The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

Was that the kind of devil Dalton meant?

“I am not good,” Dalton told her, rasping it into her mouth. “No one here is good. Knowledge is carnage. You can’t have it without sacrifice.”

She kissed him hard; he fumbled with her dress and dropped to his knees, tugging her hips towards him. She felt the hard edge of a book stabbing into the base of her spine, then the indelible sweetness of Dalton’s mouth; his kiss, his tongue and his lips. Her back arched off the wood, accommodating her quiet sigh. Somewhere in Dalton’s mind things were coming loose; a door was opening. She slid inside and sealed it shut behind her, tugging at the roots of his hair.

What was in here? Nothing much. Even now, even in his head, he was careful. She could only find fragments, remnants of things. Fear, still. Traces of guilt. He needed to come untied, come undone. She could pull a few strings and glimpse his insides, find the source of it, if she could set him on a path bound for destruction. She tugged him to his feet, hastily flaying open the zipper of his trousers. There wasn’t a man alive who couldn’t sink into her with the blankness, the blindness of ecstasy. Satisfaction was obstructive that way. She yanked at his hips, clawed into his spine, bit into the muscle of his shoulder. If they were caught like this, so be it. They’d be caught.

He had imagined this before; she could watch the evidence of it like a flipbook in his mind. He had already had her a hundred different times, a thousand ways, and that she could see them now was promising. There was a weakness in his defenses, and it was her. Poor thing, poor little academic, trying to study his books and keep his distance when really, he was fucking her on her hands and knees in the abscesses of his tired mind. Even this—taking her here, on the table covered with his notes—he had seen before: prophecy. It was like he had spirited this very vision to life.

They both gasped. He wanted the two of them close, her securely fastened in his arms, and so did she. From here she could taste the burning edges of his thoughts. He wasn’t just afraid of something; he was afraid of everything. He hated this house, the memories in it. The memories themselves were knives, glinting in the light. They pricked her fingers, warning her away. Turn the gun around. Pull the trigger. There were demons in here; devils. Can’t you strike a deal with the devil if it means getting what you want? There was boyhood in here too, juvenile and furious and small. Once, he had brought a dead sapling back to life, onl

y to watch it wither away and die regardless.

The taste of him on her tongue, real and imagined, was burnt sugar, wild adoration, tender rage. Poor thing, poor desperate thing. Parisa recalled the thoughts in Reina’s head, which the naturalist couldn’t quite control; Dalton is something, he’s something important, he knows something we don’t.

I know that, you stupid girl, thought Parisa, and I never miss my mark.

“Dalton,” she whispered, and this would have to be the first of many times, because as much as she would have liked to lose herself in him, that was the one thing she couldn’t do right now. He wanted to tell her something; something he felt was desperately important, something he couldn’t say aloud, and if she didn’t take it now, he might lock it further inside him. He might seal it away. She said his name again, twisting it around her tongue, fitting it to the shape of her indelicate longings: “Dalton.”

“Promise me,” he said again, and he was ragged this time, wretched and weak, and she was struggling to maintain her thoughts. What did he want her to know? It was something powerful, almost explosive, but it warped and waned. He wanted her to know, but couldn’t tell her. He wanted something, something he couldn’t confess aloud; something that could devastate them both.

What was it? He was close now, closer, and she had her legs snaked around his waist, her arms locked around his neck. What did Callum have to do with it? Turn the gun around. Pull the trigger. The knot inside her tightened, swelling up and pulsing in her veins. Her heart was quick, too quick, her muscles straining. Dalton, Dalton, Dalton. He was as good as she wanted him to be; traumatically so. This was a torment she would seek again and again. The trauma of him was exquisite, the vice of his intimacy combative and honeyed. Oh, he was full of lies and secrets, only some of which he wanted to keep. What had he done, what did he know, what did he want?

She only saw it in the moment she let go, soundlessly crying out between his lips. So it was her intimacy he wanted, then; only when she was vulnerable, taking pleasure at his hands, could he forget what she was long enough to let her see. She came and his mind went with her, eruptive in relief.

It was a fragment of an idea; the fractured sliver of a larger truth. So small and so sharp she almost missed it, like a thorn on a root underfoot. She stumbled on it: he wanted her not to die. Parisa. The small voice she’d heard, it was part of that same thought, the same fear. Parisa, don’t go. Parisa, please, be safe.

It slid into her mind like a splinter, a sliver. It was such a tiny thought, so innocuous, buried indiscreetly in a shallow grave of apprehension. He had countless worries, jagged little aches of thought, but this one was so easy to find she could trip over it, and she had.

She reached up, clawing a hand around his jaw.

“Who’s going to kill me?”

She had asked quickly enough that there would be no time to prevent his answer. Already he was exposed for her—enraptured, undone. Remorse would set in later, maybe resentment, maybe regret. For now, though, he would never be more hers.

The words had left her lips for him to swallow; aptly, he gulped them down his throat.

“Everyone,” he choked aloud, and then she understood it.

They will have to kill you to keep themselves alive.

V: TIME

TRISTAN

There were times when Tristan’s natural inclination towards cynicism served some larger, more enduring toxicity; a vast, chronic paranoia. Any rare glimpses of optimism were swiftly dealt with, a virus his mind and body leapt to attack, and thus were ultimately beaten into submission. Feelings of hope? Cancerous. There was a constant sensation for Tristan that if things seemed to be going well, half of him was sure he was in the process of being mightily tricked.

Which was why the possibility he could do more with his magic than he had ever been aware of before joining the Society was so stupendously upsetting. Were there logical reasons this might be true? Yes, of course. All skills became more refined when they were properly trained, particularly magical ones, and since Tristan had been either unidentifiable or misclassified for the majority of his education, it followed that he might not have experienced the true spectrum of his abilities until now.

Did that stop him from wondering if he were slowly going mad instead? No, absolutely not, because the possibility remained that he and the others were being quietly but effectively poisoned. (It would be a complex con, but a good one. If this was how he died, so be it. Whoever planned it would obviously deserve their intended result.)

It was difficult to explain, which was why he hadn’t. To anyone. He sensed he was letting off certain undercurrents of agitation, though, which was a suspicion Callum served to reinforce, always glancing over at Tristan reassuringly when he was feeling most unhinged. It was the conflict of the thing; the tension. The difficulty of seeing one thing and knowing another. Strangely, it had been something Libby said that did it; she had commented on Tristan’s ability as if it were notable that he couldn’t see her version of reality, and from there it had been a tumble of deduction.

It all hinged on a basic, undeniable fact: that what Tristan could see and what others could see were different. Other people, according to both Callum and Parisa, saw things based on their experiences, on what they were taught, on what they were told was true and what wasn’t. Einstein himself (surprisingly not a medeian; almost certainly a witch, though) had said there was no reality at all except in the relations between systems. What everyone else was seeing—illusions, perceptions, interpretations—were not an objective form of reality at all, which meant that, conversely, what Tristan could see… was.

He could see, in some sense, reality itself: a true, unbiased state of it.

But the closer he looked, the fuzzier it got.