More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For Reina alone, the earth personally offers fruit, and to Reina alone, nature speaks. It is worth noting, though, that in Reina’s opinion, she has other talents
Atlas Blakely was born as the earth was dying. This is a fact. So is this: the first thing Atlas Blakely truly understood was pain. This, too: Atlas Blakely is a man who created weapons. A man who kept secrets. And this: Atlas Blakely is a man willing to jeopardize the lives of everyone in his care, and to betray all those foolish or desperate enough to have the misfortune to trust him.
Atlas Blakely is a compendium of scars and flaws, a liar by trade and by birth. He is a man with the makings of a villain. But above all else, Atlas Blakely is just a man.
It was a small, gentle cruelty of life that most people with a true sense of purpose lack the talent to achieve it. The people with talent are far more likely directionless, an odd but unavoidable irony. (In Atlas Blakely’s experience, the best method for ruining someone’s life is to give them exactly what they want and then politely get out of their way.)
The point is there are no villains in this story, or maybe there are no heroes.
Reading the mind of a person you cannot change is as powerless as time-traveling to an ending you can’t rewrite.
The moral of the story is this: beware the man who faces you unarmed. But the moral of the story is also this: beware the shared moments of vulnerability between two grown men whose mothers are lost and gone.
We haven’t discussed yet how much Atlas loves books. How books saved his life. Not at this point in his life, because this was well on the road to ruin. But earlier. Books saved him. (What he hadn’t realized was that a person had saved him, because people, they wrote the books, the books themselves were just the tethers, the lifelines that dragged him back.
When an ecosystem dies, nature makes a new one. Don’t you get it? The world doesn’t end. Only we do.
“Let’s be gods,” Atlas says aloud, and it’s important to remember that he’s on drugs, that he misses his mother, that he hates himself.
I shouldn’t have asked for power when what I really wanted was meaning. But now he has both, so. You can see how we’re at an impasse.
Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be driven to destroy it.
Left to their own devices, humans will inevitably care for one another at great detriment to themselves. Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be compelled to save it.
Because you, Miss Kamali,” Dalton promised her with a flick of his tongue, “are the most dangerous thing in every world, including this one.”
It was already a miracle he’d been awake this long—a miracle that someone he loved could love him back with even a sliver of his urgency—so if this was where he died, if the line on his ledger was red, then it was just as fine as any other place to meet the reaper.
“Anyway, we’re out in the world now, so let’s try to focus, shall we? Lest you require my combat expertise yet again.” As if Callum had ever dirtied his hands, much less disturbed his hair. (A nearby vine snickered with agreement.)
A sudden image of Nico stroking the archive’s walls, murmuring sensually for the library to be a good girl and produce some new phenomena for him drove Libby to a blink of temporary madness.
In practice, though, his change in temperament since her return was like being trapped on the weighted end of a seesaw. Without a balanced push and pull between them, she was just sitting on the ground.
“What would Atlas do?” she asked. If Dalton was surprised, he showed no evidence of it. He shrugged. “You know what he’d do.” Destroy the world.
Gather all the pieces. Derive a plan. The answer wasn’t to destroy the world. It was to make a new one.
To be perfectly clear, Atlas Blakely doesn’t want to destroy the universe. He just doesn’t want to exist in this one.
Because it is impossible to remove from the equation of the problem the fundamental nucleus of truth, which is that Atlas Blakely loved and was loved by Ezra Fowler, and that becoming mortal enemies is unfortunately one plausible strand of outcomes of loving and being loved this way.
Li knew that if anything could unlock the Alexandrian archives, it would not be greed. It would be the furious young woman standing powerless at the door.
The last part was a love story. This one is a cautionary tale.
“You had a whole year to murder me and instead you spent it getting pissed and doing maths.” “I know, right?” Callum laughed. “Anyway, that’s what the kids call a slow burn.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to waste away in academia,” things like that, though Nico wasn’t entirely sure what the alternative to wasting away in academia was supposed to be. Wasting away in bureaucracy? In heterosexuality? In his brunch khakis?
“Just what does he think you’re going to disrupt? The mouse pad industry?”
