The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

“Of course it is.” Now he was impatient, jittery. Possibly he simply disliked being contradicted, though she suspected there was more to it than that. “The subjects contained in the library are not for everyone. They are rare, requiring immense power and unimaginable restraint. There’s a reason only six are chosen—”

“Five,” Parisa corrected him. “Five are chosen. One is slaughtered.”

His mouth tightened. “Don’t call it a slaughter. It isn’t a slaughter. It’s—”

“A willing sacrifice? I highly doubt that.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Tell me which of us would have agreed to this if we knew one would have to die for it, hm? And besides, I can see there’s more to it.” She peered at him carefully, waiting to see if he would reveal anything, but he had sealed himself into a vault again. He had already given away too much, or simply wanted her to believe he had. Whether that had been his intention or not remained unclear.

“You wanted me to know, Dalton,” she reminded him, deciding to accuse him openly and see where that went. “I don’t think you’re careless enough to let me get close to you otherwise. But if you want me to act on your warning, then you’ll have to explain to me why it exists. Otherwise,” she scoffed, “what reason would I have to stay?”

“You can’t leave, Parisa. You’ve seen too much.”

That, and he did not seem to think she would do it even if she could. There was no panic, no frenzied concern as he said it; entirely fact.

It was unfortunate his certainty was so merited. After all, what life could she possibly go back to after this?

She straightened her skirt, adjusting her undergarments, and rose to her feet.

“Dalton,” she said, and took hold of his collar. “You know I did more than use you, don’t you?”

His tongue slid over his lips. “More than?”

“I enjoyed you,” she assured him, and tugged him closer. “But I’m afraid I’ll have quite a few more questions when I’ve thought this all through.”

His hands found her waist blindly. They would itch for her now, she was sure. He would wake in the middle of the night to find the shape of her formed between his vacant palms.

“Perhaps I’ll give you nothing,” he said.

“Perhaps you will,” she agreed.

It would be a matter of weeks before they found themselves in a compromising situation once again.

By that point they had moved into time theories, and Parisa, who specialized in cognizance, was able to do far more than she had with the predominantly physical magics. Most theories of time and its motion were quietly psychological; that a person’s experience of time could be shaped by thought or memory. Pieces of the past seemed closer, while the future seemed at once nonexistent, distant, and rapidly approaching. Tristan was clearly intent on proving the significance of quantum time theory (or something), but Parisa was focused on the obvious: that the actual function of time was not a matter of its construction, but the way it was experienced by others.

It was the first time the library had begun revealing things exclusively to her, giving her its usual pseudo-sentient tug in one direction or another, and she had begun to venture into the historical texts she’d thought so little of at first. Not Freud, of course; Western mortal psychology as a self-conscious mode of study was, unsurprisingly, several centuries too late. Rather, Parisa immersed herself in the scrolls from the Islamic golden age, nipping at a half-formed hunch and uncovering that the Arabic astronomer Ibn al-Haytham had observed about optical illusions the same thing Parisa had observed about the human experience in general—namely, that time was an illusion of itself. Nearly every theory of time was rooted in a fallacy, and manipulation of it as a concept was largely accomplished through the mechanism of thought or emotion. Callum was much too lazy to focus on the latter, but Parisa dove into the early psychological medeian arts—Islamic and Buddhist, mostly— with a fervor that surprised all of the others.

All of them, that is, but Dalton.

“I told you,” he said, finding her alone in the reading room one night.

She allowed him to think he’d surprised her. “Hm?” she said, playing at startled.

He slid a chair over to sit beside her at the table. “Is this al-Biruni’s manuscript?”

“Yes.”

“Are you studying reaction time?” It was Biruni who had first begun experimenting with mental chronometry, which in this case was the lag between stimulus and response; how long it took for the eyes to see something and the brain to react.

“How do you know what I’m studying?” Parisa asked, though she didn’t need to.

Because they both knew he could not take his eyes off her, of course.

“I can see you’re working a theory,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might want to discuss it.”

She permitted a half-smile. “Should we whisper about differential psychology? How salacious.”

“There is an intimacy to intensive study that even I find unsettling,” he said, shifting towards her. “The expression of an unformed thought.”

“Who says my thoughts remain unformed?”