“Well—” He stopped. “I’m not. I’m out of options, but—”
“Your friend,” she guessed. “The one who can move through dreams?”
He said nothing.
“You never mentioned that about him,” Reina observed aloud. “His name, yes, but never what it was he could do.”
Nico seemed retroactively guilty, kicking out his feet in the grass. “I never planned to tell anyone.”
“Because he is… secretive?”
“Him? Not so much. But what he can do…” Nico sighed. “It’s just best if people don’t know.”
To her displeasure, Reina found herself more annoyed by that than usual.
“You should trust us.” She was surprised by how adamant she was. “Don’t you think?”
Nico’s expression in reply was one of total, incomprehensible openness. Parisa had been right that he was scarcely capable of guile.
“Why?” he said.
Reina considered it. Nico would want a good answer, a thorough one, and for possibly selfish reasons, she needed him to be persuaded.
“Do you understand,” she said slowly, “how alone we are one thing, but together we are another?”
A beat of silence.
Then, “Yes.”
“So it is a waste, then. Not to use the resources you have.” Another simple concept.
“You would trust Callum? Or Parisa?”
Nico sounded skeptical, for good reason.
“I trust that they are talented,” Reina confirmed slowly. “I trust their skill. I trust that when their interests align with mine, they are useful.”
“And if they don’t align?”
“Then make them.” To Reina it was logical, sequential, if-this-then-that. “Why are we part of this if not to be great? I could be good alone, as could you,” she reminded him. “We would not still be here if we wished to settle only for goodness.”
“Are you—” Nico faltered. “Are you really so certain about this?” About the Society, he meant.
“Yes,” she said.
It wasn’t true at the time, but she had plans to make it so. She intended to become that certain, and to do so would only require a few answers.
Only one man could satisfactorily provide her with those.
She could see she hadn’t startled him with her presence. Perhaps he’d been expecting her. His office had always held little interest for any of them, largely because the space itself contained nothing worth inspection. Only he was interesting, in his unobtrusive way. There had always been an air of eternal patience about him.
“What is initiation?” Reina asked without preamble, and Atlas, who had been rifling through some of the books on his shelf, slowed his motions to a halt.
“A ritual. As everything is.” He looked tired, as he often looked when they caught glimpses of him lately. He was dressed in a bespoke suit as he always was, this one a slate grey that somehow reflected his state of academic mourning. “Binding oaths are not particularly complex. I imagine you must have studied them at one point.”
She had. “Will it work without a death?”
“Yes.”
Atlas took a seat at his desk and gestured for her to do the same, removing a pen from his pocket and setting it carefully just to the right of his hand. “There may be fractures. But after two millennia of oaths to reinforce the binding, I can assure you,” he said with something close to irony, “it will hold.”
She didn’t bother asking why they didn’t simply do away with the elimination process, then, if it would hold without it. It seemed fairly obvious there were no more reasons to support it than there were to support the divine right of kings. Tradition, ritual, the general fear of chaos.
It didn’t matter. She was alive, and that was the only factor of relevance.
“I doubt you came to ask me about the logistics of the ceremony,” Atlas remarked. He was regarding her with a certain wary interest; guarded.
“I wanted to ask you something else.”
“Then ask.”
“Will you answer?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
Comforting, Reina thought.
“You told me in the cafe that my invitation to join the Society had come down to me and someone else,” she reminded him.
“Yes, I did say that.” He didn’t look as if he planned to deny anything. “Has it bothered you much?”
“In a sense.”
“Because you doubt your place here?”