The Atlas Paradox, page 16
He made his way across the gallery balustrades to the east wing of the upper floor, padding toward the chapel. The doors were parted slightly and he pushed one open, spotting Reina on the floor below the stained-glass triptych. She sat bathed in the light of the scales for justice, directly beneath the torch for knowledge.
She looked up, spotting Callum, who realized he was wearing a dressing gown and was presently shoeless. Then she looked down again in disinterest, flipping a page in her book.
“The truth is I’m fucking furious,” she said without looking up. She hadn’t said it in English, but it was familiar enough a sensation that he easily grasped the point. “And it’s terrible. It’s so much worse to be angry,” she said, for him to understand that time, “because I’m not supposed to care.”
Callum considered telling her that the world was essentially a stupid place and they were all basically flawed in the same ways. There were variations here and there, but functionally they were all idiots.
Instead he sighed and walked forward, sitting beside her on the cold wood.
“If you’re a god,” he offered indulgently, “does that mean you’re immortal?”
“How should I know? And regardless, gods die,” she said. Her tone was guarded, waiting for him to contradict her. “They die all the time.”
He shrugged. “So then what makes them gods?”
“People to worship them, I guess.” She flipped the page again, then looked up. “What did it say about me? Whatever it was you read from the archives.”
“Stuff about your family.” He leaned his head against the wall, though for once he didn’t feel pain, or tiredness. Perhaps he’d finally slept it away. “How you have more power than anyone but you’ll never be able to use it.”
He had told Tristan once that they all had the exact curses they deserved. He understood his own, that he felt everything because he wanted terribly, with all of his being, to feel nothing. Because to feel nothing would be to finally no longer feel pain.
“There’s a quote,” Reina said. “From Einstein. About how God doesn’t roll the dice.” She paused. “It doesn’t mean god like God. It means nothing in the universe is random.”
“Mm,” said Callum, closing his eyes.
“But I used to not believe that,” Reina continued. “I believed the universe was completely random, and that’s what eluded us. Because we all want to believe we are fundamental in some way. We are our own myths, our own legends. We give things reason. We are reasonable creatures and so everything must have its place, its purpose—but we are also egotistical creatures, and so we give ourselves reasons that don’t exist.”
Callum considered a world where nothing was justified or earned. It just was.
“But then, do I have this power because something happened randomly in the universe?” Reina said. “Does entropy, chaos—does that actually make more sense? That all of this, it isn’t irony just to punish us, it’s randomness? We’re just things, trinkets bouncing around in space, trying to make sense of it? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But nature is not completely random—ask a physicist,” she said wryly, or as wry as Reina ever got. “It has constants, discretion. Consistent rules that are always true and never change.”
“So then your theory is that the alternative to a random universe is … we’re gods,” Callum deduced slowly.
“We are in all the ways that matter,” said Reina, shrugging. “The power is real. The magic we have creates order. Doesn’t it? So, everything may look perfectly random,” she said, staring contemplatively ahead, “but in fact it’s not to us.”
It made an odd sort of sense. Or at least managed to ease something painful. It was probably still nonsense, but it wasn’t the worst nonsense Callum had ever heard. He’d suffered far worse inside his head.
“So,” Callum said. “What now?”
“We see what the archives are hiding from me,” Reina said.
“Couldn’t I just request it for you?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “But isn’t it more interesting to experiment this way?”
Valid point. Their day jobs were scholarly, after all. “And then?”
“Then we find out what it’s giving to Dalton.”
She sounded certain. Not quite cold, but something metallic.
Iron. That’s what it was.
He could respect that. And it was better than stale crackers. Possibly more interesting than substance abuse. Or at the very least, a certain degree less cliché. Not that he planned to admit that she was right about that, or anything.
“You’re not trying to save me, are you?” Callum said. The idea repulsed him.
“No,” Reina replied. “Not to feed into your whole ‘nobody cares’ thing, but I really don’t give a shit about you.”
Perfect.
“So should we test it? The influencing? We could try it on a person first,” he said.
He watched something beautifully sinister alight around the edges of Reina’s mouth.
“I know just the person,” she said.
So Callum closed his eyes, temporarily satisfied.
. NICO .
Tristan’s chest had not moved in several seconds.
From where he crouched over Tristan’s body on the floor of the painted room, Nico glanced up at the clock on the mantel, watching it tick and counting silently to himself.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—
Okay, fuck it. The lunacy of this experiment certainly wasn’t going to get better with lasting brain damage. Nico took a brief inhale and aimed a jolt of force into Tristan’s heart, jump-starting it like a faulty engine. The effect was immediate and perhaps overdone—Nico stumbled backward when Tristan shot upright with a gasp, his forehead only narrowly avoiding an impact with Nico’s front teeth.
“Fuck,” Tristan gritted out, panting, as Nico slammed an ankle (again) into the Victorian end table that was consistently in the way. Nico felt another little tremor of metal in his mouth, a radioactive aftertaste from the effort of reviving Tristan. He stalled for time, breathing deeply, until the aftershocks had passed, then looked up to find Tristan propped up on his elbows, legs rag-dolling out while he caught his breath.
