Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Samuel’s outline grows larger: he’s stopped again. Atlas lumbers to his side. Looking behind a shoulder, Atlas bores his eyes into the settling, uninhabited forest, he and Samuel the only bodies in view, and then breathes out. He swings the 12 gauge behind himself. He slouches, hands on his legs.

  Atlas says, “What was—”

  “Some human.” Samuel peeks through the evergreens to his left. “Hired help. It’s the best protection a Sideran can get on Earth. They’ve probably got no idea what they’re guarding.”

  “The Sideran needs protection?”

  “Everyone needs protection.” Samuel faces Atlas. “Unlike you, this Sideran doesn’t wear a ‘Come Capture and Torture Me’ sticker on his forehead.”

  “You lie. I have only ever worn clothing.”

  “Please stop.”

  Sidestepping a fallen tree trunk, Samuel turns and glides through a half-meter-wide stretch of weeds. Atlas follows till Samuel halts where trees return. Streaks of light trickle through the branches ahead, distinguishing hemlock from hardwood and shining on a rock Atlas didn’t see before, on a glassy-eyed, furry creature glaring from above, on Samuel’s lifted hand. Samuel bends back the lit branches.

  Three of fifteen military-grade bulbs flood their shelter. Cringing, Atlas peers through his own fingers and into the forest’s opening: a glade wide enough for the fortress stacked upon its center. It’s an opening not unlike Elisium’s. If it weren’t for the colossal building breaking earth’s velvet sage carpet stretched for a hundred meters, for the roof’s spidery metal ligatures supporting an equally colossal chrome bowl tilted forty-five degrees skyward—if it weren’t for fortress’s upper level enclosed by steel ramparts of catwalks drummed by combat boots, then it would be a clearing fit for Accenda. Secluded, secured, far from society.

  Eight, nine—twelve armed guards patrol the area. Two at the front doors. Four pacing behind the spotlights on the catwalks. Six walking about the lawn. All carrying long, black weapons larger than Atlas’s.

  Samuel nods to the fortress.

  Atlas waits.

  “You—there.” Samuel points to a shaded side door positioned around the right corner. “Open it.”

  “But—” He skips his eyes across the guards. His chest tightens. “You should open it.”

  “Uh-uh, Spongebob Smarty-Pants. The whole building’s protected by the barrier. I can’t touch it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Eden told me.”

  “How did she—”

  “Eden knows things. ’Kay? Now I know why they kill Siderans for prying.”

  “No.” Atlas leans back. “Not kill always. They tear out the tongues of the overly curious before dragging them through—”

  “Tell me about it later.” Samuel grabs Atlas’s collar and throws him into the clearing.

  He gasps. Looking every way, Atlas scans the area, the guards’ faces, their distant eyes, and then runs. He runs for the side door.

  Hands out, he staggers on deceleration but doesn’t stop until he hits the door. It produces an echoed thump. Sweat dripping from his forehead, Atlas spins around and hyperventilates, presses the backs of his arms against the cool steel of the door and scours the clearing for patrolmen. None in direct sight. None that saw or heard.

  Atlas rests his head against door’s steel and breathes. “Absolute.”

  Pushing off it, he turns to the door and grabs its knob. The metal shocks his hand. He recoils. His invisible fingerprints explode ripples of translucent, cobalt sheen across the door, phasing through a dozen different hues on its dissipation from knob to hinge. The rainbow light reflects off Atlas’s front, eyes, the overhanging roof, the pillars holding it up.

  His next exhale spurts out his mouth. He watches the door return to muted silver and the shade underfoot again drench each grain of entryway cement.

  He glances behind himself. Samuel stands under the forest’s shadow, propped against a tree trunk, arms folded. Atlas faces the door. He eyes it up and down and skews his jaw.

  He hugs his chest.

  Break the barrier. He twists back to Samuel’s indistinct, distant expression, ducks toward him, and stretches his mouth to extremes whispering,

  “How do I break—”

  Samuel stands unmoved, and Atlas sighs and locks his lips. Faces the door. He taps his forefinger’s tip on the doorknob and flinches, recoils, glazes his sight over the ensuing multicolored ripples that glaze the door.

