cleared his throat, clarifying, “If we were all in agreement on… him.”
“I will,” Parisa said, shrugging. “If that’s what’s
necessary and I have your support, I’m perfectly capable of doing it.”
“No.”
Libby’s interruption both surprised Parisa and didn’t. The others turned, equally wary and braced for the argument to come—murder is wrong, morality and virtue, so on and so forth—but it never arrived.
At least, not the argument Parisa anticipated.
“It has to be sacrifice, not retribution,” Libby said. “Isn’t that the purpose of studying intent, unluck?”
There was no answer for a moment. Then Reina said, “Yes.”
That, apparently, was enough to spur Libby onward. “The texts make it clear that spells cast in vengeance or retaliation will only corrupt over time. If this is for the
purpose of moving forward in the library—if it’s even going to have any value at all,” she amended firmly, “then it can’t be someone who’d be happy to see him go, and certainly not someone indifferent to him. It can’t be someone whose soul won’t suffer from the cost of it. The arrow is most lethal only when it is most righteous, and that means one thing.”
She rose to her feet, turning to where Tristan sat alone at the table, eyes locked on his tea.
“It will have to be you,” Libby said.
It was clear at once that Reina agreed, and Nico, too.
Parisa, out of habit, slid unobtrusively into Tristan’s thoughts, testing them.
Inside Tristan’s head were a meld of memories and visions, a monster of many parts. Callum’s voice, Parisa’s lips, Libby’s hands. They blurred together, inconstant, inarticulate. Libby was right about one thing, at least: It
would be a sacrifice indeed from Tristan. There was love in him, too much and still insufficient, twisted and anguished and equal in consequence to fear. It was a type of love
Parisa had seen before: easily corruptible. The love of
something uncontrollable, invulnerable. A love enamored with its own isolation, too frail to love in return.
Tristan wasn’t thinking about anything, but was instead suffering it all acutely, intensely. Intensely enough that Callum would feel his distress soon.
Parisa threw the library doors open quickly, anticipating Callum’s appearance, when sharply the agony from Tristan broke, colliding with some internal ceiling. A little slip of parchment from his head ignited suddenly in flames; curling edges that fell to smoldering pieces, crumbling to ash.
“Fine,” he said.
One word for eventuality to surface.
AN INTERLUDE
“MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO STARVE,” said Ezra.
Silence.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s
something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing.
Like some people want naturally and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. You can learn to starve.”
Silence.
“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and you can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give
yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and eventually it fades. But still you never forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the
body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After learning to starve, when someone finally gives you something you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and
wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn how to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal.”
Silence.
“Being magic is even worse,” said Ezra. “Your body doesn’t want to die, it has too much inside it. So you want more powerfully. You starve more quickly. Your capacity to
have nothing is abysmal, cataclysmic. There isn’t a medeian on earth capable of casting themselves down to ordinariness, much less to dust. We’re all starving, but not
everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s easy, so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make
themselves something are the same ones who learn to
starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something—against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually.
We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes.”
“What does?” asked Atlas.
Ezra smiled, closing his eyes in the sun.
“Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break.”
CALLUM
AS A CHILD CALLUM NEVER sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecific drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation to it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Why the drudgery of it, being despised for the
purpose of some interminable crusade, when it would be so much easier to simply let things happen? Taking over the
world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of
these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? The world didn’t even love a hero for long.
Wanting anything—beauty, omnipotence, absolution—was a
natural flaw in being human, but the elective tirelessness of villainy made it indigestibly worse.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum most honestly, the truest truths: fairytale peasant needs money for dying child, accepts whatever consequences follow. The rest of the story was always too lofty, about choosing good or the inevitable collapse of desperation and vice; recordings of human nature, prescriptions to rectify its ills.
They were the lying truths, ideologically grand but
implausible on the whole. In his view, human nature wasn’t an artful curation of morality, but merely cyclical patterns of behavior. Self-correcting; leaning one way only to balance it out with the other over time.
Callum had always tended towards the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by reaction rather than a cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the
whole but at least it was rational, explainable by even biological terms. A person had to have a foothold somewhere; a role in the ecosystem, like any species.
Callum admired that, the ability to choose a side and
behave as it dictated. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils.
It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about
destiny. It was whether or not he could live with his own
decision, because life was the only thing that truly mattered.
The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of
finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.
Libby was a hero. Parisa was a villain. Their goals were overarching, appositional.
Nico and Reina were so impartial and self-interested as to be wholly negligible.
Tristan was a soldier. He would follow wherever he was most persuasively led.
It was Callum who was an assassin. It was the same as a soldier, but when he worked, he worked alone.
