Page 13 of This Cruel Fate

She took in the autumn air and the house she assumed to be his home, and shrugged. “Because you refused to meet me in the palace?”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Fine.” Xolia steeled herself for Atlas’s ridicule. “I changed my mind.”

Atlas remained still, his eyebrow quirking up slightly.

“About your. . .” What he had suggested was illegal; it didn’t seem right to blurt it out. “About the proposition.”

Atlas’s eyes widened, and he looked suspiciously around the grounds, as if searching for prying ears. “Come inside.”

He and Xolia walked up the narrow pathway to the front door of the house. The inside of Atlas’s home was impersonal. She could no more tell Atlas lived there than anyone lived there at all. It was dressed like something from a museum, all outdated furniture and ornate paintings from past presidencies. Atlas descended into the living area of the house, but Xolia was so struck by the sheer unbelievability of the home that she lingered in the foyer, a much grander space than she would have expected of such an inconsequential building. Portraits of past vice presidents and their families lined the walls.

Xolia perused the portraits until she stopped short at a black-and-white photograph. It was smaller than all the paintings. It was Atlas. With Silas. From the rebellion. Atlas was still a teenager, and Silas had a protective arm over his shoulder. They looked like a real family; their hair looked the same color in black and white, and their facial structures were eerily similar with square jaws. Their smiles were nearly identical to one another too.

Xolia knew there was no way for Atlas to be Silas’s biological son, but looking at that photo, she became aware of how different she looked from Silas. She became aware of how much Silas wasn’t her father and had never been her father. Tears welled in her eyes, and she turned away from the offending picture before they could spill down her cheeks.

Atlas stood right behind her, which jolted Xolia into stillness. “That picture was taken right before the final siege.”

Xolia had no pictures with Silas. Not like that, at least.

“I was surprised when I found it in FAR’s Revolution archives. I thought it might fit here.” Atlas shrugged. “I hate him, but he’s the closest thing any of us had to a father, right?”

How can you hate him and have more of him than I do? “I’m not here to talk about Silas,” she said, hating the way her voice broke on his name. How weak was she?

“What made you change your mind?”

Xolia sighed. It was inescapable, that dejected exhaling of air. She looked at the couches, seemingly untouched, but Atlas gestured to the smaller of the two. Xolia sat down on the stiff cushion, deliberating on what to say.

“Does it matter?”

Atlas sat on the adjacent couch and nodded.

“Maybe I’m just feeling nostalgic,” she said. “I want to blow off some steam.”

“Wrong answer.”

“Why do you want to go?”

Atlas scoffed at her, clearly uninterested in her constant deflections. “We’re coming up on an election year. And if I’ve learned anything in the past seven years, Peter is a dreamer, but there is too much conflict in the Senate and amongst the country for any of his dreams to be carried out. I’m going to lose my position and my job by next year.”

Xolia narrowed her eyes. Atlas had never been this forthcoming with her, and the whole thing reeked of some insincere excuse. It wasn’t like she had any way to refute it, though. Besides, it might feel better to be honest for once in her life. “Rowan got the vice director position. I didn’t even know she’d applied for it.”

Atlas raised an invisible glass. “Cheers to losing our jobs, then.”

Xolia nodded, lifting her own unseen cup.

“The fights are huge, I don’t know how they’ve evaded official detection for so long,” Atlas said, leaning back against the couch. “Humans and variants bet on winners; I don’t even know the extent of the money that gets traded around those places.”

“How did you find out about it?”

“What? Do you think my job is following Peter around all day?” Atlas asked.

Xolia didn’t, but she thought that maybe his immediate defensiveness had something to do with whatever tensions lay between them. She shrugged, hoping to irk him.

“Senators see a lot of interesting things, and not many of them can keep quiet.”

“But you haven’t managed to track the money or find any specific people to connect to the fights?” Xolia guessed.

---