The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(93)

He glanced up at Tristan, who raised his own glass numbly to his lips. Like always, there was a blur of magic around Callum, but nothing identifiable. Nothing outside of the ordinary, whatever Callum’s ordinary even was.

“Anyway,” Callum went on, “I noticed that if I did certain things; said things a certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her… soften towards me.” The brandy burned in Tristan’s mouth, more fumes than flavor. “I suppose I was ten when I realized I had made my mother love me. Then I realized I could make her do other things, too. Put the glass down. Put the knife down. Unpack the suitcase. Step away from the balcony.” Callum’s smile was grim. “Now she’s perfectly content. The matriarch of the most successful media conglomerate in the world, happily satisfied by one of the many boyfriends half her age. My father hasn’t bothered her in over a decade. But she still loves me differently; falsely. She loves me because I put it there. Because I made myself her anchor to this life, and therefore she loves me only as much as she can love any sort of chain. She loves me like a prisoner of war.”

Callum took a sip.

“I feel,” he said, blue eyes meeting Tristan’s. “I feel immensely. But I must, by necessity, do it differently than other people.”

That, Tristan supposed, was an understatement. He wondered again if Callum were using anything to influence him and determined, grudgingly, that he did not know.

Could not know.

“I,” Tristan began, and cleared his throat, taking another sip. “I would not wish to have your curse.” “We all have our own curses. Our own blessings.” Callum’s smile faltered. “We are the gods of our own universes, aren’t we? Destructive ones.” He raised his glass, toasting Tristan where he sat, and slid lower in his chair. “You’re angry with me.”

“Angry?”

“There’s not a word for what you are,” Callum corrected himself, “though I suppose anger is close enough. There is bitterness now, resentment. A bit of tarnish, or rust I suppose, on what we were.”

“You killed her.” Even now it felt silly, inconceivable to say. Tristan had been numb at the time, only half-believing. Now it felt like a distant dream; something he’d invented when his mind had wandered one day. The call of the void, that sort of thing. Gruesome ugliness that danced into his thoughts and back out, too fleeting and horrid to be true.

“It seemed like the honorable thing at the time,” said Callum.

It took drastic measures not to gape at him. “How?”

Callum shrugged. “When you feel someone’s pain, Tristan, it is difficult not to want to put them out of it. Do we not do the same for physical pain, for terminal suffering? Under other circumstances it’s called mercy.” He took another sip from his glass. “Sometimes, when I suffer someone else’s anguish, I want what they want: for all of it to end. Parisa’s condition is lifelong, eternal. Degenerative.”

He set the glass on the table, empty now.

“It will consume her,” he said, “one way or another. Do I want her to die? No. But—”

Another shrug.

“Some people suffer bravely. Some clumsily.” He glanced up, catching Tristan’s look of uncertainty. “Some do so quietly, poetically. Parisa does it stubbornly and pointlessly, going on just to go on. Just to avoid defeat; to feel something more than nothing. It is, above all, vanity,” Callum said with a dry laugh. “She is like all beautiful things: they cannot bear the idea of not existing. I wonder whether her pain will grow sharper or more dull after her beauty fades away.”

“And what about those of us who don’t suffer?” asked Tristan, fingering the lip of his glass. “What worth do we have to you?”

Callum scrutinized him a moment.

“We all have the exact curses we deserve,” he said. “What would I have been, had the sins that made me been somehow different? You, I think, have a condition of smallness, invisibility.” He sat up, leaning forward. “You are forced to see everything as it is, Tristan,” Callum murmured, “because you think you cannot be seen at all.”

Callum slid the glass from Tristan’s fingers, leaning across the table. He smoothed one hand over the bone of Tristan’s cheek, his thumb resting in the imprint of Tristan’s chin. There was a moment just before it happened where Tristan thought perhaps he had wanted it: touch. Tenderness.

Callum would have known what he wanted, so perhaps he had.

“I feel,” said Callum, “immensely.”

Then he rose to his feet, long-legged and lean, leaving only the glass where he had been.

It went without saying that for days after, Tristan was quietly in torment. Callum, at least, was no different in his intimacy. They were friends primarily, same as ever, accustomed to their evening digestifs by the fire. There was a companionship to Callum, an ease. There were moments when it seemed Callum’s fingers twitched towards Tristan’s shoulder, or skated reassuringly between the traps of Tristan’s scapulae. But they were only moments.

Libby, meanwhile, kept coolly away, and Tristan’s thoughts of time with her meandered inevitably to the matter of time itself.

As spring began to break unseasonably early, creeping out from beneath the winter chill, Tristan found himself repeatedly outside, approaching the wards that surrounded the Society’s estate. Magic at its edges was thick and full, identifiable in strands as voluminous as rope. There were threads of it from other classes, other initiates, which made for a fun, sleepless puzzle. Tristan would toy with the pieces, pulling at their ends like fraying thread, and watch for any disruption in the pulse of constancy.