Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)

Following Dalton Ellery’s path was not a particularly trying task. The building was mildly sentient, possessing enough layers of enchantment that it had a basic primordial sense of thought, and so it was a simple enough effort to identify the motion of his footsteps along the vertebrae of its corridors. Parisa stepped daintily in his trajectory, hardly breaking a sweat. 

To her relief, he was still handsome upon second glance. It wasn’t a face he had put on for them at the meeting; typically, masking charms of any kind were too strenuous to hold at unnecessary moments, like this one.

She felt, though, the little catch of an unseen mechanism when he spotted her; his defenses flying up.

“You don’t seem like the power-seeking type,” Parisa ventured, deciding to guess aloud what sort of man Dalton Ellery was. The assertion was so accurate as to be unremarkable; he had a studious look to him, and a solemnity that didn’t lend itself to the hypermale braggadocio of politicians and businessmen. 

Her more pressing estimation—the more reckless guess—had been that candor might alternatively unnerve or embolden him. Either way would be enough to secure herself a place in his thoughts, in which case it would be like leaving the door open a crack behind her. She would more easily find her way back to his thoughts if she had been inside his head to begin with. 

“Miss Kamali,” said Dalton, his tone evenly measured despite his initial surprise. “I cannot imagine I seem like much at all, given the inconsequence of our meeting.”

That was insufficiently informative, to say the least; neither unnerved nor emboldened, but merely factual.

She tried again, attempting, “I wouldn’t describe anything that just happened as inconsequential.”

“No?” He shrugged, inclining his head to dismiss himself. “Well, perhaps you’re right. If you’ll excuse me—”

That wouldn’t do. “Dalton,” she said, and he glanced at her, giving her a look of intensely restrained politeness. “Surely it’s reasonable that I still have questions, despite your illuminating presentation.”

“Questions about…?”

“Everything. This Society, among other things.”

“Well, Miss Kamali, I’m afraid I can’t give you many answers beyond the ones I have already provided.”

If Parisa hadn’t already been aware how little men cared for evidence of female frustration, she might have grimaced. His indifference was deeply unhelpful.

“You,” she attempted, venturing a more effective topic. “You chose to do this once yourself, did you not?”

“Yes,” Dalton said, with an unspoken obviously.

“You chose this after one meeting?” she prompted. “Tapped by Atlas Blakely, sat in a room with strangers just as we were… and you simply agreed, no questions asked?”

Finally, a hitch of hesitation. “Yes. It is, as I’m sure you know, a compelling offer.”

“But then,” she pointed out, “you chose to stay beyond your initiation period.”

His brow twitched; another promising sign. “Does that surprise you?”

“Of course,” she said, relieved to see he was finally taking a more active role in the conversation. “Your pitch to us in that room was about power, wasn’t it? Returning to the world after initiation to take advantage of the resources allotted to the Society’s members,” she clarified, “and yet, given the opportunity to do so, you chose to remain here.” As a cleric, essentially. Some intermediary between the Alexandrian divine and their chosen flock.

“Someone once told me I don’t seem like the power-seeking type,” Dalton said.

She smiled. He didn’t know it yet, but she had found her footing.

“Well, I suppose I have little reason not to join,” Parisa replied with a shrug. Nothing, after all, was keeping her. “Only that I am not particularly enamored with teamwork.”

“You will be glad to have a team,” Dalton assured her. “The specialties are chosen to complement each other, in part. Three of you specialize in physicalities, while the other three—”

“So you know my specialty, then.”

He smiled grimly. “Yes, Miss Kamali.”

“So I suppose you don’t trust me?”

“Habitually, I refrain from trusting people like you,” said Dalton.

That, Parisa thought, was rather telling.

“I imagine you suspect me of using you, then,” she said. 

His response was a wry half-smile with a clear enough translation: I know better than to answer that.

“Well,” she said. “Then I suppose I’ll have to prove you wrong.”

He gave her another curt nod. “Best of luck to you, Miss Kamali,” he said. “I have very high hopes for you.”

He turned, about to head for the corridor, when Parisa reached for his arm, catching him unawares just long enough to draw herself up on her toes, bracing her palms on his chest.

There would be the slightest pulse of contemplation here—the hardest work was managed in the moments before a thing was accomplished. The promise of her breath on his lips; the angle at which he viewed her, her dark eyes overlarge, and the way he would gradually become conscious of her warmth. He would smell her perfume now and catch hints of it again later, wondering if she had rounded a nearby corner or recently been in a room. He would catalogue the sensation of her smallness in the same incongruous moment he registered the pressure of her presence; the immediacy of her, the nearness, would momentarily unsettle him, and in that moment, lacking the presence of mind to recoil, he would permit himself to imagine what might happen next.

The kiss itself was so fragile and brief it hardly mattered. She would learn only the smell of his cologne, the feeling of his mouth. The most important detail of a kiss was usually the cataloguing of a single fact: is the kiss returned? But this kiss, of course, was far too fleeting to be informative. Better he did not return it, in fact, as no man would allow a woman access to the more worthy corners of his mind if he kissed her too readily to start with.

“Sorry,” she said, removing her hands from his chest. Balance was a delicate matter; the sending of her desire forward while also tearing herself physically away. Those who did not believe this to be a dance had not undergone the choreography long or devotedly enough. “I’m afraid it cost more energy than I cared to expend,” she murmured, “preventing myself from doing that.” 

