The Atlas Paradox, page 39
Tristan was scouring the page, looking for the trick as if it were written in invisible ink. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch?” Hilarious. Absolutely hysterical. “You mean you don’t already see it?”
The glare he received from Tristan was a ruthless thing of beauty.
“Rhodes,” Callum explained, “can only transport herself through time through the creation of a massive explosion. How massive? Excellent question, Tristan. We’re talking nuclear,” Callum said giddily. “Lethal force. The bonding of hydrogen isotopes so heavy that it would be like regenerating a star. So enormous and frankly untested that the area may very well remain radioactive for years, to a magnitude that would cause certain death to anyone within miles of the area’s vicinity.” He checked to see that Tristan was following. By the ashen look on his face, he was. “Rhodes’s only chance of creating a wormhole of this magnitude is, as I believe you already know, to leverage the energy created by a perfect fusion weapon—which has heretofore never existed,” Callum sagely pointed out, “and which can only exist if Rhodes herself chooses to incite an explosion with exponentially greater potential for lasting damage than the atomic bomb.”
Tristan said nothing. He knew this, the hopelessness of it, and equally, Callum knew there was nothing more dismally hollowing than determining yourself to have been right all along.
“You may be able to beat the laws of physics, Tristan,” Callum said, “and with Varona’s help, you might be able to win against the laws of nature—but.”
Here Callum stepped closer, watching Tristan brace himself with a steady thud of preemptive rage.
“You will never beat Rhodes’s nature,” Callum triumphantly pointed out. “And that, my friend, is—as I’ve been warning you for nearly two years now—the absolute crux of the thing.”
He could tell that Tristan knew he was right because he could taste it, the sinking feeling, the onslaught of dread. Tristan didn’t look up from Callum’s page of stunningly accurate calculations, because what would he find?
Ah. The delightful taste of withering hope.
There were no other conclusions to draw. There were no other alternatives. In order to bring herself back through time and space, Libby Rhodes would have to choose herself over everyone. Over everything. She would have to find the power to face down her own morality and say fuck it. I matter more.
Which was thoroughly impossible. A comedy of errors to the highest degree. And this was who Tristan had chosen over Callum! This was what he had done, and in the murky plumbing of Callum’s allegedly nonexistent heart, he hoped that Tristan suffered for it. He hoped it would pain Tristan for the rest of his life, and if for some reason it didn’t, then Callum had other plans in mind. He was, after all, cleverer than anyone gave him credit for. He’d spent a year getting fabulously sauced and coming to the inevitable conclusion that, actually, none of this would ever matter, because there was no big bad. There was no villain. Atlas Blakely might have wanted Callum dead, but that didn’t make him the bad guy. Tristan might have betrayed Callum, but he wasn’t the bad guy, either. This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you. This was just what you got. Heartbreak was inevitable. Disappointment assured.
This was the conclusion Callum had landed upon, and he didn’t like it. He accepted it. Understood it. Didn’t care for it.
Still wanted to fuck around for a bit before he was done, though, so.
Here. “I have no dog in this fight,” Callum told Tristan, withholding a smile. Poor Tristan was still staring numbly at the calculations in his hand, and so of course could not see Callum’s barely withheld delight at his delivery of this most delicious and most perfect blow. “I know you know I’m right. Both about this,” he said, flicking the page in Tristan’s hand, “and about Rhodes. But I also know that you’ll come to whatever conclusions you choose, and none of that is up to me.”
“So then why do it?” asked Tristan. His voice was gravelly with resentment, maybe bitterness. Maybe even sadness, but what was Callum supposed to do with that?
“Because I said I would,” Callum said coolly. “Because on the day we took our initiation rites, someone asked me for a promise. I gave it and I kept it.” It was really very simple. These were the decisions that Callum could live with. He didn’t care what happened to the world or whether Atlas Blakely created a new one. Atlas Blakely could create an entire fucking universe and it wouldn’t matter, because nothing mattered. And wasn’t that such lovely irony! Atlas Blakely wanted to make a new world because he was a clinically depressed magical bureaucrat who already knew that nothing mattered.
