The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

“Describe Gideon’s penis,” Parisa suggested, and in the pulse of panic that followed, she had clearly plucked something from his head. “Ah,” she said, “so you transform, then? Well, that’s certainly impressive. More than.” She nudged him again, delighted. “Brilliant. Now we can never fuck,” she said, seemingly content with that conclusion, “as I make a point never to sleep with people who are more magical than me.”

“That can’t possibly be true,” said Nico, gently devastated.

“I,” Parisa replied, “am very magical. The Forum must have been especially eager to get their hands on you,” she added as an afterthought, which meant nothing to Nico. He frowned, bewildered, and she tilted her head, apparently recognizing his blankness for what it was. “Did you not get a visit from the Forum while you were in New York?”

Nico thought back to that weekend, trying to recall if anything had been out of place.

“Oi,” Gideon had said at one point, “someone’s trying to get in.” Nico, who had been in his customary form of a falcon, said nothing, but gave a brisk little flap of his wings to suggest they could well and rightly fuck off. “Right then,” said Gideon, “that’s what I thought.”

“Well,” sighed Parisa, dragging him back to the point, “never mind, then. You wanted to know about dreams and thought?” she asked, and while Nico had until that point been highly insistent on keeping what he knew of Gideon’s condition a secret, he recognized the motion of a rare door opening. Somehow, he had earned a key to Parisa Kamali’s sincerity, and he did not plan to waste it.

“You read a book,” Nico said, “about dreams. Reina told me.”

“Ibn Sirin’s book, you mean?” asked Parisa. “Though it’s said he abhorred books, so probably a lesser medeian wrote it.”

“Yes, that one. I think.” He fidgeted. “I wondered if you had any—”

“I do,” Parisa confirmed. “One theory, mainly.” She paused, and then, “What do dreams look like when you’re in one?”

“They have a topography,” Nico said. “They’re in… realms, for lack of a better word.”

“Like an astral plane?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Nico, “seeing as the only one I’ve ever been on was the one you created in my head, and I didn’t know I was in it.”

“Well, you remember how it looked and felt,” she pointed out, and he considered it.

“Indistinct from reality, you mean?”

“Pretty much,” she agreed. “Our subconscious fills in the blanks. If anyone, particularly you, had looked closely at any of the details, you would have known we were not in reality. But most people do not look closely unless they are given a reason to look.”

“Well, then yes, dream realms feel the same,” he said. “Like reality.”

“I suspect dreams are their own astral plane,” Parisa said. “Only they are absent time.”

“Absent time?”

“Yes. Are you ever aware of time when you’re traveling with Gideon?” she asked, and Nico shook his head. “Is he?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Well, perhaps your theory is close. Dreams may well be the intersect of time and thought,” Parisa said thoughtfully. “There are plenty of studies to show that time moves differently in dreams, even to a calculable extent. Possibly no differently than how time moves in space.”

That was an interesting theory. “So time could move faster or slower in dreams?”

“Instinctually it follows,” she said, shrugging, and added, “Gideon must have quite a lot of control to be able to pull himself in and out at will.”

Nico had never considered it that way, but Gideon did have a keen sense for when to return. Nico, always in bird form, just assumed Gideon wore some sort of wristwatch.

“Why do you worry about him so much?” asked Parisa, interrupting Nico’s internal pondering. “Aside from the matter of your friendship.”

Nico opened his mouth, hesitating, then closed it.

Then, gradually, opened it again for, “He’s… very valuable.”

He didn’t want to get into detail about what Gideon’s mother regularly asked him to do. Steal things, usually, and typically on behalf of medeians. She was something of a con woman, as far as Nico could tell. With ocean ecosystems changing and the increasing privatization of magic, the modern mermaid evidently could not be counted on to limit herself to the usual exploits of the sea.

Equally unclear, in Nico’s view, was whether Gideon was or wasn’t a criminal. Gideon certainly considered himself one, hence Nico’s careful secrecy on his behalf, but Nico had never liked the thought of it. When Gideon was a child he had simply done as his mother asked, not understanding the details of what he’d been tasked with or who they’d been contracted for, and once he became aware of the consequences, he had stopped, or tried to. People, Gideon said, were inclined to go mad when something was stolen from inside their thoughts, and he no longer wished to be part of it.