by Olivie Blake
The perfect team for what?
“For anything,” Atlas said. “For everything.”
He meant: Let’s take this bloody mess and all its damn books and do something that’s never been done.
They drafted imaginary plans for it at length: a physicist who could approximate what Ezra could do, but bigger. Wormholes, black holes, space travel, time travel. Someone who could see quanta, manipulate it, understand it, use it. (Was that possible? Surely it must be, said Atlas.) Someone to help them power it, like a battery. Another telepath to be Atlas’ right hand, to be his eyes and ears so he could finally rest his own. What were they building? Neither of them were entirely sure, but they knew they had the instincts, the guts, the painstaking deliberation.
“I found something,” Atlas said, earlier than anticipated. Just the one, an animator.
(Animator?)
“Just trust me,” said Atlas, who was entering his late thirties now and beginning to dress in suits, concealing his true origins behind a posher accent and better clothes. “I’ve got a feeling about this one, bruv.”
It was around this time when the initial euphoria of the plan had begun to wane, and Ezra was starting to question his usefulness. The plan relied mostly on Atlas’ gut, which was certainly something Ezra trusted, but all the darting in and out of time and meeting wherever Atlas happened to be in the world wasn’t exactly the same as being present. Ezra wasn’t contributing anything, wasn’t part of it, not really. Go back to NYUMA, Atlas suggested, see what you can find, you’re only twenty-three now (or something) and you still look young. Besides, Atlas said with a laugh, you’re too American to blend in anywhere else.
So Ezra went.
Unfortunately, in order for Ezra to see anything worth finding, time had to slow down. He had to experience time linearly again, remaining in one chronological place and putting down the half-hearted roots of a passably unthreatening persona. He resented it, finding existence slightly dull without the one thing that had always felt natural to him, but before he could abandon his efforts and move on, the banality of his existence led to a position as a resident advisor in a freshman dorm and then, unexpectedly, he had found something.
“You need them both,” Ezra told Atlas after seeing Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona face off in the row of the century. “When the time comes, you absolutely must take them both.”
“But they have the same specialty,” Atlas pointed out, looking doubtful. His hair had started to grey at the temples a few years before, so by then he had opted to shave it off. “Don’t you want to be initiated? You were always meant to be the sixth.”
Ezra paused to consider it. He had always intended to be initiated someday, but suddenly the formality seemed unimportant.
“You’ll have to have both,” he repeated, adding, “Nor do I think you could conceivably get one without the other.”
Atlas mulled it over, considering the idea from all angles.
“They’re… physicists, you said?”
“They’re mutants,” Ezra said. (High praise, in his opinion.) “Absolute mutants.”
“Well, keep an eye on them,” said Atlas thoughtfully. “I’ve got something else I’m working on right now.”
Easy enough to do. Assuming the unremarkable role of a student two years above them despite being born nearly twenty-five years before meant that Libby in particular proved herself to be intriguing to Ezra. That wasn’t an interesting story, particularly after knowing it would eventually sour.
As for Nico, they never quite got on. Ezra already knew he was giving up his spot for Nico, or for whomever Atlas found to serve one of the more necessary roles among the six. (A naturalist, Atlas said. What did they need plants for? scoffed Ezra, only to be met with Never mind about the plants, I’ve got a feeling, you’ll see.) At least Nico made things easier by rendering the offer impossible for Libby to refuse.
It was the year leading up to their initiation that finally opened Ezra’s eyes to the possibility that he may not have been starving so much as fasting. Now that Libby and Nico were gone, Ezra was left performing his cultivated mundanity for a fleet of empty seats. Worse, he had underestimated the discomfort of no longer being integral to Atlas’ plan.
“Nonsense, of course you are,” said Atlas. “In fact, I suspect you can do the ritual this year after all.”
“How?” Ezra asked irritably. Boredom stung, it itched somewhere intangibly, like a cramp in his calf. “Five are initiated, not six.”
“Yes, but I suspect I was wrong about Parisa,” Atlas said.
Ezra frowned. “Is she not as good as you thought?”
“No, in terms of ability she’s precisely what I’d hoped.” A pause. “But I suspect she’s a problem.”
“What sort of problem?” Ezra was unaware Atlas had any of those. As far as he knew, everything was going swimmingly without him. Hence the boredom.
“A problem.” Atlas sipped his tea. “I can convince her to get the others to kill Callum, at least.”
“Which one, the empath?”
“Yes.” That was always the one meant to die; even the perfect group of candidates would have to lose a member, after all. In Atlas’ eyes—and Ezra agreed—Callum was the equivalent of a nuclear code, and ridding the world of him was a favor to humanity. “Then you can have Parisa’s spot.”
“Oh yes of course, just kill her and take her spot, everything all neat and tidy,” Ezra said, waiting for a laugh that didn’t come.
Atlas sipped his tea again, and Ezra blinked.
“What?”
No reply.
“Atlas,” he growled. “Why on earth would I do that?”
“She slept with your girlfriend, for one thing,” Atlas offered with a misbegotten smile.
Which was not an answer, so Ezra rolled his eyes.
