The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(120)

It was Callum who had built the most integral defense into their wards. Libby and Nico had been the architects of the spherical shield, of course, but it was Callum who had created what he called the vacuum within the interior fabric of them. A layer of insulation, wherein all human feeling was suspended.

What replaced feelings when there were none to be had? The absence of something was never as effective as the presence of something, or so Libby had thought until then. She had suggested they fill the space with something; a trap of some kind, or possibly something nightmarish if Callum really wanted to build some sort of existential trap, but he disagreed. To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness, which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight.

Libby sat up with sudden discomfort, a little prick of worry. It wasn’t as if Tristan was powerless by any means, but maybe there was a reason Atlas had implied that Callum himself was something that should not exist. Callum’s power was always hazy, indefinable, but the effect of its use was unquestionable. He had taken a piece of Parisa’s mind and driven it to such anguish that she had destroyed herself rather than live with what he’d done.

Suddenly, Libby was aware of the chance they’d taken when they left Tristan and Callum alone together. It was a fight to the death, where only one would come out alive. If Tristan failed, then Callum would know. There was no going backwards, no halting what would come next. Callum would know they had come for him, marked him expendable in their ledgers of who deserved what, and for that there would be consequences. This, the two of them downstairs, was no different from two gladiators meeting in the ring, one of them doomed to failure.

She should not have let Tristan do this alone.

Libby sprang up from her bed and ran for the door, about to jerk it open, when something in the room shifted. The air changed. The molecules rearranged themselves, becoming cool somehow, slowing to a crawl. There was a foreignness to the room now, amnestic. It was as if the room itself no longer recognized her, and therefore hoped to crush her like a malignant tumor.

Was it fear? It wasn’t not fear, but she had been right about one thing in her conversation with Nico. The air itself was different, and she wasn’t the one who had changed it.

Libby spun, or tried to. She felt her pulse suspend again, a thing that didn’t belong. Just to exist in the room was terrible enough, because she wasn’t meant to be there. There was no way to explain the sensation; only to feel it as a lack, an absence. She suffered it, her alienness, with the way her own lungs didn’t want to expand.

If she had caught it sooner she could have stopped it. If she knew where to find its source now, she could drag it to a halt. This was the trouble with her, a weakness she would never have known she had if she had never met Tristan. She could have all the power in the world, enough to rid the global population twice over, and still, she couldn’t fight something if she couldn’t see clearly what it was.

But it wasn’t total emptiness. Distantly, she could hear something.

Do you really even know what you’ve said yes to?

An arm wrapped around her waist, dragging her backwards, and the air in the room rushed back into her lungs at the moment she finally found the voice to scream.





TRISTAN



HE ALMOST DIDN’T HEAR HER over the sound of his blood rushing, but it had been enough to make Callum blink. Enough for him to glance down at the knife in his hand and toss it away after looking at Tristan with visible disgust.

“I wouldn’t have done it,” he said, but Tristan’s adrenaline said otherwise. The knowledge of Callum’s face unmasked said otherwise. The reality of their circumstances said, quite firmly, otherwise. Tristan’s muscles ached, his entire body slow to reconvene its usual rituals of survival.

How would Caesar have made Brutus pay if he had lived?

“I’m sorry.” The words left Tristan’s mouth numbly, unevenly.

“Apology accepted,” said Callum, his voice cool and unaltered. “Forgiveness, however, declined.”

The red light in the corner flashed, attracting both their attention.

“No one could have gotten through the vacuum,” said Callum. “It’s nothing.”

“Is it?” Tristan’s breath had yet to slow. “That’s not what it sounds like.”

“No.” Callum’s brow furrowed slightly. “No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t sound like that.”

He rose to his feet, exiting the dining room, and Tristan glanced at the discarded knife before shuddering, stumbling upright in Callum’s wake.

Callum’s stride was long and surprisingly urgent as Tristan followed him up the stairs.

“What is it?”

“Someone’s here,” said Callum without pausing. “Someone’s in the house.”

“No shit,” came Parisa’s voice around the corner. She was hurrying after them from somewhere else in the house, lovely and disorderly and wearing a man’s shirt over bare legs.

Tristan arched a brow in response to her appearance, and she gave him a silencing glare.

“I don’t understand how it happened,” she said. “The house’s sentience usually alerts me when someone tries to enter. I see he’s still alive.”