The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(135)

The silence between them hollowed out and refilled with a new, tactile wave of doubt.

“The archives would never give you what you want,” Ezra said to Atlas in a low voice. “You can’t hide your intentions from the library itself.”

Silence.

“Are you using someone else to do it?”

“Either you’re in, Ezra, or you’re not,” Atlas told him, grimly exasperated.

“Of course I’m in,” Ezra said. “I’ve never not been in.”

And he hadn’t.

Not before then.

“So then it’s simple, isn’t it? You’ll see what they’re all capable of,” Atlas told him. “Open up a space for yourself among the six and it’s yours, all of it. I wouldn’t deny you any of it.”

Ezra knew better than to question him, even inside his own head.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine, get Parisa to kill Callum and I’ll deal with the rest.”

“Does Libby suspect anything?” asked Atlas.

No. No, he would make sure of it.

“I’ll keep her close,” Ezra said, having once mistaken that for something that could be done.

But truthfully he knew it couldn’t. The more Ezra had pushed her, coaxed her, worshipfully tried to persuade her of his devotion the way he assumed she would want to be loved—the more he hoped to remain inside Atlas’ confidence by maintaining Libby’s—the further she got from him, growing more distant each time they spoke. Ezra had wanted an alliance of sorts, anticipating that Libby would trust him enough to allow insight to Atlas’ plans even if Society rules precluded them. He clung to their years of companionship, their one-sided trust, and set himself to the task of distant espionage, hoping to rely on the one person whose morality he had always assumed would persist, even if their relationship did not. But Libby had pushed back, fruitlessly mistrusting, aimlessly angry.

“I’m not yours,” she said, and drew a line between them, closing the door on his access to her life.

So now, without Libby or even the promise of her, Ezra had no choice but to do something drastic. If he wanted to make sure Atlas Blakely’s plans never came to pass, then he would have to neutralize the Society on his own.

What he needed first was a way to take one of Atlas’ pieces off the board.

Breaking in would be the easy part. Twenty years ago, Ezra had quietly built a failsafe into the wards, precisely his own size and shape, for which no succeeding class of initiates would know to prevent. He could slip easily through it, falling through a dimension no one else could see, but what to do upon arrival was another matter; a troubling one.

Ezra knew, to some extent, which of the six mattered to Atlas and which ones didn’t. Libby, Nico, and Reina were part of the same triumvirate of power, and therefore Atlas would need all three. Tristan… there was something about Tristan that Atlas wasn’t telling him, which made Tristan possibly the lynchpin of Atlas’ plan.

Whichever candidate Ezra chose, Atlas would need to believe they were dead.

An illusion?

No, something better. Something convincing.

Something expensive.

“I know someone who can help you,” came back once Ezra sent feelers around, reaching out to whatever he could find among less law-abiding circles. A mermaid, they said, though the term was slung around with a derogatory aftertaste. “It’ll cost you, but if you can pay…”

“I can pay,” Ezra said.

(He could easily rob a bank in the past and come back to the future scot-free.)

It was someone known only as the Prince who, via the mermaid, gave Ezra the animation. It was sickening and faceless, expressionless and limp. Just a generic, unremarkable diorama of a corpse that had encountered a violent end.

“You’ll have to give it a face,” the mermaid said, her voice shrill and high, like glass breaking. The sound of it set off something in Ezra’s inner ear, leaving him temporarily straining for balance. “It will have to replicate someone you know well enough to complete the animation. Someone whose every expression and motion you know intimately enough to reproduce.”

That, Ezra realized with a momentary stiffening, narrowed his options considerably. But if he were going to take one of Atlas’ prizes, he may as well take the one he knew for a fact that Atlas could not do without. She and Nico were a key and a lock, and Ezra, a person who trafficked in doors, knew one was no good without the other.

Libby had intuited his presence in the room before seeing him. She had keen hearing, and something had always alerted her to his presence. Echolocation, almost. She had known his entry to the house, had felt the disruption of time that he’d caused. For a moment, seeing her eyes change, Ezra suffered a twinge of remorse.

Only for a moment.

Taking her with him was an effort, one which was only narrowly possible given the limitations of his ability to travel. Convenient that she was so small, and so taken unawares. The only sound as they went through the door was her scream, which echoed from the place they’d left until they arrived where he’d intended, and then it ended with a spark, like a match flaring.

Libby spun from his grip and glared at him.

“Ezra, what the fuck—”

“It isn’t what you think,” he said quickly, because it wasn’t. If he could have taken one of the others, he would have. This wasn’t about her.