Gut sinking, he glances at Gene, at Samuel. “We must leave.”
“Traffic.” Samuel motions to the windshield. “Us.” He motions to himself. “Stuck. Repeat those words in your head, dearest.”
Atlas grips Gene’s seat and scoots forward. Heads and bodies take his view of the ravens. Past the trail of vehicles, hundreds of walkers walk for the gray building, congregate around its two pillars vaulting three massive archways, and climb three corresponding staircases leading into a roofed entryway. Vehicles swing from their line and park next to the building. More walkers cross the street, clacking and thudding and chatting as they meet larger groups at the bottom of the stairs. All are dressed in gray or black or brown. Most wear neckties, some bowed, and those without ties wear the same blazers as those with, suits comparable to Minkar’s or the masked Accend’s in Helena.
CITY-COUNTY BUILDING is engraved into the stone above the arches. A pinch of familiarity tells Atlas he’s seen them before, perhaps the day he fell, during his wandering.
A monochromatic mass obscures lampposts and sidewalks. Among the muddy grays, something white flashes as starkly as did the black: a slinking white that stabs Atlas’s pricked subconscious. He blinks. Behind three walking, laughing men, another streak of pure white shoots across Atlas’s periphery.
Atlas reaches past Samuel’s seat and opens his door. Samuel makes a noise. Atlas shoves his seat forward, folding Samuel in half, and wriggles out the door. Gene makes a noise.
Atlas slams Samuel’s door shut.
He jogs between stopped vehicles, across the street, and for the white flash. He jogs with the direction of the sea of bodies: too many to fit through the City-County Building’s portico larger than a purge platform. He whips his head right, left, but walkers drown the white.
Gene’s and Samuel’s voices call to Atlas.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ll leave you here. Driving away right now.”
“Atlas! Samuel didn’t mean we’re stuck forever. Traffic will—”
A group of ten to fifteen steps between Atlas and their voices. Something rams his side. Heart pounding, he snaps himself straight and flips around, palms outstretched, lifted, charged.
“I am so sorry, sir,” a man says.
Atlas’s forehead crumples. His hands drop to his sides and he eyes the middle-aged, dark-skinned man, short hair, clean shaven, straightening his blazer before him. Like the majority, he wears a suit and tie.
“I didn’t mean to bump into you,” says the man. “Never thought a crowd of public officials and investors could be so rowdy. Especially at a charity auction. For real estate.” He laughs.
Atlas leans around him.
“Senator Kelley.” The man extends a hand and smiles.
Atlas stares at his palm. A second passes, then another, and Senator Kelley shifts weight and lets his arm fall.
“Look at this turnout!” He pivots in a tight circle. “Good there’s folk out there who still care.”
“Mmm.”
“Are you in business?”
“I—” Atlas’s eyes dart over the crowd, “don’t know. Goodbye.”
He steps around Senator Kelley and considers the abnormality of the name “Senator” and pushes past three dozen men and a few women. They speak about gilt baseboards and the square footage of pools for swimming and quantity of rooms for guests. One man hooks an arm around a woman half his age, dressed in a skirt too short to conform, and kisses her behind the ear when his smiling conversationalists turn away. Atlas picks up pace. He shoves the bodies blocking view of the gray building. Some look him up and down and grimace at the ash smudges on his pants. Shouted “pardon” and “excuse you” and “I’ll show you my Jaguar sometime” fall under a familiar tone. Gene’s close.
“Atlas, please stop!”
Samuel too. “Don’t say it so nicely.”
Breath serrated, Atlas angles toward the voice and calculates the distance between them and his approximation of her position. Eden. He slows.
Gene’s voice softens and cracks. “Atlas.”
“You desired I spare her life.” Atlas scoffs. Pressing foot into sidewalk at the building’s corner, he mumbles to himself. “After her seizure of the coin leading to war, after you used your weapon on her back, you expressed to me to not kill her.”
His fingers twitch and blood boils. He cuts his stare through the gaps between shoulders and heads.
He whispers, “I’m here to amend.”
