LIBBY
“MEN, CONCEPTUALLY, ARE CANCELED,” Libby said to her knees. “This Society? Founded by men, I guarantee it. Kill someone for initiation? A man’s idea. Totally male.” She pursed her lips. “Theoretically, men are a disaster. As a concept, I
unequivocally reject them.”
“If only you meant that,” drawled Nico, who was
blindfolded for the moment. He grew easily bored, which
Libby had already known, though it was different to have to actually live with it. She was starting to feel a bit of
sympathy for Gideon, who had always looked exhausted during their four years at NYUMA. He must have had his hands full having a roommate who wouldn’t stop for anything, least of all the sun.
At present, Nico was throwing knives. Something about being prepared for any possible invasion, which Libby
reminded him they already were. More likely he felt agitated about having a situation he couldn’t control, and therefore felt the need to stab it.
He held out a hand, feeling around the forces in the room.
“Levitate it,” he said. “The lamp.” “Don’t break the lamp, Varona.” “I’ll fix it.”
“Will you?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently.
Libby rolled her eyes, then focused on the forces of gravity surrounding it. She wished, not for the first time, that she could see things as Tristan saw them. She had
never wondered before whether she should question what her eyes were promising her, but now it was all she ever did. She could feel Nico’s magic now like waves, invisible.
He was stretching out his range, uncoiling it. He could tell where things were in the room just by filling it, taking up the volume of what he and Libby only saw as emptiness.
Relativity. In reality, there were pieces there, little particles of something that made up all that nothing. Tristan could see them. Libby couldn’t.
She hated that.
“Stop,” said Nico. “You’re changing the air again.”
“I’m not changing the air,” Libby said. “I can’t do that.” Tristan probably could.
“Stop,” said Nico again, and the vase shattered. The knife remained in his hand.
“Congratulations,” Libby muttered, and Nico tore off his blindfold, giving her a look of total agitation.
“What happened with Fowler?”
She bristled. “Why does everything have to be about Ezra?”
Nico’s shrugged. “I don’t like him.”
“Oh no,” Libby lamented facetiously. “Whatever will I do without your approval?”
“Rhodes. For fuck’s sake.” Nico tossed the knife aside, beckoning her to her feet. “Come on. It’ll be like the NYUMA game.”
“Stop,” she said. “I don’t want to play with you. Go find another toy.”
“What happened?” he asked again. Nothing. “We broke up.”
“Okay, and…?”
“That’s it.” Like she said. Nothing.
“Uh,” said Nico. He had a particular gift for making one sound mimic an entire musical performance about the interminable nature of suffering.
“What do you want me to say? That you were right?” “Yes, Rhodes, of course. Always.”
Fair. She had walked into that one.
Libby rose to her feet on the basis of her own agitated desire to stand. The significance of it being a response to her own volition and not Nico’s command felt especially relevant at the moment.
“You weren’t right,” she corrected him sharply, though she was pretty sure it didn’t matter what she said. Nico de Varona lived in his own reality; one that even Tristan
couldn’t make sense of, probably. “Ezra’s not… unremarkable. Or whatever it is you always say about him.”
“He’s average,” said Nico bluntly. “You’re not.” “He’s not av-”
She stopped, realizing she was focusing on the wrong thing.
“You make that sound like a compliment,” she muttered under her breath, and Nico made a face that was equal parts shut up and also, I said what I said.
“The problem with you, Rhodes, is that you refuse to see yourself as dangerous,” he told her. “You want to prove yourself, fine, but this really isn’t the uphill battle you think it is. You’re already on top. And somehow, you don’t seem to see the unfiltered idiocy of choosing someone who makes
you…” He paused, considering it. “Duller.”
“Are you finally admitting I’m better than you?” “You’re not better than me,” Nico replied perfunctorily.
“But you’re looking for the wrong things. You’re looking for, I don’t know. The other pieces.”
She made a face. “Other pieces of what?”
“How should I know? Yourself, maybe.” He scoffed under his breath before oppressing her with, “Anyway, there aren’t any other pieces, Rhodes. There’s nothing else. It’s just
you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Either you’re complete or you’re not. Stop looking. It’s right fucking there,” he informed her, snatching impatiently at her hand and half-throwing it back into her chest. She
glared at him and pulled out of his reach, vandalized. “Either it’s enough for you or nothing ever will be.”
“What is this, a lecture?”
“You’re a fire hazard, Rhodes,” he said. “So stop
apologizing for the damage and just let the fucker burn.” Part of her was annoyed beyond recognition.
The other part of her didn’t want to walk into the trap of taking Nico de Varona at his word.
So, lacking a conceivable response, Libby glanced
askance at the broken lamp and reconstructed it, replacing it on the desk.
Nico, in answer, turned the desk into a box.
Whenever Nico did any magic, it always unsettled her.
He was vast, somehow. She never saw the details of what
he was doing; if the world’s materials were strings with Nico as the puppeteer, they were unidentifiable. Things simply were and then they weren’t, just like that. She never remembered it happening, even if she stared. It was a desk, now it was a box, soon it might be a chair or a swamp.
Probably the desk didn’t even know what it had once been. “What are you, then?” she asked him. “If I’m a fire
hazard.”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe.” She returned the box to the form of a desk. “It’s funny,” Nico said. “I wouldn’t have done any of this
if they hadn’t come for both of us.” “Why’s that funny?”
“Because of this place I’m a murderer,” he said. “Complicitly,” he amended after another moment’s
consideration. “Soon to be.” The last was a conclusive mutter.
“Get to the funny part,” Libby suggested drily.
“Well there’s a stain on me now, isn’t there? A mark. ‘Would kill for ,’ followed by a blank space.” Nico
summoned the knife back to his palm, only of course it didn’t register that way. One moment the knife was cast aside, the next it was in his hand. “I wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t come here. And I wouldn’t have come here at all if it weren’t for you.”
She wondered if he blamed her. He didn’t sound accusatory, but it was hard not to assume that he was. “You were going to do it regardless, remember?”
“Yeah, but only because they asked you.”
He glanced down at the knife in his hand, turning it over to inspect the blade.
“Inseverable,” he said, neither to himself nor to her. “What?”
“Inseverable,” he repeated, louder this time. He glanced up at her, shrugging. “One of those if-then calculations,
right? We met, so now we can’t detach. We’re just going to always play a weird game of… what’s the word? The thing, espejo, the game. The mirror game.”
“Mirror game?”
“Yeah, you do one thing, I do it too. Mirror.” “But who does it first?”
“Doesn’t matter.” “Do you resent it?”
He looked down at the knife, and then back up at her. “Apparently I’d kill to protect it,” he said, “so yeah.”
Libby summoned the knife from his palm, which in practice was more like it had always been hers.
“Same,” she said quietly.
She set the knife down on his desk that had briefly been something else.
“We could stop,” she suggested. “Stop playing the game.”
“Stop where? Stop here? No,” Nico said with a shake of his head, fingers tapping at his side. “This isn’t far enough.”
“But what if it’s too far?”
“It is,” he agreed. “Too far to stop.”
“Paradox,” Libby observed aloud, and Nico’s mouth twisted with wry acknowledgement.
“Isn’t it? The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me.”
They stood there a few seconds longer until Libby plucked the knife from his desk, stabbing it into the wood. The beams of the desk grew around it, securing it in place.
“We broke up,” she said. “Ezra and me. It’s over. The end.”
“Tragic.” Nico looked smug. “So sad.” “You could at least pretend to be sorry.” “Could,” he agreed. “Won’t, though.”
She rolled her eyes and turned to the door, throwing it open and crossing the hallway to her room. She paused
beside Tristan’s door, contemplating it, and wondered how he was doing downstairs. She didn’t expect it to be easy.
Truthfully, she didn’t even expect it to work. The whole point of choosing Tristan to kill Callum was that Tristan was the least likely to do it, and therefore the whole thing was a gamble.
She thought of Tristan’s mouth, his eyes. The way it had felt to master something with his hand steady on the stillness of her pulse.
Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?
A pity she was so terribly risk averse.
Libby slid into her room and shut the door behind her, falling backwards onto her bed. She considered picking up
one of the books on her nightstand but gave up before she even started. Nico was probably onto something, what with giving himself a task to preclude falling into a full-bodied
state of waiting, but for Libby, there could be no distraction. Her mind only bounced from Tristan to Callum back to Tristan, and then briefly to herself, which gave her fleeting moments of Ezra.
So it’s over? You’re done?
He had sounded more exhausted than anything.
It’s over, she confirmed. I’m done.
It wasn’t a matter of anything changing between them so much as Libby no longer being the person she had once been. She was so fundamentally altered that she couldn’t
remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn’t anymore.
She hardly even suffered guilt for what she’d done with Tristan and Parisa, because whoever Libby had been that night, she was different from that, too. That was some transitional Libby who’d been searching for a cataclysm,
seeking something to shatter her a little. Something to wipe the slate clean and start over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She’d found it, decomposed, and moved on.
Whatever Libby was now, she was powerful with
possibility. Helpless, too, with the knowledge of her own exceptionalism. Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it. She was enslaved by it. There was so much ego to the concept of fate, but she needed to cling to it. She needed to believe she was meant for enormity; that the fulfillment of a destiny could make for the privilege of salvation, even if it didn’t feel that way right now.
The library still refused her books. The subject of
longevity in particular was denied; the question of whether her sister could have lived had Libby been better or more
talented was repeatedly denied. It was like the whole structure of the library’s archives feared her in some way, or was repulsed by her. She could sense intangible waves of
nausea at the thought that she wanted some knowledge she wasn’t meant to have.
She could feel it breaking, too. She could feel the way it would soon give way beneath her weight. It was just waiting for something, or someone. Waiting for whoever Libby Rhodes would be next.
Conservation of energy meant there must be dozens of
people in the world who didn’t exist because she did. Maybe her sister had died because she lived. Maybe her sister had died because Nico lived. Maybe the world had a finite amount of power and therefore the more of it Libby had, the less of it others could reach.
Was it worth it to let that go to waste?
She could feel herself rationalizing. Half of her was full of answers, the other half full of questions, the whole thing subject to the immensity of her guilt. Killing is wrong, it’s immoral, death is unnatural, even if it is the only plausible result of being born. The need to soothe herself with reason buzzed around her head, flies to honey.
What would happen when Callum was gone? It was
strange to think the wards around the house were imprints of past Society initiates, and therefore, in a sense, ghosts. One-sixth of the house’s magic belonged to people who had been selected to die.
When Callum had gone, would his influence remain?
It was Callum who had built the most integral defense
into their wards. Libby and Nico had been the architects of the spherical shield, of course, but it was Callum who had
created what he called the vacuum within the interior fabric
of them. A layer of insulation, wherein all human feeling was suspended.
What replaced feelings when there were none to be had?
The absence of something was never as effective as the presence of something, or so Libby had thought until then.
She had suggested they fill the space with something; a trap of some kind, or possibly something nightmarish if
Callum really wanted to build some sort of existential trap, but he disagreed. To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness, which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight.
Libby sat up with sudden discomfort, a little prick of worry. It wasn’t as if Tristan was powerless by any means,
but maybe there was a reason Atlas had implied that Callum himself was something that should not exist. Callum’s power was always hazy, indefinable, but the effect of its use was unquestionable. He had taken a piece of Parisa’s mind and driven it to such anguish that she had destroyed herself rather than live with what he’d done.
