The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

“I feel,” he said, blue eyes meeting Tristan’s. “I feel immensely. But I must, by necessity, do it differently than other people.”

That, Tristan supposed, was an understatement. He wondered again if Callum were using anything to influence him and determined, grudgingly, that he did not know.

Could not know.

“I,” Tristan began, and cleared his throat, taking another sip. “I would not wish to have your curse.”

“We all have our own curses. Our own blessings.” Callum’s smile faltered. “We are the gods of our own universes, aren’t we? Destructive ones.” He raised his glass, toasting Tristan where he sat, and slid lower in his chair. “You’re angry with me.”

“Angry?”

“There’s not a word for what you are,” Callum corrected himself, “though I suppose anger is close enough. There is bitterness now, resentment. A bit of tarnish, or rust I suppose, on what we were.”

“You killed her.” Even now it felt silly, inconceivable to say. Tristan had been numb at the time, only half-believing. Now it felt li

ke a distant dream; something he’d invented when his mind had wandered one day. The call of the void, that sort of thing. Gruesome ugliness that danced into his thoughts and back out, too fleeting and horrid to be true.

“It seemed like the honorable thing at the time,” said Callum.

It took drastic measures not to gape at him. “How?”

Callum shrugged. “When you feel someone’s pain, Tristan, it is difficult not to want to put them out of it. Do we not do the same for physical pain, for terminal suffering? Under other circumstances it’s called mercy.” He took another sip from his glass. “Sometimes, when I suffer someone else’s anguish, I want what they want: for all of it to end. Parisa’s condition is lifelong, eternal. Degenerative.”

He set the glass on the table, empty now.

“It will consume her,” he said, “one way or another. Do I want her to die? No. But—”

Another shrug.

“Some people suffer bravely. Some clumsily.” He glanced up, catching Tristan’s look of uncertainty. “Some do so quietly, poetically. Parisa does it stubbornly and pointlessly, going on just to go on. Just to avoid defeat; to feel something more than nothing. It is, above all, vanity,” Callum said with a dry laugh. “She is like all beautiful things: they cannot bear the idea of not existing. I wonder whether her pain will grow sharper or more dull after her beauty fades away.”

“And what about those of us who don’t suffer?” asked Tristan, fingering the lip of his glass. “What worth do we have to you?”

Callum scrutinized him a moment.

“We all have the exact curses we deserve,” he said. “What would I have been, had the sins that made me been somehow different? You, I think, have a condition of smallness, invisibility.” He sat up, leaning forward. “You are forced to see everything as it is, Tristan,” Callum murmured, “because you think you cannot be seen at all.”

Callum slid the glass from Tristan’s fingers, leaning across the table. He smoothed one hand over the bone of Tristan’s cheek, his thumb resting in the imprint of Tristan’s chin. There was a moment just before it happened where Tristan thought perhaps he had wanted it: touch. Tenderness.

Callum would have known what he wanted, so perhaps he had.

“I feel,” said Callum, “immensely.”

Then he rose to his feet, long-legged and lean, leaving only the glass where he had been.

It went without saying that for days after, Tristan was quietly in torment. Callum, at least, was no different in his intimacy. They were friends primarily, same as ever, accustomed to their evening digestifs by the fire. There was a companionship to Callum, an ease. There were moments when it seemed Callum’s fingers twitched towards Tristan’s shoulder, or skated reassuringly between the traps of Tristan’s scapulae. But they were only moments.

Libby, meanwhile, kept coolly away, and Tristan’s thoughts of time with her meandered inevitably to the matter of time itself.

As spring began to break unseasonably early, creeping out from beneath the winter chill, Tristan found himself repeatedly outside, approaching the wards that surrounded the Society’s estate. Magic at its edges was thick and full, identifiable in strands as voluminous as rope. There were threads of it from other classes, other initiates, which made for a fun, sleepless puzzle. Tristan would toy with the pieces, pulling at their ends like fraying thread, and watch for any disruption in the pulse of constancy.

Time. The easiest way to see it—or whatever of it Tristan could identify—was to stand there, nearly out to the street, and to exist in many stages of it at once. It wasn’t a normal activity, per se, but none of this was. Their supervision seemed to have decreased over time; coincidentally or not, none of them had seen much of Atlas since they had each been confronted by the Forum, which led to an odd sort of tiptoeing among the Society’s residents. Each had developed their own odd habits, and this was Tristan’s. He stood in silence, twisting dials he only partially knew how to use, and hoped—or, rather, assumed—that something would happen if he only looked long enough.

The trouble was his imagination. Libby had said it: hers was too small. Tristan knew the falseness of geometry, the idea that the world contained other dimensions that they were not yet programmed to understand. But he had learned shapes as a child, so naturally he looked for them now. To stare into the familiar and somehow expect to see something new felt so frustrating as to be thoroughly impossible. Yes, Tristan could see things other people could not, but he didn’t believe his own eyes when he saw them. A child told habitually of his worthlessness was now a man bereft of fantasy, lacking the inventiveness to lend him a broader scope. Ironically, it was his own nature that crippled him most.

Only once did Tristan run into someone while he did this. He looked up, startled, to suddenly see a young man facing him, staring at the house as if he couldn’t quite see it, or perhaps like he was looking at something entirely else.

“Yes?” asked Tristan, and the man blinked, adjusting his attention. He wasn’t particularly old, probably Tristan’s same age or a bit younger, and had slightly overlong black hair, plus a general look of rare untidiness. As if he were the sort of person who didn’t usually spill coffee on his collar, but he had done so today.