The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(65)

“Varona.” He heard Libby’s voice from somewhere in the pit of his stomach, the chatter of his teeth limiting him to nothing more than a grunt in reply. “Jesus Christ.”

She sounded as disapproving as she always did, so there was no telling whether she was real or imagined. The pounding in Nico’s head was deafening now, the ache from his shoulders to his neck enough to blind him with the pressure between his eyes, behind his sinuses. He could feel the fabric of his shirt being peeled from his chest and stomach, probably soaked through with sweat, but there was no stopping, not now, and why waste it? He had fixed the cystic areas of magical build-up and rot, and so turned his attention to the vacancies and gaps.

He could feel himself being dragged toward heat, waves of it unevenly covering him through flickers of what must have been flame. The so-called ‘great room’—the room for which there was a drawing room to begin with—had a hearth, so presumably Libby, if she were actually there and not merely in his imagination, was doing her damndest to keep him from a chill. She must have had plans to sweat out the fever of his effort, which was a lovely thought, all things considered, but possibly insufficient. Worst case, it would be no different from the bandages Nico was currently affixing to the house’s decay; makeshift decoration to slow an eventual demise.

But of course he was only being dramatic. He was not going to die.

“You insufferable manchild. You idiot prince.” Her fondest derivative for him, or at least her most frequent. So much so it felt like something he may have accidentally colonized and put to use. “You are not going to do something so utterly unforgivable as to waste your talent and die, I won’t have it,” Libby informed him, jerking his shoulders upright.

He would have mumbled I know that Rhodes shut up had he not been busy focusing on the task of not dying, and more specifically, on aiming what was currently oozing out of him, which was probably something he needed to survive.

“You deplorable little Philistine,” Libby said. “What on earth were you thinking? No, don’t answer that,” she grumbled, shoving him none-too-gently so that his back rested against something hard, like the leg of a Victorian chair. “Just tell me what you’re doing so I can help you—even though I ought to defenestrate you from that window instead,” she muttered in an afterthought, ostensibly to herself.

Nico grunted something in response, because what remained to be done would be exceedingly draining and, at the moment, impossible to explain in words. Nearly everything that could be sealed or reinforced had been sealed and reinforced, and all that remained were the areas of decomposition, spoiled and thin and requiring less a bandage than an amputation, reconstruction from the inside out. Reversing damage, asking chaos to be structure, was enough to sap him completely, wringing out what little remained. He could feel it in the convulsions of his intestines, the way magic was now being taken from his kidneys, his heart, his lungs.

“You can’t just give yourself away like this,” Libby scolded, ever the admonishing schoolmarm, but then she had taken his hand gruffly and laced it with hers. “Just show me.”

Most likely the moment she touched him she could already feel the direction his power had taken. They’d had a knack for it from the beginning, a way of becoming the other’s beginning and end. They typically declined to do so, of course, because it was invasive. Because him using her or her using him was like temporarily trading limbs, swapping joints. For the rest of the day he would feel like he was lifting Libby’s hand instead of his own or bending Libby’s knee to take a step, and he knew she felt the same way. He would look up to catch her eye and she would grimace like he had taken something from her, and yes, whatever she’d taken from him was equal in value as what she’d had before, and it wasn’t as if either of them had done it on purpose—but still, she was missing something that he now possessed, and vice versa.

They struggled to properly disentwine, or worse. They each became strange, molded copies of the other.

It was only when they had started using their magic to replicate the effects of space that the sense of borrowed power and stolen limbs had stopped feeling like a gruesome, halfhearted sex act and more like true synchronicity. There was a harmony to it when they were reaching together, like the gratified spreading of a broader pair of wings. Difficult to explain what the difference was, except for the sensation of having finally uncovered a proper use, an ideal purpose. They were still inhumanly powerful, yes, but they had been without aim, without direction, so that alone the use of their abilities felt retroactively clumsier, less refined. Combined it was purified and focused, untarnished and distilled.

Nico took a breath without strain for the first time in several minutes and registered with private relief that the joining of Libby’s power with his own had done more than simply alleviate his task. It left him in a cleaner, more precise stream, less the leak that Tristan might have called it (and that Nico would not have called it before if not for realizing how un-leak-like it now seemed to be) and more sleek, contoured and smooth.

Within minutes the pipes had been fixed. Seconds later the wards pulsed without disruption. Nico spent what power remained on a thorough sweep of their spherical perimeter, which left him in an unsteady rush. No faults this time, no little skips of error. No flaws to snag on the wave of his surveillance.

Libby released him and shifted, dragging slightly as she moved.