Honestly, Callum was doing just fine with his grief.
“I’m still going to bring her back.” Tristan looked up and now—god, exhausting—he was aflame with certainty.
“It’s possible,” Callum said mildly.
“We’re different,” Tristan insisted. “All of us. For having been here. For having walked these halls, read these books—”
“Yes, a magical experience, truly,” Callum blandly agreed.
“You can laugh,” Tristan snapped, “but we’re not the victims of our weaknesses that you so obviously believe we are.”
Interesting, Callum thought. He seemed not to have heard himself.
“This was nothing to you,” Tristan continued. “Just another opportunity in a life of opportunity, so fine. You can walk away from this unchanged, good for you. But for the rest of us—for me—”
“Did I say this was about you?” Callum cut in, carefully neutral, but for once, Tristan managed to surprise him.
“Of course it’s about me.” Tristan was snarling, and from the hearth was a coincidental series of cracks and sparks. “I was there, Callum. I was fucking there.”
Tristan’s chest rose and fell with anguish and Callum sat still, bearing the unexpected weight of it.
“Whether you put it there or not,” Tristan said, his voice heavy with irony, “this—between us—it was real for me. You can pretend that it didn’t matter. That I was the one who wronged you. That you had no hand in how things happened. That I made a choice based on nothing, based on my own insecurities and flaws. But I am not such an idiot—I’m not so devoid of feeling,” Tristan spat, “to not be perfectly aware that you and I had something rare and difficult and fucking significant, and in the end it only broke because I broke it.”
Callum’s chest suddenly felt as if it had been compressed with a cartoonishly large mallet.
“So, yes,” Tristan concluded with a jerk of the muscle beside his jaw. “I know this is about me.”
They didn’t speak for several minutes. It was the first time that Callum could recall not being able to sense something intangible about the room or the feelings within it. He realized later that it was because he was the one feeling things. He felt his victory ballooning into rage, pure rage. He felt anger with an intensity that was incandescent with bereavement. He wanted, just as he had wanted at the beginning of this godforsaken year, to murder Tristan. To take him by the throat and slice him into ribbons and serve him like a roast—and also, to meticulously and with great inconvenience to himself weave a flower crown laden with unrequited meaning, with which to adorn Tristan’s incredibly stupid and perfectly functioning head.
Mostly, though, Callum wanted Tristan to suffer profoundly for every honest word out of his mouth.
So he was back where he started, really.
Relieved with the eventual stasis of his conclusion, Callum exhaled. And smiled. People did not like to be contradicted, said Dale Carnegie, master of influencing, apparently. It was best not to criticize, even when people were wrong about silly things like where they had placed their loyalties.
“Good luck,” said Callum. “With everything. Hope it works out between you and Rhodes.”
Tristan’s expression darkened. “Did I not just say—”
But Callum walked past him, ignoring the impulse to stop and listen. Also ignoring the impulse to get a drink. Ignoring most impulses, really, because now he had a plan, and that was more important. Like Atlas Blakely, Callum was going to stick to his plan, even if it was objectively flawed and would lead to either despotism or tears.
He bumped into Dalton on his way out of the painted room.
“Sorry,” said Dalton under his breath, nodding to Callum while hastily averting his glance.
Callum paused.
Glanced over his shoulder.
It was unusual to see Dalton, whom Atlas had said was feeling ill, which Callum of course did not care about, although as far as he could tell, Dalton was perfectly healthy. No, what was odd wasn’t Dalton’s presence, which was never a matter of relevance to Callum. It was something, though. A distinctive and noticeable newness.
Had it been…?
Salt. Smoke. A mix of both. Unusual for Dalton. Something was off, Callum deduced with a frown. There was something deeper, there, than what had been there before.
