Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  He cringes through the heat, the sweat in his cheek’s cut, and peers over dissipating orange petals. Eden peers back. A couple dozen paces from him and Pylon, she drags Gene by her shirt and sweeps her knife’s point at Atlas. She outpours another fire wave.

  She and Gene disappear behind it. The flames grow and rush into a flood that thickens as it expands as it accelerates as heat of pyre cores warps the air blasting Atlas’s clothes in ripples. Gasping, he stumbles to his right. He swivels back his shoulder where his yaw falls short. But Eden’s fire catches his foot, charges onward, and slams, crackles, licks up the nearest building. He blows a gust at his shoe; the flames flee it, shriveling, crawling off his heel, across the road.

  Gene yells something. Her voice rings loud, near. Atlas widens his eyes, pupils narrowing, and hops over Eden’s lingering fire trail. He runs back to Pylon.

  Another scream shatters his balance. It’s not the Accenda’s.

  Atlas opens his mouth to Pylon, his skin pulling its ions, but his lungs release nothing.

  Pylon explodes another beam brighter, taller than the last never entirely dimmed. Stains of light behind his lids, Atlas shuts his eyes but speeds his sprint, however sawtooth. He flings himself through the glow and crashes into one of two figures standing within the circle. He grabs her shoulders; they stagger from the ring.

  He opens his eyes. Gene looks up at him, her arms in his hands. Both arms bleed. Red trickles toward her wrists, her face white.

  “I tried—she missed—” Gene trembles. “But she’s fast. Sorry.”

  Atlas pushes his palm into her back and walks her from Pylon. “No apologies. There’s no—”

  “Wait—Samuel.” She twists around.

  “Gene,” Atlas quickens their steps and glances behind himself, “listen to me. We haven’t—”

  A hard mass smacks his shoulder and thrusts him out of alignment; his legs wobble, arm slips from Gene. She spins after and grasps for him. Breath knocked out, he teeters on his foot’s rim rolling across road, bent over, arms outstretched. His fingertips brush ground’s brick.

  Another set of feet darts past his own. He jerks up straight and glares after the body that passed him. A young male running toward Pylon. Brows tensed, Atlas turns to the street’s northern end and another Accend slams into him, into his other shoulder and Gene’s reaching arm. He staggers farther from her. Blurs of bodies charge past him and Gene, igniting median strip trees, flourishing flames across blackened windows. Embers swarm overhead. Soot rides shockwaves from fire missiles plunged into frontrunning bodies outrun by seconds. The quickest Accenda trample over their own, waft a wind that sways Atlas’s upward balance, quake the road jarring his downward balance. The first of the Accend army lights their palms as stars and dances through Pylon’s glow with disregard for the sluggish.

  Meters distant, one exception sees beyond her own hysteria, beyond Pylon’s thriving corona. The small, frog-eyed female Accend spots Gene in the darkness and stops. She eyes her up and down. Then bolts after her. Atlas steps forward and a hefty Accend rams his side, shoving his lit hand into Atlas’s arm. Atlas falls to the road. He crawls upward.

  He yells, “Genesis, come—”

  An Accend kicks his forehead and he lurches onto his back and groans, his smoking arm slapping ground. His vision blends sky with stars and sparks and building walls. All weighs him down. Puffing through head’s cluster aches, he rolls over and claws road brick as he drags himself toward a glimpse of Gene’s leg.

  She sidesteps the charging Accend, who trips over her own propulsion and falls victim to the crowd’s current. Gene grabs Atlas’s arm. She helps him onto his feet.

  Leaning toward sidewalk that flashes behind the whoosh of silhouettes, Atlas clasps Gene’s hand and yanks; but she only budges and snaps back. He whips around.

  He goes rigid.

  A pearl white crown of hair overhangs Gene’s amber tangles, pale fingers around her arm, silver eyes drinking Gene’s wide ones. Eden swings her foot off the ground and into Atlas’s gut; nausea sprung up his throat, he jerks backward and his clammy hand slides from Gene’s. Eden reels Gene into her.

  “Two cuts just aren’t enough, beauty.” Eden throws her by her hair toward Pylon. “Let’s try again.”

