by Olivie Blake
“So why did you abduct me?” she demanded, half-stammering.
“Because of Atlas,” Ezra sighed. Now they were going in circles. “I told you. This isn’t about you.”
“But then—” Another pause. “Where did you take me?”
It was starting to settle in now, he suspected. The sensation of being held captive. The initial shock of being taken was starting to wear off, and soon she would start to consider the plausibility of escape.
“It isn’t,” Ezra began, “entirely a matter of where.”
He stopped before explaining himself any further. She was too clever, after all, and certainly too powerful not to find her way out unless it remained a labyrinth, part of a maze she couldn’t see. People generally only knew how to look at the world one way: in three dimensions. For them, time was exclusively linear, moving in a single direction never to be disrupted or stopped.
Imagine looking for someone and knowing only that they were somewhere on earth. Now imagine looking for someone knowing only that they were on earth during a time with indoor plumbing. In short, nobody would find her. Ideally, Libby Rhodes would even struggle to find herself.
“You can’t keep me here,” she said. It was flat, unfaceted, deadly. “You don’t understand what I am. You never have.”
“I know exactly what you are, Libby. I’ve known for some time. Is the empath dead yet?”
She gaped at him.
“Is that a yes?” Ezra prompted.
“I don’t—how—” She was blinking rapidly. “You know about Callum?”
He set his jaw, taking it for a rhetorical question. Obviously he had already made his answer plenty clear. “Yes or no, Libby.”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, restless. “Yes, maybe—”
He was running late now, though punctuality was never a primary concern for him. He was often late to things, finding time to be such an arbitrary measure of motion. Even in his youth, which was admittedly both enormous and a mere sliver of things, he had never felt tasked by the prospect of arriving anywhere on time. His mother had wasted countless hours haranguing him about it, even on her very last day.
Though, perhaps that was what had drawn him to Atlas, in the end. Ezra knew how to starve, and Atlas knew how to wait.
“I’ll be back,” Ezra told Libby. “Don’t go anywhere.” Not that she could, even if she tried it. He’d built the wards specifically for her, made them molecular, soluble, water-based. She would have to alter the state of her environment in order to break them; to change the elements themselves individually, draining herself more with each step of progress. One step forward, two steps back.
Keys and locks.
“You’re keeping me here?” She sounded numbly disbelieving, though that would change. Numbness would pass, and pain would surely follow.
He lamented it. “It’s for your own safety,” he reminded her.
“From Atlas?”
“Yes, from Atlas,” he said, feeling a rush of urgency. He was running late, but again, that wasn’t the problem; it was what awaited him if he stayed.
Eventually the truth would sink in for Libby, and when it did, it was best to remove any flammable objects from the room, such as Ezra’s limbs and clothing.
“What,” Libby spat, “does Atlas Blakely need me for?”
Yes, there it was. The rage was settling in.
“You’d better hope you don’t find out,” Ezra said, and then he departed for his meeting through a door, the sound of his careful stride echoing from the floors the moment they hit familiar marble.
He already knew who the room would contain when he entered it. Much like Atlas, Ezra had chosen its occupants carefully, using the contacts he had procured beneath the meticulous cover of his unremarkable face, his eradicated name. They all wanted to be found—were easily lured by the right price—and so the primary leaders from every enemy the Society had ever possessed would not have hesitated to reply to Ezra’s summons. They had been lured here by the promise of a single prize: the Society itself, which no one but Ezra had ever turned down.
Provided the animation worked, Ezra doubted Atlas would suspect him. But even if he did, it was Atlas who had made him invisible, and therefore impossible to find.
“My friends,” Ezra said, striding in to address the room without preamble. “Welcome.”
If they were surprised to discover he was so young, they hid it well. They would not have known, after all, what to make of the summons they had received, each of which contained secrets from their youth as irreconcilable leverage. (Only people who exist in three dimensions ever believe history to be sacred. Keep that to yourself.)
“The six most dangerous human beings alive,” Ezra said to the room, “are, as you all know, currently in Atlas Blakely’s care. One has been neutralized, which should buy us some time, and another has been eliminated by the Society itself. But the other four will bear the enormity of either our extinction or survival—the chosen of a despotic Society for which we are little more than pawns. We have one year until they emerge again from its protection.”
The members of the room exchanged glances. Six of them, as Ezra found beautifully ironic. The synchronicity was so crisp that even Atlas would have appreciated it, had he known.
“What do you want us to do about them?” asked Nothazai, the first to speak.
Ezra smiled as Atlas would have shrugged.
“What else? Our world is dying,” he said, and took a seat, ready to put himself to work. “It’s up to us to set it right.”
END.
And so five stood where there had once been six.
“I won’t do it,” said Nico de Varona, breaking the silence. “Not unless I have some assurances moving forward.”
Parisa Kamali was first to reply. “Assurances of what?”
“I want Rhodes back. And I want your word you’ll help me find her.” Nico’s expression was determined and grim, his voice steady and unflinching. “I refuse to be part of this Society unless I know I have your support.”
Dalton opted not to contribute things like there is no refusal, because it did not seem relevant.
Instead he sat quietly, waiting for what would come.
“I’m with Nico.” That was Reina Mori.
“As am I.” Callum Nova’s voice was smooth with confidence. Presumably he possessed the cleverness to know that for him, only one answer would be sufficient.
“You?” Nico asked Tristan Caine, who didn’t look up from his hands.
“Of course.” His voice was thin with derision. “Of course.”
“Which leaves you,” Reina observed, turning to Parisa, who glanced askance with irritation.
