BEGINNING
Atlas Blakely was born as the earth was dying. This is a fact.
So is this: the first thing Atlas Blakely truly understood was pain.
This, too: Atlas Blakely is a man who created weapons. A man who kept secrets.
And this: Atlas Blakely is a man willing to jeopardize the lives of everyone in his care, and to betray all those foolish or desperate enough to have the misfortune to trust him.
Atlas Blakely is a compendium of scars and flaws, a liar by trade and by birth. He is a man with the makings of a villain.
But above all else, Atlas Blakely is just a man.
* * *
His story began where yours did. A little differently—no smarmy toff dolled up in tweed, no insufferable well-pressed suit—though it did begin with an invitation. This is the Alexandrian Society, after all, and everyone must be invited. Even Atlas.
Even you.
The invitation addressed to Atlas Blakely had developed a thin adhesive film from whatever misfortunate substance had been its neighbor, the invitation itself having been unceremoniously mislaid beside the bin in his mother’s dilapidated flat. The monument to the misdeeds of an average Thursday (i.e., the bin and its rubbish contained within) lived inauspiciously above a square meter of scorched lino paneling and below a staggering tower of Nietzsche and de Beauvoir and Descartes. As usual, the refuse had mushroomed perilously from the constraints of the bin, old newspapers and takeaway containers and moldy, discarded turnip heads communing with untouched piles of literary journals, unfinished poetry, and a porcelain jar of paper napkins folded painstakingly into swans, so that beside it, a sticky square of posh ivory cardstock was almost entirely unnoticeable.
Almost, of course. But not quite.
Atlas Blakely, then twenty-three, plucked up the card from the floor between harrowing shifts at the local pub, a job for which he’d had to grovel despite his possession of a degree, two degrees, the potential for a third. He glanced at his name in elaborate calligraphic script and determined it had probably been carried there on the wings of a bottle. His mother would be asleep for several hours yet, so he pocketed it and stood, glancing up at the image of his father, or whatever the word was for the man whose portrait still sat upon the bookcase, gathering dust. About this or the other thing, he did not intend to ask.
Initially, the way that Atlas felt upon receipt of his Alexandrian summons could be put most plainly as repulsion. He was no stranger to medeians or academicians, being one of those himself and the progeny of the other, and knew by then to distrust both. He meant to throw it out, the card, only the adhesive of gin and what was probably the tamarind chutney his mother ordered by phone from the nearby Asian grocery (“It smells like Pa,” his mother often said when she was lucid) soon glued it to the lining of Atlas’s pocket.
His Alexandrian Caretaker, William Astor Huntington, was what Atlas would call overly fond of puzzles, to the severe detriment of things like sanity and time. It was later that evening, fiddling blindly with the card in his pocket—having just tossed out a man for the customary offense of having more whisky than sense—that Atlas determined the spellwork laced within its contents to be a cipher, which was likewise something he wouldn’t have had the time or sanity for if not for being brutally wounded by love (or whatever it was that had mainly affected his penis) some twenty-four hours prior. In Atlas Blakely’s later opinion, Huntington’s scavenging methodology was a narcissistic faff. When it came to the Society, most people needed only five minutes to be convinced.
But that was later Atlas’s opinion. At the time, Atlas was heartsick and overqualified. In the larger scheme of things, he was bored. He would come to understand over time that most people were bored, especially those in consideration for a place in the Society. It was a small, gentle cruelty of life that most people with a true sense of purpose lack the talent to achieve it. The people with talent are far more likely directionless, an odd but unavoidable irony. (In Atlas Blakely’s experience, the best method for ruining someone’s life is to give them exactly what they want and then politely get out of their way.)
The cipher led him to the toilet of a sixteenth-century chapel, which led him to the roof of a recently completed skyscraper, which led him to a field of sheep. Eventually he arrived at the Alexandrian Society’s municipal quarters, an older version of the room in which he would later meet six of his own recruits—a forthcoming renovation which Atlas would not know until later was funded by someone who was not even in the Society, had never been initiated, had probably never killed someone, ever, which was very nice for the donor in question. Presumably they slept very well at night. But that is obviously not the point.
So what is the point? The point is a man, a genius named Dr. Blakely, had an affair with one of his first-year undergraduates in the late 1970s that resulted in a child. The point is there are inadequate resources for mental health. The point is schizophrenia is latent until it isn’t, until it ripens and blooms, until you look down at the infant who ruined your life and understand both that you would willingly die for him and, also, that you will probably die for him whether the decision is left in your hands or not. The point is nobody will call it abuse because it is, by all accounts, consensual. The point is there is nothing to be done except to wonder if things might have been different had she not worn that skirt or looked at her professor that way. The point is a man’s career is at stake, his livelihood, his family! The point is Atlas Blakely will be three years old when he first hears the voices in his own mother’s head—the duality of her being, the way her genius splinters off somewhere, dovetailing into something darker than either of them understand. The point is the condom broke, or maybe there was no condom.
