The Atlas Six

“You know why you don’t understand me?” Parisa answered Reina’s thoughts, stepping closer to lower her voice. “Because you think you’ve figured me out. You think you’ve met me before, other versions of women like me, but you have no idea what I am. You think my looks are what make me? My ambitions? You can’t begin to know the sum of my parts, and you can stare all you like, but you won’t see a damn thing until I show you.”

Nico was enormously likable, unfairly so, and no matter how clever or talented Libby was, students and faculty alike preferred Nico to her. Whatever gift it was he had, it was like Midas; the effortless turning of nonsense to gold, more a reflex than a skill, and Libby, a gifted academic, had never been able to learn it. Nico’s brand of easy charm had no metric for study, no identifiable markers of finesse.

Many people incorrectly assume time to be a steady incline, a measured arc of growth and progress, but when history is written by the victors the narrative can often misrepresent that shape.

They rounded the gallery corner to the rooms. Nico was forcing open the door to Libby’s bedroom, Reina at his heels.

“Did you—”

“No,” Reina answered Parisa blandly. “I heard nothing.”

“Who could have—”

There was a blast of something inconceivable from Nico’s palm as Tristan thought for the thousandth time, my god—marveling at the power they had, Libby and Nico; individually and apart.

Imagine having something so wild in your bloodstream. Imagine feeling something, anything, and seeing it manifest without the blink of an eye. Even at Tristan’s angriest he was nothing, only of any use to anyone when he was thinking clearly, seeing sense. No bombs exploded at the whims of his frustration, which made him ordinary. It made him normal; something he had tried his whole life not to be.

It was Nico who entered the room first, letting out a sound like a wounded dog in answer to the fading sound of Libby’s scream. The bitterness on Tristan’s tongue at the sound, however mystifying and incongruous it was to feel, was envy, because of course. Of course one pseudo-twin would suffer the other’s pain, the two of them in orbit to something Tristan would never grasp or understand. It was the same reaction as always: brittle unsurprise.

“Are you finally admitting I’m better than you?”

“You’re not better than me,” Nico replied perfunctorily. “But you’re looking for the wrong things. You’re looking for, I don’t know. The other pieces.”

She made a face. “Other pieces of what?”

“How should I know? Yourself, maybe.” He scoffed under his breath before oppressing her with, “Anyway, there aren’t any other pieces, Rhodes. There’s nothing else. It’s just you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Either you’re complete or you’re not. Stop looking. It’s right fucking there,” he informed her, snatching impatiently at her hand and half-throwing it back into her chest. She glared at him and pulled out of his reach, vandalized. “Either it’s enough for you or nothing ever will be.”

“What are you, then?” she asked him. “If I’m a fire hazard.”

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe.” She returned the box to the form of a desk.

“It’s funny,” Nico said. “I wouldn’t have done any of this if they hadn’t come for both of us.”

“Why’s that funny?”

“Because of this place I’m a murderer,” he said. “Complicitly,” he amended after another moment’s consideration. “Soon to be.” The last was a conclusive mutter.

“Get to the funny part,” Libby suggested drily.

“Well there’s a stain on me now, isn’t there? A mark. ‘Would kill for _____,’ followed by a blank space.” Nico summoned the knife back to his palm, only of course it didn’t register that way. One moment the knife was cast aside, the next it was in his hand. “I wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t come here. And I wouldn’t have come here at all if it weren’t for you.”

She wondered if he blamed her. He didn’t sound accusatory, but it was hard not to assume that he was. “You were going to do it regardless, remember?”

“Yeah, but only because they asked you.”

He glanced down at the knife in his hand, turning it over to inspect the blade.

“Inseverable,” he said, neither to himself nor to her.

“What?”

“Inseverable,” he repeated, louder this time. He glanced up at her, shrugging. “One of those if-then calculations, right? We met, so now we can’t detach. We’re just going to always play a weird game of… what’s the word? The thing, espejo, the game. The mirror game.”

“Mirror game?”

“Yeah, you do one thing, I do it too. Mirror.”

“But who does it first?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Do you resent it?”

He looked down at the knife, and then back up at her.

“Apparently I’d kill to protect it,” he said, “so yeah.”

Libby summoned the knife from his palm, which in practice was more like it had always been hers.

“Same,” she said quietly.

The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.

“Rhodes hasn’t the faintest idea who she is,” said Callum. “She feels nothing.”

Tristan’s brow furrowed. “A bit harsh, isn’t it?”

“Not in the slightest.” Libby Rhodes was an anxious impending meltdown whose decisions were based entirely on what she allowed the world to shape her into. She was more powerful than all of them except for Nico, and of course she was. Because she would not misuse it. She was too small-minded, too un-hungry for that. Too trapped within the cage of her own fears, her desires to be liked. The day she woke up and realized she could make her own world would be a dangerous one, but it was so unlikely it hardly kept Callum up at night.

“It is for her own safety that she feels nothing,” Callum said. “It is something she does to survive.”

We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s easy, so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something—against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes.”

Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After learning to starve, when someone finally gives you something you become a hoarder.