“Brother,” Rico leans against the counter, “you’re sure articulate for a user.”
“This building—what is its function?”
He folds his arms. “You got someplace else you ought to be and I got a sale to survive.”
“Is it currently under government production? Where are the labor areas?”
“You Canadian?”
“For the love of the Imperium,” Atlas’s breathing accelerates, “please express to me that Curative Estates, Administrative Citadels, and all similar empirically-run houses are many, many kilometers away from this pit’s burg.”
“ICE’ll bag you if you keep talking like that.” Rico gestures to the line of walkers behind Atlas. “I got work and you got to go.”
“When does the working shift end?”
“I don’t swing that way, dude.”
“What are—”
Rico holds up his hand. “You got cash? You like Animal Collective? Buy some vinyl or get out of my region.”
“Cash—currency.” Atlas recalls his education lessons on the evils of commerce. “That is what’s used for trade, correct?”
“Get out of my shop, Canadian.”
“This is your shop then? It’s not owned by the empire or this ‘collective’ you call animal?” Atlas’s eyes widen. “Your society’s collective is not brutal?”
“This ain’t Cuba, man,” Rico says. “No collective, no empire, no more questions.”
“Am I,” Atlas presses his hands into the counter, leans forward, and clenches his jaw, “on Earth?”
“If I tell you, will you leave?”
Atlas nods.
Rico angles toward him and lowers his tone. “Yes, Mr. Spock.”
Atlas’s lungs freeze. Eyes fallen, he watches each of carpet’s knots blend into a mass as he drags himself to the exit. He bumps into the door on his way out. He doesn’t acknowledge this until he’s twenty meters past the store and down the street.
Clouds brew an inky froth, sagging sky in iron tufts, laying a cloak of shadow, but Atlas keeps his eyes on the receding sidewalk. A cotton quiet wraps his pulse thunderous. His forehead, palms, nape moisten under some vibrant thickness wafting the scent of soil. He doesn’t glance at another walker. He wanders onward, turning corners and following building walls for longer than, what feels like, an entire labor cycle.
Drool painting his mouth’s corner, he darts his eyes with his thoughts with the bobbing of his shoulders and forgets he walks. He thinks of everything and nothing and of the internal buds of branches of nets of all things seen, heard, felt since infancy to the possible beyond death. His mind expands against his skull, too tight for the influx of questions. It throbs. He doesn’t notice.
Atlas begins to add many words to his first twelve. His shoe rasps something.
He looks. A garbage bin, a few shards of broken glass, and a cardboard sheet are strewn across jagged pavement before him. It’s an alley, a smaller, darker one than the alley he fell into. He slows and slumps against the nearest wall. His back slides down its concrete and he sits, bending his knees into his chest, exhaling a breath louder than the farther streets and people and noises. He runs his fingers over the ground. Picks up a glass shard and turns it in hand. It’s sharp.
He sweeps his hand over his head. Atlas tugs a lock of his hair into view: dark brown, shaggy, thick. He remembers—his Sideran citizen appearance common as the common, too reminding, too old.
Atlas lifts the slice of glass to his head and begins sawing through his hair. He cuts around his ears, above his neck, toward his forehead, brushing strands off his legs as he goes. He finishes with the last section and tosses the glass to the other side of the alley. He fingers through the hair left.
It’s uneven, choppy, and sticks straight up, every piece in a different direction, every fragment a different length. It wars with itself. Atlas’s eyes sink to the nest of cuttings across his lap and his stomach plummets. What has he done?
As he pinches apart a brunette lock, something small taps the back of his hand. Brows tense, he touches the glimmer on his knuckles and it smears. Atlas lifts his head to purple clouds boiling, amassing sky’s roof to heave upon towers’ needles and stain-streaked eaves. He flinches each time a new drop lands on his face. Rain. A phenomenon he’s only heard about. But the darkness is what stiffens his spine and crawls his skin. He’s never seen shade as dark, as stretching as this.
