Atlas folds his hands under the table and holds still. Gene looks up.
“And I don’t want the harsher things to change that,” she says.
He stares. His tunic’s sleeve falls down.
Gene squints at it. “Or maybe not so trust-able.”
“I—” Atlas sweats. “I am a regular entity and came to be by the womb,” he whips his head around the restaurant, “exactly as you and many others in this establishment, if not all.”
She opens her mouth.
“I contain honesty,” Atlas says.
She closes it. Gene takes another bite of her pizza and continues watching Atlas, eyes glistening with emotion far from distrust, for the next seconds. Then she laughs.
* * *
The material is rough, elastic. Atlas pinches it between his thumb and forefinger, dangling it from apparently the wrong angle.
Gene bends down, grips the pants’ hem along the waist, and turns them upright. Atlas holds out the dark jeans.
“I know this is weird.” Gene slides her hands down her legs. “And I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. For this,” slurring her words, she motions to herself and bursts a breath, “me, making awkward conversation and situation and run-on sentences that can go nowhere not stressful in stressful department stores, but—” She shrugs. “You can go try on stuff and see if they fit.”
Atlas tilts his head at the pants.
“It’s the least I can do. Well,” she lowers her voice, “and the most because money’s been—you know—but that’s what praying’s for, right?”
He nods. “These will fit.”
“You sure? I always—”
“I’m certain.”
Gene rocks onto her heels. “Okay, now for a non-ripped-or-bloodied shirt.” Twisting around, she points to a shelf piled with maroon material. “There’s—”
“No.” Atlas clenches his jaw. “No red.”
Gene lifts her hands. “You know what they say about opinions.”
“Who—” Looking past her, he hugs the denim into his chest. “What said?”
She follows his gaze over her shoulder. “Um, they said we should get going because clothing store employees that stock shelves while watching me with their money-grubbing slits for eyes make me nervous.”
“And my presence doesn’t?”
Gene turns forward. “Naw. We’re friends.”
She smiles and gently elbows Atlas. He stares at his shoes until they’re around the store two more times, at checkout, and through the sliding, automated door he distrusts, items in hand. He steps onto sunlit sidewalk.
Natural glare keeps Atlas’s eyes downward as he trails behind Gene. But halfway to her car, black ash thrashes an ascent near his ear, and he snaps his head up. A massive onyx bird, hooked beak, mighty wingspan, soars above the store and into sky, croaking rusty grievances. It disappears behind a clump of trees.
“Huh,” Gene says. “That was one fat crow.”
Atlas mmms and, while clumsily mounting Gene’s sedan, tracks the horizon the bird flew behind. He’s never seen a bird as black, spreading night in its tail feathers. He likes that charred child of dusk as much as he does its sunless sire.
He jerks forward as the vehicle jerks into reverse and locks his lips for the remainder of the drive. Sunlight wanes and woody appendages cluster out roadside detail till pupil-black, till smeared into velvet down as they accelerate onto the highway. He watches the trees and the trees, raising his arm hair, surfacing close memories of surveillance without end, watch him. He leans into his seat, stifles his breath, peers into setting sky tainted with webs and fissures and climbing wicker of maples’ painted silhouette . . .
“Minus the poor impersonations of Alan Rickman and your lack of applause, of course.”
Atlas’s eyes adjust. He stands in Gene’s living room, squinting through her. His journey to this spot, under gentle lighting and decorations familiar, slipped his mind.
He clears his throat. “Could you repeat that?”
“That was fun.” Gene skews her mouth and twirls a finger in the air. “The driving and food and shopping and stuff.”
Atlas twitches his lip to curve upward.
“Says a lot.” She sets a couple bags by the sofa and plops, sighing, into the cushions. “I have to hit a man with my car before I can force him on a date.”
He sits in the armchair diagonal her. “Date?”
Gene cringes but laughs. “I didn’t—I mean, not if I offend—Gene’s making funny, funny jokes.”
“Joke.” Atlas scrunches his forehead. “I once heard a joke.”
“It’s nice to hang out with someone who doesn’t make small talk and copy every other person in sight. I haven’t told anyone about how,” she breathes in, “I feel in a long time. Thanks for listening.”
