Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)
Atlas Six: Part 5 – Chapter 22

So it was not a game, then. That, or it was a highly sadistic one.

It was only in retrospect that Parisa realized Atlas and Dalton had never specified that one of the six would be sent home; only that one of the six would be eliminated in a decision made by the others. Five would choose one to go, but the conditions of their departure had never been made clear. She had thought, initially, that it was a rather arbitrary—albeit civilized—method of ensuring that only the best and most dedicated moved on.

Now, though, everything made a twisted sort of sense. Why would the world’s most exclusive society of academics ever permit one of its potential members to leave? It would be a security risk at best; even if the eliminated medeian parted amicably from the others—already a significant if—people were reliable only for being careless with information.

Only the dead kept secrets. The moment she realized it—tripping over it in Dalton’s mind—everything else fell into place.

“One of us has to die,” Parisa had said aloud, testing it out to see how it would feel against the backdrop of reality. That Dalton was still inside her at the time was a secondary concern, until he went rigid.

“What?”

“That’s why you don’t want me to lose. You don’t want me to be the one who dies.” She pulled away to look at him. “A bit drastic, don’t you think?”

He looked neither relieved nor undone by her knowing. At best, he was resigned to it, and though he tried to pull away, she locked him in place, still processing.

“You killed someone, then.” She registered it with a blink. “Is that what you keep locked away? Your guilt?”

“You used me,” he observed tangentially, confirming his suspicions for himself.

Which was quite obviously sufficient for a yes.

“But what possible reason could there be for killing an initiate?” Parisa pressed him, uninterested for the moment in the task of soothing his ego. As if a woman could not enjoy sex and read minds at the same time! They had not even disentangled and already, Dalton was looking for ways to make her the villain of his femme fatale narrative, which was hardly something she had time or patience for. “Ridding the world of a medeian, and for what?”

Dalton drew back, fumbling with his trousers. “You’re not supposed to know about this,” he muttered. “I should have been more careful.”

Liar. He’d clearly wanted her to know it. “Perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on things we’re not supposed to know,” Parisa remarked, and Dalton slid a glance at her, the taste of her so idly sweet on his tongue that even she could see him curl his thoughts around it. “Are you going to tell me why,” she pressed him, “or should I just run off and tell the others how this is all an elaborate fight to the death?”

“That’s not what it is,” Dalton said mechanically. That was the company line, it seemed. She wondered if he were capable of delivering any other explanation, contractually or otherwise.

“Magic comes only at a price, Parisa. You know that. Some subjects require sacrifice. Blood. Pain. The only way to create such magic is to destroy it.”

His thoughts were cloudier than that; less finite. “That’s not why,” Parisa observed.

“Of course it is.” Now he was impatient, jittery. Possibly he simply disliked being contradicted, though she suspected there was more to it than that. “The subjects contained in the library are not for everyone. They are rare, requiring immense power and unimaginable restraint. There’s a reason only six are chosen—”

“Five,” Parisa corrected him. “Five are chosen. One is slaughtered.”

His mouth tightened. “Don’t call it a slaughter. It isn’t a slaughter. It’s—”

“A willing sacrifice? I highly doubt that.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Tell me which of us would have agreed to this if we knew one would have to die for it, hm? And besides, I can see there’s more to it.” She peered at him carefully, waiting to see if he would reveal anything, but he had sealed himself into a vault again. He had already given away too much, or simply wanted her to believe he had. Whether that had been his intention or not remained unclear.

“You wanted me to know, Dalton,” she reminded him, deciding to accuse him openly and see where that went. “I don’t think you’re careless enough to let me get close to you otherwise. But if you want me to act on your warning, then you’ll have to explain to me why it exists. Otherwise,” she scoffed, “what reason would I have to stay?”

“You can’t leave, Parisa. You’ve seen too much.”

That, and he did not seem to think she would do it even if she could. There was no panic, no frenzied concern as he said it; entirely fact.

It was unfortunate his certainty was so merited. After all, what life could she possibly go back to after this?

She straightened her skirt, adjusting her undergarments, and rose to her feet.

“Dalton,” she said, and took hold of his collar. “You know I did more than use you, don’t you?”

His tongue slid over his lips. “More than?”

“I enjoyed you,” she assured him, and tugged him closer. “But I’m afraid I’ll have quite a few more questions when I’ve thought this all through.”

His hands found her waist blindly. They would itch for her now, she was sure. He would wake in the middle of the night to replace the shape of her formed between his vacant palms.