“Do you worry about dying?” Tristan asked him after dinner one evening, the two of them left behind beside the dining room fire. Unnecessary warmth, given the spring breeze outside, but the Society was nothing if not
committed to aesthetics. “That someone might choose you to die, I mean.”
“I will die someday,” Callum said. “I’ve come to terms with it. People are free to choose me if they wish.” He permitted half a smile as he raised his glass to his lips,
glancing at Tristan. “I am equally free to disagree.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that the rest of the group might elect—”
Tristan stopped.
“Elect what? To kill me?” Callum prompted. “If I feared elimination I would not have come.”
“Why did you come?”
Reaction. Tristan would not understand that, of course, even if his reasons were precisely the same. He was a soldier who wanted a principled king, though he seemed unaware what his own principles were.
How pitiful, really.
“You keep asking me that,” commented Callum. “Why should it matter?”
“Doesn’t it? The point of the current subject is intention.” “So you’re asking my intentions?”
Callum took another sip while he considered his answer, allowing his thoughts to steep.
His life at the Society was not uninteresting. It was methodical, habitual, but that was a consequence of life in any collective. Self-interest was more exciting—sleeping through the afternoon one day, climbing Olympus to threaten the gods the next—but it scared people, upset them. Tending to every whim made others unnecessarily combative, mistrustful. They preferred the reassurance of customs, little traditions, the more inconsequential the better. Breakfast in the morning, supper at the sound of the gong. It soothed them, normality. Everyone wanted most
desperately to be unafraid and numb.
Humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition,
survival. “My intentions are the same as anyone’s,” said Callum after a few moments. “Stand taller. Think smarter. Be better.”
“Better than what?”
Callum shrugged. “Anyone. Everyone. Does it matter?”
He glanced at Tristan over his glass and registered a vibration of malcontent.
“Ah,” Callum said. “You’d prefer me to lie to you.” Tristan bristled. “I don’t want you to lie—”
“No, you want my truths to be different, which you know they won’t be. The more of my true intentions you know, the guiltier you feel. That’s good, you know,” Callum assured him. “You want so terribly to dissociate, but the truth is you feel more than anyone in this house.”
“More?” Tristan echoed doubtfully, recoiling from the prospect.
“More,” Callum confirmed. “At higher volumes. At broader spectrums.”
“I would have guessed you’d say Rhodes.” “Rhodes hasn’t the faintest idea who she is,” said
Callum. “She feels nothing.”
Tristan’s brow furrowed. “A bit harsh, isn’t it?”
“Not in the slightest.” Libby Rhodes was an anxious
impending meltdown whose decisions were based entirely on what she allowed the world to shape her into. She was more powerful than all of them except for Nico, and of
course she was. Because she would not misuse it. She was
too small-minded, too un-hungry for that. Too trapped within
the cage of her own fears, her desires to be liked. The day she woke up and realized she could make her own world would be a dangerous one, but it was so unlikely it hardly kept Callum up at night.
“It is for her own safety that she feels nothing,” Callum said. “It is something she does to survive.”
He had not told Tristan the truth, which was that Tristan was asking the wrong questions. For example, Tristan had never asked Callum what books the library gave him access to. It was a grave error, and perhaps even fatal.
“Tell me about your father,” Callum said, and Tristan blinked, taken aback.
“What? Why?”
“Indulge me,” Callum said. “Call it bonding.”
Tristan gave him a hawk-eyed glare. “I hate it when you do that.”
“What?”
“Act like everything is some sort of performance. Like you’re a machine replicating human behaviors. ‘Call it bonding,’ honestly.” Tristan glanced moodily at his glass. “Sometimes I wonder if you even understand what it means to care about someone else, or if you’re just imitating the motions of whatever it’s meant to look like.”
“You wonder that constantly,” Callum said. “What?”
“You said you sometimes wonder. You don’t. It’s constant.”
“So?”
“So nothing. I’m just telling you, since you seem to like it when I do that.”
Tristan glared at him again, which was at least an improvement. “You do realize what I know, don’t you?”
“The betrayal, you mean?” Tristan blinked.
Blinked again.
“You feel betrayed by me,” Callum clarified. “Because you think I have influenced you.”
“Manipulated me.” The words left Tristan’s mouth with a snarl.
It had certainly been a mistake. Callum couldn’t think how Tristan had suddenly conjured up a method to test him, but now that it had happened it couldn’t be undone. People hated to lose autonomy, free will. It revulsed them, the controls of another. Tristan would not trust him again, and it would only get worse. The difficulty of it was the festering,
the ongoing sickness. Tristan would wonder forever whether his feelings were his own, no matter what Callum did to reassure him.