  A multicolored hole tears through the land where the coin was.

  His eyes widen. Atlas knows this rainbow light; he’s seen it at his escape upon a gold coin upon golden ground. He looks at his hands.

  He spreads his palms to the door.

  Breathing in, he adjusts his feet, his right a few centimeters ahead of his left, and strengthens his posture.

  Forest’s breeze bounds to his back like a magnet. At the twist of his wrists, gale’s sweeping symphony of leaves in the millions pours through his spine, tangles with his lungs, and blasts out his palms. He cups his fingertips inward. Air’s currents funnel into a single stream, onto one imagined target dotting the door’s dentless center, and his hair takes the rebound, shooting backward.

  He tenses his stance. The barrier quivers and pops sapphire. Atlas steps forward, thrusts straight his elbows, feels for vein’s voltage turned gust that condenses in the centimeter’s space between palm and steel. One of the colorful bursts tears and peels away to the door’s silver, receding under his hand’s shadow, under the weight of wind.

  Atlas chokes. His knees bend.

  The barrier shakes and he trembles. Grinding his teeth, he pushes the charge down his arms and out his hands, narrows his cyclone, holds against its wave forward and thrust back. The door ripples red.

  He collapses. He cushions the fall with his forearms, his elbows digging into patio cement. He cringes rolling onto his back and holds his eyes on the roof’s rim that halves night sky. Something glides across his view; someone steps over him.

  “Yo.” Samuel kicks Atlas in the side. “Coming or not, angel face? Getting a little tired of dragging you along.”

  Atlas groans till the bruise forming dulls its aches. He sits up. He looks at the door: it’s open but he never saw the barrier break. For a second too long, he stares, then blinks, pushes himself onto his feet, and staggers through the doorway after Samuel.

  Samuel switches on the lights. He and Atlas stand in a small room encompassed by rows of shelves stacked with aluminum cans and cardboard boxes. Reams of paper, brooms, spray bottles, various fabrics. Nothing out of place for a supply closet, apart from the two waist-high black boxes in the corner, both padlocked shut.

  Scowling, Samuel nods to a door off the right. Atlas follows him into a hall.

  The stronghold’s inside shatters Atlas’s expectation from the outside. Golden glow warms their creep down the corridor that stretches for seven or eight doors, half a dozen mahogany end tables and aged paintings between filigree wood panels and star-patterned doorknobs. Atlas’s toe clips a table’s foot. It rattles. Samuel turns and shushes him.

  Atlas says, “Where will the Sideran—”

  Samuel shakes his head. Bending down, he lifts his left forefinger to his right shoulder.

  Atlas stares at it. He nods.

  Samuel raises an eyebrow.

  Atlas nods more quickly.

  Twitching from head to toe, jaw strained, Samuel rolls his eyes. Atlas reconsiders his understanding of physics—that one cannot explode spontaneously. He watches Samuel draw his quaking forefinger up a centimeter and point over his shoulder, to the end of the hall, where it opens wide.

  It’s a resting room of sorts. A fireplace smolders deeper room’s gilt aura; its ember orange overlays the onlooking white, gold-detailed armchair and matching embroidered sofa. The latter in which a guard lounges, his back to the hall.

  “Ah,” Atlas mouths.

  Samuel reaches into his jacket and pulls out his revolver. Flex
ing his fingers around its fitted grip, he slinks into the resting room. Atlas takes one step before the guard glances over the back of the couch. He—she, the guardswoman, cropped hair, padded vest, jumps up and scans the room for her rifle. She finds it when and where Atlas does: propped against an end table a meter from the couch.

  “Mmm, you don’t want to do that,” Samuel says.

  The young woman freezes.

  Samuel strides forward and, one by one, rolls his supporting fingers upon his armed hand, softly drumming his knuckles. His Magnum’s bore stares down the guard’s right pupil.

  “The backup too, dear. Sweet and slow.”

  With a thumb and forefinger, she slides the handgun from her belt’s holster and lets it slip. It clinks against the floor.

  “Satisfactory.” Atlas looks to Samuel. “And we proceed.”

  Samuel peers into the woman. He glides toward her until his weapon’s muzzle touches her neckline, where the padded vest stops. His eyes smile at her sternum.

