The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(128)

“I’ll get you out,” Parisa whispered to him. To some distant him, to his little fractures. The solution dawned like clarity in her mind.

If he was in pieces, she would take whatever rubble remained for herself.





REINA



“HELP ME with something.”

Nico looked up from a long distance. As far as Reina could tell, the introduction of a new subject hadn’t distracted him or eased his guilt, but something had. He was less aimless now, more determined, properly sleeping again. Impatiently waiting, but waiting nonetheless.

“Help you with what?” he asked. “I have a theory.”

She sat across from him in the grass, which protested as it always did. For once, she was glad to hear it. It served as a confirmation of sorts.

“Okay. About what?”

“I was thinking about what Callum said about sentience. Naturalism,” Reina said, gesturing wordlessly to the whispers of MotherMotherMother that ached below her palms in tiny, willowy blades. “And about that medeian, her specialty of longevity.”

“What about it?” Nico wasn’t leaping to curiosity, but he was interested enough.

“Life,” Reina posited, “must be an element. I can’t use it, but maybe someone could.” She fixed him with a careful glance. “You could.”

“Could what?” He looked startled. She sighed, “Use it.”

“Use it?” he echoed.

“Yes.” Maybe there was a better way to explain it. Maybe not. “Maybe you could manipulate it, shape it, like any other force. Like gravity.” She paused. “Possibly you could even create it.”

“You think I could create life?” Nico sat up slightly, frowning. “If it were a physical element then yes, theoretically speaking. Maybe.” His brow furrowed. “But even if I could—”

“Energy doesn’t come from nothing, I know.” She’d already thought about it at length. “That’s where I come in.”

“But—”

“The theory is a quite straightforward. Suppose life is its own element. What if Viviana Absalon’s magical specialty really was life—the ability to be alive and stay that way?” she said, waiting to see if he followed. “Life and sentience are not the same, but there are microorganisms that live without sentience, so if magic like an animation can live, in some sense—”

Nico was staring at her, brows still furrowed, and Reina reached out with a sigh, gruffly placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Just try it,” she said, and he balked. “Try… what, exactly?”

Ha ha ha, laughed the grass, rustling with amusement. Mother is much too clever, much more clever, she seesandseesandsees ha haaaaa— “Just try,” Reina repeated.

She felt Nico’s shoulder stiffen beneath her touch, bracing for an argument, but then it settled gradually into place as he must have conceded, either willingly giving in or responding against his own volition to something she was offering him. Reina wondered, not for the first time, if he could now hear what she could hear, or if that was still reserved for her personal annoyance. At least when Nico was using it she was permitted moments of reprieve, the rush of channeling it into something. It was indistinct from the sensation of allowing nature itself to take from her, as she had when Atlas had first entered her cafe.

Grow, Reina had told the seed then, and it had grown.

Now she told Nico try, and she could feel the way his power had accepted hers gratefully, willingly, hungrily. There was a sense of both relief and release, and when he lifted his palm, the response was a staggered lurch, like a full-bodied gasp.

There was no other way to describe it outside of a spark. Whether they saw it or felt it or merely intuited its presence was grossly indeterminable. Reina knew only that something which had not existed previously had existed briefly for a time, and she knew that Nico knew it too, his dark eyes widening with astonishment and the aftershocks of belated apprehension.

He had expected nothing; if she had expected anything more, it was only for having been the one to own the theory, to make use of the thought.

It really was a simple idea, almost laughable in its lack of complexity. If life could come from nothing—if it could be born at all, created like the universe itself—then why should it not come from her?

Mother, sighed the sweep of a nearby branch.

She and Nico both seemed to know what they’d done without consulting the other for evidence.

“What does it mean?” asked Nico.

“I don’t know.” She didn’t. Not yet.

“What could you do with it?”

“Me?” Reina turned to him with surprise. “Nothing.”

He frowned back at her, not understanding. “What?”

“I can’t do anything with it.”

“But—”

“You used it,” she said.

“But you gave it to me!”

“So? What’s electricity without a lightbulb? Useless.”

“That’s—”

But then he shook his head, seeming to see no point in furthering the argument.

“If Rhodes were here,” he said deflatingly, “then maybe I could do something with it. But as it is, it’s just… that.” A spark. “Whatever that was.”