Atlas turns.
Tall and wide, the circular glade in which he stands opens to daylit sky, but a heavy cloud steals it; overcast weighs on the buildings, saturates each breath. Overcast of ash. Samuel tugs Atlas forward again and soot swirls around their bodies. Air’s whiter particles drift toward treetops and its darker stoop low before recycled at the scuff of a shoe. It darkens, obscures every color and shape into shadow fit for dusk, though the sun rises somewhere behind powdered lead. It tastes of remains.
The forest still surrounds them but it’s not the same. The trees are much taller, thicker, deeply pigmented, and their foliage bristles spiny extremities, coniferous pins nettling where deciduous hammocks swayed. The average spruce, cedar, and pine trees stand quadruple the height of the woods Atlas exited minutes ago. The forest walls aren’t unlike the constellation walls he well knows. Hanging smoke and all-encompassing barriers make a mockery of its yawning bowl, and he amends his previous thought: this dimension reminds him too much of his homeland.
He looks right.
This half of the forest stretches as the left’s doppelganger. The shrubs’ and leaves’ deep sage thrives only around the left hemisphere. To his right, Atlas gazes at a ghost: a mess of charred wood and cold ash, countless kilometers of sylvan skeletons disintegrating, flaking off into carbon debris to be raised and hung, settled and agitated in the irregularly repetitious cycle of foreign movement. The forest’s opening is split down its middle. A world of growth one way, an asteroid of remains the other.
He lowers his eyes. The dozens of onlooking silhouettes, some old, more young, most dressed in a shade indistinguishable from the soot, gather before him and Samuel. Atlas loses count after the first twenty that make up a fourth of the crowd.
Clutching the back of his collar, Samuel drags Atlas to his side. He lifts his chin before the crowd and says, “Listen, charming tapeworms. I need Eden. Where’s Eden?”
A low voice, smooth and striking, wafts on the ash. “Now, Samuel, it’s not wise to search for the garden one was cast from.”
“Heh. Funny, this babe.” Samuel motions to the group. “Come on out, Eden.”
Atlas scans the heads. Bodies at the crowd’s front stumble to the outskirts and part a gap five persons wide. A young female steps through it. Atlas’s eyes widen at her hair. Lengthy, stark, floating behind her shoulder with a gloss that rends ash clean, that could freeze the Earth’s core and blind the arctic, the female’s hair burns white. Her skin’s a shade close to it.
She walks toward him.
“All for me?” Eyes glinting, the female, Eden, glances at Samuel and stops centimeters from Atlas. “Love is,” she opens her fingers to his wrist, “living.”
Samuel smirks. Eden twists her hand and runs it up Atlas’s arm, around his shoulder, to his neck. She reaches his hair, slides her fingers through it, and then clenches her jaw. Atlas cringes. Stepping back, Eden cocks her head to the side.
“No.” Her soft face hardens. “This one’s different. What is this?”
Smile stretching, Samuel leans into her and says, “A Sideran.”
Eden looks at Atlas through the corner of her eye, then Samuel. Meeting his stare, she lifts a finger and bends it in and out. Samuel takes half of a step toward her, his feet between hers.
“Samuel,” she whispers.
Atlas angles an ear to them. The crowd mumbles and bickers. A flock of black birds soars on distant ash, behind a charcoal weathervane and attic turrets, under evergreen peaks. Their croaks diffuse without echo.
Eden rests her hand on Samuel’s jacket lapel. “Are you lying to me?”
“No, I—”
“Has he lied to you?”
“N—”
“Then why did you show that Trojan Horse into our home without first discussing this?”
“I thought—”
“You didn’t. How long?”
“Wh—”
“How long has he been here?”
“In Elisium?”
“On Earth.”
Samuel’s brows tense. “I don’t know. There was that tornado thing in Pittsburgh a couple days ago and that’s when I tracked it down and saw him—”
“You’ve been,” Eden touches his jaw; “following the filth for two days and didn’t,” she digs her fingernails into his skin, “tell me.”
He looks past Eden’s shoulder, his eyes glassy, empty until one of them twitches.
Dragging her hand down Samuel’s jacket, letting it fall, Eden faces Atlas and steps to him. She grabs the rope and pulls on it. He staggers forward.
