“Help me with something.”
Nico looked up from a long distance. As far as Reina could tell, the introduction of a new subject hadn’t distracted him or eased his guilt, but something had. He was less aimless now, more determined, properly sleeping again. Impatiently waiting, but waiting nonetheless.
“Help you with what?” he asked.
“I have a theory.”
She sat across from him in the grass, which protested as it always did. For once, she was glad to hear it. It served as a confirmation of sorts.
“Okay. About what?”
“I was thinking about what Callum said about sentience. Naturalism,” Reina said, gesturing wordlessly to the whispers of MotherMotherMother that ached below her palms in tiny, willowy blades. “And about that medeian, her specialty of longevity.”
“What about it?” Nico wasn’t leaping to curiosity, but he was interested enough.
“Life,” Reina posited, “must be an element. I can’t use it, but maybe someone could.” She fixed him with a careful glance. “You could.”
“Could what?” He looked startled.
She sighed, “Use it.”
“Use it?” he echoed.
“Yes.” Maybe there was a better way to explain it. Maybe not. “Maybe you could manipulate it, shape it, like any other force. Like gravity.” She paused. “Possibly you could even create it.”
“You think I could create life?” Nico sat up slightly, frowning. “If it were a physical element then yes, theoretically speaking. Maybe.” His brow furrowed. “But even if I could—”
“Energy doesn’t come from nothing, I know.” She’d already thought about it at length. “That’s where I come in.”
“But—”
“The theory is a quite straightforward. Suppose life is its own element. What if Viviana Absalon’s magical specialty really was life—the ability to be alive and stay that way?” she said, waiting to see if he followed. “Life and sentience are not the same, but there are microorganisms that live without sentience, so if magic like an animation can live, in some sense—”
Nico was staring at her, brows still furrowed, and Reina reached out with a sigh, gruffly placing a hand on his shoulder.
“Just try it,” she said, and he balked.
“Try… what, exactly?”
Ha ha ha, laughed the grass, rustling with amusement. Mother is much too clever, much more clever, she seesandseesandsees ha haaaaa—
“Just try,” Reina repeated.
She felt Nico’s shoulder stiffen beneath her touch, bracing for an argument, but then it settled gradually into place as he must have conceded, either willingly giving in or responding against his own volition to something she was offering him. Reina wondered, not for the first time, if he could now hear what she could hear, or if that was still reserved for her personal annoyance. At least when Nico was using it she was permitted moments of reprieve, the rush of channeling it into something. It was indistinct from the sensation of allowing nature itself to take from her, as she had when Atlas had first entered her cafe.
Grow, Reina had told the seed then, and it had grown.
Now she told Nico try, and she could feel the way his power had accepted hers gratefully, willingly, hungrily. There was a sense of both relief and release, and when he lifted his palm, the response was a staggered lurch, like a full-bodied gasp.
There was no other way to describe it outside of a spark. Whether they saw it or felt it or merely intuited its presence was grossly indeterminable. Reina knew only that something which had not existed previously had existed briefly for a time, and she knew that Nico knew it too, his dark eyes widening with astonishment and the aftershocks of belated apprehension.
He had expected nothing; if she had expected anything more, it was only for having been the one to own the theory, to make use of the thought.
It really was a simple idea, almost laughable in its lack of complexity. If life could come from nothing—if it could be born at all, created like the universe itself—then why should it not come from her?
Mother, sighed the sweep of a nearby branch.
She and Nico both seemed to know what they’d done without consulting the other for evidence.
“What does it mean?” asked Nico.
“I don’t know.” She didn’t. Not yet.
“What could you do with it?”
“Me?” Reina turned to him with surprise. “Nothing.”
He frowned back at her, not understanding. “What?”
“I can’t do anything with it.”
“But—”
“You used it,” she said.
“But you gave it to me!”
“So? What’s electricity without a lightbulb? Useless.”
“That’s—”
But then he shook his head, seeming to see no point in furthering the argument.
“If Rhodes were here,” he said deflatingly, “then maybe I could do something with it. But as it is, it’s just… that.” A spark. “Whatever that was.”
“So you need more power?”
“More than that. More than more.” He drummed his fingers in the grass, a brief return to his usual state of fidgeting. “It’s not a matter of how much, it’s how… good. How pure.”
“So if Libby were here it would be something?”