Suddenly, Libby was aware of the chance they’d taken when they left Tristan and Callum alone together. It was a fight to the death, where only one would come out alive. If Tristan failed, then Callum would know. There was no going backwards, no halting what would come next. Callum would know they had come for him, marked him expendable in their ledgers of who deserved what, and for that there
would be consequences. This, the two of them downstairs, was no different from two gladiators meeting in the ring,
one of them doomed to failure.
She should not have let Tristan do this alone.
Libby sprang up from her bed and ran for the door, about to jerk it open, when something in the room shifted. The air changed. The molecules rearranged themselves, becoming cool somehow, slowing to a crawl. There was a foreignness
to the room now, amnestic. It was as if the room itself no longer recognized her, and therefore hoped to crush her like a malignant tumor.
Was it fear? It wasn’t not fear, but she had been right about one thing in her conversation with Nico.
The air itself was different, and she wasn’t the one who had changed it.
Libby spun, or tried to. She felt her pulse suspend again, a thing that didn’t belong. Just to exist in the room was
terrible enough, because she wasn’t meant to be there. There was no way to explain the sensation; only to feel it as a lack, an absence. She suffered it, her alienness, with the way her own lungs didn’t want to expand.
If she had caught it sooner she could have stopped it. If
she knew where to find its source now, she could drag it to a halt. This was the trouble with her, a weakness she would never have known she had if she had never met Tristan. She could have all the power in the world, enough to rid the global population twice over, and still, she couldn’t fight
something if she couldn’t see clearly what it was.
But it wasn’t total emptiness. Distantly, she could hear something.
Do you really even know what you’ve said yes to?
An arm wrapped around her waist, dragging her backwards, and the air in the room rushed back into her lungs at the moment she finally found the voice to scream.
TRISTAN
HE ALMOST DIDN’T HEAR HER over the sound of his blood rushing, but it had been enough to make Callum blink. Enough for him to glance down at the knife in his hand and toss it away after looking at Tristan with visible disgust.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” he said, but Tristan’s
adrenaline said otherwise. The knowledge of Callum’s face unmasked said otherwise. The reality of their circumstances said, quite firmly, otherwise. Tristan’s muscles ached, his entire body slow to reconvene its usual rituals of survival.
How would Caesar have made Brutus pay if he had lived? “I’m sorry.” The words left Tristan’s mouth numbly,
unevenly.
“Apology accepted,” said Callum, his voice cool and unaltered. “Forgiveness, however, declined.”
The red light in the corner flashed, attracting both their attention.
“No one could have gotten through the vacuum,” said Callum. “It’s nothing.”
“Is it?” Tristan’s breath had yet to slow. “That’s not what it sounds like.”
“No.” Callum’s brow furrowed slightly. “No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t sound like that.”
He rose to his feet, exiting the dining room, and Tristan
glanced at the discarded knife before shuddering, stumbling upright in Callum’s wake.
Callum’s stride was long and surprisingly urgent as Tristan followed him up the stairs.
“What is it?”
“Someone’s here,” said Callum without pausing. “Someone’s in the house.”
“No shit,” came Parisa’s voice around the corner. She was hurrying after them from somewhere else in the house, lovely and disorderly and wearing a man’s shirt over bare legs.
Tristan arched a brow in response to her appearance, and she gave him a silencing glare.
“I don’t understand how it happened,” she said. “The house’s sentience usually alerts me when someone tries to enter. I see he’s still alive.”
It took Tristan a moment to register that the last line had been said in his thoughts.
“Obviously,” he mumbled, and Callum’s eyes slid to his.
Tristan didn’t have to look to know that Callum had
understood perfectly well what Parisa had asked him, even without words. Even without magic, Callum knew.
He knew they had agreed on him to die, and now none of them would ever be forgiven.
They rounded the gallery corner to the rooms. Nico was forcing open the door to Libby’s bedroom, Reina at his heels.
“Did you—”
“No,” Reina answered Parisa blandly. “I heard nothing.” “Who could have—”
There was a blast of something inconceivable from Nico’s palm as Tristan thought for the thousandth time, my god— marveling at the power they had, Libby and Nico;
individually and apart.
Imagine having something so wild in your bloodstream.
Imagine feeling something, anything, and seeing it manifest without the blink of an eye. Even at Tristan’s angriest he was nothing, only of any use to anyone when he was
thinking clearly, seeing sense. No bombs exploded at the whims of his frustration, which made him ordinary. It made him normal; something he had tried his whole life not to be.
It was Nico who entered the room first, letting out a
sound like a wounded dog in answer to the fading sound of Libby’s scream. The bitterness on Tristan’s tongue at the sound, however mystifying and incongruous it was to feel, was envy, because of course. Of course one pseudo-twin would suffer the other’s pain, the two of them in orbit to
something Tristan would never grasp or understand. It was the same reaction as always: brittle unsurprise.
But what startled him properly were the others.
The sound from Parisa’s tongue had to be Farsi, though it was the first time Tristan had ever heard her use it. It
morphed rapidly into French, but by the time her color had fully drained, she had fallen silent again. Reina, too, was speechless and pale, though she was often speechless.
More alarmingly, it was the first time Tristan had ever
observed her forcing her gaze away from something rather than boring holes in it, unrelenting.
Callum stared loudly. His expression was vocal, even if his mouth was not. He was saying things like how could this be happening and also, somehow, I told you. It was as if the hard look in his eyes was saying something to all of them that the rest of him could not: See? I was never your enemy after all.
Nico fell to his knees, shoulders folding in around his torso like he’d lost an organ.
“This can’t be real,” he said, and swore softly under his breath. “No. No.”
The four of them, one by one, had turned to Tristan, expectant. His brow furrowed, lips tight.
“Do we think it was the Forum?” asked Parisa after a moment, her voice like sandpaper. “They got in and out last time, didn’t they?”
“Could have been someone like Wessex Corp,” said Reina darkly.
“Someone should tell Atlas. Or Dalton.”
“Whoever did this, are they still here? In the house?”
“No.” Parisa glanced at Callum, who shook his head. “No.
Not anymore.”
“I want answers.” The words, when they left Nico’s mouth, were explosive, juvenile with demand. “I want an explanation.”
“Does it count?”
To that, the others glared at Reina, who sighed loudly. “Look, we were all thinking it,” she said. “Rhodes is gone.
So that means—”
“The elimination is about sacrifice,” Tristan spat. “Death.”
The room fell silent.
“Is this not death enough for you?” Nico’s voice shook with outrage. The ground beneath them rumbled with it, but in answer, there was little Tristan could do but stare.
“How dare you,” Nico suddenly snarled at Tristan from the floor, leaking with toxicity that sparked mid-air. “How dare you—”
“Wait,” Tristan said. “What are you seeing?” The others froze, stiffening.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
“It’s Rhodes,” Callum supplied, and the others flinched at her name, revulsed. “Her body on the ground.”
“What?” Tristan’s pulse quickened. “No. No, it can’t be—”
He felt the cool traces of Parisa’s presence in his head and shivered.
“He doesn’t see it,” Parisa said, sounding bewildered at first, and then astounded. “He doesn’t see anything.”
“Wait.” Nico scrambled to his feet, taking Tristan brusquely by the shoulder. “What’s there, then?”
“Nothing.” Not entirely true. There was an excess of
magic in the room—volumes of it, impossibly swollen—but
the air was empty of her. It was vacant of Libby herself, and that was the only thing Tristan could see or feel: her absence.
Libby was gone, clearly. Even her magic was gone from the room.
“She’s not there.”
“But she’s here,” Nico insisted raggedly, while Parisa, the first to manage a response, hastily bent down, brushing her fingers over nothing.
“This is… uncanny.” She stared down in awe. “The blood, it’s—” real.
Blood. No wonder they were all repulsed. “There’s no blood,” Tristan said.
“No blood?”
He could feel their eyes on him, waiting.
“I told you, nothing.” Only emptiness. Only absence. Magic unrecognizable, belonging to no one. “But she’s definitely not here.”
“So it’s an illusion,” Parisa said, as Nico’s expression turned to a ghastly mix of concern and relief. “A really excellent one.”
“Professionally done,” Reina said, glancing at Callum.
It took a moment for Callum to process what she’d said.
“You honestly think I would abduct Rhodes and leave an illusion in her place?” he demanded.
“Your family is famous for their illusions,” Reina said. “Aren’t they?”
“I also know Tristan would see through it,” Callum snapped. “I’m not an idiot.”
“So someone outside the Society must have done it,” Parisa inserted quickly, rising to her feet again. She was barefoot, Tristan registered, and still thoroughly unconcerned with her appearance. “Only someone who wouldn’t know what Tristan’s specialty is could have done it.”
“Does anyone know—?”
“No,” Tristan said. Only Atlas had ever guessed the details, though he must have had to discuss it with the Society’s board. “I mean, maybe. But I don’t think so.”
“Could still be the Forum,” Reina said. “Or one of the other groups.” She glanced at Nico, whose face was pale.
“But why?” he asked, swallowing. “Why Rhodes?” Reina glanced at Parisa. “Victim of circumstance?”
“No. This was planned,” said Parisa with abject certainty, just as Atlas entered the room behind them, Dalton trailing in his wake.
“What’s this? Wh-” Atlas broke off, staring. “Miss Kamali, your hands—”
Parisa glanced down, scrubbing them with disgust onto
the shirt that was clearly not her own. It was comical, really, how Tristan wanted so desperately to see the carnage the
others were seeing, even if they obviously wished to put it out of their minds.
For him there were only the traces left behind, which was oppressive. There were no fingerprints, no clear signature.
Only the enormity of what was missing.
“It’s an illusion,” said Tristan. “It’s not real.”
Atlas frowned, glancing at him without conviction. “An illusion that powerful would take—”
“I know what it would take,” Tristan snarled, rapidly
losing his patience with repetition, “and I promise you, it’s not there.”
It was the harshest tone any of them had ever taken with Atlas, though at the moment Tristan didn’t much care. That someone who could break into this house and take
something inside it did not mean Libby Rhodes was still alive. The fact that she had not been killed in this room, or that this was not her body, was not, for Tristan, a comforting piece of information. Particularly not if whoever had taken her had the resources to do it in a way that could
successfully trick all but one of the most talented medeians alive.
The look on Atlas’ face in response was carefully measured.
“I will have to contact the board,” he said. “They will need to know about this immediately.”
Then he disappeared, leaving Dalton standing alone in the doorway.
None of them particularly expected him to speak, though he did. “It’s not an illusion,” Dalton said, his tone blank and perfunctory, and Tristan gave a loud growl.
“For fuck’s sake, I’m telling you, it’s not r-”
“It’s not real, no,” Dalton confirmed quickly, “but it’s not an illusion.”
He waved a hand and whatever the others saw, they leapt back from the sight of it, Parisa stifling a scream as the traces of magic rose up in a thick blur, like heavy fog. Nico looked like he was going to be sick.
“It’s an animation,” Dalton said, and then he turned and left.
In his absence, the others stood speechless again.
“We should go,” Callum said in a measured voice, at the same time Reina said, “It’s his specialty.”
Parisa glanced up. “What?”
“Dalton. He’s an animator. I don’t know what that means,” Reina added. “But that’s what he does.”
“What’s the difference between an illusion and an
animation?” The question sounded bitter from Nico, though it might not have been. His anger or his loss or whatever it was that was ailing him at Libby’s loss was bleeding, uncontained, into everything he said.
To Tristan’s immense surprise, Parisa turned to Callum for confirmation of something.