“Perhaps I’ll give you nothing,” he said.

“Perhaps you will,” she agreed.

It would be a matter of weeks before they found themselves in a compromising situation once again.

By that point they had moved into time theories, and Parisa, who specialized in cognizance, was able to do far more than she had with the predominantly physical magics. Most theories of time and its motion were quietly psychological; that a person’s experience of time could be shaped by thought or memory. Pieces of the past seemed closer, while the future seemed at once nonexistent, distant, and rapidly approaching. Tristan was clearly intent on proving the significance of quantum time theory (or something), but Parisa was focused on the obvious: that the actual function of time was not a matter of its construction, but the way it was experienced by others.

It was the first time the library had begun revealing things exclusively to her, giving her its usual pseudo-sentient tug in one direction or another, and she had begun to venture into the historical texts she’d thought so little of at first. Not Freud, of course; Western mortal psychology as a self-conscious mode of study was, unsurprisingly, several centuries too late. Rather, Parisa immersed herself in the scrolls from the Islamic golden age, nipping at a half-formed hunch and uncovering that the Arabic astronomer Ibn al-Haytham had observed about optical illusions the same thing Parisa had observed about the human experience in general—namely, that time was an illusion of itself. Nearly every theory of time was rooted in a fallacy, and manipulation of it as a concept was largely accomplished through the mechanism of thought or emotion. Callum was much too lazy to focus on the latter, but Parisa dove into the early psychological medeian arts—Islamic and Buddhist, mostly— with a fervor that surprised all of the others.

All of them, that is, but Dalton.

“I told you,” he said, replaceing her alone in the reading room one night.

She allowed him to think he’d surprised her. “Hm?” she said, playing at startled.

He slid a chair over to sit beside her at the table. “Is this al-Biruni’s manuscript?”

“Yes.”

“Are you studying reaction time?” It was Biruni who had first begun experimenting with mental chronometry, which in this case was the lag between stimulus and response; how long it took for the eyes to see something and the brain to react.

“How do you know what I’m studying?” Parisa asked, though she didn’t need to.

Because they both knew he could not take his eyes off her, of course.

“I can see you’re working a theory,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might want to discuss it.”

She permitted a half-smile. “Should we whisper about differential psychology? How salacious.”

“There is an intimacy to intensive study that even I replace unsettling,” he said, shifting towards her. “The expression of an unformed thought.”

“Who says my thoughts remain unformed?”

“You share nothing with any of the others,” he noted. “And I advised you to replace an ally.”

She brushed his knee with hers. “And haven’t I found one?”

“Not me.” He looked wryly amused, though he didn’t pull away. “I told you, it can’t be me.”

“What makes you think I need an ally? Or that I would allow myself to be killed?”

Dalton glanced around, though it was unlikely they’d be overheard. Parisa could feel no other active cognition in the house, except perhaps for Nico. He had a somewhat frequent visitor, a telepathic one of sorts, though he was never fully conscious when it happened.

“Still,” Dalton said. An appeal; believe me, listen to me.

Crave me, fuck me, love me.

“What is it about me? You don’t trust me, clearly,” Parisa observed. “I don’t even think you’d want to trust me if you could.”

He gave her a curt, telling smile. “I do not want to, no.”

“Have I seduced you, then?”

“I think conventionally you have.”

“And unconventionally?”

Her hair had slipped over one shoulder, catching his eye.

“You torment me a bit,” he said.

“Because you think I might not want you?”

“Because I think you might,” he said, “and that would be disastrous. Calamitous.”

“Having me, you mean?” It would fit the archetype of her. Seduce and destroy. The world was filled with poets who thought a woman’s love had unmade them.

“No.” His lips twitched ironically. “Because you would have me.”

“How bold of you.” Unlikely, too. She had yet to identify his nature. Was he humble or boasting? Had he been recklessly led astray, or was she the one being led somewhere with intention? The idea he might be toying with her precisely the way she toyed with him was brutally intoxicating, and she twisted to face him. “What would happen if I wanted you?”

“You would have me.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That’s it.”

“Do I not have you now?”

“If you did, wouldn’t you replace it dull?”

“So you’re playing a game, then.”

“I would never insult you with a game.” He glanced down. “What is your theory?”

“Who did you kill?” she asked.

There was a brief stalemate between them; tension unsettled.

“The others,” Dalton observed, “have suggested we focus on the mechanics of time. Loops.”

