The Obsidian Codex (The Atlas Conspiracy Cycle #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

If you are new to the cycle, I recommend seeing the entire series here.

The final, seventh book in the cycle will pull together all the threads of the previous six books, and serves as the final chapter of the series.

— Nick Thacker

There were eleven students in a room built for two hundred, and four of them were asleep.

Elena Vargas had counted them twice, because there wasn't much else to do in the back half of a lecture once the script had started running itself.

The slides advanced. Her mouth made the words.

She had stopped listening to herself somewhere around the second slide, and was mostly just counting.

She clicked to the next slide. A blade filled it, photographed against a neutral card, its edge a black line so fine the camera had struggled to hold it.

"Obsidian," she said. "The steel of Mesoamerica.

On a fresh edge it comes off sharper than a surgical scalpel — sharper than anything we can grind out of metal, actually, because it fractures down to a single row of molecules.

Surgeons still use it for certain incisions, when they want a cut that heals cleaner.

Four thousand years, and we haven't really improved on it. We've only made it more consistent."

Nobody wrote it down. A girl in the fifth row had her chin in her hand and her eyes at half-mast. The boy beside her had given up on the pretense entirely and slept with his mouth open.

"The thing you need to understand about it," Elena went on, "is that it doesn't occur everywhere.

It comes from specific volcanic sources, particular flows, and every source carries its own chemical fingerprint — trace elements, in ratios that don't repeat from one mountain to the next.

So if you put a chip of it in the right machine, an X-ray fluorescence reader will tell you, with a fair degree of confidence, which volcano it came out of.

" She let that sit for a moment, the way she used to when a room would have leaned in.

"So. Suppose we find a blade two thousand years old, and we find it a thousand kilometers from the nearest source that could have produced it. What does that tell us?"

The radiator against the far wall knocked twice and subsided. A boy in the second row had his phone flat against his thigh under the desk, his thumb moving.

"Somebody carried it," said the girl in the third row.

Elena looked at her properly for the first time. She had a pen in her hand, an actual pen, and a notebook open in front of her that already had writing on it. She was the only one in the room who did.

"Somebody carried it," Elena agreed, and clicked back a slide to the map, the one with the color-coded sources and the long arrows fanning south.

"Here's the case I find hardest to shake.

There's a green obsidian — a real green, almost gold in the light — that comes from a single source near Pachuca.

Only there. And you find it in burials a thousand kilometers to the south, in places that had perfectly serviceable gray glass of their own, sitting in the ground under their feet.

They didn't need the green. There was no functional reason for it.

They wanted it. The specific color, from the specific mountain.

And so they moved it, hand to hand, generation to generation, for centuries, because it meant something to have it. "

"Why?" the girl asked.

"That's exactly the question, and it's the one the machine can't answer for you.

The reader will tell you where the stone was born.

It won't tell you why anyone bothered to carry it four hundred years to a grave.

" Elena tapped the edge of the lectern. "That's the part that's ours to do.

The blade is a receipt. Somebody paid something to move it, and the payment left a record in where it ended up and who it ended up with.

We read the receipt, and if we read it well, we can put the road back — the whole route, the whole reason.

That's the job, in the end. Reading the things people never once meant for us to keep. "

"So how do you actually do it?" the girl asked. "The sourcing part. You said a machine reads the fingerprint. Is that all of it?"

"No, and thank you for not letting me get away with the pretty version.

" Elena leaned on the lectern. "The machine gives you a number, and the number is only as good as your library of comparisons.

You need a reference sample from every source you think it might have come from, run on the same instrument, or the numbers don't mean anything against each other.

Half the real work is unglamorous — collecting from the sources, keeping the catalog honest, arguing with the person who ran their samples on a different machine and swears their calibration was fine.

The stone is easy. People are the hard part. People always are."

The girl in the third row wrote that down. Nobody else did, and Elena found she minded that less than usual, because at least one pen was moving.