“No, it’s—I intend—” Atlas exhales. He angles forward and holds his eyes in place for the first time since dawn. “Thank you, Gene. Reconciliation is surpassed. I feel significantly less like a child lost in a big city.”
She beams. “You’re welcome.”
Atlas sits on the edge of his seat, posture rigid. He waits.
“It’s getting dark and you’re probably exhausted.” Gene springs up and, from her closet, retrieves a pillow, plush, rectangular, and blanket, thick, patterned with some sort of hexagonal crystals, two-dimensional white branches in star shapes. Shutting the closet door with her foot, she throws the pillow on the couch and the blanket over its armrest. “Sorry, the couch’s lumpy in spots. I’ve slept on many a couch lump many a time and it’s, well . . .” She slants her smile. “I should get some sleep too, ’cause work and the like. If you need anything, just knock.”
Atlas nods.
Gene returns it and heads for the door down the hall, turning off the lights as she goes. She leans around the corner. “Good night.”
“Good—” His brows tense. He glances out her curtain-framed window, at its shadows and reflected moonlight and the black growing in between. “Night?”
Gene shuts her bedroom door and Atlas switches seats. He peeks inside one of the shopping bags.
Curiosity drives him to change into his new jeans and shirt, a white, long-sleeved shirt, the closest item to familiarity. He tosses his ripped clothing and leather bands onto an armchair and pinches his jeans’ pocket. He feels heavy. He sits down and slips on his white, citizen-grade shoes. He feels heavier. But secure, as long as he doesn’t look window-ward.
Resting his head on the pillow, Atlas reclines into Gene’s couch per her implications and despite his inclinations—to lower further, onto the broad floor, even without a sleeping mat. He blinks at the ceiling. A settling peep by the front door spurs him to ponder Earth’s wind patterns, if its chaos allows such. Five minutes of stucco blurs in silence and he drags the blanket off the armrest. He unfolds it. He makes a face.
Does he need coddling?
But he brushes a hand against the fabric and his grimace falls. It’s the softest thing he’s ever touched. In Sidera, he hadn’t been permitted anything similar to a blanket after age two.
Fully clothed, shoes on, Atlas billows out the blanket and adjusts it over himself. He buries his face in it. Closes his eyes. His fingers unclench; forehead relaxes; and his breathing slows with his heart rate.
A door booms open.
His heart pounds. Atlas sits up and throws off his blanket. Gene hasn’t left her room, hasn’t opened her door with the creaking hinge his ears have labeled and filed for easy retrieval, the door very opposite the front’s.
He squints through room’s darkness and at the front doorway, at the tall figure of a man stepping over the threshold. Atlas can’t distinguish a face.
Holding his breath, he jumps onto his feet and swings around the sofa. Silhouetted in the light of the moon, dressed in black deep as his surroundings, the man spots Atlas. They both freeze. Then the man pushes off the floor and charges, a frenzied beast built of thirty black birds, at Atlas.
Atla
s raises his palms to the intruder, grinds his teeth, and releases the power in his veins. A breeze streams out his fingers. He tenses them. The breeze streams into a wind that quivers his own sleeves.
But the man collides with Atlas and wraps a hand around his throat, another around his shoulder, running him across the room. He heaves Atlas into the wall between an end table with a lamp and the window. The apartment walls rattle. The man brings his right hand to meet his left, sinks ten fingers into Atlas’s neck, and yanks his head from the wall. Then, reversing thrust, shoves Atlas back into it. Atlas groans. His vision spins black with silver slivers of the open door’s moon rays, churning a dozen crescent moons four hundred thousand kilometers fallen.
Holding Atlas with his right hand, the attacking figure withdraws a fist. He pops back his elbow, arm, shoulder, and aligns his knuckles with Atlas’s nose. Atlas’s vision focuses. He reaches to his left and, clenching the narrow shaft beneath its shade, grabs the lamp off the table. Atlas thrusts it into the man’s ear. It shatters.
