“She obtained the coin but such was not the sole purpose for compelling us to Helena.” Atlas squints through the blinds. “It was me.”
Samuel jabs a thumb at Atlas and says to Gene, “He’s doing that quiet, too-cool-for-eye-contact, deep-gaze-from-the-window thing.”
Gene nods.
Atlas spins around and looks them in the eye. “It’s about me. It always has been.”
“Dig.” Samuel snaps.
“Eden sent me to Minkar, who sent me to the lake in Helena. She’s numbering days and allowing me—us to roam along her paths without a hurried interruption. She could have captured me and forced me to Helena and the coin; however, she had reason not to. One, as to keep me unharmed and more prepared to retrieve the coin when opportunity arrived, Eden chose the less hazardous option of having me ignorantly and freely following Minkar’s deception. A clean retrieval. She obtained the coin through means that didn’t involve torture, her first plan that concluded with a bullet in the back. Two, she needed delay for time to align with the plans she set when she learned of my coming to Earth. Elaborate games for time spent. Possibly the most important,” Atlas rubs his arm and shifts his jaw, “I believe, three, Eden needed to verify. She was surveying our travel—conversation with Minkar, the interrogative Accend female at the hotel, the ravens, the comments about coming to believe my words since I was tortured. Once I retrieved the coin, its bond to me was verified but my ignorance concerning Pylon was also. She knew I knew of no such information contained in The Presage—that I truly desired to read it. Eden then advanced. She didn’t capture you,” Atlas glances at Gene, “or us for the information we carry. She captured us for the information we don’t carry.”
“Huh?” Gene says.
It’s blood that confesses. A chill bristles the back of Atlas’s neck.
“She needed us, our bodies, our presences, our storage, not our words. And us,” Atlas motions to Gene and Samuel, “because of me. I—I don’t know—we don’t know—”
“We don’t know what we don’t know, which is what Eden wants to know.” Samuel stands and, though it protrudes only a couple centimeters, kicks locked the footrest of his recliner, remote clacking to the floor. “Getting tedious.”
Gene pouts. “I’m really confused.”
“Such is another reason I must read The Presage.” Atlas sits. “Perhaps then I will truly understand why Eden has been pursuing us.”
“She thinks I’m the walker that can open Pylon and I just don’t know I am,” Gene says.
“Plausibly.”
“And that you’re connected to Pylon and don’t know it.”
Atlas nods.
“You can’t go looking for the coin, Atlas. If this is all true—that you’re super important somehow—then that’s exactly what she wants you to do.”
“Eight days, Gene.” Atlas squeezes his chair’s armrest. “If this is all true, we now have approximately two to three days before her planned event. I refuse to—”
The room’s door opens. A female nurse walks in, says brief words Atlas doesn’t hear, checks the monitor at Gene’s side, then the bandages on her arms, then the needle. Samuel glares at the nurse’s back, arms folded.
In the silence, the television babbles more clearly. A peripheral glimpse shows Atlas a crowd of people, the dedicated narrator in front, her comments peaking and dipping across Atlas’s hearing range. —biennial Homes for Homeless Gala, where some of the most important people in Allegheny—auction to fund low-income housing and corresponding programs to help aid those who don’t qualify for existing programs, being outside the 30-days-homeless prerequisite—County Mayor, says it’s a great and fun way to give back—
“Quite done?” Samuel asks the nurse.
“Actually,” she steps from the bed, “we’re good to go. Looks like Gene can go home today. How would you like that?”
Gene grins. “Very much.”
The nurse talks and counts cautions off her fingers and answers Gene’s questions about medications and gives estimations of times to heal; Atlas hears none. Gene smiles and thanks her. The nurse slips the needle from Gene’s arm and wraps her oxygen tubes around the mobile machine’s holders. She exits the room, its door clicking shut.
Gene pushes off the bed and settles her feet on the floor. She cringes.
Springing up, Atlas lifts his hand over her back. “Are you—”
“Yeah, all good.” She straightens her knees and stands. “Just hurts more than I thought it would—to move.”
Gene gathers her items. She enters the bathroom, changes into clothes Samuel brought from her apartment, and then returns. She switches off the TV. Straightens the bed covers.
