“I’m done with this. Look at the zealot. This whole trip was single-minded—getting his precious coin. I’m sure he’s just itching for a chance to return to his motherland to stay, and you think I’m gonna let him get first dibs before I can touch the bauble? Right. I’m going back to where I belong and to who I was.”
“Samuel, you should sit down. You don’t look—”
“I’m not stepping near that car without my ticket to Eden.”
Nothing is yours.
Hysteria in his eyes, a twinge in his coin-printed palm, Atlas stares between Samuel and Gene, and the tremors in his knees sound in his voice. “The coin is for one and that one is me.” He focuses on Samuel. “You’re not disregarding another agreement. You pledged away your freedom the instant you, days past, devoured the freedom of another before one born to Law. If you expect me to behave as a true Sideran, then so be it. I own, Samuel. I own you. Here I stand to help,” he speaks gusts’ residual charge, “as your imperator, broken Accend, for you certainly cannot regulate yourself.”
Gene’s eyes widen.
Samuel’s gleam. He spreads his fingers, retracts his arms, bends his elbows, and then, glaring at Atlas, throws his hands forward. Atlas flinches. The blow doesn’t come. He relaxes down his shoulders and looks at Samuel’s hands: pale, unlit. Samuel’s strained brow mirrors Atlas’s, the space between them filled only with the lake’s musty drift and an echo of Atlas’s hour-old promise already shattered.
Samuel stares at his palms, shakes them out, and then repositions. Fingertips radiating a faint orange, he thrusts his hands forward.
“Hadouken!” Gene says.
The glow stays on Samuel’s skin, the air unmoved, Atlas unharmed. Samuel gives Gene a look of utter hatred and new respect.
She bites her lip. “Thought it’d help.”
Samuel stretches his neck and attempts once more. Atlas waits. The sparks off Samuel’s fingers don’t make it as far as his own shoes. They dim and die.
“No, no, no.” Samuel rubs sweat between his hands. “No. Come on. Come on—anything but this.”
Gene eyes him up and down, inhales through her teeth. “Let’s go back. I’m illegally parked.”
“Thought sleeping was just a side-effect. Thought this was a myth. You know, stories they tell Accend kids to keep ’em straight,” Samuel says. “No. I’m losing it.”
“We can tell.”
“Losing it all. I’m,” Samuel looks up, at Gene, at Atlas, “totes human lite.”
Gene’s jaw drops and Atlas talks to himself.
“Tote’s human light. To—toes humanite . . .”
“Welcome to the club, Samuel. We have cheese and tennis and canker sores.”
Samuel’s face falls. His gaze clings to the grass, his arms hanging at his sides. His purple under-eye bags sag with new weight and his cut lip curves down.
Forehead crinkled, Gene touches his arm and then walks for her sedan. Atlas follows. Samuel staggers after. Their steps across fields find asphalt one slow, slogging minute later.
Atlas glances at the road’s end and back to his dripping sleeves. He does a double take.
Their silhouettes breaking horizon with spacing exact, six figures in a V-formation stride down the road on which Gene’s vehicle rests. The outer two figures skim road’s edges; all fan their fingers and return Atlas’s stare.
He stops and Samuel and Gene look where he does, freeze as he has. Atlas squeezes the coin till his fingers ache.
A female with pearl-white hair heads the group.
XVIII
A Change of Plans
“Oh-ho boy.” Samuel shoves Atlas as he steps to the forefront. “It’s Christmas morning.”
The group of six picks up pace. Eyes wide, Atlas faces Gene and gestures to her vehicle, opens his mouth.
“Eden!” Samuel yells. “You have no clue how much I’ve missed—”
Eden thrusts a jet of fire; compact as tunnel-driven hurricane winds, it explodes on Samuel’s front. A volcanic shockwave tosses him past Atlas and Gene, farther back than he began, flames licking up his shoulders, singeing the tips of his hair. His back hits pavement and the fire diffuses. Gene’s yelp catches on her throat. Atlas flinches but doesn’t move.
Eden slinks to a stop paces too close and, chin up, eyes roving down the sad writhe of Samuel’s smoking body, lets spill her nocturnal alto aria. “Those years of fidelity.” She frowns. “Again and again I warned you: if you, too, had been with others, you wouldn’t be disappointed.”
