Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  But Eden dives between them. She snares Gene’s shirt in ten marble talons and wrenches her around, Gene’s hands swatting Atlas’s arm and Samuel’s side in twisted flight. Eden hauls Gene backward to the trunk’s mouth. She locks her arms as a cage around Gene’s head, the inside of her elbow to her throat, and Atlas and Samuel freeze mid-strike. Atlas goes numb. Gene gasps. Kissing her hair, patting her ear, Eden smiles over Gene’s crown.

  Samuel tosses the knife to the SUV’s other side and Atlas lowers his hands.

  “Humanity has bridled you two.” Eden drags Gene, kicking her heels for standing, until she steps down onto the road. She dangles her hostage over the trunk’s threshold. “You know, if you’d slit her throat before all this, this world wouldn’t have to cower as you just did.”

  Samuel ignites his irises. “Cute coming from Sidera’s dog—”

  “No.” Eden twitches. “Dog? No.”

  “What happened to ‘pluck every fanatical totalitarian’s head from his government-endorsed body’?”

  “One can’t vault walls until she steps on others scrambling for a view. Control, Samuel. You know this. Is there any freer feeling than a neck smoldering beneath your grip?” Smile angelic, she rolls a slight headshake. “Freedom is a limited resource.”

  Samuel scoffs, and Eden shifts Gene up her arms. Gene drops into Eden’s sling by weight of her neck, her trunk-supported calves holding the bridge of her body upright. Though she stands a meter lower than her audience, Eden postures herself high above her fleshy prize and two stooping onlookers reconsidering the relativity of height. The Daughter of Absolute combs her fingers through the Walker’s hair.

  “Anarchy for me isn’t freedom until it’s authoritarianism for the many,” Eden says. “This is what we lived for, remember? Anarchy, fascism, libertarianism, socialism, left, right, all the bruised purple in between—doesn’t matter. We all just want freedom from whatever it is that holds us back and I,” she exhales quivering into Gene’s bangs, “give my dog collar to the oppressors tonight. I’m shocked you’re tightening yours.”

  Eden pets Gene’s neck next. Atlas swears his vantage floats in gray noise centimeters above his head; and Samuel tracks Eden’s visible major arteries; and Gene hates her own name. She hates her humanity and fragility and blood and hates the matte disjoint in Atlas’s gaze.

  When Atlas catches a breath, it chokes him. His eyes follow Gene’s; they stir fraught amber pools.

  Samuel leans around Eden and yells, “Just kidding! Eden just told me the joke about how she wanted to fight oppression and Siderans and the fascism. We’re actually planning on being like Sidera now but worse.” He squints at the masked Accend several steps aloof. “ ’Ts all a joke, Zorro—Batman—” he gestures three times “—bad man.”

  Eden tears Gene fully out of the trunk, off her support, and onto the road, scraping her heels against it. Gene’s whimper garbles behind short breath. Her captor turns and looks toward the near, sunset horizon.

  “Come and tell them directly.”

  Atlas and Samuel crawl out of the SUV. They wobble around the masked Accend with eyes skimming dusk light, eyes that drift after Atlas’s without mask or head budging, and then around the thick-jawed Accend with twitching, asymmetrical beetle eyes that always focus an inch off target. Each stands taller than Atlas, Samuel even. Each hangs over their backs. The masked Accend’s every rocky limb denies movement; his arms too long for his stature dangle from frozen shoulders, and he breathes, breathes only. Atlas knows this because warm air slithers onto his neck and cools halfway down his prickled spine.

  Smiling, Eden walks Gene backward around the SUV. Samuel and Atlas trail after, the two Accenda behind them.

  Gene grinds her jaw to steel, her mouth shut, and Atlas watches her eyes: they scream. He budges a forefinger but Eden snaps her gaze to the movement. She digs her fingernails into Gene’s throat. Atlas deadens his hand, and Eden relaxes.

  All six bodies slow to a stop at a crossroads’ center, a familiar intersection, though darker than Atlas’s seen it, at least in person. He peers through settling shadow at a large square building dwarfed by skyscrapers, those titanic towers that line one brick-paved street stretching five lanes through Pittsburgh’s heart. He stares at the City-County Building and its arches and steps splotched with inky red stains. Glaring phantoms tremble paces before it, paces before him: fire. A few dying flame patches scatter the sidewalk, blacken a hood detached from a sedan flipped onto its roof, brush another with a smashed windshield and frame. Glass shards crunch underfoot.

