The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(112)

It was clear at once that Reina agreed, and Nico, too. Parisa, out of habit, slid unobtrusively into Tristan’s thoughts, testing them.

Inside Tristan’s head were a meld of memories and visions, a monster of many parts. Callum’s voice, Parisa’s lips, Libby’s hands. They blurred together, inconstant, inarticulate. Libby was right about one thing, at least: It would be a sacrifice indeed from Tristan. There was love in him, too much and still insufficient, twisted and anguished and equal in consequence to fear. It was a type of love Parisa had seen before: easily corruptible. The love of something uncontrollable, invulnerable. A love enamored with its own isolation, too frail to love in return.

Tristan wasn’t thinking about anything, but was instead suffering it all acutely, intensely. Intensely enough that Callum would feel his distress soon.

Parisa threw the library doors open quickly, anticipating Callum’s appearance, when sharply the agony from Tristan broke, colliding with some internal ceiling. A little slip of parchment from his head ignited suddenly in flames; curling edges that fell to smoldering pieces, crumbling to ash.

“Fine,” he said.

One word for eventuality to surface.





AN INTERLUDE



“MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO STARVE,” said Ezra.

Silence.

“I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people want naturally and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. You can learn to starve.”

Silence.

“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and you can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and eventually it fades. But still you never forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After learning to starve, when someone finally gives you something you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn how to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal.”

Silence.

“Being magic is even worse,” said Ezra. “Your body doesn’t want to die, it has too much inside it. So you want more powerfully. You starve more quickly. Your capacity to have nothing is abysmal, cataclysmic. There isn’t a medeian on earth capable of casting themselves down to ordinariness, much less to dust. We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s easy, so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something—against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes.”

“What does?” asked Atlas.

Ezra smiled, closing his eyes in the sun.

“Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break.”





CALLUM



AS A CHILD CALLUM NEVER sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecific drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation to it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.

The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Why the drudgery of it, being despised for the purpose of some interminable crusade, when it would be so much easier to simply let things happen? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? The world didn’t even love a hero for long. Wanting anything—beauty, omnipotence, absolution—was a natural flaw in being human, but the elective tirelessness of villainy made it indigestibly worse.