The sun arcs, saturating sagebrush, crumbling beige boulder, and settles its rays into the roof of Gene’s sedan. Heat drips through. Samuel rolls down the windows a few centimeters and cool wind whistles through the gaps. It quivers Atlas’s hair, strokes his cheek like a balm. He turns toward it.
He breathes air’s charge and feels the knots in his shoulders unravel, the throb in his head slow, the weight in his legs and arms lift. Each gust, he closes his eyes for a second too long to be considered a blink.
Gene snores. Atlas turns from the window and to Samuel.
“Why now?” Atlas asks.
Samuel grunts. “Why are you talking now?”
Atlas rests his hands on his knees and stares at his knuckles, purple nubs between yellow valleys. A cut on his first knuckle now flaunts a garnet cake, which would have healed cleaner with soap.
“It’s now,” Samuel exhales, “because things are different.”
“What changed?”
“This changed—” Samuel gestures to the road, “this and, you know, I’m not talking about anything. Moving my mouth is comparable to drinking razor blades and I’m pretty sure my nose is broken.”
“I am sorry I hold no remorse for your injuries,” Atlas says.
Samuel squints past his swollen lids and squeezes the steering wheel.
Atlas breathes in. “Do you feel—”
“Like something’s gnawing on my gut and eating me from the inside out? Last night? Yeah. But it’s getting worse. I can’t look—” Samuel draws his eyes toward the rearview mirror for a second’s glance. He diverts them. “She looks different.”
“Gene?” Atlas looks over his shoulder. “She rests with her mouth open and her hair in an odd arrangement so her appearance—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“And you mean what?”
“I’m not talking about this.”
Atlas pivots ninety degrees left, stifling his flinch. “Absolute knows I abhor you so don’t quash my fleeting attempt to help.”
Samuel squeezes the wheel until his veins bulge. “I care.”
Atlas stares.
“More than living, I want to assimilate, and more than that, I didn’t. Those didn’t’s keep keeping at it. Never been around a human this long.” Samuel’s breathing speeds; his steering wavers. “Is this what it’s like being one?”
Atlas budges his lips. “You’re becoming—”
The vehicle jolts a hard stop and Atlas and Samuel slam the dashboard, groaning like geriatrics getting out of bed. Atlas twists to Gene, her hand tucked under her head, eyelids still shut, if wrinkled. He blinks at the windshield, the roadside, sedan’s right tires straddling dirt and pavement. Engine idling, Samuel whips his door shut and strides around the car’s front. Atlas follows him.
Wincing as he presses foot to asphalt, he scuffs to a stop a couple meters from Samuel’s back, which faces the countryside. Samuel shoves his hands into his jacket pockets, angles his ear toward the road, reads its solid white line as if hieroglyphs hide in the paint. Not a vehicle drives by. Whispers of wind tickle the shortgrass and the black of Samuel’s jacket soaks in sun.
He flips around. “Why didn’t you kill me?”
Atlas twitches. “What?”
“In Chicago? This morning?”
“I—” Atlas’s brow furrows. “You requested I spare your life.”
“Don’t give me that. Why really?”
He skews his frown. “I didn’t wish to see light leave one’s eyes.”
Samuel points. “Why?”
Atlas stands still.
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“No.”
“No.” Samuel smiles through purple lips. “Nah. You know how many I’ve killed? Let’s see. I’m twenty-seven, about the second most ambitious Accend next to Eden, and I’ve assimilated since I was fifteen, a bit of a late-bloomer, I know—”
“Samuel—”
“More and more each year. Got up to assimilating more than once in a day, a wild feat for Accenda, and a little time-consuming but . . .” Samuel closes his eyes and sucks through blood-encrusted nostrils.
“We should return to Gene’s—”
“No Sideran escapes Sidera and no Accend stops killing. You and I are hardly doing what we’re made to and I wanna know, you sadistic, shameless universe—tell me why I’m seeing light in their eyes and not wanting to rip it out.”