  Gene yells, her body twisted and cowered, teeth bared. She and Eden shrink and oscillate behind multiplying Accenda as they approach the light pillar. White, humming curves of glow paint their outlines. Eden thrusts Gene around till her back’s to Pylon, the obscure marks of her expression peeking over Eden’s shoulder, jots of panic and remorse mingled with their gray backdrop. Only her eyes, pointed toward Atlas, foster motes of independent light. He runs—

  Eden throws her blade sideways, one swipe, one blink of a hiss of a steel leaf, and Gene freezes her face, her breathing, her agape mouth and tensed brows. Her eyes widen to their limit; Pylon’s light capers in them. Shoulders lifted, she looks down and creeps her hands toward her waist.

  Blood drips from her shirt. A maroon slit from her core’s right to left trickles a sheet down her front.

  She mouths half a word.

  The dagger gleams red swirling iron through air and lungs. Eden nudges Gene’s chest with a forefinger and she tips backward, through the light, and collapses to Pylon, her body curved to its ring.

  Atlas’s run wavers. He chokes and slows, without cognitive permission. Eden turns to him.

  “Oh, look.” She points at Atlas, darts her eyes between Accenda, and yells, “A Sideran.”

  A dozen Accenda jerk their heads toward Atlas, then flood the space between him and Eden. Two dozen more follow. And more hush their clamors, slow their paces, angle around the first. Atlas stops and pants. A hundred Accenda bore their glimmering, dilated pupils into him with open mouths and heating palms.

  They charge. Flickering hands grab at Atlas’s shoulders, arms, and tear him from Eden and Gene but he doesn’t feel it, doesn’t register the five-fingered two-thousand Celsius clasping the back of his neck. The tunnel he’s in shrinks. Pylon’s beam narrows. Accenda push him and his head hits the ground, vision’s tunnel angling upward, shriveling in on a tiny group of dots in the sky: subtle lights grappled by night between building roofs and heads unnumbered. Taurus’s blue cluster that holds one microscopic star named a name he can’t comprehend. He’s not worthy to share it.

  Atlas scrapes his head turning it sideways and gazes past shuffling legs. They stamp for space nearer to his nose. Hands rip the hands from around his shoulders and voices yell reverberation that funnels into Atlas’s ears as earth crumbling, breaking until he brims. His nervous system ignores the kick in his side.

  He shuts his eyes.

  The hands yank him forward and up, tunic bunched between bands and sashes, arm’s bandage long gone. His head sways; his chin falls to his chest; he sits, his arms raised in the fists of jostling, thrashing mass. One fist smacks his temple. A shoe plunges into his gut. Breath spurted out his mouth, he sits. They strike him across the cheek, then the other and his scabbed gash bleeding anew, then his jaw, leg, back, and he sits. He jolts left, right, back, forward, until an Accend claws his hair and wrenches a clump of it from his scalp and he jolts upward. He settles. He sits.

  It means standing when you’d rather be sitting.

  The next kick to his ribs triggers agony. Clears hearing. Face contorted, Atlas opens his eyes.

  He lets the cry of several hours’ brewing burst from his mouth a sample of a lifetime’s pain and anger. Then leans onto a hip and swipes his leg under two Accenda’s ankles; they collapse into three others, who wobble backward into five more caught in stupors of surprise. Atlas snaps in his elbows and his arms slide from Accend grips. Inhaling, he pours a current, sweeps outward his palms spiraling 360 degrees, launches fifteen bodies in a bellowing cyclone toward crowd’s outskirts where they topple twenty others.

  He flattens his soles and swings his hands to his sides. His gust throws him onto his feet, roaring up his spine, billowing hi
s tunic. An Accend shoots flames for his back. Atlas twists without turning and hurls his wind’s remainder into the flames, their Accend, and a dozen more clambering for standing. Fire licks swirling after rippled cheeks and peeled lips, the Accenda tumble meters through charged air, into and over groaning bodies. He twists forward.

  “If you all had concerned yourself with graciously asking if I was indeed Sideran, you may not have gotten your limbs broken.” Atlas glares into the Accend between him and Pylon. “You, oily-haired malcontent,” he taps his own head, “are on my list.”

  The Accend budges his hands. Atlas ducks and the Accend thrusts a fire blast that hisses over Atlas’s head and engulfs the male at his back. Springing forward, Atlas grabs the attacking Accend’s wrists. He bends them, flings them into the Accend’s own nose; it and they crack. The attacker cries with the cries of the Accend behind Atlas and both cover their faces in a dance unattractive. Atlas shoves the frontman aside.

