Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)

Nico slipped to the inside of a right cross and missed a hard incoming hook, running directly into Reina’s fist and swearing loudly in a mix of highbrow Spanish and rural Nova Scotian slurs. 

(Once, Gideon had taught him how to say something in Mermish—which was a blend of Danish, Icelandic, and something Nico classified as vaguely Inuit—but had also warned him that, pronounced incorrectly, it would summon a sort of half-ghost, half-siren sea-thing, so it hardly seemed worth it to use. Max was not particularly helpful with profanity, as he was stubbornly prone to overuse of the same one: “balls.”)

“You’re out of sorts,” remarked Reina, wiping sweat from her brow and eyeing Nico as he stumbled back, dazed.

It took a moment, but eventually his eye stopped watering. 

“Maybe you’re just getting better,” mumbled Nico half-heartedly.

“I am, but that was your mistake,” Reina observed with her usual regard for his feelings.

“Yes, fine.” Nico slumped down to sit on the lawn, sulking a bit. “I suppose let’s call it, then.”

Reina gave the grass a derogatory look (it may have insulted her; she had mentioned once that certain types of English lawns had a tendency to be excessively entitled) but eventually sat uncomfortably beside him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Reina.

“Nothing,” said Nico.

“Fine,” said Reina.

It was, in nearly every sense, the opposite of the encounter he’d had shortly before this one.

“You’re lurking,” Parisa had called to Nico from inside the painted room, turning a page in her book without looking up. “Stop lurking.”

Nico froze outside the door frame. “I’m not—”

“Telepath,” she reminded him, sounding bored. “You’re not only lurking, you’re pining.”

“I’m not pining.”

(Okay, so maybe it wasn’t totally different from his conversation with Reina.)

“Just come in here and tell me what’s bothering you so we can move this along,” said Parisa, finally glancing up from what Nico was surprised to see was a vintage copy of the X-Men comics. 

“What?” she prompted impatiently, following his line of sight to the comic with a look most closely described as exacting. “Professor X is a telepath.”

“Well, I know,” said Nico, fumbling.

“You don’t think he’s based on a medeian?”

“No, I’m just… never mind.” He paused, rifling the hair at the back of his head with a grimace. “I’ll just—you’re busy, I’ll—”

“Sit down,” said Parisa, shoving out the chair across from her with her foot.

“Fine. Yes, alright.” He sat heavily, clumsily.

“You’re fine,” said Parisa. “Stop fretting.”

“I’m not fretting,” Nico said, bristling a bit from the wound to his manhood, and she glanced up.

It was really so desperately unfair she was so pretty, Nico thought.

“I know,” she said. “That’s my origin story, if you’ve been paying attention.”

Immediately, Nico faltered again. “I know,” he said, more to his feet than to anything. Was this what it was like to be Libby? He was almost never so oafish, nor so concerned with his own oafishness. He’d met plenty of pretty girls, and certainly a handful of attractive mean ones. He should have been prepared for this.

“I’m not mean,” Parisa corrected, “I’m brusque. And before you facetiously blame a language barrier,” she added, pausing him once he opened his mouth, “I am also conversationally trilingual, so that’s not an excuse.”

“A toast to your linguistic superiority, then,” grumbled Nico, stung.

Parisa glanced at her page, flipping it. 

“Sarcasm,” she remarked, “is a dead form of wit.”

Reference to mortality of any sort was enough to make Nico flinch, and Parisa glanced up at the motion of it, sighing.

“Just say it,” she suggested, tossing the comic aside. “I can’t have you tiptoeing around like this, Nicolás. If you go soft then I’ll have to be soft, and I can’t begin to tell you how little time I have for pretense—”

“You died,” Nico said, “in my head.”

Parisa paused for a moment, possibly to dip a toe inside the head in question. She was barefoot, he realized, observing the petal-pink of her toenails where they rested on the chair beside his. He focused purely on the observation, hoping it would be less telling than anything else she might find running through his thoughts.

“Don’t concern yourself with the me in your head,” Parisa said eventually. “She doesn’t exist, Nico. Only I do.”

Good advice, theoretically. In this case, it barely applied.