Samuel groans. Atlas puts a hand on Gene’s arm, his back between her and Eden, and pushes her toward the sedan.
“Atlas,” Eden says.
He freezes.
“You’re not going to say hello? I missed you.”
Atlas curls his fingers around the charge running through them and turns around. He opens his right hand. Lifts it to Eden.
“Your blood made me feel like I was in a garden of snowdrops and moths were gliding up my sundress.”
Atlas siphons volts from earth to braid with the tempests already swirling in his arms. He scans Eden’s mob.
One Accend wears a sleeveless shirt that bares his muscular, tattooed shoulders, arms, and hands, no skin left to darken. Another’s dressed in a suit and tie; but the left half of his head is shaved and the right sags with shoulder-length hair framing a white, featureless mask—two black holes instead of eyes. A male on Eden’s left shifts weight and Atlas twitches. With thick fingers, the Accend slicks hair from his face both stodgy and sunken and creaks on discolored boots. He’s the same foul-smelling being who assimilated the teenage girl in Elisium.
The second Accend from the right, a young female, wears her hair’s burgundy on her nails: Lydia from the Dickinson hotel. She lights a cigarette with her forefinger.
“Words, words.” Eden raises her chin and inhales. “Sanguine insides and pallid outsides. Nobody can ever really say what swims in the veins.”
Gene runs for the car. Eden lifts her foot, unlatches a thumb-long blade from a strap securing four others around her ankle, and throws it. The knife sticks into the sedan’s frame three centimeters from Gene’s nose, filigree hilt twanging its wobble to deep-set stillness. Gene stops. Her fingers slide off the door handle and drop to her side.
“I’m sorry.” Eden tilts her head. “Did I not make it clear?”
Gene whispers, “What?”
Eden’s pupils narrow, irises brighten, and eyes widen into pools of quicksilver. She smiles.
“Did I not make it clear that I,” her face contorts, “WAS SPEAKING?”
“Then speak,” Atlas says. Heart pounding in his ears, he looks to Samuel on the ground, to Eden, Gene, Lydia, the oily Accend. “What, by the Imperium, do you want?”
“I want what I gave you. That.” She points a white finger at Atlas’s fist.
He clenches it. “I uncovered this, not you.”
“Mmm, no. You’re in this very place because of me, pet.” Eden holds up her hands and pouts. “What do you say?”
Atlas squints. “Minkar led me here.”
“You say ‘thank you,’ but I’ll take it.”
“Minkar is a Sideran rebel. He couldn’t possibly have organized this ambush.”
Eden’s heather-purple lips stretch into a grin. She drags a hand down her hair, looks into distance, and laughs.
“This is Earth’s only escaped Sideran?” Her tongue curls stifled her next laugh.
Brows tensing, Atlas looks down and says, “Only? Minkar didn’t escape or he’s not Sideran?”
“Atlas of Taurus, First to Question and Last to Trust.” Eden’s lighted eyes read his body. “I don’t know if you’re astonishingly naïve or if risk just gets you hot.”
Atlas steps forward and aligns his hand with Eden’s heart. “Heat causes me to grow hot. Furthermore, I am not naïve.”
Her laughter explodes.
“I’m,” he pulses his power, “not.”
“Who do you fight fo
r, lover? Us? Them?”
He breathes in—
“I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy our intimate introductions in Elisium—was more fruitless than I hoped for. We’ve come to believe you since: you know as much as a seven-year-old. In some hope of growing up, you’re tiptoeing on the fence between war and haven’t glimpsed either side. You’re playing. You—” Eden gestures to Atlas, Samuel, Gene, “you’re three grains of childish, yes, naïve sand in the ocean and I’m the waves.”
Samuel cranks himself onto his feet. “You sent me to West Virginia.”
Eden rolls her eyes.
“You sexy skank.” Samuel stretches a shoulder and cringes. “You sent me on that pointless mission to Minkar because you knew I’d need Atlas to get me there. You knew we would go to Helena after, come to this lake, and grab the coin you couldn’t. You didn’t want me touching The Presage. I rode in the car with fugly mess,” he points behind him and twists his tone, “as your tool?”
She exhales. “And I appreciate it. Time is sensitive; trust is important; information was needed. Et cetera. Can I have my coin now?” She purses her lips. “I’ll take Atlas and the human too.”
