The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

Libby waited, and he blinked.

“Oh. No, she was—Well, it was about the Forum. Apparently—” More hesitation. He had never been so hesitant in his entire life, and wished desperately that he were clothed for this. Or that he had not known it to begin with.

Parisa was right. Thoughts, once planted, could not be forgotten. He could not unthink the way it felt to run his fingers over the bone of Libby’s clavicle, his thumb hovering above her throat like he could slice it or adorn it, or both.

“Apparently,” he attempted again, “Parisa’s visit from the Forum rather made her… think.”

“About the Society, you mean?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“What does that have to do with the trolley problem?”

“Well, someone gets eliminated, don’t they? In this case you kill one to save yourself. Not literally, of course,” Tristan rushed to add. “But… conceptually.”

“I never cared much for thought exercises,” said Libby warily. “And besides, the experiment does hinge a bit on who the people are, in some cases.”

“Suppose the one person was me, then. Would that change things?”

He attempted a lightness to the suggestion, though of course the reality of knowing what he knew rendered things immensely more disconcerting than Libby could possibly guess. Then again, she wasn’t exactly Parisa. He doubted Libby would inform him she’d be rid of him while they were still in bed together, and he was right.

“You don’t really think I’d eliminate you, do you?” she asked, frowning, and went on to say something entirely not what he’d expected: “Your potential is fully unrealized. If anyone needs the Society, Trist

an, it’s you. I think even Atlas can see that.”

That, Tristan thought, was both extremely helpful while being thoroughly not helpful at all.

Never had he known someone so positively bewildering. How could someone catastrophize the mundane at every possible turn only to readily assert her stance on such serious moral transgressions? She made him feel mad, insane, unstable. True, she was somewhat uninformed about the details (his fault), but there were markers of sensible logic here: she would not eliminate him because his power retained the most potential. Not because of who he was, or even what he was, but what he could be. That hadn’t been anywhere near the top of his concerns, nor even counted among Parisa’s, as far as he had known. She merely wanted Tristan because she trusted him on some level, he suspected. Perhaps it was a circular sort of thing, the way his usefulness to her was what proved him useful.

Meanwhile, there was no predicting where Libby Rhodes might find solid intellectual ground. Tristan, naturally, was so unsettled as to topple at every possible juncture. Did he want this so badly he would kill for it? Sometimes the answer was unquestionably yes. What was being human except to crave things unreasonably? Parisa could build worlds inside a person’s mind. Tristan knew now—though he hadn’t then—that Callum, for better or worse, could destroy a person’s soul without lifting a finger. He had thought Libby and Nico were powerful—that Reina was leaking raw magic, overflowing with it to the point of near-irresponsibility—but knew nothing of himself, or where he fit among them. Admittedly, Tristan was not the most useful now, but the return on his investment might be greatest of all.

Did he even understand what existed at his fingertips? Did any of them?

Morality, what little Tristan had of it, tugged him between schools of thought, forward and backwards. “I do what’s necessary,” had been Adrian Caine’s take on most of his sins, and while it was (academically speaking) a legitimate philosophical standpoint, it was rather repugnant when left unconstrained by things like ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’ or even ‘guilt.’ Worse, if there was one thing Tristan had always aimed to be, it was well to the left of whatever his father was.

Of course he could not kill someone; certainly not over access to a few books. (Rare ones. In the hands of the most powerful medeians he’d ever known. As part of a custom that had existed for centuries, so therefore wasn’t it…?)

(Never mind.)

In any case, if he did this—or even accepted it as a thing he could do—would he ever be able to forgive himself? Could he live with whatever remained of his conscience? Funny how quickly humans could adapt to things. He had once believed he could marry Eden Wessex and serve her father dutifully, never questioning whether he wanted more; or, as the case may have been, whether he craved it. He was starting to think his solidarity with the person he’d once been had been a much more stable time, and perhaps much healthier. It had been like regular exercise, productive diet habits, broken by a blissful, gorging binge. Now he had everything he could want; power, autonomy. Sex. Christ, the sex. And all it took was killing one person, but who would it even be? It wasn’t as if they could all agree on someone.

Unless.

“What if it were Callum?” he asked.

(Purely for the sake of argument.)

Libby frowned. “What, you mean kill Callum to save… me? The rest of us?”

“Yes.” It made Tristan anxious even to think of suggesting it, though luckily Callum wasn’t in the house. Callum’s presence, like Reina’s, was readily identifiable by excess traces of magic. With all Callum’s illusions, though, it was difficult to discern what was actively in use and what wasn’t.

“Say it was Callum on one side of the tracks, and the rest of us on the other.”

“Oh.” Libby blinked, and her eyes widened. “Well, I—”

Tristan waited, bracing himself. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted her answer to be. It was, to her, a hypothetical question, so it wasn’t as if this was enough to really determine her stance.

Still, he was rather taken aback when she said, “I’m not doing that.”