The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(136)

“Then tell me what to think!”

“I don’t have time to tell you everything,” he said, and summarized for her the basics: Atlas Blakely bad, Society bad, everything mostly bad, Libby gone for her own good.

She took it badly. “My own good? I told you not to decide that for me when we were together,” she snarled at him. “You certainly don’t get to decide it now!”

Appealing as it was to spend his time having another fight with his ex-girlfriend, Ezra didn’t currently have a lot of patience for a heart-to-heart. “Admittedly, there’s a lot of things about our relationship I’d like to change,” he told her briskly. “Most notably its inception. But seeing as I can’t—”

“It was all a lie.” Libby lifted a hand to her mouth. “My god, I believed you, I defended you—”

“It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t—” Ezra paused, clearing his throat. “Entirely true.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. In her defense, Ezra conceded, it was indeed a terrible answer. He had not improved much since their breakup at telling her things she wanted to hear—but in his defense, he’d never actually known the right things to say to begin with.

Gradually, Libby found her voice again.

“But you…” A pause. “You know everything about me. Everything.”

He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. “Yes.”

“You know about my fears, my dreams, my regrets.” Her face paled. “My sister.”

“Yes.”

“I trusted you.”

“Libby—”

“It was real for me!”

“It was real for me, too.”

Most of it.

Some of it.

“Jesus, Ezra, did I even—?”

He watched Libby stop herself from asking if she had ever mattered to him, which was a brilliant idea as far as he was concerned. Even if she could have been satisfied with his answer (likely not), being made to question it at all would cause her irreparable harm. Libby Rhodes, whatever emotional insufficiencies she may have struggled with intrinsically, knew her limits, and she regarded them with abject tenderness, like fresh bruises.

“So why did you abduct me?” she demanded, half-stammering.

“Because of Atlas,” Ezra sighed. Now they were going in circles. “I told you. This isn’t about you.”

“But then—” Another pause. “Where did you take me?”

It was starting to settle in now, he suspected. The sensation of being held captive. The initial shock of being taken was starting to wear off, and soon she would start to consider the plausibility of escape.

“It isn’t,” Ezra began, “entirely a matter of where.”

He stopped before explaining himself any further. She was too clever, after all, and certainly too powerful not to find her way out unless it remained a labyrinth, part of a maze she couldn’t see. People generally only knew how to look at the world one way: in three dimensions. For them, time was exclusively linear, moving in a single direction never to be disrupted or stopped.

Imagine looking for someone and knowing only that they were somewhere on earth. Now imagine looking for someone knowing only that they were on earth during a time with indoor plumbing. In short, nobody would find her. Ideally, Libby Rhodes would even struggle to find herself.

“You can’t keep me here,” she said. It was flat, unfaceted, deadly. “You don’t understand what I am. You never have.”

“I know exactly what you are, Libby. I’ve known for some time. Is the empath dead yet?”

She gaped at him.

“Is that a yes?” Ezra prompted.

“I don’t—how—” She was blinking rapidly. “You know about Callum?”

He set his jaw, taking it for a rhetorical question. Obviously he had already made his answer plenty clear. “Yes or no, Libby.”

“I don’t know,” she snapped, restless. “Yes, maybe—”

He was running late now, though punctuality was never a primary concern for him. He was often late to things, finding time to be such an arbitrary measure of motion. Even in his youth, which was admittedly both enormous and a mere sliver of things, he had never felt tasked by the prospect of arriving anywhere on time. His mother had wasted countless hours haranguing him about it, even on her very last day.

Though, perhaps that was what had drawn him to Atlas, in the end. Ezra knew how to starve, and Atlas knew how to wait.

“I’ll be back,” Ezra told Libby. “Don’t go anywhere.” Not that she could, even if she tried it. He’d built the wards specifically for her, made them molecular, soluble, water-based. She would have to alter the state of her environment in order to break them; to change the elements themselves individually, draining herself more with each step of progress. One step forward, two steps back.

Keys and locks.

“You’re keeping me here?” She sounded numbly disbelieving, though that would change. Numbness would pass, and pain would surely follow.

He lamented it. “It’s for your own safety,” he reminded her.

“From Atlas?”

“Yes, from Atlas,” he said, feeling a rush of urgency. He was running late, but again, that wasn’t the problem; it was what awaited him if he stayed.