Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Atlas narrows his eyes. The female fixes her bowed head and the others look to the towers. Eos’s walls reveal vertical, horizontal beams, shadows and highlights, and the spires above gain altitude. Atlas’s lungs tighten.

  “All Earth’s citizens freely operate wheeled vehicles that roll as quickly as a vigil’s strongest affliction gust,” Atlas yells. “Inside these, commoners summon never-ending music without opening their mouths.”

  A couple citizens let slip guttural noises. Kraz eyes them.

  “What music? Well,” Atlas tilts his head, “I have heard one segment declared ‘My Bloody Valentine.’ Such screeched like disoriented, underwater machinery. There are many waters on Earth. Persons swim in them as they please and criticize current government and eat sustenance generated in exchange for currency. Oh, and beds are comfortable. Rain is cold. The moon is brighter than you imagine.”

  Atlas grunts. His hands squeeze and pop between his captor’s. Behind, low murmurs hop from body to body, a hum on breeze. They start and stop. Silence, then another few whispers rise together, coordinated to mask each’s neighbor; their words blend. Atlas angles an ear, but these citizens have had too much practice with tones too unisonous.

  “Any being can conjure moving images through rectangles held in hand,” Atlas continues. “Atop a hill, I kissed a walker of my choosing.”

  The leading captor halts and yanks Atlas back and around, the other two lurching to reposition. The major grabs the shake in Atlas’s shoulders and glares into his blinkless austerity and stony jaw denying all internal palpitations. Corvus’s common encircle the first; Atlas scans twenty-one gray figures stopped for his halo.

  “We do not understand,” the major says.

  Atlas retracts his head. “That’s clear.”

  “Is this enjoyable for you?”

  He pries his mouth—

  “You,” the captor claws Atlas’s shoulders, “wish to be taken to the Administrative Citadel.”

  “No?”

  “This is deceit!” The trembling woman points. “This is the heretic’s intent. He wishes to be taken to our Absolute, where he will attempt assassination.”

  “Um.” Captors’ grips around his biceps, Atlas rubs his free fingers into his palms. “Yes. That is what I was planning.”

  The crowd quivers and hyperventilates. The major releases Atlas and turns to the others.

  “Shall we kill him here to protect our empire?”

  The female with the bowed head hugs her chest. The twitching one lights up. Kraz furrows his brow.

  “Kill him before he spreads his sin,” the twitching female says. “Let us be good citizens.”

  “No.” Kraz faces her. “Choice is left to those above.”

  Atlas holds stiff, eyes darting between face and voice. “Perhaps we should wait for further instruction.”

  “Quiet, apostate.”

  “Kill the enemy and we will be crowned exemplary, perhaps elevated to positions in Eos.”

  “We cannot make such decision,” Kraz says. “We are to take him inside the tower as instructed and allow—”

  “Use your bands as whips and beat his eyes hollow.”

  “But his eyes appear so similar—”

  “I wish to return to our laborspaces.”

  “—Imperium to judge if he should suffer death or rehabilitation for the remainder of—”

  “—to the Absolute’s.”

  “End it! End—”

  “—his life.”

  Atlas shuffles backward, but the two at his sides him jerk him stopped. Sun drenches his scalp boiling and his muscles seized. The major steps forward and the rest follow.

  The twitching female unlatches her primary shoulder sash and slips it off. Knees shuddering, she marches toward Atlas, clutches the sash in a fist, raises it. The buckle glints. It swings behind her shoulder. Atlas flings himself left and the female swings her strap for his head; it whistles past his ear and bludgeons the captor at his right. One of two captors recoils into his bleeding lip and moaning crouch, and the other twenty bodies charge in a yowling swarm over Atlas.

  Arms bent overhead, Atlas braces against the blur. The captor at his left braces one second too late; he trips over an ankle and shrinks under the bash of a wayward elbow and delivers Atlas to the throng. One figure grabs the back of Atlas’s secondary sash, another strangling his tunic collar. Atlas wrests between opposite yanks. Then flourishes the dregs of his strength as he corkscrews tall, pivots so either arm spreads to either attacker, snaps open his palms, and thrusts wind.

