The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(116)

“You’re lying. You’re—” Tristan turned away. “You’re doing something to me.”

“Yes, I am,” Callum said, setting aside his glass as he rose to his feet, coming closer. “This is what you would feel if I were manipulating you. I’m doing it now. Do you feel this?” he asked, closing a hand around the back of Tristan’s neck and turning the dials up on Tristan’s sorrow, his emptiness. “Nothing hurts like shame,” Callum murmured, finding the ridges of Tristan’s love, riddled with holes and brittle with corrosion. His many pockets of envy, desire; his madness equating to want.

“You want his approval, Tristan, but he will never give it to you. And you can’t let him die—not the real him, not even the idea of him—because without him, you still have nothing. You are seeing everything as it truly is and still, do you know what you see?”

Tristan’s eyes shut.

“Nothing,” Callum said, as a sound left Tristan’s mouth, bitterly wounded. “You see nothing. Your ability to understand your power requires accepting the world as it is, but you refuse to do it. You gravitate to Parisa because she cannot love you, because her contempt for you and everyone feels familiar, feels like home. You gravitate to me because I remind you of your father, and truthfully, Tristan, you want me to be cruel. You like my cruelty, because you don’t understand what it is, but it entices you, it soothes you to be close to it, just like Rhodes and her proclivity for flame.”

Tristan’s cheeks were moist, probably with torment. Callum did not enjoy this, the destruction of a human psyche. It was ashy, like rubble. Wreckage was so empty and unalluring, even when suffering was overripe. A sense of cusp; not salty, not sweet, but not neither. It was the peril of tilting one way or another, falling too heavily—irreversibly and irreparably—to one unsurvivable side.

“I am the father you didn’t get to have,” Callum observed aloud. “I love you. That’s why you can’t turn your back on me, even if you want to. You know my flaws but crave them; you lust for them. The worse I am, the more desperately you are willing to forgive me.”

“No.” It was no small amount of admirable that Tristan could speak, given what he was going through. “No.”

“The truth is I don’t want to hurt you,” Callum told him softly. “This, what I’m doing to you, I would never have done it if not to save you. To save us. You no longer wish to trust me,” he acknowledged, “I understand that, but I cannot let you keep your distance. You need to know what my magic tastes like, how it feels, so that you will recognize the absence of it. You need to know pain from my hands, Tristan. You need me to hurt you so that you can finally learn the difference between torture and love.”

Whatever remained in Tristan’s chest brought him to his knees, and Callum followed, sinking with him to the floor. He rested his forehead against Tristan’s, holding him upright.

“I won’t break you,” Callum said. “The secret is people want to break. It’s a climax, the breaking point, and everything after that is easier. But when it becomes too easy, people crave it more, they chase it. I won’t do that to you. You would never come back.”

He eased his touch, taking his magic along with him. Tristan shuddered, but it wouldn’t be immediate relief. He would have no release, and the fade was like a muscle cramp. Like a limb gone numb and then waking, pins and needles. Nerves twitching to life again, resurrecting. Pressure finding a place to fill.

“How,” Tristan began, and Callum shrugged.

“Someone in the Society has books on us,” he said. “Predictions.”

Tristan couldn’t lift his head.

“Not like an oracle,” Callum clarified. “More like… probabilities. Likelihood of one behavior or another. Charts and graphs of data, plus volumes of personal history, what drives us. What follows is a narrative arc of our lives, a projection. Most likely outcome.”

Tristan sank against his chest, and Callum pulled him closer, letting him rest his head there, feverishly returning to the stasis of his own soul.

“Yours isn’t the most interesting,” Callum told him regretfully, “but it does have some relevant details. Obviously I paid more attention to it than the others.”

“Why,” Tristan attempted hoarsely.

“Why me? I don’t know. I requested it on a whim, to be honest. To see what the library would give me. I wrote down Parisa’s name first, for obvious reasons.” Callum chuckled. “I should have known she would recruit people to her cause against me, and Rhodes was such an obvious choice. So hideously moral, so tragically insecure. Surprisingly acrobatic, though,” he offered as an afterthought. “Or so I can only assume, given your… encounters.”

Tristan said nothing.

“Her book predicts she’ll never come into the full scope of her power. Odds of 1/1, actually. Frustrating thought, isn’t it? She nearly wasn’t chosen for the Society because they couldn’t agree on whether she would, but in the end Atlas Blakely convinced them.”

He felt Tristan shift.

“Blakely hates me, of course. Wants me dead. Wiped out like the plague. Loves you,” he added, shifting to look at Tristan. “If I were you, I’d start wondering why.”

“What did it say—” Tristan swallowed. He could speak normally by then, but probably didn’t want to. “What did it say about—”