But that was Parisa’s problem—or certainly anyone else’s but his—so he ignored it, setting off up the stairs while whistling “La Vie en Rose.” It was very freeing to have a plan, Callum thought, passing an open window with a deep breath of wintry air. He could see why Atlas clung so desperately to his own. Spring would come soon, followed by summer, followed by the inevitable smiting of all his enemies—or more accurately, the unavoidable despair and sense of loss that came with being human and alive. Marvelous.
For a man responsible for the brutal deaths of four people—his friends, at that—Atlas Blakely was really on to something.
. REINA .
Reina suspected she’d had a dream about her grandmother, or maybe it was just her grandmother’s house. She never kept track of her dreams much, but she woke up that morning with the sense that she had recently been very small.
No, she remembered now, through a flash of something, a hint of steam. It wasn’t her grandmother making her feel small—it was the Businessman, her stepfather. It was a memory again, the same one she’d had while watching Nico’s initiation ritual. He was looking through her in her café in Osaka. The Businessman, or rather the reaper, whose business was war, and therefore death. She dreamt of the same scene, the same foreign name, the same angry words.
He did it once, he can do it again!
She had not thought about this event since the day Nico had brought it to mind, but doing so must have triggered something slow-acting in her brain. Something just on the tip of her tongue, because here she was, thinking about the Businessman again, which she almost never did, and about the Englishman who’d so angered him, which was not something she’d considered relevant at the time. It had seemed ubiquitous then. Meaningless. But now she remembered the name again retroactively, with a sudden significance, as if a color lingering in the background had recently come to light.
“I had a strange dream,” Reina commented as Nico strode past where she’d been waiting beside the foot of the stairs. He had been whistling something as he took off toward the reading room but froze at the sound of her voice, startled.
“Jesus.” Nico pressed a hand to his chest like she’d shot him, then backstepped to face her. “Sorry, didn’t see you there—”
“I hadn’t forgotten, you know. About Rhodes. Actually,” she added, “I thought we were going to work together to find her.” She paused. “Wasn’t that the agreement?”
Nico blinked, looking like a small boy awaiting a scolding. Then he carefully recovered. “We still can, can’t we? It’s not like the year is over yet.”
“What did Tristan do for the Wessex Corporation?” Reina asked, ignoring Nico’s response. Too little, too late. “I know he was a VC. What kind of technology did he fund?”
“Hell if I know.” Nico shrugged. “Tech, I assume? Software? Doorknobs?”
“You don’t know?” asked Reina blandly.
“We’re not exactly friends.” Nico was looking at her with a strange expression on his face. “You don’t think I somehow replaced you with Tristan, do you?”
“I was just thinking,” Reina said, “that last year, you and Rhodes … the wormhole. The reaction you caused. It was to release enough energy to create it, yes?”
“You helped us do it,” insisted Nico. “Without you, we wouldn’t have—”
“What else could cause it?” asked Reina, who wasn’t looking for flattery. “Fusion. At that size.”
“Oh. Uh.” Nico looked wobbly and destabilized. “I don’t know.”
That didn’t sound like the whole truth. “You don’t know?”
Nico rubbed his temple, thinking of how to explain. “Most things like that, big energy outputs, they require fission to start the reaction.” Fission: splitting an atom into smaller nuclei. “That’s what generates the energy necessary for fusion.” Fusion: combining different particles for the release of energy. “Usually there’s energy lost in fission, which prevents a more explosive fusion reaction, but Rhodes and I—and you,” he clarified quickly, “we were able to bypass that energy loss, so the reaction was—” He frowned, concluding suboptimally, “Well, bigger, I guess.”
“Right.” Reina had already known that. “So then what could replace you and Rhodes?”