Samuel says, “Why didn’t you play this little game earlier? Use force? Go straight to the—”
“Atlas, dear, give yourself up and I won’t hurt her.”
“This isn’t your usual tactics. Why use Minkar, if he really is a dove-bot like Attie, to—”
“No struggle and no violence.”
“—are you waiting on? ’Cause, honey, you’re not one for waiting unless—”
“Though, blood is nice. From what I’ve seen, and that’s quite a bit in these past three days, that would be an opinion you share, right, beloved?”
“Eden,” Samuel stands up straight, represses a wince, deepens his tone, “are you actually working with someone? I don’t mean Minkar.”
“Imperium help me.”
Seven sets of eyes and the masked being’s black gaps turn to Atlas.
He tenses his raised fingers. “I am significantly soaked and fatigued. Can we resume without such verbal nonsense?”
Eden smiles.
She budges a foot, the five bodies behind her watching it, and Samuel slips his hand into his jacket. He whips it out with his revolver. He aims at Eden; she sees, pivots a shoulder; he shoots.
The bullet grazes her shoulder and blood seeps through her silk shirt. She clutches the wound.
Samuel looks to Atlas. “I shot my girlfriend.”
Eden screams. “Don’t you love me?”
“Forev’, babe.” Samuel pulls back his revolver’s hammer. “But it’s you, not me.”
Atlas spins on a heel and runs toward Gene. She shakes her head and points past his shoulder. When Atlas reaches her, he glances over his shoulder, to the source of nearing foot thuds.
An Accend, the only Atlas hadn’t examined—one bearded but somehow effeminate—sweeps his hand through the air. A thousand-frond vine of flames plumes larger, darker as it charges at Atlas and Gene. Atlas recoils, raises his arms, his hands. Wind surfaces and fizzes, whistles off his fingers, meets the fire, and waves it to the right in an invisible wall headed lakeward. The flames bend. Their red petals brush Gene’s cheek and Atlas’s arm and disperse upon their exhales.
The masked Accend leaps through scattered fire and snags Atlas’s tunic. They plummet to the road; Atlas’s back smacks it. Gene makes a noise and air bursts out Atlas’s lungs into the Accend’s white mask, wafting his shoulder-length bangs from his eye gaps. The Accend wraps his fingers around Atlas’s throat. His even mouth slit, colorless bulges for eyebrows, silent breath bear down and Atlas searches for his limbs.
A boom goes off. Another immediately follows.
The first, bearded Accend thumps to the road, Samuel’s revolver aimed where he stood. The masked Accend eases pressure as he turns to the smoke off Samuel’s bore meters distant and, for one heartbeat under his palms, stays turned; Atlas swings his elbow into his attacker’s jaw, thrusts his knee into his side, and throws him off. Groan muffled, the Accend rolls onto asphalt, and Eden kicks a heel into Samuel’s gut, another on his downed shoulder. Samuel collapses and Atlas gets on his feet.
Three Accenda sprint after Atlas: Lydia, the oily male, and the tattooed one.
Atlas steps to Gene’s sedan, pulls the driver’s handle, and slings open the door. It crashes into Lydia and the oily Accend. They tumble backward over each other. The Accend with broad, blackened arms sidesteps them and pitches fire off the palms of bodily canvas.
Atlas ducks behind the car door. Fire slams it, jars Atlas’s grip around the handle well, sweats saline his already drenched tunic. It dissipates and he breathes into his tremors. Around the door, the Accend’s massive silhouette blurs in movement.
One blink and, knees unbending, weight lifting, Atlas smashes into the sedan’s frame, hot metal at his back, hot fingers around his wrists. The tattooed male squeezes Atlas’s forearms so tightly, his fingertips blue and power recedes and nerves numb, but he clasps the coin still. The Accend conjures fire; flames weave up his, Atlas’s arms. Atlas cries out and opens his fists; the coin clinks to the ground.
Gene appears at the Accend’s back and yanks on his ear. Atlas disbelieves his sliver of sight. Tattooed clamps unlock from Atlas’s wrists as the Accend, grinding furious molars, leans after Gene’s grip. His hands flicker until cold, until power severs. Heat lingering, Atlas pats his arms; his wet sleeves remain translucent white but his wrists throb.
