Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  The veins in his eyelids dissect searing light into eclectic polygons; he squeezes them warped. Crinkles shade his pupils and new ground meets his feet. Ten, eleven, twelve seconds—a couple fewer than last transportation—and Atlas relaxes his eyelids. He opens them.

  “—not standing within fifteen feet of you next time you do that.”

  Atlas bats his eyes but black spots linger. “What?”

  “Shh.”

  The spots fade and Atlas looks at towering, sage evergreens triple—quadruple the height of Helena’s mountain trees. Darkness settles between thick foliage, layered ferns, blanketed moss on fallen trunks and aerial roots. A mist hovers among fungi invading the underbrush.

  Or—Atlas rubs his eyes—ash. Mist and ash. He draws his gaze across the clearing, that massive, round glade into which his heels sink, and coughs on soot that clouds about his mouth and clusters in his eyes’ corners. Opposite of its left semicircle, the clearing’s right half stretches in decay. The space between bare trunks and branches would show kilometers of vacancy if airborne cinders didn’t insulate.

  “Elisium,” Samuel says. “No cable, only WiFi, so don’t expect the Hallmark channel.”

  Atlas scans the outskirts. Several men and women—males and females, rather—converse by one of the largest iron-fenced buildings near the circle’s right ward. They speak and laugh and scuff the dirt, some sitting on soot-streaked steps, under shade of roofs splintered, tarnished by time and re-blackened by more. Two other Accenda pace the perimeter.

  “Samuel,” Atlas watches the closest pacing Accend, “our plan was what again?”

  “Spontaneity.”

  “And that spontaneity—does it have a strategy?”

  “It has a .44 Magnum.”

  The Accend freezes. His patrolling mate does too. They look Atlas and Samuel in the eye.

  Samuel jerks and, a blink later, upholds his revolver, finger on the trigger, hammer cocked back. The sights align with the first Accend’s chest, a streak of hazed sun glinting off the barrel’s blue steel.

  Samuel says, “Do you feel lucky, punk?”

  He presses the trigger. It clicks.

  Pursing his lips, Samuel swings out the cylinder and lets six metal shells slide from it. They clink to the ground, each hollow, fired.

  Samuel leans toward Atlas. “That’s always a misquote anyway.”

  The Accenda sprint for them, their hands alight, streaking air with orange arcs. Atlas glances between them and pretends Samuel said a word he understood.

  “Fantastic strategy.”

  “Attie!” Samuel gapes at him. “You’re getting really good at using sarcasm. I’m proud of you.”

  For the heartbeat it takes, Atlas looks past Samuel till the Accenda’s thudding against ash-softened turf increases to maximum volume. His next breath gathers a rattle, next moments spin a blur, and the fastest, closest Accend lunges. Atlas flinches. White bursts splatter on black canvas a millisecond’s realization that slips under his subconscious. A wall hits his side and cheek and the ash coughed billows about his arms and seeks residence up his nose.

  * * *

  Tap.

  Atlas groans.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  His forehead stings and his wrists—no, his forehead—Atlas squeezes together his eyelids. His forehead aches. It’s freezing, burning, prickling a jagged hole into—

  He gasps, opens his eyes, and sits up. He lifts his hands but steel cuffs yank back and cut circles into his wrists and jingle their chains as gratified snickering. His hands don’t make it above his knees. He again groans. Shifting on bruised hips and throbbing ankles, Atlas follows his irons’ links to the wall behind him; steel plates and rivets at the wall’s corner root the chains that root him.

  A deep bellow echoes. Atlas pales and whips his head around the dungeon; the concrete shell of a room—frigid stone but sweltry air—lies under a single, hanging incandescent bulb. It casts a ring that sputters to the fringes of four gray walls, its black corners untouched. Atlas squints into the corner farthest from him.

  It rumbles back.

  A chill bristles Atlas’s neck hair through a sweaty film, and another tap breaks on his forehead, drizzling between his eyebrows. It burns. He ducks toward his chains, to sweep his fingers across his brow, and flicks from his skin a warm liquid. He raises his head, makes a face, and rubs faint glimmers between his thumb and forefinger.

  Atlas looks toward the ceiling and another burning droplet hits his cheek. He cringes. Pulling against his chains, he scoots as far left as he can and bends in his legs, his ankles miraculously free from restraint but no less stiff. The next drip splatters stone a centimeter from his thigh; a steam wisp whirls up his side.

