Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)

Part 5 – Time

There were times when Tristan’s natural inclination towards cynicism served some larger, more enduring toxicity; a vast, chronic paranoia. Any rare glimpses of optimism were swiftly dealt with, a virus his mind and body leapt to attack, and thus were ultimately beaten into submission. Feelings of hope? Cancerous. There was a constant sensation for Tristan that if things seemed to be going well, half of him was sure he was in the process of being mightily tricked.

Which was why the possibility he could do more with his magic than he had ever been aware of before joining the Society was so stupendously upsetting. Were there logical reasons this might be true? Yes, of course. All skills became more refined when they were properly trained, particularly magical ones, and since Tristan had been either unidentifiable or misclassified for the majority of his education, it followed that he might not have experienced the true spectrum of his abilities until now.

Did that stop him from wondering if he were slowly going mad instead? No, absolutely not, because the possibility remained that he and the others were being quietly but effectively poisoned. (It would be a complex con, but a good one. If this was how he died, so be it. Whoever planned it would obviously deserve their intended result.)

It was difficult to explain, which was why he hadn’t. To anyone. He sensed he was letting off certain undercurrents of agitation, though, which was a suspicion Callum served to reinforce, always glancing over at Tristan reassuringly when he was feeling most unhinged. It was the conflict of the thing; the tension. The difficulty of seeing one thing and knowing another. Strangely, it had been something Libby said that did it; she had commented on Tristan’s ability as if it were notable that he couldn’t see her version of reality, and from there it had been a tumble of deduction. 

It all hinged on a basic, undeniable fact: that what Tristan could see and what others could see were different. Other people, according to both Callum and Parisa, saw things based on their experiences, on what they were taught, on what they were told was true and what wasn’t. Einstein himself (surprisingly not a medeian; almost certainly a witch, though) had said there was no reality at all except in the relations between systems. What everyone else was seeing—illusions, perceptions, interpretations—were not an objective form of reality at all, which meant that, conversely, what Tristan could see… was.

He could see, in some sense, reality itself: a true, unbiased state of it. 

But the closer he looked, the fuzzier it got.

It was late one night when he couldn’t sleep, sitting cross-legged in the center of his mattress to test his eyesight again. Of course, it wasn’t his actual eyes he was using; it was some other form of looking, which he supposed was his magic, though he hadn’t progressed to knowing what to call it yet. Mostly, if he concentrated, he could see little particles of things. Like dust, almost, where if he focused in on one thing, he could watch its trajectory, follow its path. Sometimes he could identify something from it; a mood, which took the form of a color, like an aurora, which was still somehow none of those things, because of course he hadn’t honed the sense required to name it. He wasn’t hearing or smelling reality, and he certainly wasn’t tasting it. It was more like he was dismantling it layer by layer, observing it as a model instead. 

It had the same logical progression most other things possessed. Take the fire that had been burning in the hearth, for instance. The weather was getting colder now, moving briskly into autumn, and so Tristan had fallen asleep to the light dancing, shadows falling, the smell of flames warming the air as flakes of ash floated down to the base of the wood. He knew it was fire because it looked like fire, smelled like fire. He knew from experience, from his personal history, that if he touched it, he would burn. He knew it was fire because he had been told it was fire; that much had been proven countless times.

But what if it wasn’t?

That was the question Tristan was struggling with. Not about the fire specifically, but about everything else. A very existential crisis, really, that he no longer knew the difference between what was true, objectively, and what he merely believed to be true because it had been told to him that way. Was that what happened to everyone? The world had been flat once; it was believed to be flat, so in the collective consciousness it was, or had been, even if it wasn’t. 

Or was it?

It was giving Tristan such a monumental headache that he didn’t even stop to question why someone would be knocking on his door at this hour. He simply waved a hand and summoned it open.

“What?” he said, Tristan-ly.

“Turn down the cataclysm, would you? It’s the middle of the night,” said Parisa, Parisa-ly. She, he noted, was fully dressed, if a bit… rumpled. He frowned at her, and she shut the door behind her, leaning against it.

“I obviously didn’t wake you,” Tristan commented in observation, wondering if she would take the bait and explain.

Unsurprisingly, she did not. “No, you didn’t wake me. But as a general rule, you could stand to calm down,” she said, and then stepped further into the room.

Moonlight fell on her from the window in a panel; just narrow enough that he could see the little furrow of concern in her brow. Each of Parisa’s expressions were so artful they could hang in the Louvre, and not for the first time, Tristan wondered what on earth her parents must have looked like to achieve such outrageous genetic symmetry.