“What’s wrong with his hair?” she asks.
Atlas frowns.
“Found him like that, then brought him here as quickly as I could because I thought,” Samuel turns halfway toward Eden and speaks over a shoulder, “you could squeeze something out of the rock. I didn’t tell him a thing and he’s as dangerous as a week-old bunny. No danger, no harm, and no apologies, dear.”
Eden’s silk forehead crumples and her stone eyes, locked on Atlas’s, fall three shades darker. She bares her teeth.
“What are you? What are,” she raises a forefinger to Atlas’s cheek, “you? What,” her face flashes five emotions, “are—what—you are—”
Eden brushes the tip of her nose against his left cheek and plunges her fingernail into his right. Inhaling, she yanks down her forefinger. It rips open his skin and blood trickles toward his chin. Atlas cries out. He coughs on cinders, lurches against his restraints, blinks through lingering head throbs.
“Sideran.” Grinning, Eden strides backward and rubs his blood between two fingers.
Some in the group of assumed Accenda whistle and jeer ooos, and more talk amongst themselves, a scroungy preteen at its brink laughing. A few bodies inch closer; a few inch back. A couple exchange a fistful of paper. Most stand and peer over Atlas’s every centimeter. He bites down and slows his panting.
Eden glides behind Samuel, her loose, thin blouse drifting into the air, swirling its submissive soot into a vortex. She wraps a pale hand around Samuel’s neck and whispers something in his ear. His mouth falls open. Atlas pieces sounds into words and words into sentences.
“—fixed this complication you’ve created, come back and maybe I’ll show you how,” Eden coils her fingers around his collar and stretches out the material, “easily this can tear.”
Samuel whispers, “But I like my jacket.”
“That will change.”
He makes a face. “I don’t know. It’s eighty percent wool and has surprisingly good flexibility for—”
“GET OUT,” Eden yells.
The crowd, Atlas, and Samuel jump. Samuel spins on a heel and bolts for the forest. Curling her fingers, Eden swings her arms back, launches them forward, and snaps straight her elbows as her fingers spread and palms gush two streams of orange. Fire shoots off her hands. The flames merge into one plait of thrashing, gleaming briar that roars after Samuel. Eden increases her outpour and crackling red sparks glaze the grass at Samuel’s heel. In a millisecond, his last leap off the hot ground is his last in Elisium; Samuel hits the forest edge, where he and Atlas entered, and disappears with a burst of scarlet light, smoke in his wake.
Eden shakes out her hands and her fire dies, flickers dissipating into air’s ash. She turns to Atlas.
His chest compacts. He’d rather it were Samuel.
Emanating fire and frost from her eyes, Eden scoops up Atlas’s rope in a limp hand and strolls for horizon’s five-story, steepled manor, the largest on the outskirts. The hundred Accenda remaining part for her and Atlas. She doesn’t have to tug him forward. Atlas fades into Eden’s shadow, stepping when she steps, keeping pace a meter behind. He’s practiced it many times before: obedience. His gut churns.
Eden balances Atlas’s rope on her shoulder and says, “It’s you and I now, pet. Today is a big, big day.”
* * *
Cold cement veiled in soot steals the universe. Eyelids drooping, head hanging on hi
s neck by a thread, Atlas slumps into the concrete brick at his back. Nothing lies beyond it, beyond the walls around him, the floor. The shadow he glares into devours reality and wipes Elisium, Sidera, Earth from mind until only shreds remain, dreams of dreams. Clouds of room’s ever-migrating dust descend through his windpipe, into blood and brain smearing glimpses of three dimensions he, hours past, believed real. He forgets the last time he slept. He coughs. And coughs. His lungs fester.
Two earthly days ago, he supposedly escaped the barriers that confined him for thirty-one full cycles. Hours ago, he was tossed into barriers tighter.
He scoffs and coughs.
The half-healed scratch down his cheek aching, wrists aching more, Atlas breathes out. He’s done it before—he can do it again.
He searches the room, stretches his squint through blankets of dust for some object, some shard or debris or cracked brick to assist him in prying or lock picking. Six square meters, the dungeon contains three things: a metal slab protruding from the left wall, a steel door, and the shackles, chained to stone, around his wrists and ankles. He bends in his hands and presses his middle fingers into his cuffs’ keyholes. They’re small. His eyes narrow. And thick, like everything under the withering glow from the fourth item he missed: the single lightbulb above his head.
