The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(77)

But in the end, it was all so exhausting she simply turned and pulled open the door, planning nothing beyond the certainty of walking through it.

Immediately: a coat would have been a good idea. She shivered in the dark, glancing up the block toward Nico’s apartment. A thought, definitely, but if there was ever anyone to be unsympathetic—or even sympathetic, but in an enormously unhelpful way—it would be Nico, who had loathed Ezra on sight.

Not to mention that if she went to Nico, she’d have to discuss the visitor she’d just received.

“Elizabeth Rhodes?” the woman had asked in her Bronx accent. If not for the expensive scarf tied around her natural hair, she might have looked like one of those campaigners who stopped people on the street to talk about the environment or veganism, or possibly the hazards of imperiling their immortal souls. “If I could just have a moment of your time—”

Libby shivered and turned left, heading for the train station.

She wondered why they had not been warned that other organizations might come recruiting. Atlas had mentioned the Forum’s existence, fine, but he’d left out that for two days of their initiation period, they would be vulnerable to interception.

Was it a trial of some sort, as the installment had been? Was her loyalty being tested?

“Miss Rhodes, surely you’ve thought about the natural elitism of the Society’s mere existence,” the woman, Williams, had said. “No one else in your family is magically trained, are they? But I wonder,” Williams mused softly. “Could the Society have saved your sister if they had ever shared what they had known?”

It was a question that Libby had asked herself hundreds of times before. In fact, for a time it had left her sleepless, particularly when she was first approached by NYUMA. The thoughts, torturous and destructive, were always the same: If she had only known more, or if she had just been trained sooner, or if someone had told her earlier…

But she already knew the answer. For years, she’d researched at length. “There is no cure for degenerative diseases,” she replied, with the confidence of someone possessing dismal, intimate knowledge of the fact.

Williams had arched a brow. “Isn’t there?”

It was a trap of some sort. Whether it was a test or not, it was certainly a trap. Someone was toying with her personal history, manipulating her with it, and Libby didn’t care for it. If there was one thing she’d learned from working alongside Callum, it was that feeling too much or too fully only meant she wasn’t thinking with her head.

It wasn’t the Society’s fault, Libby had argued in response, that capitalism prevented medeian healthcare from being available to mortals. If medeian methods were priced according to empathy, then yes, fine, perhaps one could blame the research for existing privately—but it would have gone through both the mortal and medeian corporations first; it would have come at so inflated a cost that even if a cure existed, it would have bankrupted her family to try and use.

“So your sister deserved to die, then?” asked Williams blankly.

Which was when Libby had slammed the door.

She had not spoken about Katherine to anyone in years. She thought of her sister from time to time, but only distantly, as something she kept at arm’s length. As a measure of sanity, she had ruled out wondering whether something could have been done; in fact, she had already driven herself half mad considering it. The idea that a stranger might have suddenly brought everything to the surface felt a bit manipulative, and certainly unwelcome.

Was this the Society’s doing? They would know about Katherine Rhodes, whom Libby had called Kitty as a child, and whom her parents had rightfully adored. Katherine, who had died at sixteen to Libby’s thirteen, wasted away in a hospital bed at the whims of a magicless body that slowly killed her. The administrators at NYUMA, when asked, had told Libby her abilities had likely not come to fruition until after the stress of losing her sister had faded away. Katherine, they said, had been ill for years, requiring most of the attention from her parents, and thus Libby would not have focused on her abilities even if she had noticed she had them. It would take work to catch up, they said.

“Could I have saved my sister?” she asked, because survivor’s guilt was sharpest in retrospect.

“No,” they told her. “Nothing exists to reverse the effects of her illness, or even to slow it.”

It had taken Libby two years of manic research to prove them right, and then two more to finally lay thoughts of her sister to rest. She might not have managed it at all if not for Nico; “Oh, buck up, Rhodes, we’ve all got problems. Doesn’t mean you get to waste the time she never got,” was his take on the situation—confessed to him at the height of finals delirium, and clearly a massive mistake—at which point Libby had slapped him, and eventually Ezra had intervened. Nico was placed on probation and Libby told herself she would beat him in every class if it killed her.

She kissed Ezra for the first time that same night.

The Society would have known all that, minus the inconsequential details of her personal life. They would have known about Katherine, so maybe this was a test, but it wasn’t as if the circumstances of her origin story weren’t easily discoverable information for anyone who wanted them. A late-blooming medeian with a dead sister? Not terribly complicated to put the pieces together, particularly for an organization with comparable resources. Either the Society knew precisely what to taunt her with in order to test her loyalty, or the Forum had wanted to give her a compelling reason to doubt the Society.