184
" You’re not better than me,” Nico replied perfunctorily. “But you’re looking for the wrong things. You’re looking for, I don’t know. The other pieces.”
She made a face. “Other pieces of what?”
“How should I know? Yourself, maybe.” He scoffed under his breath before oppressing her with “Anyway, there aren’t any other pieces, Rhodes. There’s nothing else. It’s just you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Either you’re complete or you’re not. Stop looking. It’s right fucking there,” he informed her, snatching impatiently at her hand and half throwing it back into her chest. She glared at him and pulled out of his reach, vandalized. “Either it’s enough for you or nothing ever will be.”
“What is this, a lecture?”
“You’re a fire hazard, Rhodes,” he said. “So stop apologizing for the damage and just let the fucker burn. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
189
" Because of this place I’m a murderer,” he said. “Complicity,” he amended after a moment’s consideration. “Soon to be.” The last was a conclusive mutter.
“Get to the funny part,” Libby suggested dryly.
“Well, there’s a stain on me now, isn’t there? A mark. Would kill for…followed by a blank space.” Nico summoned the knife back to his palm, only of course it didn’t register that way. One moment the knife was cast aside, the next it was in his hand. “I wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t come here. And I wouldn’t have come here at all if it weren’t for you.”
She wondered if he blamed her. He didn’t sound accusatory, but it was hard not to assume that he was. “You were going to do it regardless, remember?”
“Yeah but only because they asked you.”
He glanced down at the knife in his hand, turning it over to inspect the blade.
“Inseverable,” he said, neither to himself nor her.
“What?”
“Inseverable,” he repeated, louder this time. He glanced at her, shrugging. “One of those if-then calculations, right? We met, so now we can’t detach. We’re just going to always play a weird game of…what’s the word? The thing, espejo, the game. The mirror game.”
“Mirror game?”
“Yeah, you do one thing, I do it too. Mirror.”
Libby asked, “But who does it first?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Do you resent it?”
He looked down at the knife, and then back up at her.
“Apparently, I’d kill to protect it,” he said, “so yeah.”
“We could stop,” she suggested. “Stop playing the game.”
“Stop where? Stop here? No,” Nico said with a shake of his head, fingers tapping at his side. “This isn’t far enough.”
“But what if it’s too far?”
“It is,” he agreed. “Too far to stop.”
“Paradox,” Libby observed aloud, and Nico’s mouth twisted with wry acknowledgement.
“Isn’t it? The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
190
" He’s not letting her get away with that.
Well fine, maybe she’ll just leave then, she has her own apartment, she hardly needs to sleep here, and besides, maybe he’s being nosy.
Maybe he is but she started it, and she can leave any time if she wants to, so long as she comes back.
Fine, but only because he said that last bit. She’s tired of people telling her she’s free to leave, she hates it.
He doesn’t want her to leave at all but there’s a whole thing in the rulebook about letting people have agency. ‘If it’s meant to be’ and all that.
She thinks that’s bullshit, can’t people just hold on?
He agrees. "
― Olivie Blake , Alone With You in the Ether
191
" What are we celebrating?”
“Our fragile mortality,” Tristan said. “The inevitability that we will descend into chaos and dust.”
“Grim,” Callum offered appreciatively, closing a hand around Tristan’s shoulder. “Try not to tell Rhodes that or she’ll start decaying all over the place.”
Because he could not resist, Tristan asked, “What if she’s tougher than you think she is?”
Callum shrugged, dismissive.
“I’m just curious,” Tristan clarified, “whether that would please you or send you into a spiral of existential despair.”
“Me? I never despair,” said Callum. “I am only ever patently unsurprised.”
Not for the first time, Tristan considered how the ability to estimate people to the precise degree of what they were must be a dangerous quality to have. The gift of understanding a person’s reality, both their lightness and darkness, without the flaws of perception to blur their edges or to lend meaning to their existence was…unsettling.
A blessing, or a curse.
“And if I disappoint you?” Tristan prompted.
“You disappoint me all the time, Caine. It’s why I’m so very fond of you,” Callum mused, beckoning Tristan toward the library and its finer bottles of vintage scotch. "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
194
" Varona, if you’re planning to do something stupid—”
“First of all,” Nico said, spinning curtly to address her as she stumbled into his back, “if I were to elect to do something stupid, I would not require your opinion on the matter. Secondly—”
“You can’t just run around playing with things unnecessarily just because you’re bored,” Libby retorted, sounding matronly and exhausted. As if she were his mother or his keeper, which she resolutely was not. “What if you’re needed for something?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Something.” She glared at him, exasperated. “Perhaps it stands to reason, Varona, that you shouldn’t do stupid things simply because they’re stupid. Or does that not compute? "
― Olivie Blake , The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
199
" Dimitri, astoundingly, shifted as if to drop the infant. The movement was so unpredictable and sharp that both Koschei and Roman stumbled forward, panicked, and the baby Lev began to cry in earnest, wailing with his little hands curled into fists.
“Dima!” Koschei roared in anger, snatching Lev from his eldest son’s hands and pressing him close to his own chest, protective at last over the fragility of his newest son. “You would have dropped him!”
“No,” Dimitri corrected, laughing his clever warrior’s laugh, “because you wouldn’t have let me, Papa. Nor would Roma,” he added, gesturing over his shoulder to where Roman had stumbled forward, nearly falling over himself in his effort to keep the baby aloft. “Because we are all brothers,” Dimitri explained, and Roman blinked, watching Koschei’s eyes widen with understanding.
“Because, Papa,” Dimitri finished, reaching out to let the crying Lev reach for his fingers, soothing him gently, “we are all your sons. "
― Olivie Blake , One For My Enemy