“Libby doesn’t know a thing about me. Bit hypocritical, don’t you think, if I held that particular blemish against her?”
“Regardless, you know there’s a bonding aspect to initiation. You’ll have to become part of them somehow if you plan to take their initiation oath. Sacrifice will do the trick.”
“And if I don’t want to be initiated?”
Atlas’ cup paused partway to his lips. “What?”
“I don’t see the point,” Ezra said restlessly. “You’re here, aren’t you, with me? What do I need to be part of the Society for? I’ve been on your side since the beginning.”
“Yes, and it’s been exceedingly helpful,” said Atlas, setting his cup to the side.
There was something about the foreignness of the motion—Atlas had never liked tea, preferring extreme intoxication instead—that made Ezra wonder whether he really knew Atlas Blakely at all. He certainly had at one point, but over two decades had passed since then, and Ezra had missed them. What might have happened to Atlas’ mind, to his convictions, to his soul? What had initiation into the Society done to him?
So Ezra decided to do something he had never bothered with doing before.
He opened a door to the distant future.
This was not as exciting a thing as it sounded, because the future could always be changed. True, there were some unalterable events, but in general Ezra had learned to take his distant doors as a pseudo-reliable astrological reading: likely to happen, but not guaranteed. So long as he did not remain there, he wasn’t bound to the consequences of anything he saw. His presence, if he did not disrupt anything, was as forgettable as the motion of a single grain of sand.
But what he discovered discomfited him intensely. Because what Ezra saw—the conclusion of his and Atlas Blakely’s plan—was almost certainly the end of the world.
“Let’s make a new one,” Atlas had said once. Not long ago, in Ezra’s memory. Twenty years in Atlas Blakely’s, and therefore perhaps long enough for him to believe Ezra might have forgotten what he said. “This one’s shitty, mate, it’s gone and lost the plot completely. No more fixing, no more tinkering around with broken parts. When one e
cosystem fails, nature makes a new one. Nature, or whoever’s in charge. That’s how the species survives.”
He had turned his head, locking his dark gaze on Ezra’s.
“Let’s be gods, bruv,” Atlas said.
At the time, Ezra had blamed it on the drugs. But then he saw Tristan Caine inside one of his doors, traversing time itself on the wards Ezra had helped put in place, and he understood for the first time that Atlas Blakely had already built the perfect team without him.
“What is it Tristan can do?” Ezra asked casually on their next meeting. “You never told me.”
“Did I not?” said Atlas, lifting his cup to his lips.
Ezra, irritated, knocked the tea out of his hands. “You know you didn’t, Atlas—”
“Getting cold feet, old friend?” Atlas murmured, giving Ezra a thin smile as he waved a hand, returning the cup to its original state. “I imagine you may find yourself less devoted to our goals than you once were. Perhaps,” he said, in English so falsely aristocratic he might as well have fucked the queen, “because you’ve made no sacrifices to get here.”
“Me? Atlas,” Ezra snapped. “This was always part of the plan—”
“Yes,” Atlas agreed, “but while I’ve spent the last quarter of a century getting older, you’ve remained a child, haven’t you, Ezra? We erased you, remade you, to the point where your stakes don’t exist. You,” he said with accusation, or possibly disappointment, “can’t see the way the game has changed.”
“I’m a child?” Ezra echoed, astounded. “Have you forgotten that I did your dirty work for you?”
“I believe I thanked you for that several times over,” Atlas reminded him. “And I offered you a seat at the table, did I not?”
“Only because you want me to take out another obstacle to you—and what’s wrong with Parisa, anyway?” Ezra demanded, bristling. “What threat is she to you?”
“No threat,” Atlas said. “Just… not the ally I’d hoped she’d be.”
The inadequacy of his response pricked like a needle, and Ezra stared at him.
“We started all this because we agreed this Society was fucked,” he said flatly.
“Yes,” Atlas agreed.
“And now?”
“Still fucked, as you put it,” said Atlas. “But this time, I can fix it. We,” he amended. “We can fix it, if you’re willing to see things as I see them.”
When one ecosystem fails, nature makes a new one.
That’s how the species survives.
The silence between them hollowed out and refilled with a new, tactile wave of doubt.
“The archives would never give you what you want,” Ezra said to Atlas in a low voice. “You can’t hide your intentions from the library itself.”
Silence.
“Are you using someone else to do it?”
“Either you’re in, Ezra, or you’re not,” Atlas told him, grimly exasperated.
“Of course I’m in,” Ezra said. “I’ve never not been in.”
And he hadn’t.
Not before then.
“So then it’s simple, isn’t it? You’ll see what they’re all capable of,” Atlas told him. “Open up a space for yourself among the six and it’s yours, all of it. I wouldn’t deny you any of it.”
Ezra knew better than to question him, even inside his own head.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine, get Parisa to kill Callum and I’ll deal with the rest.”
“Does Libby suspect anything?” asked Atlas.
No. No, he would make sure of it.
“I’ll keep her close,” Ezra said, having once mistaken that for something that could be done.