Parisa shrugged. “I have no need to rebuild the universe like blocks.”

“Why not? Isn’t that power?”

“Why, simply because no one else has done it? I don’t need a new world.”

“Because you want this one?”

“Because,” Parisa said impatiently, “the power it would take to create one would only destroy countless things in its path. Magic has costs. Didn’t you say it yourself?”

“So you agree, then.”

“With what?”

“The Society’s rules. Its elimination process.”

“Its murder game, you mean,” corrected Parisa, “which is itself insulting.”

“And yet you remain, don’t you?”

Unwillingly, she felt her eyes travel askance to her notes.

“I told you.” This time, Dalton’s smile broadened. “I told you. Even knowing the truth, you would not say no.”

“Who did you kill?” Parisa asked him. “And how did you do it?”

He tugged the page from below her arm, glancing over it.

She sighed, remembering what he said about the intimacy of academia. He liked her most when she was vulnerable, didn’t he? When he had a piece of her that she had not wished to give up. Pleasure unadulterated, or knowledge unshared.

“Memory,” she said, and Dalton glanced up. “The experience of time through memory.”

He arched a brow.

“Time travel,” Parisa explained, “is simple, provided you are traveling through one person’s perception of time. Perhaps,” she demurred, agitated in anticipation of inevitable misunderstanding, “that might be considered less interesting to my unsubtle associates—”

“They study what they specialize in, as do you. Go on,” Dalton said.

“It’s not very complex,” she told him; surprised but not displeased by his dismissal. “Intelligent people respond more quickly to stimuli, therefore intelligent people experience time faster, and may be perceived to have more of it. Intelligence is, in some senses, also an illness—genius is frequently a side effect of mania. Perhaps some would have such an excess of time that they are experiencing it differently. Also, if time could be consumed differently, it could also be preserved. And if a person had an excess of time—”

“They could travel throughout their own experience of time differently,” Dalton concluded.

“Yes,” Parisa said, “in essence.”

He curled a hand around his mouth in thought, contemplating it.

“How would you measure intelligence? Or would it be magic, in this case?”

“Who did you kill?” asked Parisa.

“He was not well liked,” said Dalton, surprising her again. She had not expected an answer. “Not that it’s an excuse,” Dalton added.

“Was he dangerous?”

Dalton’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“Was he dangerous,” Parisa repeated. “To either you or the Society?”

“He—” Dalton blinked, retreating slightly. “The Society did not determine whether he lived or died.”

“Didn’t they? In a sense,” Parisa said. “They selected six candidates knowing that one would be eliminated. Don’t you think they have an idea which one they replace expendable?”

Dalton blinked again.

And again.

His thoughts went cloudy and reformed; a different shape this time.

“How did you kill him?” Parisa asked.

“Knife,” said Dalton.

“Ambush?”

“Yes. A bit.”

“How Roman of you.”

“We were heavily intoxicated.” He scrubbed wearily at his jaw. “It is not easy, taking a life. Even when we knew it was required.”

Compulsory anything was not a concept Parisa enjoyed. “What if you had not done it?”

“What?”

“What if you had chosen not to kill someone,” Parisa repeated, clarifying as Dalton’s thoughts unraveled a second time. “Would the Society have stepped in?”

“He knew,” Dalton said, which was not an answer. “He knew it would be him.”

“So?”

“So he would have killed one of us instead, if he could have.” A pause. “Probably me.”

Ah, so that explained his fear, or at least part of it.

Parisa reached out, brushing Dalton’s hair from his forehead.

“Have me in your bed tonight,” she said. “I replace I’m besieged by curiosity.”

His sheets were crisply white, cleanly tucked. She took great pleasure in unmaking them.

There were other times.

Once, she found him in the gardens. It was early, cold, and damp.

“The English,” she said, “over-romanticize their own dreary winters.”

“Anglophilia,” said Dalton, turning towards her. His cheeks were bright, spot lit by twin buds of cold, and she reached for him, taking his face between her hands to warm them.

“Careful,” he warned. “I may take this for tenderness.”

“You think I’m not tender? Seduction is not all lethality,” said Parisa impatiently. “Most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I’d get nowhere at all.”

“And where do you want to go this morning?”

“Nowhere you cannot take me,” she said.

“Flattery is part of seduction,” he said, “isn’t it?”

“Inescapably, yes.”

“Ah. I regret being such a straightforward case.”

“No one is ever straightforward.”

He half-smiled. “So we’re not simple, we’re just… all the same?”