“Sentience?” she asked. She was asking him alone. “Sort of,” Callum said. Nobody but Parisa seemed willing
to meet his eye. “Illusions have no sentience, but
animations have… some. It’s not strictly sentience,” he corrected himself, “but it’s an approximation of life. A sort of… naturalistic spirit. Not to any level of consciousness, but to the extent of being, arguably, alive.”
“There are myths about that.” Reina’s tone was cerebral. “And writings from antiquity.”
“Yes,” Callum said. “Spectral things, certain creatures.
They’re animated but not sentient.”
“It’s not in our heads,” Parisa said. “Tristan can’t see it.” “No,” Callum confirmed. “It’s still just magic.
Manufactured somehow and put here deliberately for us to find.”
“But why would someone want us to think Rhodes was dead?” (Nico.)
“Is the question why Rhodes, or why us?” (Parisa.) “Either. Both.”
Their collective silence suggested a confounding lack of answer. Tristan’s sore muscles ached, throbbing with pain.
“Let’s get out of here,” Parisa said eventually, turning her face away with another flinch. “I’m done looking at this.”
She turned and left, followed by a hesitant Nico. A less hesitant Reina glanced at Tristan, then at Callum. Then she, too, turned and left.
When only Callum and Tristan remained in the room, the briefly forgotten intensity of the evening returned. It occurred to Tristan that he should be prepared for something, anything, but acknowledging so to himself
already seemed like the beginning of an end.
“There was something else in the scream,” Callum remarked without looking up from whatever animation had been left in Libby’s place. “It wasn’t fear. It was closer to
rage.”
After another beat of silence, Callum clarified, “Betrayal.” It took a while for Tristan to find his voice.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning she knew the person who did this to her,” Callum said, perfunctory in his certainty. “It wasn’t a stranger. And—”
He stopped. Tristan waited. “…and?”
Callum shrugged.
“And,” he said. “That means something.”
Clearly more remained unsaid than not from Callum, but considering that Tristan was expected to have killed him by now, he didn’t particularly feel the need to press the issue. The magic left in the room, whatever it was and whoever it belonged to, was already starting to rot. The whole room was off-color, tainted, like the magic itself was corroding the further its creator went from them. Whatever form of intent had cast it, that was poisoned now.
Along with other things in the room.
“Why didn’t you tell the others?” Tristan asked, and now Callum’s mouth morphed into some misbegotten smile, like a laugh he meant to indulge earlier but remained somewhere deep in his throat, awaiting a more spontaneous delivery.
“I may have to kill one of them,” Callum said. “Tactically speaking, I’d rather they not know everything I know.”
So Tristan had been correct: They would not be forgiven.
None of them.
Nor, he realized, would they get a second shot at Callum. “Why tell me?” Tristan asked, clearing his throat.
The thin line of Callum’s mouth told him he already knew the answer.
“Because you deserve to wonder whether it might be you.”
Tristan forced himself not to flinch when Callum raised a hand, touching his thumb to the center of Tristan’s forehead. A blessing, or the mockery of one.
“Truthfully, I respect you more for this,” Callum remarked, withdrawing his hand. “I always hoped you’d make someone a worthy adversary.”
In his mind, Tristan manifested a new talisman; a new scroll to recount his new truths.
Part one: Your value is not negotiable.
Part two: You will kill him before he kills you.
“Sleep well,” Tristan said.
Callum spared him a nod before turning to the door, passing irreversibly through it.
NICO
NO ONE could find her.
If they had not understood the Society’s scope of power before, they did now. Representatives from countless foreign governments were contacted for information from any and all forms of magical and mortal surveillance. Medeians with advanced tracking abilities were summoned. A team of the Society’s own specialized task force was called upon to search.
Nico, of course, offered to help them. “I know exactly what shape she takes up in the universe,” he pleaded in explanation. “If anyone can recognize her, it’s me.”
Atlas didn’t stop him.
“As I told the six of you once,” Atlas said, “anything taken from the Society must eventually be recovered.”
Still, there was nothing Nico could do that was any better than even the Society’s most generic efforts. There were no traces of Libby Rhodes anywhere. She had been wiped clean the moment she disappeared. No explanations were
provided for why measures existed to track magical output
—it was, as it turned out, a bit like tracking credit card purchases—or why each of their movements seemed to be mined for someone’s observation like medeian points of data, but Nico didn’t ask. That was a future Nico problem. Right now, it was about doing whatever it took to find her.
“A lot of work for someone you claim to hate,” remarked Gideon.
Nico had been spending a lot of time fitfully asleep for
the purposes of these conversations. When Reina asked him one night about his groggy arrival to dinner, he lied. And he lied and he lied and he lied, but then eventually he couldn’t take it anymore and confessed. “I know someone. A friend, my roommate. He can travel through dreams.”
It was the most forthcoming Nico had ever been on the subject of Gideon aside from his conversation with Parisa, but as he might have predicted, Reina said almost nothing in response.
“Oh,” she said, “interesting,” and wandered away.
The frequent overuse of Nico’s magic was starting to show, even in the manifestation of his dreams. The atmosphere of his subconscious felt thinner, and remaining purposefully inside it was more difficult than usual. He had to wrestle between his need to sleep soundly and the
importance of clinging to his conscious thoughts, vacillating between his waking self and his dream self. He could feel himself wavering in some in-between place, ready to snap awake, prepared to slumber more deeply, depending how
much energy he exhausted containing Gideon within his consciousness.
At least it was easier the longer the days got, the warmer the weather became. Body temperature was easier to regulate, and even groggy half-sleep was sufficient to remain where he was. The only thing that refused to lessen was his guilt.
“Was it Eilif?” he asked hoarsely. “No,” Gideon said.
“But how do you know?” “Because I know.”
“But it could it have been—” “It wasn’t.”
“But—”
“Sleep,” Gideon advised, and Nico shook his head, forcing himself not to manifest any dancing lollipops or sheep into the ambiance of his dream space.
“Not until I understand this. Not until it makes sense.” “What doesn’t make sense? You have enemies,” Gideon
pointed out. “Libby could have easily been a target for one of the other agencies like yours. Or for anyone.”
“But she’s not a hostage,” Nico said, frustrated. “I could understand it if she were, but—”
He broke off, blinking, and frowned.
One of the other agencies like yours.
“Wait,” he said, and Gideon turned away. “Wait. Wait—” “Cálmate,” said Gideon, not looking at him.
“Absolutely not,” snapped Nico, rising sharply to his feet. “How long have you known? And how do you know?”
Gideon glanced through the bars at the spare inches between them and then set his mouth grimly, suggesting that Nico should not ask.
“Fuck.” Nico shook his head, furious. “Que cojones
hiciste? Tell me you didn’t,” he answered himself, cognizant enough now to indulge the heat of his frustration. “Not after everything I did to keep her out! After every precaution I took, Gideon, fuck—!”
“I didn’t break any wards to meet her,” Gideon countered blandly. “I stayed in here.”
“Jesus,” Nico exhaled, letting his forehead fall against the bars. “Gideon.”
He could feel the twist of Gideon’s tension, the tightening of his knuckles from the other side.
“Listen to me, Nico.” A low warning. “Libby’s gone. You think I’m going to sit back and wonder if you’re next?”
Nico didn’t look up.
“I agreed to meet with my mother on the condition that she would tell me exactly where you were, what you were doing. Which, by the way, I should have known. You should have told me from the start this was more than a—”
Nico winced.
“A fellowship,” Gideon finished with obvious resentment. “Gideon—”
“There was a catch, obviously. The usual strings. She wants me for a job, and I knew she would.” He paused. “But
it was worth it to finally have an answer.”
Nico shut his eyes, warring with his dream self’s need to float away like a balloon.
“What’s the job?”
“I told you, the usual.” “Meaning what? Theft?”
Gideon shook his head. “Break someone out. For a fee.” “Break them out of what? Their subconscious?”
“Their conscious mind, actually.”
Nico glanced up with confusion, finding Gideon’s eyes on him. “How is that possible?”
“You really should have taken more electives,” Gideon sighed, but at a pursed look of impatience from Nico, he shrugged. “The mind has mechanisms, Nicky, levers. It is
possible to trap certain functions inside it, or to prevent the pieces of a person’s mind from working as intended.”
“So then how would you break in?”
“I wouldn’t,” Gideon said firmly, which Nico did not find particularly reassuring. “I’ll tell my mother it’s impossible. Or I’ll find her the money some other way, she won’t care about the details. Whatever it takes. But I knew she’d tell me where you were.”
“Eilif is a real piece of work,” Nico reminded him gruffly. “She’s basically just a mermaid with a gambling problem.”
“It’s not a gambling problem—”
“It’s close enough,” Nico snapped, though immediately, his head hurt. Worse, Gideon gave him a look that said don’t snap, which he loathed. Mostly because it was effective.
“This Society of yours is not a secret,” Gideon told him. “Not enough of one, anyway. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s corporately funded.”
“So?”
“So money is important, Nico. Don’t you care to know whose pocket you’re in?”
Nico tipped his head back with a groan. “Gideon. Basta.” “Libby is gone.”
Nico shut his eyes again.
“She’s gone, Nico. But you will not disappear.” “I won’t, I told you—”
“No, you won’t,” Gideon said flatly. “And you know why?
Because I won’t let you. Because I’ll do whatever my mother asks of me, for you. Because I’ll hunt you down if you even
try.”
“Gideon—”
“You’re not safe there. Not as safe as you think you are.” “What are you talking about? You’ve seen the wards.” He
had repaired them himself. He and Libby. “Yes, I know, but you’re not prepared.”
“For what?” He was. He had checked everything. Libby had checked everything.
Impenetrable. They should have been impenetrable.
Libby is gone.
Impossible.
“Dimensions, Nicolás, dimensions. Don’t just think big, think shapeless. Think infinite.”
“Gideon basta, infinity is false, it’s a false conception.” Even Nico could hear himself mumbling. “Grains of sand and atoms could all be counted if we really tried—”
“Listen to me Nicky, your wards have a hole. A big one.” “That’s—”
“Don’t say impossible.”
Blearily, he watched Gideon’s feet step closer to the bars.
“Watch this,” said Gideon, and before Nico could look up, it was already happening.
It was a touch against his cheek, spectral and bodiless. It was Gideon’s touch; gentle, soothing. Impossible.
Nico closed his eyes and felt relief again. Impossible. Libby was gone. Libby was gone. Libby was gone.
Impossible.
“It’s a memory,” Gideon explained, and the little spurts of dreamscape shook Nico a bit, rocking him somewhere less stable. He could feel the earth beneath him shaking,
the smell of fire, the sound of the scream.
She had left his room moments before she disappeared. She had been gone what, five minutes? Ten at the most? He had been drifting off, not quite awake, and it had been the warp in the atmosphere that called him. Waves were Libby’s method of interference. Nico was reliant on her ability to
sense them—too reliant—but for that moment, she had been the wave. He only understood the danger after he’d already smelled smoke.
The loss of his usual grasp of reality—the box of limitations he used in order to function, in order to exist— came over him with a flood of sudden nausea.
Dimensions, Nicolás, dimensions.
Nico lifted a hand to his face, trying to understand it through the low doldrum of restless slumber.
“What is it,” he asked, “a memory?”
“Time,” said Gideon, shrugging. “I told you. Another dimension.”
Time. Fuck. Fuckballs. Fucking balls. Nico felt the sharp pins of opposition bursting in through the numbing wave of sleep.