“I feel responsible somehow,” he admitted, “which is—”

“Ridiculous,” she supplied.

“—I was going to say possibly unfair,” he corrected, “but still. Why—?”

He stopped.

“Why did I choose to use your head and not one of the others?” Parisa prompted. “I told you, Nico, because you’re the least capable of guile.”

“Sounds like an insult.”

“Why?”

“Makes me sound… I don’t know.” He was mumbling, half-shamed. “Naïve.”

“What is this, machismo?” Parisa sighed.

Nico shifted in his chair, glancing at her toes again.

“For what it’s worth, it’s you I’d most want in bed,” she remarked, subjecting him to untold decades of trauma simply by holding his gaze while she said it. “It’s rare that I’m selfless enough to keep my distance, truthfully, and rarer still that I summon any restraint. Unfortunately I find myself with such a pressing desire not to ruin you.”

He slid a hand to where her feet were idly sat atop the chair beside his, stroking a finger along one arch. “Who says you’d ruin me?”

“Oh, Nico, I would love for you to be the one to ruin me,” she said flippantly, shifting to rest her feet in his lap, “but much to my own detriment, I wouldn’t allow it; and anyway, you do things much too openly, with far too much of yourself. You’d fuck me with your whole heart,” she lamented, “and I can’t put you in that sort of danger.”

“I am capable of casual sex,” said Nico, wondering why he felt the need to make it true. He curled his palm around her heel, drawing it up to the bone of her ankle and caressing her calf slowly, molding his hand to the shape of her.

“For you, it can either be good or it can be casual,” she said. “And I can’t take the chance of having one without both.”

She dug her toes into his thigh, sliding down in her chair.

“What do you do in your dreams?” she said, and then, “You speak to someone,” she answered herself, drumming her nails along the wood of the table. “I can hear you doing it sometimes.”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “I… it’s really not my—”

“Not your secret to tell, I know, only I already know it, so there’s very little telling involved. His name is Gideon,” Parisa produced matter-of-factly, like a familiar character she had plucked from the pages of a comic book. “He worries you constantly. Gideon, Gideon, Gideon… he is in your thoughts so often I think his name sometimes myself.” She sighed a little as Nico continued to work his palms mindlessly into the slender muscle of her calf, strumming the tender fibers of her. “He’s a traveler, isn’t he, your Gideon? Not a telepath.” She closed her eyes, exhaling again when Nico’s fingers brushed the inside of her knee. “From what I can tell he operates in dreams, not thought.”

“Actually,” said Nico, and stopped.

Parisa eyes opened and she shifted her leg again, this time adjusting so the arch of her foot sat perilously atop Max’s prized vulgarity of choice.

“Actually?” she prompted.

For once she wasn’t smiling coyly. She didn’t intend to seduce him into an answer. She meant to crush him if he did not.

Nico liked her more for that, which was troubling.

“Don’t be troubled,” she assured him. “You may be the only person who likes me for the right reasons.”

He rolled his eyes, taking her foot in his hands again. “Do you think there’s an intersect between dreams and thought?” To her pause of expectation, he clarified, “I’ve been trying to do research on it but it’s no use, really. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“What is he?” she asked him. “Gideon.”

He kneaded the bone above her arch, stroking it with his thumb.

“A creature, technically.”

“Hybrid human?”

“Well—” Nico bit the inside of his cheek. “No. Half mermaid, half satyr.”

“Oh.” Parisa’s smile twitched, and then broadened. “Human-shaped? Where it counts, that is.”

He glanced up at her. “Is that meant to be funny?”

“Yes. A bit.” Her tongue slid over her lips, rendering her faintly girlish. “I can’t help my appetites.”

“He’s got a dick, if that answers your question.” He switched gruffly to her other foot, tugging punitively at her pinky toe. “Not that I—” More hesitation. “I’m just saying, I’ve lived with him for a long time. Things happen.”

“So you’ve seen it?”

Nico glanced up, defensive, and she shrugged.

“I’ve seen plenty,” she told him. “I wouldn’t judge you.”

“It’s not like that,” he muttered.

“Fine, machismo again.” She nudged his knee with her heel. “Don’t be cross.”