The intruder releases Atlas and staggers sideways, following the drift of airborne ceramic shards. He stumbles into the coffee table but catches himself on its edge. Though he slouches, the man’s figure, skimmed by rays through swaying curtains, still hangs a few centimeters over Atlas. Fingers curled, Atlas hurls a fist. It lands on the man’s jaw and whips his head to the side. The dark silhouette suppresses a grunt as it straightens.
“What in holy heaven?”
Atlas looks past the man’s shoulder. Pale, mouth agape, Gene props herself against the hallway, lit by a glow from inside her bedroom. She presses her arm into the wall. She shakes.
The man faces her. He raises a hand and flicks something orange-tinted, something bright off it: a spark. It dissipates into night. He upturns his palm and another, much larger wave of the same radiance climbs the air, sharpens the shadows on room’s every object, stretches above the man’s head. Heat tapers off its dancing petals. Fire. It crawls up his wrist and around the back of his hand.
Gene hyperventilates.
“Return to your room, Gene.” Atlas points. “Leave.”
Swinging back his fiery arm, the man twists his front foot, adjusts his rear foot, and fixes his hand in Atlas’s line of sight. But the man doesn’t aim his way; the inferno clung to unburned fingers consumes Atlas’s view of Gene.
Atlas flings himself forward, past the man, onto the coffee table, and steps between its edge and a vase. The attacker thrusts the fire from his hand. It streams as a saffron drill for Gene’s wide eyes. Atlas jumps off the table.
He hits the flames midair, his shoulder first and his back taking the rest of the blow. He crumples to the ground. Table’s vase wobbling to settle, Atlas skids on his elbow across hardwood. He rolls onto his back and the fire suffocates, though blistering heat lingers on his neck, more exposed than it would have been before he changed clothing.
Striding around the coffee table, the man represses his power. It shrinks into his skin until the room loses its glow and all retakes darkness, except Gene’s outline in hallway light. She reels toward Atlas, who hears two things: her gasps heartbeats apart and the creak of footsteps too steady and muffled to be hers. Gene kneels and grips Atlas’s shoulder.
Atlas sits up and pushes one hand into hardwood floor, pushing the other into Gene, pushing her away. He winces onto his feet.
He spreads a palm at his side. Atlas inhales to his diaphragm and again attempts: he gathers the charge electrifying his lungs, funnels it down his arm, and snaps his hand forward. The power meets his fingers when they meet their target. Air gushes out, floods the space between Atlas and the man, tosses their hair, rocks picture frames, billows curtains, blasts the snowflake blanket and overturns a potted fern and cracks tabletop’s vase as it dives into the floor. The man turns a cheek. But, grimacing forward, waves fire in the flourish of his hands. A livid tangle of solar tufts collides with Atlas’s wind, driving a similar force, though many degrees higher in temperature, into his siphoned from spring skies. Flames push at one end and gusts at the other; both churn a bulb. Fire and wind’s impact swells in the center of Gene’s living room till Atlas narrows his throbbing eyes to slits that peek its small sun. Flurries and licks of orange and merging, compacting, glaring seas spin into a whirlpool suspended above hardwood’s hazy mirror exactly between their two propellants.
Atlas locks his jaw, strains his stance. He steps forward. His bared teeth showing through a gap in the collision, the man does the same.
They both pant into the whir of wind and fire’s gravitational compression. Atlas cringes; his knees quake.
His wind charges onward and, devouring its sparks at flight, extinguishes the man’s inferno. The room falls black. Atlas releases the last of his power and collapses.
IV
In Infernum
If his mind remains whole and alert in some distant alcove in his head, then he knows what it would be contemplating:
How can darkness, the absence of light, weigh so heavily? How can exhaustion, the absence of energy, cumber his shoulders and cement his body to the hardwood floor?
“Atlas. Atlas.” A hand touches his arm. “Are you okay?”
His mouth moves. “Mm, ita vero. Such occurs not rarely—falling from skies, taking vehicle collision. Let—” Atlas squeezes his eyelids together. “Let me rest and then discuss next cycle.”
“He might wake up and we need to get out of here and call the police and not die.” Gene slides her arm underneath his back and pushes. “Come on.”