Gene says something but it dissolves under nearby murmurs. Atlas turns and searches. No pale skin or white hair skims his sight. He frowns. Perhaps his imagination—
A scream splits ears. Atlas’s arteries pulse wind that steals his breath, and the scream cuts short. It came from ahead—up the building’s stairs where it echoes in the portico. The crowd hushes its murmuring, heads turning, eyes widening. Atlas peers between bodies and breaks into a run.
He slams into walkers and staggers and rebalances. A woman gasps. Several men recoil, one thrown to the concrete by the clip of Atlas’s toe.
Another shriek stabs the crowd. The hushed murmurs swell into clamoring and dozens of bodies back up, spin around, scamper from the building. One backward-stepping man collides with Atlas. They stumble and the man swears, then jogs across the road; Atlas jogs toward a new voice.
A male voice. It trembles and fluctuates tone and, as a group near the first archway shuffles and Atlas approaches, grows in volume.
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be. Unless you want nine-year-old Ellie to hear you died sobbing.”
Atlas stops. His last step’s shock vibrates up his spine and constricts his throat. Her ethereal hum drifts on air over hundreds of heads. A few paces forward—
“How do you—where is my family? What have you done?” The first voice breaks. “Please, no.”
Eden clicks her tongue. “Shh. Listen. Hold on. Listen. Listen. That tone—did you use that tone when you extorted the lower class into raising the monopolization of your corporate monarchy? Did you cry when you imported women’s health pharmaceuticals from India and forgot to label them ‘poison’ after you labeled them fifteen times the wholesale? When you slept with some different whore each night in your ten-thousand-dollar hotel room?” Her voice shifts. “Sorry. With that one, you probably did. Impotence—comes with the territory. Do you want me to make you cry harder so your then shriveled penis pales in comparison?”
“I—I—”
“You—you should’ve been aborted?”
“I’ve never seen you in my life. You don’t—”
“I know everything. You ache for the limelight. And I concede. These importants need someone to look up to, after all.”
Atlas runs the last steps and shoves the final shoulder from his path. Panting, he scans the circumference of a circle walkers cleared to a ten-meter radius, hundreds of eyes on the two bodies in its center. The bodies encircle the middle of three staircases; Eden and a man stand at its top. Several walkers uphold duplicates of the scene in their electronic rectangles.
Her elbow wraps the man’s throat. He teeters on the balls of his feet, dangles from her arm, bares his teeth as Eden presses the tip of her engraved knife into his chin.
Tilting her head, her white hair draping his shoulder, she draws her knife up his jaw and down again. She strokes him. “Charity. I think, as you should agree,” Eden glances around the clearing, “your charity could be more generous.”
A man at the crowd’s front gingerly turns from the stage and pushes toward the road. Three others do the same. Eden lifts her foot, touches her ankle with her armed hand, sets her foot down, and throws something. The crowd shrieks and jostles and Atlas glares. Three bodies fall through the mob; the first grabs at himself, convulses, gargles a scream. Blood seeping through his jacket, two small knife hilts protrude from his shoulder and upper back.
Atlas can’t feel. He stands in a tar pit of disreality.
Somethin
g touches his shoulder. Feeling flooding back, an inhale cutting his throat, he jerks his head around. Samuel stands behind his right shoulder and Gene behind his left. She looks on the verge of vomiting. Samuel eyes Eden and shakes his head at Atlas.
Who mouths, “She alone?”
Samuel casts still-headed glances and budges a shrug.
“The greatest charity of 18th-century France was the guillotine and this fascist regime can only end with a Reign of Terror.” Eden grabs a new blade from her ankle and jabs it upward. “The sky will fall and your slavery will end and you will burn with them upon Pylon.” Twitching a smile, she lifts her chin to sky. “All will be—”
The man sobs louder than her words and Eden stops. She sears her silver irises into the side of his head.
Tears streaming down his cheeks, the man under Eden’s grip kicks to ground his feet and straighten his legs but Eden claws the front of his dress shirt. He stumbles and bobs between the buckling of his ankles and Eden’s grapple. Her hand glows red. Eyes glimmer.
Gene’s breath burns Atlas’s neck; two or three walkers stand between him and Eden; he charges his palms.
Eden swipes her blade from the man’s chin to the corner of his eye and he cries out. She thrusts him to the stone. Her hair’s snowy silk magnetized to his cower, she steps one foot over the man whimpering into his blood, crouches, and swishes the flames on her palm blue.