Magic was an energy they all knew better than to waste; on some level, she knew he would relate.

“Miss Kamali.” These, the first words after kissing her, would forever taste like her, and she doubted he’d escape an opportunity to say her name again. “Perhaps you misunderstand.”

“Oh, I’m sure I do,” she said, “but I suppose I quite enjoy an opportunity for misunderstanding.”

She smiled up at him, and he slowly detached himself from her.

“Your efforts,” he said, “would be better spent convincing your initiation class of your value. I have no direct impact on the decision as to whether or not you’ll be chosen for initiation.”

“I’m very good at what I do. I’m not concerned with their opinions.”

“Perhaps you should be.”

“I don’t make a habit of doing things I should.”

“So it appears.” 

He flicked another glance at her, and this time, to her immense satisfaction, she saw it.

The opening of a door.

“If I believed you capable of sincerity I would recommend you turn and run,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think you have every weapon necessary to win this game.”

“So it is a game, then.” Finally, something she could use.

“It is a game,” he confirmed. “But I’m afraid you miscalculated. I am not a useful piece.”

She did not, as a rule, miscalculate. Better that he wonder, though.

“Perhaps I’ll simply have you for fun, then,” she said, but as she did not make a habit of being the one left behind, she took the first step in retreat. “Are the transportation portals that way?” she asked him, deliberately pointing in the wrong direction. The moment his mind would take to replace the incorrect information with accuracy would be enough to catch the shadow of something, and she was right, observing a flicker of something heavily suppressed.

“That way,” Dalton said, “just around the corner.”

Whatever lurked in his mind was not a complete thought. It was a rush of things, identifiable only by how carnal they were. Desire, for example. She had kissed him, and he was wanting. But there was something else, too, and it wasn’t interwoven with the rest the way it sometimes was.

Lust was a color, but fear was a sensation. Clammy hands or a cold sweat were obvious markers, but more often it was some sort of multisensory incongruity. Like seeing sun and smelling smoke, or feeling silk and tasting bile. Sounds that rose out of unseeing darkness. 

Dalton Ellery was definitely afraid of something. Tragically, that something wasn’t her.

“Thank you,” Parisa said, rather meaning it, and proceeded down the corridor to find there was an additional person waiting in the vestibule.

He, she thought, was interesting. There was something very coiled up about him, something rearing to strike, but the best part about snakes was how little they could be bothered to do so unless someone was blocking their sun.

Besides, call it merciless Westernization, but she liked British accents.

“Tristan, isn’t it?” she asked, watching him look up from a rather murky swamp of thoughts. “Are you headed to London?”

“Yes.” He was half-listening, half-thinking, though his thoughts were mostly unidentifiable. On the one hand they took very linear paths, like a map of Manhattan, but they also seemed to reach destinations that would require more effort than Parisa had energy to follow at the moment. “And you?”

“London as well,” she said, and he blinked with surprise, refocusing on her.

He was recalling her academic origin of École Magique de Paris and her personal origin of Tehran, basic introductory details distributed by Atlas.

Good, so he’d been paying attention.

“But I thought—”

“Can you see through all illusions?” she asked him. “Or is it just the bad ones?”

Tristan hesitated for a moment, and then his mouth twisted. He had an angry mouth, or at least a mouth accustomed to camouflaging anger. 

“You’re one of those,” he said.

“If you’re not busy, we should have a drink,” she replied. 

He was instantly suspicious. “Why?”

“Well, there’s no point in me going back to Paris. And besides, I need to entertain myself for what remains of the evening.”

“You think I’ll entertain you?”

She allowed a deliberate flick of her eyes, following the shape of him. 

“I certainly think I’d like to see you try,” she said. “And anyway, if we’re going to do this, we ought to start making friends.”

“Friends?” He practically licked his lips with the word.

“I like to know my friends intimately,” she assured him. 

“I’m engaged.” True, but immaterial.

“How wonderful for you. I’m sure she’s a lovely girl.”

“She isn’t, actually.”

“Even better,” Parisa said. “Neither am I.”

Tristan cut her a sidelong glance. “What kept you so long after the meeting?”

She considered what to tell him, weighing her options. This wasn’t the same calculation that Dalton Ellery had been, of course. This was purely recreational. Dalton was more of a professional concern, though it was tinged with a bit of genuine craving.

Dalton was chess; Tristan was sport. Importantly, though, both were games.

“I’ll tell you over breakfast,” Parisa suggested.

Tristan sighed aloud, addressing his resignation to empty air, and then turned back to her.

“I have to do a few things first,” he said. “Break things off with Eden. Quit my job. Punch my best friend in the jaw.”

“That all sounds like responsible behavior that can wait until morning,” advised Parisa, stepping through the portal’s open doors and beckoning him after her. “Be sure to schedule in the part where I tell you my theories about what we’re not being told, presumably between the broken engagement and the probably well-deserved assault.”

He, obligingly, stepped into the portal after her. “You have theories?”

She pushed the button for London. “Don’t you?”

They exchanged a glance, both smiling, as the portal confirmed: King’s Cross Station, London, England, United Kingdom.

“Why me?” said Tristan.

“Why not?” said Parisa.

It seemed they were like-minded. She was inexperienced with collaboration, but felt that was an important qualification for teamwork.

“I could certainly use a pint,” Tristan said, and the doors closed, delivering them to the remainder of their evening.