The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

Libby had intuited his presence in the room before seeing him. She had keen hearing, and something had always alerted her to his presence. Echolocation, almost. She had known his entry to the house, had felt the disruption of time that he’d caused. For a moment, seeing her eyes change, Ezra suffered a twinge of remorse.

Only for a moment.

Taking her with him was an effort, one which was only narrowly possible given the limitations of his ability to travel. Convenient that she was so small, and so taken unawares. The only sound as they went through the door was her scream, which echoed from the place they’d left until they arrived where he’d intended, and then it ended with a spark, like a match flaring.

Libby spun from his grip and glared at him.

“Ezra, what the fuck—”

“It isn’t what you think,” he said quickly, because it wasn’t. If he could have taken one of the others, he would have. This wasn’t about her.

“Then tell me what to think!”

“I don’t have time to tell you everything,” he said, and

summarized for her the basics: Atlas Blakely bad, Society bad, everything mostly bad, Libby gone for her own good.

She took it badly. “My own good? I told you not to decide that for me when we were together,” she snarled at him. “You certainly don’t get to decide it now!”

Appealing as it was to spend his time having another fight with his ex-girlfriend, Ezra didn’t currently have a lot of patience for a heart-to-heart. “Admittedly, there’s a lot of things about our relationship I’d like to change,” he told her briskly. “Most notably its inception. But seeing as I can’t—”

“It was all a lie.” Libby lifted a hand to her mouth. “My god, I believed you, I defended you—”

“It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t—” Ezra paused, clearing his throat. “Entirely true.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. In her defense, Ezra conceded, it was indeed a terrible answer. He had not improved much since their breakup at telling her things she wanted to hear—but in his defense, he’d never actually known the right things to say to begin with.

Gradually, Libby found her voice again.

“But you…” A pause. “You know everything about me. Everything.”

He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. “Yes.”

“You know about my fears, my dreams, my regrets.” Her face paled. “My sister.”

“Yes.”

“I trusted you.”

“Libby—”

“It was real for me!”

“It was real for me, too.”

Most of it.

Some of it.

“Jesus, Ezra, did I even—?”

He watched Libby stop herself from asking if she had ever mattered to him, which was a brilliant idea as far as he was concerned. Even if she could have been satisfied with his answer (likely not), being made to question it at all would cause her irreparable harm. Libby Rhodes, whatever emotional insufficiencies she may have struggled with intrinsically, knew her limits, and she regarded them with abject tenderness, like fresh bruises.

“So why did you abduct me?” she demanded, half-stammering.

“Because of Atlas,” Ezra sighed. Now they were going in circles. “I told you. This isn’t about you.”

“But then—” Another pause. “Where did you take me?”