The Atlas Complex (The Atlas, #3)

by Olivie Blake

I shouldn’t have asked for power when what I really wanted was meaning.

Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be driven to destroy it.

That it was always meant to end with one of us.

“For a second I thought you were gone, and I was … It was like I lost a piece of me.”

“But I don’t know, there’s just something about you, about knowing that you exist. It’s like without you, I’m just push, you know? Just push with no pull, but then you were gone and I just fell over.”

“Some part of me kept thinking that if I’d had you, things would have been better. Or that without you, I was more lost than I’d ever been.”

“Do you ever wonder if maybe it’s supposed to be us?” It felt inevitable, that moment. That question. Like every alternate path still led them here. Like somewhere innate, they both knew they’d spent lifetimes dancing around the gravitational pull of the obvious. “Yes,” Nico said. “I do.”

“I will spend my life orbiting yours,” Nico said, and the exhaustion in his voice, she knew it. She understood it. “I consider it a privilege. Does that mean less if we never sleep together? If we never have babies and hold hands, does that have to mean less? You’re in every world I exist in, your fate is my fate, either you follow me or I follow you, it doesn’t matter which and I don’t care. If that’s not love then maybe I don’t understand love, and that’s fine with me—it doesn’t make me angry to know I’m actually an idiot after all. And if it’s not enough for you, then okay, it’s not enough. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m willing to give it. What you’re willing to accept doesn’t change what I’m willing to give.”

What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes— “Make sure to stretch,” Libby told Nico. “It’s time to make a new fucking world.” —and who will you betray to do it?

“We didn’t get here by accident.”

Power was easy to find. In this house it was always just below the surface, always just within reach, his foot constantly hovering atop the gas pedal. Since Libby had left, since she’d returned, all Nico had done was coast. Her absence, that was paralysis, the ongoing sensation of a hoax. But she was back now—she was here, with her hands in his, and she was strong, stronger than she had ever been, and he was intent on proving that to her. It was a rev of the engine, the wave of a flag, the chatter of a light fixture, Edwardian lamps trembling atop Victorian tables. His signal, waiting for her reply.

the power you have will never be enough compared to the power you’ll always lack.