The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

“Well there’s a stain on me now, isn’t there? A mark. ‘Would kill for _____,’ followed by a blank space.” Nico summoned the knife back to his palm, only of course it didn’t register that way. One moment the knife was cast aside, the next it was in his hand. “I wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t come here. And I wouldn’t have come here at all if it weren’t for you.”

She wondered if he blamed her. He didn’t sound accusatory, but it was hard not to assume that he was. “You were going to do it regardless, remember?”

“Yeah, but only because they asked you.”

He glanced down at the knife in his hand, turning it over to inspect the blade.

“Inseverable,” he said, neither to himself nor to her.

“What?”

“Inseverable,” he repeated, louder this time. He glanced up at her, shrugging. “One of those if-then calculations, right? We met, so now we can’t detach. We’re just going to always play a weird game of… what’s the word? The thing, espejo, the game. The mirror game.”

“Mirror game?”

“Yeah, you do one thing, I do it too. Mirror.”

“But who does it first?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Do you resent it?”

He looked down at the knife, and then back up at her.

“Apparently I’d kill to protect it,” he said, “so yeah.”

Libby summoned the knife from his palm, which in practice was more like it had always been hers.

“Same,” she said quietly.

She set the knife down on his desk that had briefly been something else.

“We could stop,” she suggested. “Stop playing the game.”

“Stop where? Stop here? No,” Nico said with a shake of his head, fingers tapping at his side. “This isn’t far enough.”

“But what if it’s too far?”

“It is,” he agreed. “Too far to stop.”

“Paradox,” Libby observed aloud, and Nico’s mouth twisted with wry acknowledgement.

“Isn’t it? The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me.”

They stood there a few seconds longer until Libby plucked the knife from his desk, stabbing it into the wood. The beams of the desk grew around it, securing it in place.

“We broke up,” she said. “Ezra and me. It’s over. The end.”

“Tragic.” Nico looked smug. “So sad.”

“You could at least pretend to be sorry.”

“Could,” he agreed. “Won’t, though.”

She rolled her eyes and turned to the door, throwing it open and crossing the hallway to her room. She paused beside Tristan’s door, contemplating it, and wondered how he was doing downstairs. She didn’t expect it to be easy. Truthfully, she didn’t even expect it to work. The whole point of choosing Tristan to kill Callum was that Tristan was the least likely to do it, and therefore the whole thing was a gamble.

She thought of Tristan’s mouth, his eyes. The way it had felt to master something with his hand steady on the stillness of her pulse.