“A flaw of humanity,” said Parisa, shrugging. “The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness.”

They were out of sight already, up too early for anyone else to stir, but he pulled her into the nearby grove of birch trees anyway, concealing them.

“You make me so common,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Think how interesting I could be to someone else,” he suggested. “A homicidal academic.”

“You’re not uninteresting,” she said. “Why did he want to kill you?”

“Who?” The pretense was so very tiresome, but apparently necessary.

“How many people have wanted to kill you, Dalton?”

“Probably very many.”

“How deliciously uncommon,” she offered evasively.

He drew her into his arms, hips flush against hers.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Would you have wanted me more if I had denied you longer?”

“No,” Parisa said. “I’d have found you a considerable idiot if you had.”

She toyed with loop of his trousers, turning over stones in her thoughts.

“Tell me about the Forum,” she said, pleased to see the evidence of momentary startlement. “I replace I’ve been wondering about this Society’s enemies. Specifically, whether they may be right.” She hadn’t forgotten that the Forum’s agents alone had been able to escape after slipping the Society’s wards during the installation.

Despite his initial flicker of surprise, Dalton seemed relatively unfazed. “Why should I know anything about the Forum?”

“Fine,” she sighed, disappointed but unsurprised, “then tell me why he wanted to kill you.”

“He had to kill someone,” Dalton said with an air of repetition, “before they killed him.”

“Were you too weak or too strong?”

“What?”

“Either he chose you as a target because you were too weak,” she clarified, “or because you were too strong.”

“What do you think?”

She glanced up to replace Dalton watching her closely.

“You must have chosen me for a reason yourself,” he remarked, shrugging. “Was it because I was weak, or strong?”

“Are you making yourself a parable?”

“Maybe.”

“Why,” Parisa countered, “did you think it would be dangerous for me to have you? Who would it be dangerous for?”

“Me,” said Dalton. “Among others.”

“And yet you lack quite a bit of self-preservation, don’t you?”

“Most likely.”

“Is that why he wanted to kill you?”

She’d meant it as a joke, pushing him to see what might come to light even if she aimed blindly, but he seemed to regard her with new severity.

“I want to try something,” he said. “Meet me tonight.”

“Where?”

“My room. I want to see how good you are.”

“We’ve already tried that,” she said drily, “and I believe we both rose admirably to the occasion.”

“Not that,” he said, though he was obviously not opposed. “I only meant I’m going to spend the day burying something. A thought.”

“An answer?”

“Yes.”

A little thrill coursed through her.

“I thought you wouldn’t play games with me?”

“This isn’t a game. It’s a test.”

“What do I get if I pass?”

“An answer.”

“The answer?”

“Yes, fine.” A pause. “It will drain you.”

“Good,” she said invitingly.

“I already know what you can do without trying. I want to see what happens when you try.”

She shivered with anticipation. She had missed the sensation of operating in her element.

“Alright,” she said, flexing her fingers. “Then I’ll try.”

By the time she reached his private chambers, slipping in quietly when the others had gone to bed, Dalton was already sleeping. There was an hourglass beside the bed, with the implication clear enough: there was a time limit to this test. She flipped it, closing her eyes, and lay on her back beside Dalton, replaceing the rhythm of his pulse. It would be a matter of sinking into her own consciousness to locate the edges of his, then the effort of seeking out the most difficult doors to open.

When she opened her eyes, it was to a tangle of thorns.

“How very cliché,” she sighed, spotting the labyrinth that led to the castle. “I have an hour to reach the princess in the tower, is that it?”

An hour of his experience, that is, and all indications suggested he was particularly brilliant. She turned to the side, glimpsing a handful of non-native fungi sprouting along the path of thorns.

“Subtle,” she said drily, and plucked one, letting it turn to sand in her palm.

Mental chronometry. She was playing with his concept of time, collecting it for her use. She conjured, for purposes of allusion, a fashionable set of thin-plated armor, tucking the grains of excess time away.

The process of traversing the thorns was merely designed to waste her energy. Working her own magic inside his head was exponentially more effort than doing it in the physical universe; power worked like a traffic jam that way. One car slowing down meant a wave of amplified delay, and likewise, the use of magic outside Dalton’s mind compounded to a phantom degree of effort inside it. If she used the extra time she collected, she would exhaust herself. If she did not, she would run out. It was a clumsy set of rules, but clever enough, particularly for someone who was not primarily telepathic.