“Actually, my parents aren’t particularly attractive,” said Parisa blandly. “And my face isn’t technically symmetrical.” She paused, and then, “My breasts certainly aren’t.”

“I know.” He hadn’t specifically noticed, but it felt like the right thing to remind her; that he had been in a position to know, at least. Several positions. “And is that supposed to be self-deprecation? Or humility?”

“Neither. Beauty is nothing.” She waved it away and stole towards him, settling herself on the edge of his bed. “Everyone’s perception is flawed. They have standards drilled into them by cultural propaganda. Nothing anyone sees is real; only how they perceive it.”

How very topical, Tristan thought grimly. Which might have been intentional on her part, though at the moment he didn’t care to dwell on which of his thoughts she was or wasn’t using. 

“What is it?” he asked her. “Clearly something’s bothering you.”

“I’ve just discovered something. I think.” She toyed with her fingers, tapping them mindlessly in her lap. “I’m not sure yet whether it will be in your best interest to tell you.”

“In my best interest?”

“Well, you’re right, it wouldn’t be in yours. You wouldn’t take it well at all.” She glanced at him, eyes narrowing. “No, I can’t tell you,” she determined after a moment. “But regrettably, I do want you to trust me.”

“Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the concept of trust,” Tristan pointed out, assuming that she almost certainly was, “but it is very rarely based on nothing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re suggesting that you’d like me to blindly trust your judgment despite having multiple things you’re unwilling to tell me?” 

“I know the inside of your head, Tristan,” Parisa reminded him, the same way he’d commented on his intimacy with her, albeit more confidently. She had actually taken stock of his details, whereas he, with her, had been mostly preoccupied. “You wouldn’t take it well.”

“Ah, wonderful,” Tristan muttered. “You even condescend beautifully.”

When she shifted towards him on the bed he caught a hint of her perfume, only it wasn’t hers entirely. Parisa had a signature scent, a spectrum of florals. At the moment, there were traces of cologne, musks of something masculine and smoky, which, to Eden’s credit, Tristan’s former fiancée had always been very careful to prevent. Eden Wessex might not have known that Tristan could see through her illusions, but she was a very dutiful adulterer. He had considered it—still considered it, in fact—to be one of her primary strengths. 

“This Society,” Parisa said, jolting him back to the point. “It’s not what I thought. They’re telling us at least one lie.”

The restless feeling of resistance bristled again, rearing up in protest. Again, the usual torment: Tristan wanted to believe the Society was giving him something he could not have gotten otherwise. He was suspicious of what that something was. Now, Parisa was tipping the scales once again, feeding his inexhaustible doubt.

“I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it,” Parisa remarked curtly. “Not yet. But I think it’s worth knowing who we work for.”

Tristan frowned. “Atlas, you mean?”

“Or is it?” she posed, pursing her lips. “There are some answers I need to dig up, I think, but in the meantime, you need to be careful.”

He hated to continuously express his bewilderment, but there was nothing for it. 

“Me?”

“Callum is influencing you,” said Parisa. “I don’t know if he’s doing it magically or otherwise, but he wants something from you. He’s willing to blind you to accomplish it.”

“I’m not a damsel, Parisa. I don’t need rescuing.”

That, much to the dismay of his vanity, only served to amuse her.  “Actually, I think you’re precisely a damsel, Tristan.” She reached out, touching his cheek. “I know you don’t trust Callum,” she said, murmuring it. “I think that’s precisely what he’s using against you. He’s presenting you with his reality, thinking his candor will appeal to you, but you’re not listening, are you, Tristan? You’re not listening to what he really is, even when he says it to your face.”

Tristan stiffened. “If I don’t trust him, then what does it matter?”

“Because even if you don’t trust him, you believe him. He is influencing your perception by confirming everything you already believe to be true. He’s planting things in you, and I worry.” 

Her thumb stroked his jaw, floating over his lips. “I worry,” she said again, quieter.

Tristan’s immediate reflex was to mistrust Parisa’s softness.

“What did he do?” he asked her. “What could have possibly upset you so much?”

“It didn’t upset me. It unsettled me.” She pulled away. “And if you really must know, he convinced the illusionist to kill herself.”

Tristan frowned. “So?”

“So, don’t you see? His weapon is us. Our beliefs, our weaknesses, he can turn them against us.” From the faint light through the window, Tristan could see the tightening of her mouth. “He finds the monsters we keep locked away and sets them loose, so why would I ever want him to see mine?”