Samuel sighs. “Pick it up. We should’ve had a scrap of common sense and gotten ourselves out of this hole days ago.”
“Gene is injured,” Atlas says. “Cease mouth movement.”
“That? Injury? Eden skimmed the first sentence in her Book of Agonizing Hellfire.”
“If you wish to protect the scantness of your life from Eden, then finally do what you’ve deemed wise. Leave us.” Atlas grabs the door and yanks it open, ushering the flux of stale air. “A companion to our enemy, however newly separated, has no place here.”
Gene says, “Atlas—”
“I would.” Samuel locks his jaw.
“I hope you meant ‘will.’ ”
“I can’t.”
“You possess feet.”
“You stuck-up, hormonal, genetically mutated excuse for a person—”
“Your composition is much better?”
“Halfway human is better than what morsels of soul you permanent skybags could hope to feel.”
Gene says Samuel’s name the way she said Atlas’s and Atlas seethes with wind renewed. The sting under skin both broadens his shoulders and packs denser the stone behind his heart. He scans the bulges in Samuel’s grocery sack, the same kind Gene has carried, holding foods he’ll never need. Though Samuel slouches in surrender, averts his eyes behind a sheet of black bangs, Atlas cocks wider his mouth and wider the door.
“Go—”
“There’s nowhere,” Samuel gestures to nothing, “to go.”
“There’s the edge of a cliff,” Atlas says.
Gene inhales through her teeth and exhales a whisper. “Oh, no. Oh, that’s not good at all.”
Samuel rigidifies and curls his fingers into fists and unclenches them again. He contorts his face through five emotions. Glints touch his eyes; scowls touch his lips. Gene takes half a step toward him. Forehead crumpled, she finishes her step into silence between the half-human and nonhuman, rests her hand on former’s arm, and nudges until she and Samuel walk out the door.
Atlas stares at his foot. It props the door. He stares. Gene’s and Samuel’s steps echo through the hall and each vibrating thud off bare walls softens the next. Absence rattles Atlas’s eardrums, stirs his head’s contents, upsets his balance still grounded to hospital folding chairs.
Air slipping from his mouth, he releases his foot’s hold and steps out the doorway. He follows the reverb of footsteps’ last remains. Door’s shutting click rides above.
Atlas looks up and halts; he stands in the vertical travel box with Gene and Samuel. Gene takes her hand from the sliding doors’ pathway, presses a button on the box’s panel and, in stagnant air, muffled humming, they descend. Atlas’s insides lift against gravity. His heart jolts but claustrophobia disperses when he again glances up and sees the hospital lobby and Gene’s and Samuel’s backs. They’re on the ground floor. Atlas trails after, exiting the hospital into morning breeze cool on his hands and face.
Gene flips around. Samuel strides on, across the parking lot, hands in his pockets.
“Sometimes you can be so childish,” Gene says.
Atlas stops before her, squinting through sun. “But Samuel—”
“That’s exactly why. Lose the grudge and start looking outside yourself. Start acting your age.”
He loo
ks at the concrete.
Gene steps toward him and ducks her head, bends her knees. She looks through her eyelashes at his.
“This is what I mean.” Gene touches her hand to his jaw; he lifts his chin. “Look up, Atlas.”
He presses his lips into a line, and she drops her hand.
“He’s trying to do good. He may not know why he’s still here, helping us, but he is—and that deserves a little support. He’s our friend.”
“It’s only—I need—” Atlas exhales. “I fear I have lost all of it.”
Her eyebrows draw together. “Lost what?”
“This body—my genetic disposition has been tampered with profusely. Siderans were once human, Gene. My Sideran forerunners have transformed me into a machine, some miscreation built to withstand the savage elements, to inflict the more savage upon others. The aspect that draws me to Earth, to your—” His face burns. “And I fear I’ve lost my humanity.”
“You?” Gene quietly laughs. “No way.”
“Look at me. I speak about killing in the same tone you speak about the picture rectangle and suggest, without hesitation, Samuel end his life. I’ve longed to end it for him.” Atlas opens his mouth and shuts it. He grimaces. “Six days past, the man—the Accend’s blood dripped down the blade I lodged in his neck and he stared—” He gasps. “He stared at me. He stared at me, Gene.”