He groans. Her voice prods his consciousness until pangs down his body budge mind’s cogs into shattering their rust and spinning a mechanical jungle. One by one, he feels his shoulders, his arms, his back. They ache.
Atlas opens his eyes and, cringing with his cringes, Gene helps him sit upright. In the new glow of a lamp left standing, he blinks and swallows and stretches his neck. He freezes.
A set of frayed, casual shoes lies a meter from Atlas’s. The feet of a darkly dressed, floor-strewn man propped against the living room table fill them.
“I, um, don’t thi—” Gene’s tone rises an octave and squeaks. She clears her throat. “I don’t think he’s dead but you knocked him out pretty good with,” she faces Atlas, brows tensing, “whatever you did.”
Atlas roots his heels, Gene hoisting his arm, and stands. He steps toward the body in question.
“We should just go,” Gene whispers.
She tugs on Atlas’s sleeve but he shakes his head, squinting at the man on the floor.
“One moment,” he says.
Atlas grips the coffee table and shoves it forty-five degrees from the man, whose head thumps the hardwood. The man sprawls out. His mouth falls open; hair spills across floor; and his left arm clatters into settling unnaturally bent above his head. Atlas’s forehead crumples. The man’s young—mid to late-twenties—and so unlike his silhouetted persona, one that loomed a half-meter taller, eighty percent blacker, and much less splayed.
The man’s shaggy, black hair skims his huddled shoulders and waves at the ends. Dark stubble contrasts the pallor of his chin and jaw. His double-breasted jacket, a cropped, black trench coat, makes his hands and neck, framed by his upturned collar, appear white under the lamp’s ring. He’s thin, angular.
Crouching, Atlas grabs the man by his shoulders and yanks him up. The man bats his eyes. Atlas straightens his knees, locks labor-calloused fingers around the intruder’s cropped coat, and throws him into the same section of wall he himself was pinned against earlier. The black-haired being grimaces; Gene lets slip a frail peep.
Atlas leans forward and says, “What are you?”
The man spits.
Narrowing his eyes, Atlas wipes his cheek with the back of a hand and then wipes his hand on the man’s jacket. “You’re hardly the first to treat me in such a manner. Hmm,” he purses his lips, “sorry. Your saliva fails to upset me.”
“Do not.” The man squirms. “Touch. My ja
cket.”
Atlas wraps one hand around the man’s throat and whispers, “Do you feel powerful now, fire being?”
He smirks. “Yeeeap.”
“Define ‘yeeeap.’ ”
“Yee: noun—you.” He ducks his head. “Eap: verb—are the pageant queen of morons.”
Atlas looks past the man’s shoulder. “Yee,” he studies the window with blurred vision, “ea—”
“Don’t pop an aneurysm.”
“Quiet.” Atlas jams the man’s back into the wall. “Why did you attack us?”
The man jerks his thick bangs to one side of his face. “I attacked you. You’re a Sideran.”
His eyes widen. “How—why,” Atlas exhales, “do you believe such gives you permission to burst into Gene’s dwelling establishment and assault the both of us?”
“I have ‘permission’ to do what I want. Now, get out of my face.” The being upturns his palms at his sides and sparks dance off them; but Atlas wraps both hands around his throat and clenches until the sparks fade and gagged groans replace them.
“Mmnaw amah ergges,” splutters the man.
Atlas loosens his grip by a hair. “What?”
Lines of pain and annoyance rimming his eyes, the subdued intruder gasps the purple from his face and repeats, “I—I’m not at my perkiest. This visit’s been peachy but let’s do it another time.”
“What is your prejudice against Siderans?” Atlas asks.
The man coughs. “Are you completely stupid?”
Atlas digs his fingers into his neck, leans in till their noses are centimeters apart, and lowers his voice to a breath softer than the man’s accelerating heartbeat. “Are you?”
The man stares. Then rests his head against the wall and breathes in. “You know, now that I think about it, Siderans aren’t that bad of non-people people. Apart from their bloody massacre of freedom, the impotents at the top, and the fanatical, collective salute to Stalin from the Kool-Aid-drinking bottom, Siderans are—” The man smiles. “Well, they’re just farm-fresh daisies.”
“I fled Sidera,” Atlas says.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 4