The Accend thrusts Gene to the road and Atlas sees it. A silver flash in his peripheral vision.
Atlas stretches to his right, wraps his fingers around Eden’s throwing blade lodged in the car frame, and pulls. The Accend twists back to Atlas. Atlas forgets breath, presence, thought, and flings Eden’s knife into the tattooed being’s neck. It sinks deep.
The glistening silver leaf glides through skin and finds place between spine and gland and bleeds in the air coughed. Its handle shocks Atlas; he lets go of it. The Accend hacks up the red streaming down engraved leather hilt, his eyes glazed with blindness, between here and there, light and—
Have you ever killed anyone?
Atlas pushes the Accend, diverts his eyes, and stumbles from the sedan. He clutches Gene’s arm and pulls her onto her feet, hovering before her view, before the fall and thud of the Accend’s body against asphalt.
“Run, drive—” Atlas gasps. “Anything—leave.”
Gene trembles. “But Samuel—”
Atlas looks down the road. Samuel lies on it, his bent knees slumping straight, the oily, middle-aged Accend standing over him; fire radiates from the Accend’s plump fingers. Eden watches.
Lifting his hands, Atlas draws wind to his palms and funnels it into air dense enough to solidify. He propels it at the Accend. Wind pierces the Accend’s side and hurls him off his boots, over Samuel. His shoulder scuffs road as he flops onto it.
Atlas runs for Samuel’s fallen revolver a couple meters from Eden. She grazes her bottom lip with her tongue. Her eyes gleam.
He reaches it. Atlas picks Samuel’s handgun off the pavement and aims at Eden. But she doesn’t glance at him. Gazing into their snow dunes, she fingers through locks of her hair. She slows near the ends, cradles one blindingly white section, and then caresses the fringe of her anciently anemic but youthfully glittering weighty spider silk. With a bloodied hand, she strokes and strokes.
Atlas’s forehead crumples.
He jerks backward. From behind, the oily Accend locks his heavy arms around Atlas’s throat and constricts. Atlas’s lungs shrivel. Back pops. He flushes, convulses, gapes for air, staggering on his heels, and the Accend’s smile in his ear reeks of overripe berries twined about an oven of summertime sepulcher.
Atlas clenches his core and bends down. His knuckles straining, aching, he twists the revolver to face the Accend’s upper arm and squeezes the trigger. The Elisium assimilator wails into the shot’s deafening boom and jolts from the s
nap of the recoil. Releasing Atlas, he claws at his gushing arm. Atlas catches his breath in great, surging whoops and straightens.
He darts his eyes for Eden. She’s gone. Only Samuel occupies the road’s one end.
Samuel holds himself up with his hands on his thighs, feet planted, breath ragged, and meets Atlas’s stare. Then looks past it, over his shoulder.
“Get down,” Samuel yells.
Atlas ducks and fire streams overhead, hisses past the tips of his heat-dried hair. Samuel sprints toward him. Cringing each step, he leaps past Atlas, clasps Lydia’s ears, and, with a twist of his arms, wrenches her head. Atlas doesn’t look but hears: a crack. Lydia collapses.
Atlas freezes. He forces his glare to remain stagnant, upon a landscape of spent casings and mottled maroon soaking into asphalt. He glares. Glares, for seconds slowed to eternities. He coughs and then breathes easily and, numbness crinkling his brow, searches his gut for unease. Detachment only. Before him, a diorama, of miniatures of another time of another world.
“Would’ve gone for the kill—your crush,” Samuel says.
Atlas nods.
Samuel goes rigid and points. “On your left.”
Atlas swings the revolver left and, before sight registers fact, presses the trigger three times. Two of the three resounding cracks of thunder puncture the masked Accend’s dress shirt. His body falls. Atlas shoves the revolver into Samuel’s hands and turns from the body, shutting his eyes until his ears stop ringing. Samuel’s voice scrapes the siren.
“Um.”
Atlas’s eyes burst open. He glances at Samuel’s bit lip and then the road. Four bodies scatter the asphalt, sedan’s door swung open, blood spatter overlaying streaks of char. Two of the six are missing. Two and—
Atlas asks, “Where’s Gene?”
XIX
From Come to Go
Samuel jogs to her car, looks behind it, around it, and shakes his head.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 23