“Should we try again?” asked Tristan, which was so like Nico himself he wasn’t sure which one of them to strangle. (Not Tristan, they’d already tried that.)
“Why, so you can just die slower over time?” Nico reminded him, irritated at having to be the voice of reason, a role he did not fill naturally and should not have been forced into.
But Tristan was starting to look a little gray around the edges, which meant someone would have to do it. He was like a bad animation of himself, and Nico wasn’t doing much better. Not that he wanted to discuss it.
“This was supposed to be straightforward,” muttered Nico to himself. Additionally, it was supposed to be more of a one-time thing, not a third strike for the evening on a night that was already the third strike that week. “Are you really not seeing anything different?” he asked Tristan, regrettably using a tone he felt certain would elicit an irrational response, which of course it did.
“Maybe it’s your fault,” Tristan shot at him, which was clearly a no. “How hard is it to almost kill someone?”
“I don’t know, Tristan, you tell me,” Nico snapped, at which Tristan’s mouth tightened, irritated.
Great. So things were going well.
Not much had changed since the first time Nico had tried to kill Tristan, which was well over a month ago now. Then, like now, Tristan had simply hovered in the wake of death instead of miraculously shifting his vision to perceive time and space as he claimed he was meant to do. Each time had been slightly different, but always ultimately the same: whether Tristan meditated first or listened to heavy metal first or slept first or kept himself awake all night, the outcome was that Tristan’s body loved dying and clearly wanted to do it more than Tristan’s brain thought he should.
“Maybe we need a bigger gamble,” Nico said. “Bigger risk.” That was Nico’s modus operandi, after all. If things weren’t working, make them worse.
Tristan rubbed the back of his neck. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” Nico wanted to discuss it with Reina, but Tristan had made it clear that he didn’t want other people to know about this. Probably because it sounded insane, which it very definitely was. “But whatever your magic is, it obviously doesn’t want to be disturbed unless it has to be.”
“Maybe the problem is that I don’t believe I’m actually dying.” Tristan’s natural expression of resting asshole face was starting to bother Nico less, but only marginally. At the moment he wanted badly to punch Tristan in the mouth.
“So you want me to be a more convincing murderer?” Nico snapped.
“Maybe I do.” Tristan shook his head, glaring at Nico—who was obviously at fault, why not. “I should have asked Parisa to do this,” Tristan muttered to himself. “I have absolutely no doubt that she’d kill me given half a chance.”
“She also wouldn’t save you. Which honestly sounds ideal to me at this point.” Nico let his head fall back against the floor, staring at the ceiling.
He had been wondering what to make of Tristan since the confession of his upbringing, clearly shared to soothe something blistering between them. Nico had thought, idiotically, that knowing something about what made up the parts of Tristan Caine would make him more sympathetic to Tristan overall, or more patient in the aggregate. But patience was not something Nico excelled at in general, and no matter how tragic Tristan’s background, this was all getting hugely out of hand.
“Look,” Nico said. “I don’t know how much more of this I have in me.”
He heard Tristan’s breath falter, the motion of his chest hitching. “Oh.”
“I want to help you,” Nico added. “But maybe you’re right, maybe I can’t.”
Tristan didn’t say anything.
“Because for this to work,” Nico continued, “you have to find the exact right conditions of believing you’re about to die. And if you think I’m too soft to kill you, or too weak, or—”
“I don’t.” Tristan’s voice cut through the silence of the room. “I think—”
He stopped.
“I think you’re probably quite a good person,” Tristan muttered.
Nico said nothing, assuming it to be an insult.
“Which is ultimately the same problem,” Tristan finished gruffly. “Because if you’re that good, then yeah, I can’t possibly believe you’ll let me die. Or that I’m actually in danger.”
“Great,” Nico said glumly, staring into the flames of the painted room’s hearth. “So I’ve just wasted a month of my life, then.”
“Yes.” Tristan struggled upright, pausing for a moment before rising completely to his feet. “Which I appreciate,” he added with aggressive distaste as he stood over Nico.
Nico wondered for a moment if Tristan might offer a hand to help him up from the floor. He hoped not. Something about this whole situation was starting to mess with him. Maybe it was that he and Tristan shared some kind of fundamental devastation, some advancing degree of decay that neither wanted to confess aloud, but which both knew to share one name. And that name was Libby Rhodes.
Helping each other only seemed to make the devastation worse.
“Night,” said Nico, pointedly closing his eyes. He would live here now, on the floor of the painted room, if that’s what it took.
“Night.” Tristan paused for a moment, but not much longer than that. Then he padded out of the room, his footsteps receding down the corridor as Nico gradually opened his eyes again, staring into the fireplace.
