The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, Lib—”

She knew what was coming next. For one thing, it wasn’t as if she’d come home to the promise of sex and chocolates or whatever. The fight had begun the moment she walked in the door, and two days later, it still hadn’t been resolved. The fact that he needed her to beat the same dead horse was starting to feel inhumane to both of them (and the horse).

“I already told you,” she sighed, cutting him off, “I’m not going to tell you anything, Ezra. I can’t.”

“Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear,” he replied, too sharply, and then he grimaced, recognizing the combative undertones in his own voice. “Look, I don’t want to fight about it again—”

“Then don’t.”

She paced away from the door, suddenly desperate for motion. He followed, ceaselessly orbiting her until she thought she might choke.

“I’m just worried about you, Libby.”

“Don’t be.” A softer tone would help, probably.

Not that she had one to spare.

“What am I supposed to do? You come back after six months without warning and you can’t even tell me where you’ve been. Now you have people knocking on the door upsetting you, and you’re trying to… to what? Hide them from me?”

“Yes. Because this has nothing to do with you,” said Libby, still brusque with impatience. “I’ve always known you didn’t trust me, Ezra, not fully, but this is getting out of hand—”

“This isn’t about trust, Libby. It’s about your safety.” This again. “If you’re in over your head somehow, or if you’ve gotten caught up in something—”

She tightened a fist. “So you think I’m stupid. Is that it?”

“Libby, don’t. You’re my girlfriend; you’re important to me. You, for better or worse, are my responsibility, and—”

“Ezra, listen to me carefully, because this is the last time I’ll say it.”

She took three steps to close the distance between them, slamming the book shut on the last argument she planned to have today.

“I am not,” Libby said flatly, “yours.”

She didn’t wait to see if he would argue. The look on his face suggested that whatever came next, she wasn’t going to enjoy it. She thought about packing a bag, summoning her things. She thought about screaming or crying or making demands; making a mess, in general.

But in the end, it was all so exhausting she simply turned and pulled open the door, planning nothing beyond the certainty of walking through it.

Immediately: a coat would have been a good idea. She shivered in the dark, glancing up the block toward Nico’s apartment. A thought, definitely, but if there was ever anyone to be unsympathetic—or even sympathetic, but in an enormously unhelpful way—it would be Nico, who had loathed Ezra on sight.

Not to mention that if she went to Nico, she’d have to discuss the visitor she’d just received.

“Elizabeth Rhodes?” the woman had asked in her Bronx accent. If not for the expensive scarf tied around her natural hair, she might have looked like one of those campaigners who stopped people on the street to talk about the environment or veganism, or possibly the hazards of imperiling their immortal souls. “If I could just have a moment of your time—”

Libby shivered and turned left, heading for the train station.

She wondered why they had not been warned that other organizations might come recruiting. Atlas had mentioned the Forum’s existence, fine, but he’d left out that for two days of their initiation period, they would be vulnerable to interception.

Was it a trial of some sort, as the installment had been? Was her loyalty being tested?

“Miss Rhodes, surely you’ve thought about the natural elitism of the Society’s mere existence,” the woman, Williams, had said. “No one else in your family is magically trained, are they? But I wonder,” Williams mused softly. “Could the Society have saved your sister if they had ever shared what they had known?”

It was a question that Libby had asked herself hundreds of times before. In fact, for a time it had left her sleepless, particularly when she was first approached by NYUMA. The thoughts, torturous and destructive, were always the same: If she had only known more, or if she had just been trained sooner, or if someone had told her earlier…

But she already knew the answer. For years, she’d researched at length. “There is no cure for degenerative diseases,” she replied, with the confidence of someone possessing dismal, intimate knowledge of the fact.

Williams had arched a brow. “Isn’t there?”

It was a trap of some sort. Whether it was a test or not, it was certainly a trap. Someone was toying with her personal history, manipulating her with it, and Libby didn’t care for it. If there was one thing she’d learned from working alongside Callum, it was that feeling too much or too fully only meant she wasn’t thinking with her head.