“The amount of energy it would require to break a time ward is… impossible, unfathomable,” Nico mumbled, trying to sift through his thoughts. “And easily combated by other wards. Too much magic.” His wards, Libby’s wards. They
would have been enough to keep it out. “Okay, but what if it wasn’t?”
“What if it wasn’t? Gideon, it is. Rules of conservation
apply. No one could possibly restore that amount of energy and power themselves unless—”
“Unless they could,” Gideon answered for him, and then, “Unless someone exists who can.”
The idea that someone could possibly be so powerful was beyond disconcerting. It was well outside the scope of Nico’s understanding. He had never met anyone more powerful than he was, or more powerful than Libby was, so
for this to have been the work of some unknown medeian who wasn’t even in this Society was—
“They wouldn’t have to be more powerful than you,” Gideon said. “It could be a very specific ability. Something very niche, possibly even limited.”
“Stop,” grumbled Nico, because Gideon was reading his mind. It wasn’t the same as Parisa reading his mind,
because Parisa didn’t care and she did it by magic, but Gideon was doing it because he did care and it wasn’t magical at all. It was because Gideon knew Nico too well,
and all the caring Gideon was doing about Nico was starting to make Nico feel slightly sick, or at least unsteady. It was
wrapping around Nico like a blanketed embrace, making him drowsy, serving a gratifying warmth to the aching in his chest.
“Help me,” Nico said. He was suddenly tired, too tired to stand, and he sank backwards. “Help me find her, Gideon, please.”
“Yeah, Nico. Okay.” “Help me.”
“I will.”
“You promise?” “Yes. I promise.”
Nico felt it again, the touch that had been against his cheek before, only now it was full-bodied, whole. He remembered it from years ago, suddenly reapplying itself like a fine layer of gauze over the person he’d once been.
You don’t need to help me, Nico. You have a life, plans, a future—
You should have all those things!
Face it, a ticking clock isn’t the same as a future. You and your ticking clock, Gideon, that’s my future.
That’s mine.
Gideon’s voice was apparitional, in two places at once. “Sleep well, Nicky.” Distant. Safe.
Comforted, Nico finally closed his eyes and drifted, the warmth of his memories slowly fading into the precipice of rest.
PARISA
IN LIBBY’S ABSENCE, THE FIVE remaining members were offered initiation. When asked whether there would be magical consequences for not fulfilling the traditional ritual, Dalton was unflappable as usual.
“Something,” he evasively explained, “has come up.”
They had taken a week to look for Libby with no results. Parisa had been among the first to give up, as she could no longer feel or sense Libby’s thoughts and therefore did not want to know what had happened to her. Whatever it was, it was enough to effectively kill her, and that was all Parisa
needed to know. If the Society had enemies who could wipe a person’s consciousness from the face of the earth, clearly it was worth it to lay claim to whatever else it had to show them.
The five remaining candidates had settled uncomfortably into the painted room for the introduction of their next subject, leaving Libby’s chair empty out of habit. Not that
they sat in any particular order, but disorder was hardly preferred. Libby usually sat near Nico, on his left. Nico
refused to look at the empty seat beside him, and Parisa
could hear the same buzzing from his mind that she heard from everyone else’s. The acknowledgement of a missing piece, like a dismembered limb.
She wondered if it would have been the same if it was Callum’s seat that had emptied.
“This,” Dalton said, “is Viviana Absalon.”
The others tensed as he waved in a cadaver, neatly preserved, the facial expression limp and non-committal, as if death had been something she’d preferred not to do but had gone ahead with anyway. Nothing gory had been done to the body, aside from a gaping incision that had been
tastefully resewn. Obviously an autopsy had been
performed somewhat recently, but outside of that, in death Viviana Absalon lay as still and tranquil as if she’d fallen asleep.
Briefly, Parisa’s stomach churned with the memory of Libby’s animation; the way Libby had been broken and contorted, her eyes vacant and wide. That, unlike this, had been gruesome, Parisa’s hands sweltering with the blood her mind had refused to grasp was actually nothing. The
idea that it was all magic, none of it real, had unnerved her deeply, reminding her what was at stake in the world.
Mortality was one thing; power was another. It was a lesson she would have to remember not to forget.
“Viviana is a forty-five-year-old female of French and Italian descent. She was misclassified as a mortal,” said Dalton, “in more ways than one.”
He pulled up a projection of pictures. Not unlike the preservation of the body, there was a clinical nature to the slides. Handwritten notes were scribbled unobtrusively next to arrows, annotative observations from the cadaver’s incisions.
“By the age of eighteen, which is when most medeians have already shown signs of magical prowess, Viviana had revealed nothing out of the ordinary. She lacked any
conceivable talent for witchcraft, and by age twenty-one, the alarms she had begun to set off were formally
dismissed. 99% of medeians are identified correctly,” Dalton reminded them, “but when it comes to a population of
nearly ten billion people, there is a lot of room for error in the remaining 1%.”
He waved a hand to move to the next slide. “At the time of her death, Viviana was in excellent physical health. She had already given birth to four children by the time she was
thirty, while many in her village of Uzès still regarded her as the town beauty, even more lovely than the young women seeking husbands in their twenties. Unfortunately,” Dalton said, “Viviana was hit by an automobile a matter of weeks
ago. She died instantly.”
Another wave, another slide, this one showing the accident before moving onto the details of Viviana’s peculiarities. “As you can see,” Dalton said, pulling up a side by side comparison with two sets of similar cadavers, “Viviana’s internal organs stopped aging around twenty-
one.”
He swept through quickly, comparing incomprehensible (to Parisa) portions of her body first to those of a twenty- one-year-old, then a comparable forty-five-year-old.
“Her skin had not lost any elasticity. The features of her
face were unchanged. Her hair did not turn grey. Most of her village simply believed she had exercised and eaten well,
and perhaps dyed her hair. As for whether Viviana herself noticed anything suspicious, it appears not. She seems to have merely considered herself lucky—inordinately so, but not extraordinarily.”
The slides concluded as Dalton turned to face them. “As far as we can surmise, Viviana would not have died
of natural causes if not for her accident,” Dalton said,
clarifying what had already been heavily implied. “Her death was not the result of any form of degeneration. What we do not know,” he emphasized, “is how long she would have
lived had she not met an untimely end, nor how frequently this occurs in other undiagnosed medeians.”
“Did she show any signs of regeneration?” Tristan asked. “Damage that repaired itself magically, you mean? No,”
Dalton said. “She simply didn’t degenerate as a mortal should.”
“Would she have been more or less susceptible to disease?” (Reina.)
“Unclear. Her village was particularly homogenous.” “Did she contract any significant illnesses?” (Tristan
again.)
“No, but she was regularly vaccinated, so that would not be out of the ordinary.”
“The common cold,” Callum suggested drily, and Dalton shrugged.
“Most people do not take note of commonalities,” he said, “hence the inadequacy of our existing research.”
“What exactly are we supposed to do with this?” Nico asked, his fingers tapping impatiently at his sides. “Her magical specialty was… life?”
“Somewhere in her genetics is the ability to not decay,”
Dalton replied, which appeared to be confirmation. “We
have no way of knowing how common this ability is, which is part of the purpose for research. Is Viviana the only one?”
he posed to the group. “Have there been, historically, others? If none have lived long enough to become
remarkable, then do people blessed with longevity typically
attract fatalities? Is it possible they habitually die young, and if so, is this a result of magic?”
“Or,” Dalton asked after a moment of silence, “is it somehow proof of fate?”
Parisa felt her eyes narrow, at odds with Dalton’s
offhanded remark. Magic the way they typically studied it was narrow, predictable, scientific in its results. Fate was inherently not. The magnetic quality of being drawn to a particular end was to remove the option of choice, which was so displeasing as to prick her slightly. Parisa did not care for the sensation of not being in control; it filled her mouth with bitterness, like excess salivation.
“You said something had come up,” Reina said in her low voice. “Is this not what was planned for our next subject?”
Dalton tilted his head, reconciling with what appeared to be his own thoughts. “Yes and no. The unit of study
following the initiation rites is always death,” he said. “Most often we perform the traditional rituals on the eliminated member.”
Tristan twitched with discomfort. Callum, solemnly, did not move.
“This particular case is, contrary to its appearance, fortuitous timing,” Dalton flippantly remarked. “The Society’s work remains uninterrupted, in a sense.”
“Does it?” said Nico blisteringly, and Dalton slid a glance to him.
“For all intents and purposes, yes,” he said. “Initiation will move forward as scheduled. You will also find that the units on life and death will allow you to access far more of the library’s resources.”
“And in exchange?” Parisa prompted.
Dalton’s shoulders gave his customary indication of tension at the sound of her voice. It was a reflex born from a need to not look so quickly, fighting eagerness, which
ultimately manifested like a tic of hesitation.
“You are beholden to the Society as it is beholden to you,” he said without expression, before returning his
attention to the details of Viviana’s undiagnosed medeian status.
Parisa left the remainder of her questions for when they were alone. When she found him, Dalton was sitting in the reading room over a single book, toying with something out of her sight; invisible. Whatever it was he was doing, it was causing him intense strain. She watched the fight go out of him at the realization of her presence and stepped forward to reach him, smoothing a bead of sweat from his brow.
“What is it?” she murmured.
He glanced blearily up at her from a distance, traversing miles of thought.
“Do you know why he wants you?” he asked.
It was a question that had been plaguing Parisa since Libby’s disappearance, if not earlier.
“No,” she said.
“I do.” He leaned his cheek against her hand, closing his eyes. “It’s because you know how to starve.”
They sat in silence as Parisa considered the implications of this. After all, was there a way to starve properly?
Yes. Conservation done well was to survive when others would perish.
Longevity, she thought in silence.
Then she stroked the back of Dalton’s neck, smoothing the tension from his vertebrae.
“You saw something,” she said. “In Libby’s… in that thing.”
It had been haunting her a bit from night to night. First the image of Libby on the floor, bleeding out, contorted.
Then what Dalton had done, launching the corpse upright, making it dance.
An animation, he said. For which he was briefly the puppeteer.
“What is it?” she asked him again, and in the moment Dalton’s eyes met hers, she thought she caught a glimpse of the familiar. Not the man in her bed from time to time, but the one she sought like firelight, drawn to him like a flame.
“Only one person could have made that animation,” Dalton said.
“Who?”
She knew the answer before he said it. “Me.”
There was no point asking what he remembered. If that animation had ever been his creation, he clearly didn’t know. Whether Dalton was indeed some god descending from machines was outside his existing mind’s jurisdiction, and now he was pleading with her in silence. Begging for her to take away the guilt unearned.
Parisa slid the contents of the desk aside, replacing them with herself, and Dalton leaned forward to breathe her in, a wrench from his throat like a silent sob to bury in the fabric of her dress.
This was the difference between life and longevity; somewhere between a car crash and a splintered soul. “I’ll get you out,” Parisa whispered to him. To some
distant him, to his little fractures. The solution dawned like
clarity in her mind.
If he was in pieces, she would take whatever rubble remained for herself.
REINA
“HELP ME with something.”
Nico looked up from a long distance. As far as Reina could tell, the introduction of a new subject hadn’t
distracted him or eased his guilt, but something had. He was less aimless now, more determined, properly sleeping again. Impatiently waiting, but waiting nonetheless.
“Help you with what?” he asked. “I have a theory.”
She sat across from him in the grass, which protested as it always did. For once, she was glad to hear it. It served as a confirmation of sorts.
“Okay. About what?”
“I was thinking about what Callum said about sentience.