The rain pours down a clapping cacophony and soaks Atlas’s tunic, pants, and flattens, impossibly, his hair. Shivering, he grasps his legs and nestles into his corner between the wall and sidewalk. Sky dims and dims beyond the umbra of cloud cover. He awaits its blackest: night, a concept austere education shift instructors describe with fear in their eyes. Night: one of Earth’s many changes.
He asked for this. Atlas received his prize and escaped to another dimension. He asked for this.
Burying his head in his arms, he replays the image of his choice to step into the coin’s portal and then the other not acted upon—the choice to step backward, to Sidera’s cliff, and fall the direction to oblivion.
He closes his eyes. Concrete closes around his spine curled over gut’s boulder and haze droops down and Earth doesn’t feel like the dimension of freedom.
Pushing his forehead into his arms, Atlas hunches and, through his squeezed eyelids, looks to Sidera’s southern horizon until the rain on his neck, on his newly exposed ears numbs his thoughts.
II
Dawning
There’s an uninhabited garden in Sidera, the golden sky dimension. One that stretches for a hundred kilometers southeast of Taurus, trees a rarity but abundant in flowers unnamed. Atlas there flies. His power surges through blood as a river of fire scorching veins to cold crystal, while sun, bolted into sky sixty degrees above the eastern horizon, spills light down his knuckles and drips gold through his fingers.
Atlas leaps from area to area, isle to isle, his palms facing ground; each releases a tornado harmonized with its partner: two merging cones that propel him upward and forward. He touches down only to glide another dozen meters. Chills up Atlas’s spine, wind through his sleeves, the bronze land beneath feet blurs with flowers bloomed and blonded till landscape’s rainbow pastels stroke out all detail.
He’s found himself in this place twice in his life. Once when the watchmen were injecting stimulants in the guardhouse, once when a guard’s dozing delayed the shift change, he had slipped out the resthouse’s purge-side exit and headed for the constellation walls.
Step as if you hadn’t. Breathe as if it’s breeze. Lock inside the earthquake of your pulse.
Glide across the courtyard and behind the labor mill, brushing your hands along its crumbling brick. Crawl under the slanted flue and head for the constellation wall’s first ledge three centimeters wide. Reach for the second. Pull your body up and above the first, moving quickly so its sun-soaked black metal doesn’t blister an idle finger. Turn your foot when you step on the ledge until your other can too. Repeat with the remaining forty-nine ledges, balance yourself at the top, and then prepare for the more difficult part: descending.
Though Sideran full cycles separated his successful journeys over the constellation fences—a more accurate moniker than walls—his smile, the only time it showed, had stolen memories of all cycles spent before. He’d hit the ground and run. Without weight of scrutiny.
Until his heart would flutter itself shriveled and spin his mind and prickle his spine, until he would meet the first fissure in the land, the fifth minute of his fun, and turn back.
How Atlas runs here now, in Sidera’s gardens, he has no idea. His smile shows. And falls. He eases his power’s current and stops, skidding, when he hears some deafening noise.
A horn. His eardrums shatter.
Seconds, minutes—hours, perhaps, of groaning and blaring and Atlas staggers. He looks down. The ground opens up, bares its serrated teeth, and swallows him. He plummets through its gaping hole, his stomach suspending
, lungs hanging on to their last gasp, eyes cemented open. He falls until he’s through the land and Sidera’s underbelly replaces the sky upward. Its golden rocks shrink, fade into blue in his acceleration. Clawing at nothing, he screams but the whir past his ears screams louder, yelling one echoed, soul-piercing sentence: this is how he—
Atlas wakes panting. He springs into a seated position, digs his fingers into his legs, and coaxes a slower breath. His forehead crumples. He hasn’t remembered a dream since he can remember.
A distant, grating something—a dehydrated screech blares in long, migrating increments. He angles an ear. It must be some kind of walker machinery: an enormous vehicle and its horn.
