The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(63)

“You can’t just run around playing with things unnecessarily just because you’re bored,” Libby retorted, sounding matronly and exhausted. As if she were his mother or his keeper, which she resolutely was not. “What if you’re needed for something?”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. Something.” She glared at him, exasperated. “Perhaps it stands to reason, Varona, that you shouldn’t do stupid things simply because they’re stupid. Or does that somehow not compute?”

“If I’m bored, you’re certainly bored,” Nico offered in retaliatory accusation. “Just because you won’t admit it doesn’t make it any less true. And following me around to see what I do wrong gives you a bit of a thrill, doesn’t it?”

“I,” Libby replied hotly, “am not following you around. I’m putting myself to good use. I’m using the research we’re learning and applying it where I can, which is precisely what you should be doing.”

“Oh, truly? How magnificent for you. How scholarly you are,” Nico gushed in plaintive mockery, reaching out to pet her head. “That’s a good girl, Rhodes—”

She swatted his hand away, the air around them crackling with the sparks of her intemperance. “Just tell me what you’re up to, Varona. We could go about it faster if you just asked me for—”

“For what? For help?”

She fell silent.

“Would you have asked me for help, Rhodes?” Nico countered, aware how thinly skeptical his voice sounded. “We aren’t different people now just because we’ve come to a single agreement. Or have you forgotten we’re still competing?”

He regretted it the moment he said it, as it wasn’t what he meant. He hardly needed to make an enemy of Libby, and certainly did not aspire to waste time on any rivalries beyond what was necessary for initiation. He did, however, need her to stay out of his private business, and in this case, he very much did not want to hear the inevitable lecture on how he’d inadvertently allowed a misbehaving mermaid into the house. He doubted it would be brief, and he knew it would be followed extensively with questions, none of which he planned to answer.

“So that’s your idea of an alliance, then.” Libby’s voice was flat with anger.

No, not anger. Something more bitter, less malicious than that.

Brittle sadness.

“Let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t,” Nico said, because the damage had already been done, and it wasn’t as if she’d ever been known to forgive him. “We’re not friends, Rhodes. We never have been, we never will be—and,” he added, giving in to a burst of frustration that mixed unrelentingly with guilt, “since I can’t simply ask you to leave me alone—”

She spun away, the last glimpse of her expression one of hollow disappointment. Nico watched her dismount the stairs, taking a sharp turn to disappear from sight as a little echo of Gideon suddenly tutted softly in his head: Are you being nice to Rhodes?

No, of course not. Because there wasn’t a person in the world who could make him feel less adequate simply by existing, and besides. He had wards to fix.

Nico slid irascibly up the remainder of the stairs, taking a turn at the gallery in the opposite direction of the painted room and bedrooms. He would need privacy to work uninterrupted, which meant the ground floor was not an option, and upstairs contained plenty of unnecessary stages for empty grandeur where no one ever went. He closed himself into one of the gilded drawing rooms (it had long ago stopped being a place for aristocratic dances or whatever purpose the British required rooms to draw) and set himself to the task of mindful pacing, once again engaging the twitchy need for motion he habitually found expelling from his limbs.

Ultimately the wards were gridlike, ordered, and therefore easily surveyed for something out of place, which at first glance was nothing. The six of them had designed the structure of the security system in a spherical globe, within which a tightly woven fabric of magical defenses cloaked the Society and its archives. Physical entry would be easily repelled by the shell of altered forces surrounding the house, while intangible magical entry was readily sensed by the internal system of woven, fluid sentience.

How, then, had Eilif managed to slip them in order to wind up in his sink?

Probably best to check the pipes.

Nico closed his eyes with a grimace and examined the house’s plumbing, feeling at the edges for the warps of magic he recognized as his own, or possibly Libby’s. In terms of magical fingerprints, their signatures were almost identical; a consequence of similar training, perhaps. Nico felt another bristle of guilt or irritation or allergies and shrugged it away, trying to focus more, or possibly less. Intuitively it didn’t matter which specific element of magic belonged to him. Libby’s or his own, it would respond just as obediently, mastered by the skill regardless of the hand that cast it.

Sure enough, upon closer inspection there were numerous bubbles and blemishes, little bastardizations of security from what Nico could feel around the pipes and then, upon further scrutiny, between the layers of insulation in the walls. Not enough to prevent a person from emerging corporeally through the cracks—compression was a difficult task, requiring enough energy to set off the house’s internal sensory wards before any conceivable success of entry—but for Eilif, or for some other creature attempting entry? Possibly, if what Reina said about refinement of power was true. It wasn’t as if air ducts or other methods of entry had never been neglected before, and in this case, Nico could feel the way the house’s infrastructure strained beneath their wards, corroded by magic and hard water and whatever else eroded metal over time. He wasn’t much of a mechanic, but perhaps that was precisely the problem. The medeians elected for the Society were academicians, not tradesmen, and they certainly weren’t chosen for their efficiency at knowing when an old house required maintenance. Sentient though it may have been at times, it was still a physical structure, and Nico’s element was physicality. Perhaps this was always meant to be his (or Libby’s) responsibility to maintain.