“I’m not, I’m just—”

“So Gideon can travel in dreams, then?”

“Gideon… can,” Nico said slowly. “Yes. Sorry, yes.”

“Oh.” Parisa sat up, abruptly removing both feet from his lap. “You’ve done it too?”

“I—” He felt his cheeks flush. “It’s a private question.”

“Is it?”

No.

“Fine, I do it,” Nico said with a grimace, “but don’t ask me how I—”

“How do you do it?”

He gritted his teeth. “I told you, it’s—”

“Describe Gideon’s penis,” Parisa suggested, and in the pulse of panic that followed, she had clearly plucked something from his head. “Ah,” she said, “so you transform, then? Well, that’s certainly impressive. More than.” She nudged him again, delighted. “Brilliant. Now we can never fuck,” she said, seemingly content with that conclusion, “as I make a point never to sleep with people who are more magical than me.”

“That can’t possibly be true,” said Nico, gently devastated.

“I,” Parisa replied, “am very magical. The Forum must have been especially eager to get their hands on you,” she added as an afterthought, which meant nothing to Nico. He frowned, bewildered, and she tilted her head, apparently recognizing his blankness for what it was. “Did you not get a visit from the Forum while you were in New York?”

Nico thought back to that weekend, trying to recall if anything had been out of place.

“Oi,” Gideon had said at one point, “someone’s trying to get in.” Nico, who had been in his customary form of a falcon, said nothing, but gave a brisk little flap of his wings to suggest they could well and rightly fuck off. “Right then,” said Gideon, “that’s what I thought.”

“Well,” sighed Parisa, dragging him back to the point, “never mind, then. You wanted to know about dreams and thought?” she asked, and while Nico had until that point been highly insistent on keeping what he knew of Gideon’s condition a secret, he recognized the motion of a rare door opening. Somehow, he had earned a key to Parisa Kamali’s sincerity, and he did not plan to waste it.

“You read a book,” Nico said, “about dreams. Reina told me.”

“Ibn Sirin’s book, you mean?” asked Parisa. “Though it’s said he abhorred books, so probably a lesser medeian wrote it.”

“Yes, that one. I think.” He fidgeted. “I wondered if you had any—”

“I do,” Parisa confirmed. “One theory, mainly.” She paused, and then, “What do dreams look like when you’re in one?”

“They have a topography,” Nico said. “They’re in… realms, for lack of a better word.”

“Like an astral plane?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Nico, “seeing as the only one I’ve ever been on was the one you created in my head, and I didn’t know I was in it.”

“Well, you remember how it looked and felt,” she pointed out, and he considered it.

“Indistinct from reality, you mean?”

“Pretty much,” she agreed. “Our subconscious fills in the blanks. If anyone, particularly you, had looked closely at any of the details, you would have known we were not in reality. But most people do not look closely unless they are given a reason to look.”

“Well, then yes, dream realms feel the same,” he said. “Like reality.”

“I suspect dreams are their own astral plane,” Parisa said. “Only they are absent time.”

“Absent time?”

“Yes. Are you ever aware of time when you’re traveling with Gideon?” she asked, and Nico shook his head. “Is he?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Well, perhaps your theory is close. Dreams may well be the intersect of time and thought,” Parisa said thoughtfully. “There are plenty of studies to show that time moves differently in dreams, even to a calculable extent. Possibly no differently than how time moves in space.”

That was an interesting theory. “So time could move faster or slower in dreams?”

“Instinctually it follows,” she said, shrugging, and added, “Gideon must have quite a lot of control to be able to pull himself in and out at will.”

Nico had never considered it that way, but Gideon did have a keen sense for when to return. Nico, always in bird form, just assumed Gideon wore some sort of wristwatch.

“Why do you worry about him so much?” asked Parisa, interrupting Nico’s internal pondering. “Aside from the matter of your friendship.”

Nico opened his mouth, hesitating, then closed it.

Then, gradually, opened it again for, “He’s… very valuable.”

He didn’t want to get into detail about what Gideon’s mother regularly asked him to do. Steal things, usually, and typically on behalf of medeians. She was something of a con woman, as far as Nico could tell. With ocean ecosystems changing and the increasing privatization of magic, the modern mermaid evidently could not be counted on to limit herself to the usual exploits of the sea. 

