Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  “My beloved,” she whispers.

  He stiffens.

  Dropping his hand, Atlas shrinks into ground and blinks until his eyes adjust. The woman crouched over him tilts her head. The sun around her skin cracks and withers, snaps, recedes from underneath her shimmer freezing in the glare of midwinter. Ice pierces his chest. Her hair drains to white and her complexion to gray, and Atlas’s spine brittles under their scourge.

  Silver irises cut into his. “What’s wrong, lover?”

  Atlas gasps and kicks his heels into the ground and pushes back against grit until her shade no longer drapes his body. He sits up, holds a hand over his eyes. He flattens his feet, straightens his knees, and stands. He sways left, right, vision spinning, head screaming. He groans.

  He scratches his arm for the extra magazine. Then spins and scans the road. His hands surge empty.

  Eden frowns. “I thought we had something.”

  “If you,” Atlas raises his palm, aiming two meters off Eden’s silhouette, “come near me—”

  “You’ll make love to me?” Eden smiles. “What can you do?”

  Atlas grasps at his head and peers through sun. He stands at an intersection’s edge: the intersection before the City-County Building’s two-pillared entrance. Ten, eleven—Atlas turns—two dozen—three, perhaps—Accenda surround him and Eden. Male, female, shaved heads, waist-length hair, bulky, thin, charred sleeves and branded cheeks. His sweatshirt umber, the male Atlas saw before he reached the yellow tape stands among them.

  Eden rests a hand on her hip. “Why don’t you slow down, weigh your options, and listen for a minute?”

  Atlas grimaces. “Why?”

  “I don’t know why you have this idea,” she rubs her thumb and finger together; they spark a flame, “that we’re enemies or something.”

  He narrows his eyes.

  She holds up her fingers and stares into their dancing orange petal. “Here you come, carrying Samuel’s gun, when I never wanted that.” Eden frowns at him and extinguishes her hand. “I never wanted you dead. All I wanted was you. I want means to do what I need to do, which is what everyone needs. We’re all in this together. I’ll do anything for you.”

  Atlas channels wind down his arms. Eden motions to someone in the encircling crowd. A young Accend, a symbol shaved from the hair of his head’s side, jacket leather, circles in his earlobes, steps forward. His wide eyes shift and body trembles.

  “You’ve met Brian.” Smiling, Eden sifts her fingers through Brian’s hair. She scowls, locks her fingers, and yanks his head up. “He’s a little devil.”

  Brian’s yelp croaks as Eden grabs his throat. She engulfs it with flames. Brian jolts, screams no sound, bends his arms halfway to there freeze, and she squeezes his neck with both hands. Fire streams up his chin; it catches his hair and climbs his head, vines intertwining in shapes’ distortion around his scalp, between his eyes. Fire consumes his face. Eden moves her hands to his ears and his scream explodes from the fire licking his tongue.

  Atlas loses feeling. A flame, the slightest petal, shoots out Brian’s mouth. His scream stops.

  Brian falls limp, jaw hanging, fire crackling, and Eden drops his body. It thuds road’s brick. Red and black pry leaves from his cheek peeking through flames.

  “See?” Eden says. “I’d do anything for you.”

  Atlas thrusts off the brick and pops back his elbow. He hurls his fist into Eden’s mouth. He opens his hand mid-swing and releases a cyclone; her body trailing after, wind throws her head, jerks it eighty degrees toward her shoulder, cracks her neck. She slams the road. Her temple breaks open, bleeds.

  Twelve hands grab Atlas’s shoulders and arms and yank him backward. He stirs wind between his fingers. It fatigues his writhing. All meager wind-draw grays his vision and constricts his lungs till internal gusts recede. He tenses his fingers, searches for a charge, but only pain responds, throbbing behind his eyes, each backward step swelling head’s internal clusters.

  Eden laughs. She spits blood from her mouth and pushes onto her knees.

  “No, why—” She looks at her Accenda. “Why’d you stop him?”

  They release Atlas and return to their circle. Eden gets on her feet, arms outstretched, palms toward the ground. She inhales and steadies.

  She raises a finger. “I like you.”

  Atlas burns his stare into her and squeezes his fists, his dominant scarlet-bright.

