The Atlas Paradox

If power is a thing to be had, it must be capable of possession. But power is not any discrete size or weight. Power is continuous. Power is parabolic. Say you are given some power, which then increases your capacity to accumulate more power. Your capacity for power increases exponentially in relation to the actual power you have gained. Thus, to gain power is to be increasingly powerless.

If the more power one has, the less one has, then is it the thing or are you?

“Varona,” Libby said, taking a step toward him. “We need to talk.”

Then she collapsed into Gideon’s arms.

He, Gideon noted, seemed for once too stunned to speak, one hand still pressed to his mouth and the ghost of Gideon’s kiss.

It was unmissably magical, unavoidably so. The opening of a transport ward.

Gideon spun, one arm thrown instinctively into Nico’s chest to put himself between Nico and his latest assassin, when instead he blinked in surprise. Behind him, Gideon felt Nico’s pulse stutter and quicken; heard the confusion in his voice.

“Rhodes?”

Libby Rhodes stood before them on the sidewalk. There was blood on her clothes—clearly someone else’s—and ash in her hair, but there was no question it was her. She had found her way back, through time and space and impossibility. It was Libby Rhodes, and she was here.

To say she was unharmed would be false. Her eyes were unfocused except for the way they met Nico’s.

There was a streak of blood on Nico’s cheek when Gideon looked at him. A slow trickle from Nico’s hairline, a cut along his jaw. There was a roar of something furious and fierce in Gideon, who reached up to brush the blood away and then stopped.

“What?” said Nico, who swallowed a laugh. The muscle in his jaw jumped, then stilled.

“Nothing,” said Gideon.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Gideon, come on, no te hagas rogar—”

Don’t make me beg. Ha, as if he would. As if he could.

Nico laughed again and it hurt Gideon somewhere deep, jellying his legs with delayed paralysis. That, or a timed-release breakdown. Fear, firstly, that they had skirted something narrowly, so narrowly that it was almost a disaster, a disaster from which Gideon would never recover. Relief, that no one had put a stop to that arrogant laugh. That Nico de Varona had never learned how fragile Gideon really was. That because Nico believed himself to be invincible, Gideon sometimes believed it, too, right up until the terrifying moments when he didn’t. Like now.

“I always forget how good you are at stuff,” Nico was babbling appreciatively, still talking, still laughing, still blissfully, ridiculously alive, and some madness inside Gideon’s chest made up his mind for him. He leaned forward and caught Nico’s mouth with his in something of a punitive force, a captive blow. More of a gasp than anything else, really.

Although technically it was a kiss.

Nico’s lips were dry and his mouth was hot, taken aback, unprepared and metallic with concentration. Gideon felt Nico’s breath catch on his tongue, an audible hitch of surprise, and then Nico pulled away and Gideon thought no, no, no—

“Oh. So it’s like that?” Nico said. His eyes were searching and bewilderingly, confusingly bright. In response Gideon felt unopened and raw, like he’d cracked his chest in two and presented the evidence for Nico’s evaluation.

“Yeah.” It left Gideon in a rasp, but fuck it. It had lived in his throat long enough. “Yeah,” he attempted again, “yeah, it’s like that.”

Nico’s smile broadened.

“Good.” Nico caught him by a fistful of his T-shirt, tugging him in again. “Good.”

Gideon’s heart banged in his chest, his lips parting in absolute rapture, when he heard another noise behind him.

“Nico, get down!”

He shoved Nico out of the way and felt something singe the side of his head, as if he’d smacked it on the corner of a table. It rattled his brain, the skin of his temple searing from the impact, eyes watering so thoroughly he heard but didn’t see the blast from Nico’s palm, aimed upward from Nico’s position where Gideon had flung him near the ground. Gideon spun with a grunt of pain, blindly tossing out an arm and catching the medeian around the throat, holding him still while Nico, still dropped in levels, took the medeian out at the knees. Gideon caught the medeian as he went down, this time with another of his specialty combat moves. This one he’d learned as a foster kid from their neighbor, a hunter who was known for putting down rabid bears. It was quick and brutal, with a sound that Gideon would never unhear.

The moment it was over, Gideon wanted to be sick, but instead he reached out for Nico’s hand, grasping it sightlessly. “You good?”

“I’m good, Sandman.” Nico sounded dazed, euphoric, awed. “Where the fuck did you learn that? I told you to stop playing video games.”

“Shut up, asshole.” Gideon was panting, almost retching with fatigue, when his vision finally cleared enough to see that Nico was laughing at his expense. The two of them stood like mirror images, both folded at the waist and grasping at their knees.

“How dumb, exactly?”

“Need you to go that way,” Nico said with a jut of his chin toward the Seine. “But then, like, duck.”

“Okay,” Gideon said uncertainly, wondering if there was room for a veto. “So when exactly would you want me t—”

But Nico was already rolling away, and the shield he’d conjured dissipated at the moment his strike hit the cobbled path. Gideon sighed, but he did as he was told, waving a streak of sparks as he dove for the opposite side of the bridge.

Someone had shouted to follow him, Gideon knew that much, and if he knew Nico—which he did—then something explosive was coming next, so Gideon closed his eyes and careened over the edge of the bridge, aiming himself in a high arc, more up than out.

Time slowed, wind whistling in his ears, while something loud as a gunshot went off overhead. Then everything sped up again, too fast, adrenaline coursing through his veins, the primal rush of mortality. The impact against the river would be hard and there was no way to break the surface tension. Just live, Gideon told himself. Just live.

