Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Thunder rattles sky; Sideran voices cut through night. Curling in her fingers, Eden gets on her feet and faces Samuel. Her bleeding hand hangs, a chunk out of its side; her healthy hand rises and conjures flame, its yellow and Pylon’s white and Sidera’s golden glow sculpted across her face’s peaks. Shadows settle in the wrinkles of her downturned brows and reflections of Samuel burn into her burning eyes. The portal expands wide enough for the closest couple Siderans. Imperium sentries yell. Citizens charge.

  Samuel relaxes his grip. He lowers his revolver, lets it slip to the tips of his fingers, and then drops it. Metal thudding road, his heart in his throat, Atlas gapes at his passive, nearly dead companion.

  Eden thrusts her flames.

  With vigor unexpected, Samuel snaps his arm straight and hand up and shrinks behind his outstretched fingers. The flames explode on his palm. He cries out.

  Then plunges his other arm into Pylon, splays his burning one at his side, and yanks the nearest body from the glow. Eyes bulging, the Sideran writhes and claws at Samuel’s face and screams contempt; but Samuel hooks one immovable hand around the Sideran’s primary sash and presses the other fiery palm to his sternum. The citizen’s screams gargle. Samuel’s inflate. He flattens his blistering hand against the male’s heart and the fire licking up Samuel’s fingers morphs to Pleiades blue. Both bodies howl above condensing raindrops that pound soreness into scalps. Azure glare swells at their chests. It grows until it consumes the two bodies from view.

  Eden and Atlas stare.

  The Sideran’s screams die seconds before Samuel’s. The glow retracts into their bodies and the citizen drops limply to the road, chest smoking, tunic charred from pre-assimilation fire. Samuel stands taller before Atlas. Flames remaining sink into his palm until blue highlights yield to the shine of a premature dawn flittering from Pylon’s split. Sunlight glittering the rain down his side, Samuel touches his gut and then his shoulder, and widens his eyes and then twitches them narrow. He checks his hands. Breath heavy, shoulders bobbing, he bends his fingers in and out, all ten unburned, and faces Eden.

  Her brows tense. “What did you—”

  “Siderans leave a strange taste.” Samuel smacks his lips. “Like Febreze.”

  Atlas eyes him up and down. He watches the rainwater swirling red at his feet; no new drop falls from Samuel’s jacket.

  “Now I know why nobody craves these dweebs.” Rubbing his hands, Samuel says, “Not terrible, though.”

  “But you’re,” Eden gawks, “human.”

  “Naw. Never completely but maybe someday, right?”

  Atlas throws his knuckles into Eden’s jaw and she recoils, groans.

  “Fantastical. Retrieve your weapon.” Atlas points at the ground. “We must leave.”

  Samuel picks up his revolver before Pylon. From under a slice of drenched bangs, he gazes into it.

  Siderans start at Imperium’s barks and, with more anxiety than bravado, grab at each other to get through to Pittsburgh. The lancet arch of a portal chips away at earthly reality as it expands beyond Pylon’s original white ring. Sunlight gushes from it. Sun gilts building walls, lampposts, diagonal streaks in air that pitter brick that gleams its truer hue under shadows receding. A broadening wedge of the warmest light engulfs a third of the intersection, darkest night taking the rest. Thunder explodes over Sideran chants crescendoing to chorus. The first five or six citizens stumble through, onto earthly puddles, into lightning flashes.

  Atlas jogs for the intersection’s corner and glances over a shoulder. “Samuel, now.”

  The Siderans spot Samuel.

  They rush at him and he lights his hand, swings it forward, and propels orange snaking leaves into four of six Siderans. Their shrieks erupt a chain reaction through the portal, down the army.

  Cringing, Atlas slows his steps. “Not wise.”

  “The enemy,” one Sideran shouts.

  Those two words spur another, more guttural backward wave of roars discordant to their song, and Samuel gets a mighty kick in the gut. He kicks a Sideran in the gut. Flames and cries and shuffling follow, dozens more Siderans shoving through Pylon.

  Atlas glances at Gene in the distance, at the bodies encircling Samuel, at Gene. Halfway between, he halts.

  A footstep splashes the water behind him; Atlas spins around. Equally equidistant from his pondered destinations, Eden approaches Atlas. She clutches her hand and, leaning around him, smiles at Gene. He steps between them.