  Atlas looks under his heel and, drawing his nose up toward horizon, follows a line of glass to the street at his left. Overturned vehicles stack a road-wide barrier. Uprooted trees bloom blazing flowers down the street right, a mountain of dumpsters and their garbage and sundry looted furniture behind that. Spent ammunition casings glimmer between fire patches.

  Heat wafts through Atlas’s nose and stains it with an odor remembered well. Charred flesh. He goes rigid, eyes wide. Then drops his hands to his thighs, gags up spit, and watches the grooves between road bricks shrink and ripple and morph. Images of the charity auction, all sounds and smells, tastes and feelings, penetrate his every fiber, road brick graying gone. Those of Constellation Corvus chase after. The memories speak presently, wriggle as they will through his flesh, pulling limb from limb as his fingertips go cold and unfeeling, maggot invaders perforating his gristle asunder. Atlas gapes for air.

  Samuel rests a hand on Atlas’s shoulder. Atlas jerks up straight, world reappearing with a dizzying lurch.

  He looks where Samuel does. A kilometer distant, past caustic flame licks, beyond the smoke rising in spirited whorls and its weighty counterpart puddling between tower bases, black mass writhes as the ravens that chased Gene, Samuel, and Atlas. The ground rumbles. Atlas squints at the embers whisked through bottom skies, squints beyond Gene and Eden and the median strip’s trees and lightless traffic signals. He squints through the street ahead at the mass growing bigger, closer, stronger. A fog born of fists tumbles between buildings. A thousand cries echo distortion through ash clouds and rattle the city limits.

  Countless foot thuds wade a black river.

  “Accenda,” Samuel says.

  They scramble and bob toward Atlas and the others.

  “And the police are where?” Samuel raises his voice and scratches his stubble. “National Guard? NATO? Blue Berets?”

  “Inside persuasion has developed over the decades. The ones not diverted,” Eden looks to an upside-down police cruiser, “have been subdued.”

  Atlas’s head feels detached, balancing on his neck by a toothpick skewered through his throat. His stare dulls, body numbs, tongue sticks. The Accenda stomping down the street launch fire streams into sky and spray nearby buildings with crackling waves. The persons at the crowd’s rear trample to the front. The persons at the front thrust flames in retaliation. The ranks shout and laugh as they step over their own roasting, screaming bodies.

  Budging it to the right, Atlas sharpens his vision on the foreground. He meets Gene’s eyes straining to look where he has and shakes his head once.

  “My Sovereign and I have studied Pylon for centuries.” Eden closes her eyes. Inhaling, she jerks Gene’s head back by her hair. “I can’t tell you how beautiful this is. She’s beautiful. She really is. It took some burning,” she squeezes Gene’s arm, “some cutting, and some blood but now I see her allure. We finally have what we need. We have you.” Her eyelids open. “Genesis, beauty.”

  Atlas’s knees weaken and mind disengages. He flings his doubling vision for a hint of unbeing, unpresence—some lie that he’s still experiencing The Presage in Corvus’s tower.

  “Centuries?” Samuel’s mouth falls open. “Eden, I’m gonna ask. How old are you?”

  Eden angles around Gene to smile at her. “She’s lovely, Atlas.”

  Give, enforce, transform. Give, en-en-enforce—blood.

  “Seriously, how old are you? W
e dated for over a decade and you always changed the subject when I asked.”

  “Gene, beauty, would you like to experience the death of legends?”

  Blood is so, so, so—

  “Two hundred? Three hundred? It’s okay. Just tell me.”

  “The fruit’s ripe and it’s almost eve, Genesis.”

  Are you prepared?

  “FOR THE OBSCENITY OF THE POLLUTED, REPULSIVE IMPERIUM,” Atlas yells.

  Samuel jumps, Eden shuts her mouth, and Gene stops squirming.

  “I am not well.” Fire’s reflection emanating from his eyes, Atlas glares at Eden. “If you don’t release Gene and return your Accenda to their dank pit,” he says, “I will topple this city under tempests so cataclysmic, you’ll kiss my feet at death merely because the contemplation of my finger slipping, once more, has even your cold blood freezing.”

  Eden steps forward, forces Gene with her, and leans into Atlas. “Mi dilectus, I’ve already kissed the ground you stand on. Look.” She glances at the road.

