The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

Reina seemed to be managing well enough with hand-to-hand combat; Nico caught a glimpse of her from the corner of his eye. She moved like a bull, attack after attack, and the force of her blows remained unfinished but heavy, unmistakable. He was a bit more finessed, more agile. The first gunman, now armed with a small utility knife, came for him with a blind overhand right hook, which Nico happily ducked, sending the gunman stumbling with a loud slur of profanity.

That, Nico thought, was certainly British English. CIA and MI6, perhaps?

How flattering.

Reina handled two of the gunmen, landing a hard but accessible shot to immobilize one thigh while Nico narrowed the remaining four men to three, twisting the gunman’s knife around for a blow to the kidney. He brought three to two with some tricky shots to the head, dazzling with a few careless jabs before shooting upwards with an uppercut, snapping the gunman’s neck back. All it took was a little precision to guide his non-dominant, uninjured hand.

It made sense, really, that whoever was trying to break into the Society would not have sent an entire company of medeians. Surely they knew what sort of security measures they were trying to breach, and a pack of special operatives could conceivably do just as much damage without sacrificing a drop of valuable magical blood. Yes, they would have to be accompanied by a medeian to break the security wards, but nobody Nico was facing now was dangerous unless he allowed them to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he wasn’t particularly in the mood to be killed.

The two remaining gunmen weren’t stupid. They attacked side by side, making Nico the point of an isosceles triangle; a basic tenet of two-on-one combat, and therefore easy enough to predict. As was Nico’s decision to force them into an Orion’s belt, sprinting towards one while firing a blast of force at the other. For Nico, magic was merely an augmentation of his natural aptitude; he was sure-footed, well-balanced, compact and quick without any help from his powers, which would need to be preserved as much as possible. He could waste it, ending the fight sooner and requiring more time to recover, but he knew better than to do something short-sighted. These men may not have been magical, but someone here was, and they would surely prove it soon enough. Nico intended to be ready when they did.

He used only enough to give his blows the equivalency of electrocution, sending one gunman (now fully disarmed with the help of a summoning charm and the burying of the gunman’s own knife into the muscle of his quadricep) stumbling backwards, temporarily immobilized, while the other shot forward, missing Nico by an inch.

Nico, regaining control of the gunman’s knife, slipped just in time to avoid a shot aimed for his wounded shoulder—which, he supposed, was a bit of a giveaway as a pressure point, seeing as it was currently covered in blood. Luckily, his reflexive counter led his opponent directly to the spot of difficulty he’d hoped for, and his next slip, calculated to intercept the gunman barreling forward from behind him, caused the second gunman to make contact with the first.

Then he felt a little rumble underfoot; a warning, and a reminder that these were not the only intruders left in the house. Caught between the final two, Nico loosened the pull of gravity again to levitate himself parallel to the ground, slitting one’s carotid with the knife in his hand while aiming the arch of his foot into the sternum of another. The final gunman took the effect of Nico’s kick like a blow to his heart, halting mid-gasp and collapsing just as Reina drove a blade into the side of her assailant’s head.

Nico was about to turn and whoop—to congratulate her with a hand on her shoulder for having done slightly more than read a book—when he felt the unsettling sound enter his head again; this time, the dial had been turned so high he rose off the ground, floating in full-bodied paralysis.

Was that all this medeian could do? Waves? He supposed there was a reason only six of them had been chosen for the Society; not every medeian had both power and skill. This one seemed to have only one talent. In the medeian’s defense, though, it was a highly useful talent, and Nico was rendered instantaneously weak, having bled copious amounts during all the moments he wasn’t concentrating on clotting the wound to his shoulder. If he hadn’t already made such an expenditure of effort, this would have been no trouble at all to resist. He could overpower most medeians on strength alone, but not while he was crucially injured.

Still, it would have to be done. It would hurt, but it would have to be done.