  “This,” he leans backward and, stepping sideways, dodges a female’s knife, “is what battling a Sideran is like.” He leaps over another’s body. “Satisfying?” Running for the light pillar embedded in retinas, Atlas glances behind a shoulder, pitches wind that blows over two others, and yells, “No? Not how you envisioned it?”

  Pylon explodes and Atlas looks forward. Road trembles, sound warps, sight stings, and he stops running, swaying in place. His narrowed eyes follow Pylon’s beam upward.

  It launches into black and, halfway up alley walls, splits into branches that web to skyscrapers’ tips and beyond, a tree of lightning without thunder. Atlas cringes until his eyes ease Pylon’s burns. Each branch flashes and dances through sky, over roofs, toward atmosphere’s apex and edges, stretching, hopping between stars they draw into constellations. Gene’s blood shatters Pylon’s seal. An invisible wave ripples heat from the light’s trunk, through Atlas, across the city until electric wind weaves through every alley and hums in every ear and sweats every street.

  Even the Accenda stop to stare.

  Atlas glares at the light sinking deeper into his head and veins than The Presage ever prepared him for and whispers, “Neither I.”

  XLVII

  And Are Consumed by Fire

  Atlas pushes off road’s quakes and wobbles the last paces between him and Pylon. He steps through the light; millions of pinpricks dry-wash his body, deplete his breath, raise his arm and neck hair despite their swelter. He bats his scorched eyes. Wind squints them.

  His foot slides to the right and he catches himself and looks down. The road’s wet. Her blood paints his shoe, viscous red seeping to Pylon’s inner edge, where its touch ruptures another thousand energy bursts.

  The air smells of rust and fire and ash and tastes of screams.

  “Beauty’s spilled all over. Why aren’t you?”

  Atlas angles against wind cycloning from the ring’s center and peers at Eden. She clutches the back of Gene’s shirt, Gene dangling from her grasp, arms swaying beneath her body. Eden frowns at Atlas and clicks her tongue twice.

  Atlas clenches one fist and opens the other. Twisting his body, he swings his outstretched palm into Eden’s chin and, the moment it hits, releases his power. Her head jerks back, hand slips from Gene’s shirt, and feet lose ground. A concentrated tornado hurls her out of Pylon’s ring, through distance enough to mute her body’s tumble.

  He catches Gene as she falls. Atlas wraps an arm around her shoulders, another around her waist, and, crouching, tips her backward. He lifts her legs. Too quick. Atlas staggers on skidding feet, his arms’ veins bulging, muscles rending down his shoulders and back and through his thighs. Vision spinning, he stumbles from the ionized glow and onto road lit by flames and moon. He slows forward momentum, yanks back, staggers backward, leans forward, staggers two steps forward, and regains balance planting both feet into glass shards and bloodstains. Blood fresher wets his front; its vivid shade against his white tunic scratches the lid of his subconsciousness. Mind ricochets off his full skeletal tremors. He simply hoists Gene up by her knees and shoulders and looks over her hanging head.

  Down the alley, flashes of skin and clothing dart among darkness and between flame streams. Blending blurs of hundreds of the army’s anterior surround Pylon. Haze shrouds the street’s farther end; ash cloaks the glare of distant fire. But a red bulb shoots from a wall of smoke and rushes its brightening, yellowing flare past Gene’s feet, its tail skimming her toes. Atlas jolts her around. He gasps and limps for the sidewalk.

  He blinks through smoke that stings and raises his voice over Pylon’s wind and Accenda’s shouting.

  “Gene?”

  “Open!” Accenda lift their heels on chant’s first syllable and stomp on the second. “O-pen! Bite back! O-pen! Throw down!”

  Eyes halfway closed, Gene budges their whites millimeters visible.

  Atlas’s lungs constrict. “The time for resting is not now.” He trudges, voice quavering. “Speak to me.”

  An Accend grabs Atlas’s tunic, curls his fingers under the leather strap slung across it, and yanks him backward. Pulse jarred, Atlas squeezes Gene into his chest. He bumps the Accend on his second step back and falls onto him. The three crumple to the ground. Gene falls into Atlas but Atlas slams the brick, his hip propped on the Accend’s leg.

  The Accend scrambles out from under Atlas. He grunts pushing himself up and grabs for something beneath his overshirt.