  Atlas’s pulse takes his hearing. “Onward, Samuel.”

  Sidestepping the sofa, Samuel jabs his revolver into the guard’s collarbone; she steps backward. She bumps into a glass coffee table, overcorrects into an end table, shaking its lamp, as she backs into the far wall. Samuel releases the gun’s grip with one hand. He opens his fingers to her throat.

  “Samuel, now.”

  He pockets his revolver. Samuel jerks forward and, in Atlas’s skipped heartbeat, seizes the woman’s neck. He throws her against the wall. She makes a noise.

  She says, “I won’t—”

  Samuel curves his hand around her mouth and squeezes. Upon his free hand, he blooms a brilliant orange, the same orange that paints the fireplace, a bloody wildfire orange that brims room’s four walls of a heating oven, that shimmers in the woman’s gaping gaze. It’s an orange that snakes into the hottest spectral blue Atlas remembers too well.

  Serpents swimming in his mirror eyes, Samuel tips his head to the side. “Hunger always sneaks up on you.”

  Atlas swings his 12 gauge around his shoulder, clutches its handle and forend, and aligns its sights with Samuel’s middle back. He cocks it. The muzzle bobs up and down, side to side, its trigger slippery. He strangles the pistol grip but his sights shake harder. A sweltering bath unrelated to room’s temperature washes over his body, weighs on his skin, smothers his chest smothered by his sodden shirt.

  “Too bad you don’t know the half of this, Attie.” Samuel angles toward the woman and, inhaling, flicks another fire burst through his fingers. “Craving’s almost as fun as having.” He presses his hand to her chest. “Almost.”

  “Step away, Samuel.”

  He shoves his forearm into the woman’s jaw and elbow into her shoulder, holding her with his knees. “Make sure safety’s off.”

  Fiery blue soaks room’s every highlight, wraps every cheek flush anemic and every orange remnant in its negative; and Atlas compresses his weapon’s trigger. It clicks. Then falls silent. Without physical grip, Samuel’s hand yanks on the woman’s chest, its ghostlight reeling her sternum into his palm, into the blue that warms and chills and arches her back and casts sharp shadows across her bulging eyes. Tears streak her cheeks. Contrast shades them as sooty rivulets wavering to the beat of Samuel’s flames. She whimpers into his grip.

  Atlas again squeezes the trigger. And again. Three, four, five dead clicks, but safety—he checks it—is off; and his ammunition—he looks in the chamber—is in place. Samuel strains his hand until his fingers curve to the curve of the woman’s heartspace and blue flames flourish cyan over her vest and neck, licking up his knuckles, weaving between their gaps. She screams into his palm, yanks on his arms, breaks his skin with her nails. Reflective pools brim her eyes; they challenge their lids’ limits and risk mirroring the cold caustic green of Samuel’s before he closes them. He breathes in. The woman’s face pales.

  Throwing the 12 gauge’s strap overhead, Atlas drops his shotgun, pushes off the floor, and raises his hands. He channels—

  Samuel waves his lit hand behind a shoulder. Intertwining, rustling, crackling cobalt vines a thousand degrees too warm stream toward Atlas. He dives to the side. The fire whirs past his arm. Head tucked, Atlas crashes through the coffee table and hits floor’s glass spatter as flames explode oranging gradients up the wall. Crystal shards spray the air and cut Atlas’s temple, right shoulder, and shock-absorbing hand. He cries out. The woman can’t.

  Her eyelids shut and last breath wafts on stale air: the remains of muffled gasps burned from within shriveled lungs. She slides down the wall and thumps onto the floor.

  Atlas doesn’t look away.

  Grimacing, he gets on his feet, picks a piece of glass out of his wrist, and stares. Samuel sticks a thumb in his mouth and pops it outward. He faces Atlas.

  “Tasted like sunshine.” Samuel smiles.

  Twice.

  “Sorry about that 12 gauge.” Pouting, Samuel steps over the woman’s body. “It’s been broken for years. Can’t give the little Sideran a working gun—he could hurt himself.”

  The second murder Atlas’s watched because of Samuel.