Footsteps echo outside the door. Atlas perks up. He unbends his hands and looks forward.
The door creaks open; her voice follows.
“You missed me.” Eden steps through the threshold and toward the left wall’s metal shelf, juggling an arsenal: six different types of blades, a gun that resembles Samuel’s, and a few instruments that have Atlas’s imagination rattling his posture. She leaves the door open. “I’m sorry. I won’t abandon you again.”
She dumps the weapons on the slab. They clatter and settle.
Eden looks at her pile. “Not a necessity but I like pretty things. And you—” She kneels in front of Atlas, her pearl hair brushing his knees. “What do you like, Sideran? Pain of choice?”
He stares.
Eden runs her fingertips down the crook of his elbow. “My dear, I really want to feel what’s inside.” She stops at the clamp around his wrist, fingers under his sleeve’s rumpled hem, and then slides her hand under it. She presses her palm flat against his pounding arm. “I do. But I can’t until you help me out.”
Atlas recoils and grimaces at his arm. “Exceptional leverage.”
“Is that sarcasm?” She clicks her tongue. “You’re quite the nonconformist for your roots. What do I call you, Sideran?”
Atlas glares into the pale gray of Eden’s eyes for a microsecond too long, and she locks her fingers around his arm. Her hand heats. Before the cry in his throat can claw free, ice-hot agony burns through his skin and up his nervous system, sawing at every cord, ramming every centimeter in his lungs until they compress. He screams.
“Please,” Eden says.
“My name,” he gasps, “is Atlas.”
She smiles and withdraws. “A lovely name. So, Atlas, would you say your dimension, to you, holds sentimental value?”
Yes. “No,” Atlas says.
“The people then?”
“Some I pity and many I dislike.”
“The Imperium?”
“I,” he twitches, “dislike them.”
“Come now. We’re friends here.”
Atlas inhales through his teeth. “Better if Imperium fell into a scalding oblivion to never be seen, heard, or spoken of again.”
She bores her eyes into his. “Fascinating.”
“Yes, fascinating.” Atlas trembles. “Similar to how getting abducted and thrown into an underground stronghold for no discernable reason is fascinating.”
“You know why you’re here, Atlas of Taurus.”
His heart jolts. He hasn’t mentioned Taurus.
“My beloved,” Eden melts her gaze to his lip and tilts her head, “how did you get to this world?”
Atlas locks his jaw.
Closing her deep-set eyes, Eden draws a lungful and straightens her legs. Her lashes are a shade darker than the rings under them, her brows thick, sculpted. She has a kind face, angular but angelic.
She stands for over two minutes. Atlas restrains his breathing, but it only huffs and quivers. When Eden’s hand moves to the metal shelf, he jolts; he’d forgotten a porcelain statue isn’t what’s confining him. She takes a decorated knife, filigree cutouts tessellating its blade from tip to hilt, and turns it in hand. Raises it. Her eyelids again sliding closed, she brushes the dagger’s spine past her lips. She stoops down, rests a hand on Atlas’s injured cheek, and opens her eyes.
He turns his head but Eden seizes his jaw and turns it back with fingers too thin, too delicate for their strength. She touches the edge of her knife to Atlas’s bottom lip and drags it down. Ruby red breaks upon the blade’s silver. He chokes back a groan. The knot in his stomach vacuums his attention and breath until Eden lowers her knife and face’s sting ruptures them outward, sweat soaking his hairline, eyes frantic.
Leaning forward, Eden smooths, elongates her voice’s hum. “Relax, Atlas.” She pushes her knife’s handle into his leg and, with her other hand, slips her thumb under his shirt collar. She exhales down his chest. “Relax.”
Atlas shoves every bone, every muscle in his back into the cement behind it, his jaw throbbing, shackles printing his wrists and hands ballooning their lavic veins. Eden then freezes his pain, stops his thoughts, challenges his expectations, and returns him to his early twenties in a Sideran laborhouse filled with patrolling Imperium executioners on a cycle he overheated, melted, and concealed three hundred aluminum bolts: twelve cycles’ worth of preparation labor.