She frowns.
“The other—the man with the mask lurched off his feet as if my projectiles were internal explosions, ripping him from the inside out, and I left him there. They very well lay and bled for perhaps hours before—they didn’t close their eyes and the asphalt was so hard. I didn’t consider how jagged, how hot the asphalt was.” Atlas’s inhale quivers. “I hadn’t given thought to it.”
Gene breathes a reply forming.
“I don’t know—I cannot change as Samuel does. I’m less than Accend. I don’t know what I am. I’m inhuman. I—” Atlas’s lungs collapse, “I am nothing.”
Tears spill from his eyes. Atlas drags his hands across them but more outpour. His back slumps and gut churns and teeth chatter against his locked jaw. He chokes. Liquid trickles from his nose and eyes and he quakes into his trembling hands that race to wipe the streams.
Stare steady, Gene installs her frown. She brushes her thumb over his cheek, over a tear he missed.
“That’s how you’re human, Atlas.”
He swallows a lump and blinks the wetness from his eyes. He meets Gene’s.
She says, “You’ll never lose it. This—that’s the Atlas I watched sunset with. He never left.”
Atlas sniffs.
“Now, this is going to hurt but I’m not one for doing the smartest of things.” She laughs.
Stepping her feet between his, Gene slips her arms under Atlas’s and pulls herself into him. She grips his jacket, curls her fingers over the backs of his shoulders, turns her head toward his neck. She presses her chest to his.
Atlas stands still.
His heartbeat accelerates. His gaze darts back and forth over her shoulder.
Breath ragged, he stretches his arms around her back and rests his cheek against her hair. He feels the waves in it, the crinkles in her T-shirt. He closes his eyes.
Gene withdraws. He opens his eyes.
“Ow.” She smiles. “Yeah, that hurt.”
Atlas’s arms fall. He rocks to his pulse. With the tip of her forefinger, Gene touches the center of his chest and her smile stretches.
“Not human one bit,” she says.
Gene turns and walks after Samuel into the parking lot. Atlas holds a hand to his heart; it pounds back. Clenching his jaw, he follows Gene between cars, across asphalt, to a black vehicle—Samuel’s “Eden 2.0” 1969 black Mustang soaking in sun.
Samuel’s at the wheel. Atlas climbs behind the passenger seat angled forward and into the back: leather seating, limited space, claustrophobia’s return. Gene clicks the same seat upright and slides into the passenger’s side. Irises vivid cerulean against scarlet webs, Atlas rubs his nose’s flush in the shadow of Gene’s seat. Their door slams shut.
In the rearview mirror, Samuel narrows his eyes. Atlas glances at them, at the sharpened pupils plunging into his own, and, eyes unchanged, Samuel smiles. Atlas’s stomach sinks. He looks away.
Gene faces Samuel. “I never asked—how did we get to the hospital after we went through the portal? This car was at my apartment.”
“I stole a Maserati from an old man,” Samuel says.
Her mouth falls open.
“It was illegally parked, Denim.”
“You—what—”
Samuel rolls his eyes. “Re. Lax. I returned it exactly to where he left it, keys between the console and seat. Never knew it was gone. We have enough after us.” He clicks his tongue. “Parking it in the same place—that felt wrong. Despicable law-breaker, that man.”
They drive out of the hospital entrance and onto the highway. Samuel switches on the radio. A man’s stern voice pours from the speakers, not unlike the woman’s alto on the TV, only more solemn.
—murder outside of Helena, Montana, leaving four dead. Though they have yet to identify the victims, authorities tell the media they are one step closer in finding the two men witnesses say are responsible. Helena’s chief of police explains the owner of the silver Mazda may not be involved in this brutal and possibly gang-related crime. He says, “Genesis Walker, twenty-two, resident of Monroeville, Pennsylvania, and owner of the getaway vehicle, has been reported missing. Her vehicle was found east of Hauser Reservoir and just up the Rocky Mountains. We believe it might have been stolen—”
“This channel is boringgg.” Samuel switches the station and a heavy beat replaces the voice.