  Atlas looks down. A ring of light somewhat larger than one meter in diameter, its glow as wide as his thumb, rises from the road’s brick. His right foot breaks the halo, his toes between two curved, ascending beams that join behind his back. He moves his foot. The circle completes; the light surrounds Atlas’s body.

  It brightens before his eyes. The sun sets and the ring emerges, climbing for moonlight. Its vertical rays outshine nearby fires and glisten with the sheen of sunbeams Sidera-high. Day bows to its successor; night casts speckled stardust but sky doesn’t oppose, streetlamps don’t rival, moon can’t overwhelm the ring’s glow. All grant their brilliance to the circle. It lifts twinkling particles from blackening road with radiance softer, but no less unyielding, than eastern mountains at sunrise until it shines through Atlas’s raised fingers. He turns his hand in it. Warmth swaddles his knuckles. Warmth charges his palms. His skin absorbs ionic power beaming up his arm, past his shoulder, into his heart and blood.

  His pupils dilate.

  He trembles for a different reason than before. Atlas’s arteries roll their pulse to the rhythm of his eardrums but pound heavier than stellar collisions because he feels it. The why of his birth. Of his escape. Pylon saturates his body’s depths with voltage that prods him to leap from the Earth and orbit it.

  Atlas looks up. He spreads his fingers and angles them at his sides. “Present me with justification and Pylon, along with the city, is ruin for all of us.”

  “But Gene.” Eden pouts at her. “She’s scared, Atlas.”

  Staring through Pylon’s sheet of light, into Gene’s eyes, Atlas mouths the words, “Doesn’t mean unafraid.”

  Gene nods.

  “Pylon adores your walker. Mmm. That glow—” Eden grins at the ring. “Can you feel it?”

  Atlas ducks his head. He frowns at the amber in Gene’s irises, shimmering under Pylon’s rays. She looks back. Her lashes dampen and glisten and Pylon’s white light matures the faintest golden aura to paint each, individually, till spurs wreathe her suns. Samuel stands still. Fists tensed, he watches Eden, Atlas, Gene, the two Accenda, four others hanging behind them, and the thousands more distant.

  “Honestly, Atlas,” Eden shrugs, “I don’t know how or why you’re back on Earth, but fate is fate. Maybe our Sovereign would have this unfold,” her eyes tighten, “more ceremonial. Maybe The Cartographer’s prophecies hold more credibility than we knew and I’m not being as polite as I should be.” She steps through the light, Atlas stepping back, and stops when Pylon’s ring glazes her back luminescent, when Gene’s feet shuffle for balance centimeters before Atlas’s. The highlights in Eden’s hair burn beyond pearls. “I have this fantasy. It involves you, her, and,” she slips a hand under her blouse and retrieves a blade, “this.”

  Atlas’s inhale saws down his throat as ice chips. He grimaces at the road, at its bricks, umber and gray blocks squeezed into repetitive patterns lit only by Pylon, and exhales that same, unwarmed air. He shakes his head.

  “Take it, lover.” Eden flips around her knife and, pinching its blade, holds out the handle to Atlas.

  He closes his eyes. Gene whimpers and he bursts them open. They dart to Gene’s neck; Eden’s fingernails dig into it, and one of them breaks skin. A drop of blood runs down Eden’s finger, down her knuckles, falls, and splatters the ground. Pylon’s light swells the height of the City-County Building, bursts the voltage of thunderclouds, the brilliance of The Presage in a lightless spire room. Atlas shrinks, and then Pylon dims, glowing at its previous brightness.

  “Take it,” Eden says. “Take—take it, dilectus. Take it.”

  Atlas wraps his fingers around the blade’s hilt. He draws it toward himself and Eden releases her grip on it and Gene’s neck. She smiles. Gasping, Gene holds her throat.

  “You feel it. You feel her and you feel the light and knife and moon. It feels right.” Eden gently pats Gene’s cheek. “You know it does.”

  Twisting his arm, Atlas looks the blade up and down. He turns it over and over, reflecting Pylon’s aura in its face without dent or smudge, crystal silver pulsing white. Atlas stares for seconds. Ten. Twenty. He stares and his imagination sways with the blade’s mirror image to the Accenda’s march, to the molasses scalded upon chemically-cured, moth-eaten swine hides that twirls as aroma from fires, to Gene’s waist.

  Eden strokes it, pulling long the cotton furrows clothing Gene’s belly button, as she drifts to her other side. “The night is due.”