“Can you really blame me? I preferred the libation of my choice,” said Callum, suddenly finding the whole thing rather exhausting. “Anyone given a talent has a tendency to use it.”
“What else have you done to me?”
“Nothing worse than Parisa has done to you,” Callum said. “Or do you really think she cares about you more sincerely than I do?”
Tristan’s expression was anguished, curiosity warring with suspicion. That was the trouble with possessing too many feelings, Callum thought. So difficult to choose one.
“What does Parisa have to do with it?”
“Everything,” Callum said. “She controls you and you don’t even see it.”
“Do you even hear the irony of what you just said?” “Oh, it is exceptionally ironic,” Callum assured him.
“Petrifyingly so. Tell me about your father,” he added tangentially, and Tristan scowled.
“My father is not at issue.”
“Why not? You discuss him at length, you know, but you never actually say anything when you do it.”
“Ridiculous.” A scoff.
“Is it? Speaking of ironies,” Callum mused. “Upfront but never true.”
“Why would I be honest with you?” Tristan retorted. “Why would anyone, ever, be honest with you?”
The question fell like an axe over them both, clumsily surprising them.
A shift, then.
For a moment, Callum said nothing.
Then, “When Elizabeth Rhodes was a child, she discovered she could fly,” Callum said. “She didn’t know at the time that she was altering the molecular structure within the room while shifting the force of gravity. She
already had a predilection for fire, always reaching for
candle flames, but that was normal for a child her age, and
her parents were devoted, attentive. They kept her from burning, so she has never actually discovered that she cannot, as a rule, burn. Her understanding is that she can only alter physical forces without disturbing natural
elements,” Callum added, “but she is wrong. The amount of energy it would require for her to change molecular composition is simply more than she possesses on her
own.”
Tristan said nothing, so Callum continued, “It startled her sister, or so Libby thought. In reality her sister was suffering the early symptoms of her degenerative illness: weight loss, loss of hearing, loss of vision, weakening bones. Her sister fainted, which was purely coincidence. Lacking an explanation, Libby blamed herself and did not use her powers for close to a decade, not until after her sister
passed away. Now she thinks of it only as she would think of a recurring dream.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Tristan attempted brusquely, but Callum pressed on.
“Nicolás Ferrer de Varona is the only child of two deeply average medeians who made a considerable profit on good investments, despite what talent they lacked themselves.
He is, of course, their most profitable investment, being more aware of his talents than Libby, but not by much.”
At Tristan’s arched brow, Callum shrugged. “He can transform his own shape as well as the things around him.” Few medeians who were not naturally shifters could do so,
and shifters could not perform Nico’s magic in reverse: shifters could transform themselves, but nothing else.
Tristan, already familiar with the difficulty of the magic involved, furrowed his brow into the obvious question of why.
“I don’t know if he’s in love with his roommate and unaware of it, or simply careless with his life,” Callum
commented with a roll of his eyes, “but unbeknownst to him, Nico de Varona died briefly in the process of
transforming the first time. Now he can do it easily,” Callum assured Tristan, “having trained his body to recognize the muscle memory of being forced into its alternate shape, but if not for the magic in his veins restarting his heart, he
would not still be breathing. Now he is quicker, more intuitive, his senses keener because they have to be, for survival. Because his body understands that by trying to keep up with him, it might die again.”
“What animal?” Tristan asked. An irrelevant question, but interesting enough.
“A falcon,” said Callum. “Why?”
“Unclear,” Callum said, and moved on. “Reina Mori is an illegitimate daughter belonging to an influential mortal clan, the primary branch of which are members of the Japanese
nobility. Her father is unknown and she was raised in secret, albeit in wealth and privilege, by her grandmother. The control she has over nature is nearly that of a necromancer. Why she resists it so much is incomprehensible—why she
refuses to use it, even more so—but it has something to do with resentment. She resents it.”
“Because it makes her too powerful?”
“Because it weakens her,” Callum corrected. “She is a universal donor for some life source she cannot use herself, and there is nothing available to strengthen her in return.
Her own magic is essentially non-existent. Everything she possesses can be used to whatever excess it wishes by
anyone but her.”
“So she refuses to use it out of,” Tristan began, and frowned. “Self-interest?”
“Perhaps,” Callum said. When Tristan paused in thought, he added, “As for Parisa, you know her story. She is the most aware of her talents. All of her talents,” Callum qualified with half a smile, “but the magical ones in particular.”
When Tristan was quiet again, Callum glanced at him. “Ask.”
“Ask what?”
“What you always ask me. Why is she here?” “Who, Parisa?”
