The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(123)

“It’s not in our heads,” Parisa said. “Tristan can’t see it.”

“No,” Callum confirmed. “It’s still just magic. Manufactured somehow and put here deliberately for us to find.”

“But why would someone want us to think Rhodes was dead?” (Nico.) “Is the question why Rhodes, or why us?” (Parisa.)

“Either. Both.”

Their collective silence suggested a confounding lack of answer. Tristan’s sore muscles ached, throbbing with pain.

“Let’s get out of here,” Parisa said eventually, turning her face away with another flinch. “I’m done looking at this.”

She turned and left, followed by a hesitant Nico. A less hesitant Reina glanced at Tristan, then at Callum. Then she, too, turned and left.

When only Callum and Tristan remained in the room, the briefly forgotten intensity of the evening returned. It occurred to Tristan that he should be prepared for something, anything, but acknowledging so to himself already seemed like the beginning of an end.

“There was something else in the scream,” Callum remarked without looking up from whatever animation had been left in Libby’s place. “It wasn’t fear. It was closer to rage.”

After another beat of silence, Callum clarified, “Betrayal.”

It took a while for Tristan to find his voice.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning she knew the person who did this to her,” Callum said, perfunctory in his certainty. “It wasn’t a stranger. And—”

He stopped. Tristan waited.

“…and?”

Callum shrugged.

“And,” he said. “That means something.”

Clearly more remained unsaid than not from Callum, but considering that Tristan was expected to have killed him by now, he didn’t particularly feel the need to press the issue. The magic left in the room, whatever it was and whoever it belonged to, was already starting to rot. The whole room was off-color, tainted, like the magic itself was corroding the further its creator went from them. Whatever form of intent had cast it, that was poisoned now.

Along with other things in the room.

“Why didn’t you tell the others?” Tristan asked, and now Callum’s mouth morphed into some misbegotten smile, like a laugh he meant to indulge earlier but remained somewhere deep in his throat, awaiting a more spontaneous delivery.

“I may have to kill one of them,” Callum said. “Tactically speaking, I’d rather they not know everything I know.”

So Tristan had been correct: They would not be forgiven. None of them.

Nor, he realized, would they get a second shot at Callum.

“Why tell me?” Tristan asked, clearing his throat.

The thin line of Callum’s mouth told him he already knew the answer.

“Because you deserve to wonder whether it might be you.”

Tristan forced himself not to flinch when Callum raised a hand, touching his thumb to the center of Tristan’s forehead. A blessing, or the mockery of one.

“Truthfully, I respect you more for this,” Callum remarked, withdrawing his hand. “I always hoped you’d make someone a worthy adversary.”

In his mind, Tristan manifested a new talisman; a new scroll to recount his new truths.

Part one: Your value is not negotiable.

Part two: You will kill him before he kills you.

“Sleep well,” Tristan said.

Callum spared him a nod before turning to the door, passing irreversibly through it.





NICO



NO ONE could find her.

If they had not understood the Society’s scope of power before, they did now. Representatives from countless foreign governments were contacted for information from any and all forms of magical and mortal surveillance. Medeians with advanced tracking abilities were summoned. A team of the Society’s own specialized task force was called upon to search.

Nico, of course, offered to help them. “I know exactly what shape she takes up in the universe,” he pleaded in explanation. “If anyone can recognize her, it’s me.”

Atlas didn’t stop him.

“As I told the six of you once,” Atlas said, “anything taken from the Society must eventually be recovered.”

Still, there was nothing Nico could do that was any better than even the Society’s most generic efforts. There were no traces of Libby Rhodes anywhere. She had been wiped clean the moment she disappeared. No explanations were provided for why measures existed to track magical output—it was, as it turned out, a bit like tracking credit card purchases—or why each of their movements seemed to be mined for someone’s observation like medeian points of data, but Nico didn’t ask. That was a future Nico problem. Right now, it was about doing whatever it took to find her.

“A lot of work for someone you claim to hate,” remarked Gideon.

Nico had been spending a lot of time fitfully asleep for the purposes of these conversations. When Reina asked him one night about his groggy arrival to dinner, he lied. And he lied and he lied and he lied, but then eventually he couldn’t take it anymore and confessed. “I know someone. A friend, my roommate. He can travel through dreams.”

It was the most forthcoming Nico had ever been on the subject of Gideon aside from his conversation with Parisa, but as he might have predicted, Reina said almost nothing in response.