And it creeps, bellowing, out of his trance. Reality creeps after. His mind rushes over its newest images of the hours before sleep and struggles to embed them as history. His dream blurs with his fogged vision with his near memory with instinct of tugging on labor gloves to work Taurus’s iron presses moments after waking; and a lurch in the gut tells him the hardness beneath his legs, the chill on his face, must in the air, horn’s echo through alleys, blackness cloaking his shoulders are wrong. Out of place, like a joint out of socket that stabs at its numbness the more it fidgets, the more he blinks. He rubs his eyes till confusion ebbs and sight draws shape from darkness.
Something taps Atlas’s neck. Some distantly familiar prod that streaks lingering cold on his skin after it bends course, slides off, and sinks into concrete. He cringes. And realizes, with a shudder, the same coldness wets his shoulders and shins. He looks up at an overhanging light; burnt out, the sloped sconce drips water every few seconds, concentrating clouds’ deposit into an incessant dribble for his crown. The tower at his back sheltered him from rain’s majority, but windblown sprays found his sides and lucky long-fallers found his extremities.
It’s dismally dark. Dark without clouds. Sky no longer weeps but its funereal face remains, a black veil of sadness and dread Atlas’s never seen on his normally sunny acquaintance. He can’t recall how many earthly hours his Sideran textbooks told him night lasts—six? Seven? He yanks his damp collar further up his neck and grasps his arms. Seventy?
His eyes widen. Atlas’s hand shoots back to his neck and inches upward, finding his hair. His finger brushes the more rebellious strands first.
He groans.
Grinding his teeth, he rediscovers the pain in his legs as he throws himself onto his feet. He stumbles forward, stopping only after he scuffs a few glass shards and hits the alley’s opposite wall. He pushes off it and exhales. Drags his hands down his face.
There’s one thing he can do today: what he did yesterday. His hair and uniform might dry while walking.
Atlas stretches and winces as he ambles on pinpricked legs, out the alley’s opening and around the corner. He glances up and down a much wider alley. It’s empty, quiet; streetlights glint road’s dampness and pull limp shadows between buildings and behind signs. Asphalt underfoot, he wobbles across the road, chasing the flicker of a dying streetlamp.
It dies. Darkness slows his shaking steps and takes his path.
Then two radiant beams cut through it. Atlas flinches and jolts toward them. The rays intensify, blind him, consume his vision, his body. A squeal, much higher pitched than his waking horn, gushes with the light and crescendos metallic balloons through his ears. Noise and glare speed faster than tower-top gusts toward his front. He lifts his hands—
An eruption of white lined in layers of multicolored webs flashes under Atlas’s closed eyelids. He’s hurled off his feet. Agony floods his body, his back hitting asphalt, lungs collapsing as black returns. The squealing ends; a low purr takes its place.
“Crap, crap, oh crap. Oh great heapy crap. This is not good.”
The slam of a door and a female voice. Footsteps.
“Hey, are you all right?” A hand touches his shoulder and a gasp follows. “No, no, no. This is not good.”
Atlas pries his eyelids.
The female paces back and forth, gripping her hair, releasing it, gripping it again, and then spreads her hands before herself and glares between them. She inhales a quivering breath. “I—I need to call an ambulance. That’s what I need to do, right? Yes—yeah, that’s what I’ll do.”
Atlas rolls onto his side and presses his hands into ground.
“9-1-1, right?” The walker scoffs. “They couldn’t have possibly changed the number and forgot to email me about it or anything.” Her pacing and breathing stop. “Oh, please no.”
Lugging in his legs, Atlas locks his jaw and internalizes a groan. He stands. Cringes. He touches his forehead; it’s wet, wetter than his storm-weathered clothing, though the cut—he traces it—stretches no longer than a few centimeters and no wider than a few millimeters.
“You’re standing?” The female walker glimpses Atlas and clasps together her hands. She throws them into the air. “Dear Lord, thank you for watching over this man—”
Atlas swivels around. He limps in the direction he came. The woman races after him and, sliding an arm under his shoulder, pulls him back toward her car, a silver sedan.
“No way. Uh-uh.” She guides him to the passenger door. “You’re not going anywhere. I’m taking you to the hospital.”