“Yes. Ask me why Parisa is here.”
“Boredom, I assume,” Tristan muttered, which proved how little he knew.
“Perhaps a bit,” Callum acknowledged, “but in fact, Parisa is dangerous. She is angry,” he clarified. “She is furious, vindictive, spiteful, naturally misanthropic. If she had Libby’s power, or Nico’s, she would have destroyed what remains of society by now.”
Tristan looked doubtful. “So then why is she here, according to you?”
“To find a way to do it,” he said. “Do what?”
“Destroy things. Or take control of them. Whatever suits her when she finds it.”
“That’s absurd,” said Tristan.
“Is it?” countered Callum. “She knows what people are.
With very few exceptions, she hates them.” “Are you saying you don’t?”
“I can’t afford hatred,” said Callum. “I’ve told you this, as you may recall.”
“So you are capable of feeling nothing when it’s convenient for you,” Tristan muttered.
Callum slid him a grim smile. “Did it hurt?” he asked.
Tristan braced for something. Rightfully. “Did what hurt?” “The things your father did, the things he said,” Callum
said. “Was it painful, or just humiliating?”
Tristan looked away. “How do you know all of this about us? Surely not just by sensing our emotions.”
“No, not just that,” Callum confirmed, adding, “Why wouldn’t you leave?”
“What?”
“Well, that’s the story, isn’t it? If it was so bad, why didn’t they leave. Why didn’t Cinderella leave the home of her wicked stepmother, why didn’t Snow White flee the evil queen’s kingdom. Why didn’t Rapunzel leave her tower?”
Tristan curled a fist. “I’m not a—”
“Not what? A victim? You are,” Callum interrupted, “but of course you can’t allow the world to call you that.”
“Is that judgment? An accusation?”
“Not at all. Your father is a violent man,” Callum said. “Ruthless and cruel. Demanding, exacting. But the worst of it is that you love him.”
“I hate my father. You know this.”
“It’s not hate,” Callum said. “It’s corrupted love, twisted love. Love with a sickness, a parasite. You need him in order to survive.”
“I am a medeian,” Tristan snapped. “He’s a witch.” “You are only anything because you came from him,”
Callum said. “Had you been raised in a loving home, you would not have been forced to see a different reality. Your magic might have accumulated in some other way, taking some other form. But you needed to see through things, because seeing them as they were was far too painful.
Because seeing your father for the whole of what he was—a violent, cruel man whose approval you still need more than anything on earth,” Callum clarified, and Tristan flinched. “That would have killed you.”
“You’re lying. You’re—” Tristan turned away. “You’re doing something to me.”
“Yes, I am,” Callum said, setting aside his glass as he
rose to his feet, coming closer. “This is what you would feel if I were manipulating you. I’m doing it now. Do you feel
this?” he asked, closing a hand around the back of Tristan’s
neck and turning the dials up on Tristan’s sorrow, his emptiness. “Nothing hurts like shame,” Callum murmured, finding the ridges of Tristan’s love, riddled with holes and brittle with corrosion. His many pockets of envy, desire; his madness equating to want.
“You want his approval, Tristan, but he will never give it
to you. And you can’t let him die—not the real him, not even the idea of him—because without him, you still have nothing. You are seeing everything as it truly is and still, do you know what you see?”
Tristan’s eyes shut.
“Nothing,” Callum said, as a sound left Tristan’s mouth, bitterly wounded. “You see nothing. Your ability to
understand your power requires accepting the world as it is, but you refuse to do it. You gravitate to Parisa because she cannot love you, because her contempt for you and
everyone feels familiar, feels like home. You gravitate to me because I remind you of your father, and truthfully, Tristan, you want me to be cruel. You like my cruelty, because you don’t understand what it is, but it entices you, it soothes you to be close to it, just like Rhodes and her proclivity for flame.”
Tristan’s cheeks were moist, probably with torment.
Callum did not enjoy this, the destruction of a human psyche. It was ashy, like rubble. Wreckage was so empty and unalluring, even when suffering was overripe. A sense
of cusp; not salty, not sweet, but not neither. It was the peril
of tilting one way or another, falling too heavily—irreversibly and irreparably—to one unsurvivable side.
“I am the father you didn’t get to have,” Callum
observed aloud. “I love you. That’s why you can’t turn your back on me, even if you want to. You know my flaws but
crave them; you lust for them. The worse I am, the more desperately you are willing to forgive me.”
“No.” It was no small amount of admirable that Tristan could speak, given what he was going through. “No.”
