The Atlas Six

“You know why you don’t understand me?” Parisa answered Reina’s thoughts, stepping closer to lower her voice. “Because you think you’ve figured me out. You think you’ve met me before, other versions of women like me, but you have no idea what I am. You think my looks are what make me? My ambitions? You can’t begin to know the sum of my parts, and you can stare all you like, but you won’t see a damn thing until I show you.”

Nico was enormously likable, unfairly so, and no matter how clever or talented Libby was, students and faculty alike preferred Nico to her. Whatever gift it was he had, it was like Midas; the effortless turning of nonsense to gold, more a reflex than a skill, and Libby, a gifted academic, had never been able to learn it. Nico’s brand of easy charm had no metric for study, no identifiable markers of finesse.

Many people incorrectly assume time to be a steady incline, a measured arc of growth and progress, but when history is written by the victors the narrative can often misrepresent that shape.

“I know exactly what shape she takes up in the universe,” he pleaded in explanation. “If anyone can recognize her, it’s me.”

The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.

You can learn to starve but you can’t learn how to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal.”

In another world he might have touched her.

In another world, she would have welcomed it.

ho am I to place value on someone else’s life, Tristan? This isn’t self-defense, this is greed! This is… it’s wrong, and—”

We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don’t you see it’s because we’re riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn.”

Some people suffer bravely. Some clumsily.” He glanced up, catching Tristan’s look of uncertainty. “Some do so quietly, poetically. Parisa does it stubbornly and pointlessly, going on just to go on. Just to avoid defeat; to feel something more than nothing. It is, above all, vanity