“Um. Nothing, to my knowledge.” He looked no more smug than usual, so it must have been true and not hyperbole. “That’s kind of the problem,” he admitted, which explained his tone of hesitation before. “Creating a pure fusion reaction like that would have to be magical, and the energy released would have to be channeled by a medeian of really proficient skill. But for it to work at any significant size, it would also have to be a reaction bigger than anything a single medeian could produce, so even someone really, really skilled would still need to be able t—”
“Would you have killed me?” Reina asked.
At that point Nico looked lost. “What?”
“Would you have killed me?” Reina repeated. “If it had become a race.”
“Oh. You mean last year? No. God, no. Of course not.” He shook his head vigorously.
“Easy to say that now,” Reina observed. “Now that nobody else has to die, right?”
“Well, still. I wouldn’t have.” He shrugged.
“Would you have killed Callum?” Reina asked.
“I—I mean, no,” Nico said, sounding troubled. “No, probably not—”
“Or Tristan?”
By then, Nico’s brow was creased with conflict. “I don’t—”
“Definitely not Parisa or Rhodes,” Reina commented, “so basically, you wouldn’t have killed anyone.” She was trying to decide why this realization was so disappointing when Nico abruptly took the defensive.
“Where is this going?” asked Nico irritably. He was annoyed, obviously, not because he hadn’t considered this before, but because he had been trapped into admitting something that he had not intended to confess.
“Well,” said Reina, “I guess I’m just wondering what the hell you’re doing here.”
Nico stared at her.
“That’s … it?” he asked. Or rather, demanded. “You don’t talk to me for months and this is what you have to say? To ask me why the hell I exist?”
“Not exist,” she said impatiently. “Just … here. You were willing to kill someone hypothetically.”
He frowned. “Yes, and—?”
“But it wasn’t a theory. Or a hypothesis. It was a real requirement.”
“So?” He folded his arms testily over his chest. “You’ve been extremely weird for almost an entire year and now you’re mad because I wouldn’t have murdered you?”
Yes. “Maybe.”
“What—” Nico inhaled. Exhaled.
“You also wouldn’t have killed someone else to keep me alive,” Reina noted.
Nico visibly bristled. “Look, if Nova came for you with a knife I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t just stand there—”
“Pretty sure,” Reina echoed, and then Nico’s face contorted into a mask of itself. Boyish frustration.
God, he suddenly seemed so young.
“Okay, what the fuck?” Nico demanded, before scoffing transactionally, “Like you would have saved me. It apparently makes no difference to you whether I’m alive or dead.”
Reina felt a sharp plummeting in her chest that she worried was some kind of loathsome sentimentality. Luckily it was gone now. Dead. Drowned. A mercy kill, really. Because the price of admission was too much. The cost of confession was too high. No, Nico, I would have lit on fire anyone with even the slightest intention of harming you, and that is the kind of friend I am, when I choose to be a friend. Which I have never dared to dream of doing.
Until you.
“Okay,” she said, and turned away to climb the stairs.
“Reina,” Nico called after her, sounding frustrated. “Reina!”
She told herself that actually, this was tactical. Responsible, even. Callum had made that plenty clear.
“Look,” Callum had said to her the night before, accosting her when she was busy looking over the notes they had submitted to the archives during their first unit on space. “I’m only telling you this because I think it’s important that you not do anything stupid,” he said, “and I have a suspicion that in order to keep your wits about you, you’re going to need all the facts.”
“Which are?” asked Reina without looking up. She didn’t typically associate Callum with facts. He seemed exceptionally emotional, which was what the others seemed to be missing about him. If he actually was a psychopath, he’d probably get a lot more done.
Callum slid into the chair opposite hers, immediately taking up too much space.
“Atlas Blakely is depressed,” he said.
“Okay,” Reina replied dully. “Who isn’t?”
“And because he’s depressed,” Callum continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “he’s looking for a way to open a portal to a different strand of the multiverse. I think, anyway,” Callum qualified. “Since I doubt he’s trying to actually start a new universe from scratch.”