Not that any of this was primitive in the least; the kingdom Dalton had built in his head could not have been erected in a day, not when a lesser medeian would not have managed it in a lifetime. The labyrinth was unstable, constantly shifting, but grandiose and complex. Whatever the secret was that Dalton Ellery had locked away, it did not want to be found, and he must have had extraordinary capabilities to be so capable of keeping it from her.

She expected, given the sophistication of his mental defenses, something to force her out; flame was easy for the mind to conjure, and small brush fires leapt up through cracks, incandescent tongues to light her path. When she was attacked by spectral guards, she wasn’t surprised. They had been hastily cloned from one conception, and all fought mechanically—the same pattern of blows, over and over. Again, impressive for the work of an amateur, but this was only a test. Dalton had already made it clear he didn’t want her to die, so perhaps that was why his mind could not truly bring itself to threaten her. It was only designed to give her something to prove.

She took the tower steps two at a time, sprinkling sand as she went. The armor she’d made had begun to rust. She, corporeally, was fading. Time was running out.

The castle itself was well formed, uncreatively imagined. Based, most likely, on somewhere Dalton had once been, though there were details she hadn’t expected: each individual torch was lit upon the wall with a flame that responded uniquely to changes in the air, and the colors in the tapestries must have been selected, not recalled. She took the central staircase, following the path set for her, but could see that the rooms flanking it were furnished and filled; they were crafted, not copied.

The corridors narrowed, leading her upwards from landing to landing until she stepped onto a winding, circular staircase. At the top of the stairs were three tower rooms; these, unlike the others, were shut. She had time to open all three, but only long enough for a glimpse. If she wanted to fully search their contents, she would have to choose one.

Inside the first door was herself. That Parisa—Dalton’s Parisa—turned in Dalton’s arms to look at where the real Parisa stood in the corridor, expectant. Ah, so he had given her the opportunity to see what he truly felt about her, then. Uninteresting.

She opened the second door, replaceing a memory. A stranger, and Dalton with a knife in his hand. So that was what had happened. Tempting.

The third door contained only a locked chest. To break it might require more time than she currently had, though she paused when she realized the setting. It was a Roman plaza; a forum. The Forum.

She hesitated, stepping inside, but then stopped. This could wait. That, or it was an answer she could replace on her own.

So she turned, darting back into the hallway to thrust open the second door.

Almost immediately, she was hurled into Dalton’s consciousness, living it from his memory, though it had not begun where she thought.

“—you sure?”

It was a whisper from a young man to a young Dalton, who was nearly unrecognizable. His hair was the same, his appearance as meticulous as always, but there was something about his face that was distinct. A decade younger, true, but filled with something.

No. Absent something.

“Once we do this, we can’t go back.” It was a tawny-skinned young man who spoke with an unfamiliar accent. “Can you live with it?”

Dalton was only half-listening. He was charming something idly; the air surrounding his open book flickered and twisted, a small storm forming above the page.

“I wouldn’t have to,” Dalton said. Eerily, he turned to Parisa. “People think it’s the meaning of life that matters,” he said, and she blinked. She wasn’t sure how he was manipulating his memory to speak with her, but there was no doubt that he was. “It’s not the meaning. Everyone wants a purpose, but there is no purpose. There is only alive and not alive. Do you like this?” he asked, abruptly shifting in tone. “I made it for you.”

He turned back to the other young man before Parisa could answer.

“I could bring you back,” he suggested.

Even Parisa could see that this younger Dalton did not sound genuine.

“I thought you said you couldn’t do that?” the young man asked.

“I said I don’t. But of course I can.” Dalton twisted again for another sidelong glance, giving Parisa an unnerving smile. “I’m an animator,” he told her, which the other young man did not appear to hear. “Death does not register for me with any sort of permanence. Except my own, which I suppose explains what I did next.”

He turned back to the young man. “There is nothing to say we can’t bring you back,” he said. “Maybe it’s an additional test? Maybe there’s always an animator, and therefore no one actually dies.”

There was a flash of something; a knife. It glinted in Parisa’s own hand.

Then she felt a lurch; the unmistakable entry of the blade into flesh.

Then, without warning, she was sitting alone.

“I shouldn’t be doing this, but you have to listen to me.” It was Atlas Blakely, pacing, and Parisa glanced down, recognizing Dalton’s clasped fingers as her own. “It’s you they want to kill, Dalton. The others have agreed on you.”

“How do you know?” came out of Parisa’s mouth, which was Dalton’s.

