The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

Libby lifted her head, slate eyes darting around apprehensively. “Where is he?”

“Wherever he is, he won’t be gone long,” Parisa said with a shrug, impassive. “He’ll feel the discussion and come soon, within minutes.”

At the window, Nico was fidgeting, his fingers tapping relentlessly at his sides. “Are we sure this has to be done?”

“It will be done,” Parisa reminded him. “And we can either decide on someone as a group or wait to see who comes for each of us in the night.”

They all exchanged mistrusting glances at that, though a small sensation of distaste was reserved for her specifically.

“I merely said it aloud,” Parisa told Reina. “Everyone would have come to the same conclusion eventually.”

“You think we’ll turn on each other?” asked Nico, disbelieving.

“We could be easily split into factions,” Parisa confirmed, “in which case it would become a race.”

That seemed to ring true without exception. Already, none of them trusted the others enough to believe they wouldn’t turn assassin once things got dire.

“Who would do it? If we actually chose someone.” Nico cleared his throat, clarifying, “If we were all in agreement on… him.”

“I will,” Parisa said, shrugging. “If that’s what’s necessary and I have your support, I’m perfectly capable of doing it.”

“No.”

Libby’s interruption both surprised Parisa and didn’t. The others turned, equally wary and braced for the argument to come—murder is wrong, morality and virtue, so on and so forth—but it never arrived.

At least, not the argument Parisa anticipated.

“It has to be sacrifice, not retribution,” Libby said. “Isn’t that the purpose of studying intent, unluck?”

There was no answer for a moment.

Then Reina said, “Yes.”

That, apparently, was enough to spur Libby onward. “The texts make it clear that spells cast in vengeance or retaliation will only corrupt over time. If this is for the purpose of moving forward in the library—if it’s even going to have any value at all,” she amended firmly, “then it can’t be someone who’d be happy to see him go, and certainly not someone indifferent to him. It can’t be someone whose soul won’t suffer from the cost of it. The arrow is most lethal only when it is most righteous, and that means one thing.”

She rose

to her feet, turning to where Tristan sat alone at the table, eyes locked on his tea.

“It will have to be you,” Libby said.

It was clear at once that Reina agreed, and Nico, too. Parisa, out of habit, slid unobtrusively into Tristan’s thoughts, testing them.

Inside Tristan’s head were a meld of memories and visions, a monster of many parts. Callum’s voice, Parisa’s lips, Libby’s hands. They blurred together, inconstant, inarticulate. Libby was right about one thing, at least: It would be a sacrifice indeed from Tristan. There was love in him, too much and still insufficient, twisted and anguished and equal in consequence to fear. It was a type of love Parisa had seen before: easily corruptible. The love of something uncontrollable, invulnerable. A love enamored with its own isolation, too frail to love in return.

Tristan wasn’t thinking about anything, but was instead suffering it all acutely, intensely. Intensely enough that Callum would feel his distress soon.

Parisa threw the library doors open quickly, anticipating Callum’s appearance, when sharply the agony from Tristan broke, colliding with some internal ceiling. A little slip of parchment from his head ignited suddenly in flames; curling edges that fell to smoldering pieces, crumbling to ash.

“Fine,” he said.

One word for eventuality to surface.

AN INTERLUDE

“Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra.

Silence.