Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  A citizen in the crowd shouts and two dozen citizens look up and shove the rest. Atlas steadies in a second’s alignment, elbows out, front against air resistance, and fixes his fingers over the coin. It glints pure sun once; he flourishes two merging currents from both palms.

  The crowd clears a small circle. The last meters between him and hundreds of wide blue eyes and brunette hair quivering in wind hurls closed. Black marble leaps up to meet his body. Atlas breathes all crystal heaven, streams his power after the aureus, and, a flash of coin’s violet, of emerald flickering a trail, plummets the last centimeters.

  He flinches.

  XLII

  Reunion

  “-Leave him there, he’ll bleed to death and you agreed to help me out but you’re just standing with your ugly hands in your pockets—ho-oh, behold my manly nonchalance—and he’s dying with all unconsciousness because he was probably thrown out a window or, y’know, that mother-smacking tornado over the Koppers Building. Gracious. What if he’s brain dead?”

  “He was always brain dead.”

  “I—what—he—”

  “You cry and I leave.”

  “What do I do? Call 9-1-1? No, at least two of us have warrants.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Look at all those burns on his arm—heavens, look at that cut—”

  “What about my hands is ugly?”

  “Help me pick him up.”

  “Did you say ‘mother-smacking’?”

  “Samuel, help.”

  “Stop shrieking into my ear like a four-year-old that accidentally drowned Sparky and I might.”

  Lights and sounds—ringing. Dense ringing in the depths of Atlas’s skull that swells every time his heart pounds his ribcage. His lungs expand against a nail bed; his arteries pump razors through his shoulders, arms, to the tips of his fingers. He budges them. They touch a rough surface.

  “I pray you never had pets as a child.”

  “I had humans.”

  “Lovely, Samuel. Just grab Atlas’s shoulder.”

  A hand slides under Atlas’s shoulder and another under his back. They push him up into a seated position. The razors in his blood grow to handsaws tearing his spine as it bends. He cringes.

  “Atlas? Atlas, are you all right?”

  “He’s dandy. All that encrusted blood through his ripped getup—stylistic choice. That crater his body left in the sidewalk looks cozy. A Coke and an iPad would make it home.”

  “Shush. Atlas?”

  Atlas squeezes his eyelids together. Sun sinks between their veins and glows them throbbing pink. Its rays pulse his head, sear his swollen wrist, soak his tunic to his chest and hair to scalp. The hands heave him onto his knees, then his feet, his toes dangling, scraping the same rough surface he touched. Two arms wrap his back, his arms around theirs, and drag him till his fingers bump something hard; the object swings. A door. The hands lay him on a soft surface beyond it. They pull his back up hot padding and release him.

  One of the smaller hands props his head. It brushes his cheek. “What happened to you?”

  It’s more a sigh than words. The light through Atlas’s eyelids dims so he peels them. He flinches. Blinks. His pupils practice adjusting, though the throbbing behind them remains, and he squints upward.

  Gene leans over him, her hair draped around his periphery, her hand on her lap and under his head. A vehicle’s roof shades her shadow across his face.

  “Gene,” Atlas mouths.

  She contorts her face and wipes her cheek. “Atlas?”

  His brows tense. “Hello.”

  Gene exhales, bends down, and kisses his forehead. Withdrawing, she strokes with a thumb the spot her lips touched. “Thank you, Lord. Thank you.”

  Atlas stares. He mumbles a wheeze mere decibels above silence: “Are you aware of your face?”

  “I would hope,” Gene’s smile falls, “so?”

  “Your face’s upside-down.” Atlas darts his eyes trailing pulsing smears and, groaning, shuts them. “Am I—am—”

  Pain in his back, arms, legs claws toward his brain and seizes his muscles. He shortens his breaths.

  “Denim, move.” Samuel shoulders between her and the back of the passenger’s seat. “Toddler needs his naptime.”