“Would I really be stupid enough to refuse?”
“Don’t,” Nico cut in before anyone could respond. “This isn’t a fight. It’s not a threat, it’s a fact. Either you’re with me or you’re not.”
Either they were with him or he was not with them, Dalton interpreted in silence. But this was the point of the binding, wasn’t it? They had not suffered this year for nothing.
“Fine,” Parisa said. “If Rhodes can be found—”
“She will be,” Nico said brusquely. “That’s the point.”
“Fine.”
Parisa slid a glance around the room, to the five candidates present alongside the absence that none could ignore. She dared them to contradict her, but when, as predicted, they did not, she said, “You have our word, Varona.”
And so where there had once been six were now, irreversibly, one.
When an ecosystem dies, nature makes a new one. Simple rules for a simple concept, for which the Society was proof itself. It existed on the ashes of its former selves, atop the bones of things abandoned or destroyed. It was a secret buried within a labyrinth, inside a maze. To reach it was only to find a tumor that grew insidiously within itself.
The Society was built upon itself, higher and higher, like Babel reaching for the sky. Invention, progression, t
he building up of everything had no option but to continue; something put in motion did not, of its own volition, stop. The trouble with knowledge, the idiosyncrasy of its particular addiction, was that it was not the same as other types of vice. Because knowledge was not chemical, was not physical or hormonal or easily within reach, someone given a taste of omniscience could never be satisfied by the contents of a bare reality without it. Life and death as once prescribed would carry no weight, and even the usual temptations of excess would taste unsavory. The lives they might have had would only feel ill-fitting, poorly worn. Someday, perhaps quite soon, they might be able to create entire worlds; to not only reach, but to become like gods.
Dalton Ellery stood before the five initiates of the Alexandrian Society and watched them take their vows, marrying themselves to the inevitability of change and inseverable alteration. Henceforth, things would only be more difficult. Barriers would fall away; the world belonging to those who had not merited entry through the Society’s doors would no longer exist, and the only walls left to contain these five would be the ones they managed to build themselves. What they did not realize yet, Dalton thought in silence, was the safety of a cage, the security of containment. Given a task, even a lab rat could be capable of satisfaction; from a prescribed morality, contentment; from the fulfillment of a purpose, the discovery of a cause. Endless choices, by contrast, would only leave the rat to chase itself in circles, unable to rest or be fulfilled.
For a moment it occurred to Dalton like a seedling of something half-remembered that perhaps he should say something along those lines. That perhaps he should warn them how the access they were soon to have would be too much to allow for any weakness, too little to accommodate for pre-existing strengths. He thought: You are entering the cycle of your own destruction, the wheel of your own fortune, which will rise and fall and so will you. You will deconstruct and resurrect in some other form, and the ashes of yourself will be the rubble from the fall.
Rome falls, he wanted to say. Everything collapses. You will, too.
You will, soon.
But before Dalton could bring himself to speak, he looked up at the mirrored surface of the reading room’s glass and saw, behind him, the face of Atlas Blakely, who was the reason he still existed in any form. He had needed walls, an addict, and Atlas had given them to him in the form of a purpose. It was Atlas who had promised him that there would be an end, a conclusion to the hunger, completion of the cycle. He had taken away the chains of Dalton’s invulnerability and given him what he needed most; the one thing the others might not find on their own: an answer.
Was there such a thing as too much power?
In the glass, a little manic glimmer flashed behind Dalton’s eyes; a glimpse of who he’d once been. Past lives, ill-fitting. But this answer Dalton Ellery knew, as the initiates would soon learn, because it was the only answer even if it was the worst one, the least comforting, the most limitless:
Yes.
But as the world itself will tell you, something put in motion will not stop.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I can’t believe I keep writing things and you keep reading them. Miraculous.
This book in particular was a long time coming; these characters existed in an entirely different world amid a vastly unrelated plot before I dismantled the whole thing, used the remains for kindling, and rebuilt the story before you from the ashes of its former self. A special outpouring of thanks to Aurora and Mr Blake, who read all of this book’s different versions and persuaded me to keep going. I say this every time, but every time, I mean it: if not for them, the book you hold in your hands would not exist.
Many thanks to the usual suspects: my editors, Aurora and Cyndi; my science consultant, Mr Blake; my fight consultant, Nacho; my beloved illustrator, Little Chmura. Will I ever be able to thank you enough? Distressingly no, but I’ll keep trying. For my parents, who cheerfully back away when I’m writing and don’t ask me too often how things are going. Thank you for putting up with my artistic temperament and my deep, disturbing love of my work. For my sisters, KMS. To all of my family, my friends who continuously support me: Allie, Ana, Bella, Cara, Carrie, David, Elena, Garrett, Kayla, Lauren, Mackenzie, Megan, Stacie. To the Boxing Book Club. To my therapist, who let me use an entire hour for an incoherent stream of consciousness to work out a plot point I couldn’t untangle. To all the people who say you’re not crazy, keep going, this is good. I wish gratitude were easier to package.
To my mom, since I know she reads these: I love and am very indebted to you. (Just generally.)
To Mr Blake: thank you for telling me that my construction of magic proves I understand basic principles of physics. I worry you will eventually discover this is not correct; when that day arrives, my condolences. Thank you for considering me the good kind of crazy. Thank you for teaching everyone, me most of all. I tire of everything, always, but never you.
To you: writing is my excruciating joy, my feast of hope, my method of survival. Ipso facto, so are you. As always, it has been an honor to put these words down for you. I sincerely hope you enjoyed the story.
xx, Olivie