The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

He was as inscrutable as always, peering down at her in his hawkish way. “Do you still have the Lucretius?”

“Oh, yes, of course—hang on. Come in.”

She left the door open for him, turning to sort out where she’d left the book. “Working on a Saturday?” she asked him, peering around for it in her pile of things. She hadn’t planned to touch the manuscript any time soon; she was rather intent on spending the day in her yoga pants, recovering in advance of whatever massive energy output she’d need to produce on Monday.

“I just want to have another look at it,” he said.

“Truthfully, I don’t know if it’ll be much help,” she said, finally spotting it in the pile beside the nightstand. She wasn’t the neatest person alive, nor was she the best at rising early. All in all, she felt woefully inadequate next to Tristan, who was so pulled together he nearly sparkled. “I can’t say it has much in it that hasn’t been addressed by later works.”

“There’s something about time,” Tristan said, “isn’t there?”

“Sort of. Nothing concrete, but—”

“I’d like to see for myself,” he told her curtly, and she blinked.

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying t-”

“Don’t apologize,” he said impatiently. “I just have a theory I’d like to test.”

“Oh.” She held the book out for him, and he took it. Before he could leave, though, she cleared her throat. “Any chance you’d like to tell me what theory you’re testing?”

“Why?”

“I… curiosity, I guess.” Incredible how he made it feel like a capital crime just to ask him a simple question. “I do actually care about the research we do, you know.”

He bristled slightly. “I never suggested you didn’t.”

“I know, I’m s-” She broke off before apologizing again. “Never mind. You can hang onto it, by the way,” she said, gesturing to the book. “I don’t think there’s anything useful. Theoretically, I suppose the idea that time and movement aren’t separate functions is an interesting baseline, but that’s hardly unique to—”

“You and Nico manipulate force, correct?”

She was startled, first by the interruption and secondly, by having her abilities addressed.

“What?”

“Force. Yes?”

“Yes, force.” He seemed to be playing with something in his head, so she added, “We use it to alter the physical makeup of things.”

“Why couldn’t you make a wormhole through time?”

“I—” That wasn’t what she expected his follow-up to be. “Well, I… theoretically I suppose we could, but that would require understanding the nature of time to begin with.”

“What would you need to know in order to understand?”

He didn’t seem to be mocking her; she hazarded an attempt to explain without getting defensive at being asked a moderately obvious question.

“Well, time’s not a physical thing,” Libby said slowly. “Var- Nico and I can manipulate things we can see and feel, but time is… something different.”

“You can’t see or feel it?”

“I—” Again, she stopped, a little taken aback. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you can?”

He regarded her for a moment, mildly troubled.

“I didn’t say that,” he amended. “I just want to be prepared for whatever we do on Monday.”

It didn’t seem worth it to point out that Tristan had done almost nothing the past few weeks as it was. Aside from posing theoretical arguments to guide their experiments, he hadn’t contributed all that much.