The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(91)

“I think,” he said slowly, “Parisa would plot some sort of mutiny. Take over the train.” He managed a grim laugh that hurt his throat, stinging. “Kill three and save three, somehow, just so she didn’t have to do precisely as she was instructed.”

“Well, there’s that for choices,” said Libby, shrugging, as if anything he’d said were a plausible option. Tristan blinked, attempting to formulate thought, but was interrupted by the motion of Libby carefully marking her place in the manuscript, turning to face him.

“I should probably talk to—” A pause. “I need to, um. My boyfriend is,” she began, and then faded into silence. “I should probably tell him.”

“You aren’t going to…” Fuck. “What are you going to tell him?”

She chewed her lip. “I haven’t decided.”

“You’re not going to—” Stay.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” A pause. “No.”

“So…”

The fact that Tristan could neither fully speak nor fully keep from speaking was a rather upsetting one. He longed for the presence of mind to say nothing, to wander out of here like someone who did this sort of thing all the time, but at the moment he suffered only pinpricks of dehydration and total, unfettered stupidity.

“So you’re just going to tell him, then? Straight out?”

“I don’t know. I need to think about it,” she said.

Clearly she meant alone, which was fair. This thought exercise, unlike the previous one, was not designed for peer review. The impulse to ask think about what? temporarily flooded Tristan’s consciousness, but muscle memory kept him from lingering overlong. Bad enough that he’d done what he’d done; he did not want to suddenly become the sort of person who lingered. He had limbs accustomed to impassive distance, and to his relief, he put it between him and Libby Rhodes with ease.

Weeks later, he had still heard nothing from her. Their first few interactions had been slightly awkward, with occasional averted glances and one truly precarious collision that involved his palm inadvertently skating her hip as they passed each other between tables in the reading room, but there had been no further discussion. There had been no deliberate contact of any kind, nor anything outside of hello or good evening or please pass the bread.

Until, of course, “Electrons.”

“What do you mean electrons?” Tristan asked, feeling groggy and stupid. Ironic that the research spent on thought would leave him so utterly bereft of any, even after nearly two months. Their current topic of precognition (and its study of history’s most famous precognitors, like Cassandra and Nostradamus) had done absolutely fuck-all to prepare him for this sort of interaction, which could only be described as nightmarishly unexpected.

“If you could break things down as small as an electron, you could alter them chemically,” Libby said. “Conceivably, that is.”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Well, it seems a bit more of a… later topic, doesn’t it?”

“What, chemistry?”

“We’re still on psychokinesis.”

“Well, that’s not unrelated to thought in general,” she said. “I actually thought of it when we were discussing the mechanics of the future. By the way, have you thought any further about time?”

She had such a ceaseless way of making him wonder what on earth she was talking about.

“About… time?”

“About whether you can use it.” She, unlike him, seemed blissfully unaware that this was the first time they were speaking to each other privately since he had woken up in her bed. “Precognition is proof the future can be accessed through thought, so why not physically as well? Not to mention that time is a dimension none of the rest of us can even imagine the shape of, much less see.” She fixed him with a direct, unnerving glance. “Unlike you.”

“What, you think I can—?” His misdiagnosed illusionist training was failing him. Magically speaking, he hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of language could be used to describe what she was suggesting. “Traverse time?”

“I have absolutely no idea, Tristan,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking you. It just seems as if you probably have some way to use it, don’t you?”

“Use what?”

“Your specialty.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s yours, isn’t it? So presumably you’re the one who should be using it, not me.”

Foggily, he produced an argument, plucking it from somewhere. “Plenty of magical specialties are designed to be used together. Most naturalists work with—”

“I’m not saying that.” Libby tilted her head, brushing her fringe to one side. She had grown it out; now it was nearly long enough to tuck behind her ear, a fact of which Tristan was troublingly assured. “There’s nothing wrong with it not being yours to use. I simply suspect otherwise.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why suspect otherwise?”

“Truthfully, it’s really more of a guess than a suspicion. What does Parisa think?”

“I—” He stopped, taken by surprise yet again. “What?”