Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  “Release?” Eden laughs. “You’re Sideran. Your blood will always be the price for freedom.”

  “Why do I speak then?”

  “Because you’re Sideran.” She runs the tip of her knife along his jaw. “And Siderans are dogs by nature and so, Atlas of Eden, next question: who is the ‘Walker’?”

  He wheezes. “I don’t understand.”

  “The human from The Presage. Who is it?”

  “What ‘Presage’?”

  “I like dogs. Siderans are even better.” Eden leans over his legs, a hand on his knee. “You can cut them and cut them and they just don’t die.”

  She tosses her knife in the air and catches it, middle and ring finger curled around the handle’s pummel, the blade’s tip downward. She dangles it over Atlas’s stomach.

  “Is this new?” Eden nods to his shirt.

  He grasps his shackles.

  Before his thoughts acknowledge his senses, she throws down her arm. The knife’s tip sinks into his gut—

  Too tight. Can’t breathe. Eyes wide, fingers clawing the stone floor, Atlas thrusts a scream up his throat but it doesn’t come out. The viscous liquid seeping from his shirt burns. It pulses through every muscle and webs through every vein until it cycles again to his center and spews woodchips.

  —and Eden slides the blade upward, up over his stomach and to his chest.

  The first gasp breaks through his teeth. It burns more than his blood.

  Atlas’s eyes make three translucent Edens out of one, the snow draped over their heads swaying, crossing, tangling his vision. Each of the angels climbs on top of Atlas, anchors her knees by his hips, grips his stained shirt, and inhales. He squints. Eden, merging into a single being, gazes at the ceiling light.

  She whispers, “No one opens a gateway between sky and earth, no one but the one sent. You. That’s how you’re special, amans. You know about the prophecy. I don’t appreciate lying—can’t trust you when you’re lying. Trust is important, Atlas.”

  His scream spews in dry, strained segments. He gags on them.

  “You know what else is important?” The glint in Eden’s eye swells. “Blood is important.”

  Lowering her chin, she looks into Atlas and holds the knife to his jaw. He scrapes char up his fingernails digging into his fetters, suffocates under the slit in his abdomen, watches the silver gleam in Eden’s irises. He closes his eyes and, denying all paper-thin steel pressing his skin, conjures an image he’d rather have as his last: Sideran plains and their sun. They flash and depart. His mind won’t hold them; agony won’t surrender to them.

  The blade retracts and releases its pressure. Eden lifts her elbow, centers herself, and tenses her fingers. She throws the knife forward.

  VI

  Light That Leaves the Hanged Head

  An explosion rattles Atlas’s eardrums but not the room. His eyes burst open and Eden stares through him, her mouth agape. She drops her knife. Slumps to the side. Her foot drags across his lap, and the destroying angel hits floor’s stone facedown, limbs sprawled.

  Atlas looks to the doorway. His mind buzzes with his ears and his eyes show him a dream too hazed, too unreal:

  Half a head shorter than his captor’s, the silhouette of a woman parts the incandescence between dungeon and hall. Her hair’s honey soaks in yellow backlight, her elbows grazing door’s jambs; and Gene aims a handgun into Atlas’s cell, pistol’s black shaft meeting his neck where Eden’s back was seconds ago. Gene’s arms tremble, eyes bloodshot, and her skin drains to white a shade warmer than Eden.

  “Whoa,” she mouths.

  Atlas compresses his lungs; only a groan releases.

  “Oh, good heaven above.” Gene lowers her weapon and stumbles into the chamber. “What did they—”

  She heaves an exhale and bends down, eyes on Atlas’s stomach. Sweat paints her forehead. She hyperventilates.

  Atlas says, “How—”

  “No, no talking.” Gene fiddles with his irons. “Key. Key’s a where—care’s a wee—” She shakes her head and then whips it around, scanning the cement. “GRAH. KEY?”

  I don’t know, Atlas mouths, but half his thoughts don’t follow his lips and all don’t sound. Why is everything excessively wet? Am I asleep at your dwelling?

  Gene curves a hand around Eden’s shoulder and pushes her over. Gene jolts and recoils.

