The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(99)
Then Parisa had leaned closer and said something that Nico had taken like a blow, still reeling even after hours had passed.
“What is it?” Reina asked again, startling him back to their conversation. She was normally comfortable without speaking, but presumably he had been silent for too long.
Nico tugged at a blade of grass, plucking it free. He wondered if Reina could hear it scream when he did so, and flinched at the reminder that the universe had some voice he couldn’t hear. Another detail among many he couldn’t un-know. A blissful piece of foregone ignorance, belonging to a person he would never be again.
“Would you kill someone to have all of this?” he muttered to Reina, though he regretted having asked the question as soon as it fell out of his mouth. Would she ask him why, and would he be able to answer if she did?
But he needn’t have worried. She didn’t even spare a breath.
“Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes, warming silently in the grass.
VII: INTENT
REINA
THE REALM OF THOUGHT wasn’t totally uninteresting as a topic of study, but even so, Reina was pleased to move on. The breaks in subject matter were particularly intriguing because there was always a sense of some invisible, underlying fabric; that they were being directed by currents they couldn’t necessarily see until they’d already absorbed it, swallowed it whole.
Reina had the benefit of being raised amid Eastern philosophies as opposed to Western, which meant she trusted general policies of oneness. Suchness, as it were. She understood, in a way the others did not, the existence of polarities, a mysticism of opposition: that acknowledging the presence of life meant accepting the presence of death. That knowledge necessitated ignorance. That gain meant loss. Ambition suggested contentment, in a sense, because starvation implied the existence of glut.
“Luck is a matter of probability,” said Dalton. He wasn’t always assigned the role of lecturer, which was probably for good reason. He didn’t seem to care for it, as if they had dragged him away from something more important; he had an air of wanting to be elsewhere, or generally belonging to thoughts a great distance from theirs. Still, they had grown familiar enough with him by then that his presence was less that of an administrator and more like a cook they rarely saw, or a housekeeper. Someone providing them with sustenance but not interfering much with their daily lives.
“Luck,” Dalton continued, “is both a magic and a science that has been studied in detail, by medeians and mortals alike. It is chance, but with a loaded die: the lean of likelihood toward a favorable event. For obvious reasons, one’s proclivity for luck is a valuable commodity. Also a common magic, even for the lowest rungs of witches. Now, the issue of unluck—”
“Unluck?” echoed Libby, bewildered.
(Reina had no such confusion. The existence of luck necessarily implied its opposite.)
“Unluck,” Dalton confirmed, “for lack of a better term, is the purposeful disruption of probability. Jinxes, hexes, curses—”
“Battle magic?” asked Nico, who despite his best intentions had a tendency to be mercilessly literal.
“Unluck,” Dalton repeated. “Hexes are of course the most direct form; intentional bad luck caused to the victim. The other two—”
“Jinxes are inconveniences, entanglements,” said Libby. “And curses are deliberate harm?”
She always seemed to phrase things in the form of a question even when she was certain, ostensibly out of a desire to appear unthreatening. (As if any of them would be threatened by something they were all required to study as first year students at university, if not sooner.)
“Academically, yes,” confirmed Dalton. “But for the Society’s purposes, we are less concerned with the results of such magic than we are with their construction. Which curses have proven most effective and why, that sort of thing. Mostly,” he said, his attention straying, as it often did, to Parisa, “how the disruption of luck can be used to unmake a man, unsettling him from the design—or rather, the lack of design—his path should naturally take.”
Parisa’s dark eyes held his for a moment. Dalton cleared his throat.
“Nature is chaos, magic is order, but they are not wholly unrelated. Bloodlines,” Dalton continued, “are a common carrier for mechanisms of unluck—genetic continuity. Very common that a curse will follow genealogy in some way or be passed on to progeny. That sort of magic is much more complex than it seems; anything with such lasting consequences requires a certain degree of sacrifice and loss to the caster.”
Reina’s commentary was rare, but sometimes necessary. “Why?”
The plants beside her slithered with glee, coaxing her to speak further. MotherMother soothe us with your voice it pleases us to hear you!
She crossed one leg over the other, irritated.
“Why?” echoed Dalton at her interruption, looking once again as if he wished he were left alone with his thoughts. “Because although magic and nature have different forms, they are not inseverable: magic has aspects of nature, nature has aspects of magic, and to take one away from either is a corruption to both their forms. It is the disintegration of naturalism itself. A man with a curse will upset the balance of things, warping the universe around him. Luck magic is a corruption as well; for any corruption to hold, the caster must accept, in some way, a fracture—a piece of themselves forever broken, in payment for the imbalance they have caused.”