Naturalism,” Reina said, gesturing wordlessly to the whispers of MotherMotherMother that ached below her palms in tiny, willowy blades. “And about that medeian, her specialty of longevity.”
“What about it?” Nico wasn’t leaping to curiosity, but he was interested enough.
“Life,” Reina posited, “must be an element. I can’t use it, but maybe someone could.” She fixed him with a careful glance. “You could.”
“Could what?” He looked startled. She sighed, “Use it.”
“Use it?” he echoed.
“Yes.” Maybe there was a better way to explain it. Maybe not. “Maybe you could manipulate it, shape it, like any other force. Like gravity.” She paused. “Possibly you could even create it.”
“You think I could create life?” Nico sat up slightly, frowning. “If it were a physical element then yes, theoretically speaking. Maybe.” His brow furrowed. “But even if I could—”
“Energy doesn’t come from nothing, I know.” She’d
already thought about it at length. “That’s where I come in.” “But—”
“The theory is a quite straightforward. Suppose life is its own element. What if Viviana Absalon’s magical specialty really was life—the ability to be alive and stay that way?”
she said, waiting to see if he followed. “Life and sentience are not the same, but there are microorganisms that live without sentience, so if magic like an animation can live, in some sense—”
Nico was staring at her, brows still furrowed, and Reina reached out with a sigh, gruffly placing a hand on his shoulder.
“Just try it,” she said, and he balked.
“Try… what, exactly?”
Ha ha ha, laughed the grass, rustling with amusement.
Mother is much too clever, much more clever, she seesandseesandsees ha haaaaa—
“Just try,” Reina repeated.
She felt Nico’s shoulder stiffen beneath her touch,
bracing for an argument, but then it settled gradually into
place as he must have conceded, either willingly giving in or responding against his own volition to something she was offering him. Reina wondered, not for the first time, if he
could now hear what she could hear, or if that was still reserved for her personal annoyance. At least when Nico was using it she was permitted moments of reprieve, the
rush of channeling it into something. It was indistinct from the sensation of allowing nature itself to take from her, as she had when Atlas had first entered her cafe.
Grow, Reina had told the seed then, and it had grown.
Now she told Nico try, and she could feel the way his power had accepted hers gratefully, willingly, hungrily.
There was a sense of both relief and release, and when he lifted his palm, the response was a staggered lurch, like a full-bodied gasp.
There was no other way to describe it outside of a spark. Whether they saw it or felt it or merely intuited its presence was grossly indeterminable. Reina knew only that something which had not existed previously had existed briefly for a time, and she knew that Nico knew it too, his dark eyes
widening with astonishment and the aftershocks of belated apprehension.
He had expected nothing; if she had expected anything more, it was only for having been the one to own the theory, to make use of the thought.
It really was a simple idea, almost laughable in its lack of complexity. If life could come from nothing—if it could be born at all, created like the universe itself—then why should it not come from her?
Mother, sighed the sweep of a nearby branch.
She and Nico both seemed to know what they’d done without consulting the other for evidence.
“What does it mean?” asked Nico. “I don’t know.” She didn’t. Not yet. “What could you do with it?”
“Me?” Reina turned to him with surprise. “Nothing.” He frowned back at her, not understanding. “What?” “I can’t do anything with it.”
“But—”
“You used it,” she said. “But you gave it to me!”
“So? What’s electricity without a lightbulb? Useless.” “That’s—”
But then he shook his head, seeming to see no point in furthering the argument.
“If Rhodes were here,” he said deflatingly, “then maybe I could do something with it. But as it is, it’s just… that.” A spark. “Whatever that was.”
“So you need more power?”
“More than that. More than more.” He drummed his fingers in the grass, a brief return to his usual state of fidgeting. “It’s not a matter of how much, it’s how… good. How pure.”
“So if Libby were here it would be something?”
“Yes.” He sounded certain. He always sounded certain, but that particular certainty was more persuasive than smug. “I don’t know what, but something.”
“Well.” Reina paused to shield her eyes as the sun broke through the cloud cover overhead, enveloping them in a harsh wave of brightness. “We’ll have to find her, then.”
There was a pulse of tension as Nico braced himself again.
“We?”
“If I can help, yes.” She glanced at him. “I assumed you were doing something already.”
“Well—” He stopped. “I’m not. I’m out of options, but—” “Your friend,” she guessed. “The one who can move
through dreams?” He said nothing.
“You never mentioned that about him,” Reina observed aloud. “His name, yes, but never what it was he could do.”
Nico seemed retroactively guilty, kicking out his feet in the grass. “I never planned to tell anyone.”
“Because he is… secretive?”
“Him? Not so much. But what he can do…” Nico sighed. “It’s just best if people don’t know.”
To her displeasure, Reina found herself more annoyed by that than usual.
“You should trust us.” She was surprised by how adamant she was. “Don’t you think?”
Nico’s expression in reply was one of total,
incomprehensible openness. Parisa had been right that he was scarcely capable of guile.
“Why?” he said.
Reina considered it. Nico would want a good answer, a thorough one, and for possibly selfish reasons, she needed him to be persuaded.
“Do you understand,” she said slowly, “how alone we are one thing, but together we are another?”
A beat of silence. Then, “Yes.”
“So it is a waste, then. Not to use the resources you have.” Another simple concept.
“You would trust Callum? Or Parisa?”
Nico sounded skeptical, for good reason.
“I trust that they are talented,” Reina confirmed slowly. “I trust their skill. I trust that when their interests align with mine, they are useful.”
“And if they don’t align?”
“Then make them.” To Reina it was logical, sequential, if- this-then-that. “Why are we part of this if not to be great? I could be good alone, as could you,” she reminded him. “We would not still be here if we wished to settle only for
goodness.”
“Are you—” Nico faltered. “Are you really so certain about this?”
About the Society, he meant. “Yes,” she said.
It wasn’t true at the time, but she had plans to make it
so. She intended to become that certain, and to do so would only require a few answers.
Only one man could satisfactorily provide her with those. She could see she hadn’t startled him with her presence.
Perhaps he’d been expecting her. His office had always held little interest for any of them, largely because the space itself contained nothing worth inspection. Only he was interesting, in his unobtrusive way. There had always been an air of eternal patience about him.
“What is initiation?” Reina asked without preamble, and Atlas, who had been rifling through some of the books on his shelf, slowed his motions to a halt.
“A ritual. As everything is.” He looked tired, as he often looked when they caught glimpses of him lately. He was
dressed in a bespoke suit as he always was, this one a slate grey that somehow reflected his state of academic mourning. “Binding oaths are not particularly complex. I
imagine you must have studied them at one point.” She had. “Will it work without a death?”
“Yes.”
Atlas took a seat at his desk and gestured for her to do the same, removing a pen from his pocket and setting it carefully just to the right of his hand. “There may be
fractures. But after two millennia of oaths to reinforce the binding, I can assure you,” he said with something close to irony, “it will hold.”
She didn’t bother asking why they didn’t simply do away with the elimination process, then, if it would hold without it. It seemed fairly obvious there were no more reasons to support it than there were to support the divine right of kings. Tradition, ritual, the general fear of chaos.
It didn’t matter. She was alive, and that was the only factor of relevance.
“I doubt you came to ask me about the logistics of the ceremony,” Atlas remarked. He was regarding her with a certain wary interest; guarded.
“I wanted to ask you something else.” “Then ask.”
“Will you answer?” “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Comforting, Reina thought.
“You told me in the cafe that my invitation to join the Society had come down to me and someone else,” she reminded him.
“Yes, I did say that.” He didn’t look as if he planned to deny anything. “Has it bothered you much?”
“In a sense.”
“Because you doubt your place here?”
“No,” Reina said, and she didn’t. “I knew it was mine if I wanted it.”
Atlas leaned back in his chair, contemplating her with a glance. “Then what’s to think about?”
“The fact that there are others.” It wasn’t a threat so much as a curiosity. “People who nearly make the cut, but don’t.”
“There’s no reason to worry about them, if that’s what you mean,” Atlas said. “There are plenty of other pursuits, noble ones. Not everyone merits an invitation to the
Society.”
“Do they work for the Forum?”
“The Forum is not the same, structurally,” Atlas said. “It is closer to a corporation.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Its members stand to profit.” “From what?”
“Our loss,” Atlas said simply, waving a hand over an empty mug. Within moments there was tea inside it, the
smell of lavender and bergamot wafting in the air between them. “But such is the nature of things. Balance,” he said, bringing the cup to his lips. “There cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck.”
“No life without death?” asked Reina.
Atlas inclined his head in agreement. “So you see the purpose of the ritual,” he said.
She wondered if perhaps she wanted this too much. She was willing to make excuses for it, to believe its lies. A toxic love, born of starvation.
Too late now. “Do you know what happened to Libby Rhodes?”
“No.” It came without hesitation, but not too quickly. She could see the formulation of concern in his brow, which
seemed real enough. “And I’m sorry to say I would have readily believed her dead if not for Mr. Caine.”
“Do you believe it was the Forum?” “I think it’s a possibility.”
“What are the other possibilities?”
She could see his tongue catching, a mechanism sliding shut.
“Innumerable,” he said.
So he would not be sharing his theories with her. “Should we trust you?” Reina asked him.
Atlas gave her a paternal half-smile.
“I will tell you this,” he said. “If I could retrieve Elizabeth Rhodes myself, I would do everything in my power to do so. There would be no reason for me to abandon her pursuit. I reap no benefit from her loss.”
Reina did believe that, grudgingly. She supposed there was no reason to doubt him. Anyone could see Libby’s value.
“But none of this is why you came here,” Atlas observed.
Reina glanced down at her hands, wondering for a moment what felt so strange about them here. She realized eventually it was the lack of tension within them, because unlike other rooms in the house, this one did not contain
any life. There were no plants, only books and dead wood.
Interesting, she thought.
“You said there was a traveler,” she said. “I wanted to know if it was Nico’s friend.”
“Ah yes, Gideon Drake,” said Atlas. “He was a finalist, albeit not in the final ten.”
“Is it true that his friend can travel through dream realms?”
“Realms of the subconscious,” Atlas clarified with a nod. “A fascinating ability, without question, but the Society’s board was ultimately unconvinced of Mr. Drake’s control over his abilities. I believe even Miss Rhodes knew only of his incurable narcolepsy, which could not be successfully prevented,” he added with a small inward chuckle. “Very few of NYUMA’s professors knew what to do with him. He is quite close to untrained, in some senses. And his mother is highly dangerous and likely to interfere.”
“Who is she?”
“No one in particular,” Atlas said. “Something of a spy.
No telling why or how she fell into it, but she appears to
have a debt, or at least a fondness for earning new ones.” Reina frowned. “So she does… what, exactly?”
“She’s a criminal, but a forgettable one. Not unlike Mr.
Caine’s father.”
“Oh.” For some reason, that information made Reina
deeply sad. Perhaps it was the way that, in calling Gideon Drake’s mother forgettable, Atlas was so quick to suggest that memory was a luxury not to be wasted on the
unworthy. “And Gideon?”
“I suspect that if Mr. Drake had never met Nico de Varona, his life would look quite different,” Atlas said. “If indeed he were still living without Nico’s help.”
Reina shifted in her chair. “So that’s it?” “What is?”
“The unremarkable are punished for their unremarkability,” she said.
Atlas set down his cup of tea, steeping the moment in silence.