“Fine,” Tristan permitted evasively, “but couldn’t you do the same? You can read minds. Should we regard you with the same suspicion?”

Parisa rose agitatedly to her feet.

“There is a difference between what we are capable of and how we choose to use it,” she snapped.

“Maybe so, but if you want me to trust you, you’ll have to give me a reason,” Tristan pointed out. “Otherwise, how are you any different from Callum?”

She gave him a glare so sharp he could feel it, cutting himself on its edge.

“Callum,” she said, “doesn’t need you, Tristan. He wants you. You should ask yourself why that is.”

Then she slipped out of his room and did not speak to him again for four days.

Not that it bothered him too immensely. The silence of temperamental women was a very common feature in his life, and anyway, he did not know what to make of her… warning? Threat? Unclear what she wanted, though he was privately pleased she hadn’t gotten it. He hated giving people what they wanted, especially if it was unintentionally done. 

He was also extremely distracted. They were covering the many theories about time, beginning with attempts at time travel by witches in the Middle Ages; a conversation which also included, for some reason, the prominent European attempts at extending the mortal lifetime. In Tristan’s mind, the concept of time should have been covered in the physical magics, not historical or alchemical failures. Perhaps it was just an excuse to give them more access to another magical period in history.

He was beginning to steal away privately more and more, pursuing his own research in the ancient texts they’d been reading about the construction of the universe before doubling back to the mysteries he felt unsolved. Why hadn’t their wormhole successfully traveled through time? Did it really require more magic to influence time, or had they simply not gone about it correctly? He tried to draw it once, scribbling it in his notes while Dalton droned on about Magellan and the Fountain of Youth, but nothing came of it.

Nothing, that is, until Libby sought him out.

It wasn’t clear at first that she’d been intentionally looking for him. He had assumed she merely stumbled on him in the painted room after dinner and would therefore hastily leave. It became apparent, however, that the stumbling was really just another side effect of her natural presence, and so he glanced up expectantly.

“I had a thought,” she said. 

He waited.

“Well, Varona and I both had a thought. I mean, I thought of it,” Libby clarified hurriedly, “but I needed him to test it, and, well, I don’t know if you’re willing to hear it, but I noticed your drawing the other day and—not that I was prying, I just… oh god, sorry,” she said, mangling what might have been a blissful end to that sentence. “I didn’t mean t- Well, the thing is—”

“Spit it out, Rhodes,” said Tristan. He had just been on the verge of something, maybe. (Probably not, his brain reminded him. Wishful thinking.) “I haven’t got all day.”

“Right, well, alright.” Her cheeks burned furiously, but she came closer. “Can you… try something with me?”

He gave her a look intended to express that he would consider it, if—and only if—it meant she would get to it and leave him alone.

“Right,” she said, clearing her throat. “Watch this.”

She plucked a small rubber ball from her pocket and tossed it, letting it bounce three times before freezing it in place.

“Now watch while I reverse it,” she said.

It bounced three times backwards and landed snugly in her hand.

“Okay,” Tristan said. “And?”

“I have a theory,” Libby said, “that it looked different to you than it did to me. To me, I did the exact same thing forwards and backwards. I could have gone ten seconds back in time and noticed nothing different from before I threw the ball. But you,” she said, trailing off, and waited.

Tristan thought about it.

“Do it again,” he said, and her face immediately relaxed. Relief, he suspected, that he might have actually noticed something, or was at least giving her the opportunity to make him notice.

She tossed the ball again, letting it bounce three times, and froze it.

Then she summoned it back, same as before, and caught it in her hand.

“See something?” she said.

Yes. Not something he could explain, but there was some element out of place. A rapid motion around the ball, barely visible.

“What did you expect me to see?” he asked her.

“Heat,” she said, breath quickening. Clearly she was excited; childishly so. “The thing is,” bubbled from her lips, “according to everything I’ve read, it’s possible time is measurably no different from gravity. Things moving up and down? Gravity. Things moving backward and forward? Force, of course, depending on the dimension—but also, in some respect, time. If the clocks had been stopped, if nothing had changed, there would be no physical evidence that I hadn’t reversed time itself when I reversed the ball’s motion. The only real way you could know that we haven’t traveled in time—aside from trusting your understanding that we haven’t,” she provided as a caveat, gesturing around the room to her experiment, “is that heat was produced by the ball hitting the ground, and heat can’t be lost. Thermal energy bouncing the ball has to go somewhere, so as long as that hasn’t vanished, then we haven’t moved back in time.”

