The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(88)

“It hasn’t been an hour,” he said, visibly dumbfounded.

“Are you mad?” Tristan spat, seeming to fumble for words. His eyes, Callum observed, were widest, though it was difficult to tell which emotions were uniquely his. Callum could feel a variety of things from Tristan: sadness, disbelief, and then, at the tail end, distrust.

Ah, he thought with a grimace, and looked up, catching Parisa’s eye as she smiled at him.

“Time to wake up,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

In an instant, they were all back in the painted room, standing still, clothes dry.

As if they had never moved.

“I said no astral planes,” Callum said, irritated, though he had to give her credit. He hadn’t noticed anything; not one detail of the house had been amiss, and the rain had been a nice touch.

“So I should be dead, then?” she scoffed. “And anyway, we weren’t on an astral plane. We were in someone else’s head.”

“Whose?”

“Nico’s,” Parisa said, as Nico blinked, startled. “Sorry,” she added insincerely, turning to him.

Retroactively, Callum realized why she had begun with such a simple question, electing to misdirect him while she addressed Nico within the first minute. Clever girl, he thought grimly.

“You were rather an easy target, Varona. Guileless,” Parisa offered to Nico in explanation. “Fewest impermeable walls.”

“Thank you?” Nico said, though he was staring at her, still unconvinced that she was real.

“That’s an hour,” said Dalton, exhaling with relief as he glanced at his watch. “Though I’m not sure how to declare a winner.”

“Callum, of course,” said Parisa. “He did the most magic, didn’t he? I could hardly even fight back,” she said, turning to him.

“Did I?” he echoed, and watched her mouth twitch.

“Yes,” she said. “I may have put us somewhere you couldn’t actually harm me, but you beat me nonetheless. You broke me, didn’t you? So you’ve won.”

But he could feel the triumph radiating from her; it was sickening and putrid, rancid and rotting. She was overripe with it, devolving to decay. She was deadness taking root in fertile soil, resurrecting in the abundance of his loss.

He had genuinely broken her, that much was undeniable. Her death, even in noncorporeal form, had been real. But still, there was no question she’d let him find the pieces to break, knowing he would do it. Nothing she had revealed to him was a lie, but in taking advantage of her weakness, he’d revealed far more of himself. She, after all, understood thought: specifically, that something, once planted, could never be forgotten.

Now Callum’s mistake was obvious: he had thought to prove himself strong, but nobody wanted strength. Not like his. Strength was for machines and monsters; the others could not relate to faultlessness or perfection. Humans wanted humanity, and that meant he would have to show evidence of weakness. He could see Tristan failing to meet his eye and knew it, that Parisa had beaten him, but this was only a single round. For his next trick, he would have to let the smokescreen of what he’d been today disappear.

“Callum, then,” said Dalton, turning to the others. “Would anyone like to review what we saw?”

“No,” said Reina flatly; speaking, for once, for all the others. She turned to Parisa with something like sympathy, which Callum observed with a grimace.

He would have to make them believe he could be weak. Perhaps only one person would be willing to believe it of him, but Parisa had already proven that to be considerable enough.

There was no stopping what one person could believe.





TRISTAN



IT HAD STARTED with a question.

“What do you think we should do?” Tristan had asked, summoning the bottle of absinthe and raising it to his lips.

He should have known Parisa would have an answer. For every question, but specifically that one. She would not have come to him empty-handed.

“I say,” she replied, cleverly undoing one of the buttons of his shirt, “we should make our own rules.”

That night was a blur to consider in retrospect, which was something Tristan wished he could have said at the time. Unfortunately he had been perfectly clear-eyed and conscious when he slid his tongue between Libby’s lips, knowing both who she was and what he ought to have been—which was, ideally, able to prevent himself from stumbling into depravity and, quite probably, doom. Regrettably, he wasn’t.

Parisa may have been the reason this all started—cleverly, and with what Tristan assumed to be centuries of atavistic female guile—but he had made no attempts to stop, and there was no recovering from what he now understood he craved.

And truly, it was a craving, nothing so intentional as wanting. Some chemical reaction was responsible, or demonic possession, or some tragic malformation that other people wrote books about surviving. The absinthe had certainly encouraged him, spreading like warmth through his limbs, but whatever it was Tristan suffered, he was faintly aware he’d been suffering it already. The symptoms preempted the condition, or perhaps the condition had existed (blindly, deafly, and dumbly) all along.

That Libby Rhodes was primarily a physicist was never to be discounted. Even now, her touch rumbled through his bones like the tremors of the earth itself.