Atlas

by Nicholas Gagnier

  I suppose he will never tell me which came first or last, but it doesn’t matter any longer.

  The first time will always be that little girl.

  On the God’s Road, the dragons shriek victoriously above; intuitively aware their master holds the Seed of Light. More than ten of them circle the Spire like overripe seagulls, squawking and snapping at each other mid-flight.

  The ground is a different story. The outlanders outnumber the Brotherhood three to one and are less appreciative of their new digs than naturalized citizens, soiling the streets of nearly every district with their presence. They wield weapons brought from Earth that are more familiar than the swords and spears of Atlas, and no less dangerous.

  The Brotherhood run security, telling the outlanders to settle down. The invaders scoff, flaunting their guns. One Brother smacks an invader upside the head— the newcomer relieves his pistol, and shoots the robed figure dead on the God’s Road. His friends join in with toothless smiles and love of God and apocalyptic country, riddling the corpse with fresh bullets. The nearby Brotherhood’s eyes widen, but there are too many of them to control, and they follow no law.

  One of the Behemoths swoops down to mediate the conflict. Its footpads fight air as it descends, craning its accordion-like neck to snap up two of the outlanders. One screams before being sawed in half by razor-sharp teeth. The other loses his head as the dragon’s jaw snaps shut over him, and beating wings lift the dragon skyward to rejoin its mates.

  The surviving collective of outlanders involved in the Brother’s shooting duck and yell, having bitten off more than they can chew. They scramble back to Devil’s Corner as my name is called. My pounding heart is set on destruction, and it passes by me like Avalon’s insect.

  “Ramona!”

  The woman never planned to go quietly— she would rather destroy Atlas than forfeit, burn the world down than admit defeat.

  Maybe we should have just surrendered.

  “Ramona!” Luca calls, grabbing me by the shoulder. Although larger and more capable, he does not look confident in our plan any longer. “Thank the Light. What happened?”

  “No time,” I pant. “Hannah has the Seed. We need to get it back.” At Luca’s widened blues, I nod. “It must have dislodged from Harper’s locket when you fought the dragon. All that matters is getting it back.”

  The angel nods.

  “Agreed. We will rejoin the others— they are safe in the Cathedral passage you found.”

  “All of them?”

  “Tim, Harper and Quorroc. Nobody has been able to find Avalon, though. Nor his remaining students.”

  They must have seen the writing on the wall, and ported out of Atlas altogether. Or they’re dead, taken down in some back alley by outlanders.

  I have to hope for the former.

  “Okay,” I reply. “Let’s join up with —“

  We are interrupted by several sets of eyes that have noticed us. It begins with the Brotherhood in the vicinity tapping their comrades on the shoulder, pointing out the woman who should be dead in the Illumitory. From there, more Brothers are alerted; some recruit idle outlanders, telling them to help resolve a security issue. The dragons are signalled, and their shadows grow larger under my feet.

  “Well, lookie watch we got here!”

  Hannah’s tribal-minded followers enclose Luca and I by the God City arch where I have stood, spellbound by all of Creation’s hatred and self-loathing, winged monsters and wicked witches. There is no sign of the woman— only her people who know that we have been the cause of so much trouble, soon joined by massive dragons trembling the broken cobbles under their landing gear.

  “Missus told us you was all taken care of,” the speaking Brother quips. “Guessss you don’t know when to quit, do ya?”

  Luca’s hand finds his sword’s hilt, placing the strength to draw it in shallow reserve.

  Rather than address the tightening circle of clashing factions and self-interested agents of chaos, Luca looks to me.

  “When I tell you, you clamber over the wall behind us. Run for your life, sister. Run, and don’t look back.”

  No.

  “What? Luca, I’m not leaving you!”

  Scanning the shrinking army we couldn’t possibly hope to hold off alone, the angel doesn’t meet my eye.

  “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve under you, Ramona Knox.” He yanks on the hilt, pulling its gleaming blade to run parallel with his face, gripping it with both palms. “Go.”

  I can’t do this to him.