Atlas bores his eyes’ blur into his palm. “Because this world harms. It’s loud; it’s dark; it’s blinding; it burdens my powers; it agonizes beyond any torture I’ve endured in my thirty-one full cycles of Sideran living and I’m not quite positive I desire this freedom for a moment longer because each earthly day has torn me, to speak figuratively, into a thousand pink pieces deserted for time’s centurial erosion.” He looks up. “Yet I hold to it. It’s enough because the passing days promise new vision that promises new views. This world takes and takes, yes. But it does so until there is space for oxygen to burn. You’re seeing light in walkers’ eyes because a flame, the first not stolen, might have been sparked in your own.”
Samuel glares.
“Uh-huh. Cute,” he says. “So I’m Mr. Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed.” Motioning to the sedan, Samuel steps toward Atlas with venom lacing his eyes’ webbed whites. “She gave me a disease. You muzzled me until it took over and now I’m Sideran waste, fighting for something like,” he slips his hand under his jacket lapel, “say, human fodder status.”
Atlas grabs his arm, yanks it from the bulge under his jacket, and twists. Shoulder popping, Samuel bites a groan. His hand hangs empty, fingers free.
“Don’t attempt it,” Atlas whispers.
With a flinch, Samuel yanks his arm back down, but Atlas watches it.
“You know, this one time,” Samuel leans forward, lowers his voice, “I tip-toed into a twelve-year-old boy’s room while he slept. I was looking for his parents but they were on a date at the movies—and I’m not one for waiting. The kid had posters of Iron Man everywhere and little action figures and video games stacked on his nightstand—new ones he got for his birthday four days earlier. Guess how long it took my hands and the kid’s slippery body to, whoops, burn down the house with li’l sis in the bedroom across the hall.”
Atlas clutches Samuel’s shoulder, his fingers digging into his bruises, thumb gouging black cotton. Samuel grimaces.
“Do it.” He grins through clenched teeth. “It’s who we are. Do it.”
Atlas narrows his eyes. “But you don’t wish to die.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
Something of the half-cleansed ruby lining Samuel’s nostrils, of Atlas’s bony protuberances grappling jacket’s epaulet and the wind sputtering behind his palm, something of Samuel’s tone zaps Atlas’s hand loose. His battered knuckles drop from Samuel’s shoulder, anchors from a precipice, and the bloating heap in Atlas’s throat halves the volume of his retort. “I am not a slave to violence—or any force.”
“We’re all slaves to something.”
He avoids the glint in Samuel’s scrutiny. “I didn’t kill you because I believe in humanity.” Atlas slackens his fingers. “Some things have to be believed in.”
“Please. Stop with the—” Samuel claws his hair. “Stop talking. Just stop.”
“Good Imperium. What do you want?”
Samuel’s face contorts. His words quiet and tone softens. Rocking under a natural breeze, he lets his hands hit his sides and draws two quaking breaths before releasing the words:
“I want to die and I’m too afraid to ask for it.”
Atlas steps back to road shoulder’s rasp. He pinches the bridge of his nose, and rubs the heat of highway’s million wriggling phantom puddles from the backs of his eyes, and pushes a million thoughts to the depths of his mind. He brings out one only.
“Come,” he says. “We must continue.”
Samuel looks through the sedan’s windshield. “Can’t. She’s in there.”
“As I will be.”
Samuel stares at Atlas under eyelids’ maroon pillows. Then shuffles around the vehicle and plops into the driver’s side. Once in the passenger’s, Atlas picks at a spot of blood on his sleeve, another smaller one on his knee. They were so white.
Atlas studies Gene; her side drifts up, collapses down. Smacking her lips, she rolls over and hugs her knees into the back seat. Her hair spills off her shoulders and drapes around her back.
Atlas twists forward. Samuel shifts into drive and, in their backward jolt, swings back over the shoulder’s solid line.
“I can’t forgive you,” Atlas says. “For which I truly am sorry.”
Samuel nods. They continue down the road.