“Yes.” He sounded certain. He always sounded certain, but that particular certainty was more persuasive than smug. “I don’t know what, but something.”
“Well.” Reina paused to shield her eyes as the sun broke through the cloud cover overhead, enveloping them in a harsh wave of brightness. “We’ll have to find her, then.”
There was a pulse of tension as Nico braced himself again.
“We?”
“If I can help, yes.” She glanced at him. “I assumed you were doing something already.”
“Well—” He stopped. “I’m not. I’m out of options, but—”
“Your friend,” she guessed. “The one who can move through dreams?”
He said nothing.
“You never mentioned that about him,” Reina observed aloud. “His name, yes, but never what it was he could do.”
Nico seemed retroactively guilty, kicking out his feet in the grass. “I never planned to tell anyone.”
“Because he is… secretive?”
“Him? Not so much. But what he can do…” Nico sighed. “It’s just best if people don’t know.”
To her displeasure, Reina found herself more annoyed by that than usual.
“You should trust us.” She was surprised by how adamant she was. “Don’t you think?”
Nico’s expression in reply was one of total, incomprehensible openness. Parisa had been right that he was scarcely capable of guile.
“Why?” he said.
Reina considered it. Nico would want a good answer, a thorough one, and for possibly selfish reasons, she needed him to be persuaded.
“Do you understand,” she said slowly, “how alone we are one thing, but together we are another?”
A beat of silence.
Then, “Yes.”
“So it is a waste, then. Not to use the resources you have.” Another simple concept.
“You would trust Callum? Or Parisa?”
Nico sounded skeptical, for good reason.
“I trust that they are talented,” Reina confirmed slowly. “I trust their skill. I trust that when their interests align with mine, they are useful.”
“And if they don’t align?”
“Then make them.” To Reina it was logical, sequential, if-this-then-that. “Why are we part of this if not to be great? I could be good alone, as could you,” she reminded him. “We would not still be here if we wished to settle only for goodness.”
“Are you—” Nico faltered. “Are you really so certain about this?”
About the Society, he meant.
“Yes,” she said.
It wasn’t true at the time, but she had plans to make it so. She intended to become that certain, and to do so would only require a few answers.
Only one man could satisfactorily provide her with those.
She could see she hadn’t startled him with her presence. Perhaps he’d been expecting her. His office had always held little interest for any of them, largely because the space itself contained nothing worth inspection. Only he was interesting, in his unobtrusive way. There had always been an air of eternal patience about him.
“What is initiation?” Reina asked without preamble, and Atlas, who had been rifling through some of the books on his shelf, slowed his motions to a halt.
“A ritual. As everything is.” He looked tired, as he often looked when they caught glimpses of him lately. He was dressed in a bespoke suit as he always was, this one a slate grey that somehow reflected his state of academic mourning. “Binding oaths are not particularly complex. I imagine you must have studied them at one point.”
She had. “Will it work without a death?”
“Yes.”
Atlas took a seat at his desk and gestured for her to do the same, removing a pen from his pocket and setting it carefully just to the right of his hand. “There may be fractures. But after two millennia of oaths to reinforce the binding, I can assure you,” he said with something close to irony, “it will hold.”
She didn’t bother asking why they didn’t simply do away with the elimination process, then, if it would hold without it. It seemed fairly obvious there were no more reasons to support it than there were to support the divine right of kings. Tradition, ritual, the general fear of chaos.
It didn’t matter. She was alive, and that was the only factor of relevance.
“I doubt you came to ask me about the logistics of the ceremony,” Atlas remarked. He was regarding her with a certain wary interest; guarded.
“I wanted to ask you something else.”
“Then ask.”
“Will you answer?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
Comforting, Reina thought.
“You told me in the cafe that my invitation to join the Society had come down to me and someone else,” she reminded him.
“Yes, I did say that.” He didn’t look as if he planned to deny anything. “Has it bothered you much?”
“In a sense.”
“Because you doubt your place here?”
“No,” Reina said, and she didn’t. “I knew it was mine if I wanted it.”
Atlas leaned back in his chair, contemplating her with a glance. “Then what’s to think about?”
“The fact that there are others.” It wasn’t a threat so much as a curiosity. “People who nearly make the cut, but don’t.”
“There’s no reason to worry about them, if that’s what you mean,” Atlas said. “There are plenty of other pursuits, noble ones. Not everyone merits an invitation to the Society.”