  Formless, invisible streams roar in ears and bristle between fingers and slam one attacker’s shoulder, the other’s chest. Both let go, fly in opposite directions. As he swings together his arms, Atlas pours his charge’s remainder across the deformed circle. It throws a dozen bodies off their feet, tumbling over limbs. Atlas springs forward and jumps over them.

  He runs for Eos, the only formation in view.

  Dirt crunches underfoot. Copper cakes between grass patches, shriveled dry in sun, crumble at heel at every terrain collision every step. The citizens behind beat their heels; pebbles meters distant bounce off ground. Forty-two feet pound golden fur flat and vibrate erratic rhythm through Sidera, up Atlas’s legs, into his heart and jostle it as dead leaves, battered wicker at tornado’s center. They close distance between them and him. Pick up speed.

  Atlas sinks into his stride, knees rubber, lungs rattling. He glues his gaze forward but tastes their approaching stampede and scrape of shoe, their gusts between arm and side as both cross, suspension over land as the milliseconds lift them to flight.

  He can’t recall Corvus’s area of labor but these citizens run as the rest: relatives of Accenda.

  Atlas rocks to air’s oscillation through mouth. He coughs; it swerves his path. Over walls, between four towers, the Administrative Citadel mounts sky’s pinnacle, its tip bending Atlas’s neck. He looks upward at the spire and a twisting in gut drops his eyes again. His bobbing knees smear across ground. A terrene crack clips the tip of his toe and, jaw locked, he forces his feet to lift higher.

  The soot lodged in lungs, charred flesh in throat crawl metal back up his tongue. He swallows it and gasps compensation for the second spent without breath. The nearest citizen nears; Atlas exhales a loose motor and feels one heavier down the back of his tunic collar. Two—one meter away, this citizen.

  Atlas’s body numbs and screams. His arteries dilate till blood drowns thought.

  He twists his spine, opens both palms to the twenty-one V-forming bodies, drinks the blast against hair, current through sleeves, channels arcs between veins churning galaxies within atoms, and shoots a gust. The closest citizen’s head snaps backward, spine trailing, and flies toward the others. He flops over himself three times. His body hits a couple citizens as the wind does. The citizens of Corvus launch backward; sky’s tsunami slams them with ten times their running force and twenty-one bodies skid into dirt billowing a cloud.

  Atlas turns forward. The citizens roll onto hands and knees, coughing cringes, but Atlas sprints and thirty meters fill the space between him and them. Timed thuds and ragged breath replace their rumblings. His drumming’s the only that fills his ears.

  Eos’s walls stretch up its towers. Atlas scans them, squints for the gates’ hinges, their crevices.

  When he glances behind a shoulder, he wonders when it happened:

  They’re so far away.

  XXXVI

  Transparency

  A species of bird traverses the southwestern stretch beyond the Great Scissum, Sidera’s vast divide. They weave in, out, over isle barriers by peripheral constellations overlooking far forests and underground caverns. Their wingspans near one and a half meters, beaks sharp, dives from sun to soil executed in a blink. Berries baked across southern plains vanish before labor cycle’s end when one of these flies hungry. Unnamed, unseen, this bird matches its ocean.

  This bird is blue. Sky-cerulean from beak to tail, eye to ta
lon, it flies transparently. No predators pursue; none spot its flight. Its conformity: evasion. Protection.

  Atlas stares at one of these birds. Its shape, the curvature of its head, glint in its eye latch to mind and revise his previous glimpses, two or three in youth. The bird perches atop a wall ledge two higher than the ledge at Atlas’s eye level. He raises his brow at it.

  It looks out across land; Atlas follows its gaze.

  Shoulders squeezed forward, Atlas pokes his head out from Eos’s eastern gate jamb, his cramped hiding hole for the past thousand breaths, and squints toward the golden horizon. Sky clear, scope wide, his wind’s dust settles into footprints the citizens of Corvus trailed around Eos’s west some nine hundred breaths ago. His last gust had them scratching at their eyes.

  Kraz did glance toward the gates’ eastern hinge, but Atlas retracted until his back met steel and all twenty-one bodies passed.