  Samuel raises a long, clear syringe, needle-side up, and taps it. He presses his thumb into its plunger and a liquid squirts out.

  “Um.” Gene goes white. “What are you doing?”

  “Sixteen hours sleep should ease my pain,” Samuel says.

  “You mean his pain.”

  “You’re doing that thing you do with your words again. Keep it in check.”

  Her open mouth dislodges a noise. “Where did you get that?”

  “7-Eleven.”

  “What is that?”

  “Heroin.”

  “Why do I even try to communicate?”

  Samuel yanks up Atlas’s sleeve. “Why indeed.”

  “Uuuhh.” She grabs Samuel’s equipped arm with a trembling hand. “But it—that—it’s not really? Samuel.”

  Samuel shakes her off and gives her a look. “Great devil, Denim. Why does everyone take everything so literally?”

  “Because life isn’t a joke.”

  Samuel laughs. “Nice.” He puts the needle, his middle and forefinger under its side grips, to Atlas’s arm and pushes it in. A few seconds later, he slides it out again. He gestures to the trickle left by its prick. “Hold that.”

  Gene draws Atlas’s sleeve to his elbow and presses on it. Tossing the syringe to the floor mat, Samuel ducks out of the car and shuts the door. He gets in the driver’s side and clicks the engine to a rumble too low for familiarity. The vehicle moves.

  Wincing as he swallows, Atlas looks at Gene, but she looks away. She frowns at the back of Samuel’s seat. She freezes that way, the fingers on his arm tight, the hand under his head stiff. Atlas lifts a finger, budges his lips, but he only exhales and drops it, closes them.

  He watches the sun through branches and buildings and utility poles drooping their wires and all glides over Gene’s cheek, patterns her hair. Rays wrap golden projections around her shoulders. Vehicle’s hum and wheels’ roll deepen his blinks. Wind whistles through the side window’s centimeter gap, and her hair catches it in his staccato glimpses. He thinks of lifting his hand to her neck.

  He blinks the last that glues eyelids together and prays to Imperium he’s not moved when he wakes.

  * * *

  Sliding a hand down his face, Atlas rolls onto his side and opens his eyes.

  Gene sits on the console between the vehicle’s two front seats, her crossed legs pressing her stomach. Atlas still lies across the back seat but it no longer hums. Trees stand in the windows, an empty road through the windshield; none of it moves. Gene smiles.

  “Hi, Atlas. You slept a long time.”

  Atlas sits up and scans his arms, his legs, turning one hand in the other. The bruises, burns, and tunic’s reddened tears are gone, the gash in his upper arm—he touches its wholeness, cleanliness. He must have forgotten.

  “Hmm.” Gene touches a finger to his nose. “That’s funny.”

  “What is?” Atlas asks.

  “Your time left.” She tilts her head and her grin falls with her hair. “Didn’t it tell you?”

  Atlas’s forehead crumples. “To what are we referring?”

  “Didn’t the map tell you that it’s only one page and you have a lot more to go?”

  “Maps,” he raises an eyebrow, “do not verbalize.”

  Pouting, Gene throws down her arms and sighs. “Aw, man. You forgot to open it again, didn’t you? Your heart, not your mind. May’s the fifth month but coming midwinter and you don’t own a single jacket.”

  Atlas rolls his eyes. “Gene, you truly need to cease these senseless emotional lectures. They’re beginning to irk me.”

  “Just because you’re,” she taps his nose again, “jealous.”

  “Of what?”

  �
��My humanity.”

  Atlas stares at her. “I need fresh air.”

  He tugs on the door handle and climbs out of the vehicle. Dividing a forest, no buildings, no power lines, road’s emptiness pours claustrophobia both uncanny and ordinary. Atlas walks around the Mustang’s front toward Samuel. Gene already stands at his side.

  They shrug and talk and gesture to the car. Samuel pops his Mustang’s hood and fingers around inside.