The point is there are no villains in this story, or maybe there are no heroes.
The point is: someone offers Atlas Blakely power and Atlas Blakely says, unequivocally, yes.
* * *
He finds out later that another member of his recruitment cohort, Ezra Fowler, found his own cipher stuck to the bottom of his shoe. No fucking clue how it got there. Nearly threw it away, really didn’t give a fuck, only didn’t have any other plans, so, here we are.
Ivy Breton, NYUMA graduate who did a year at Madrid, finds hers inside an antique dollhouse, perched upon the replica of a Queen Anne chair that her great-aunt, a hobbyist, had varnished by hand.
Folade Ilori, Nigerian born, educated at Universitá Medeia, finds hers on the wing of a hummingbird in the vineyards of her uncle’s estate.
Alexis Lai, from Hong Kong, educated at the National University of Magic in Singapore, finds hers tucked neatly into the excavated bones of what her team believed to be a Neolithic skeleton in Portugal. (It wasn’t, but that was another darkness, for another time.)
Neel Mishra, the other Brit, who is actually Indian, finds his cipher in his telescope—literally written in the stars.
And then there’s Atlas with the bins and Ezra with his shoe. They were destined to lock eyes, recognize the immensity of this revelation, and follow it up with some weed.
After Alexis dies and Atlas thinks a somberer version of well, fuck, better get on with it, he learns exactly how they were each selected. (This happens after Atlas discovers the existence of Dalton Ellery but before his Caretaker, Huntington, makes the “spontaneous” decision to retire.) Apparently, the Society can track the magical output of any person in the world. That’s it. That’s their main consideration and it’s … underwhelming. Almost frustratingly simple. They look for whoever is doing a fuckton of magic and determine whether that magic comes with a price that someone else has already paid, and if not they say oi!, that looks promising. It’s a little more refined than that, but that’s the gist of it.
(This is not the long version of the story, because you’re not interested in the long version. You already know what Atlas is, or have some idea of what’s going on with him. You know this story doesn’t end well. It’s written on the wall—which, to be fair, means Atlas can see it, too. He’s not an idiot. He’s just pretty much fucked any way you look at it.)
The point is Ezra Fowler is really, really magical. So is anyone who steps through that door, but by the standards of pure output, Ezra tops the list.
“I can open wormholes,” Ezra explains one night over indecency and small talk. (It takes him much longer to discuss the event that awoke his particular magical specialty, i.e., his mother’s murder in what would later be called a hate crime, as if treating a virus as a coalition of separate, unrelated symptoms could possibly derive a cure.) “Little ones, but still.”
“How little?” asks Atlas.
“Me-sized.”
“Oh, I thought this was a shrinking down situation,” Atlas exhales. “You know. Some Alice in Wonderland shit or something.”
“No,” Ezra says, “they’re pretty normal sized. Like, if wormholes were normal.”
“How do you know they’re wormholes?”
“I don’t know what else they’d be.”
“Cool, cool.” Drugs made this conversation easier. Then again, drugs made all of Atlas’s conversations easier. It’s actually kind of impossible to explain this to anyone, but hearing people’s inner thoughts makes relationships approximately one million times harder. Atlas is an overthinker. He was a careful child, careful to conceal his origins, his bruises, his flat, his malnourishment, his expert forgery of his mother’s signature, careful, so careful, quiet and unobtrusive, but … is he too quiet?, should we be worried?, should we speak to his parents?, no no, he’s a pleasure to have in class, he’s so helpful, perhaps he was just shy, is he too charming?, is it even natural to be this charming at five years old, six, seveneightnine?, he’s just so well-behaved for his age, so mature, so worldly, doesn’t ever act out, do we wonder…?, should we see if…? Ah, spoke too soon, there we go, a rebellious streak right on cue, a flaw, thank goodness.
Thank goodness. He’s a normal child after all.
“What?” says Atlas, realizing that Ezra is still speaking.
“I’ve never told anyone that before. About the doors.” He’s staring at the bookcase in the painted room, at the layout that Future Atlas does not rearrange.
“Doors?” Atlas echoes meaninglessly.
“I call them doors,” Ezra says.
In general, Atlas knows doors. Knows not to open them. Some doors are closed for a reason. “Where do your doors go?”
“Past. Future.” Ezra picks at a flake of dry skin on his cuticle. “Wherever.”
“Can you take anyone with you?” Atlas says, thinking: I just want to see. I just want to see what happens. (Does he ever get his comeuppance? Does she ever get well?) I just want to know. But he knows he wants it too much to ask it out loud, because Ezra’s brain throws up a red flag that only Atlas is privy to. “I’m just curious,” he clarifies through a smoke ring. “I’ve never heard of anyone who can make their own fucking wormholes.”
