The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(64)

Magic was no different from rot, corrosion, temperature change, overuse. Contractions and expansions and chipping and peeling and movements of time and space. Funny how laughably simple everything was in the end, even when it belonged to the immeasurable, or the invaluable. Nico would simply have to repair the areas where the wards were weakened, reinforcing them with custom bandages where they may have waned and warped.

Whether his remedies would hold would be a matter of adhesion, which was… slightly difficult, but hardly impossible. Nico would simply bend back into shape what he could and then cover up what he could not.

Distantly Nico was aware he was considering something Gideon would deem “irresponsible”—or possibly it was Libby calling it that, and Gideon was standing somewhere over her shoulder in Nico’s head, grimacing in agreement. Max would not care either way, which Nico foggily pieced together was something he positively adored about Reina. He could go and grab her now, he thought, considering that the extra burst of energy he seemed to consensually borrow from her might be wise to have at present, but at the disastrous implication he might have been behaving unwisely (“Something stupid,” Libby irked snottily in his head) he promptly nudged the idea away, flicking it aside with a twitch of dismissal.

So what if he overexerted himself, just this once? His power was renewable, easily replenished. He would be sore for a night or three and then the discomfort would pass, and no one would have to know the mistake he’d made initially by overlooking it. If Libby lorded it over him that he was more tired than usual, so be it. It wasn’t as if he was much use in the realm of time, anyway. He had no interest in fountains, youthful or otherwise.

The bristle of recalling his current uselessness was enough to secure Nico’s decision. He disliked the anxiety of listlessness, which was as constant to him as Libby’s unrelenting undercurrent of fear. Fear of what? Failure, probably. She was the sort of perfectionist who was so desperately frightened of being any degree of inadequate that, on occasion, the effort of trying at all was enough to paralyze her with doubt. Nico, meanwhile, never considered failure an option, and whether that was ultimately to his detriment, at least it did not restrain him.

If Libby made the mistake of thinking herself too small, then Nico would gladly consider himself too vast by contrast. If anything, the opportunity to swell beyond the ceiling of his existing powers ignited him. Why not reach further, for things beyond the limits of his current grasp? Even when the options were to reach the sun or collide flaming with the sea, safety was a uselessness Nico de Varona couldn’t abide.

So he started with the easiest tasks: unraveling clusters that had formed around the little gapings of the house. Magic was then thinner at the points of disentanglement, so he reinforced them with his own, sealing them until power flowed smoothly instead of being sucked up into little vacuums of inefficiency. It was a mix of push and pull, easing the entropy of decay into orderly avenues of traffic. The house itself resisted, straining a little, and sweat dripped in thin rivulets down the notches of Nico’s spine. His neck ached a little from a muscular knot he’d hardly noticed before, but which throbbed now with discomfort and strain. Evidence, he surmised belatedly, of his weeks of physical misuse while working with space. It wouldn’t be the first time he would be instructed (or berated) to stretch.

He ignored the pins and needles in the nerves that pricked up the length of his neck, shoving aside the pinch that reverberated upwards, thudding, to his head. A headache; marvelous. Possibly he was dehydrated, too. But stopping now would mean having to start up again later, and Nico loathed a task unfinished. Call it hyper-focus, but his fixations were what they were.

Finding no further bird-nests or clumps, Nico set himself to the task of metallurgy, purifying the toxicities that were the result of erosion over time. Briefly he became aware of something nagging at his memory, an old half-attended lecture; magic cannot be produced from nothing much as the case with energy there is no difference Mr de Varona would you be so kind as to lend us your attention please, and then there was an echo of laughter as Nico must have replied irreverently and yes, fine, this unit of study belonged to the principles of time, didn’t it? The inconvenience of knowing his mind had tucked away things for future use, which were in fact too late, because the truth of the matter—that Nico was a mere human currently trying to power the regeneration of a physical structure vastly more sizable than himself—was hardly helpful now that he’d started. He felt the rumble of the ground beneath him; something else slipping out from his control. He may have miscalculated the velocity at which this house would drain him, greedily suckling at what he had intended to carefully measure out. He’d cut himself open too widely, bleeding magic without being able to keep pace or cauterize the wound.

Hm. What to do, at this point? Keep going was the only answer Nico had ever known. Failure, stopping, ceasing to be or to do was never an option. He gritted his teeth, shivering with a chill or a shudder of power that left him like an expulsive, painful sneeze. Ouch, fuck, bless you, the sort of burst that could ultimately break a rib or burst a blood vessel, which most people were not aware a sneeze could do. Funny how that worked; the innocent fragility of being human. There were so many ways to break and so few of them heroic or noble.

At least Libby could use his eulogy as a posthumous lecture, or so he assumed. “Nicolás Ferrer de Varona was an idiot,” she would say, “an idiot who never believed he had limits despite being heartily assured so by me, and did you know it was possible to die from overexertion? He knew, of course, because I told him so plenty of times, but, surprise surprise, he never listened—”