  Atlas exhales and leans back into his crevice. He lets his shoulders go limp and three walls drag his tunic upward as he slouches, arms wedged between gate’s jamb and side. The hinge presses a grid into his spine. He cringes. And starts his count of the next thousand breaths. And yawns. His lungs swell constriction against his arms too close. Heels dug into dirt, legs locked, gravity droops his knees concave and magnifies his powers’ void where a charge should be.

  The crevice, a shaft flanking the gate from ground to sky, shuts out sun rays by a palm’s width; hot shadow pours down his neck. Undying day soaks black steel scorching, but—Atlas sinks into his slouch—warming, as breaths counted slow their legato rhythm. He blinks and his eyelids remain closed for seconds. He forces them open. He looks to the bird.

  It looks back.

  “Your presence is improbable,” Atlas says.

  It twitches a wing.

  “You should be in the sky and I,” his brows tense, “should be . . .”

  Its cobalt eye glimmering, the bird hops a centimeter to the right. Atlas shifts his mouth.

  “Earth is a fairly pleasant place to be.” He looks at his feet. “There are many trees with many varieties of birds who have their own nests. And there are showers and blankets and persons who would not report you to authority, no matter your language. The sky often alters color because the entire land revolves as you live. It’s unimaginable.”

  The bird stares.

  “A sunset—the expanse opens you to some force—the colors in some way—” Atlas crumples his forehead. “They show you outside of you. It’s impossible to express. Orange, pinks, and purples drawn into navy brim inside and outpour the dust you’ve so long piled. You may fly and fly but conformity departs when you pass by horizon at sunset. Truer colors emerge in the wait of view. And you can. One can view and wait and look toward sky and be filled with a belonging in the dissociation because colors were always meant to show and you had no idea. Then sun drops below horizon—but such is well. When the sun rises again, it’s more beautiful than when it set. That defines Earth I suppose.” He looks up. “The beginnings.”

  The bird is gone; burning shadow puddles in the ledge’s crevice. Atlas runs his fingers along one nearer: a ledge much too worn, narrow, rounded to hold a foot or hand.

  He lifts his head to the gap of sky above it. He lowers it.

  “Why am I in this place?” Atlas whispers.

  He turns his palms to the hinge at his back. He holds his breath as he presses thumb and finger into circular crannies between steel vertebrae, calculating their climbability for the twentieth time. They stand static, as usual, Eos’s side gates the more frequently accessed, but their knuckles fit nearly flush.

  He sighs and reclines. His eyelids slide shut, shoulder blades scraping metal. Skin adapts to hot steel cooling. Warmth deepens his breaths and seeps dreams untasted for dozens of hours before hours he’s stood alone.

  Click.

  Atlas opens his eyes and snaps up his head. He presses his ear to the gate. It ticks an insect swarm that chirps to an accelerating metronome. The curved metal at his back shifts. The clicks rumble into screeches, wailing, sputtering, and the hinge’s knuckles revolve. His shoulders squeeze inward. Heart jolts.

  He springs out of his slouch and twists sideways. The walls close in, lungs close in. The gap of sky shrinks and his chest touches metal, his back flat against the same. Turning his feet diagonally, Atlas shuffles from the narrowing crevice.

  But his eyes emerge first and a mass of hundreds of gray figures spills across the plains, toward him. He freezes, retracts.

  He again peeks.

  Near a thousand citizens, tunics off-white, bands leather, march in rectangular formation, in sections, in synch. They keep their chins toward Eos’s gates. Blood and dirt and charred black tear and spot their uniforms and skin. The citizens of Corvus: the constellation’s remaining.

  The gates swing open. Ebony steel walls groan, cry, sear hymns upon gritted bones of disharmonic resonance up twenty birdless ledges luring deepest shadow. Atlas locks arms to his sides and shifts his shoulders. He shimmies toward the crevice’s mouth.

  He stops. He stares at the citizens, their blotches of ashen faces too far for detail, too close for privacy. They march; he stays. The gate creeps toward its jamb and presses his chest.

  He exhales his last and drags his toes against gate’s base as he shambles around its impending corner, the cast that closes to rejoin its mold. He raises his arms but they stick. He pales. The gate revolves into his upper arm and grabs it between rounded ridges. Atlas hyperventilates, wriggles toward sun, slaps his forearm around the corner, clawing gate’s exterior. He frees his right shoulder. He shoves his hand into the gate and sucks in his gut, heaves out any trace of breath. He pushes on the exterior; he pushes his left shoulder, arm, hips, thighs free.