“No,” he said at last, adjusting his tie. “It is the remarkable who suffer. The unremarkable are passed over, yes, but greatness is not without its pains.” He fixed her with a solemn glance, adding, “I know very few medeians who would not ultimately choose to be unremarkable and happy, were they able to do so.”
“But you do know some who wouldn’t choose that,” Reina pointed out.
Atlas’ mouth twisted upwards. “Yes,” he said. “I do know some.”
He seemed ready to let her go, his episode of candor coming to a close, but Reina lingered a moment longer, contemplating her lack of satisfaction. She supposed she
had thought the confirmation of Nico’s friend would solve her puzzle, but it hadn’t. The initial satisfaction of having questions answered was a cheap high, and now she was unfulfilled again.
“The traveler,” she said. “The one you rejected to choose me instead. Who was it?”
She knew without a doubt this would be the last question she was permitted to ask.
“He was not rejected,” said Atlas, before inclining his head in dismissal, rising to his feet and leading her
conclusively to the door.
EZRA
EZRA MIKHAIL FOWLER WAS BORN as the earth was dying. There had been an entire fuss of it on the news that year, about
the carbon crisis and how little time the ozone had left,
leaving an entire generation to turn to their therapists and proclaim a collective, widespread existential disengagement. The United States had been awash in fires and floods for months, with only half the country believing they had any hand in its demolishment. Even the ones who still believed in a vengeful God had failed to see the signs.
Still, things would have to get much worse before they got better. Only when time and breathable air and potable water were running out did someone, somewhere, decide to change their stance. Magical technology that had once been bought and sold by governments in secret transitioned to
private hands, allowing it to be bought and sold via trade secret instead. It healed some of the earth’s viruses,
provided some renewable energy, repairing enough of the
damage caused by industrialization and globalization and all the other -ations that the world could successfully go on a
bit longer without any drastic change in attitude or behaviors. Politicians politicked as usual, which meant that for every incremental step forward there was still a looming end in sight. But it was delayed, and that was what was important. Any senator could tell you that.
Ezra, meanwhile, grew up in an unfortunate corner of Los Angeles. The sort that was too far east to have ever laid eyes on the ocean, and that also believed unquestionably that a river was nothing more than a slow trickle above cement. His was a generally fatherless nation, a community of misfortune for which mothers were primary caregivers
and breadwinners as well, albeit for very little bread. Ezra had been a tribesman of his local multigenerational
matriarchy until the age of twelve, when his mother died as the result of a shooting while at worship inside her temple. Ezra had been there, but also not there. He remembered the details of the event clearly for multiple reasons, her death notwithstanding: One, he and his mother had had an argument that morning about him running off somewhere
the day before, which he assured her he hadn’t done. Two, it had been his first experience with a door.
Perhaps if he’d been braver or more aware of what he was doing he might have held his mother’s hand more
tightly. As it was, the sound of the automatic rifle had sent him careening backwards in space, to the point where he wondered if he had actually been shot. He was familiar with the idea of a live shooter, having been made to run drills for it in school, but death itself remained a foreign concept. In
Ezra’s mind, the idea of a bullet piercing any part of him was just like this had been: a collapse, his ears ringing, the entirety of the world tilting sideways for a moment. When the sensation cleared, though, Ezra realized he was either dead or very, very much alive.
When he opened his eyes the temple was quiet, eerily so. He walked around to the spot where his mother had been, feeling at the edges of the wood for evidence of bullets. There were none, and he thought perhaps he had
made it happen by magic. Perhaps he had fixed everything, done it over, and now everything would be fine? He went
home to find his mother asleep on the sofa, still in her nurse’s uniform. He went to bed. He woke up. The sun shone.
Then things began to happen oddly. The same burnt toast for breakfast as yesterday, the same terrible jokes on the daily morning news. His mother yelled at him for
running off the day before, disappearing and coming home after she’d been asleep. She dragged him to the bathroom, shouting for him to wash his hair and get dressed for temple. No, no, he said instantly, no we can’t go there, Mom listen to me it’s important, but she was insistent. Put your
good shoes on Ezra Mikhail, wash your hair and let’s go.
When the shooter appeared again, Ezra finally confirmed with certainty his suspicion that he had somehow gone into the past, which at first he took as a blessing. He tried several times to save his mother, thinking it his divinely
appointed task. Each time things repeated as they had
before, the situation altering like puzzle pieces to form the prophetic picture on the box. Exhausted, he eventually fell through the little vacancy in time for the thirteenth round and stayed there, and then, for the first time, he tried to open a new crevice for himself, something to lead him elsewhere. When he stepped out, he was three weeks
beyond his mother’s funeral—the furthest he could take himself at the time.
Social services soon arrived to gather him into custody.
Perhaps because he had already watched his mother die twelve times, Ezra numbly went.
It’s not a secret that the foster care system leaves much to be desired. Ezra had vowed never to run away again, never to tell a soul about what he’d seen and done, but life has a way of breaking its promises to children. Within a year, he was learning to use the doors with some regularity, securing control over their outcome. He did not age as time passed if he didn’t choose to, moving fluidly through it instead, and by his sixteenth birthday he was only fifteen
and one day, having skipped through any instances of the time he couldn’t otherwise abide.
At seventeen (or so), Ezra was offered a scholarship to the New York University of Magical Arts, which was the first time he fully understood that he was not alone in what he could do. True, he was the only one who had access to the doors specifically, but for the first time, he understood that he was not the only magician in the world—no, medeian,
they told him. It was a new word, unfamiliar on his tongue.
So what was he? Not a physicist, not exactly. He was
definitely opening and closing tiny, Ezra-sized wormholes to navigate through time, that much seemed clear, but his
magic was limited and self-concentrated. It was a unique power, dangerous.
Keep it quiet, his professors advised. You never know what sort of people will try to mess with time. Never the kind with good intentions.
Dutifully, Ezra kept his abilities a secret, or tried to.
Eventually, though, the Alexandrian Society found him out.
It was a tempting offer. (It was always tempting; power always is.) What was particularly interesting to Ezra, though, were the others, his fellow initiates, or the four who would
become his fellow initiates after one of them had been eliminated. Ezra was introverted by nature—a combination of poverty, inexplicable power, and his mother’s untimely death had combined to make him relatively standoffish—but there was one other initiate with whom he instantly shared a bond.
Atlas Blakely was a rakish vagrant with wild natural hair and an insuppressible grin. A “bi’ o’ London rough,” as he
called himself, who laughed so loudly it regularly frightened pigeons. He was wolfish and lively and so sharp it sometimes made others uneasy, but Ezra warmed to him immediately, and Atlas to him. They shared something they gradually deduced was hunger, though for what was initially unclear. Ezra’s theory was that they were merely cut from
the same indigent cloth, the easy cast-offs of a dying earth.
The other four candidates were educated, well-born, and therefore bred with a comfortable cynicism, a posh sort of gloom. Ezra and Atlas, on the other hand were sunspots.
They were stars who refused to die out.
It was Atlas who first sorted out the death clause of the Society’s initiation, reading it somewhere in someone’s thoughts or whatever he did that Atlas insisted was not
actually mind reading. “It’s good and rightly fucked, innit?” he said to Ezra, his accent thickly unintelligible at times. “We’re supposed to kill someone? Thanks, mate, no
thanks.” (No fanks, as it sounded to Ezra.)
“The books, though,” Ezra said, quietly buzzing. The two of them shared a fondness for intoxicants, mortal drugs when they could get it. It made the doors easier to access for Ezra, and Atlas got tired of hearing the sound of other people’s thoughts. Gave him a bleedin’ migraine, he said.
“The damn books. A whole library. All those books.” “Books ain’t enough, bruv,” grunted Atlas sagely.
But fundamentally, Ezra disagreed. “This Society is something,” he said. “It’s not just the books, it’s the questions, the answers. It’s all something more than
nothing.” (Drugs made this theory difficult to communicate.) “What we need is to get ourselves in, but then get on top somehow. Power begets power and all that.”
It was clear that Atlas did not understand him, so he went on.
“Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra, going on to describe how few people were capable of actually
understanding time and how much of it there was, and how much a person could gain if they could just hold on a little longer. If they could starve long enough to get by on almost nothing, if they fed themselves only little by little, in the end they would be the ones to last. The patient shall inherit the earth, or something like that. Killing was bad, sure, but
worse it was unnecessary, inefficient. What had Ezra’s
existence ever been aside from a recurring loophole to the nature of life itself?
And besides, they still wanted the damn books, so from there they made a plan: it was Atlas who would do the waiting, Ezra who would disappear. They could fake his death, Ezra suggested, and thus with one person out of the running, there would be no need for either of them to kill anyone. The other initiates didn’t like Ezra, anyway. He was too secretive, they didn’t trust him. They also didn’t know what he could do, and in the end, that was clearly for the best.
So Ezra opened a door and went forward five years,
meeting Atlas in the cafe they’d agreed on before he left. In what felt like a matter of hours to Ezra, Atlas had advanced to twenty-eight and lost the accent, but not the swagger. He slid into the chair opposite Ezra and grinned. “I’m in,” he said.
“They bought it?” The Society knew what Ezra could do, but still. Who were they to say he wasn’t dead?
“Yes.”
“So what’d they do with… you know. Me?”
“Same thing they do to every eliminated candidate.
Erased you,” Atlas said. “Like you never existed.” Perfect. “And even without the ritual…?”
Atlas raised a glass. “The Society is dead; long live the Society.”
Continuity into perpetuity. Time, as ever, went on.
“So what next?” asked Ezra, blazing with the prospects yet to come.
They kept their meetings up sparingly, a year at a time. Neither of them wanted Ezra to age unnecessarily; for him, time passed differently, but it was still passing. They were waiting for the six, Atlas said. The right six, the perfect collection, including Ezra. Atlas, meanwhile, would have to work his way up, to ensure he would be the next Caretaker of the archives (theirs had been quite old already, which
aside from wealth beyond measure made an excellent qualification for impending retirement), and then once Atlas managed it, he would be able to start hand-selecting the candidates himself. He would choose the perfect team of
five—one to die, of course, at the initiates’ choosing, though even that unlucky soul would be someone carefully and
thoughtfully selected—and then Ezra, the sixth, would be at the helm of it.
The perfect team for what?
“For anything,” Atlas said. “For everything.”
He meant: Let’s take this bloody mess and all its damn books and do something that’s never been done.
They drafted imaginary plans for it at length: a physicist who could approximate what Ezra could do, but bigger.
Wormholes, black holes, space travel, time travel. Someone who could see quanta, manipulate it, understand it, use it. (Was that possible? Surely it must be, said Atlas.) Someone to help them power it, like a battery. Another telepath to be Atlas’ right hand, to be his eyes and ears so he could finally rest his own. What were they building? Neither of them were entirely sure, but they knew they had the instincts, the guts, the painstaking deliberation.
“I found something,” Atlas said, earlier than anticipated.
Just the one, an animator. (Animator?)
“Just trust me,” said Atlas, who was entering his late thirties now and beginning to dress in suits, concealing his
true origins behind a posher accent and better clothes. “I’ve got a feeling about this one, bruv.”
It was around this time when the initial euphoria of the plan had begun to wane, and Ezra was starting to question his usefulness. The plan relied mostly on Atlas’ gut, which was certainly something Ezra trusted, but all the darting in and out of time and meeting wherever Atlas happened to be in the world wasn’t exactly the same as being present. Ezra wasn’t contributing anything, wasn’t part of it, not really. Go back to NYUMA, Atlas suggested, see what you can find, you’re only twenty-three now (or something) and you still look young. Besides, Atlas said with a laugh, you’re too American to blend in anywhere else.
