The Atlas Complex

I don’t want to rule the world, I don’t want to control it, I don’t even want to influence it. I want to sit beside you in a little garden, I want to put your needs before mine, I want to fetch you a glass of water when you’re thirsty. I want to laugh at your jokes, even the bad ones, and bury my head in proverbial sand.

This is the problem with knowledge: its inexhaustible craving. The madness inherent in knowing there is only more to know. It’s a problem of mortality, of seeing the invariable end from the immovable beginning, of determining that the more you try to fix it, the more beginnings there are to discover, the more ways to reach the same unavoidable end.

I will spend my life orbiting yours," Nico said, and the exhaustion in his voice, she knew it. She understood it. "I consider it a privilege.

I like you with a little carnage.

What you’re willing to accept doesn’t change what I’m willing to give.

He’d meant what he said, that he believed Libby Rhodes to be present in every theoretical universe of his existence; to be a person of great significance in every single one. It was too familiar, too traceable. Too many places their lives would have collided, a web of unavoidable consequences where coincidence dressed up like fate. Within it, Nico truly believed all their other outcomes ricocheted, but eventually returned. Other lives, other existences, it didn’t matter. They were polarities, and wherever they went, his half would always find hers.

Callum would simply have to look Tristan in the eye and say, as un-pathetically as possible, you don't have to choose me. Just know that it won't stop me from choosing you.

I think the point is to be surprised by people. It’s not to know them completely. It’s to see them in a new way all the time, always turning them over and finding something different, some new fascinating thing.

Left to their own devices, humans will inevitably care for one another at great detriment to themselves. Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be compelled to save it. It is not one side or the other. Both are true. Flip the coin and see where it lands.

You should be warned, though, whatever else you take from this, that knowledge is always carnage. Power is a siren song, bloodstained and miserly hoarded. Forgiveness is not a given. Redemption is not a right.

Maybe her only purpose was to survive, which was fucking difficult, and so maybe that was enough.

Grief, oh god, the weight of it. Depression was hollow, sadness was vacant. Neither was anything like this.

This was it, the chronic condition—the only meaning Parisa had left in life. It wasn’t a secret society, it wasn’t an ancient library, it wasn’t an experiment that had taken two decades to design, it was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. The tiny, unceremonious, incomparable mdiracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting. It was cruel and it was cursed; it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.

If you saw what I saw, you’d choose betrayal, too.

The best method for ruining someone's life is to give them exactly what they want and then politely get out of their way.

So it wouldn't be forever. Did that make any of this less precious, less beautiful? No. If anything, the opposite.

Within every human being is the power to see the world as it is and still be driven to destroy it.

They had always been like stars in orbit, chasing each other, faster and faster until sometimes they got caught, becoming one with the orbit itself. The line where he ended or she began, it inevitably became irrelevant. Her magic responded to his like it had been born in his body. His joined up with hers like it had finally found its way home.

But I’m just the villain, Rhodes. It’s my job to lose.

The point is there are no villains in this story, or maybe there are no heroes.

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.

This was a world where stolen knowledge could stay stolen, because plenty of knowledge that came freely remained unscrutinized every day.

Is this actually possible?” Gideon asked. Nico made a face that meant maybe, I don’t know, I’m bored. “Does it matter?" A valid question. Either yes, it mattered very much, or no, it didn’t matter at all, and also nothing really mattered, and who was to say what was actually real aside from the beat of his heart in his chest?

Because if Parisa was a person who’d learned to fight for herself, who’d chosen satisfaction over compromise and power over morality—if she was a person with blood on her hands—it was because she’d had to be. Because this world demanded it. Because she’d needed protection that no one but herself had ever been willing to provide. Because this was a world that would stare at her breasts and still count her for less if she let it; a world that would gladly tell her what she was worth and what she wasn’t. So what mattered about this world? Only that she remained the most dangerous thing in it.

Until then, drink expensive liquor, buy some nice shoes, and make a man stop talking by sitting comfortably on his face.

I will spend my life orbiting your,” Nico said, and the exhaustion in his voice, she knew it. She understood it. I consider it a privilege. Does that mean less if we never sleep together? IF we never have babies and hold hands, does that have to mean less? You’re in every world I exist in, your fate is my fate, either you follow me or I follow you, it doesn’t matter which and I don’t care. If that’s not love then maybe I don’t understand love, and that’s fine with me- it doesn’t make me angry to know I’m actually an idiot after all. And if it’s not enough for you, then okay, it’s not enough. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m willing to give it. What you’re willing to accept doesn’t change what I’m willing to give.

Here, he thought, yanking the sunglasses from his misshapen face—see me. See all of me for what I really am. You’re the only one who ever has.

To Gideon, time felt especially theoretical. Like something he would always chase and never really have. He wished he could say that the feeling was a portent, that it was knowledge of significance, but it was something terrible, something worse. Dread. Hope. Two sides of the same desperation. Belief that if a moment was perfect, it was surely undeserved; it wasn’t meant to last. Cosmic significance dictated that light would fade; that something gold could never stay.

Tristan stared after her, wondering if he ought to push the issue. Nico probably would, but Tristan wasn't Nico. It was one of his favorite things about himself, actually, that he wasn't Nico.

Bodies are so faulty already, just moments away from total collapse. The shapes we take - the things housing our souls that we resent and mistreat and yet trust so implicitly - they were just objects of force, constantly acted upon.