"How do you know," the girl said, looking up, "that you're not just seeing what you already wanted to see? If the whole thing is reading meaning into where the stone landed — how do you keep from making up the story you like best?"

It was the first real question anyone had asked her in months, and it landed somewhere under her ribs, and she very nearly gave it the answer it deserved.

"You go looking for the thing that proves you wrong," she said.

"That's the whole of it, honestly. You make the reading, the one that feels right, and then instead of defending it you turn around and try as hard as you can to break it.

You look for the blade that shouldn't be there, the burial that doesn't fit, the simpler explanation you'd been avoiding.

And if you've actually done that — if you've genuinely gone hunting for your own mistake and you still can't find it — then maybe, provisionally, you're allowed to believe yourself.

" She heard her own voice climbing, gaining a warmth she hadn't authorized, and she reached in and pulled it back down where it belonged.

"We'll get to all of that. Sourcing first. One thing at a time. "

"But most people don't do that," the girl said. "Try to break their own reading. Do they? It sounds like the opposite of what most people do."

"Most people don't, no." Elena looked at her a moment longer than she'd meant to.

"Most people find the answer they can live with and stop digging the instant they reach it, and they call the stopping rigor.

It's the hardest discipline in the field and it's the one nobody grades you on.

You'll have to grade yourself." She caught the shape of what she was doing, standing here handing a real answer to one alert girl in an empty hall, and she stepped back from it.

"Which is a long way of saying: read the chapter. "

She turned back to the screen and advanced to the next slide, and she saw the error before she'd finished registering the drawing.

The line art itself was clean — a good hand had done it, someone who understood the conventions.

The caption underneath was wrong. Whoever had written it had read the lower day-sign as Cimi, death, when the doubled bar beneath the cartouche made it Caban. Earth. Movement. The trembling sign.

Her hand was already coming up with the laser pointer, the red dot already finding the doubled bar, before she remembered where she was.

Not one person in this room would ever, in the whole course of their lives, need to know the difference between Cimi and Caban.

Three of them were asleep. The correction died in her throat with the dot still hovering over the stone.

"—though that particular reading is contested," she finished, and lowered the pointer.

It wasn't contested. It was simply wrong, and she was the only one who knew it, and she let it stand.

A boy near the back lowered his phone. He'd been slouched so far down she'd half forgotten he was there, and now he sat up a little, and something in the way he did it made her go still before he'd said a word.

"Professor Vargas," he said. "Weren't you the one with the fake? The codex thing. My roommate was telling me about it — he said you got kind of famous for it, for a while."

The room woke up. It always woke up for that. Heads came off hands. The sleeping boy in the fifth row surfaced and blinked around as though he'd heard his own name.

Elena set the laser pointer down on the lectern, carefully, so that her hand would have somewhere to be and something to do.

"That's a longer conversation than we've got time for today," she said.

Level. She had practiced level in front of a bathroom mirror until it stopped costing her anything, and mostly it didn't anymore.

"Trade routes next week. Read the chapter before you come — actually read it, please, not the first and last paragraph. I can tell. I can always tell."

"But did you know it was fake?" the boy pressed. "Like, going in? Or did it just?—"

"Next week," she said.

The bell was a thing she controlled, and she rang it eight minutes early, and they were up and moving before her laptop had finished closing.

Eleven became none in under a minute, the room emptying with the speed of people who had somewhere better to be and had been waiting a while to go there.

The boy with the phone filmed his way up the aisle, the lens panning across the empty rows and, for a second or two, across her.

He wasn't cruel about it. That was almost the worst of it.

He filmed her exactly the way he'd filmed the empty seats, with the same idle thumb, and then he was through the double doors and gone.

Let him, she thought, and found she meant it, more or less.

She pulled the projector cable and coiled it around her hand, and she gathered up the lecture notes she hadn't looked at once, and she stood for a moment in the particular quiet of a hall built to hold two hundred voices and holding, at present, exactly one.

Then she switched off the projector and left the screen dark and went out the side door.