So Ezra went.
Unfortunately, in order for Ezra to see anything worth finding, time had to slow down. He had to experience time linearly again, remaining in one chronological place and
putting down the half-hearted roots of a passably unthreatening persona. He resented it, finding existence slightly dull without the one thing that had always felt
natural to him, but before he could abandon his efforts and move on, the banality of his existence led to a position as a resident advisor in a freshman dorm and then,
unexpectedly, he had found something.
“You need them both,” Ezra told Atlas after seeing Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona face off in the row of the
century. “When the time comes, you absolutely must take them both.”
“But they have the same specialty,” Atlas pointed out,
looking doubtful. His hair had started to grey at the temples a few years before, so by then he had opted to shave it off. “Don’t you want to be initiated? You were always meant to be the sixth.”
Ezra paused to consider it. He had always intended to be initiated someday, but suddenly the formality seemed unimportant.
“You’ll have to have both,” he repeated, adding, “Nor do I think you could conceivably get one without the other.”
Atlas mulled it over, considering the idea from all angles. “They’re… physicists, you said?”
“They’re mutants,” Ezra said. (High praise, in his opinion.) “Absolute mutants.”
“Well, keep an eye on them,” said Atlas thoughtfully. “I’ve got something else I’m working on right now.”
Easy enough to do. Assuming the unremarkable role of a student two years above them despite being born nearly
twenty-five years before meant that Libby in particular proved herself to be intriguing to Ezra. That wasn’t an interesting story, particularly after knowing it would
eventually sour.
As for Nico, they never quite got on. Ezra already knew he was giving up his spot for Nico, or for whomever Atlas
found to serve one of the more necessary roles among the six. (A naturalist, Atlas said. What did they need plants for? scoffed Ezra, only to be met with Never mind about the plants, I’ve got a feeling, you’ll see.) At least Nico made things easier by rendering the offer impossible for Libby to refuse.
It was the year leading up to their initiation that finally opened Ezra’s eyes to the possibility that he may not have been starving so much as fasting. Now that Libby and Nico were gone, Ezra was left performing his cultivated
mundanity for a fleet of empty seats. Worse, he had
underestimated the discomfort of no longer being integral to Atlas’ plan.
“Nonsense, of course you are,” said Atlas. “In fact, I suspect you can do the ritual this year after all.”
“How?” Ezra asked irritably. Boredom stung, it itched somewhere intangibly, like a cramp in his calf. “Five are initiated, not six.”
“Yes, but I suspect I was wrong about Parisa,” Atlas said. Ezra frowned. “Is she not as good as you thought?”
“No, in terms of ability she’s precisely what I’d hoped.” A pause. “But I suspect she’s a problem.”
“What sort of problem?” Ezra was unaware Atlas had any of those. As far as he knew, everything was going
swimmingly without him. Hence the boredom.
“A problem.” Atlas sipped his tea. “I can convince her to get the others to kill Callum, at least.”
“Which one, the empath?”
“Yes.” That was always the one meant to die; even the perfect group of candidates would have to lose a member, after all. In Atlas’ eyes—and Ezra agreed—Callum was the equivalent of a nuclear code, and ridding the world of him was a favor to humanity. “Then you can have Parisa’s spot.”
“Oh yes of course, just kill her and take her spot,
everything all neat and tidy,” Ezra said, waiting for a laugh that didn’t come.
Atlas sipped his tea again, and Ezra blinked. “What?”
No reply.
“Atlas,” he growled. “Why on earth would I do that?” “She slept with your girlfriend, for one thing,” Atlas
offered with a misbegotten smile.
Which was not an answer, so Ezra rolled his eyes.
“Libby doesn’t know a thing about me. Bit hypocritical, don’t you think, if I held that particular blemish against
her?”
“Regardless, you know there’s a bonding aspect to initiation. You’ll have to become part of them somehow if you plan to take their initiation oath. Sacrifice will do the trick.”
“And if I don’t want to be initiated?”
Atlas’ cup paused partway to his lips. “What?”
“I don’t see the point,” Ezra said restlessly. “You’re here, aren’t you, with me? What do I need to be part of the
Society for? I’ve been on your side since the beginning.” “Yes, and it’s been exceedingly helpful,” said Atlas,
setting his cup to the side.
There was something about the foreignness of the motion—Atlas had never liked tea, preferring extreme
intoxication instead—that made Ezra wonder whether he really knew Atlas Blakely at all. He certainly had at one point, but over two decades had passed since then, and
Ezra had missed them. What might have happened to Atlas’ mind, to his convictions, to his soul? What had initiation into the Society done to him?
So Ezra decided to do something he had never bothered with doing before.
He opened a door to the distant future.
This was not as exciting a thing as it sounded, because the future could always be changed. True, there were some unalterable events, but in general Ezra had learned to take
his distant doors as a pseudo-reliable astrological reading: likely to happen, but not guaranteed. So long as he did not remain there, he wasn’t bound to the consequences of
anything he saw. His presence, if he did not disrupt anything, was as forgettable as the motion of a single grain of sand.
But what he discovered discomfited him intensely.
Because what Ezra saw—the conclusion of his and Atlas Blakely’s plan—was almost certainly the end of the world.
“Let’s make a new one,” Atlas had said once. Not long ago, in Ezra’s memory. Twenty years in Atlas Blakely’s, and therefore perhaps long enough for him to believe Ezra might have forgotten what he said. “This one’s shitty, mate, it’s
gone and lost the plot completely. No more fixing, no more tinkering around with broken parts. When one ecosystem fails, nature makes a new one. Nature, or whoever’s in charge. That’s how the species survives.”
He had turned his head, locking his dark gaze on Ezra’s. “Let’s be gods, bruv,” Atlas said.
At the time, Ezra had blamed it on the drugs. But then he saw Tristan Caine inside one of his doors, traversing time itself on the wards Ezra had helped put in place, and he
understood for the first time that Atlas Blakely had already built the perfect team without him.
“What is it Tristan can do?” Ezra asked casually on their next meeting. “You never told me.”
“Did I not?” said Atlas, lifting his cup to his lips.
Ezra, irritated, knocked the tea out of his hands. “You know you didn’t, Atlas—”
“Getting cold feet, old friend?” Atlas murmured, giving Ezra a thin smile as he waved a hand, returning the cup to its original state. “I imagine you may find yourself less
devoted to our goals than you once were. Perhaps,” he said, in English so falsely aristocratic he might as well have
fucked the queen, “because you’ve made no sacrifices to get here.”
“Me? Atlas,” Ezra snapped. “This was always part of the plan—”
“Yes,” Atlas agreed, “but while I’ve spent the last quarter of a century getting older, you’ve remained a child, haven’t you, Ezra? We erased you, remade you, to the point where your stakes don’t exist. You,” he said with accusation, or
possibly disappointment, “can’t see the way the game has changed.”
“I’m a child?” Ezra echoed, astounded. “Have you forgotten that I did your dirty work for you?”
“I believe I thanked you for that several times over,” Atlas reminded him. “And I offered you a seat at the table, did I not?”
“Only because you want me to take out another obstacle to you—and what’s wrong with Parisa, anyway?” Ezra demanded, bristling. “What threat is she to you?”
“No threat,” Atlas said. “Just… not the ally I’d hoped she’d be.”
The inadequacy of his response pricked like a needle, and Ezra stared at him.
“We started all this because we agreed this Society was fucked,” he said flatly.
“Yes,” Atlas agreed. “And now?”
“Still fucked, as you put it,” said Atlas. “But this time, I can fix it. We,” he amended. “We can fix it, if you’re willing to see things as I see them.”
When one ecosystem fails, nature makes a new one. That’s how the species survives.
The silence between them hollowed out and refilled with a new, tactile wave of doubt.
“The archives would never give you what you want,” Ezra said to Atlas in a low voice. “You can’t hide your intentions from the library itself.”
Silence.
“Are you using someone else to do it?”
“Either you’re in, Ezra, or you’re not,” Atlas told him, grimly exasperated.
“Of course I’m in,” Ezra said. “I’ve never not been in.” And he hadn’t.
Not before then.
“So then it’s simple, isn’t it? You’ll see what they’re all capable of,” Atlas told him. “Open up a space for yourself among the six and it’s yours, all of it. I wouldn’t deny you any of it.”
Ezra knew better than to question him, even inside his own head.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine, get Parisa to kill Callum and I’ll deal with the rest.”
“Does Libby suspect anything?” asked Atlas. No. No, he would make sure of it.
“I’ll keep her close,” Ezra said, having once mistaken that for something that could be done.
But truthfully he knew it couldn’t. The more Ezra had
pushed her, coaxed her, worshipfully tried to persuade her of his devotion the way he assumed she would want to be loved—the more he hoped to remain inside Atlas’
confidence by maintaining Libby’s—the further she got from him, growing more distant each time they spoke. Ezra had wanted an alliance of sorts, anticipating that Libby would trust him enough to allow insight to Atlas’ plans even if
Society rules precluded them. He clung to their years of companionship, their one-sided trust, and set himself to the task of distant espionage, hoping to rely on the one person whose morality he had always assumed would persist, even if their relationship did not. But Libby had pushed back,
fruitlessly mistrusting, aimlessly angry.
“I’m not yours,” she said, and drew a line between them, closing the door on his access to her life.
So now, without Libby or even the promise of her, Ezra had no choice but to do something drastic. If he wanted to
make sure Atlas Blakely’s plans never came to pass, then he would have to neutralize the Society on his own.
What he needed first was a way to take one of Atlas’ pieces off the board.
Breaking in would be the easy part. Twenty years ago,
Ezra had quietly built a failsafe into the wards, precisely his own size and shape, for which no succeeding class of initiates would know to prevent. He could slip easily through it, falling through a dimension no one else could see, but what to do upon arrival was another matter; a troubling one.
Ezra knew, to some extent, which of the six mattered to Atlas and which ones didn’t. Libby, Nico, and Reina were part of the same triumvirate of power, and therefore Atlas would need all three. Tristan… there was something about Tristan that Atlas wasn’t telling him, which made Tristan
possibly the lynchpin of Atlas’ plan.
Whichever candidate Ezra chose, Atlas would need to believe they were dead.
An illusion?
No, something better. Something convincing. Something expensive.
“I know someone who can help you,” came back once
Ezra sent feelers around, reaching out to whatever he could find among less law-abiding circles. A mermaid, they said, though the term was slung around with a derogatory aftertaste. “It’ll cost you, but if you can pay…”
“I can pay,” Ezra said.
(He could easily rob a bank in the past and come back to the future scot-free.)
It was someone known only as the Prince who, via the mermaid, gave Ezra the animation. It was sickening and faceless, expressionless and limp. Just a generic, unremarkable diorama of a corpse that had encountered a violent end.
“You’ll have to give it a face,” the mermaid said, her
voice shrill and high, like glass breaking. The sound of it set off something in Ezra’s inner ear, leaving him temporarily
straining for balance. “It will have to replicate someone you know well enough to complete the animation. Someone
whose every expression and motion you know intimately enough to reproduce.”
That, Ezra realized with a momentary stiffening,
narrowed his options considerably. But if he were going to take one of Atlas’ prizes, he may as well take the one he knew for a fact that Atlas could not do without. She and Nico were a key and a lock, and Ezra, a person who trafficked in doors, knew one was no good without the other.