  Open wide, Eden’s eyes dart; her chest expands and contracts twice per second; her blouse steeps in the living scarlet that pools around her side. Holding her breath, Gene slips her fingers into Eden’s pants pockets, the left after the right, and retrieves a small, rusted key. She inserts it into Atlas’s shackles. The key hops out of her quivering fingers six times before she successfully frees his ankles and wrists.

  Gene stares at Atlas, then Eden, Atlas again. “ ’Kay. Going.”

  She wraps her arm around Atlas’s back and helps him up. He would scream if he knew how. They limp and stagger and straighten their knees, crumple, and straighten again through the door and into the hall.

  The hall extends into a tunnel, connecting series of countless others. The burning razor blades lodged in Atlas’s abdomen sew his mouth shut, but his mind can’t retrace the steps taken into Elisium’s stronghold or form a sentence to express it anyway. Gene grinds her teeth and leads Atlas. They lumber around meter-wide curved pathways, into straight ones three meters wider, and shimmy through others barely classifiable as walking spaces.

  Atlas’s hands, arms, brain—all shuts down and falls limp. His legs cycle on automatic. Laying eroded corners and skulking under dim light, the pewter stone beneath foot throbs with his vision: inclining and declining, cutting short and bounding far into darkness. They crawl a labyrinth. Nausea climbs up his throat.

  “You’re all right.” Gene grasps his shoulder. “You’re okay.”

  He bobs up and down, wincing each step.

  She lowers her voice. “A promise’s a promise.”

  They trudge up the staircase that Eden once threw him down. Stone stairs morph into wooden ones. Atlas’s foot presses a creak into a floorboard, the first at staircase’s top, and slips. Gene gasps and steadies him. Ash swirls the air, black carbon clotting their tear ducts, and the top step’s dust kicks thicker their wake in an aerial riot as Gene and Atlas skid onto level flooring. The gray before them drapes untouched:

  It buries all but the ceiling—the fresco, gold-leafed vaults crafted for a cathedral but shrunk for Elisium’s primary manor. Ash coats the scalloped armchairs and chaise lounges, sticks in the details of engraved end tables, clings to antique paintings desaturated less by time, more by sooty veils. Gene guides Atlas through a hallway lined with dozens of these: gray slabs framed. She coughs. Atlas too, but not for the same reason.

  “Someone,” Gene gasps, “needs a Swiffer.”

  They cut the corner, Atlas bumping its edge, groaning, and shuffle through the lobby. They reach the front, stained-glass door. Gene opens it, glances left and right, and lugs Atlas along the building’s exterior, ducking below wrought iron fence pickets and their stiletto-tipped spade crowns. A familiar fog of woodsmoke and shredded char dances before the thick, spongey turf Atlas crosses. They walk for the forest. He doesn’t look up, up past his shoes or behind a shoulder or to his more vulnerable side; he watches the halved opening’s grass blur with his feet.

  Snarled shadows sway across the ground, distorting his distorted vision, and they’re at the forest’s edge. Atlas lifts his head. A spiny trunk towers a pace from his nose. Gene tugs him closer and he slips past it, his fingers brushing its bark.

  “They didn’t see us.” Slowing her steps, Gene exhales. “We made it. God lives.”

  “Sure, blondie. Eden’s reputation lives. And, boy, do the most curious of Accenda book one-way flights to Japan when she’s in a let’s-pry-the-legs-off-Barbie mood.”

  Atlas squints through forest’s shade. He and Gene bumble to a stop before a tall figure. He can’t make out a face.

  �
�You.” Gene points her weapon at the figure’s chest. “You’re going to take us out of this place and you’re gonna do it as an Oscar-winner, just like we agreed.”

  Samuel steps out of the shadows. Atlas clenches his jaw until it rivals the pain in his abdomen.

  “Relax. I made a deal with you and there’s no breaking, bending, or snapping of said deals,” Samuel says.

  Atlas chokes on a scoff.

  “Just chill.” Samuel pockets his hands and nods to Gene’s handgun. “Okay?”

  She discharges her weapon at his feet. Samuel jumps half a meter in the air and makes a noise.

  “Sorry,” Gene says.

  Samuel rubs his ears. “Huh?”

  “No. Mm-mm.” One after the other, Gene shakes out her hands and then squeezes the gun’s grip. “There’s no ‘chilling.’ There’s Morgan Freeman.” She jerks her weapon. “There’s me. And there’s a dying man in serious need of a hospital.”