He wondered what Gideon was doing. Wondered if Gideon had found Libby, obviously, but also if Gideon had laughed that day or pondered something stupid that only Nico would understand. Nico was starting to miss the little things, the painful ordinariness of existing in Gideon’s periphery. The things he sent to Nico throughout the day that contributed to some shared language—some thread of stupid, easy amusement that bound them both so tightly that even while apart, Nico knew exactly what made Gideon laugh and Gideon, too, knew that Nico did not like his eggs flipped or his competency questioned. The way he knew that Gideon would say, Nicolás, you said that you would help him. Or I know you, Nicky, and the one thing you are not is a liar or a quitter. Even if you are also the dumbest idiot I’ve ever known.
Something in Nico ached and he curled up on his side, facing away from the hearth. He stayed there for a second, listening to the clock tick. The crackle of flame gradually fell away until the shadows crept up from the floor, the room filling with darkness.
Then Nico rose to his feet, making his way up the stairs.
From a physicist’s perspective, everything Tristan had explained about his powers made sense and should work. That was the maddening part, that theoretically Tristan had every reason to be right. His description of his own magic, the melding of space and time into space-time, seemed consistent with a fourth dimension that only Tristan could see. And Tristan’s explanation for the look of it, the way particles moved, sounded consistent with Brownian motion: that the movements that seemed random were not actually random, but ordered relative to something that Tristan could apparently understand.
“If I could figure out its motions,” Tristan had said, “I could control it.” And what Nico had not confessed was that if Tristan could control it, then he could do more than Nico. More than Libby, too.
Because if Tristan could control the motion of things down to their quanta—down to the fundamental particles of their energy—then he was more than a physicist. He was not limited by the physical world or bound by the properties of force. He could also alter the chemical. He could travel through time. He could identify the materials of the universe, and if he could find them, he could move them. Create them. He could reverse entropy, master chaos. In fact, there would be no such thing as chaos anymore—no randomness, no spontaneity. It was no longer a world made up of things, but of events, systems, paths of a larger design that the rest of them, ignorant as they were, mistook for something human: A will. Fate. A plan. The universe through Tristan’s eyes would be orderly—and that, more than anything, was the closest thing Nico could imagine to omnipotence. It was as close to divine as anything could possibly be.
And Tristan couldn’t access it, all because Nico did not actually want Tristan to die.
There was something very ridiculous about that.
“Have you chosen your topic of study?” Dalton had asked Nico earlier that day, coming upon him in the reading room. Nico was holding a book in his hands, something he had not been intending to read. His goal, he reminded himself, was to understand Gideon. To have answers for Gideon. There was still nothing more important, and ultimately no other reason for Nico’s continued presence in this house.
But there was also something calling to him. Some awakening of his own sense of wonder that he blamed on Tristan Caine. Because nothing about Nico’s magic had been sufficiently interesting before—neither his abilities nor his limitations—until he finally understood that there was more of it to be had. Gideon had said that if his theory was right, then someone who could travel in time did not necessarily have to be more powerful than Nico—that perhaps that skill could be very narrow, very limited—but if Tristan was right, then that did not have to be true. And so, for the first time, Nico de Varona had asked for a book from the archives that was not about creatures, not about evolution or classification or genetics, but about life.
Aviditas. Appetite. Aviditas vitae, the wanting to live. The hunger for it, which drove everything. Nico knew it to exist because he had seen Reina create it. He knew it to be powerful because he believed Tristan to be correct. He now believed the desire to live to be more than philosophy, more than psychology, but rather, a primordial principle of physics.
That things would unravel given half a chance was part of an intricate infrastructure. Entropy was law—the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to be precise—and therefore written into the codification of existence. Some human animus, some fundamental consciousness, was still an element of naturalism, and therefore of the physical world, but perhaps to master entropy was to master more than just some formless rule of chaos. Perhaps what it meant was the possibility of control over the cosmology of life itself.
What would it mean to create that spark of life? To have mastery over it? To birth it or destroy it at will? What mysteries of the universe could they uncover if they stopped associating all forms of danger with the inevitability of death?
Which was why it was a simple matter to silently dismantle the lock on Tristan’s bedroom. To step quietly across the floor and hold his breath, waiting to determine the motion of Tristan’s chest. To tell himself that if Tristan was in fact wrong, if Tristan’s calculations of being doomed to failure were even remotely incorrect, then there was a lesson there worth knowing, a certainty worth defying. Because this—Nico being here, alive, breathing, in existence at the same time as Tristan Caine, despite all the versions of their lives in which they did not meet—this confluence of events was not, could not be randomness. This was relativity at work, wasn’t it? That Nico existed relative to Tristan, and as a result, their research was fundamentally intertwined. Their experiences were shared. Caring for Gideon had driven Nico here, and existing beside Libby had pushed him, and pushed Tristan, and everything that had led to her loss could not be random. It wasn’t chance. It was by design, and if Nico could see the design, then somehow he could change it. He could change the ending and start again.
Tristan slept on his back, restless. Nico put out a hand, letting it hover above Tristan’s chest.
And then he slammed it down, applying the maximum force to Tristan’s heart just after Tristan’s eyes shot open, the instinctive reflex of terror waking him up with a strangled gasp.
