The Atlas Paradox (The Atlas, #2)

by Olivie Blake

The burnings were a fine reminder of something Gideon had learned long ago: there is doom to be found everywhere if doom is what you seek.

(If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.)

can’t help clinging to our origins, Callum said. The past always seems more ordered, Rhodes. It always seems clearer, more straightforward, easier to understand. We have a craving for it, that sense of simplicity, but only an idiot would ever chase the past, because our perception of it is false—it was never that the world was simple. Just that in retrospect it could be known, and therefore understood.

As it turned out, being the smartest person in the room was honestly kind of dull.

“I think having progeny is inherently selfish,” said Dalton, who instantly grew bored.

“Forcing something to exist that has no choice over the matter,” he said, “is an act of pure selfishness.”