The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

Libby closed her eyes, holding out a hand.

With the flat of her palm, she pushed down. The pressure nearly dragged Tristan to his knees.

“Like a wave,” she explained belatedly. “Like things are floating in an invisible current.”

Tristan conjured his understanding of linear time, turning it over in his mind. Where might the misconceptions have been? That it was linear, he supposed. That it moved forward and backward. That it was ordered. That it was irrelevant to concepts like heat.

There it was; when he dismissed his expectations, he found it. It was the only thing moving at an identifiably constant pace, though it varied from different levels throughout the room. Faster higher up, slower lower down. Not the same constancy of the clock on the wall, which was close to the ceiling’s apex, but near Libby, it was regular. As regular as a pulse. He could see it, or feel it—or however he was experiencing it—at what he presumed to be sixty beats per minute right where Libby’s hair brushed the tops of her shoulders, flipping girlishly out. It was getting long; it had grown at least an inch since they’d arrived.

Tristan reached forward, resting a hand on Libby’s arm, and started tapping the pattern of the motion.

“Is there something that feels like that in this room?” he asked her.

She closed her eyes again, frowning. Then she reached for his hand, pulling it just below her clavicle, resting it on her breastbone and jarring him slightly out of his rhythm, his fingers brushing bare skin.

“Sorry,” she said. “Need it somewhere I can feel it.”

Right. It would ricochet through her chest that way.

Tristan located the precise beat he was looking for and tapped the pattern again, waiting. For another ten, twenty beats, he tapped it out like a metronome, and by the time he reached forty beats or so, Libby’s eyes shot open.

“I found it,” she said, and then, with a motion of her hand, the pattern Tristan had been watching went still.

To his disbelief, everything went still.

The clock on the wall had stopped. Tristan himself, the motion of his breath, had been suspended, and he suspected the blood in his veins had been, too. Nothing moved, though he could look around somehow, or feel around, experiencing himself newly within the space he’d taken up. His hand was still resting on Libby’s chest, his thumb below the collar of her shirt, no longer tapping. She had the strangest look on her face; nearly a smile, but somehow louder. It burned with resilience, with triumph, and then he processed it: she had done this with intention, with skill.

With his help, Libby Rhodes had stopped time.

She blinked and everything fell back into place, careening into motion. It had been nothing more than a lag, a momentary resistance that had been nearly unidentifiable, but even so, Tristan could see the sweat on her brow. It had not cost her nothing.

She rose to her feet too quickly, spinning to face him in her fervor, and nearly collapsed. He caught her with one arm around her ribs and she struggled upright, grasping his shoulders for leverage.

“I could do more if I had Nico,” she said, staring at nothing. At his chest, but also at nothing; staring down the barrel of her thoughts, rapidly calculating something. How to do it again, or do more, or do better. “I couldn’t hold it alone, but if I had him, or maybe Reina… and you showed me how to move it first, then maybe we could—Well, maybe if I’d just… drat, I should have—”

“Rhodes,” Tristan sighed. “Listen—”

“Well, I don’t know what we could do, to be honest,” she confessed worriedly. “If this is how time moves, then everything is a bit different, isn’t it? If time is a force that can be measured like any other—”

“Rhodes, listen—”

“—at very least we could model it, couldn’t we? I mean, if you can see it, then—”

“Rhodes, for fuck’s sake!”

She looked up, startled, to find Tristan staring (exasperatedly, he assumed) down at her.

“Thank you,” he said, and then exhaled, irritated. “Jesus, fuck. I just wanted to say thank you.”

That abysmal fringe of hers was getting outrageously long; it had fallen into her eyes. She brushed it away with one hand, lowering her chin slightly.

“You’re welcome,” she said, her voice soft.

The silence that followed, a rarity indeed, was filled with things Tristan generally hated. Floaty, swollen things, like gratitude, because now he understood that he hadn’t imagined any of it; she had proven that for him. She had proven that whether what he had was blindness or madness, it could still be put to use somehow. True, he might be little more than a lens through w

hich to view things, but he was a scope, a necessity. Without him she could not see it. Without him, she could not do it.

What a relief it was, being a cog in something that actually turned for once.