She looks at Atlas’s lips, opens hers, and runs her tongue along his fresh incision.
Atlas pales. He stares.
Eden retracts and licks the scarlet from her teeth. Her smile stops at her eyes.
“How did you get to this world?” she says.
He blinks. “There—and—gold then—” Atlas swallows the blood and dead lavender tingeing his taste buds. “Tu mulier insana es cum—”
“English, dear.” Eden ducks her head. “And I’m hardly the mad one in this room.”
Curling fingers into fists, he clears his throat and raises his voice to his knees. “I’ve been tortured for the satisfaction of others long before maturity—education shift instructors, Imperium guardsmen and women, fellow citizens.” Atlas glances at her. “I understand procedure of these situations. I ask to know the details of this dimension and its concern with me before I express what you wish.”
She rolls her eyes and, forcing them open, intertwines his fingers with hers. Her hand glows red, then orange and, one constriction later, a bright yellow inferno wraps Atlas’s knuckles. He moans through ground teeth. Eden pulls away, but her fire, dimmed and departed, continues to cook his skin.
“Lover,” she says, “we don’t have deals. Samuel has deals. Samuel has lying, betraying deals that break a girl’s heart. Since you’re in my world, living my truth, and waiting on my hands to take fault in your words, I expect you to be honest.”
Atlas coughs out ash with his next words. “I broke the barrier between Earth and Sidera with a coin, a golden token of sorts—”
“Where did you get that?”
His forehead crinkles. “Merely cycles ago, during a reprimand, I discovered it on my guardian’s collection sector bench. I secretly recovered it. After such, I escap—”
“Recovered.” Eden clenches her knife. “You had the coin before. When did you find it first?”
“I didn’t.”
Cemented to the dagger’s handle, her hand smolders red. “You didn’t?”
“I’ve always possessed it. For as long as I can remember, the coin remained my only possession—the only item exclusively owned among Sideran citizens, the item I concealed for too many full cycles. I—” Atlas looks at his feet. “I haven’t seen it since I fell.”
“You rec
overed it?”
He watches his feet with double vision, wandering thoughts, fogged memories and blurred concrete. He listens to his pulse.
Something sharp presses his arm. He looks at it. Eden’s blade.
He jumps. “Yes, I recovered it on the same cycle I lost it while laboring. I recovered it and felt different.” Atlas fidgets his burned fingers and winces. “A charge filled the air. I then enacted the decision I had been pondering. After the labor cycle, I secured my coin under my armband and followed the wind over the constellation barriers, across Sidera, to the source of the air’s charge. The affliction I learned of in education shifts was passively and naturally restored and I,” he lifts his shoulders, “did what I felt it—my wind ability wished me to do.”
“You knew to open a portal.”
“Yes.”
“Because,” Eden raises an eyebrow, “the wind told you?”
Drawing in his legs as far as the shackles allow, Atlas frowns.
“No.” She stands up straight and paces the room. Two steps, turn, two steps, turn, two—“No. No, dilectus. No one.”
Eyeing her legs, Atlas angles his healthy palm and rubs power’s charge between his fingers; but his shallow breath siphons plumes of tufted motes that muddy the wind under skin. He flicks his fingers. They cast the slightest puff that dies half a meter out.
Eden contorts her upturned hands. “No one escapes Sidera. How are you not no one?”
“I am.”
“No, you’re,” Eden stops, bursts her hands alight, and, in the dancing glow that shears halved her face, says, “NOT.”
Atlas closes his mouth. He hides his palm.
Crouching, Eden smiles and scowls and studies him in a space too small for a moment too long; but her eyes remain fixed, wet stone. She extinguishes her hands.
“How are you special?” she whispers.
“I don’t know.” Atlas exhales. “I don’t, for the love of the Imperium, know. I don’t know why I’m here, how I was dragged into interrogation for a war not yet commenced because of a force I couldn’t dream of understanding, let alone explaining, and how the race of people I met merely this earthly day, a tremendously new concept, have managed to steal the iota of freedom I obtained with all but my blood. Release me.” His voice cracks. “I am beyond confused and no threat to you.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 6
