The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)

by Olivie Blake

All men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that; lost knowledge even more so.

an empire could sit successfully only upon a chair of three legs: subjugation, desperation, and ignorance.

after all, not everything was sex; sometimes insider trading was the easier option,

If anyone was going to be involved in Parisa’s life, they were going to bring money, power, or magic. Nothing else would do.

He remained uncertain whether her delight in reminding him of his insufficiencies was a result of her insufferable personality, her alarmingly too-similar powers, or their long-standing history of forced coexistence. He assumed it was some magical combination of all three, making the source of their antipathy at least 33 percent her fault.

Again, there was no telling whether they had always been this way, or if they had learned it over the course of their unwilling inseparability. If not for her, Nico might not have noticed most of the things he did, and probably vice versa. A uniquely upsetting curse, really, how little he knew how to exist when she wasn’t there; his only source of pleasure was knowing she probably felt the same whenever she could bring herself to stomach the admission.

“I hate you,” she added. A gratuitous conversational tic established between them, akin to an “um” or a thoughtful pause.

That sneaky little monstress. This was Nico’s punishment, then. Forced communication with people who mattered to him—which she knew he loathed—all for implying that her boyfriend was precisely what he was.

At least he’d gotten sex that day, which promised a refreshing turn of events, but also, his partner in the act (read: Libby) had clung to a secretive and knowingly manipulative agenda that had left her distracted and unable to climax, so that was … potentially less lovely for him.

agh hate it when i have sex with someone clinging to a secretive and knowingly manipulative agenda

Typical; faux-intellectualism would always be appealing to any girl who’d spent too much time in France. It was about as Parisian as bobs, sartorial minimalism, and cheese.

a triptych of narrow stained glass windows depicting wisdom, justice, and either enlightenment or arson),

He felt the impact leave her body from where his fingers had curled around her wrists. He could feel the entire force of it pumping through her veins and marveled, silently, at being so close to what felt like live ammunition. She was a human bomb; she could split the room, the air itself,

male, female, race, class, it didn’t matter. Optics were nothing. Usefulness was paramount. Destruction was Adrian Caine’s god.

He had such a talent for finding women who put themselves first. It was like he was some sort of sniffer dog for emotional fatality, always able to dig it up from the one person in the room who would have no trouble making him feel small. He wished he were less attracted to it, that brazen sense of self, but unfortunately ambition left such a sweet taste in his mouth, and so had Parisa. Maybe she was right; maybe it was daddy problems. Maybe after a lifetime of being useless, Tristan simply wanted to be used.

“Stop cursing my dick,” said Nico impatiently. “I’m not going to change my mind.”

“Gideon, for fuck’s sake, I’m rich and extremely handsome,” Nico growled. “Do you think I have my own problems? No, I do not, so let me have yours. Put me to use, I beg you.”

In Reina’s mind, they were binary stars, trapped in each other’s gravitational field and easily diminished without the other’s opposing force. She wasn’t at all surprised when she discovered one was right-handed (Nico) and the other left- (Libby).

This was a torment she would seek again and again. The trauma of him was exquisite, the vice of his intimacy combative and honeyed. Oh, he was full of lies and secrets, only some of which he wanted to keep. What had he done, what did he know, what did he want?

All of Parisa’s expressions were so artful they could hang in the Louvre, and not for the first time, Tristan wondered what on earth her parents must have looked like for her to achieve such outrageous genetic symmetry.

Even when the options were to reach the sun or collide flaming with the sea, safety was a uselessness Nico de Varona couldn’t abide.

“You insufferable man-child. You idiot prince.” Her fondest derivative for him, or at least her most frequent. So much so it felt like something he might have accidentally colonized and put to use. “You are not going to do something so utterly unforgivable as to waste your talent and die, I won’t have it,”

Most likely the moment she touched him she could already feel the direction his power had taken. They’d had a knack for it from the start, a way of becoming the other’s beginning and end. They typically declined to do so, of course, because it was invasive. Because him using her or her using him was like temporarily trading limbs, swapping joints. For the rest of the day he would feel like he was lifting Libby’s hand instead of his own or bending Libby’s knee to take a step, and he knew she felt the same way. He would look up to catch her eye and she would grimace like he had taken something from her, and yes, whatever she’d taken from him was equal in value to what she’d had before, and it wasn’t as if either of them had done it on purpose—but still, she was missing something that he now possessed, and vice versa.

It was only when they had started using their magic to replicate the effects of space that the sense of borrowed power and stolen limbs had stopped feeling like a gruesome, half-hearted sex act and more like true synchronicity.

As if a woman could not enjoy sex and read minds at the same time!

The idea he might be toying with her precisely the way she toyed with him was brutally intoxicating,

misjudged Reina poorly for being free of principle, when in fact her principles were clear: she would not bleed out for nothing. If this world felt it could take from Reina, so be it. She would gladly take from it.

Perhaps Tristan would even confirm that he’d had suspicions, which he nearly always had. He was a man so beloved of his own misanthropy that he would surely express less horror at knowing the truth than he would a lack of surprise at uncovering it.

“What did you do?” “Changed them,” she said with a shrug. “Can’t reverse that sort of thing.”

“Secretly, you believe yourself to be far worse than I have ever been, because your hunger is incurable. Your wants are insatiable. You never tire of making people weak for you, do you? The perversity of your desire scares you, but it’s easier to think I might be worse.”

But he could feel the triumph radiating from her; it was sickening and putrid, rancid and rotting. She was overripe with it, devolving to decay. She was deadness taking root in fertile soil, resurrecting in the abundance of his loss. He had genuinely broken her, that much was undeniable. Her death, even in noncorporeal form, had been real. But still, there was no question she’d let him find the pieces to break, knowing he would do it. No wonder she hadn’t fought back.

And truly, it was a craving—nothing so intentional as wanting. Some chemical reaction was responsible, or demonic possession, or some other tragic malformation that people wrote books about surviving.

She loves me because I put it there. Because I made myself her anchor to this life, and therefore she loves me only as much as she can love any sort of chain. She loves me like a prisoner of war.”

And anyway, you do things much too openly, with far too much of yourself. You’d fuck me with your whole heart,” she lamented, “and I can’t put you in that sort of danger.”

Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don’t you see it’s because we’re riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn.”

“Do you really think anyone can walk away from this? Believe me, I know recruitment, I know the difference between institutions and cults, and there is no innocence to this one. You do not get to walk away.”

In another world, he might have touched her. In another world, she would have welcomed it.

You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.”

Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic terms. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end.

Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else.

The question fell like an ax over them both,

“I understand that, but I cannot let you keep your distance. You need to know what my magic tastes like, how it feels, so that you will recognize the absence of it. You need to know pain from my hands, Tristan. You need me to hurt you so that you can finally learn the difference between torture and love.”

“Men, conceptually, are canceled,” Libby said to her knees from where she was perched on the chair beside Nico’s desk, torso folded inward. “This Society? Founded by men, I guarantee it. Kill someone for initiation? A man’s idea. Totally male.” She pursed her lips. “Theoretically, men are a disaster. As a concept, I unequivocally reject them.”

“Uh,” said Nico. He had a particular gift for making one sound mimic an entire musical performance about the interminable nature of suffering.

“You’re a fire hazard, Rhodes,” he said. “So stop apologizing for the damage and just let the fucker burn.”

That was some transitional Libby who’d been searching for a disturbance, seeking something to shatter her a little. Something to wipe the slate clean and start over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She’d found it, decomposed, and moved on.

They shared something they gradually deduced was hunger, though for what was initially unclear.