The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(7)

A small escape, but it was one, still.

She graduated from the Osaka Institute of Magic and got a job as a waitress in a cafe and tearoom near the magical epicenter of the city. The best part about being a waitress where magic did most of the legwork? Plenty of time to read. And write. Reina, who’d had countless agricultural firms ready to pounce the moment she’d graduated (several of them for rival companies from China and the United States as well as Japan), had done everything she could to steer clear of working amid the vastness of planting fields, where both the earth and its inhabitants would drain her for their purposes. The cafe contained no plants, certainly no animals, and while from time to time the wooden furniture would warp under her hands, going so far as to longingly spelling her name in the exposed rings, it was easy enough to ignore.

Which wasn’t to say people had ceased to come looking for her. Today, it was a tall, dark-skinned man in a Burberry trench coat.

To his credit, he didn’t look like the usual capitalist villain. He looked a bit like Sherlock Holmes, in fact. He came in, sat at a table, and placed three small seedlings on its surface, waiting until Reina had risen to her feet with a sigh.

There was nobody else in the cafe; she assumed he’d taken care of that.

“Make them grow,” he suggested, apropos of nothing.

He said it in a restrained Tokyo dialect rather than a typical Osaka one, which made two things very clear: One, he knew precisely who she was, or at least where she was from. Two, this was obviously not his first language.

Reina gave the man a dull look. “I don’t make them grow,” she said in English. “They just do it.”

He looked unfazed in a smug sort of way, as if he’d guessed she might say that, answering in an accented English that was intensely, poshly British. “You think that has nothing to do with you?”

She knew what he expected her to say. Today, like all days, he would not get it.

“You want something from me,” Reina observed, adding tonelessly, “Everyone does.”

“I do,” the man agreed. “I’d like a coffee, please.”

“Great.” She waved a hand over her shoulder. “It’ll be out in two minutes. Anything else?”

“Yes,” he said. “Does it work better when you’re angry? When you’re sad?”

So, not coffee then. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There are other naturalists.” He fixed her with a long, searching glance. “Why should I choose you?”

“You shouldn’t,” she said. “I’m a waitress, not a naturalist.”

One of the seedlings split open and dug into the wood of the table.

“There are gifts and there are talents,” the man said. “What would you say this is?”

“Neither.” The second seedling cracked. “A curse, maybe.”

“Hm.” The man glanced down at the seeds, then up at Reina. “What are you reading?”

She’d forgotten she still had the book tucked under her arm. “A translation of a manuscript by Circe, the Greek witch.”

His mouth twitched. “That manuscript is long lost, isn’t it?”

“People read it,” Reina said. “They wrote down what it contained.”

“About as reliable as the New Testament, then,” the man said.

Reina shrugged. “It’s what I have.”

“What if I said you could have the real thing?”

The third seedling shot up, colliding with the ceiling, and when it fell, it dug into the grains of the floor.

For a few seconds, neither of them moved.

“It doesn’t exist,” Reina said, clearing her throat. “You just said so.”

“No, I specifically said it was long-lost,” the man said. “Not everyone gets to see it.”

Reina felt her mouth tighten. It was a strange bribe, but she’d been offered things before. Everything came with a price. “So what would I have to do, then?” she asked, irritated. “Promise you eight years of harvest in exchange? Make up a percentage of your annual profits? No, thank you.”

She turned and something cracked beneath her feet. Little green roots sprouted from the floor and crept out like tendrils, like tentacles, reaching for her ankles and tapping at the base of her shoes.

“How about,” the man posed neutrally, “in exchange for three answers?”

Reina turned sharply, and the man didn’t hesitate. Clearly he’d had some practice leveraging people before. “What makes it happen?” he asked. His first question, and certainly not the one Reina would have gone with if she’d been the one given the choice.

“I don’t know.” He arched a brow, waiting, and she sighed. “Fine, it… uses me. Uses my energy, my thoughts, my emotions. If there’s more energy to give, then it takes more of it. Most of the time I’m restraining it, but if I let my mind go—”

“What happens to you in those moments? No, wait, let me clarify,” he amended, apparently sticking to his promise of three answers. “Does it drain you?”

She set her jaw. “It gives a little back, sometimes. But normally, yes.”

“I see. Last question,” he said. “What happens if you try to use it?”