“They’re afraid of you. You unnerve them.”

“Rather small of them,” said Dalton irreverently, before conceding, “Fine. Let them try.”

“No.” Atlas spun. “You must change their minds. You must survive.”

“Why?”

“The Society needs you, whether they see it or not. What can they do with him? There have been others like him before. Men like him become wealthy, become rich, that’s all. They contribute to the global oligarchy and that’s it, that’s the end. You are necessary in other ways.”

There was a rip, a small tear, and then Dalton was sitting before her again like a sunspot Parisa tried fruitlessly to blink away, returning to her armored form within his mental tower’s small room. They were alone this time, and Dalton—this young version of him—was leaning forward, inches from her.

“They got used to me,” he said. “And I didn’t like killing. I’m an animator,” he added, as if that explained everything. She supposed it did, in part.

“You bring life,” she remarked.

“I bring life,” he agreed.

She could see the evidence that he had been tampered with, the jerks of his motions so unlike the fastidious Dalton she knew. It was unclear how honest he was being with her; his memories had clearly been altered, either by the corruption of his past experience or by the clever hand of his present self.

“Are you using me?” she asked him, wondering if she might have permitted herself to be lured somewhere unwise.

His younger self smiled brilliantly.

“I wish you’d seen the other room,” he told her. “We’d have both enjoyed it immensely. This one is dull.”

“You lied to him,” she observed. “You told him you would bring him back?”

“He never actually agreed to do it,” said Dalton. “I think he knew I wouldn’t.”

“Kill him, or bring him back?”

“Neither, I suspect.”

“So he told the others to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“And you persuaded them otherwise?”

“Yes.”

“Was it difficult?”

“No. They were just happy it wasn’t them.”

“And why didn’t you bring him back?”

“Too much work,” said Dalton, shrugging. “And anyway, I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“About everything.” Another shrug. “Someone always dies. They have to.”

This version of him wasn’t at all what she imagined.

“What’s the Forum?” she asked him.

“Boring,” said Dalton. “Society rejects.”

“You don’t replace that interesting?”

“Everyone has enemies.”

She couldn’t help feeling a mismatch; some glitch of something, details that didn’t follow.

“Why are you still here?” she asked him.

He stole forward, prowling towards her sleekly, and in that moment, she registered what he was. He flickered slightly, moving in bursts.

“Are you an animation?” she asked, forgetting her previous question.

Dalton’s mouth twisted wryly. His lips parted.

Then Parisa felt a hand on her collar, dragging her backwards.

“Get out,” said a deep voice. “Now.”

She jolted upright, or tried to, but found that the return to her own consciousness had left her lying paralyzed on her side. The real Dalton was holding her head, and gradually, as she resumed occupation in her body, she realized she had been seizing. She was choking, half-retching on what she registered belatedly was her tongue.

She had overexerted herself; the hourglass beside her had long since run out, and by the look on Dalton’s face, it had taken a significant amount of effort to wake her.

She scrambled away from him, blinking. “What was that?”

He frowned. “What was what?”

“That voice at the end, was that—?”

She stopped, blinking.

There was something about Dalton’s face now; not that it was older, which it was. He must have been in his early twenties in his memory, but this was more than that. The expression he wore was different now, more steeped in concern. She had not tried to read his younger self’s thoughts at the time, thinking she was speaking directly with them—they were, after all, both inside his head—but retroactively, she could see she’d been wrong.

Whatever he had been then, his current self did not contain any trace of it. It was a loose thread fraying; something that had come undone, and then been severed.

“You’re not whole,” she realized aloud, “are you?”

He stared at her. “What?”

“That thing, the animation, it was—”

“You never started the test,” he cut in slowly, and then it was her turn to stare at him.

“What?”

“Where were you?” he pressed her, concerned now. “I could feel you, but—”

She felt a shudder of uncertainty.

“What was it?” she asked. “Your test.”

“A bank vault,” he said. “With a combination lock. A puzzle, in essence.”

So what had she broken into inside his head, then? Strange. More than strange. The situation he described sounded straightforward, even elementary. In short, something she would expect from someone who was not a telepath, unlike the thing she’d found.

“What did your bank vault contain?” she asked warily.

“A bit of parchment, nothing important… It was only supposed to take a few minutes to replace. Where were you?” Dalton said again, more urgently, but this time, Parisa didn’t answer.

Wherever she had been, she was growing increasingly certain that Atlas Blakely had been the one to pull her out.