  “This—is it control to you?” Atlas yells. He contorts his face, scoffs. “Why have you done this?”

  Eden’s smile stretches.

  “You were an innocent Sideran—”

  “If you took a minute to consider how alien your purposes are to me,” she touches a bloodstained finger to her lip’s center and drags it to the corner, “you might be able to understand mine.”

  He charges a palm. “Tell me.”

  Eden strides through star showers of glowing water streaks, toward Atlas. “If you’d like, I could show you.”

  Atlas hurls a current at her. She leaps forward, leans backward. She tips on her heels, hits the road on her back, and slides feet-first for Atlas, under his wind and over reflections. Airborne droplets swept into her momentum, Eden locks her knees and rams her feet into Atlas’s ankles. He collapses at her side, water webs spurting up around his body.

  Eden yanks Atlas’s back into her, his shoulders to hers, and angles into his ear. She whispers, “This is why.”

  Agony shoots through his side and spreads to every limb, sawing through every vein, every muscle, every bone in his body. Atlas opens his mouth, eyes gaping, throat clogged. He tries to scream. Tries to breathe. He freezes.

  Eden jerks the throwing knife, its blade long as her thumb, out of Atlas’s side. He gasps. His first breath inhaled in centuries breaks through as burning woodchips, tearing and charring all the way down. Eden rolls Atlas onto the road, onto his back soaking in puddles, and climbs on top of him. Eyeing his cheek’s cut and jaw and neck, she tears a strip from the bottom of her blouse, wraps it around her bleeding hand, and bites one end, yanks the other until it knots. She folds both hands around Atlas’s tunic collar. She tugs him upward.

  “This,” Eden pulls Atlas into a sitting position, stroking his nape, “is the only real thing in the universe.”

  Atlas gags. His whole body trembles.

  “Hush, beloved. Shh,” she twiddles the hair above his neck, “it’s just for pain. The things you’ve taught Sovereign and me . . .” Though she squeezes her bandaged hand around Atlas’s tunic till her blood seeps onto it, Eden softens her gaze down his profile. “You were the unexpected in our predictable reality, but this,” she pats his gouged side, “is proof no one escapes Sidera. That’s what’s important, 27.”

  Closing her eyes, she curves her healthy hand around his head and presses her jaw to his. Her skin chills. Her exhale bites his ear. Atlas chokes out his breath and locks his glare forward, on her hair streaked red.

  “I do this because you are nothing.” Eden blinks and her eyelashes brush his jaw. “You belong,” her lips graze the space under his ear, “to me.”

  Dead lavender clings to the inhale through Atlas’s nose. Nausea chases it.

  He scratches at the ground by his hip, wriggling his fingers over brick crevices. Yelling and banging and thudding slosh upon puddles behind him but interpretation tangles with the water in his ears. He strains his peripheral vision. Beyond the frost Eden exhales, the white fibers that tickle his cheek, Atlas forces vision’s thickening tunnel to his right and glimpses a silver gleam. His heart jolts.

  Samuel’s revolver. It must have gotten kicked out of Pylon’s innermost scuffling; it lies loaded, rain tapping its steel finish, two meters from Atlas’s leg.

  Eden sinks her fingernails into his neck. He clenches his shoulders up into her claws and sucks a silent gasp. Smoothing into porcelain, she angles back, relaxes her hands. She looks Atlas in the eye.

  “This sto
oping beneath me is the truth all will accept. And I’ll take it—all. Your playmates, life, name, world—” Eden touches his lip with her thumb. “You’ll lose it all because, dear nothing,” she frowns, “Atlas’s shoulders are breaking.”

  His wide pupils glazed, fixated on hers, Atlas grasps at the road for the revolver. He leans and throws down his arm but his outstretched fingers slap cold, wet ground a meter from the pistol grip and then drag back. His gut drops.

  Eden smiles. She holds a finger to her lips. The same finger runs down Atlas’s chest, sailing shallow seas over leather sashes and tunic furrows, and the other four fingers uncurl from her palm as it touches his heartspace. Eden there bursts a bright tangerine flame that morphs to translucent blue in half a second. She presses it against his chest. It seizes Atlas. From the inside out, spinal column to ribs and skin shamefully thin, it pulls. His back arched to extremes, sternum suctioned to her hand, temperatures too molten to understand sear Atlas’s depths until his mind lies, telling him rain’s liquid nitrogen and her fire: a lightless vacuum. He thinks he screams.

