The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(119)

“But who does it first?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Do you resent it?”

He looked down at the knife, and then back up at her.

“Apparently I’d kill to protect it,” he said, “so yeah.”

Libby summoned the knife from his palm, which in practice was more like it had always been hers.

“Same,” she said quietly.

She set the knife down on his desk that had briefly been something else.

“We could stop,” she suggested. “Stop playing the game.”

“Stop where? Stop here? No,” Nico said with a shake of his head, fingers tapping at his side. “This isn’t far enough.”

“But what if it’s too far?”

“It is,” he agreed. “Too far to stop.”

“Paradox,” Libby observed aloud, and Nico’s mouth twisted with wry acknowledgement.

“Isn’t it? The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me.”

They stood there a few seconds longer until Libby plucked the knife from his desk, stabbing it into the wood. The beams of the desk grew around it, securing it in place.

“We broke up,” she said. “Ezra and me. It’s over. The end.”

“Tragic.” Nico looked smug. “So sad.”

“You could at least pretend to be sorry.”

“Could,” he agreed. “Won’t, though.”

She rolled her eyes and turned to the door, throwing it open and crossing the hallway to her room. She paused beside Tristan’s door, contemplating it, and wondered how he was doing downstairs. She didn’t expect it to be easy. Truthfully, she didn’t even expect it to work. The whole point of choosing Tristan to kill Callum was that Tristan was the least likely to do it, and therefore the whole thing was a gamble.

She thought of Tristan’s mouth, his eyes. The way it had felt to master something with his hand steady on the stillness of her pulse.

Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?

A pity she was so terribly risk averse.

Libby slid into her room and shut the door behind her, falling backwards onto her bed. She considered picking up one of the books on her nightstand but gave up before she even started. Nico was probably onto something, what with giving himself a task to preclude falling into a full-bodied state of waiting, but for Libby, there could be no distraction. Her mind only bounced from Tristan to Callum back to Tristan, and then briefly to herself, which gave her fleeting moments of Ezra.

So it’s over? You’re done?

He had sounded more exhausted than anything.

It’s over, she confirmed. I’m done.

It wasn’t a matter of anything changing between them so much as Libby no longer being the person she had once been. She was so fundamentally altered that she couldn’t remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn’t anymore.

She hardly even suffered guilt for what she’d done with Tristan and Parisa, because whoever Libby had been that night, she was different from that, too. That was some transitional Libby who’d been searching for a cataclysm, seeking something to shatter her a little. Something to wipe the slate clean and start over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She’d found it, decomposed, and moved on.

Whatever Libby was now, she was powerful with possibility. Helpless, too, with the knowledge of her own exceptionalism. Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it. She was enslaved by it. There was so much ego to the concept of fate, but she needed to cling to it. She needed to believe she was meant for enormity; that the fulfillment of a destiny could make for the privilege of salvation, even if it didn’t feel that way right now.

The library still refused her books. The subject of longevity in particular was denied; the question of whether her sister could have lived had Libby been better or more talented was repeatedly denied. It was like the whole structure of the library’s archives feared her in some way, or was repulsed by her. She could sense intangible waves of nausea at the thought that she wanted some knowledge she wasn’t meant to have.

She could feel it breaking, too. She could feel the way it would soon give way beneath her weight. It was just waiting for something, or someone. Waiting for whoever Libby Rhodes would be next.

Conservation of energy meant there must be dozens of people in the world who didn’t exist because she did. Maybe her sister had died because she lived. Maybe her sister had died because Nico lived. Maybe the world had a finite amount of power and therefore the more of it Libby had, the less of it others could reach.

Was it worth it to let that go to waste?

She could feel herself rationalizing. Half of her was full of answers, the other half full of questions, the whole thing subject to the immensity of her guilt. Killing is wrong, it’s immoral, death is unnatural, even if it is the only plausible result of being born. The need to soothe herself with reason buzzed around her head, flies to honey.

What would happen when Callum was gone? It was strange to think the wards around the house were imprints of past Society initiates, and therefore, in a sense, ghosts. One-sixth of the house’s magic belonged to people who had been selected to die.

When Callum had gone, would his influence remain?