The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(132)

At seventeen (or so), Ezra was offered a scholarship to the New York University of Magical Arts, which was the first time he fully understood that he was not alone in what he could do. True, he was the only one who had access to the doors specifically, but for the first time, he understood that he was not the only magician in the world—no, medeian, they told him. It was a new word, unfamiliar on his tongue.

So what was he? Not a physicist, not exactly. He was definitely opening and closing tiny, Ezra-sized wormholes to navigate through time, that much seemed clear, but his magic was limited and self-concentrated. It was a unique power, dangerous.

Keep it quiet, his professors advised. You never know what sort of people will try to mess with time. Never the kind with good intentions.

Dutifully, Ezra kept his abilities a secret, or tried to. Eventually, though, the Alexandrian Society found him out.

It was a tempting offer. (It was always tempting; power always is.) What was particularly interesting to Ezra, though, were the others, his fellow initiates, or the four who would become his fellow initiates after one of them had been eliminated. Ezra was introverted by nature—a combination of poverty, inexplicable power, and his mother’s untimely death had combined to make him relatively standoffish—but there was one other initiate with whom he instantly shared a bond.

Atlas Blakely was a rakish vagrant with wild natural hair and an insuppressible grin. A “bi’ o’ London rough,” as he called himself, who laughed so loudly it regularly frightened pigeons. He was wolfish and lively and so sharp it sometimes made others uneasy, but Ezra warmed to him immediately, and Atlas to him. They shared something they gradually deduced was hunger, though for what was initially unclear. Ezra’s theory was that they were merely cut from the same indigent cloth, the easy cast-offs of a dying earth. The other four candidates were educated, well-born, and therefore bred with a comfortable cynicism, a posh sort of gloom. Ezra and Atlas, on the other hand were sunspots. They were stars who refused to die out.

It was Atlas who first sorted out the death clause of the Society’s initiation, reading it somewhere in someone’s thoughts or whatever he did that Atlas insisted was not actually mind reading. “It’s good and rightly fucked, innit?” he said to Ezra, his accent thickly unintelligible at times. “We’re supposed to kill someone? Thanks, mate, no thanks.” (No fanks, as it sounded to Ezra.)

“The books, though,” Ezra said, quietly buzzing. The two of them shared a fondness for intoxicants, mortal drugs when they could get it. It made the doors easier to access for Ezra, and Atlas got tired of hearing the sound of other people’s thoughts. Gave him a bleedin’ migraine, he said.

“The damn books. A whole library. All those books.”

“Books ain’t enough, bruv,” grunted Atlas sagely.

But fundamentally, Ezra disagreed. “This Society is something,” he said. “It’s not just the books, it’s the questions, the answers. It’s all something more than nothing.” (Drugs made this theory difficult to communicate.) “What we need is to get ourselves in, but then get on top somehow. Power begets power and all that.”

It was clear that Atlas did not understand him, so he went on.

“Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra, going on to describe how few people were capable of actually understanding time and how much of it there was, and how much a person could gain if they could just hold on a little longer. If they could starve long enough to get by on almost nothing, if they fed themselves only little by little, in the end they would be the ones to last. The patient shall inherit the earth, or something like that. Killing was bad, sure, but worse it was unnecessary, inefficient. What had Ezra’s existence ever been aside from a recurring loophole to the nature of life itself?

And besides, they still wanted the damn books, so from there they made a plan: it was Atlas who would do the waiting, Ezra who would disappear. They could fake his death, Ezra suggested, and thus with one person out of the running, there would be no need for either of them to kill anyone. The other initiates didn’t like Ezra, anyway. He was too secretive, they didn’t trust him. They also didn’t know what he could do, and in the end, that was clearly for the best.

So Ezra opened a door and went forward five years, meeting Atlas in the cafe they’d agreed on before he left. In what felt like a matter of hours to Ezra, Atlas had advanced to twenty-eight and lost the accent, but not the swagger. He slid into the chair opposite Ezra and grinned. “I’m in,” he said.

“They bought it?” The Society knew what Ezra could do, but still. Who were they to say he wasn’t dead?

“Yes.”

“So what’d they do with… you know. Me?”

“Same thing they do to every eliminated candidate. Erased you,” Atlas said. “Like you never existed.”

Perfect. “And even without the ritual…?”

Atlas raised a glass. “The Society is dead; long live the Society.”

Continuity into perpetuity. Time, as ever, went on.

“So what next?” asked Ezra, blazing with the prospects yet to come.

They kept their meetings up sparingly, a year at a time. Neither of them wanted Ezra to age unnecessarily; for him, time passed differently, but it was still passing. They were waiting for the six, Atlas said. The right six, the perfect collection, including Ezra. Atlas, meanwhile, would have to work his way up, to ensure he would be the next Caretaker of the archives (theirs had been quite old already, which aside from wealth beyond measure made an excellent qualification for impending retirement), and then once Atlas managed it, he would be able to start hand-selecting the candidates himself. He would choose the perfect team of five—one to die, of course, at the initiates’ choosing, though even that unlucky soul would be someone carefully and thoughtfully selected—and then Ezra, the sixth, would be at the helm of it.