Gene gapes her mouth; but Samuel grabs it and she yells into his palm. Atlas jolts to her cry and, snapping his hand onto his sight of Eden’s side, lurches from the crowd.
Without looking, Eden throws her knife. It slices Atlas’s upper arm. He groans and bites down and clutches his wound: trickling blood but no deeper than half a centimeter under tunic and jacket. The knife clinks to sidewalk. Gene wriggles until her yell breaks through Samuel’s fingers and reaches for Atlas.
Eden stands up straight. “Veni ad me, mi dilecte.”
“I am not,” Atlas gasps, “your beloved.”
She releases grip on the man’s suit and kicks his shoulder; he tumbles down the stairs. Facedown, cement at his cheek, he stops fidgeting. Strings of smoke twirl off his unburnt blazer, his pallor, his glazed eyes telling of soullessness. Hundreds of walkers run and jump over vehicles in traffic and shove each other, a few slamming Atlas, Samuel, and Gene, their shoulders and sides. The circle clearing scatters into obscurity.
Samuel rolls his eyes. “Does no one carry a firearm these days?”
He draws his revolver from his jacket and Eden leaps behind the first pillar. As he swears, Samuel aims, pulls the trigger, and a boom tears a crater into the pillar’s stone.
The walkers still running grab their ears and glance in every direction and two young children across the road wail to a crying woman. A group denser than the street’s remaining pours from the City-County Building’s front doors and down the stairs. Atlas grabs Gene’s hand. Bodies wash over them, and Samuel and Eden. Atlas loses sight of Samuel, then Eden.
“These people, the oppressors, the mighty,” Eden shouts; Atlas doesn’t see, “their blood will mean much in Pylon’s wake. I’ll thank them.”
The ringing of her voice weaves with the ringing in his ears and Atlas squeezes Gene’s hand until it hurts. Grimace wet, Gene reaches for a body stuck with one of Eden’s knives; Atlas yanks her back and thinks to say something of its futility, but only a guttural blurt puffs the hair at her ear. His swim an ocean. He shifts toward a yelp at his left. Eden speaks at his right, tone bobbing under, above, riding the whoosh of blurred shoulders, the pounding of feet, the screams.
“And all of it—this—”
Atlas steps right and three figures break to Eden’s voice. She stands tall before him. Blood smears the bangs of her hair, fire climbing her arm, its petals brushing her shoulder, charring her sleeve, and bodies lie at her feet. Six. Six men still twitching, gashes across their backs, necks, chests, swollen faces, and between their wandering, wide eyes.
Senator Kelley crawls from the bodies’ pile.
“—will be the fault of one refugee that weakened our borders.” Eden meets Atlas’s eyes. “You’ve brought war. I adore you.”
Eden raises her burning arm and favorite knife, blood dripping through the floral pattern carved from its blade, fire licking up the hilt and consuming each drop. Atlas flinches. He steps in front of Gene; but Eden jerks her fiery arm and knife downward, into Senator Kelley’s back. She jerks it out again.
Senator Kelley falls limp.
Eden points her knife at his body and shoots the crackling orange off her arm. Fire glides over her blade, dancing off its tip, and explodes on the senator’s back. Eden fans the stream to the other bodies. They catch fire. Great bushes of flares smear clothing and skin and hair into their blinding, collective flight for Sideran blue.
Atlas cringes in the heat and Eden waves her flames across the alley, between him and her, until a fifteen-meter-long wall of fire fizzles higher than his head and veils her figure. He blows a gust at the wall, for the silhouette behind it; but it hits, throws the flames, warps the wall, and she’s gone. Charred lavender aroma swirls his head. The screams from a woman weeping over a body, a man on fire, others grasping their legs and arms resonate through his skull seconds late.
He looks through flames’ leaves falling into sky and releases Gene’s hand. Pulse racing, sweat soaking his tunic, Atlas leaps toward fire’s net dispersed to the height of his hips.
Gene grabs his arm. He pulls against her. Police sirens travel up the street.
