The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(61)

Callum watched her leave, half-laughing to himself.

“Can you imagine? Being like that. Born with all that power and still not good enough, still desperate to flee the room. Sad, if you think about it.” Callum pulled out one of the free chairs, sinking into it. “Someone really ought to take that power away from her and put it to good use.”

Explaining what she had just done was unlikely to change Callum’s mind. If anything, it only served to prove his point. “At least she’s relentless,” said Tristan.

“Her? She’s entirely relenting, Caine.” Callum was still smiling; his opinion of Libby, however low it happened to be, wasn’t nearly enough to stifle his mood. “Have any interest?”

“In her? Not remotely.” Tristan slid into the chair where Libby had been. “But I can certainly see why she was chosen for this.”

“I rather can’t believe that’s still a thing you question,” remarked Callum. “What does the ‘why’ really matter? Aside from your personal taste for intrigue, that is.”

Tristan slid a glance at him. “Don’t you wonder?”

“No.” Callum shrugged. “The Society has its reasons for choosing us. What matters is my choices. Why play their game,” he added, smile glinting again, “when I can play my own?”

Callum doesn’t need you. He wants you, Parisa’s voice reminded Tristan. You should ask yourself why that is.

“There’s that doubt again,” Callum said, ostensibly delighted by whatever he could read from Tristan. “It’s so refreshing, really. Everyone else has this irritating frequency, full of jolts and jerks, but then there’s you. A steady, pleasant base.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“It’s like meditation.” Callum closed his eyes, sinking lower in the chair. He inhaled deeply, and then, slowly, opened them. “Your vibes,” he drawled facetiously, “are absolutely resplendent.”

Tristan rolled his eyes. “Want a drink?” he said. “Could use one.”

Callum rose to his feet with a nod. “What are we celebrating?”

“Our fragile mortality,” Tristan said. “The inevitability that we will descend into chaos and dust.”

“Grim,” Callum offered appreciatively, closing a hand around Tristan’s shoulder. “Try not to tell Rhodes that or she’ll start decaying all over the place.”

Because he could not resist, Tristan asked, “What if she’s tougher than you think she is?”

Callum shrugged, dismissive.

“I’m just curious,” Tristan clarified, “whether that would please you or send you into a spiral of existential despair.”

“Me? I never despair,” said Callum. “I am only ever patently unsurprised.”

Not for the first time, Tristan considered how the ability to estimate people to the precise degree of what they were must be a dangerous quality to have. The gift of understanding a person’s reality, both their lightness and darkness, without the flaws of perception to blur their edges or lend meaning to their existence was… unsettling.

A blessing, or a curse.

“And if I disappoint you?” Tristan prompted.

“You disappoint me all the time, Caine. It’s why I’m so very fond of you,” Callum mused, beckoning Tristan toward the library and its finer bottles of vintage scotch.





NICO



IT STOOD TO REASON, given Eilif’s appearance in his bathroom sink, that the wards had a hole of some kind. Not that magic was so easily simplified to concrete matters of holes or solidity or otherwise, but for all intents and purposes, the wards intended to keep people out of the Society must have been faulty on the basis of precisely that: they were intended for people.

The library’s archives, at least, had seen fit to provide Nico with something of a primer on creatures and their respective magics, for which he had required Reina’s knowledge of runes and antiquated linguistics to fully grasp. There had been no recent treatises on the subject, owing first to hunting and then to the (not-dissimilar) prospect of academic study that was hardly distinct from captivity. The practice of “conservation” where it came to magical species had become so mistrusted among the creatures themselves that, according to Gideon, most had either disappeared or chosen to align themselves—as his mother had—with fairly dubious magical sources.

“My father is either dead or hiding,” Gideon had explained to Nico once, “not that it matters which, as I don’t expect to ever hear from him. I’m quite sure I have siblings all over the world, belonging to any variety of species. Doubtless he acknowledges none.”

Gideon had said it in a factual manner at the time, wholly unemotional about the prospect, and Nico hadn’t bothered to question him any further. Gideon already had plenty of psychological trauma without adding a father fixation to the mix, so if anything, the absence of Gideon’s father was probably a blessing.

Nico’s single concern was, as always, keeping Gideon’s mother out. Once the Society’s perimeter was secured, he could return his attention to the study of Gideon’s remaining fractures without fearing he’d become responsible for a massive security breach.

Despite trusting Reina to accurately translate runes for him as he’d requested, Nico had hoped not to have to explain the reasons for his little foray into rare extracurricular study. True to form, Reina required little explanation.