THE EZRA SIX
ONE
Julian
Julian Rivera Pérez was also born as the earth was dying because everyone was, fuck you! Atlas Blakely wasn’t special and frankly, neither are you. Neither was Julian. This was a sentiment, lightly paraphrased, that Julian’s abuela used to express in a variety of ways, very often. A hard worker, Julian’s abuela, and deeply religious from a place of faith, not fear. Everything is hard, mijo, to live is a challenge. Eat your mofongo, it’s getting cold.
...(Want to know what power feels like? Julian didn’t know, had never really known, but he imagined it was the carelessness of “forgetting” a video recording. Or maybe it was Atlas Blakely greeting him at the door of a country manor house, sly as a fox, slippery as a ghost. If Julian’s suspicions were right, the sentience of the archives would function like an algorithm by now, which meant that someone who spoke the right language could unpuzzle the answers to any imaginable question. Is there a heaven. How many nuclear weapons were Wessex—and his daughter—blatantly not telling them about. If Julian had just driven Jenny to the clinic like she’d asked instead of making her go alone, would his kids now have her smile?)
“Never mind,” Julian said to the room. “Take five.”
