The Atlas Complex

Nico is one of the novel's primary protagonists. He attended the New York University of Magical Arts along with Libby and is also one of the two physicists in the group. He is described as charismatic and charming but also arrogant and immature. He comes from a privileged background, a point of conflict between himself and his roommate-turned-love interest, Gideon. After Libby’s character transformation, Nico takes her prior place as the group’s moral center. Tristan notes, “If someone had asked Tristan before he walked into that room to choose one person to carry the weight of the world, he would have said Nico de Varona […] He would have said that Nico de Varona was the only one who could save anyone” (360).

Nico spends much of the narrative emotionally trapped between Libby and Gideon. The book portrays the relationship between Libby and Nico as one of inevitability. Their powers are connected, and it is implied that both are in each other’s lives in every possible universe. Nico says, “It’s hard to imagine that there’s a world where either of us exists alone” (274). Meanwhile, his relationship with Gideon is a variable to Libby’s constant, making it special due to its rarity. He chooses his relationship with Gideon over Libby, which she is hurt by. When the experiment fails, she decides to let him die. Afterward, he appears in Gideon’s dreams, and it is unclear if this is a projection by Gideon or a copy created by the archives.

Tristan is the son of a London crime boss, Adrian Caine. Adrian was abusive toward Tristan, and he first tried to escape through his work for James Wessex and engagement to his daughter, Eden, and then through joining the Society. In the previous book, he decided to stay at the archives after the others left due to his father’s repeated attempts on his life. Once Libby returns, Tristan begins a relationship with her. However, their relationship faces strain from her continued connection to Nico. He also spends much of the novel having sexually charged text conversations with Callum about how each wants to kill the other.

After Libby sabotages the experiment, Tristan is forced to face his role in what happened. They argue, and he breaks up with her. The moment when he leaves the manor house, his father kidnaps him. His story ends with him confronting the two men who have had the most devastating effects on his life: his father and James. Adrian tries to blackmail Tristan into abandoning the Society and returning to work for him because James is also hunting him. Tristan uses his powers to jump between different scenarios of possible futures before he refuses and shoots Adrian. He then goes to the Wessex Corporation’s headquarters to confront James and, using his reality-warping abilities, convinces him to call off all the attacks on the Society.

Parisa is a telepath and is noted for her exceptional beauty. Her looks tend to draw attention wherever she goes, which she is constantly aware of due to her ability. She uses her looks, as well as sex, to manipulate people to her advantage. Like Atlas, her telepathy and her history have left her with a jaded view of the world. Her character arc is tied to her search for meaning in her life, which led her to leave the Society with Dalton to create a new world in the prior book.

In The Atlas Complex, all of her prior relationships are broken down, forcing her to look closer at herself. The Forum kills her husband, Nasser. While her relationship with him was complicated, she still grieves, especially for the fact that she never made him understand the extent of the damage he did to her. After Dalton demonstrates his powers and she realizes what he is willing to do to get answers, she runs away. She hunts for answers as to what is happening with Atlas and discovers that the man was killed by Libby months prior, which means that he will never fulfill his promise to come after her. In the end, she decides that she’s tired of being rootless and making the same selfish decisions, so she stays at the manor house to learn how to live. When Reina arrives, also distraught over her loss of meaning, Parisa offers to stay with her.

Reina is one of the six and a naturalist. While she can communicate with plants, she can also unwittingly share her energy with anything natural, including people. Her part in Atlas’s plan was to serve as a sort of battery for the experiment. Unlike the other characters, she has no interest in forming relationships with others; while it is never stated outright in the books, she has been confirmed by the author to be asexual and aromantic. Rather than focusing on others, her goals are the most important thing in her life. She grew up avoiding her power and studying mythology to escape. This focus on mythology led her to believe that medeians are the new gods of the world. At the end of The Atlas Paradox, she decided to become a god and left the Society with Callum. They spend most of The Atlas Complex attempting to manipulate world politics by using her energy to boost his empathic abilities. However, this is a losing battle. As Callum warned her, the world is too complicated for her to permanently change, and the American congressman she views as her “chosen one” to fix the world is assassinated. In the aftermath of her failure, she decides to go back to the Society. She returns to the manor house, where she meets back up with Parisa. The two of them stay at the house together to heal.

Callum is a South African empath from the wealthy Nova family, owners of a media company called the Nova Corporation. He is portrayed as selfish and nihilistic and was meant to be the victim of the archives’ ritual until Ezra kidnapped Libby in The Atlas Six. At the end of The Atlas Paradox, he left to help Reina. However, he is skeptical of her plans and outright tells her that her idea to literally change the minds of the world isn’t possible. He also agreed to kill Tristan for the Caine family.

Callum spends much of The Atlas Complex being in denial. He insists that he’s going to kill Tristan, something that the rest of the characters know to be a lie but that he only realizes for himself at the end of the book. He also realizes that his family, despite the work he has done for them, no longer sees him as being of value. His arc concludes with him realizing that he chooses Tristan, even if Tristan will never choose him, and goes to rescue him from the Caines, only to be shot in the head. While Callum appears to be dead after this point, Olivie Blake has subsequently commented that he survived to the end of the series. How he does so is never stated but may be the result of Tristan’s newfound reality-warping abilities. The only hint of Callum’s presence comes from James Wessex seeing someone tampering with his security cameras, noting “a glimpse of platinum blond [winking] before the lens” (457). This glimpse is the last hint of him in the novel.

Gideon is Nico’s former roommate and, as of the end of The Atlas Paradox, his love interest. He is kind and caring toward the people close to him, but he is also aware of the world’s harshness due to his circumstances. Gideon is the son of Eilif, a mermaid, and an unknown satyr. His heritage gives him power over dreams: He can walk through dream realms and manipulate them. For example, near the novel’s end, he creates items and a monster to trap Dalton and the people sent to attack the Society by James Wessex. However, his heritage means that his tether to reality is weak, and he has narcoleptic symptoms. When Eilif dies at the novel’s beginning, he takes on her debts, and James is a direct threat to him until Tristan deals with him during the book’s conclusion.

Gideon is the only major protagonist in the novel who is not one of the Society initiates. He is “hired” by the Society as an archivist; they do so to keep an eye on him because he is not meant to know about the Society, though Nico revealed it to him. It is Nico’s job to keep Gideon in the waking world. After Nico’s death, there is nothing left to keep Gideon awake. He debates using cocaine as a way to stave off sleep but decides not to and ends the book functionally trapped in the dream realms. There, he stays with a version of Nico who may or may not be real.

Atlas was the former Caretaker of the Alexandrian Society and is a primary antagonist in The Atlas Complex despite only being present in the novel through flashbacks. He was the product of an affair between a medeian professor and one of his students. After she was rejected, his mother’s mental health deteriorated, and he grew up having to take care of her. The injustice of their situation gave Atlas a jaded view of the world and a desire to fix everything. He also used his telepathic abilities to manipulate those around him. He was an initiate of the Society in the same cohort as Ezra Fowler. The two of them devised a plan to remake the Society, which they saw as too flawed to continue in its current state. He recruited the six initiates in The Atlas Six as part of this plan. After Ezra’s betrayal, they sought to destroy each other. Atlas’s plan at this point, after he killed Ezra, was to perform the experiment to open the doors to the multiverse and “save” the world from his mistakes. The first of his mistakes was the fact that, because they merely faked Ezra’s death and none of the cohort was actually killed, the cohort died off one by one. While his presence looms over the whole of The Atlas Complex, and many of the chapters are told from his perspective, it is revealed later in the novel that he has been dead the entire time, as Libby killed him only minutes after she killed Ezra at the end of the prior book.