  “Calm yourself for just a minute. Okay?” Stretching her neck, Eden touches her forehead and winces. “Can you do that, lover?”

  He glares.

  “That.” She motions to Brian’s head and the flames crawling down his shoulders. “That’s charity. It’s stunning. Now the world’s a better place and we all play a part.”

  A smoky, savory stink floods the air. The fleshy bonfire sputters and Atlas gags.

  “He gave his life so you’d understand, without a doubt, what I’m saying.” Eden slips her hand into her pants pocket. She pulls out a gold object. “This belongs to you. Am I right?”

  Her blouse, arm, the building behind her, gray stone blurring contortion in his eyes, Atlas looks at her fingers: the golden coin balances between them. He twitches a foot.

  “Now, I can give this to you, right here, and off you can skip to your magical empire, doing whatever, or you can,” she shifts her mouth, “misunderstand.”

  “You will simply hand me my coin?” Atlas says.

  She lifts her hands. “I don’t want it. My work is here. At Pylon. Smit told you I’m sure.”

  He gives a weak laugh. “You believe me to be an imbecile.”

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “I’m not entering any portal to Sidera when you are planted on the very gateway that could obliterate Earth.” Atlas rubs his fingers. “I will remain here.”

  “If I could open Pylon, it’d already be opened. But I’m empty-handed.” She claps once. “Because everyone knows you won’t do what you don’t choose, you stubborn little, confused, bruised little, beautiful little puppy, I’m giving you a choice. You can take the coin and go find that Presage, like you’ve craved, or you’re guaranteed something unfun.”

  “You can torture me to my death.”

  She clicks her tongue. “There’s a raven tracking a certain black Mustang some miles from here. Samuel,” Eden tips her head, “Gene.”

  Atlas’s gut drops.

  “We know where they are.”

  “How—” He looks over his shoulder, to the wall of mismatched soldiers glaring back, and thistles of breath creep up his closing throat. “How, good Imperium, does giving me the coin bring you benefit?”

  She gasps. “Do I do anything for just me? Beneficium. Tastes like iron. No, I like the taste of iron.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “I want you,” she jiggles the coin, “to take this.”

  Extending her arm, Eden holds the coin to eye level, flicks it off her thumb, and watches it clink to the road a meter from Atlas. He stares at it.

  He stares and fights the rocking of the pounding of his heart.

  Eden screams. Atlas and three dozen Accenda jump. She claws her hair, cuts it forward, smears the blood on her forehead, fingers sharp, mouth gaping. She stops. She closes her eyes, runs a thumb over her bloody lip, and lowers her voice to a breath.

  “I want you—” She softens her fingers. “I want you, want you—I want—” Eyes closed, she points to the coin. “I want you to take it. Take it.”

  Atlas bends down and picks the coin off the road. He tightens his trembling fist around it.

  Eden exhales into her hair. “I want you to open a portal. Right here.”

  “No.”

  “You know,” she opens her eyes at the road, sways her head right, left, right, “she’s beautiful, if you’re into that sort of thing. She won’t win a trophy for what’s on the outside but she’s a smart girl. Good at pretending. Gen—” Eden looks up “—esis.”

  Atlas lowers his chin and m
eets her eyes past his brow. “Do not utter that name while I live.”

  “You trust her like a dog and that’s fine. It’s fine. You are one, but did she tell you the truth about what happened in Elisium? Samuel’s the liar?” Eden scoffs. “Samuel’s the most honest person I’ve met.”

  She looks into distance and her jaw relaxes. She plays with a lock of her hair.

  “Gene cannot lie,” Atlas says.

  Eden gazes. “Hmm?”

  “Gene cannot lie.”

  Her eyes jerk to Atlas. “There are so many truths being kept from you and you have no idea—”

  “I will not play this—”

  “I’ll just tell you. For one, the ‘travel’ planned today—that’s your travel, love. Two, my birds have seen your everything. Three, I’m older than you think, and four—”

  “Cease. For the love of—”

  “She cried, Atlas.”

  His mouth slackens.

  “She cried and cried and cried.” Eden twirls a finger. “She begged for death, screamed, squirmed. But what’s the best part?”

  Atlas holds his breath.

  “Not once did she call your name. Or Samuel’s. Or her god’s.” She smiles. “Genesis called out another’s in her last dying, bleeding, agonizing moments and that, amans, is the only truth she’s ever revealed.”