Libby had intuited his presence in the room before seeing him. She had keen hearing, and something had
always alerted her to his presence. Echolocation, almost. She had known his entry to the house, had felt the disruption of time that he’d caused. For a moment, seeing her eyes change, Ezra suffered a twinge of remorse.
Only for a moment.
Taking her with him was an effort, one which was only narrowly possible given the limitations of his ability to travel. Convenient that she was so small, and so taken
unawares. The only sound as they went through the door was her scream, which echoed from the place they’d left until they arrived where he’d intended, and then it ended with a spark, like a match flaring.
Libby spun from his grip and glared at him. “Ezra, what the fuck—”
“It isn’t what you think,” he said quickly, because it wasn’t. If he could have taken one of the others, he would have. This wasn’t about her.
“Then tell me what to think!”
“I don’t have time to tell you everything,” he said, and summarized for her the basics: Atlas Blakely bad, Society bad, everything mostly bad, Libby gone for her own good.
She took it badly. “My own good? I told you not to decide that for me when we were together,” she snarled at him. “You certainly don’t get to decide it now!”
Appealing as it was to spend his time having another fight with his ex-girlfriend, Ezra didn’t currently have a lot of patience for a heart-to-heart. “Admittedly, there’s a lot of things about our relationship I’d like to change,” he told her briskly. “Most notably its inception. But seeing as I can’t—”
“It was all a lie.” Libby lifted a hand to her mouth. “My god, I believed you, I defended you—”
“It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t—” Ezra paused, clearing his throat. “Entirely true.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded. In her defense, Ezra conceded, it was indeed a terrible answer. He had not improved much since their breakup at telling her things she
wanted to hear—but in his defense, he’d never actually known the right things to say to begin with.
Gradually, Libby found her voice again.
“But you…” A pause. “You know everything about me.
Everything.”
He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. “Yes.”
“You know about my fears, my dreams, my regrets.” Her face paled. “My sister.”
“Yes.”
“I trusted you.” “Libby—”
“It was real for me!”
“It was real for me, too.” Most of it.
Some of it.
“Jesus, Ezra, did I even—?”
He watched Libby stop herself from asking if she had ever mattered to him, which was a brilliant idea as far as he was concerned. Even if she could have been satisfied with his answer (likely not), being made to question it at all
would cause her irreparable harm. Libby Rhodes, whatever emotional insufficiencies she may have struggled with intrinsically, knew her limits, and she regarded them with abject tenderness, like fresh bruises.
“So why did you abduct me?” she demanded, half- stammering.
“Because of Atlas,” Ezra sighed. Now they were going in circles. “I told you. This isn’t about you.”
“But then—” Another pause. “Where did you take me?”
It was starting to settle in now, he suspected. The sensation of being held captive. The initial shock of being taken was starting to wear off, and soon she would start to consider the plausibility of escape.
“It isn’t,” Ezra began, “entirely a matter of where.”
He stopped before explaining himself any further. She was too clever, after all, and certainly too powerful not to find her way out unless it remained a labyrinth, part of a maze she couldn’t see. People generally only knew how to look at the world one way: in three dimensions. For them, time was exclusively linear, moving in a single direction never to be disrupted or stopped.
Imagine looking for someone and knowing only that they were somewhere on earth. Now imagine looking for
someone knowing only that they were on earth during a
time with indoor plumbing. In short, nobody would find her. Ideally, Libby Rhodes would even struggle to find herself.
“You can’t keep me here,” she said. It was flat, unfaceted, deadly. “You don’t understand what I am. You never have.”
“I know exactly what you are, Libby. I’ve known for some time. Is the empath dead yet?”
She gaped at him.
“Is that a yes?” Ezra prompted.
“I don’t—how—” She was blinking rapidly. “You know about Callum?”
He set his jaw, taking it for a rhetorical question.
Obviously he had already made his answer plenty clear. “Yes or no, Libby.”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, restless. “Yes, maybe—”
He was running late now, though punctuality was never a primary concern for him. He was often late to things, finding time to be such an arbitrary measure of motion. Even in his youth, which was admittedly both enormous and a mere sliver of things, he had never felt tasked by the prospect of arriving anywhere on time. His mother had wasted countless hours haranguing him about it, even on her very last day.
Though, perhaps that was what had drawn him to Atlas, in the end. Ezra knew how to starve, and Atlas knew how to wait.
“I’ll be back,” Ezra told Libby. “Don’t go anywhere.” Not that she could, even if she tried it. He’d built the wards specifically for her, made them molecular, soluble, water- based. She would have to alter the state of her environment in order to break them; to change the elements themselves individually, draining herself more with each step of progress. One step forward, two steps back.
Keys and locks.
“You’re keeping me here?” She sounded numbly disbelieving, though that would change. Numbness would pass, and pain would surely follow.
He lamented it. “It’s for your own safety,” he reminded her.
“From Atlas?”
“Yes, from Atlas,” he said, feeling a rush of urgency. He was running late, but again, that wasn’t the problem; it was what awaited him if he stayed.
Eventually the truth would sink in for Libby, and when it did, it was best to remove any flammable objects from the room, such as Ezra’s limbs and clothing.
“What,” Libby spat, “does Atlas Blakely need me for?” Yes, there it was. The rage was settling in.
“You’d better hope you don’t find out,” Ezra said, and then he departed for his meeting through a door, the sound of his careful stride echoing from the floors the moment
they hit familiar marble.
He already knew who the room would contain when he entered it. Much like Atlas, Ezra had chosen its occupants carefully, using the contacts he had procured beneath the meticulous cover of his unremarkable face, his eradicated name. They all wanted to be found—were easily lured by the right price—and so the primary leaders from every enemy
the Society had ever possessed would not have hesitated to reply to Ezra’s summons. They had been lured here by the promise of a single prize: the Society itself, which no one but Ezra had ever turned down.
Provided the animation worked, Ezra doubted Atlas
would suspect him. But even if he did, it was Atlas who had made him invisible, and therefore impossible to find.
“My friends,” Ezra said, striding in to address the room without preamble. “Welcome.”
If they were surprised to discover he was so young, they hid it well. They would not have known, after all, what to make of the summons they had received, each of which
contained secrets from their youth as irreconcilable leverage. (Only people who exist in three dimensions ever believe history to be sacred. Keep that to yourself.)
“The six most dangerous human beings alive,” Ezra said to the room, “are, as you all know, currently in Atlas Blakely’s care. One has been neutralized, which should buy us some time, and another has been eliminated by the
Society itself. But the other four will bear the enormity of either our extinction or survival—the chosen of a despotic Society for which we are little more than pawns. We have one year until they emerge again from its protection.”
The members of the room exchanged glances. Six of them, as Ezra found beautifully ironic. The synchronicity was so crisp that even Atlas would have appreciated it, had he known.
“What do you want us to do about them?” asked Nothazai, the first to speak.
Ezra smiled as Atlas would have shrugged.
“What else? Our world is dying,” he said, and took a seat, ready to put himself to work. “It’s up to us to set it right.”
END.
AND SO FIVE STOOD where there had once been six.
“I won’t do it,” said Nico de Varona, breaking the silence. “Not unless I have some assurances moving forward.”
Parisa Kamali was first to reply. “Assurances of what?” “I want Rhodes back. And I want your word you’ll help
me find her.” Nico’s expression was determined and grim, his voice steady and unflinching. “I refuse to be part of this Society unless I know I have your support.”
Dalton opted not to contribute things like there is no refusal, because it did not seem relevant.
Instead he sat quietly, waiting for what would come. “I’m with Nico.” That was Reina Mori.
“As am I.” Callum Nova’s voice was smooth with confidence. Presumably he possessed the cleverness to know that for him, only one answer would be sufficient.
“You?” Nico asked Tristan Caine, who didn’t look up from his hands.
“Of course.” His voice was thin with derision. “Of course.”
“Which leaves you,” Reina observed, turning to Parisa, who glanced askance with irritation.
“Would I really be stupid enough to refuse?”
“Don’t,” Nico cut in before anyone could respond. “This isn’t a fight. It’s not a threat, it’s a fact. Either you’re with me or you’re not.”
Either they were with him or he was not with them, Dalton interpreted in silence. But this was the point of the binding, wasn’t it? They had not suffered this year for nothing.
“Fine,” Parisa said. “If Rhodes can be found—”
“She will be,” Nico said brusquely. “That’s the point.” “Fine.”
Parisa slid a glance around the room, to the five candidates present alongside the absence that none could ignore. She dared them to contradict her, but when, as predicted, they did not, she said, “You have our word, Varona.”
And so where there had once been six were now, irreversibly, one.
WHEN AN ECOSYSTEM DIES, nature makes a new one. Simple rules for a simple concept, for which the Society was proof itself. It existed on the ashes of its former selves, atop the bones of things abandoned or destroyed. It was a secret
buried within a labyrinth, inside a maze. To reach it was only to find a tumor that grew insidiously within itself.
The Society was built upon itself, higher and higher, like Babel reaching for the sky. Invention, progression, the
building up of everything had no option but to continue; something put in motion did not, of its own volition, stop.
The trouble with knowledge, the idiosyncrasy of its particular addiction, was that it was not the same as other types of vice. Because knowledge was not chemical, was not physical or hormonal or easily within reach, someone given a taste of omniscience could never be satisfied by the contents of a bare reality without it. Life and death as once prescribed would carry no weight, and even the usual temptations of excess would taste unsavory. The lives they might have had would only feel ill-fitting, poorly worn.
Someday, perhaps quite soon, they might be able to create entire worlds; to not only reach, but to become like gods.
Dalton Ellery stood before the five initiates of the
Alexandrian Society and watched them take their vows, marrying themselves to the inevitability of change and
inseverable alteration. Henceforth, things would only be more difficult. Barriers would fall away; the world belonging to those who had not merited entry through the Society’s doors would no longer exist, and the only walls left to contain these five would be the ones they managed to build themselves. What they did not realize yet, Dalton thought in silence, was the safety of a cage, the security of containment. Given a task, even a lab rat could be capable
of satisfaction; from a prescribed morality, contentment; from the fulfillment of a purpose, the discovery of a cause.
Endless choices, by contrast, would only leave the rat to chase itself in circles, unable to rest or be fulfilled.
For a moment it occurred to Dalton like a seedling of something half-remembered that perhaps he should say
something along those lines. That perhaps he should warn them how the access they were soon to have would be too much to allow for any weakness, too little to accommodate for pre-existing strengths. He thought: You are entering the cycle of your own destruction, the wheel of your own fortune, which will rise and fall and so will you. You will deconstruct and resurrect in some other form, and the ashes of yourself will be the rubble from the fall.
Rome falls, he wanted to say. Everything collapses. You will, too.
You will, soon.
But before Dalton could bring himself to speak, he looked up at the mirrored surface of the reading room’s glass and saw, behind him, the face of Atlas Blakely, who was the reason he still existed in any form. He had needed walls, an addict, and Atlas had given them to him in the form of a purpose. It was Atlas who had promised him that there
would be an end, a conclusion to the hunger, completion of the cycle. He had taken away the chains of Dalton’s
invulnerability and given him what he needed most; the one thing the others might not find on their own: an answer.
Was there such a thing as too much power?
In the glass, a little manic glimmer flashed behind Dalton’s eyes; a glimpse of who he’d once been. Past lives, ill-fitting. But this answer Dalton Ellery knew, as the initiates would soon learn, because it was the only answer even if it was the worst one, the least comforting, the most limitless:
Yes.
But as the world itself will tell you, something put in motion will not stop.