“The truth is I don’t want to hurt you,” Callum told him softly. “This, what I’m doing to you, I would never have done it if not to save you. To save us. You no longer wish to trust me,” he acknowledged, “I understand that, but I cannot let you keep your distance. You need to know what my magic tastes like, how it feels, so that you will recognize the
absence of it. You need to know pain from my hands, Tristan. You need me to hurt you so that you can finally learn the difference between torture and love.”
Whatever remained in Tristan’s chest brought him to his knees, and Callum followed, sinking with him to the floor. He rested his forehead against Tristan’s, holding him upright.
“I won’t break you,” Callum said. “The secret is people want to break. It’s a climax, the breaking point, and
everything after that is easier. But when it becomes too easy, people crave it more, they chase it. I won’t do that to you. You would never come back.”
He eased his touch, taking his magic along with him.
Tristan shuddered, but it wouldn’t be immediate relief. He
would have no release, and the fade was like a muscle cramp. Like a limb gone numb and then waking, pins and needles. Nerves twitching to life again, resurrecting.
Pressure finding a place to fill.
“How,” Tristan began, and Callum shrugged.
“Someone in the Society has books on us,” he said. “Predictions.”
Tristan couldn’t lift his head.
“Not like an oracle,” Callum clarified. “More like… probabilities. Likelihood of one behavior or another. Charts and graphs of data, plus volumes of personal history, what drives us. What follows is a narrative arc of our lives, a projection. Most likely outcome.”
Tristan sank against his chest, and Callum pulled him closer, letting him rest his head there, feverishly returning to the stasis of his own soul.
“Yours isn’t the most interesting,” Callum told him regretfully, “but it does have some relevant details.
Obviously I paid more attention to it than the others.” “Why,” Tristan attempted hoarsely.
“Why me? I don’t know. I requested it on a whim, to be honest. To see what the library would give me. I wrote down Parisa’s name first, for obvious reasons.” Callum chuckled. “I should have known she would recruit people to her cause against me, and Rhodes was such an obvious choice. So
hideously moral, so tragically insecure. Surprisingly acrobatic, though,” he offered as an afterthought. “Or so I can only assume, given your… encounters.”
Tristan said nothing.
“Her book predicts she’ll never come into the full scope of her power. Odds of 1/1, actually. Frustrating thought, isn’t it? She nearly wasn’t chosen for the Society because they couldn’t agree on whether she would, but in the end Atlas Blakely convinced them.”
He felt Tristan shift.
“Blakely hates me, of course. Wants me dead. Wiped out like the plague. Loves you,” he added, shifting to look at Tristan. “If I were you, I’d start wondering why.”
“What did it say—” Tristan swallowed. He could speak normally by then, but probably didn’t want to. “What did it say about—”
“This? The elimination?” No answer.
“I know we’ve only been left alone this long because
they are waiting for you to do it,” Callum said. “I know you chose the dining room because, not long ago, you slid a
knife into your pocket. I even know,” he added, glancing down to where Tristan’s hand had disappeared from sight, “that your fingers have wrapped themselves around the
handle of that knife right now, and that the distance from there to my ribs is premeditated, carefully measured.”
Tristan stiffened. The hand around the knife was strained, though it had paused.
“I also know it’s insurmountable,” Callum said. Silence.
“Put the knife down,” Callum told him. “You won’t kill me.
It was a good idea,” he added. “Whoever decided it would
have to be you—Rhodes, probably,” he answered himself on second thought, and when Tristan didn’t deny it, he shrugged. “It was a good idea,” he said again. “But so
deeply unlikely.”
Tristan braced, and Callum waited.
“I could kill you,” Tristan said. “You might deserve to die.”
“Oh, surely,” Callum said. “But will I?” Silence.
Elsewhere, a clock ticked. Tristan swallowed.
Then he shoved Callum away and slid the knife from where he’d concealed it in his pocket, tossing it into the space between them.
“You can’t kill Rhodes,” said Tristan hoarsely. “Fine,” Callum agreed.
“Or Parisa.” “Fine.”
Tristan’s mouth tightened. “And you’re wrong.” “About what?” It didn’t matter. He wasn’t wrong. “Everything.”
Things fell silent between them again. Exhausted, emptied, and probably in need of more healing than he realized, Tristan summoned his glass from the table,
draining it in one motion of his head. Callum watched the
sheen of wine lingering on Tristan’s lips, slick when they parted.
“So who dies?” Tristan asked.
Finally. For once, he was asking the right questions.
Callum reached over to pick up the knife with one hand,
observing it in silence. The flicker of the dining room flames danced along its edge.
“As it turns out,” he said quietly, and glanced up, meeting Tristan’s eye. “I kill you.”
Within moments, the silence was punctured by a scream.
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