“You know, don’t let this go to your head,” she said, “but I actually had that exact thought several times last year.” “What, that I was right?” “No, that you’d somehow realize telepathically that you were right from thirty years away and still manage to annoy me with it.”
“I know we’ve always been … us,” he determined for lack of a better word. “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.”
“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.
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.”
How many times can a woman look you dead in the eye and dare you to change her mind before you finally realize you’re kind of in love with her? Three, it turns out. But this isn’t the part of the story you’re interested in, so we’ll go right ahead and move on.
He wondered what Tristan could see; if looking at them together felt like staring into the sun; if it was obvious now that this was what they had always been. Varona and Rhodes, duality and synchronicity. Beginnings and endings, stardust and stars.
What did it mean to be a soulmate? To know someone in every world, in every universe? To slip effortlessly between where they ended and you began?
If someone had asked Tristan before he walked into that room to choose one person to carry the weight of the world, he would have said Nico de Varona. He would have said it without hesitation.
“Did you really think you were so different?” he asked her in disbelief, wanting suddenly to laugh. “Different from what?” Her eyes had narrowed and god, she had never looked so young. “From Atlas. From Ezra. From anyone. Did you really think you were doing something different, making a different choice?”
So much for playing god! Imagine a god who did nothing but make smaller, worse gods.
That’s what Gideon was talking about. Nothing comes back the same. Libby Rhodes was not the same, she could never be the same, and whatever Nico de Varona had been, they had already lost him. They had lost him.
Oh, so she thought she loved Nico more than Tristan loved anyone? Interesting. Salt in the wound. This much salt, though, and he could fill an ocean. “We all wanted to be the best,” he said eventually. “Congratulations, Rhodes. Now you are.”
“Telepath,” Gideon greeted her tonelessly. Parisa lifted the sword in her hand. The one she’d nearly killed him with. Fine, so she wouldn’t be dying today. Not this way. “Dreamer,” she replied.
Gideon’s pain was eternal, a time loop, back and forth between meeting Nico and meeting Nico’s fate, and he wanted to save Parisa—he wanted to save someone; he wanted, for once in his fucking life, to be of some use, not just to someone but to her—to be what he couldn’t be for Nico.
Sometimes you couldn’t save things, and the knowledge of it, the finality—the odd, horrifying satisfaction of the conclusion that nothing was in Gideon’s control except himself—was like a falling blade of certainty. Yet another heartbreak. Another goodbye.
She could power the stars, unmake universes, leave a trail of destruction in her wake—and still, she would be nothing more than a speck in the universe. A single grain of sand.
Tristan in the eye and say, as un-pathetically as possible, you don’t have to choose me. Just know that it won’t stop me from choosing you. Oh, that was actually kind of brilliant, Callum thought, wondering if he should write it down as the taxi screamed down a narrow lane, forcing a man with a suitcase to drift shoutily over to the sidewalk. Which was where he belonged!
We’re not gods, or maybe you are, or Reina is, but I’m not a god, Tristan, I’m just very very sad and stupid! I have been looking for inspiration and it turns out I’m not inspired, I’m lazy!
He didn’t see Tristan’s expression become one of horror, which was good, really. For the best. Callum’s last glimpse was of the ceiling when his head snapped back, which would not make sense to him until it was too late for any sense to be made.
In his final moments, Callum Nova understood this one last piece of everything: that this was what inspiration felt like. If fate was an answer, if destiny had a flavor, if Tristan loved him back, if peace was attainable even if—especially if—it was wholly undeserved … these were details that no longer mattered. He could feel it anyway, and that meant all of it was real.
If Tristan had wanted to be seen, fine, Callum had seen him and Tristan had seen Callum, and by some definition that was love. A bad love. A corruptible love. Poets wouldn’t write about it. But that didn’t undo what had already been done.
“This doesn’t mean I’ve ruled out killing you.” He watched Callum’s throat jump with a heady swallow. “Save the pillow talk,” he said. “I’ve got to have a shower first.”
She killed him, obviously. Don’t play with matches. Don’t startle physicists who’ve traveled here on a fucking nuclear bomb.