  An arm’s reach from Samuel’s weapon, his veined fingers constrict and shrivel closed.

  Eden’s hand is too small, its glow dancing highlights dimmer than Pylon’s, for the invisible agony that burrows through his unburned skin and tunic, wrenching life kilometers deeper than heart and micrometers finer than cells. Beyond the physical, something of his being dislocates. Cold disperses in unearthly detachment and leaves pain only, oscillating razors that drill out his every pore.

  His sight warps. Pulse skips each third beat and lungs shrink and the scorching wrings his brain until it peaks. Atlas numbs. His lids droop halfway down his eyes. He slumps into the last traces of air expelled from his open mouth.

  Then it stops. His heart jerks a return third beat and inhale swoops back. Atlas peels his eyelids.

  Gene stands behind Eden, holding Samuel’s revolver to her hair, the barrel’s tip buried in pearl strands. Eden starts to turn. Gene squeezes the trigger.

  Eden slumps off Atlas and to the road before the explosion cracks through his eardrums and resonates off alley walls. Gene steps around Eden, who lies sprawled, facedown. She aims for Eden’s back and again shoots. And again. Gene discharges the revolver five times in total but pulls the trigger at least twenty. It clicks and clicks until she stops and raises the weapon above her shoulder. She hurls it at Eden’s body. The hunk of steel smacks her motionless back and bounces off, clanking to stillness that equals its target, in the road, under the rain.

  Atlas clutches his side. Gasping on tremors, he drags a leg out from underneath Eden’s ankle and bends in his knees.

  Gene stares at the body. Her hands hover at her sides; her chest expands and contracts as quickly as Atlas’s heart beats; her waist still bleeds. She stares. Through the pitter-patters laying their mirrors.

  Atlas grimaces pushing himself onto his feet somehow, sometime, and holds out a hand. “Come away.”

  She looks at him. Her eyes roll back, shoulders sag, and she falls.

  “Gene.” Atlas jumps forward and catches her halfway sprawled onto road. He tips her back into his arm. Legs shaking, his gouge screaming, he slouches under her weight. “You can’t. You senseless walker, you can’t—” He gasps. “Return to me.”

  Her eyelids slide open. She squints at his face and whispers, “Sorry.”

  “For the love of the Imperium,” Atlas sighs, “cease these apologies and survive with me.”

  She budges her head up and down.

  “I don’t—” He cringes. “I don’t believe I can carry you.”

  “But you can carry the world?” Gene hangs on to his shoulder and inhales. “Time to lose weight, Gene.”

  He turns his head, vertigo replaying the motion, and shouts, “Samuel!”

  Near one hundred Siderans stream from the portal, now the width of a double door. Black eye and bruised jaw, Samuel shoves from the crowd and waves flames at the hands grabbing his back. He runs for Atlas and Gene, flailing his arms and legs. Paces from them, he glances down and stops. He leaps to his revolver. Pockets it, hurls another fire stream into the Siderans, heat distorting the distortion bloating Pylon’s threshold, and flings himself the last steps with a grin and glow not flaunted in weeks. Samuel wraps his arm around Gene’s back.

  He glimpses white tendrils a meter from his foot; he does a double take. His face blanks, pales, and breath pauses.

  He says, “Is she—”

  Atlas nods.

  Samuel diverts his eyes. He pulls Gene up straight and Atlas follows.

  Clutching his side and Gene’s shoulder, Atlas staggers with her and Samuel toward the ledged building and then past it. He thuds his foot down and drags Gene centimeters down and lifts it and squeezes her shoulder upward. He winces until his winces embed as contortion permanent. Samuel wears the same, only with wider eyes; they gloss over Grant Street’s vanishing point, where the Accenda tumbled minutes past, and reflect the raindrops scattering Sideran light beyond its cone. The three stumble from Pylon.

  Atlas looks over his shoulder. Thirty Siderans chase after them, all dressed in leather-strapped white, all empty-handed. No Imperium red: no guards, no guardians, sentries, or vigils crawl the streets. The beings in maroon jackets stand tall, jaws jutted, behind the anterior masses, sun down their puffed chests, their catalyst gauntlets prodding forward adolescents and middle-aged women and a young male silently sobbing. Though distance fades these unsoiled generals from view, Atlas can hear the disdain in their echoed commands, feel the dither in citizens’ first earthly steps. He narrows his eyes.

