Atlas

by Nicholas Gagnier

  There are few good courses of action. With the Council dead, Atlas at the mercy of Ziz and a blond witch holding our collective fate in her hands, it could well be lost.

  Eventually, Tim shuffles down the cell, taking a seat beside me. His hair is out of place. The white clothing worn since his trial is the most disheveled I have seen him in three decades. Sitting together, backs against the bars, our muffled conversation is only witnessed by the hoarse Light from Harper’s locket.

  “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I’m sorry for getting you into this.”

  I snort, too exhausted for hindsight’s bullshit. Tears at the precipice are foreign, borne more of emotional collapse than any affinity for having them.

  “Please. Even I know that trial was a sham. Whatever comes next is a mockery.”

  “That’s only scratching the surface. Hannah …”

  “Tim. Nobody could have seen that coming — your wife being wrapped up in this was an unforeseen outcome to every person in Atlas. Everyone,” I finish on downturned lips, “except Stephen. He knew. The entire fucking time! And I was so stupid, to let him fool me again—”

  “How could you have known, Ro?”

  I scoff.

  “How could I have known? How could I have not, Tim? The man kidnapped and sold children! He burned me alive! What in my right fucking mind made me think he had changed?”

  Tim shakes his head, nothing to offer. I fall into self-aggrandizing spirals — eyes on the woman sitting opposite us, but not really looking at her head catatonically pointed at the floor.

  All I see is Stephen Hardwick.

  Stop it, Ramona.

  I need a plan. We can’t just sit here, waiting for the world to end. I use the bars to pull myself to balance. Tim casts me an inquisitive look, but sitting here, beating myself up over Hardwick won’t win Atlas back from that witch.

  “Get up.”

  The woman doesn’t respond to my command at first, forcing me to repeat it. On its second, more confident iteration, Harper’s head lifts. The hair strewn over her face falls to the side.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You too, Tim,” I say, glancing back at him. “You two have some big problem between you— fine! Kill each other when this is over, then. But right now, we need a truce. We need co-existence, because his wife is about to wipe us off the face of Atlas! So both of you, get up right now!”

  Tim obeys. Unlike his uniform as Death — a black blazer that has hints of blue in low light, a white shirt and matching silk vest between them which never creases for anything— his prison whites are dirty and stained at the knees, immaculate nails blackened and grown. His skin is a pale gray, like old people who have been alive too long.

  Or the recently dead.

  Stop it, Ramona.

  Harper, on the other hand, does not obey. Like a slouching high schooler, her spirit is not one of cooperation.

  “No.”

  Unbelievable.

  “Why?” I counter.

  The Phoenix scoffs.

  “Why? Oh, let me see. You want us to kiss and make-up, when you have no idea what he’s responsible for—

  “I know exactly what he’s responsible for! He’s Death, for fuck’s sake! What, do you expect him to go around giving out candy? Of course he’s hurt a lot of people, you included —and, from what I know of you Harper Whitaker, you were probably once someone who believed in doing the right thing. That’s what I am trying to do here! So get over yourself!”

  Harper chews her words. Her hands can only move so far apart, and she uses them to join our level, delivering her death stare.

  “Bitch,” she says, “you have no idea how close I came to killing you. In your hospital bed? If Tim didn’t stop me, I would have fucking succeeded.”

  I disregard the revelation, glancing back at the wall her light shines onto. It brightens with her anger, making the golden object visible. It is Atlas — a dot near its northernmost tip pinpoints the destroyed Cathedral as its marker.

  A map; maybe something that can help us.

  “Your locket.”

  “What?” Harper asks.

  “Look,” I say, pointing to the wall. Its light swims and wavers as her head cocks to examine it. Tim notices it too. “It’s trying to tell us something.”

  The golden dot at the northern tip of the Cathedral district where the Maesters once lived, destroyed by a dragon Hannah let loose and timed to Seraphina’s outburst earns an eye roll from the Phoenix, and she paces past Tim, shaking her head.

  “What is that?” Tim asks.

  Not so all-knowing now, are you, Death?

  “An answer,” I smile. “Once we spring from here, that’s where I’m going—”

  Harper returns from where she paced past Tim — and throws her binds over his head. It finds his jugular, and Harper pulls the chains back. Dragging him to his knees as she did to the Brother in the Arena, Tim gasps for breath. The Phoenix has the element of surprise, and it takes too long for my shock to abate.

  “What the fuck around you doing?”

  “C’mon,” Harper grimaces, pulling the chain tighter around Death’s bulging neck. His eyes shudder and his hands claw outward, shattering any faith I had in his immortality. “You don’t really believe he can die, do you? He’s Death. He’s not giving out candy, right?”

  Tim’s gagging pulls me back from the weaponization of my own words. His hands reach for me, face reflecting blue and purple shades I would have never expected of the man who calls himself Death, genuinely distressing my darkest reaches.

  “Let go of him!”

  The voice from my mouth is dragged down by failure and the snapping beams of my tolerance for death and destruction. But it is too late — Tim’s final breaths evaporate. The rest of him breaks away in the same cloud-like form he showed me in the Shroud, black flakes drifting up to nothing until all of him is gone.