But truthfully he knew it couldn’t. The more Ezra had pushed her, coaxed her, worshipfully tried to persuade her of his devotion the way he assumed she would want to be loved—the more he hoped to remain inside Atlas’ confidence by maintaining Libby’s—the further she got from him, growing more distant each time they spoke. Ezra had wanted an alliance of sorts, anticipating that Libby would trust him enough to allow insight to Atlas’ plans even if Society rules precluded them. He clung to their years of companionship, their one-sided trust, and set himself to the task of distant espionage, hoping to rely on the one person whose morality he had always assumed would persist, even if their relationship did not. But Libby had pushed back, fruitlessly mistrusting, aimlessly angry.
“I’m not yours,” she said, and drew a line between them, closing the door on his access to her life.
So now, without Libby or even the promise of her, Ezra had no choice but to do something drastic. If he wanted to make sure Atlas Blakely’s plans never came to pass, then he would have to neutralize the Society on his own.
What he needed first was a way to take one of Atlas’ pieces off the board.
Breaking in would be the easy part. Twenty years ago, Ezra had quietly built a failsafe into the wards, precisely his own size and shape, for which no succeeding class of initiates would know to prevent. He could slip easily through it, falling through a dimension no one else could see, but what to do upon arrival was another matter; a troubling one.
Ezra knew, to some extent, which of the six mattered to Atlas and which ones didn’t. Libby, Nico, and Reina were part of the same triumvirate of power, and therefore Atlas would need all three. Tristan… there was something about Tristan that Atlas wasn’t telling him, which made Tristan possibly the lynchpin of Atlas’ plan.
Whichever candidate Ezra chose, Atlas would need to believe they were dead.
An illusion?
No, something better. Something convincing.
Something expensive.
“I know someone who can help you,” came back once Ezra sent feelers around, reaching out to whatever he could find among less law-abiding circles. A mermaid, they said, though the term was slung around with a derogatory aftertaste. “It’ll cost you, but if you can pay…”
“I can pay,” Ezra said.
(He could easily rob a bank in the past and come back to the future scot-free.)
It was someone known only as the Prince who, via the mermaid, gave Ezra the animation. It was sickening and faceless, expressionless and limp. Just a generic, unremarkable diorama of a corpse that had encountered a violent end.
“You’ll have to give it a face,” the mermaid said, her voice shrill and high, like glass breaking. The sound of it set off something in Ezra’s inner ear, leaving him temporarily straining for balance. “It will have to replicate someone you know well enough to complete the animation. Someone whose every expression and motion you know intimately enough to reproduce.”
That, Ezra realized with a momentary stiffening, narrowed his options considerably. But if he were going to take one of Atlas’ prizes, he may as well take the one he knew for a fact that Atlas could not do without. She and Nico were a key and a lock, and Ezra, a person who trafficked in doors, knew one was no good without the other.
Libby had intuited his presence in the room before seeing him. She had keen hearing, and something had always alerted her to his presence. Echolocation, almost. She had known his entry to the house, had felt the disruption of time that he’d caused. For a moment, seeing her eyes change, Ezra suffered a twinge of remorse.
Only for a moment.
Taking her with him was an effort, one which was only narrowly possible given the limitations of his ability to travel. Convenient that she was so small, and so taken unawares. The only sound as they went through the door was her scream, which echoed from the place they’d left until they arrived where he’d intended, and then it ended with a spark, like a match flaring.
Libby spun from his grip and glared at him.
“Ezra, what the fuck—”
“It isn’t what you think,” he said quickly, because it wasn’t. If he could have taken one of the others, he would have. This wasn’t about her.
“Then tell me what to think!”
“I don’t have time to tell you everything,” he said, and
summarized for her the basics: Atlas Blakely bad, Society bad, everything mostly bad, Libby gone for her own good.
She took it badly. “My own good? I told you not to decide that for me when we were together,” she snarled at him. “You certainly don’t get to decide it now!”
Appealing as it was to spend his time having another fight with his ex-girlfriend, Ezra didn’t currently have a lot of patience for a heart-to-heart. “Admittedly, there’s a lot of things about our relationship I’d like to change,” he told her briskly. “Most notably its inception. But seeing as I can’t—”
“It was all a lie.” Libby lifted a hand to her mouth. “My god, I believed you, I defended you—”
“It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t—” Ezra paused, clearing his throat. “Entirely true.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded. In her defense, Ezra conceded, it was indeed a terrible answer. He had not improved much since their breakup at telling her things she wanted to hear—but in his defense, he’d never actually known the right things to say to begin with.
Gradually, Libby found her voice again.
“But you…” A pause. “You know everything about me. Everything.”
He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. “Yes.”
“You know about my fears, my dreams, my regrets.” Her face paled. “My sister.”
“Yes.”
“I trusted you.”
“Libby—”
“It was real for me!”
“It was real for me, too.”
Most of it.
Some of it.
“Jesus, Ezra, did I even—?”
He watched Libby stop herself from asking if she had ever mattered to him, which was a brilliant idea as far as he was concerned. Even if she could have been satisfied with his answer (likely not), being made to question it at all would cause her irreparable harm. Libby Rhodes, whatever emotional insufficiencies she may have struggled with intrinsically, knew her limits, and she regarded them with abject tenderness, like fresh bruises.