  “You named your nine-millimeter Morgan Freeman.”

  “What?”

  “No, no, you’re fine. It’s fine.”

  “What’s your gun’s name then?”

  “Same as my baby’s.”

  “Girlfriend or car? Or baby?”

  “All three if the timing’s right some—”

  Atlas groans.

  “Not the topic.” Gene straightens her aim at Samuel. “I am so very, very jittery right now so my finger doesn’t have the best trigger control right now so move it. Right now.”

  Samuel lifts his hands. “All right, Judge Judy. The tri-dimensional area heard that gunshot and is probably coming for us anyway. Then again, the tri-dimensional area hears a gunshot every half hour from this place.” He motions to the clearing. “Fastest way’s thatta way.”

  Holding his palms to his gut, bleeding through his grasp, Atlas faces the clearing. Before he bends a knee, takes one step, Samuel slides behind him, grabs his elbows, then wrists, and coils a thick twine around them. Atlas grunts and turns and raises an arm but it’s stuck. His elbow jabs Samuel’s face.

  “If you want it to look real, you better,” Samuel snorts and tightens the twine, “let me do this.”

  Atlas twists to Gene. She frowns.

  “Sorry,” she mouths.

  Samuel yanks the cord’s ends and knots them together. Atlas’s wrists numb. Stepping toward Gene, Samuel unravels the rest of his twine.

  She recoils and grips her weapon. “I’m going exactly as I am.”

  “Whatever.”

  Samuel steps in front of Atlas and Gene steps behind them both. With her left hand, she clutches Atlas’s shoulder, supports his weight and, with her right, points her 9mm at Samuel’s back, keeping its barrel adjacent to her waist and below sight. They walk from the forest edge, into wisps of dusk light, no larger gap than a few centimeters between their bodies. They shuffle for the clearing’s far side.

  Glancing over a shoulder, Samuel says, “We could skip around Elisium’s opening but a nasty assortment of things lives in the forest. Not even I’d love to get caught in there.”

  “Where’s the door thingy back?” Gene asks.

  “Straight ahead. Keep your voice and head down. And stop shaking like a bird that ate wedding rice.”

  Atlas glimpses the area through his eyelashes and periphery and scans the encircling structures clockwise.

  A good distance from the main manor, six or seven Accenda lounge around wooden framework topped with a platform. Atlas knows this structure: the gallows. He watched an execution on its stage at fourteen full cycles old. Though it wasn’t his first execution experienced, it was the first he’d seen through eyes frozen on the executed’s that dimmed till dead. It was the first time he’d watched life leave a body.

  They don’t shroud the hanged’s head in Sidera.

  Four more Accenda stand outside another structure, a tall house, to the right of the gallows. A dozen more loiter about the opening’s outskirts. None look to Atlas, Gene, or Samuel, who proceed until their toes touch the tips of cedar tree shadows cast by the setting sun—Earth’s same sun that traveled a day’s journey while Atlas was in the dungeons.

  Forty paces from the invisible portal, Atlas catches sight of a couple last figures. Though the air’s ash is compact and his stomach’s ache distracting, he distinguishes a male Accend from a female. Atlas leans into Gene and blinks. The male stomps a careening stand into ground meters too close to their destination, a walnut brown button-up restraining the shudder of his bulges, his wrinkled grimace halfhearted. Atlas assumes the female to also be Accend until the male seizes her neck with fat fingers. She struggles and thrashes but doesn’t light her hands or succeed in budging his. She’s no older than sixteen.

  Atlas twitches. Samuel spots the two figures on his next step and glances at Atlas and Gene; but Gene still peers down her shaking arm, to her rattled handgun.

  “Nope, Attie,” Samuel whispers. “We’re staying right here.”

  His breathing speeds and feet slow and Gene pushes him forward till both accelerate. Atlas forgets the blood down his front.

  The girl yanks against the middle-aged Accend’s grip and screams. He tenses his fingers; her screams dull to chokes. The Accend lifts his free hand and sets it aglow, the same fiery glow from the third new person Atlas’s examined today, confirming evidence that all Accenda have similar ability. Atlas squints. But this glow blooms through the Accend’s fingers as paling snakes that, without glare, without solidity, dance shadow onto their faces. This glow is different. The Accend opens his hand toward the girl and its blazing scarlet morphs into a translucent blue. It’s a shade that flowers at a flame’s base, a blue that murmurs phantom shadows in dungeon darkness, that wavers more than its orange predecessor but holds stronger. A blue that consumes while universe sleeps. This blue couldn’t be further from the sky’s.