  His brows tense.

  Something arrhythmic offsets the metronomic tick of droplets drumming floor: a low gargle, both soothing and impending: a boil. Neither near nor far, the fizz and churn of riotous water meets Atlas’s sensory adaptation and then surpasses it, grumbling some imagined approach, building and stuffing, overflowing his head. Steam’s source lurks out of sight, but its humidity muddies the ash between his fingers and pulls a rotting mustiness from cell’s brick. Its weight brims his ears. Until a noise more animal leaps his attention backward, to a roar stronger tenfold:

  “The Titan came to me. He came and it’s time.”

  Atlas shrinks into the wall, its grooves digging into his back. Hot liquid drips onto his shoulder. He bites down and leans away.

  A voice from the black of the far corner quakes, wails, wheezes, and Atlas classifies it as laughter. He glares into the shadow. Foot thumps follow the voice’s resonance and jar six stone slabs of room’s box and rupture the air between.

  A man—an Accend steps into the light. With fingers double the thickness of Atlas’s, he slicks the uneven cut of side-swept hair around his ear, where it clings, where a tendril’s tawny backdrop and keen highlight paints his left jaw. He wears muted colors, hanging, stained fabric that puddles in the darkness of elbow creases and the line above his belly. The Accend Atlas shot in the arm earlier today—the Accend who assimilated the adolescent’s life in this very dimension—huffs down on Atlas’s knees.

  Inflection unfamiliar, consonants throat-projected, he speaks with an accent.

  “Sideran—he did this.” The Accend pats his upper arm and the bulk under his sleeve: bandages. Baring yellow teeth, he snorts over his wrinkled mouth. “But he took out a loan. He took it and now he’s paying interest.”

  Atlas stares into the shadow under the Accend’s bulging eyebrows. His gut churns. He instead glances about the room. He follows floor’s rhythmic spatters to a rusted metal spout overhead; it releases a drop every couple seconds. The Accend steps before the room’s bulb, eclipses it, his silhouette shedding all features but the polished onyxes for eyes, and the spout’s bronze highlight severs in two.

  “You!” the Accend shouts.

  Atlas jerks back to him.

  “I made that for you. It’s water, see? But it’s boiled—boils—it’s boiling. A bucket of experiments.” He flourishes his hands. “The Chinese thought they did it all right and new but they hadn’t tried heating the water before they drip, drippity it onto their patients like frogs—or is that fish? Yes.”

  Atlas stares.

  “I thought to myself—I thought,” the Accend juts out his jaw, “that here sits—or lies—” He laughs. “You were so long a winter bear but I’m not counting. No, no—I was saying. Here lies the famous Greek and infamous Sideran who we’ve been fussing about for longer than we should have probably.” He smacks his lips. “And I thought: why not see if Titan lives up to the poems? Let’s see if Atlas can endure.”

  The Accend crouches, centimeter by centimeter, and meets Atlas’s level, his eyes, his own grazing incandescent light—a world of imagination placed in trembling hands. No space for whites, black irises cradle blacker pupils that extend to the edges of his eyes. They flicker. His eyes hold a stolen flame.

 
; He exhales and a bog twelve hundred trodden fruits deep under stale overcast roils off his skin.

  “You call me Smit. It’s a family name and Sideran and I aren’t personal. Not yet.” He raises his hand and a forearm-long blade protrudes from it, one similar to Samuel’s Elisium key. “Not yet but soon because it’s blood that confesses to the priest.”

  Atlas swallows; it catches on ash. He coughs.

  “Have you got that checked?” Smit asks.

  “I—” Atlas presses his lips together. “Um.”

  Swaying in place, Smit leans back and narrows his eyes at Atlas’s hair. “That’s a labyrinth. Don’t get lost.” He jabs his knife at the ceiling. “Have you got that checked? Check it? Has Atlas checked his atlas?”

  He blinks. “How—h—” Atlas thrusts out his breath’s last. “How long have I remained here?”

  “Mmm silly questions—silly, funny questions, not like mine. Too many branches, strings.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t count,” Smit slams his dagger’s pommel on the floor, “winter bear.”

  Atlas takes three seconds to nod once.

  “Time’s the emotions to Smit and it matters where you’re standing. It might’ve been a couple smeared hours—might be ten. We don’t know, curious sinner.”