  The walls grab his ankle. Both hands on the exterior, he thrusts himself toward Corvus’s citizens, heart pounding, ears ringing, foot wedged. He scrapes his ankle’s skin red and foot bruised and, with a pop, wrenches his shoe out of the crevice. He tumbles to the ground, free. The hinge closes and gate meets its jamb with a thud.

  He wheezes and pushes his palm to dirt and himself to his knees. His halfway loosed citizen footwear, a buckled, hard-soled slipper, slides off his toes as he plants them. Wobbling on one jittery leg, Atlas crams his foot back into his shoe and exhales the ice that lingers in the squirms in limbs and the images in mind oozing from gate’s crack centimeters behind. He thinks on the brittleness of his bones, the enormity of the gate: talc under a sledgehammer. Wrapping an arm around his center, Atlas forces air through his nose and staggers from the closed crevice.

  He looks to the citizens and the last of them, gazes unmoved, disappear behind gate’s black wall. They march inside Eos. The open gate shudders upon full stop and Atlas stumbles along the new perpendicular protrusion.

  Brushing its grid of ridges, fingers bobbing in and out, he walks to the gate’s edge and leans around it.

  Voices call and tattered backs depart. Walls the height of one and a quarter standard constellation fences cast dozens of meters of shadow and gape an entrance dozens of meters wide. The bases of towers and heads of persons fill it.

  “Onward to constancy, citizens,” shouts an Imperium sentry.

  Corvus’s examination and relocation plausibly. Atlas squints at the line of maroon Imperium jackets. A few dozen guards stand before a few guardians standing before two sentries before one vigil, their head. The line curves around Corvus’s citizens as they advance. Imperium stretches and clenches their affliction gauntlets and heightens their frames and puffs their chests and broadens their shoulders. Their black leather bands and sashes, embedded with jewels, strung across chest and arm and waist, jut their thick jacket folds and exaggerate their bulk.

  The sentry again yells. The citizens flinch. They pick up pace and the gates screech into motion, swinging inward.

  “With haste,” the sentry shouts.

  Hems sharp, fasteners gold, footwear polished, jackets knee-length and high-collared
, the Imperium watchmen wring their gloves as they step around the citizens. These affliction-catalytic gauntlets extend up the wrist, clothe each finger, but leave fingers’ fleshy undersides bare, straps around each joint, one ring of a wire-wide stabilizer centered in their palms also otherwise naked. Their every studded knuckle drinks gauntlets’ electrical output. This triples their power. Their palms warp breezes in centimetric cyclones.

  The guards turn around and, shoulder to shoulder, march with the citizens into Eos. The gates swing from Atlas. He follows them.

  Inhaling, Atlas clenches his jaw, glances at the vigil, the sentries, and sprints out from behind the gate’s exterior. He runs to the crowd’s back. He ducks in welcome shadow as he barrels through the rearmost citizens, squeezing past three rows leaking grunts. He slows at the fourth; he matches their march. Nearby citizens glare at him.

  “Protection and security lie within,” the sentry yells. “We join our body in the courtyard. Great is the cycle.”

  The citizens look forward. They and Atlas yell, “Great is the cycle.”

  “Atlas of Taurus.”

  His gut launches up his throat. Pulse pounding, Atlas turns toward the citizen adjacent. A familiar, young face, hair centimeters fuller, longer than standard, stares back.

  “You’re,” Atlas mouths, “Kraz.”

  His eyebrows pinch. “You know my alphabetical title.”

  “And you mine.” Atlas steps to the right and, craning his neck, scans crowd’s bulk. “It was adequate suffering you. Goodbye.”

  Kraz grabs his arm. “Wait. I will not reveal you. I will not harm you.”

  Atlas jerks his arm from Kraz’s grip and narrows his eyes. “Why?”

  “Because I do not believe you have retractable claws.”

  “What do you believe?”

  Kraz raises his voice to a notch under the gates’ screech. “That you may not be a loyal Sideran but you may be a kind being. I glimpsed stirrings in the laborhouse and believe another created the fire. I believe you chose to save my constellation. I believe you were born strange.”