Silence.
“You can read minds,” comments Ezra after a moment, which is both an observation and a warning.
Atlas doesn’t bother confirming this, since it’s not technically true. Reading is very elementary and minds are illegible as a rule. He does something else with minds, something more complex than people understand, more invasive than people can empathize with. As a matter of self-preservation, Atlas leaves out the details. Still, there’s a reason that if he wants someone to like him, they generally do, because meeting Atlas Blakely is a little like debugging your own personal code. Or it can be if you let it.
(One day, years later, after Neel has died several times but Folade only twice, when they’re deciding whether or not to leave Ivy in her grave—if, perhaps, that might temporarily leave the archives satisfied…?—Alexis will tell Atlas that she likes it, the mind reading. She not only doesn’t mind it, she actively thinks it’s ideal. They can go days without speaking to each other, which is perfect. She doesn’t like to talk. In her words, children who see dead people don’t like to talk. It’s a thing, she assures him. Atlas asks if they have a support group, you know, for the children who see dead people who are now really, really quiet adults, and she laughs and flicks some bubbles at him from the bath. Stop talking, she says, and holds out a hand for him. He says okay and gets in.)
“What’s it like?” Ezra says.
Atlas blows another perfect smoke ring and smiles the stupid smile of the truly overindulged. Somewhere else, for the first time in his life, his mother is doing something he has no idea about. He hasn’t checked in. Doesn’t plan to. Inevitably will, though, because that is the way of things. The tide always returns. “What, mind reading?”
“Knowing what to say,” Ezra corrects him.
“Fucked,” Atlas replies.
Intuitively, they both understand. Reading the mind of a person you cannot change is as powerless as time-traveling to an ending you can’t rewrite.
* * *
The moral of the story is this: beware the man who faces you unarmed. But the moral of the story is also this: beware the shared moments of vulnerability between two grown men whose mothers are lost and gone. Whatever is forged between Ezra and Atlas, it is the foundation for everything rotten that follows. It’s the landscape for every catastrophe that blooms. Call it an origin story, a superposition. A second chance at something like life, which is of course the beginning of the end, because existence is largely futile.
Which isn’t to say the others in their Society cohort are unpleasant. Folade, Ade when she’s feeling cheeky, is the oldest and she doesn’t actually give a fuck about any of them, which is, honestly, fair. She fancies herself a poet, is deeply superstitious and the only one of them that’s also religious, which isn’t odd so much as impressive, because it means she gets moments of peace that the rest of them don’t. She’s a physicist, an atomist—the best Atlas has ever seen until he meets Nico de Varona and Libby Rhodes. Ivy is a sunny little rich girl who happens to be a viral biomancer capable of enacting mass extinction in something like five, six days. (Later, Atlas will think, oh. She’s the one we should have killed. Which he does, in a way. But not the way he should have done it, or any way capable of meaningful change.)
Neel is the youngest, chipper and mouthy and deeply twenty-one. He was at the London school with Atlas, though they never spoke because Neel was busy with the stars and Atlas was busy cleaning vomit off his mum or covertly dismantling her thoughts. (There’s a lot of physical junk in his mother’s life too, not just the dregs of her psyche. At first Atlas tries rearranging things in her head, reassigning her anxieties about the unknown, because a well-organized mind seems moderately more helpful for a sanitized home, or possibly he has that backward. One such attempt successfully clears the produce drawer of unidentifiable nightmare rot for a week but then only makes it worse, makes the paranoia sharper—as if she can tell somehow that there’s been a robber, that someone else has been inside. For half a second, things get so bad that Atlas thinks the end is nearer. But it isn’t. And he’s glad about that. But also, he’s absolutely fucked.) Neel is a divinist and he’s always saying things like don’t touch the strawberries today, Blakely, they’re off. It’s annoying, but Atlas knows—can see very clearly—that Neel means it, that he’s never had an impure thought in his life, except for maybe one or two about Ivy. Who is very pretty. Even if she is a walking harbinger of death.
Then there’s Alexis. She’s twenty-eight and fed up with the living.
“She scares me,” Ezra admits over midnight shepherd’s pie.
“Yeah,” Atlas agrees and means it.
(Later, Alexis will hold his hand right before she goes and say that it isn’t his fault even though it is, which Atlas will know because in her head she’s thinking you absolute moron, you stupid little prick. There’s no weight to it because Alexis really isn’t one to dwell on things overlong, and aloud she’ll say just don’t waste it, Blakely, okay? You made your bed, fine, it is what it is, for fuck’s sake just don’t waste it. But he will, of course. Of course he will.)
Copyright © 2023 by Alexene Farol Follmuth