  Atlas squeezes the coin until it indents his palm. He opens his free hand and draws a new charge.

  “You are dust,” he says.

  Eden eyes his fist. “The strongest relics find ways of surviving the ages. Dust and death are kind to those who’ve breathed it enough to build an immunity.” She buoys her chin. “Are you going to cry or will you return to your homeland and not provoke Genesis to scream that name one last time?”

  Atlas stares into a fog deeper than cremation’s smoke. “You can’t.”

  “Mm-mm.” Eden swipes a whorl through a smoke string. “You can’t. You can’t resist. You need to go to Sidera, to go after your Presage, and don’t know why. Atlas has to keep escaping. Moving. Shrugging that weight on his shoulders.”

  Atlas frowns and opens his fist. He holds his eyes on the coin but sees only a red mass, blood pounding through his palm.

  He found the hole Sidera dug in him.

  Breathe, work, sleep, stay, listen, repeat, quiet, abstain, repress, praise, die, live. Earth’s soil never filled it. He aches through the core and sinks under the breath unreleased for the past minute. When he exhales, the last of him disperses in the air before his mouth and he can’t remember what her hand feels like. The scar Eden sliced into his stomach weeks ago burns anew.

  Running from or to?

  His muscles melt, arms droop. His vision focuses and the coin gleams.

  “Direct sunlight’s all you need. The dimensional barrier is thin here.” Liquid nickel simmering, swirling, seething her irises, Eden licks her blood and twitches her fingers to spark. “It shouldn’t be hard, dilectus. I won’t follow.”

  Atlas brushes the coin’s face with a thumb. It cradles an engraved dove mid-flight, the finest details micrometers thick, tail spread, wings fanned in a swath of heavenly upthrust. His forehead crinkles and gut eases. He looks up.

  Then places the coin in the center of Eden’s circle. He steps back. Atlas lifts his hands, shifts the currents in his arms to his palms, and projects wind.

  Eden’s glinting, the eyes on his back and front and hands fade behind his tunnel vision. A gale streams through his fingers and whips his hair and blasts flinching Accenda and their quivering clothes. It hits the coin, which latches in place.

  Midday sun drenches the street, glows the coin’s gold, and a violet wisp twirls out of the engraved dove’s wing, toward the current that woke it. His head throbbing, limbs sore, Atlas throws the ions in his bulging veins onto the coin and it bursts five, six, seven colors he’s seen in sky and sunset and stars. They interlace. A sapphire glimmer warps the ground and cracks brick’s terra cotta, ears’ drums. Road quakes. A shockwave breaks. A warm, pulsing gust skids Atlas backward on his heels.

  He pants. Locks his feet. He peers into the portal, past weaving lights climbing air, distorting figures, and glimpses coin’s last golden flicker. He clenches his fingers pale and grinds his teeth. The coin falls behind a sprout devouring wind in cerulean petals that grow faster than Earth turns.

  Atlas gazes. Tendrils tickling his arms hot and blood bright, he steps toward the flower till he’s one pace from its bulb and slows his stream.

  He whispers, “In girum imus nocte—”

  “—and are consumed by fire,” Eden says.

  Atlas steps forward.

  XXXIV

  Fanning the Flames

  The yank of five hundred blinks lightning across flesh—kilometers per hour, war cannons, five hundred senses. Five spires in Sidera. Fifty constellations, they’ve said. Heels drumming and wardens coming and sawtooth tornadoes and rending from shoulders and hip. They pull; he falls; flies; dies; rides limbo through Helena’s lake so sparkling. Depths heave their waves and sink his head, blood chilled, thundering windpulsed verve under thin skin into neon dreams spun lucid while stars sing beckoning he wears a comet upward.

  Were there words.

  Universal secrets beat through veins but Atlas can’t discern a syllable. Mind gives to material and spirit to viscera. Bones displace time never existent. He feels everything and nothing and out of the physical and worlds inside it.

  Body spinning, arms outstretched, legs dangling, Atlas dives horizontally through the tunnel he’s once before traveled and peeks dimensions his wide eyes reject. Churning in his gut, wind in his hair, vertigo in his core indicate motion but he’s skeptical.