“She’s gone.” Gene whispers her version of his previous objection, and it blares over a million cries. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Atlas crouches by Senator Kelley. Gasping through his teeth, Atlas grips his arms and drags him from the fire. Senator Kelley’s dead pupils gaze past Atlas’s foot; his arms shock Atlas’s hands seconds before molten heat does. Atlas lets him go.
“Atlas,” Gene whispers.
He straightens himself.
He blows another gust onto the fire and fire, following his motion, clings to his wind in ravenous snarls and spreads down the sidewalk. It feasts with hot, gratified sighs. Dropping his hands, clawing his stomach, Atlas whips his head around for the screaming man—the one on fire. He can’t find him.
Gene watches. “Atlas.”
He chokes.
“Atlas.” Gene rests a hand on his shoulder.
He turns and falls into her. Atlas wraps his arms around Gene, hers around him, and twists knots into the back of her shirt. Gene hides her face in his neck’s curve. Atlas’s eyes water.
“It’s over,” she says.
A familiar voice rises over the sirens. “Let’s go. Now.”
Gene and Atlas step back and turn to it; Samuel tucks his revolver into his jacket.
The three run past fire and through walkers and to Samuel’s Mustang. Atlas fights looking back. They hop into the vehicle and Samuel peels from the roadside, around a parked sedan blaring its alarm, away from flashing lights. They screech and rumble and swerve out of downtown and onto the freeway in less than a minute.
“How perfect’s that, huh?” Samuel squeezes the steering wheel with white knuckles. “Police show up when she leaves. Wouldn’t surprise me if she’s got them around her finger.”
Atlas glares. Gene looks out the windshield; Atlas looks into her seat’s backing.
“Validating her words,” Samuel says. “Eden’s serious and wants the world to know it. This was a solo run—didn’t plan on us being there—too messy for kidnapping. This was about prepping the war, making her debut. Possibly provoking the little people, promoting class warfare, hoping for some kind of uprising. The Sideran-Accend war just nabbed humanity.”
Gene budges her lips. “She’s going to do it. Burn the universe.”
“Eh.” Samuel snorts. “Maybe.”
Atlas turns his head to the side window and it takes half a minute. His stare falls on the purple clouds churning black between skyscraper r
ooftops; it trails down to where the City-County Building would be. Other buildings block the view from his overpass vantage but he imagines. It’s smaller from here.
* * *
“Maybe you should go check on him. It’s been almost twenty minutes.”
“Maybe Samuel should have a competent adult escort him each instance he journeys to the gasoline terminal center.”
Twisting around, Gene faces him. “We’ve talked about this.”
“I know. Be more,” Atlas flicks open his hands and feigns a smile, “cordial, Atlas.”
“I mean, don’t call it a ‘gasoline terminal.’ No one knows what you’re trying to say.” She points to the building out the windshield. “Go get Samuel.”
Atlas frowns. He pushes Samuel’s seat forward, slips from the back, and walks toward the small structure beyond multipart hoses and contraptions and vehicles. His arm no longer bleeds but it aches.
He enters the building and scans the line at the front counter, paces each aisle, peeks into the tiled room at the back; and inside, some man, who is most probably not Samuel, shouts and Atlas runs out of the building. He clenches his jaw. Overcast weighs on his skin, a recharging charge pulsing beneath. Atlas walks around the building and, foot to cracked asphalt, turns the back corner.
“Samuel.”
He sits against a wall opposite the gas station’s, one leg sprawled out, the other digging its heel into a pothole near his curb. Shadow would catch the gnarled branches low-hanging and cast them across his wall’s brickwork, across Samuel’s bowed head if cloud didn’t veil sun; instead, diffuse light and humidity soften contrast and saturate the emerald in foliage and umber in brick and mottled flush in Samuel’s nose, poking from his curtain of hair. He holds a glass bottle. Another tin vessel lies on its side at his feet.
Atlas walks to him. “You’re doing what?”
Samuel jerks back his head and his bangs spill off his face. “Attie, you’d be a funny drunk.”
“We must leave.”
“Y’know, I wonder how easy it would’ve been to pickpocket all those Wall Street D-bags during that scene.”
Atlas’s brows tense.
“Could’ve gotten so many new Lamborghinis. Missed,” Samuel bangs his head against the wall, “opportunity.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 31