“Do they work for the Forum?”
“The Forum is not the same, structurally,” Atlas said. “It is closer to a corporation.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Its members stand to profit.”
“From what?”
“Our loss,” Atlas said simply, waving a hand over an empty mug. Within moments there was tea inside it, the smell of lavender and bergamot wafting in the air between them. “But such is the nature of things. Balance,” he said, bringing the cup to his lips. “There cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck.”
“No life without death?” asked Reina.
Atlas inclined his head in agreement. “So you see the purpose of the ritual,” he said.
She wondered if perhaps she wanted this too much. She was willing to make excuses for it, to believe its lies. A toxic love, born of starvation.
Too late now. “Do you know what happened to Libby Rhodes?”
“No.” It came without hesitation, but not too quickly. She could see the formulation of concern in his brow, which seemed real enough. “And I’m sorry to say I would have readily believed her dead if not for Mr. Caine.”
“Do you believe it was the Forum?”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
“What are the other possibilities?”
She could see his tongue catching, a mechanism sliding shut.
“Innumerable,” he said.
So he would not be sharing his theories with her.
“Should we trust you?” Reina asked him.
Atlas gave her a paternal half-smile.
“I will tell you this,” he said. “If I could retrieve Elizabeth Rhodes myself, I would do everything in my power to do so. There would be no reason for me to abandon her pursuit. I reap no benefit from her loss.”
Reina did believe that, grudgingly. She supposed there was no reason to doubt him. Anyone could see Libby’s value.
“But none of this is why you came here,” Atlas observed.
Reina glanced down at her hands, wondering for a moment what felt so strange about them here. She realized eventually it was the lack of tension within them, because unlike other rooms in the house, this one did not contain any life. There were no plants, only books and dead wood.
Interesting, she thought.
“You said there was a traveler,” she said. “I wanted to know if it was Nico’s friend.”
“Ah yes, Gideon Drake,” said Atlas. “He was a finalist, albeit not in the final ten.”
“Is it true that his friend can travel through dream realms?”
“Realms of the subconscious,” Atlas clarified with a nod. “A fascinating ability, without question, but the Society’s board was ultimately unconvinced of Mr. Drake’s control over his abilities. I believe even Miss Rhodes knew only of his incurable narcolepsy, which could not be successfully prevented,” he added with a small inward chuckle. “Very few of NYUMA’s professors knew what to do with him. He is quite close to untrained, in some senses. And his mother is highly dangerous and likely to interfere.”
“Who is she?”
“No one in particular,” Atlas said. “Something of a spy. No telling why or how she fell into it, but she appears to have a debt, or at least a fondness for earning new ones.”
Reina frowned. “So she does… what, exactly?”
“She’s a criminal, but a forgettable one. Not unlike Mr. Caine’s father.”
“Oh.” For some reason, that information made Reina deeply sad. Perhaps it was the way that, in calling Gideon Drake’s mother forgettable, Atlas was so quick to suggest that memory was a luxury not to be wasted on the unworthy. “And Gideon?”
“I suspect that if Mr. Drake had never met Nico de Varona, his life would look quite different,” Atlas said. “If indeed he were still living without Nico’s help.”
Reina shifted in her chair. “So that’s it?”
“What is?”
“The unremarkable are punished for their unremarkability,” she said.
Atlas set down his cup of tea, steeping the moment in silence.
“No,” he said at last, adjusting his tie. “It is the remarkable who suffer. The unremarkable are passed over, yes, but greatness is not without its pains.” He fixed her with a solemn glance, adding, “I know very few medeians who would not ultimately choose to be unremarkable and happy, were they able to do so.”
“But you do know some who wouldn’t choose that,” Reina pointed out.
Atlas’ mouth twisted upwards.
“Yes,” he said. “I do know some.”
He seemed ready to let her go, his episode of candor coming to a close, but Reina lingered a moment longer, contemplating her lack of satisfaction. She supposed she had thought the confirmation of Nico’s friend would solve her puzzle, but it hadn’t. The initial satisfaction of having questions answered was a cheap high, and now she was unfulfilled again.
“The traveler,” she said. “The one you rejected to choose me instead. Who was it?”
She knew without a doubt this would be the last question she was permitted to ask.
“He was not rejected,” said Atlas, before inclining his head in dismissal, rising to his feet and leading her conclusively to the door.