  “Luca,” I say. “You don’t need to do this.”

  The mob progresses slowly. Earthlings with raised barrels and Atlasians with pointed tips alike have us in their sights, salivating at our impending demise.

  The angel doesn’t answer verbally, grabbing my shirt by the collar, lifting me above his head. The fabrics stretch under his pull, but he does not let go. His wings spread beneath my kicking feet and protesting grunts and demands to put me down. Wielding his weapon outward to ward off Ziz’s forces, the arm holding me up thrusts my body toward the top of the wall.

  “Go, sister!” he screams. My own hands grab the brick barrier, one leg vaulting over it. Luca swings outward, cutting through a number of posturing Brotherhood; shreds of their robes follow the mutually crimson streaks from severed limbs and impaled torsos.

  A set of gunshots escape the outlanders. A second follows it, grazing Luca’s arm. He counters, dropping a mix of Brotherhood and invaders in a neat pile of lacerated corpses. A bullet strikes Luca in the rib, halting his momentum.

  The angel drops to a kneel, wings instinctively contracting around his center mass to protect him. From my place on the proverbial fence above — one leg over each side, watching the slow march of Luca’s end— he seems resigned as the cabal reinforced by dragons winds around him.

  But the angel isn’t done. He yells some indecipherable battle cry, pushing off one knee to balance, carving an arc across the entire front line of Brotherhood caught in the sword’s path. They collapse to the ground at his feet.

  “Ramona, go!”

  The angel’s final proclamation is met with several rounds of gunfire, spattering blood across the same wall I hold onto for dear life. The sword drops from Luca’s open hand— he collapses to both knees this time; wings at full span, a stream of red saliva spilling between his teeth onto the road below.

  I try to call his name, but only a low sob escapes my throat as the crowd parts. A Behemoth pushes between them, huffing before the angel. There is no Seed to shield him now, but I don’t think Luca cares any longer.

  The blast from the dragon’s lungs blows me off the wall. I land hard on my side as its rage burns long and hot, cooking my friend alive.

  I can’t stay here. Luca is gone, and would have wanted me to finish this, not martyr myself to save him. Once the cheering and whooping on the wall’s other side cedes, they’ll remember the bitch who sat above the angel, watching their cruelty and murderous impulse take root.

  I have to join the others. Fighting the breaths caught in my throat, there can be no mourning now.

  When the time comes, I’ll avenge Luca as well.

  ***

  As the angel foretold, Tim and Harper are in the tunnel below the Cathedral ruins. Its pieces are still shoved aside from the trap door. Had any of the woman’s forces patrolled the area, they would have surely seen it. But no Brotherhood pursued me over the wall, appearing through the arch beyond which I fell, scrambling away from my fallen ally and his murderers.

  Quorroc is not here — the man who calls himself Death tells me the Maester had some final preparations to make.

  “What about Luca?” he asks. “I assumed he would have returned with you.”

  The mention of the angel is enough to send me into spirals. I close my eyes, lowering my shaking head.

  “There are too many of them,” I say. “Atlas is overrun with degenerates — all the bad apples the Council tried to keep out
to begin with.”

  “What a damn mess,” Harper muses. “So what do we do?”

  I’m done pretending to have any of the answers. Hannah has the Seed, and all is lost.

  “Time to find some hole to hide in before Ziz wipes out Creation, I guess. Look, there’s no point fooling ourselves any longer. She won, okay?”

  “So that’s it? You’re just going to give up?”

  “What do you want me to do, Harper? The Council was wrong. I’m not special. I’m not extraordinary. I’m just a freak who made friends with Death and got to play on easy mode for a while!” The words burn my throat on the way up, and the bitterness may never go back in its bottle. “Face it. The bitch won.”

  The three of us fall silent, back in a cell where Harper strangled Tim. Her resentment has cooled toward him, and he is equally cold at the suspicion none of this would have happened if he never interfered in my young life.

  “There may be another way.”

  The voice booming down the dark expanse does not belong to anyone in our party, but is immediately familiar. Its synthetic inflections emerge from deeper down the tunnel, the way Harper and I came on our way to claim the Seed.