  Harper’s locket flickers. Its allocated Light dies with the rest of Tim’s dissolution, and the final rod holding up my frail state is gone.

  After all, the only thing I know is darkness.

  The only difference now is I’m terrified of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Many of my earliest memories have nothing to do with the man who calls himself Death. Before he became a constant presence in my life, it was never directionless, but purpose seemed to wander anyway. My relationships were few and far between. Maya was the only constant force in my life. She got more and more sick, and I became less and less convinced anything about my introverted love life would change.

  Everything before that is a blur, from a time that my petty transactions amongst the living amounted to nothing important — only to me. The first boy I kissed. The day I graduated from high school. The day Maya collapsed, and we learned she had emphysema — all of these moments had nothing to do with Tim. I chalked up the elusive visitor to childhood loneliness, an imaginary friend. I grew up, and he was soon forgotten.

  Watching him dissolve into nothing, as Harper pulled at the chain over his jugular, and the exertion against his Adam’s apple bulged the veins in his face and his panicked hands clawed for me to help him, all I could manage was a half-hearted plea.

  Now he is gone, and I am back in my corner, trying to console my trembling hands. The rabbit hole in my memory is rife with landmines — recollections of Tim in my young life intercut with all the times I thought he might never return.

  Harper is also back in her corner, no more comforted for her actions. Her Light returned after a few moments, but she offered nothing more. All I could do was glare as inner clockwork rotated snippets between its gears.

  I blamed you when your interference in a natural order resulted in the world going to shit, and my life going to shit with it! I blamed you when you weren’t just straight with me, and had to play your stupid, minutiative games, when you could have just been honest!

  After a while, though — and short of trying to kill her — it was easi
er to sink back into self-pity.

  You were the best of us, Knox.

  I don’t know if Tim gave Harper the slip somehow. I wouldn’t put it past him. She’s resigned to these events and slowly, I find myself treading in the same pessimistic direction.

  Everything I had left to fight for is gone. Gonna go back in time and change that, too? Be my guest. I wouldn’t defend your honor if it reversed everything!

  That map from her locket is the key. Despite every indication I should lie down and die, that necklace is imbued with Light. It knows something. If we ever escape from this wretched hole in the ground, that is my only lead. Light willing, I can wrangle the woman into helping me defend Atlas, trial or no trial.

  Then there’s the matter of Tim’s wife. If the man who calls himself Death still lurks nearby — and I have every reason to suspect he does — I wonder where he will draw the line between her deeds and her safety. If he intervenes to save her, things could get ugly.

  “He’s not dead, you know.”

  As if she could hear my whirring panic, Harper’s low voice pulls me back from self-torment and fleeting visuals.

  “What?”

  The Phoenix chuckles, jangling the chain links between her spread legs. Her hair is matted and her stare blank, the words from her lips as empty.

  “It would take a lot more than an angry lesbian and some strangulation to be rid of him. Don’t get me wrong,” Harper muses, hazel eyes drifting away from me, out the bars. “I won’t be any happier to see him.”

  “Awfully assumptive to assume that was reversible.”

  “Maybe. But when you get rid of one screw-up called Death, you know how hard it will be to escape another.”

  Her confidence brings some relief — my lips lift on one corner, and I nod in understanding.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him to choose you,” I reply. “From what he told me, things ended badly between you.”

  Harper scoffs.

  “Badly is an understatement. So much happens in this fucked-up universe that I can’t rightly explain. I know he’s not responsible for all of it. But...what you two did made my personal life kind of difficult for a while.

  “Maybe you’ve come to terms with what that man is,” she continues. “He is so different from the Tim Hawkins I first met, I don’t know if I’ll ever see that man again. It’s my fault he became Death in the first place — if I hadn’t been so selfish, wanting to go home to Em, it would have been me.... it should have been me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  And so Harper tells me the final piece of the story I haven’t heard — how her mother Olivia impersonated Hannah’s ghost, pulling him into Aumothera to defeat Hale; how he almost lost his mind without the apparition he had become used to. And finally, given the ultimatum that one of them had to take Hale’s place to keep him from returning, Harper allowed Tim to volunteer. It completed what had been stolen from him, but emptied Tim of his humanity.

  Our conversation is cut short by a loud banging sound and screams from above as objects are thrown into walls and ceilings. Garbled commands survive the trip between levels as nonsense, followed by a shriek before everything falls silent upstairs.

  The cellar door opens, pouring a wide berth of Light into the dark chamber. Footsteps follow it down the ladder. It takes me a second to recognize the gleaming loafers as they descend the rungs. The figure descends, and Harper rolls her eyes as I lapse into a tearful smile.

  The man who calls himself Death is alive and well. His dirty prison whites are gone, replaced with the black blazer and matching silk vest. Not a hair on his head is out of place. His hand wields the key to our freedom, a silver little thing with jagged edges.

  “Thought I’d make myself useful while our friend settled down,” he says, sliding the key in the lock. It turns, jangles and gives, collapsing the tumbler and opening the cell. “Miss me?”

  I rush out of the cell door and hug him, taking him aback with the sudden gesture.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” I say.