XVII
Wind and Water
“And that’s the tone you use when you want to discourage stalkers.”
“You mustn’t drive.” Atlas raises his voice. “Your innards were nearly suctioned out your—”
“Gross, no.”
“You’re ill and—”
“He’s not?” Gene motions to Samuel, whose left hand hangs from the wheel by support of his fingertips, his right flopped at his side.
“You are positive your head doesn’t ache and your vertigo has subsided?”
“Yes and yes. I promise. Napping worked it off and I feel one hundred percent like a person who’s very much a person,” Gene says. “Let him take a break. He looks like he’s on Ambien.”
“Terminology, Gene.”
“He looks like he’s tired.”
Samuel grunts.
“He shouldn’t be.” Atlas folds his arms and faces the windshield. “As I recall, he doesn’t sleep.”
Samuel grunts.
“He does now.”
Atlas glances to his left. “Mmm. Naturally. You’ve decided you now sleep.”
“Will you stop?” Gene exhales. “You’re sassier than a preteen girl and Siderans don’t sound like that. Probably.”
He twists to face her. “You defend him why?”
“Atlas.”
“Suddenly it’s my misconduct that drives your anger?”
Staring ahead, eyelids drooped, Samuel decelerates and parks on the roadside. He hoists himself out of the vehicle and trades places with Gene. He collapses to the back seat; once Gene presses the gas, passes the semi-truck a few meters down the road, Samuel snores into the upholstery.
“I don’t know what exactly happened this morning,” Gene squints toward skyline’s first green ridges seen in hours and lifts her shoulders, “but you need to give it a break.”
“I haven’t the slightest what you’re expressing,” Atlas says.
She rolls her eyes. “Look at him. Really look.”
His lips pressed a line, he glances at Samuel, at the strands on his hairline clumped with blood that evaded Gene’s cleansing wipes.
“This morning, he was—but you—” Gene swallows a peak in tone. “Atlas,” the inner corners of her brows rising, she flits her eyes right, “do you know how serious that is?”
His heart recedes and jaw hardens and mouth opens to rebut but voice catches on the twist in his gut. He frowns at his knee’s scuffed patch.
“I know he almost killed me, which is kind of a big thing, but he almost—he’s so close. Now’s the time he needs the most support.” She leans to her right. “He could grab his gun, shoot us both, and run wherever and steal things and do the anarchy. There’s only one reason he’s still going along with us. He respects you.”
Atlas scoffs. “I merely—I don’t believe you should forgive so readily. If one thing, then this I have learned since my Sideran fall: trust carefully.”
“Forgiveness isn’t trust, Atlas.” Gene presses her lips together. “My trust isn’t given easily. My kindness should be.”
“Such seems naïve.”
“It’s innocent.”
“Adjectives identical.”
“No, not really at all.”
Atlas presses his elbows into his knees, bends forward, and rests his neck in his hands. He rubs it.
“What I wanted—” Gene breathes out and looks at him. “I miss you.”
His hands stop.
“You’re carrying too much. Mentally, I mean. I want to hang out with the innocent friend that blew leaves around on that hill.” Gene smiles. “He wasn’t so weighed down.”
He lifts his head a few centimeters. “I miss it also.”
The vehicle bumps and hums, Samuel’s snores vibrating. They drive alongside power lines draped upon wooden poles that step down into distance, blend into grass paling. The sun approaches peak and the plains bulge and curve the road around increasingly tree-topped knolls at mountains’ foot.
“And I trust you,” Gene says.
Atlas’s face warms.
“Foolishly so.” He frowns. “I should have been watching more cautiously—this morning, I should have—”
“I made a promise a couple years ago and I mentioned it when we met.”
He closes his mouth and sits up straight. “I remember.”
“Well, that—” Gene clears her throat. “My promise was that I’d never let innocence go harmed.”
Atlas’s brows tense.
“You.” Her eyes smile; her lips don’t. “I just want you to stay that way. Promise me you won’t even think about Samuel until you’ve forgiven him.”
