57 pages • 1 hour read
Olivie BlakeThe Atlas Six
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Space”
Content Warning: This section includes mentions of suicide.
Libby
The chapter starts with Libby talking to Ezra on the phone. He asks her questions about her life at the house, and she remains elusive while discussing the past few weeks. She and the other medeians had their first lesson, a lecture on magic led by Atlas, and Libby has also been learning more about the sentient house, testing its limits by requesting obscure texts from its archives. Most significantly, she and Nico successfully created a wormhole as an experiment. Ezra and Libby’s conversation is cut short when Tristan knocks on Libby’s door. Prompted by her and Nico’s success, Libby engages Tristan in a conversation about the nature of time and space, during which they discuss the possibility of time travel.
Callum
Reflecting on the other medeians’ usefulness in serving his interests, Callum decides to talk with Tristan during one of their lectures. He proposes an alliance, arguing that Tristan does not see him as a threat and therefore will not want to eliminate him. Tristan agrees to work together.
Nico
Gideon’s mermaid mother Eilif suddenly appears in Nico’s bathroom. She wants to find her son, who is protected by Nico’s wards, to send him on a job. She is a volatile, manipulative criminal and has used Gideon to steal from people’s dreams in the past, which is why Nico has been keeping him hidden. Eilif tries to convince Nico to let her see Gideon, but he refuses to help her. Later that night, Nico meets Gideon in his dreams to warn him that his mother is looking for him, and Gideon realizes that Nico has been magically protecting him without his knowledge.
Reina
Reina reflects on her first few months at the Society, where she has had access to all the rare texts she wants and has decided that she wants this life. She meets Aiya Sata, a member of the Society, in the reading room, and has an odd conversation. Aiya seems surprised to learn that Dalton, who was in the same initiation class as her, has stayed as a researcher because she believed he would be the first to leave. Reina is perplexed by Aiya’s reaction but learns that Dalton’s specialty is animation, or the ability to create lifelike illusions. Aiya also tells Reina about Atlas, who was her and Dalton’s guide before he was a Caretaker, and she’s again surprised to learn that Atlas is so involved given his other responsibilities. When Reina finally asks if the elimination process was difficult, Aiya claims that it was painful but worth it. After their conversation, Reina feels like “she had just had a very strange interaction, though she couldn’t quite explain why” (145). On a later day, a fern plant alerts her to trouble, and Reina surmises through observation that Parisa wants something from Dalton, but she cannot understand the telepath’s motivations.
Parisa
Parisa sets out to seduce Dalton and meets him in the reading room, where they discuss their mutual attraction. But Dalton says that she will not gain anything from him. During their conversation, Parisa explains that on the night of the attack, Callum killed one of the medeians simply by convincing her to kill herself. She confesses to Dalton that the act unsettled her, but incidentally realizes that Dalton is hiding something from her. Eventually, she succeeds in manipulating him into having sex with her and, while his telepathic defenses are down, he reveals to her that the others will have to “kill her to keep themselves alive” (155), implying that the elimination process is quite literal.
Chapter 4 Analysis
The candidates begin to use more of the space they have been offered at the house—physically, socially, and emotionally—and to test its boundaries. Each of them comes to a different realization about what the opportunity to be initiated into the Alexandrian Society means to them, which prompts them to make decisions about the sacrifices and moral dilemmas they will be facing.
In the first section, Libby is starting to distance herself from Ezra. A key detail in her characterization is that she has been testing the sentient house’s ability to provide the archived books she requests. This draws a significant parallel between Libby’s development, as the house is testing her limits as a medeian, and the physical space around her, with which she can also interact as a physicist. Reina, similarly, has decided that she wants to keep her access to the archives, and is content to play Atlas’s game in return. Her motivations may be less altruistic, but her self-interest is driven by her desire to be left alone rather than by cruelty (as opposed to Callum).
The six medeians are ready to take up their place at the Society until the revelation about the elimination process forces them to reevaluate the moral compromises they are willing to make. Parisa is the first medeian who uncovers the truth about it when she pulls it out of Dalton’s mind at the very end of the chapter:
She reached up, clawing a hand around his jaw. ‘Who’s going to kill me?’ [...]
‘Everyone,’ he choked aloud, and then she understood it.
They will have to kill you to keep themselves alive (154-55).
Libby and Nico’s wormhole also echoes the chapter title as they have been experimenting with matter to bend space. Libby thinks that “if there could be larger power sources in the future [...] then someone could easily create the same effect in space, in time … in space-time!” (118). Their foray into space already sets up their later experiments with time. The other candidates are equally elated about the success of the wormhole (although they feel slightly threatened by Libby and Nico’s power), except for Callum, who is nonplussed. He deems the experiment pointless and “terrifically impractical” (129). He is more interested in people’s actions—or, rather, their motivations—and figuring out how to exploit them. Callum’s alliance with Tristan is purely strategic, as shown by his detailed explanation of the flaws he sees in the others. However, although he can feel their emotions, Callum’s interpretations are fairly clinical and foreshadow that some of the characters may eventually contradict his conclusions. When he claims that Libby is “so unthreatening as to be a nonfactor” (134), for instance, he is underestimating her (as the reader, who has access to Libby’s point of view, can deduce). By depicting Callum’s arrogance and his belief that his opponents are predictable, the narrator sets up the groundwork for a plot twist.
Nico does not develop much in this chapter, but he meets with Gideon’s mermaid mother Eilif for the first time in the story. As a magical creature, she can travel through realms, which is why she can circumvent the house’s wards. This foreshadows her role in helping Ezra abduct Libby in the last chapter, as well as highlighting the flaws in the Society’s defenses, which may be exploited by its enemies. Nico’s attempt to fix the wards in Chapter 5 seems to indicate that the house is safe again at that point, but this is only misdirection since Ezra will use time, rather than space, to cross its boundaries. Nico’s section of this chapter illustrates the different types of spaces in the story—physical space, magical realms, and dreams—which suggests the characters can interact with more than their direct surroundings and foreshadows the significance of other dimensions in the rest of the book.
Related Titles
By Olivie Blake
