There was always a time when it seemed appropriate to voice one’s concerns, after which point doing so would only become increasingly unproductive. Naggy, in a sense. For Gideon, that particular moment had passed about a month ago, long enough for such concerns to lose potency.
Theoretically, that is.
“—so anyway, those are the archives, blah blah,” Nico had said at the time, ending his tour of the Alexandrian manor house by pulling the reading room doors shut behind him. “I know they said no security clearance for you,” he added, “but I can always pull anything you want. Or you can ask Tristan. Who is admittedly The Worst”—an eye roll, capital letters strongly implied—“but he owes you for getting Rhodes back and he’s exceptionally transactional that way, so yeah. And you’ll like Atlas, maybe. Probably. I think.” A grimace. “I don’t think there’s any reason not to like Atlas—unless you, like Rhodes, think he’s some kind of tyrant, in which case … Well, whatever, you don’t have to marry him or work for him. Well, you’re obviously working for him, but that’s my fault, not his. Unless Rhodes is also right about his sinister plan for recruiting us specifically, but I don’t know, she’s not exactly at her best at the moment. Maybe you can talk to her? Every time I try to bring up”—and here, a drop in volume—“Fowler, she gets this look on her face like maybe I should have issued a trigger warning, and anyway, you’re much more palatable to her in general, so…”
Nico finally took a sufficient pause for breath, glancing worriedly at Gideon.
“What do you think?” Nico asked, bracing himself.
What did Gideon think? Excellent question.
At the time, these were his thoughts, in order:
Something was off about Libby Rhodes. Not that Gideon wouldn’t expect something to be off about her, given what he knew of her experience over the last year, but he had the distinct sensation that Nico either couldn’t see exactly what it was or simply didn’t want to. Nico chattered to Libby as he always had and met her barbs with his own as he’d always done, seemingly unfazed by the element of … something. Gideon had yet to put a finger on whatever it was. Libby was quieter than he remembered, but who wouldn’t be quiet, given everything? There was something else wrong, though; something familiar but unplaceable. Gideon had been racking his brain for an answer, but it remained trapped on the tip of his tongue, unhelpful. Like a half-remembered dream.
Tristan Caine, the researcher, the one with whom Nico had an obviously charged history and half a meager rivalry, was another odd piece of the grand aristocratic puzzle. He was polite, or just British. Unclear which applied more closely. Nothing about him seemed obviously different from the way Nico had described him. Nothing he said was tellingly abnormal. There was tension between him and Libby, something obviously sexually unresolved (they both seemed overly conscious of the exact degree of distance between them at all times) but Nico had already clocked it and warned Gideon that was the case, so it wasn’t necessarily that. Tristan didn’t seem to have a problem with Gideon, perhaps because Libby didn’t have a problem with Gideon, and people in general did not have problems with Gideon, except for—
Ah, that’s what it was. The disconcerting element of Libby’s new outward-facing persona—it reminded Gideon of his mother. Which didn’t seem right, exactly, because Eilif was a criminal, a mermaid, and not in possession of any qualities that Gideon typically applied to his friends. He had always been wary of his mother, but not … not entirely endangered. It was Nico who found Eilif dangerous, not Gideon. Gideon was aware of Eilif’s flaws—she was narcissistic, forgetful, generally a bit of a psychopath—but to him that was more like a pattern of scales than a weapon. Those characteristics were what made her, and he could no more hate her for that than he could a mirror. She was doing the best she could with what she had, which was … well, an addiction. Eilif was a compulsive gambler, and worse, she was equipped with a certain self-serving streak that meant every wager was a good one if there was even the slimmest chance for her to win. The last time Gideon had seen her she’d been more compulsive than usual, more certain, which also meant more desperate. The closer to ruin Eilif was, the more inspired she could be.
And not that Gideon would ever call Libby a gambler, but he could see something similar in her eyes. It wasn’t dim in there, there wasn’t loss, she wasn’t visibly haunted by trauma any more than the average person. It was the spark that unnerved him. The sense that she had come for something, and now she would get it, no matter the cost.
Which reminded Gideon that his mother’s recent absence felt … noticeable. No news was good news, sometimes, but sometimes no news was bad news, very bad news indeed. Impossible to tell the difference from where he stood. Impossible to tell what, under Gideon’s usual circumstances, would even be considered good. He supposed he wouldn’t hear from her anytime soon, if Nico was right about the creature wards, but unlike Nico, Gideon had a feeling the attacks orchestrated against Nico’s Society cohort would eventually appeal to Eilif—if not originate with her, opportunistic as she was. He hoped that wasn’t the case—that she would not actively endanger him or Nico purely out of self-interest—but perhaps if it wasn’t her choice? She’d been in trouble, more trouble than usual, dropping stray mumbles about dreams and NFTs and debts. And again, Gideon did know her. Even if he didn’t hate her for what she was, he was merely optimistic, not a fucking fool.
Speaking of optimism. Gideon wondered what to make of Atlas Blakely, whom Nico unwisely trusted and whom Tristan seemed to respect in a more dignified fashion. Libby was undemonstrative on the subject aside from repeatedly noting that Atlas could, quote, destroy the world. It felt like rhetoric to Gideon, the idea that the world could be destroyed. After all, what did that really mean?