  He hits the cold: the icy, viscous liquid. A familiar white noise explodes, rumbling into a screech, and pressure squeezes his outsides inward. He stiffens and gasps and claws for his ears, arms making it only halfway. Black soaks him blind.

  * * *

  Atlas’s eyes rove their lids, and he groans. Legions of sun delve low, throb his head, flood his front, spot his vision.

  He moves his arms; dirt scrapes them. He scoops fistfuls of soil warmer than Pittsburgh’s asphalt, finer than the grit rooting Montana’s shortgrass. Wrinkling together his eyelids, he sits up. He cringes through the creaks and pops in his joints, gray coiled about his sight through lidded and unlidded flutters. He counts how many instances he’s fallen unconscious and squints into rays shriveling his pupils.

  Sky, ground. Atlas’s lips part, lungs expel a burst, and he looks across gold that splits plains from air. The dirt in his hands slips through his fingers, leaving them warmer than comfortable, but crystal oxygen breezes through his tunic as a telepathic salve. He whips his head around. And catches vertigo’s toss and fingers the ache behind his eye and, sucking a slower chestful, browses the landscape.

  For kilometers left, right, golden plains stretch their horizon, islands fracturing the skyline jagged at each crevice centimeters to thirty meters wide. Multicolored flowers sprout from fissures. Grass shimmers bronze where sun wets land. Sky burns blue.

  Atlas inhales air inhaled by no other and a charge spurs his skin. Warmth glistening his forehead, he hops onto his feet, twitches his hands, and fills his lungs. It tastes electric. He grins. His vision clears, bones strengthen, hearing reaches far across floating rocks kissing sapphire cradling its suitor. He lifts his head—

  Cerulean sinks into his irises. Cloud wisps drift; his grin falls and he gapes for minutes, dozens, neck sore but aches elsewhere easing. He steps to spin.

  But wobbles and collapses.

  He grunts. He pushes his hands into ground and staggers to again stand. He steps, stumbles, stays. Lifting his palms to the sky, Atlas closes his eyes and breathes air he’d forgotten: pure, transparent, calculated moisture flushing lungs and depths clean. He opens his eyes and steps once, rocking heel to toe, and then mimics land’s stillness.

  Horizon’s cotton tailfeathers hail a breeze, a hearty tide that sails un
scathed out of cosmos’s vanishing point and bends a billion blades of grass, sways Atlas all the same. Wind dances his clothing and licks up his side, through his sleeves, out his collar, to his shambles of hair. Sky threads his skin. His pupils dilate and sun permits.

  The wind curves around his back; Atlas walks forward; it roars. He picks up pace, trembles, glances behind a shoulder. Wind blasting his eyes, he squints and the ring of native Heliomeris Aethiopica flowers seen at his first descent, the northernmost cliffs behind it, shrinks into the dust whisked high by his escorting wind. He twists forward and southward and jogs from the ring.

  He remembers what’s been said about dimensional barriers stretching thin in certain places.

  The currents whistling in his ears slam his back and open his palms. Atlas runs. Shocking his leg, his next step rattles his frame but electrifies his blood. The next holds his foot, rolls it across dirt, and springs it up again. The next quickens. The next twenty latch breath to rhythm, heart to piston, and motion to machine and wind pours fuel.

  Every grain under foot, molecule in air, blade of sun, glint in ground and flower brushing ankle and pebble flying from heel foretell of the next crevice. Without looking, Atlas leaps over three of them. Four. Twelve. He treads a larger island: inland. He runs southwest for the northern constellations, wind steering him from southeast’s Taurus; its closeness—his anticipation of black walls over horizon prods a divot in his heart that would veer him from his northernmost constellation anyway.

  Stretching his palm, he swings far his arm’s pendulum and, at its backward limit, throws a current. It cuts through sky’s forward current, explodes on the ground, ricochets, and joins the wind propelling him. It hurls him off his feet. He flies meters forward, his insides lurching, and slaps land, skids on his stomach, then falls still, his fingers dangling over a palm-wide crack. He inhales a knife and groans it out. He spits two dirt clumps from his mouth, wiping grass from his chin. Grimacing, Atlas pushes himself onto his knees, rubs his shoulder, his arm, and gets on his feet.

  He bursts out laughing.