  We separate — the awkward patting on my back tells me to cut it short — as Harper lifts herself from the floor, approaching us at the open cell.

  “What did I tell you? Good as new,” she snipes. Casting only a glare at Tim, the Phoenix pushes between us, wasting no time in climbing the ladder that leads up to the light source. There isn’t so much as thanks in passing — part of her was ready to rot here, but with no plans to stick around, Tim and I are left alone.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  I scoff.

  “All things aside, I’m okay. Seeing you strangled, though—”

  “Must have been unnerving. It was not my intention to scare you. Giving her the chance to exert some aggression seemed better than fighting her, and potentially hurting you in the process. Not to mention her girlfriend’s death has put her in a worse mood than usual.”

  “See, I thought she was in a good mood,” I joke, but the humor slides off quickly. “Tim, that projection from her locket. I’m going to see what it leads to.”

  The man who calls himself Death responds with a raised eyebrow.

  “You really think it could help us?”

  “I don’t know. There aren’t many good options. But if that locket leads to something we can use to defend ourselves — isn’t that worth it?”

  “You’re not wrong,” Tim says. “Come on, we should get out of this cellar.”

  ***

  The temple we were escorted by Brotherhood into a cellar is nothing like it was. The painted walls are torn and tattered where bodies at their base were thrown against it. The dead are all Brotherhood— at least twenty corpses are sprawled across the room, bringing to mind our attack on the team of FBI backing Hardwick.

  It seems like a lifetime ago.

  The scope of Death’s destructive powers never ceases to leave my mouth hanging open. The bird masks are crumpled. Their robes are torn where Tim split them open like he once did against a legion of federal agents.

  “Jesus,” I say, standing just short of the cellar door and ladder we ascended from. “You’re really good at that, aren’t you?”

  Tim shrugs as he spots a speck on his breast pocket, flicking it off with his middle finger and thumb.

  “Only when I need to be. We should go — before more Brotherhood show up.”

  We step over the bodies, moving past our macabre statement of self-defence, and for a second, we may stand a fighting chance — of convincing the Phoenix, defeating Ziz and saving Atlas. As the double doors open, exiting into the Barracks’ courtyard, my eyes adjust to natural Light, and that optimism dies.

  The Phoenix is forced to her knees at the passage’s center. Her hands are still bound, hair obscuring known disgust. Hannah circles her, twirling a golden dagger in her hand, brushing close to Harper’s face before flipping it away from her.

  From the arches into the defunct Nephalim headquarters to the stone steps leading up to the Obelisk doors, the woman pulled the full strength of Ziz’s army to contain us. The Brotherhood are reinforced by at least five Behemoths circling the courtyard overhead. The groundside forces are armed with swords and crossbows, their bearers wearing the same expression as any man I’ve ever seen on the other end of a gun.

  “Didn’t think you would escape so easily, did you sweetie?” Hannah grins. “Arrogance is such a dreadful thing, isn’t it?”

  “No matter. I knew you were clever enough to weasel out of your accommodations. After conferencing with the Dark Lord, I agree it is somewhat useless to cause ourselves the headache trying to contain you. Come with me, if you would.”

  “Where?” Tim asks, breaking his silence.

  “Why,” she smiles, “to the heart of Atlas, my dear husband.”

  That locket is our only hope now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Physically speaking, the Spire is untouched by Hannah’s rebellion. The rest of Atlas is defaced as Tim and I are boxed between the
Brotherhood, but the Seat where the Council held palaver still twinkles under the constant daylight surrounding it. It may not have been ruined by its occupiers like the riots we passed on the way to it, or have the misfortune of proximity to the flaming torches tossed through the gates of God City, where turncoat Arbiters pull citizens through smoke and rising ash to Stone Mountain, freed from their moral bond as the dragons swing over districts, torching insurgents from above.

  Harper was quickly pulled a different way — now Tim and I are carted through the heart of desperate cries and sundered peace, and the white clouds rising up from the cracked cobblestone of Heaven’s central road.

  The Royal Guard that once protected the commandeered Spire have perished, either wiped out during the initial assault or numbering among the bodies scattered around it. Of those who remain, the winged helmets are crumpled, robes torched where the dragons flambeed them to death. Hannah disregards the destruction she and her friends have caused, leading the mob through the gates, now open to all of Atlas.

  The paintings that once captured my interest are unharmed, unlike those in the Barracks, but I can no longer admire them. I keep eyes straight ahead, burning a hole in Hannah’s back as she leads us into the Council’s old chamber.

  The lights are not dimmed and four of the five chairs are gone, leaving only one where gods once sat and argued. My heart hurts at the other chairs’ outlines where they were ripped from the stone floors. Hannah’s army pulls us to a stop with them — only Tim’s wife advances, climbing the shallow stairs to the spot Creation was once controlled by greater beings than her.

  It is not until she wheels around, my chest caves and her power is indisputable. Taking a seat in the lonely throne, Hannah crosses one leg over the other, settling against the stone backrest. Her tiny hands tap the chair’s massive arms, that wretched smile fully present. Our escorts move Tim and I into the circle of pillars where I became Nephalim and once theorized Seraphina was the worst that Atlas had to offer.