Olivie Blake

ONLY THE EXTRAORDINARY ARE CHOSEN
ONLY THE CUNNING SURVIVE

An explosive return to the Library leaves the six Alexandrians vulnerable and facing the lethal terms of their recruitment. As the initiates devise opposing strategies to circumvent the deadly bargain they've failed to uphold, old alliances fracture. Those who remain within the Society's archives wrestle with the ethics of their astronomical abilities; elsewhere, an unlikely Alexandrian pair partner to influence global politics, while the outside world mobilizes to destroy them.

The society Caretaker himself, Atlas Blakely, may succeed at a plan with world-ending stakes. It's a race to survive as the six Society recruits are faced with the question of what they're willing to betray for limitless power - and who will be destroyed along the way.

Power is taken

The Atlas Complex

cee 

Now I understand the desire to bless something.

Romy

His hand twitched a moment as if to find his phone, but no, not yet. Not now. Chances were too high that he might say something counterproductive, such as I miss you or forgive me. Or tell me you love me, even once.

Julia Rutgers

The goodness she'd compromise for greatness if given the chance, because the unstained version of her was already gone.

He hadn't mentioned the other things - the price, the way power was not something waiting to be called on like a lover but something to be stolen like a right. 

It wasn't forever and it was sweeter that way, ripe on the edge of rotten.

Elle bagnall

When an ecosystem dies, nature makes a new one. Don't you get it? The world doesn't end. Only we do. But maybe... maybe we could be bigger than that. Maybe that's what she meant. Maybe we are meant to be bigger than that. (Slowly, Atlas becomes sure. Yes, that must be what she meant.) It doesn't matter where it started. Doesn't matter where it ends. Were part of the cycle whether we like it or not, so don't be the wasteland.

Be the locusts. Be the plague. “Let's be gods," Atlas says aloud, and it’s important to remember that he's on drugs, that he misses his mother, that he hates himself. It's critical to recall that at this very moment in time, Atlas Blakely is a scared, sad, lonely little speck of a being, a freckle on the arse of humanity's latest impending doom. Atlas Blakely doesn't care if he makes it to tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow. He doesn't care if he gets struck by lightning, dies tonight. Atlas Blakely is a neurotic, desperate-for-meaning twenty-something-year-old (twenty-five, then) under the influ- e of at least three mind-altering substances and in the presence of maybe his very first real friend, and at first, when he says it, he isn't thinking about the consequences. He doesn't understand consequences yet! 

Once the idea of death becomes necessary, even palatable, there is always someone the rest of the herd can stand to lose

Okay, I believe in it as a theoretical possibility, but I don't BELIEVE in it. We don't get to undo our mistakes. We just make new ones and try to make the next ones more interesting

The Atlas Complex quotes

Join the club