He draws a deep breath and looks at the sky. “I promise.”
Her smile breaks through. Cheeks flushing, Gene glances to her right and says, “Now we both have something to keep.”
The road crinkles, waves, and the vehicle climbs and descends and repeats. Black birds burst from an elm patch beyond blue waters reflecting the breath, the breadth of sky settling in mountains’ dips. The birds fly across train tracks parallel with the highway, fly overhead, the broad V’s of their wings disappearing above the sedan roof before emerging on the car’s opposite side. The birds croak. Ice doesn’t pierce Atlas’s spine; he’s looking through the oncoming freight train’s churning, swimming exhale of an exhaust shadow and to the crystal dome that cradles clouds sheltered from the black of cosmic space. Sun catches heaven’s cobalt aflame and the mountains that look up flush green with envy.
Cattle fields blurring behind, Atlas’s eyes meet their reflection in the window. His forehead crumples.
He looks over his shoulder and watches the receding asphalt, the world of plains, towns, people, gas stations, hotels, and cities between him and Pittsburgh’s forested hills. Sidera beyond that.
“Gene,” Atlas twists around, “do you truly care about reaching Helena and retrieving the coin? The Presage?”
She leans back. “Uh.”
“And why is Samuel torturing himself despite all he declares he holds to? You say you come for,” Atlas gestures to the window, “this and he proclaims to come for Eden but—” He draws his eyes to the bobbing side mirror. “I’m unsure myself that I come for truth and positive I haven’t come for Sidera.”
Gene purses her lips.
“It’s only—” Atlas drags his hand down his neck. “I can’t cease thinking: who in this vehicle is running toward something and who is running from something?”
They hush their breathing and stare out the windshield. A cliff takes the roadside.
“Maybe we’re all wandering.” Gene looks past the points of new pine trees. “Maybe that’s okay for now.”
Samuel stirs. He groans and rolls over. Atlas’s back tenses and Gene glimpses her rearview mirror, her face deflating.
Atlas says, “You do acknowledge that he, this morning—you know what occurred. How are you perfectly unafraid?”
She shifts in her seat.
“I’m terrified.” Gene looks to him, the corner of her mouth turning up. “But with you I feel safe.”
He stares.
“That night, after the bunch of ravens chased us, in the hotel—you were a stranger really and it didn’t—” Gene presses her thumb into the steering wheel.
“I had never felt, didn’t think I could feel safer in my entire existence. That feeling hasn’t left.”
Atlas’s vision blurs.
Gene rubs her lips together. His head itches. He’s too heavy to scratch it.
“I acknowledge your commentary,” Atlas says.
Gene’s lips curve into a smile and he watches it.
She says, “I think we’re a few miles from—”
Samuel again groans: louder this time. Gene quiets. The next minutes increase the frequency and intensity of his moaning while the mountains synchronize a slow bow to civilization. Gene drives into town. Traffic and rooftops and streetlights huddled between evergreens greet them.
Grasping the middle seatbelt, Samuel pants and bends in his knees for a rattling cage of protection. His neck glistens where his hair parts. Gene twists to look at him.
She twists back to the steering wheel, pats it once with nervous fingers, and, brow furrowed, turns off the highway. She follows another sedan through a side street and around a corner.
“Do you stop for sustenance?” Atlas asks.
Gene shakes her head. “Hold on.” She lifts her finger to a small building with a small parking lot, rosebushes insulating its sienna brick, an engraved wooden sign hanging above its entrance. “Watch for cops. I’ll just be a second.”
She parks, slides out, and disappears into the building. Atlas leans back. He listens to Samuel shiver, scratch at his seat and jacket, whimper. Samuel gasps and groans and chews on his cheeks and bites his teeth, his eyelids squeezed shut, forehead dripping. He wraps his lank arms easily around his neck. Arms crossed, he pushes his fingernails toward his shoulder blades and buries his face in his elbows.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 21