  “Oh, don’t give me that look. You know where Accenda are on the food chain and you know what I am. You didn’t forget.” Samuel ducks down. “Did you, cutie pie?”

  Atlas stares.

  “Are you going to help me tie up the rebel’s trust with a bow or are you going to stand there and wait for the guards to come? Your girlfriend can’t save you this time.”

  He stares.

  “Huh? Put aside your personal vendettas and come with daddy, buttercup.”

  Atlas’s veins bulge. They pulse wind through his bloodstream, gush fermenting volts to his tattered shoulder no longer aching, and his fingers spread. He stares knives into Samuel.

  He pries his mouth. “I trusted—”

  “Do that a lot?” Samuel kicks a broken vase; its bottom half tumbles to Atlas’s feet. “Funny Sideran thinks he can think for himself. You’ll trust and get used for the rest of your life because,” he raises his eyebrows, “you don’t have an identity, silly.”

  Atlas flings himself at Samuel, grabs his throat. Digging his fingers into his jaw, Atlas thrusts Samuel backward and over the back of the sofa, which flips with their descent. He throws his knuckles for Samuel’s nose; but Samuel rolls his head and Atlas punches the floor. Samuel settles his feet and, wriggling from Atlas’s grasp, springs upward. Atlas follows, breath in his teeth. He grips Samuel’s shoulders before they can turn, positions him between the double doors at room’s far end, and launches Samuel, two lamps caught by the cords, and a ceramic abstract art piece into his sprint.

  Thumb rippling Samuel’s cheek, uncovering his gums, Atlas grapples Samuel’s face and runs him through flying shards and lampshades until they’re across the room. He angles his left hand to the ground and releases his power. Wind ricochets off the floorboards. It hurls Atlas and Samuel, groping air, off their feet and into the double doors.

  The doors don’t open; they break. The wood snaps into five chunks and Atlas and Samuel crash down sliding on a new floor—harder, cooler: marble.

  Black spots dance over Atlas’s vision. He rolls onto his back, groans, and hears a groan from his right.

  Seconds pass and two sets of hands clutch Atlas’s shoulders and arms and yank him up. They drag him on his knees. Atlas hangs his head and blinks before marble’s blurred, blued silver webs, swirled into white, till the spots lessen and he comprehends the thickness of the guards’ gloves against his throbbing arms.

  Sorry. He squeezes his eyelids closed. He’s so sorry.

  XI

  Pledge to Lie

  “What is this?”

  “They were in the south wing and broke through the doors—”

  “Yes. How?”

  “They have hard heads?”

  “How did they enter the building?”

  Atlas flutters his eyelids and swings his head right, left. Two guards t
ower silhouettes that obscure his view of marble columns and, one step to the right, Samuel, surrounded by two more guards. Atlas drags, plants his feet. He strains to straighten his legs slow to obey command, lead rods where thrummed electrified flesh not five minutes ago. Lifting his chin, he holds his weight on trembling knees and looks forward, to the fifth new man at the top of an elevated platform. Three stories tall, the rectangular corridor there leads all vanishing points: the room’s stage, its head, buttressed upon a short, flared staircase.

  Middle-aged, the man stands centimeters from the top step, lounge’s same warm glow cloaking his pallor. He has a shaved head and unremarkable features, punctuated by small divots where once wrinkled stern emotion, ridges stitching his forehead, dents around his mouth. He grasps his suit lapel.

  “I—” the guard at Atlas’s left clears his throat, “they came through—entered—”

  “Are you frightened?”

  Atlas squints. The bald man blurs and warps. Atlas shakes his head and inhales; the man’s outline clears and his voice, flat, steady, resonates in Atlas’s ears as if he stood ten paces closer.

  “Are you afraid, warden?” The man stares into the guard. “Do you require more or less fear to answer the question?”

  The guard twitches staring back. “I’m not afraid.”

  “How did they enter the building?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “Apologizing is an impractical use of time.” Stance frozen and tone level, the man only breathes. “You are fired. You,” he points to another guard, “you, you, and you. Report to the north wing.”

  Their eyes widen.

  One of Samuel’s guards asks, “All of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “But—” He hyperventilates. “I tried my best.”