The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?

A pity she was so terribly risk averse.

Libby slid into her room and shut the door behind her, falling backwards onto her bed. She considered picking up one of the books on her nightstand but gave up before she even started. Nico was probably onto something, what with giving himself a task to preclude falling into a full-bodied state of waiting, but for Libby, there could be no distraction. Her mind only bounced from Tristan to Callum back to Tristan, and then briefly to herself, which gave her fleeting moments of Ezra.

So it’s over? You’re done?

He had sounded more exhausted than anything.

It’s over, she confirmed. I’m done.

It wasn’t a matter of anything changing between them so much as Libby no longer being the person she had once been. She was so fundamentally altered that she couldn’t remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn’t anymore.

She hardly even suffered guilt for what she’d done with Tristan and Parisa, because whoever Libby had been that night, she was different from that, too. That was some transitional Libby who’d been searching for a cataclysm, seeking something to shatter her a little. Something to wipe the slate clean and start over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She’d found it, decomposed, and moved on.

Whatever Libby was now, she was powerful with possibility. Helpless, too, with the knowledge of her own exceptionalism. Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it. She was enslaved by it. There was so much ego to the concept of fate, but she needed to cling to it. She needed to believe she was meant for enormity; that the fulfillment of a destiny could make for the privilege of salvation, even if it didn’t feel that way right now.

The library still refused her books. The subject of longevity in particular was denied; the question of whether her sister could have lived had Libby been better or more talented was repeatedly denied. It was like the whole structure of the library’s archives feared her in some way, or was repulsed by her. She could sense intangible waves of nausea at the thought that she wanted some knowledge she wasn’t meant to have.

She could feel it breaking, too. She could feel the way it would soon give way beneath her weight. It was just waiting for something, or someone. Waiting for whoever Libby Rhodes would be next.

Conservation of energy meant there must be dozens of people in the world who didn’t exist because she did. Maybe her sister had died because she lived. Maybe her sister had died because Nico lived. Maybe the world had a finite amount of power and therefore the more of it Libby had, the less of it others could reach.

Was it worth it to let that go to waste?

She could feel herself rationalizing. Half of her was full of answers, the other half full of questions, the whole thing subject to the immensity of her guilt. Killing is wrong, it’s immoral, death is unnatural, even if it is the only plausible result of being born. The need to soothe herself with reason buzzed around her head, flies to honey.

What would happen when Callum was gone? It was strange to think the wards around the house were imprints of past Society initiates, and therefore, in a sense, ghosts. One-sixth of the house’s magic belonged to people who had been selected to die.

When Callum had gone, would his influence remain?

It was Callum who had built the most integral defense into their wards. Libby and Nico had been the architects of the spherical shield, of course, but it was Callum who had created what he called the vacuum within the interior fabric of them. A layer of insulation, wherein all human feeling was suspended.

What replaced feelings when there were none to be had? The absence of something was never as effective as the presence of something, or so Libby had thought until then. She had suggested they fill the space with something; a trap of some kind, or possibly something nightmarish if Callum really wanted to build some sort of existential trap, but he disagreed. To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness, which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight.

Libby sat up with sudden discomfort, a little prick of worry. It wasn’t as if Tristan was powerless by any means, but maybe there was a reason Atlas had implied that Callum himself was something that should not exist. Callum’s power was always hazy, indefinable, but the effect of its use was unquestionable. He had taken a piece of Parisa’s mind and driven it to such anguish that she had destroyed herself rather than live with what he’d done.

Suddenly, Libby was aware of the chance they’d taken when they left Tristan and Callum alone together. It was a fight to the death, where only one would come out alive. If Tristan failed, then Callum would know. There was no going backwards, no halting what would come next. Callum would know they had come for him, marked him expendable in their ledgers of who deserved what, and for that there would be consequences. This, the two of them downstairs, was no different from two gladiators meeting in the ring, one of them doomed to failure.

She should not have let Tristan do this alone.

Libby sprang up from her bed and ran for the door, about to jerk it open, when something in the room shifted. The air changed. The molecules rearranged themselves, becoming cool somehow, slowing to a crawl. There was a foreignness to the room now, amnestic. It was as if the room itself no longer recognized her, and therefore hoped to crush her like a malignant tumor.

Was it fear? It wasn’t not fear, but she had been right about one thing in her conversation with Nico.

The air itself was different, and she wasn’t the one who had changed it.

Libby spun, or tried to. She felt her pulse suspend again, a thing that didn’t belong. Just to exist in the room was terrible enough, because she wasn’t meant to be there. There was no way to explain the sensation; only to feel it as a lack, an absence. She suffered it, her alienness, with the way her own lungs didn’t want to expand.

If she had caught it sooner she could have stopped it. If she knew where to find its source now, she could drag it to a halt. This was the trouble with her, a weakness she would never have known she had if she had never met Tristan. She could have all the power in the world, enough to rid the global population twice over, and still, she couldn’t fight something if she couldn’t see clearly what it was.

But it wasn’t total emptiness. Distantly, she could hear something.

Do you really even know what you’ve said yes to?

An arm wrapped around her waist, dragging her backwards, and the air in the room rushed back into her lungs at the moment she finally found the voice to scream.

TRISTAN