The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(102)

“Still.” Tristan’s stomach hurt, or his chest. He felt nauseated and broken. Was this what Dalton meant about a person being fractured? Perhaps they were being disintegrated on purpose, morality removed so as to be stitched back up with less human parts. Maybe in the end his former beliefs would be vestigial, like a foregone tail. Some little nub at the base of his philosophical spine.

It was astounding how easily he had come around to the idea. Shouldn’t he have balked, recoiled, run away? Instead, it seemed to have settled in like something he’d always suspected, becoming more undeniably obvious each day; of course someone had to die. Immense magic required a power source, and a sacrifice of this nature would be precisely that: immense.

For him, anyway.

“Maybe it won’t work if you feel nothing,” Tristan murmured, and Callum looked up sharply.

“What?”

“I just meant—”

What had he meant? This was Callum, after all. “Never mind.”

“You had faith in me once.” Callum’s fingers tightened around his cup. “Not anymore, I take it?”

“Well, it’s just—”

“This is what I do to survive,” Callum said, his voice harsh now with something; betrayal, maybe. Tristan flinched, remembering what Callum had said: Trust, once dead, cannot be resurrected. “I thought you understood that about me by now.”

“I did. I do,” Tristan corrected himself. “But you just sound so…”

“What, callous? Cold, indifferent, ambivalent?” A pause. “Or do you mean cruel?”

Silence.

Callum turned his head to glance expectantly at Tristan, who didn’t look up. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

Tristan said nothing.

“We are this way because of what we have, not what we lack,” Callum said, suddenly bristling with impatience. “Who would Parisa be if she had not seen her brother’s thoughts? If Reina had not been leached upon from birth?”

“Callum,” Tristan managed to say, “I was only trying to—”

“To what? To vilify me? In the end we will make the same choice, Tristan. In fact, we have made it already.” Callum’s mouth was thinly lined; tight with malice, or pain. “Eventually, you and I will both decide to kill someone. Are you less guilty simply because you’ve been the one to unravel more?”

Foggily, Tristan thought to say yes. He thought to argue: This is guilt, it is human, your decisiveness is robotic, like a machine. In the end I could not carry on as I was, I could not become a false version of myself, I have a beating heart inside my chest and where is yours?

He didn’t.

“You are here,” Callum said, “because you crave something from this as much as I do. Power, understanding, it doesn’t matter which. Maybe it’s knowledge you want, maybe not. Maybe you’re here because you plan to walk out of this Society and take over James Wessex’s company the moment you do. Maybe you’ll bankrupt him, send his daughter into ruin. Maybe this is vengeance for you, reprisal, whether you plan to admit that to yourself or not.”

Tristan swallowed heavily.

“Maybe you can see others, Tristan, but I can see the parts of you that you won’t allow yourself to see. That’s my fucking curse, Tristan!”

Callum slammed a fist against the table, rising to his feet.

“There isn’t a person alive who can see themselves as I see them,” Callum snarled, and it did not sound like a warning. Not a threat. “You want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, makes you better? It doesn’t. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don’t you see it’s because we’re riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn.”

He pivoted as one hand fell to his side, exasperated.

“We are medeians because we will never have enough,” Callum said hoarsely. “We aren’t normal; we are gods born with pain built in. We are incendiary beings and we are flawed, except the weaknesses we pretend to have are not our true weaknesses at all. We are not soft, we do not suffer impairment or frailty—we imitate it. We tell ourselves we have it. But our only real weakness is that we know we are bigger, stronger, as close to omnipotence as we can be, and we are hungry, we are aching for it. Other people can see their limits, Tristan, but we have none. We want to find our impossible edges, to close our fingers around constraints that don’t exist, and that,” Callum exhaled. “That is what will drive us to madness.”

Tristan glanced down at his forgotten toast, suddenly feeling drained.

Callum’s voice didn’t soften. “You don’t want to go mad? Too bad, you are already. If you leave here the madness will only follow you. You have already gone too far, and so have I.”

“I won’t kill Rhodes,” said Tristan. “I can’t do it.”

Callum paused a moment, stiffening, and then he resumed his seat, waving a hand over his coffee to replenish its warmth.

“Yes,” he said without expression. “Parisa made sure of that.”

For the rest of the day, Tristan felt dazed, as if he’d suffered a wound that hadn’t clotted. The constant questioning of himself, of others, was viciously acute. It was one thing to be understood by someone else, to be exposed by them, and another (however inevitable it was) to be misused by them. Both Parisa and Callum had seen pieces of Tristan that he either didn’t or couldn’t understand; both fundamentally distrusted the other. What, then, had they seen in him that they could each use to their advantage? He was caving in on himself beneath the weight of his doubt, uncertain.