  A micro-shiver laces Gene’s shoulders; seeing reproduces it in Atlas’s. Eden steps back, one shift of a half step, and wades out of the light embodying her skin and hair perfectly blended. She becomes a ghost, haunting light’s ring as she glides along its circumference. Her image recedes and tone melts, and Atlas and Gene stand alone.

  “Only one thing missing,” Eden says.

  Atlas’s mouth widens a notch; his feet are exactly where they were, equipped hand exactly where it was. He knows this blade. He knows this scene and smell and feel.

  “You hold it. Power. The world on your shoulders.” Eden runs her white fingers down Gene’s arm, a glimpse of reminding that three stand present. “I want you to have this moment. One cut and you’ll finally feel like a Titan.”

  His palms sweat, heart jars nausea up his throat. Gene’s breath gathers ions and shoots them into his lungs lurching electric arcs stirring storms within.

  Stillness insulates their circle. Distant screams drown. Atlas lifts his chin. He bursts an exhale that quivers Gene’s bangs and draws her tears. Beads rolling down her cheeks, her face smooths to stone but eyes whisper volumes.

  Gene whispers, “With my life.”

  He knows what she means.

  He swallows the metallic charge on his tongue that magnifies the scent of iron staining her collar red. Sun casts its last golden ribbon and then shrinks behind City Hall, under horizon. Pylon stretches its ring toward emerging constellations. Gut seething, muscles restless, Atlas wraps his fingers around Gene’s shoulder and, with his dominant hand, wrings the dagger’s leather until its texture patterns his palm.

  He side-glances at Samuel outside the circle. The masked and eye-twitching Accenda stand close behind him, the other four, who drove their SUVs with the first two into Pittsburgh, behind them. They lean against the SUVs’ doors and hoods.

  Atlas squeezes Gene’s shoulder; he meets her eyes; Eden gleams her own simmering silver.

  “Are you prepared?” Atlas mouths.

  Gene darts her eyes between his and, budging her head a centimeter up, centimeter down, nods. One of her tears splashes Pylon; its light throbs tall. Wind gushes through Atlas’s veins.

  He raises the blade to her waist. He sucks a breath, locks his fingers white around her shoulder, absorbs the unanointed gateway’s power up his legs, through his heart, to his dilated pupils—

  And then thrusts her sideways.

  Atlas pushes Gene’s shoulder as she trips out of the light ring and into Samuel, w
ho catches her. Atlas throws the dagger forward, for Pylon’s ghost. Eden shifts her weight onto a heel, swings her hip left, and dodges its paper-thin edge by a thread.

  Eden screeches. She waves her palm upward and orange petals fan launching from it, through air higher than Atlas’s head, multiplying, snarling as they devour the oxygen headed for his nose.

  He leaps out of Pylon; the flames spray past. Atlas steps distance between him and the ring’s glare and, peering for Eden, yells, “I killed him. I escaped your Corvus’s insignificant citadel and incinerated him with his own power.”

  Her voice pours through Pylon. “Not possible.”

  “He screamed and wept for assistance before he was reduced to ashes.”

  “Atlas, the one free, naïve Sideran, playing dirty?” Eden steps into view from around light’s column and bares her teeth. “Give me more.”

  “He cried and cried and cried.” Atlas eyes her hands, feet, grips the dagger. “In the end, he begged for death. But do you know what the best part is?”

  She narrows her eyes.

  Atlas deepens tone. “Not once did he call your name. Or mention the Accenda. Corvus was engrossed with his son,” he touches his primary sash, “in his last dying, bleeding moments and that, amans degener, is the only truth he has ever revealed.”

  Staring into him, Eden runs her tongue over her bottom lip. The masked and twitching Accenda run at Samuel and Gene. Samuel grabs the masked Accend by the arm, swings him with his momentum 360 degrees, and hurls him in the opposite direction, into the closest SUV’s bumper. The Accend crashes at stop, falls to one knee. He claws the radiator grille as he drags himself up, as Beetle Eyes advances with fists clothed in trailing tendrils of flame. Samuel dodges the beetle-eyed’s swing and then sprints for the first Accend. He thrusts down his foot on the masked male’s hunched back; Faceless drops, hits his jaw on the grille, slumps to the road. Beetle Eyes thrusts flame at Samuel’s back but Samuel ducks, sparks skimming his shoulder, and then, springing upward and forward, elbows the second Accend in the face.

  The same Accend that before elbowed Samuel’s face groans grabbing his own cheek. Samuel grins.