It was starting to settle in now, he suspected. The sensation of being held captive. The initial shock of being taken was starting to wear off, and soon she would start to consider the plausibility of escape.
“It isn’t,” Ezra began, “entirely a matter of where.”
He stopped before explaining himself any further. She was too clever, after all, and certainly too powerful not to find her way out unless it remained a labyrinth, part of a maze she couldn’t see. People generally only knew how to look at the world one way: in three dimensions. For them, time was exclusively linear, moving in a single direction never to be disrupted or stopped.
Imagine looking for someone and knowing only that they were somewhere on earth. Now imagine looking for someone knowing only that they were on earth during a time with indoor plumbing. In short, nobody would find her. Ideally, Libby Rhodes would even struggle to find herself.
“You can’t keep me here,” she said. It was flat, unfaceted, deadly. “You don’t understand what I am. You never have.”
“I know exactly what you are, Libby. I’ve known for some time. Is the empath dead yet?”
She gaped at him.
“Is that a yes?” Ezra prompted.
“I don’t—how—” She was blinking rapidly. “You know about Callum?”
He set his jaw, taking it for a rhetorical question. Obviously he had already made his answer plenty clear. “Yes or no, Libby.”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, restless. “Yes, maybe—”
He was running late now, though punctuality was never a primary concern for him. He was often late to things, finding time to be such an arbitrary measure of motion. Even in his youth, which was admittedly both enormous and a mere sliver of things, he had never felt tasked by the prospect of arriving anywhere on time. His mother had wasted countless hours haranguing him about it, even on her very last day.
Though, perhaps that was what had drawn him to Atlas, in the end. Ezra knew how to starve, and Atlas knew how to wait.
“I’ll be back,” Ezra told Libby. “Don’t go anywhere.” Not that she could, even if she tried it. He’d built the wards specifically for her, made them molecular, soluble, water-based. She would have to alter the state of her environment in order to break them; to change the elements themselves individually, draining herself more with each step of progress. One step forward, two steps back.
Keys and locks.
“You’re keeping me here?” She sounded numbly disbelieving, though that would change. Numbness would pass, and pain would surely follow.
He lamented it. “It’s for your own safety,” he reminded her.
“From Atlas?”
“Yes, from Atlas,” he said, feeling a rush of urgency. He was running late, but again, that wasn’t the problem; it was what awaited him if he stayed.
Eventually the truth would sink in for Libby, and when it did, it was best to remove any flammable objects from the room, such as Ezra’s limbs and clothing.
“What,” Libby spat, “does Atlas Blakely need me for?”
Yes, there it was. The rage was settling in.
“You’d better hope you don’t find out,” Ezra said, and then he departed for his meeting through a door, the sound of his careful stride echoing from the floors the moment they hit familiar marble.
He already knew who the room would contain when he entered it. Much like Atlas, Ezra had chosen its occupants carefully, using the contacts he had procured beneath the meticulous cover of his unremarkable face, his eradicated name. They all wanted to be found—were easily lured by the right price—and so the primary leaders from every enemy the Society had ever possessed would not have hesitated to reply to Ezra’s summons. They had been lured here by the promise of a single prize: the Society itself, which no one but Ezra had ever turned down.
Provided the animation worked, Ezra doubted Atlas would suspect him. But even if he did, it was Atlas who had made him invisible, and therefore impossible to find.
“My friends,” Ezra said, striding in to address the room without preamble. “Welcome.”
If they were surprised to discover he was so young, they hid it well. They would not have known, after all, what to make of the summons they had received, each of which contained secrets from their youth as irreconcilable leverage. (Only people who exist in three dimensions ever believe history to be sacred. Keep that to yourself.)
“The six most dangerous human beings alive,” Ezra said to the room, “are, as you all know, currently in Atlas Blakely’s care. One has been neutralized, which should buy us some time, and another has been eliminated by the Society itself. But the other four will bear the enormity of either our extinction or survival—the chosen of a despotic Society for which we are little more than pawns. We have one year until they emerge again from its protection.”
The members of the room exchanged glances. Six of them, as Ezra found beautifully ironic. The synchronicity was so crisp that even Atlas would have appreciated it, had he known.
“What do you want us to do about them?” asked Nothazai, the first to speak.