Atlas’s brows cinch. Elbowing open the door, the walker helps him sit. Then jogs around the vehicle, its beams blinking closer on her passing, climbs into the seat next to him, and grips the hoop before her. She presses a pedal under her foot. Atlas darts his eyes to every door, window, and button, and grows very concerned when the vehicle begins to move. It zooms down the street.
Watching the road, the walker shakes her head. “I am so, so, so sorry. I’ve never hit anything in my life. I came around the corner and there wasn’t any traffic and I was trying to text my dad and you were in the dark and—and I’m the worst human being. Didn’t see anything. I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to—” She glances at him. “Where do you want me to take you? Do you need to call someone? What’s your name?”
Atlas stares.
“Sorry.” She sucks her whisper into her cheeks and shakes her head twice more, eyes glued forward. She exhales louder. “What’s your name?”
Without moving the sorer of his muscles, he picks at a thread on his pants. “Atlas.”
“Okay, A-Atlas,” sputters her up-tone. “Where do you want me to take you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re probably freezing.” She revolves a dial on her control panel. “Do you have family? Do you want me to take you home?”
Family, home. He doesn’t recognize those words. Atlas looks at the rug under his feet and curves his fingers around his knees, hot, throbbing. All chills down his scalp and back retract to raw heat, the kind that closes the walls around him and shortens his breaths.
“You poor soul.” She frowns. “Don’t even have family. Hospital it is.”
Atlas’s heart thumps accelerate. “I don’t wish to go anywhere.”
The woman bites the inside of her lip and scans the street. Atlas studies her. The furrows scored into her inner brow ages her youth. She has a soft jaw and smiling cheeks. Amber highlights, honey undertones, her hair tangles its wave off her shoulders the more she flips her head after shapes in the dark.
“You could have something broken and—” She flourishes a hand at the windshield. “And you’re bleeding. You need to see a doctor.”
The female looks at Atlas. She looks at the road. Then at Atlas.
“Your forehead—” She points.
Lifting his hand to it, Atlas runs a finger along his minute-old gash. It’s healed over, a slim scab, close to a scar, left in its place.
“At least,” the walker blinks, “I thought you were leebing—”
“I heal quickly,” Atlas says.
“Oh, good. Great.” Voice trembling, she whispers, “That’s great.”
Atlas angles to his side window. Sky brightens by the semi-shade, and his sigh of relief curbs his palpitations. He wat
ches asphalt blur and buildings glint cloud’s cotton scatter. Green and red and yellow-white lights morph the vehicle’s path into the vortex he fell through an earthly day ago. Nausea soon swims up his throat, nausea tight and painful, certain to expel nothing but a string of bitter saliva, as discovered when he was seven full cycles old and accidentally swallowed a pratum gnat. Jaw rigid, he leans onto the edge of his seat to pin his eyes to objects slower: the rattle of the vehicle frame, the blinking of dawn between structures, his wide eyes mirrored in the window so crystal, clean, a world of images his imagination’s never skimmed. He forgets his nausea.
The young walker presses her lips thin. “I should stop by my apartment to check the address. There’s a hospital on the other side of Monroeville. It will be a few minutes. Just relax.” Her mouth’s corner lifts and eyes hop to his, the grooves between her brows curling upward.
Atlas clears his throat. “I am healthy, I assure you. I would rather not go anywhere but,” he peeks out his window, “here.”
“Oh, no.” She glares through the windshield. “I’m a kidnapper. I totally just kidnapped you. I took you and you’re hurt and you didn’t want to go with me specifically because you knew I would be this much of a sadistic abductor who never even told you her name.”
“No—”
“I never told you my name.” The female grimaces. “I’m like one of those mentally unstable types who was raised in a broken home and swears vengeance against her father and enacts it on innocent strangers. I am a serial killer. Not really, though—I’m not! Heh. I’m a secretary, see.”
She taps the slab of plastic hanging from a mirror between her and him. Atlas squints at it; but a road bump jostles, revolves its image and text from view.
The walker’s hand returns to the hoop. Frown taut, she glances right. “My name’s Gene. With a ‘G,’ not a ‘J.’ I know. I have an old man’s name. Don’t laugh.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 2