  The Accend wrenches the girl closer and presses his hand to her chest. Her screams return; they sputter.

  Atlas watches. He watches the Accend constrict the girl’s throat and scorch her body and the girl dig her nails into his discolored button-up and bulge her eyes. Pulling against his wrist’s twine, Atlas takes a step out of alignment, away from Gene—

  She turns to him. “What are you—”

  His vision spins and, when it steadies, he’s on the ground, his cheek to the grass, his gash gushing fresh knives through his blood. The world sideways, he looks over broken weeds, through unsettled ash.

  The girl stops screaming and her thrashings diminish to nudges. The Accend doesn’t burn her, not noticeably. Not a charred centimeter in sight, the Accend shoves his palm into the girl’s heartspace suctioned to his cobalt flame that grazes her chin, that drains the color from her lips and cheeks. Her eyelids flutter. She wobbles as the Accend’s palm swells that spectral shade: the blue that coils around his fingers and licks upward, up her blouse with undertones fueled by the glint of the hanged’s eyes seventeen full cycles dead.

  Atlas looks away.

  A hand grabs the back of his shirt and pulls him onto his feet. He groans. Samuel’s voice blasts his ear.

  “Getting us all killed—chore or pastime?”

  “Atlas, are you okay?”

  “Is the oblivious commie okay? Am I okay?”

  Atlas again darts his eyes to the field’s edge. The Accend’s hands are free. The girl is on the ground. And Atlas isn’t. His gut sinks.

  “The w—” Atlas gasps. “Walker—”

  “And PETA sheds tears over bunny rabbits. Get going or we’ll be crying about a lot worse,” Samuel says.

  Eyes on the distance, Gene curves her arm around Atlas’s back and helps him onward, trailing after Samuel. Twenty paces from the forest’s edge, Samuel sighs.

  “Great. Look at what you did, Miss America. He’s coming over here now.”

  The surly Accend steps over the girl’s body and pounds deep his boot prints as he stumbles toward Atlas, Gene, and Samuel. When he’s a couple paces away, Atlas inhales a strong odor,
a dense vapor that clings to the Accend’s huffing, his oily hair and sagging face. It’s similar to a trodden berry bush left rotting in the constant Sideran sun—a hybrid of otherworldly bronze berries that effuses a sour smell to begin with.

  The Accend points at Atlas. “That—filthy Sideran. It’s the one. What’s it doing out?” He faces Samuel. “Eden banished you.”

  Samuel purses his lips. “Good to see you too, Kenny. Yeah, Eden’s bipolar—we all know this. She told me and,” he jabs a thumb at Gene, “Fernanda to keep our little dove at a safe house many states from here. Eden doesn’t want to break a nail lifting one.”

  “Safe? Safest is where you stand.”

  “That right?” Samuel makes a face and looks over his shoulder. “Seven, eight—twenty-plus back-stabbing strategists currently watching our every move, waiting to tell or not tell the remaining thousands and, whether you’re in it for the money, fame, or satisfied appetite, you’re going to want hands, at the least, on the most pivotal being in three dimensions. You’re gonna want it right now.” He nods to the group by the gallows. “Them.”

  The Accend leans backward and sways, eyes narrowing between Samuel and the far Accenda.

  “Elisium’s thin ice and we’re not camping on it.” Samuel folds his arms. “Grab another drink, get out of my face, and, for the sake of militant anarchy, wash that hair.”

  He glares at Samuel. The passing seconds sink Atlas’s knees. Gene trembles and, his gash losing feeling, eyelids sticking between warped glimpses, Atlas lets his shoulder fall into hers. She exhales and clenches her handgun.

  The Accend turns his glare to Gene and Atlas. “Pivotal. Vital.” He looks down Atlas’s front and a grin stretches across his face. “Vital liquids all out.”

  “Blood pretty. Violence fun.” Samuel waves his hands forward. “Shoo.”

  Eyeing her up and down, smiling, the fire man gives Gene one last look and staggers away.