Equally unclear, in Nico’s view, was whether Gideon was or wasn’t a criminal. Gideon certainly considered himself one, hence Nico’s careful secrecy on his behalf, but Nico had never liked the thought of it. When Gideon was a child he had simply done as his mother asked, not understanding the details of what he’d been tasked with or who they’d been contracted for, and once he became aware of the consequences, he had stopped, or tried to. People, Gideon said, were inclined to go mad when something was stolen from inside their thoughts, and he no longer wished to be part of it. 

But it hadn’t taken Gideon long to realize that hiding from his mother (and her employers) was far more easily said than done.

“Ah, yes,” Parisa murmured to herself, “I suppose his abilities would be easily monetized. Plenty of people would pay to take ownership of something in a dream if they knew such power existed.” She stared off for a moment, thinking. “So what exactly is it you’re looking for in the archives?”

Confessing the truth was something of a difficulty, but it didn’t seem worth keeping to himself. If anyone was going to be able to help him—or to have no particular agenda in knowing what he knew—Nico supposed it was Parisa.  

“What he is, I suppose,” Nico admitted. “What his powers are. What his life span is. Whether anyone has ever existed like him before.” A pause. “That sort of thing.”

“He craves a species, I take it?”

“In a sense.”

“Pity,” she said. “Very human of him, to long for a collective.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Nico had a feeling Parisa was in her own thoughts rather than his at the moment, which was an interesting observation. She seemed to revolve within a solitary orbit, the energy in the room suddenly collecting around her in tendrils of curiosity rather than expelling outward, as other people’s contemplation tended to do.

“You should have something,” Parisa said after a moment. “A talisman to carry with you.”

Nico blinked, looking up. “What?”

“Something to keep with you. Something you keep secret. So that you know where you are,” she explained, “and whether you exist on a plane of reality. Your friend Gideon should carry one, too.”

“Why?”

Nico stared in puzzlement as Parisa rose to her feet, stretching languidly.

“Well, you haven’t identified it yet, but the reason you can’t let go of what you saw inside your head is because you didn’t know you were inside it.” She turned to look at him, half-smiling. “It’s a favor, Nico. You ought to have a talisman. Find one and keep it with you, and then you’ll never have to wonder what’s real.”

She turned to leave, expressing every intention to exit the room without further discussion, but Nico leapt to his feet, catching her arm to pause her.

“You don’t think Callum would really hurt you, do you?” he asked, his voice more urgent than he would have preferred it to be. An hour before, even five minutes ago, he would never have attempted such a spectacular display of vulnerability, but now he needed to know. “In real life, I mean. In actuality. Whatever that means.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly in calculation.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, and turned away, but Nico tugged her back, imploring her.

“How can it not matter? You can see inside his head, Parisa. I can’t.” He released her, but kept the pull of conspiracy between them. “Please. Just tell me what he really is.”

For a moment when she looked at him, Nico thought he saw uncharacteristic evidence of tension in Parisa’s face. Vestiges of a secret soon to be known; a truth wanting out. She made the decision in the second her eyes met his, but even with the improbability of the conversation they’d just had, he couldn’t have prepared himself for how her answer would shake him.

“It doesn’t matter whether Callum plans to hurt me,” she said, “because I’ll kill him before he does.”

Then Parisa had leaned closer and said something that Nico had taken like a blow, still reeling even after hours had passed.

“What is it?” Reina asked again, startling him back to their conversation. She was normally comfortable without speaking, but presumably he had been silent for too long.

Nico tugged at a blade of grass, plucking it free. He wondered if Reina could hear it scream when he did so, and flinched at the reminder that the universe had some voice he couldn’t hear. Another detail among many he couldn’t un-know. A blissful piece of foregone ignorance, belonging to a person he would never be again.

“Would you kill someone to have all of this?” he muttered to Reina, though he regretted having asked the question as soon as it fell out of his mouth. Would she ask him why, and would he be able to answer if she did?

But he needn’t have worried. She didn’t even spare a breath.

“Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes, warming silently in the grass.