  The Avatar. Her arrival is accompanied by a sudden, wretched humming, followed by that horrible relay-flipping sound from Stone Mountain, and bright lights pouring up the tunnel. In seconds, Mother’s Star is outshone by its creator.

  “What way?” I ask, stepping forward.

  The Avatar hesitates.

  “My unit was designed to house the Seed of Light, and I have done so since the dying days of the First Age. Its power has residually spread to most of my internal network over such a long period — being hooked into every room and building through Atlas, this means the Seed has left deposits of concentrated Light in every corner of the city.”

  “What’s your point?” Tim asks.

  “Considering most of these points in the network are within my parameters of control, it means I can access them, and use those concentrations of pure energy to short-circuit the electromagnetic barrier that serves as an atmosphere to Atlas.”

  Harper squints, struggling to understand the implications.

  “English, please.”

  “If the barrier is overloaded, anything caught in the field of impact — that is, anything that flies — will experience nothing less than fatal electrocution.”

  “Not even a dragon should survive that,” I say. “That’s the point you’re trying to make, right?”

  The Avatar is reluctant once again.

  “Yes. But it does come with a caveat.”

  “What doesn’t? Every action has a reaction.”

  “That is correct,” she says. “Overloading the barrier will also destroy my circuitry, ceasing operations. In short, it will destroy part of Atlas’ defense network.”

  This is it — our chance to disable the dragons, and one I never thought we would have. But after losing Luca, I am overly sentimental, and look back at Harper and Tim.

  I’m done.

  “You make this call,” I tell them. “I don’t care which of you makes it. Just make it. I...my heart’s not in this anymore, guys.”

  Done making calls that only result in murder and mayhem either way. Done being damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.

  “Do it,” says the man who calls himself Death.

  I can’t bear the responsibility.

  “Very well,” the Avatar replies. “I will require a few moments to designate the appropriate vectors. I would prepare to make your final stand. The outcome will be definitive and immediate.”

  I don’t want to be a monster anymore.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Hannah is alone as she emerges from the Spire. Escaping her hideout in the carcass of Creation, the Avatar’s final act smoked her out. It required no fire, but the crashing bodies of dragons. Barrett follows her out just in time to see its dying sacrifice, and all the destruction it entails.

  The fifteen or so remaining beasts fall out of the sky like planes. One by one, they land in various places across Atlas.

  One plunges into the shadows of Devil’s Corner. I don’t see it landing— only hear the snapping beams and collapse of whatever structure it plowed into at maximum velocity, sweeping brick and stone and plaster into the district’s wailing remains. Another drops dead over the Cathedral ruins, while one more takes out the opening gate to the supreme realm. A fourth dragon dies when it tries to avoid swerving around Stone Mountain in its last moments. The prison narrowly escapes being cut in half as the Behemoth destroys the Dark Quadrant’s outer wall. A second beast can’t avoid its graceless descent — its body strikes the tower at its base. Stone Mountain buckles, leans and finally topples over, disappearing from my sight line. The prison’s destruction is echoed by two hundred million souls escaping it, assuming the Arbiters weren’t inflating the numbers. The souls themselves — black beads with no faces and terrible, tiny screams — collectively swirl from the prison’s wreckage, meeting fresh air and escaping into a black hole of freedom.

  A seventh dragon destroys what remains of the Arena, while an eighth and ninth jointly disappear over the supreme realm’s borders, swallowed by the cosmos. The remaining six are gathered over the Spire; two collide in mid-air, but hit the ground on either side of the Seat. One destroys the Atlas-like statue to the Spire’s periphery, another grazing past its symmetrical equivalent.

  The final Behemoths die on the God’s Road. They rotate as their falls culminate in cracking bones on the cobblestone. Harper is nearly flattened as one of the last dragons tumbles from flight— were it not for my arm reaching out, yanking her out of the landing zone, the Phoenix would be flattened.

