The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

That night was a blur to consider in retrospect, which was something Tristan wished he could have said at the time. Unfortunately he had been perfectly clear-eyed and conscious when he slid his tongue between Libby’s lips, knowing both who she was and what he ought to have been—which was, ideally, able to prevent himself from stumbling into depravity and, quite probably, doom. Regrettably, he wasn’t.

Parisa may have been the reason this all started—cleverly, and with what Tristan assumed to be centuries of atavistic female guile—but he had made no attempts to stop, and there was no recovering from what he now understood he craved.

And truly, it was a craving, nothing so intentional as wanting. Some chemical reaction was responsible, or demonic possession, or some tragic malformation that other people wrote books about surviving. The absinthe had certainly encouraged him, spreading like warmth through his limbs, but whatever it was Tristan suffered, he was faintly aware he’d been suffering it already. The symptoms preempted the condition, or perhaps the condition had existed (blindly, deafly, and dumbly) all along.

That Libby Rhodes was primarily a physicist was never to be discounted. Even now, her touch rumbled through his bones like the tremors of the earth itself.

Not that she seemed to be fixating much on what had passed between them.

“Electrons,” Libby said without preamble, startling Tristan. He had recently begun trying to fiddle with the dials of his magic while listening to music, or otherwise disabling or distracting one of his senses. At the moment, he had been filling his ear canals with ambient noise while thinking about the taste of her mouth.

“Sorry, what?” he said, relieved that only Parisa could read his mind. (Fortunately, she was not in the room.)

“How small can you see?” asked Libby.

That wasn’t much clearer. “What?”

“Well, you seem to be able to focus on the components of things,” she said, still not addressing any of the more obvious things, like how they had slept together somewhat recently.

He had woken up in bed with her—with her, not Parisa—and had expected to find something more similar to the usual Libby Rhodes. Apprehension, regret, guilt, any of the above. Instead he’d awoken to Libby reading a manuscript, glancing at him as he sat up with difficulty.

“We don’t need to talk about it,” had been the first words out of her mouth. “In fact I’d prefer if we didn’t.”

Tristan had managed somewhat miraculously to straighten, squinting at her. His mouth was inconceivably dry, his head pounding, and he was being treated to merciless flashes of things he’d recently done and felt and tasted.

“Fine,” he managed, though she paused, clearly hitting some sort of internal snag.

“What were you doing back here with Parisa last night, anyway?”

Dehydration wasn’t going to make this conversation any easier. “She asked me to come. Said she had something to discuss.” He could hear the coldness in his voice and paused, unsure whether it was worth getting into what Parisa had revealed about the Society under these uniquely troubling circumstances.

“Oh.” Libby glanced away. “Well, if you don’t want to tell me—”

For fuck’s sake. He would have to now, wouldn’t he?

“Rhodes,” he began, and stopped.

There was no way she would take it well.

Though, keeping it from her would be morally quite worse, given how he had spent the previous evening. There was something about waking up naked in someone’s sheets that made Tristan quite unwilling to subject her to secret group homicide.

Where to start, even if he could? Parisa had told him that in order for five to be initiated, one had to die. They had never been choosing someone to be eliminated; they were responsible for choosing someone to eliminate. The whole time they had been led to believe this was civilized and fair, but really it was primitive and shameful and, if Parisa was right, then they were possibly under the thumb of an organization that killed and had been killing for thousands of years.

But Tristan expected some form of panic, and so determined perhaps a half-lie would be best.

“Are you familiar with the trolley problem?” he asked Libby instead. “Where you find yourself at a lever in control of a runaway trolley—”

“And you either kill five to save one, or kill one to save five. Yes, I know it.”

What a miraculous coincidence it was, that he would be having this conversation with her in her bed during the study of thought. Of course, where it came to magic, thought was less about philosophy than it was about the compulsions of it, and how it could be read or toyed with or interpreted.

In this case, ethics would have to do.

“Would you?” he asked, and when Libby frowned, he clarified, “Kill one to save five.”

“Parisa summoned you here for a thought experiment?”

“What?”