  One pursuing citizen narrows her eyes back. She thrusts her arm and wind billows her hair and shoots for Atlas’s heels. He flinches but her current fizzles halfway through flight, reaching the back of his tunic in ripples.

  Atlas turns forward and picks up pace, sympathy wilted. His blood pounds fire. “They’ve regained their abilities.”

  Samuel grunts.

  “Samuel,” Atlas lugs himself lugging Gene, “procure us time.”

  Twisting his free hand behind him, Samuel tosses a bolt of flames at the road a few meters ahead of their pursuers.

  Atlas frowns. “No. Procure: verb. Obtain or acquire something—”

  Samuel’s fire crashes into ground, springs off it, and fans out. The palm-wide flow bursts into a flood that stretches from building to building. It flashes a vivid yellow and swallows view of every last Sideran shrieking behind the clash of fire blossoms.

  “Time: noun.” Samuel hoists Gene up and staggers for the next intersection. “The thing toddlers should use before flapping their pompous holes.”

  Making a face, Gene grips their shoulders. “You guys shouldn’t snark—” she whispers, “snarky.”

  “Gene, reserve your energy.”

  “Don’t talk, Denim.”

  Atlas, Gene, and Samuel limp past the first block, under smoldering branches, by blackened brick and tattered advertisement banners. They walk around an Accend body; Gene cringes and recoils her gaze into Samuel’s jacket, scuffing her foot on black and red streaks and crystal shards. Soot settles beneath rain. Blood and dirt wash from their clothing and skin and burden them with kilograms of soaked material too heavy.

  “Gene, Samuel,” Atlas huffs, “Pylon is opened.”

  Their feet slap puddles and grips reposition.

  His chest tightens. “We—I’ve failed.”

  Gene watches the road recede. “Atlas—”

  “Prophecy is prophecy.” Samuel lifts his chin. “Nothin’ we could’ve done.”

  “If I had been m-more vigilant, hadn’t misused time—”

  “Hey.” Samuel leans forward and meets Atlas’s eyes stitched with scarlet and clouded by fatigue. “Nothin’,” he ducks his head, “we could’ve done.”

  Gene’s arms slide down Atlas’s and Samuel’s backs; her fingers catch their necks. A cold sweat clasps the back of Atlas’s tunic collar. He looks at Gene. She slows,
slows them, and hangs her head into her concaved frame.

  Atlas tenses his arm. “Merely a few more steps, Gene.”

  But it’s more for himself, his side remaking the tangibility of Smit’s cut to his back, of its delving teeth and stink like rusty nails. Though howling for attention, his gouge begs softly under the malaise encumbering his every limb, lethargy muffling his pain. A chill rain couldn’t impart braids his bones; assimilation lingers in his chest.

  “A few more,” Atlas whispers.

  “I—” Gene groans. “I can’t—”

  Stumbling right, Gene slips from Samuel and Atlas and drops to the curb. She sits on sidewalk and props herself on her hands behind her hips. Eyelids fluttering, she pants, trembles, sweats beads riding rain down her forehead until she wipes it and streaks the red on her hands across her brow. Her skin surpasses the pallor of Elisium’s overthrown queen drowning in blood and water blocks down the street.

  “Whoa.” Samuel eyes Gene’s stomach. “You’re still—”

  “Bleeding,” Atlas says. Gut knotted, he kneels at the curb and hovers his hands before her cut.

  Gene gasps and looks at Samuel. “You’re not.”

  “Wacky transformation.” He fingers around his jacket pockets. “I’m all Accend again and not dead, by the way.”

  She chokes. “I saw.”

  “Shh.” Atlas holds a hand to her forehead and another to her gash. She’s ice, much more than himself.

  “That Sideran—” Skewing her face, Gene frowns at Samuel. “You just killed him.”

  Samuel gropes around his pants pockets next, then the side of his left shoe, and pulls out something. He crouches. “We’re at war, Bonbon Jr.” He cradles three pills in his palm before Gene. “Immediate-release oxycodone. Swallow.”

  Atlas wipes the blood from her forehead with little success, and Gene grimaces at Samuel’s hand. He shoves it toward her mouth. She makes a noise and grabs the tablets and swallows them one by one. She coughs. Then goes stiff, squeezing her lips holding her breath.

  “Lie down flat.” Samuel glances at Atlas and points to Gene’s feet. “Get out of the way and elevate her legs.”