In the half second before he made contact with the water, eyes closing against the glassy oncoming surface of the Seine, the force of Gideon’s momentum suddenly collapsed beneath him. He gasped, breathing hard, with his face no more than an inch above the water as something reversed his course, propelling him backward and onto the now partially deconstructed cobbled stone bridge. There was a chunk missing from the wall, the scorched pile of rubble in its wake concealing a glimpse of unmoving limbs.

Gideon, who landed on his back, took another moment to recover from his temporary brush with doom. “Nice catch,” he offered breathlessly to Nico, who grinned in his maddeningly arrogant way.

“Always,” Nico replied, offering a hand.

Gideon took it, accepting the lurch to his feet and glancing around at the small crowd that had gathered around them. “Are you worried about this?” he asked, gesturing to the oncoming siren of metro police.

Naturally not. Nico shrugged. “I’ll just put it on Blakely’s tab.”

Gideon figured that was reasonable. Though he had evidently suffered what was either a blow to his head or a disorienting flash of sun, because he thought he caught a little blur of something as he rose.

That being said—to suggest that Gideon was not a fighter by nature did not mean that he wasn’t formidable when given a chance.

“Nice one,” panted Nico, who, true to form, had paused to backhand Gideon’s chest after a particularly well-thrown blow to the side of his attacker’s head, which was designed to discombobulate and temporarily destabilize the inner ear. Gideon was particularly good at those types of specialty impacts. Unlike Nico, he didn’t like to draw things out.

This, though, was less a matter of Nico’s enjoyment than it was a genuinely well-constructed snare. Ironically, the trap that had been set for Parisa Kamali was not unlike the traps that Parisa herself had set for Gideon in the past. These were not regular people, not police, not witches like the kinds of assailants that Nico had described encountering in England. These were medeians, each one specifically selected to face off against the most talented telepath Gideon had ever met. One was a biomancer who seemed to have control over muscle matter—Gideon kept feeling abrupt muscle spasms, fighting through the sense that he might spontaneously collapse. Another was a specialist in multipotence, who could replicate her consciousness to be several places at once—a clever form of combat against telepathy, presumably to create an echo chamber of thought, although it wasn’t terribly efficient against Nico’s use of force. The third was a physicist who specialized in energy conversion, which was an inconvenience for Nico (and slightly more than that for Gideon). It was ultimately a test of who could outlast, outman, and magically outgun.

This was also not a dream. This was reality, where mortality was an issue, perhaps more so than pain. Pain was temporary. Pain would end. Consciousness could blink out, which was the far more troubling outcome. Gideon felt Nico’s scapulae align with his, the two of them back-to-back as the three medeians circled their periphery, formulating their next attack.

It was only when he realized that he had lost control of the moment, lost his recognition of himself in time and space, that Ezra turned over his shoulder to come face-to-face with his moment of reckoning.

So this was what he’d been waiting for.

The conclusion of a lifetime’s worth of waiting; the knowledge that eventually, his time would come. Ezra’s knees buckled in fear, which was simultaneously relief.

She was smoldering. She was singed. Her clothing had burned away and she stood before him in the doorway like an angry, avenging goddess.

“Fuck you, Ezra,” said Libby, her chest ragged with anguish.

The explosion from her palm was white-hot behind his eyes, and for once, there were no doors to fall through. No sliver to crawl through. No way to escape, and in the moment that he burned, he pined, he perished, Ezra Mikhail Fowler looked into the eyes of his death and thought ah, so then this is destiny.

So this, then, was fate.

“Is that what you think? That I don’t understand?” Atlas’s voice was gravelly with something. Not honesty, Ezra thought. It could not be honesty. “Ezra, just end it here,” Atlas sighed. “Let me finish my research, then let the whole thing end here with me.”

Ezra’s eyes were blurring with something. Conflict. Misery. Hate. “I can kill her,” he flung at Atlas like a threat.

“You can’t.” Again, the pity. “Ezra, you won’t, because you can’t.”

“Yes, I can. I have to. I would not have done this if not for—” He took a deep breath. Exhaled shakily. “If not for something I believed unquestionably—”

“Change your path,” Atlas said. “Ezra. Change it.”

“No. No.” His vision was swimming. “I can’t. I’ve gone too far. I can’t come back from this.”

“It will only get harder to live with, Ezra.”

“Don’t tell me what I can live with. You have no idea what I can live with!” His voice was breaking, and something in Ezra thought: Now, it will have to be now. It will have to be now, this moment, because if you don’t, the world will end. The world as you know it, the world that has for so long turned its back on you, the world that you did everything in your power to save—it will end.

It’s not about the world, the professor had said to him, which sounded like a warning now. It’s never about the world.

It is, Ezra thought desperately. It has to be. It has to be, because if it is not about the world, then I have spent the last year in agony for nothing. I have betrayed the woman I love, I have watched her suffer without lifting a finger to help her, I have turned my back on the only friend I ever had. I betrayed myself, my beliefs, the books that were nothing, that weren’t ever anything, because knowledge is a fucking curse. Knowledge is nothing, I could have lived a whole life and never known the meaning of it or the reason for existence and I still might have had joy, or sweetness, or softness—

“She has to die,” Ezra said, the words numb between his lips. “She has to. You don’t understand.” It was hollow, tunneled out with sorrow, or perhaps with falseness, because surely Atlas knew he didn’t mean it. Atlas, that motherfucker, knew weakness when he saw it, and he knew, finally, the truth: that Ezra was weak. That he had come not for vengeance, not for reprisal, but for redemption. For forgiveness. To confess that yes, he had made a mistake, he had thought he was choosing the lesser of two evils but it was still evil, it was still the wrong choice—but now, that was impossible. Now he could never say it. “You don’t understand.”