  Hours. Atlas’s pulse skyrockets. He stretches his neck and squints past Smit’s shoulder; peeking out from behind it is a steel door. One too familiar—room too familiar. Atlas’s memory catches up with his heartbeat and a hundred kilograms press on his core, on his scar six—seven days healing? Eden’s knife flashes in Smit’s. Atlas clenches a fist.

  “I wish to see Eden.” He faces Smit. “Where is she?”

  Smit explodes a guffaw. “A funny branch in the tornado’s eye. Going around and around in circles. So funny, strange, fantastic—fantastic like jenever, like Frysk Hynder. It’s single malt and it does the winding fireworks of the making where when the brain in my—my,” he taps his head and nods, “geode. You should see it.”

  Atlas grasps his shackles’ chains and slows his words. “I wish. To see. Eden.”

  “Okay.”

  Atlas narrows his eyes. Smit stands up straight and stomps across the room, then back. He again crouches, sets his knife on the ground, and grabs Atlas’s hair. Smit yanks his head back. Thick fingers around a white jug handle, he shoves a plastic bottle lip into Atlas’s mouth and bubbling, searing, barbed liquid turns Atlas’s face purple, wrings his senses screaming, slips past his uvula, down his throat.

  Atlas gags. He writhes under steel cuffs and heaves the liquid at Smit until his stone of a stomach empties.

  Pursing his lips, Smit withdraws. He wipes his cheek and looks at the plastic jug. He tilts his head.

  “Wait, wait.” Smit grabs his knife and prods the jug with its hilt. “This is bleach, not Frysk Hynder.”

  Kicking the stone floor, eyes wide, Atlas shrinks into the wall and pants and rocks to his pulse. Bleach drips down his chin; hot water hits his shoulder; he neglects feeling.

  Smit places the jug on the floor. “Many, many liquids so things get confusing. The sinner wants Eden and I forgot that’s not the same as single malt. Whoops.”

  “Where,” Atlas coughs, “is she?”

  “You’re not the priest, transgressor. Cherubim and a flaming sword are walls that keep the fled out. Now, little moth, from heavy wings and gnawing night, watches prison’s fire and dreams of landing in it.”

  Atlas clears his throat and crinkles his eyelids closed. The fester down his esophagus and behind his nose and the toxins nibbling at his lungs morph, by the heat of pulse, to a call for storm. Pins up his nerves prick open hollows singing wind. “Absolute assist me. I am beyond tired of continual blather. Where,” he opens his eyes, “does Eden contain Gene? I will give all I have and more.”

  “It’s blood that confesses.” Smit strangles his knife’s hilt. “No more dead words. Lies lie in things that are dead—a trail of bloodless bodies that spilt their truth for killer’s two eyes.”

  Atlas stares at the blade’s silver tip. “Mmhmm. Yes. Exactly. If you kill me, Eden will never know the truth. I will not speak until I see her.”

  Smit laughs. “I lied. Truth and lies are playdough. Anyway, Titan holds no information and the garden knows. Smit is just here to play. Play,” he taps his forefinger with his blade, “play,” and repeats, “playdough.”

  Atlas’s breaths shallow. “And Samuel—he is where?”

  “It’s early and it’s sport. A cut to a question and blood to reveal the answer.”

  Ice tears through Atlas’s spine. He opens his mouth, but Smit leans in, bends down, bores the highlighted, black-swaddled beads of his pupils into Atlas; and he shuts it again.

  “I’ll go first, little giant.”

  Smit pulls his sleeve over his hand and, with a metallic screech, swings the waterspout to the side. He then pushes Atlas’s sleeves up. Smit holds the blade to his right forearm. Atlas blinks; Smit drags the metal leaf, notched edge, frigid sting, across his skin and blood seeps out. Scream stuck on bleach residue, Atlas crushes his fingers in his fists.

  “I got it. I got it, dissenter.” Smit leans back and lifts a finger. “Everyone’s asking. But I got it: you escaped for one of two. This one’s innocence got it running for ideals or its naïvety got it running for danger. It’s in your blood, see. Always running or heart dies and dead, dead lies.”

  Atlas stares.

  “Ask your,” Smit carves his scowl, rumbles his voice, “QUESTION.”

  He flinches. “Where is Gene being confined?”