  Lungs rattling, breath in notches, Atlas rolls onto his elbow; it touches a dampness, too oily to be blood. He cringes sitting up, heaves Gene to his side opposite the wetness, and looks: between him and the Accend, a shallow, translucent pool swirls rainbow hues. A trail leads the puddle to one of the street’s mauled vehicles. Not far above, embers swim the air, liquid reflecting their smoldering wisps.

  Settling Gene behind himself, Atlas kneels. The Accend draws a handgun.

  Half a breath. Atlas lunges. He grips the Accend’s hair and yanks his head down, into the puddle. The male’s face smashes road. Atlas strikes the pistol from the Accend’s hand before he can reel up his head, liquid dripping from his chin.

  “In our educations shifts—Sideran education shifts—as I’m from Sidera—” Atlas crouches and, twisting upward, kicks the Accend’s chest, “we were taught of the properties and nature of fire.” The Accend thuds road on his back, and Atlas tugs his own sleeve up his dominant arm. “Gene taught me of gasoline after Samuel and I nearly exploded one of its terminals. The uniting of the two, I’m told, is discouraged.”

  The Accend coughs. Atlas pinches a light out of the air: a leaf twinkling around its edges, a ring of orange singeing it smaller. He arches his forefinger and thumb around the leaf’s embers, pinching its center, bends over, and drops the leaf on the Accend’s nose.

  Atlas jerks up and back. The embers spurt a flame up the leaf’s middle; the male’s face bursts into an inferno. He screams and squirms and smothers his face but the fire only catches his hands and shirt, similarly soaked.

  Atlas touches his right fingers to his left shoulder. “Praise Imperium.”

  He flips around. Atlas slides his arms under Gene’s shoulders and knees and, grinding his teeth, lifts her. He steps for a building at the intersection’s corner. The writhing Accend slaps his hand into the gasoline puddle and fire shoots down the liquid’s line, to its source.

  Flames boom at Atlas’s back. Sweat rolling down his forehead, more matting his scalp, he keeps forward his dilating eyes, hindered only by explosion’s road-dull reflection, a surge of yellow that envelops his long shadow. He plods to the corner building, to a chest-high, wingspan-wide ledge at its base, and lays Gene on it. A bus stop shelters them from the heat and light of street’s center.

  He whips his head around. He faces Gene and brushes the hair from her face. He tilts her head toward him. Presses his palm against her cheek. Cold, clammy. Atlas holds his hand to her neck; her pulse flutters.

  “Apologies are empty,” he whispers.

  He twists Ge
ne’s arms upward, their gashes facing sky, and forces his eyes to her stomach. Blood trickles down her sides.

  “But I am,” Atlas glances over his shoulder, at an Accend looking back at him, “so sorry.” His voice breaks. “There are too many and the bulk has hardly arrived. I’m the object of their frustration. I,” he steps backward, “can’t remain. I—I need—”

  He exhales. He scans Gene up and down and then turns and jogs into the street. Four Accenda run after him: one flailing her arms that burn toward her shoulders, another with a full-face tattoo of a skull, and a couple more wearing jackets that whip up behind their steps, glimmers of weaponry peeking from their jacket linings.

  “Oppressing whitewash,” the skull-faced yells. “Let me cut off those pretty cloned fingers.”

  Squinting at Pylon, Atlas yells, “Dear, omnipotent superiors, we are progression and our path is one. Salute Sidera and her eternal sun.” He glances at his pursuers. “Would you like to hear it in Latin?”

  The Accenda twitch. The burning woman screeches. Atlas smiles through a scowl.

  He reaches Pylon and stretches his hand through its luminant shaft, and borrowed stain—hers—the human blood coating his fingers suctions with slingshot shock a billion rays from Pylon’s cosmic bank. His next gasp speeds his pulse until it’s faster than Gene’s but thumping the force of steel pistons. Wind crashes against his front and a zap lifts his shoulders, stiffens his spine, electric skies on his tongue, cloudless blue in his eyes.

  Atlas turns to the Accenda. He flicks out his finger and the four joined by six more shoot thirty meters off ground. Wind blasts back their extremities, torsos trailing, and throws the fire from their arms and hands. It sounds a boom that quivers windows and spooks blazes into candlelike crouches. The shockwave crunches a couple bodies into City Hall’s upper stories; the others flip for sky, their feet flying above their heads, limbs sprawled.