But that wasn’t technically the question on Gideon’s mind. Actually, his question was much simpler. Not quite as simple as where was Atlas Blakely, although that was definitely a ponderance of significance. Nico found it normal that Atlas was absent from the house—which, true, was perhaps not suspicious enough on its own, and yes, fine, Gideon did not know what a Caretaker did or was supposed to do—but the Society on high had evidently not known either when they sent him here, which was an institutional carelessness that Gideon doubted very much was par for the course. This was not some underfunded municipality. He had been told, flat out, to his actual face, that he was being tracked and so were all the others. If he ran, they would find him. If Atlas Blakely had run, he’d certainly be apprehended soon. But Gideon did not take someone of Atlas Blakely’s stature to be the running type, so it likely wasn’t that. And more importantly, Tristan and Libby seemed to know something that Nico did not.
Other thoughts? If what it took to leave the Society wards via the dream realms was anything like the process of entering them, Gideon’s periodic bouts of narcolepsy were about to become massively constrained and very, very dull. Would he be confined to the same prison cell in which he’d spoken to Nico every time his consciousness slipped? Also, he wondered if the house concerned itself much with dietary restrictions. He was slightly lactose intolerant—not enough to ignore cheese entirely, but enough that some internal decision trees were necessarily involved. He had been in houses like this one, of similar grandeur and size. Max lived in a house like this one. Something that Nico did not know (or perhaps did know but chose not to acknowledge) was that Max had nearly not received medeian status because his output as a shifter was minimal, squarely on the line between medeian qualification and mere witchery. This revelation had been part of an intoxicated “don’t feel bad” speech from Max to Gideon sometime during their second year, wherein Max had disclosed that, actually, the Wolfe family had made a significant donation to the political office of the municipal medeian registry, because it was one thing to have a son without any corporate ambitions but another thing entirely to have one that was magically average.
Money, that was another thing Gideon worried over (as in, who controlled the Society’s money? Because whoever it was, they controlled the Society and therefore—toppling gradually but surely, the last domino to fall—they controlled Nico himself) but Nico didn’t think about that because he had it, was accustomed to having it. He didn’t understand the way money made decisions, the way that on a looming, unavoidable scale, money determined what was wrong or right more critically than Sunday school or philosophical preponderance of thought. Money was a gift, a burden, one version of a cost. Gideon had had a dream recently about a man with red eyes, a red pen. An accountant asking questions about a prince. There was no escaping it, the threats, the greed. An accountant, because money was a weapon. An accountant, because to own someone’s debt was to own them, full stop. His own mother had never been free. Not that Nico would need to worry about such things because he had Gideon to worry about them for him, but perhaps there was a reason the two things were so connected in Gideon’s mind.
Nico didn’t understand poverty the way that Gideon understood poverty, or hunger the way Gideon understood hunger, or fear the way Gideon knew fear. Not fear for his life—Nico understood that (just ignored it). Fear that his way of life was threatened. Fear that change would, for example, destroy the world that they had known, which was for all intents and purposes destroying the world itself. Nico knew but didn’t know how simply (not easily, but simply) someone’s soul could be bought, sold, or compromised, and while that wasn’t necessarily something to worry about today, it would be someday.
It would be someday, and it might very well take place inside this house. Atlas, and therefore Tristan or Libby, might already know something about that.
Something had happened to Atlas Blakely, that much was clear. Gideon heard hoofbeats and tried not to think zebras, tried to think horses instead. After all, Atlas Blakely’s initiates were being hunted. One had already been abducted and Libby’s loaded silence on the matter of Ezra Fowler was deafening, with implications very much implied. Atlas Blakely had made some kind of terrible mistake that he did not want the Society to know about, and whatever he was doing now, surely the only two people in the last place Atlas had been had every reason to cover it up. Wherever he was, it was relevant and unignorable, and something was very obviously wrong.
But critically, Gideon’s final response in answer to Nico’s question of what Gideon thought of the Society and the archives to which he was now contractually bound was simply that he’d been inside worse prisons for much longer. Prisons that had not included Nico pausing to pin him casually against the tactile Edwardian wallpaper of some privy chamber with inadequate ventilation—and if there was none of that, then there was no real reason for existing.
So yes, it was certainly possible the Society was fucked, and that Libby was right, and the world-ending stakes that Nico’s curiosity (or arrogance, or ambition) seemed willing to overlook were very definitely on the line. But if life outside this house was just a matter of certain death and tireless capitulation to social norms regardless, then what difference did it make to Gideon if Atlas Blakely tried to break the world from somewhere inside it or not?
Which was why Gideon’s ultimate answer was, “It’s nice. Very quaint. Could potentially use a thorough dusting.”
At the time, Nico’s grin had broadened, satisfied. How easy it was to make him happy, both then and now. How unquestionably worth the effort, too. So Nico wanted to try some kind of nutty multiverse experiment that could only end in personal disaster, if not total annihilation? Very well, Gideon could be persuaded. It was already a miracle he’d been awake this long—a miracle that someone he loved could love him back with even a sliver of his urgency—so if this was where he died, if the line on his ledger was red, then it was just as fine as any other place to meet the reaper.
And anyway, the wormhole to the kitchen was funny, the end.
Of course, the more the days slid by, the more Gideon would wonder whether he’d been remiss in failing to mention the veritable buffet of potentially relevant problems. If a version of his future self was screaming, prophecy seemed as yet insignificant beside the singular pleasantness of his personal doom.
“What are the chances we can magic up some pie?” Gideon asked Nico aloud, having then decided not to worry about the other things over which to potentially worry. Because the end of the world would really be much better with some pie. He wasn’t picky. Fruit pie. Savory pie. Cream pie would hurt his stomach, but it would be worth it.
“Oh, avec plaisir,” replied Nico happily. “I gotta text Reina again, which will probably end in tears. Mine, obviously. But give me five minutes?”
Five minutes, a lifetime. Potato, potato.
“Con mucho gusto, Nicolás,” said Gideon, drowsily pondering the best place for a nap. “Take your time.”