Nico summoned what remained in the reserves of his abilities, half-exhausting himself in the process, and was surprised by a little spark; a jolt, somewhere in the unfeeling palm of his hand. It was a rush of something, like an electrical current, and Nico felt it leave him in a burst; an expulsion with the force of a gasp and the volume of a scream.

It had to have been Reina, but he couldn’t think about what had caused it just then. He had seconds before the medeian conjured another sound wave, so he shoved a cluster of magic—power, energy, force, whatever anyone wanted to call it—directly into the body of the waiting medeian.

The sound of his shot meeting its target was a woman’s cry of pain, and Nico cleared the fog and dust from the air, waiting until he and Reina could both clearly see her.

“Well,” Nico said to Reina, glancing at the medeian who was struggling to her feet. “Do you want to go first, or should I?”

He wasn’t particularly surprised when Reina smiled grimly, taking a step forward.

“I’m sure there’s room for both of us,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder as Nico gladly summoned what sparked from his veins.

TRISTAN

Somewhere, Tristan caught the sound of a deafening explosion, followed by the unmistakable whoop of Nico de Varona’s laughter.

He was enjoying this, Tristan thought with disgust. When they’d last left Nico behind, gunshot wound and all, his steps had been so careless and at ease he looked like he was dancing, slipping between gunshots; as if gravity itself worked differently for him, which it probably did. Tristan hadn’t known anyone with the broad specialty of ‘physicist’ before, finding that most physical medeians had the narrowest fields of skill. With immense power typically came the ability to influence only certain things: Levitation. Incandescence. Force. Speed. Tristan hadn’t known it was possible for someone to be capable of all of that, and, by the looks of it, possibly even more. Physical magics were draining enough that Nico should have been exhausted by now, but he wasn’t.

He was laughing. He was enjoying this, and meanwhile, Tristan was going to be sick.

In Tristan’s mind, he had accepted the easier job; he was only going to ‘secure the perimeter,’ or whatever this sort of activity could be called. If anyone was going to shoot at anything, he reasoned privately, it was going to be all those guns aimed at Nico, whom Tristan hadn’t particularly liked to begin with. He knew the type—loud, showy, full of meritless bravado, like most of his father’s gang of witches. They all had violent streaks they barely concealed with a slavish devotion to rugby, and Tristan had assumed Nico was one of those. Young, brash, and prone to fights he couldn’t win.

Apparently Tristan was wrong. Nico could not only win, he could also do it with a gunshot wound to the shoulder of his dominant hand.

Even more alarmingly, he wasn’t the only one who could.

It was with immense reluctance that Tristan had initially agreed to split off with Libby, who had been little more than an irritation that Tristan suspected of being too insecure to last a day. Only chivalry (or something akin to it) had kept him from wandering off instead with Callum and Parisa, who had taken a left turn based on something the latter could read in the house’s mind. Tristan had thought, Well, someone’s going to have to keep an eye on the poor little annoying girl, or how else would she survive having no one to answer her thousand questions?

But then, of course, he’d been blindsided by a pack of what appeared to be spies with guns, and he was now having to rely on said annoying girl

much more heavily than he cared to admit.

“Get down,” Libby snapped as another gun fired, this time from somewhere behind them. It was, at least, a refreshing change of pace from her usual apprehensive mumbling. If there was one thing to be relieved about given all this, it was that Libby Rhodes was far more capable than she looked.

Tristan was beginning to regret not befriending any of the three physical specialties. Nico would have been ideal, given that he seemed to be a powerhouse of energy. The magic radiating from him was more refined than any Tristan had ever seen, and he’d seen quite a lot in his capacity as an investment analyst. He’d met with medeians claiming to power entire plants with the equivalent of nuclear energy who didn’t have the raw talent Nico had, and who certainly didn’t have his control. It occurred to Tristan, unhappily, that Libby and Nico may have come off as the least threatening for being the youngest and least experienced, but he suddenly doubted they were as juvenile as they seemed. He wished now that he hadn’t drawn a line between him and the others, because he doubted it would be easy to un-draw.