Silence.
“Being magic is even worse,” said Ezra. “Your body doesn’t want to die, it has too much inside it. So you want more powerfully. You starve more quickly. Your capacity to have nothing is abysmal, cataclysmic. There isn’t a medeian on earth capable of casting themselves down to ordinariness, much less to dust. We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s easy, so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something—against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes.”
“What does?” asked Atlas.
Ezra smiled, closing his eyes in the sun.
“Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break.”
CALLUM
AS A CHILD CALLUM NEVER sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecific drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation to it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Why the drudgery of it, being despised for the purpose of some interminable crusade, when it would be so much easier to simply let things happen? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? The world didn’t even love a hero for long. Wanting anything—beauty, omnipotence, absolution—was a natural flaw in being human, but the elective tirelessness of villainy made it indigestibly worse.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum most honestly, the truest truths: fairytale peasant needs money for dying child, accepts whatever consequences follow. The rest of the story was always too lofty, about choosing good or the inevitable collapse of desperation and vice; recordings of human nature, prescriptions to rectify its ills. They were the lying truths, ideologically grand but implausible on the whole. In his view, human nature wasn’t an artful curation of morality, but merely cyclical patterns of behavior. Self-correcting; leaning one way only to balance it out with the other over time.
Callum had always tended towards the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by reaction rather than a cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole but at least it was rational, explainable by even biological terms. A person had to have a foothold somewhere; a role in the ecosystem, like any species. Callum admired that, the ability to choose a side and behave as it dictated. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision, because life was the only thing that truly mattered.
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.
Libby was a hero. Parisa was a villain. Their goals were overarching, appositional.
Nico and Reina were so impartial and self-interested as to be wholly negligible.
Tristan was a soldier. He would follow wherever he was most persuasively led.
It was Callum who was an assassin. It was the same as a soldier, but when he worked, he worked alone.
“Do you worry about dying?” Tristan asked him after dinner one evening, the two of them left behind beside the dining room fire. Unnecessary warmth, given the spring breeze outside, but the Society was nothing if not committed to aesthetics. “That someone might choose you to die, I mean.”