“Okay,” Tristan said slowly, “and?”

“And—”

She stopped.

“And… nothing,” she concluded, deflating a little. “I just thought—” She broke off again, faltering. “Well, if you can see heat, you could also see time, don’t you think?” she said, nudging her fringe aside. “If what you’re seeing is even more specific—electrons or something, or quanta itself—then the next step is to manipulate it. I’ve been thinking about it for ages,” she informed him, again becoming Studious Libby, who temporarily lost her anxious ticks. “With the illusions, with that medeian that I—”

She broke off on the word killed, clearing her throat.

“You told me what you saw,” she clarified, “and I used that information to change my surroundings. So, if you told me what you saw when it came to time—”

“You could use it. Change it.” Tristan chewed the thought for a moment. “Manipulate it?”

“I guess it depends on what you were seeing,” Libby said carefully, “but I think, if I’m right about what you can do, that if you could identify the physical structure of time, then yes. We could maneuver it somehow.” She was breathless with exhilaration; the thrill of a problem nearly solved.

“Though, if you’re busy,” she amended with a floundering blink, “we could always try it another t-”

“Rhodes, shut up,” said Tristan. “Come here.”

She was clearly so pleased that she didn’t bother opposing his tone, instead bounding over to sit beside him. He stopped her and rose to his feet, gesturing her into his chair.

“You sit,” he said. “I’ll stand behind you.”

She slid into his seat and nodded as he concentrated once again.

Whatever this particular magic was, when he focused it hard enough, things became grainy. When he did the equivalent of squinting, it was like the zooming of a microscopic lens. Things were blurrier at the edges, but he could see things, smaller and smaller. Layers upon layers, motion growing more rapid the closer he got.

“When you manipulate gravity,” he said. “What does it feel like?”

Libby closed her eyes, holding out a hand.

With the flat of her palm, she pushed down. The pressure nearly dragged Tristan to his knees.

“Like a wave,” she explained belatedly. “Like things are floating in an invisible current.”

Tristan conjured his understanding of linear time, turning it over in his mind. Where might the misconceptions have been? That it was linear, he supposed. That it moved forward and backward. That it was ordered. That it was irrelevant to concepts like heat. 

There it was; when he dismissed his expectations, he found it. It was the only thing moving at an identifiably constant pace, though it varied from different levels throughout the room. Faster higher up, slower lower down. Not the same constancy of the clock on the wall, which was close to the ceiling’s apex, but near Libby, it was regular. As regular as a pulse. He could see it, or feel it—or however he was experiencing it—at what he presumed to be sixty beats per minute right where Libby’s hair brushed the tops of her shoulders, flipping girlishly out. It was getting long; it had grown at least an inch since they’d arrived.

Tristan reached forward, resting a hand on Libby’s arm, and started tapping the pattern of the motion.

“Is there something that feels like that in this room?” he asked her.

She closed her eyes again, frowning. Then she reached for his hand, pulling it just below her clavicle, resting it on her breastbone and jarring him slightly out of his rhythm, his fingers brushing bare skin.

“Sorry,” she said. “Need it somewhere I can feel it.”

Right. It would ricochet through her chest that way.

Tristan located the precise beat he was looking for and tapped the pattern again, waiting. For another ten, twenty beats, he tapped it out like a metronome, and by the time he reached forty beats or so, Libby’s eyes shot open.

“I found it,” she said, and then, with a motion of her hand, the pattern Tristan had been watching went still.

To his disbelief, everything went still.

The clock on the wall had stopped. Tristan himself, the motion of his breath, had been suspended, and he suspected the blood in his veins had been, too. Nothing moved, though he could look around somehow, or feel around, experiencing himself newly within the space he’d taken up. His hand was still resting on Libby’s chest, his thumb below the collar of her shirt, no longer tapping. She had the strangest look on her face; nearly a smile, but somehow louder. It burned with resilience, with triumph, and then he processed it: she had done this with intention, with skill.

With his help, Libby Rhodes had stopped time.

She blinked and everything fell back into place, careening into motion. It had been nothing more than a lag, a momentary resistance that had been nearly unidentifiable, but even so, Tristan could see the sweat on her brow. It had not cost her nothing.

She rose to her feet too quickly, spinning to face him in her fervor, and nearly collapsed. He caught her with one arm around her ribs and she struggled upright, grasping his shoulders for leverage. 