  The blond woman watches alongside Barrett — the old Maester is calm, despite the drained color from his toadstool of a face. Gone is the woman’s maddening smile, replaced with horror at her massacred pets, and not an eternal reward to show for it.

  “It’s over, Hannah!”

  Tim’s voice rings across the gap dividing us from her. The man who calls himself Death exhibits a volume and confidence I have never seen of him. It takes a second to realize past his calm, measured composure, that this is a new side of him, a piece of the puzzle I have never seen.

  Anger.

  “Come along,” he says. “You lost. It’s time to stop fighting it.”

  But the blond woman (for all her tenacity and brutality) only clasps her hands, shaking her cocked head at the man she once married — there is nothing recognizable about that fact now.

  “You don’t understand,” Hannah says. Her eyes water, but the voice remains steady. “The Dark Lord and I are one now.”

  “Then take him with you!”

  A trail of moisture treads down her cheek, pulling part of her mascara with it. The black streak continues to her mouth corners — were she to smile, Tim might slap that grin off her face.

  “He will not go. He is almost free — do you think after all this time and patience, the darkness will just go back in its bottle, Tim?”

  The suited man is beyond conversation.

  “I don’t care. You got into bed with the Devil — you live with it! I was ready to face my punishment; you and your Dark Lord took that, and turned it into a mockery, because — why? You were jealous? You were stupid? You couldn’t have figured it out: you were gone! Absorbed in the same fucking locket my friend Harper wears now!”

  Tim’s voice grows, and he has begun to pace back and forth.

  “Tell me you remember that! Or was that one of Olivia’s infamous lies?”

  Of all the things he and I have said to Hannah over her short and violent tenure— all the taunts and jeers and slurs— this is the first to break her exterior. Beyond the fear of displeasing Ziz, she has played it cool, maintaining a minimal confidence. As the barbs in Tim’s voice strike, her expression changes, embracing the one emotion I’ve never seen from her.

  Sadness.

  “Of course I remember that—�
�

  “Then tell me, Hannah — what happened to you?”

  An encore tear follows the first, dying on the same spot— the definition of insanity, as Hannah called it. Closing the distance between her and Tim, she stops in front of him, their faces only inches apart.

  “I love you from Haven, to the stars. I meant that.”

  “If that’s true,” Tim replies, “then give me the Seed.”

  Even from behind him. I see the look — that nanosecond of her viscous, shit-eating grin. In the heartbeat before she unveils a dagger meant for her estranged husband, I try yelling his name, but the sound catches in my throat as Hannah pulls her arm back, thrusting the blade into Tim’s midsection.

  The man who calls himself Death is ready for the sleight-of-hand. She might have thrown him for a loop before, but he has left no contingency unchecked, no suspicion unturned. Dissolving into smoke, his black tendrils arc over Hannah’s head, reappearing in human form behind her.

  This prompts the morose Barrett to lunge forward, producing the same knife used to murder the Priestess. The elder lifts his arm; the knife travels, plunging down, and it seems like forever before it reaches the peak of my dread.

  The loud sound that sends Barrett flying starts by tearing a hole in his neck. His body is catapulted toward the Seat as the Maester’s lower face explodes in a mess. He falls still just past the Spire’s double door.

  Craning my neck back to see who saved Tim yields a very uncertain-looking Quorroc, holding a dead outlander’s weapon. The elder’s nervous hands hold the shotgun, in awe of its sheer power and recoil.

  “First time?” I ask him.

  Hannah, whose face is shades of Lovecraftian horror in its own right, turns and sprints from the scene, holding up the gown that drags behind her. She cuts right around the Seat’s crumpled wall.

  Harper is the first to attempt halting the blond woman. The locket flares; no longer imbued with the stolen Seed, its cast has returned to regular flames. Tim’s wife ducks as the fireball flies past her, missing its mark and landing in one of the houses that dots the God’s Road. The structure bursts into flames, spreading quickly to the next, and the one after that. Soon, all the white facades are engulfed in licking streams of red and orange, tunneling through their insides as the inferno works its way around Atlas’ central plaza.