Gene glares.
“Inhale, Gene,” Atlas says.
She doesn’t for half a minute. Her face falls to her hands.
“ ’S all good. Your friends and family probably just think you’re dead.” Samuel purses his lips. “Denim doesn’t have friends. She’s a bunch of blue cotton people wear on their legs.”
Gene neglects movement. Atlas scratches his head.
“This is gonna be fun,” Samuel says. “We’ve got a babelicious, fire-breathing, coin-carrying ex-girlfriend out for our hides, the law looking to throw us in prison for life, and the walls of this dimension twitchin’ to crumble from the prophesied human who could, at any second, fall into the wrong hands.”
Atlas sighs.
“What’s saving the world without a little opposition? Am I right?”
“We are going to die,” Atlas says.
“If we do it right.” Samuel taps his thumb to music’s beat and accelerates for the skyscrapers on horizon. “Let’s save humanity.”
XXIV
Blood Is Charity
“Freeway. Freeway.”
Gene points out the windshield to Samuel’s left. He goes straight.
“I know what I’m doing, Denim. And we’re going this way.”
“If we want to stop at my apartment, then through downtown is the worst possible way to go.”
“This is my car and I’m driving.” Samuel pats the top of Gene’s head. “You’ll figure it out someday.”
“You’re doing that thing you do to Atlas to me.”
Atlas looks out his side window. There blur the underbellies of freeway overpasses and their cemented, symmetrical beams and lamps blinking behind them. The Mustang accelerates and the last underpass in the series breaks to sky’s glare that shatters manmade glow. The trees lining the street, the buildings that shade them, withdraw to new beams—metal beams striping a new, spacious backdrop. They grow in height, then peak at an overhanging arch and scoop down again and repeat until Atlas knows on what they drive.
Under road under tires, one straight but slightly bulging deck leaps waters. A bridge. They speed alongside three or four parallel bridges to their right and left. Ivy creeps up the bridges’ ends, interweaves with their patterned nubs of fasteners that stipple
the steelwork and roadside barriers, each bolt and joint dripping rust. Skyscrapers lift from the untraveled asphalt at horizon.
Atlas turns to the absence beyond their bridge. Straight left. Straight right. In both directions, the river lays expanse devoid of metal and cement and geometry and nurtures two winding borders of greenery. Sky gleams in the waters.
His brows tense. Behind the framework of one adjacent bridge, purple clouds loom; they stretch from water’s reflection and for the sun that casts it. Samuel rolls down his window and warm air whips Atlas’s hair and swirls a dampness. Samuel, Gene, and Atlas meet downtown’s edge and the purple clouds slip behind earth-toned masonry.
Alleys, rivers, roads: they web in the same manner gaps of sky would in Sidera. Earth’s gravity holds itself together, but Sidera disintegrates, drifts, balances on a needle of nothing storm would easily tip. Atlas imagines the bodies of one hundred thousand Siderans flooding Pittsburgh streets, beating their heels till earth fractures like his homeland has.
“The only reason I’m not driving is because my car,” Gene flourishes her hands, “is in Montana.”
Samuel makes a face. “That’s weird.”
“You owe me a car and a lifetime not spent in prison or a mental hospital,” Gene says.
Samuel veers his Mustang down the road left, then right, right, left, right. Buildings steal the sun and cool their vehicle—until dozens of other humming engines, squeaking tires, overworked mufflers join theirs in a bustling, frictional swelter. Traffic congests. A sedan eight vehicles behind Samuel’s honks though an idling trail several blocks long stops them.
“We’re on Grant Street.” Gene’s eyes widen. “Why are we on Grant Street?”
“No backseat driving, Denim.”
“I’m not in the back. Atlas is in the back.”
“Attie, no backseat driving.”
Atlas glimpses a spot of black, fluttering black that pricks his subconscious, and stretches his neck as he squints through the windshield. Over the tops of cars, beyond a packed parking lot, at a gray building’s base is a flock of black birds. Atlas counts five. They’re perched atop a small ledge chiseled from the building.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 30