  “The tunnels are veins of doors and rooms and passages: all connected to the heart, where things die if you don’t run. Begrijp? Ja. Biggest room—center stage. There she’s be. The altar in the chapel.”

  “Mmm. And where is the key for these irons?”

  “Funny sinner and its funny schemes. There are two keys. Both physical, one spiritual, and one here.” Smit pats a frayed pouch on his shirt’s front. “Cathedral’s transept makes a cross two walkers will walk and the crypt makes a beginning. At last, At-las. He comes to make genesis. But that means several things to several people and you know the two only, lonely star.”

  Atlas’s voice shudders. “And I am being confined where?”

  “No, no, no.” Smit shakes his head. “Too many. A question to a cut. A cut to a question. It’s really not that hard to understand, young Titan.”

  Atlas presses his back to the wall, his knees to his chest, but Smit yanks his left wrist up and out. With the blade, Smit taps Atlas’s forearm, where, on his other arm, his gash issues floor-bound rivulets.

  “Symmetry is nice when it’s not too much but fairly close, like the faces of metal workers. They have a stench but it’s in proportion.” Smit angles his head and lifts the blade to Atlas’s cheek. “Not today.”

  Cold steel digs into his jaw, his cheek, his jaw as Smit draws the tip of his knife up and down his face. Atlas glares at the front of Smit’s shirt: the pocket. Its hanging bulge swings with movement.

  “Round two. Two, two, many twos.” Smit points the knife at Atlas’s eye. “You hardly need two. That’s just excessive and greedy, like the ruling who build tall, tall towers over low, low smog. Sharing is fair-ing.”

  Atlas turns his head, wind pulsing through his arteries, pounding, battering the walls of his veins. He spreads his fingers and raises his hands, but metal cuffs slam his wrists a centimeter’s journey away; the clang of metal links going taut punctuates his entrapment as its jolt travels his bones to his mind. Thoughts spill from his ears. Smit grabs Atlas’s face, thumb and fingers digging into each cheek, and turns his head back.

  He floats his knife forward. Its sliver of a glint assumes the universe, everything inside and beyond, and grows and blurs into a pointed oval mass before Atlas’s pupil. Atlas looks over Smit’s shoulder and the blade’s tip brushes his right eyelashes.

  Lightbulb—Atlas draws his eye down—the room’s o
ther end: darkness. Nothing. Nothing. Atlas twitches his fingers. The clinking of chains. Smit’s blade. Shadow.

  Steam.

  Past Smit’s figure, across the room, wisps of the same vapor that weaved up his side weave toward the ceiling. On a stone slab chest-high, an open, tall kettle puffs steam. The kettle’s beyond ceiling light but smoldering coals—slight, dark orange gutters, ashen tops—glaze a metal grate on which the kettle’s rounded bottom balances. From there, a system of bronze tubes and conduits, upon inclined boards upon makeshift scaffolding upon stone slabs alike, wraps around the room and narrows into the faucet above Atlas’s head a moment ago. The faucet now hangs above Smit’s.

  “If Smit doesn’t take from Siderans, they’ll take, take over. Chain the chains before they chain. Proactive vengeance simmering: an eye for an eye that looks to pluck.” He circles the blade around Atlas’s. “Whisperings in my skin. War comes.”

  Hands by his hips and Smit between their reach, Atlas channels his power and flicks his fingers. A breeze ripples Smit’s shirt hem. The knife circles back to pupil’s center and, gasping, budging his jaw under Smit’s grip, Atlas outstretches his hand. Once more, he flourishes his fingers. Wind sweeps from them and rattles the room’s opposite side.

  The kettle tips.

  It falls into its trough and steaming water gushes out, runs down the canals, and spurts from the faucet; water the volume of Smit’s head breaks on his cheek, eye, and neck, slipping down his shirt. Smit howls. He recoils and drops his blade. Atlas rears a shoulder against stray droplets as Smit smothers his face flushed bright red.

  Standing, Smit teeters on his boots and claws at his eye.

  “Sinner. Sideran scum and its greed.”

  Atlas rolls onto his left side, bends his right leg, and snaps it out. He kicks Smit’s ankle. Smit wobbles the more, boot scuffing a damp slurry of ash and dust, and then collapses onto his shoulder. His face slams stone. An object falls from his pocket. It clinks to the floor, where it settles a palm’s width closer than Smit’s knife, a palm’s width from Atlas’s shoe.