“I could do more if I had Nico,” she said, staring at nothing. At his chest, but also at nothing; staring down the barrel of her thoughts, rapidly calculating something. How to do it again, or do more, or do better. “I couldn’t hold it alone, but if I had him, or maybe Reina… and you showed me how to move it first, then maybe we could—Well, maybe if I’d just… drat, I should have—”

“Rhodes,” Tristan sighed. “Listen—”

“Well, I don’t know what we could do, to be honest,” she confessed worriedly. “If this is how time moves, then everything is a bit different, isn’t it? If time is a force that can be measured like any other—”

“Rhodes, listen—”

“—at very least we could model it, couldn’t we? I mean, if you can see it, then—”

“Rhodes, for fuck’s sake!”

She looked up, startled, to find Tristan staring (exasperatedly, he assumed) down at her.

“Thank you,” he said, and then exhaled, irritated. “Jesus, fuck. I just wanted to say thank you.” 

That abysmal fringe of hers was getting outrageously long; it had fallen into her eyes. She brushed it away with one hand, lowering her chin slightly.

“You’re welcome,” she said, her voice soft.

The silence that followed, a rarity indeed, was filled with things Tristan generally hated. Floaty, swollen things, like gratitude, because now he understood that he hadn’t imagined any of it; she had proven that for him. She had proven that whether what he had was blindness or madness, it could still be put to use somehow. True, he might be little more than a lens through which to view things, but he was a scope, a necessity. Without him she could not see it. Without him, she could not do it.

What a relief it was, being a cog in something that actually turned for once.

“What’s this?” came a voice behind them, and Tristan immediately released her, taking a jarring step back. “Odd,” remarked Callum, sauntering into the room as Libby felt for the chair behind her, rapidly flustered. “Doing homework, children?”

Tristan said nothing.

“I should go,” Libby mumbled in reply, and dropped her chin, hurrying to the door.

Callum watched her leave, half-laughing to himself.

“Can you imagine? Being like that. Born with all that power and still not good enough, still desperate to flee the room. Sad, if you think about it.” Callum pulled out one of the free chairs, sinking into it. “Someone really ought to take that power away from her and put it to good use.”

Explaining what she had just done was unlikely to change Callum’s mind. If anything, it only served to prove his point. “At least she’s relentless,” said Tristan.

“Her? She’s entirely relenting, Caine.” Callum was still smiling; his opinion of Libby, however low it happened to be, wasn’t nearly enough to stifle his mood. “Have any interest?”

“In her? Not remotely.” Tristan slid into the chair where Libby had been. “But I can certainly see why she was chosen for this.”

“I rather can’t believe that’s still a thing you question,” remarked Callum. “What does the ‘why’ really matter? Aside from your personal taste for intrigue, that is.”

Tristan slid a glance at him. “Don’t you wonder?”

“No.” Callum shrugged. “The Society has its reasons for choosing us. What matters is my choices. Why play their game,” he added, smile glinting again, “when I can play my own?”

Callum doesn’t need you. He wants you, Parisa’s voice reminded Tristan. You should ask yourself why that is.

“There’s that doubt again,” Callum said, ostensibly delighted by whatever he could read from Tristan. “It’s so refreshing, really. Everyone else has this irritating frequency, full of jolts and jerks, but then there’s you. A steady, pleasant base.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“It’s like meditation.” Callum closed his eyes, sinking lower in the chair. He inhaled deeply, and then, slowly, opened them. “Your vibes,” he drawled facetiously, “are absolutely resplendent.”

Tristan rolled his eyes. “Want a drink?” he said. “Could use one.”

Callum rose to his feet with a nod. “What are we celebrating?”

“Our fragile mortality,” Tristan said. “The inevitability that we will descend into chaos and dust.”

“Grim,” Callum offered appreciatively, closing a hand around Tristan’s shoulder. “Try not to tell Rhodes that or she’ll start decaying all over the place.”

Because he could not resist, Tristan asked, “What if she’s tougher than you think she is?” 

Callum shrugged, dismissive.

“I’m just curious,” Tristan clarified, “whether that would please you or send you into a spiral of existential despair.”

“Me? I never despair,” said Callum. “I am only ever patently unsurprised.”

Not for the first time, Tristan considered how the ability to estimate people to the precise degree of what they were must be a dangerous quality to have. The gift of understanding a person’s reality, both their lightness and darkness, without the flaws of perception to blur their edges or lend meaning to their existence was… unsettling.   

A blessing, or a curse.

“And if I disappoint you?” Tristan prompted.

“You disappoint me all the time, Caine. It’s why I’m so very fond of you,” Callum mused, beckoning Tristan toward the library and its finer bottles of vintage scotch.