  “There’s so much I need to fix and Attie, the girly dove-bot, like always,” Samuel waves his hands forward, “ruins everything. ’Cause of him, we’ve got a war coming and I can’t show up with this fireless flab. Look at my engine. It’s searing pork chops with how over-cooled it is.”

  Gene nods. “Yummy.”

  “Here, take some.” Samuel pulls out a plate from under the hood and, on it, stacks five or six meaty chops. He hands it to her with a spoon.

  Gene smirks and nudges Samuel’s shoulder. “Teach me how to make fire, ’kay, BFF?”

  “You’re the only one who knows how. Attie, the damaged baby, is the one who hasn’t learned yet, not until the opening. What a weirdy. No one likes him because of his hair and the way he dresses.”

  Gene beams. “And his personality!”

  “And his personality.”

  “Gene,” Atlas steps forward; “I wish you wouldn’t remain around this,” he makes a face and motions to Samuel, “severity. It’s affecting you. You’re too innocent.”

  “No, you.” Gene laughs.

  Samuel points at Atlas. “No, you!”

  “Absolute.”

  “Too innocent and naïve. Thing is, one cancels out the other eventually so you can’t be both.” Gene sets her pork chops on the car’s roof. “Choose, Atlas. Innocent or naïve. You’re born with naïvety but innocence must be learned.”

  Atlas purses his lips. “Learned?”

  “Yeah, like guilty until proven innocent. Like going to jail. Like raking it outta rat nests till the cows come home. No, wait! It’s like learning how to find an element’s number of valance electrons without a periodic table. Right, Samuel?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Teach me, Samuel.” Gene pokes him. “Teach me about electrons before Instructor Tauri comes back!”

  Samuel shuts the hood and turns to her. “Calm down. I’ll teach you. Hold out your hands.”

  Gene does as she’s told, palms up. Samuel rests his hands on hers and closes his eyes. She copies him.

  “All hail Sovereign—” Samuel shakes his head. “That’s not right. How does it go, Denim?”

  “I think it starts with a ‘C,’ ” Gene whispers.

  He breathes out. “Oh, right. Cantaloupe.”

  “Clientology.”

  “Corgi.”

  “Collectivism.”

  “Ooo, good one,” Samuel says. “Do you taste the electrons yet?”

  Gene smacks her lips. “No.”

  “Let’s keep going then. Cajun.”

  “Crew-cut.”

  “Ciler.”

  Atlas exhales. He spins around. Without stepping, he looks at the forest across the street and he’s in it. He glances behind a shoulder but the Mustang, Gene, Samuel are nonexistent. Only bushes and branches scratch his cheek and web the dusking sky. He twists forward. Paces before his narrowed eyes, a dark figure slips behind a tree trunk.

  Atlas squints.

  The figure shrinks.

  Legs fossilized, body numb, Atlas leans onto the balls of his feet and stares after the silhouette, its nose peeking from a hood, until the birds stop chirping and night falls.

  “It will open.”

  “Cartographer,” Atlas whispers.

  He turns around and peers for the voice’s source.

  The Cartographer stands in the center of Elisium’s clearing. The halved opening surrounds Atlas—one half: lush green conifers taller than some ten-story buildings and the other: leafless skeletons flaking char. Century-old manors gird the forest’s base, their iron steeples and black roofs pointed toward evergreens’ points. Soot swirls the air gray.

  Atlas rubs his eyes. The Cartographer looks the same as he did in Atlas’s last vision: downturned, hooded eyes, his graying hair too long for Sideran standards swept behind his ears. Only, he stands taller, his Sideran garb smoother, hair untangled. Full moonlight pales his russet irises.

  “Pylon will open,” The Cartographer says.

  The next inhale slips through Atlas’s teeth and pulls the words, “You can’t know that.”

  The Cartographer lifts a scroll—The Presage. He lowers it to his side.

  Atlas sighs. “Your scrawled thoughts don’t predict anything. You cannot create fate.”

  Bobbing his head to one side, he steps forward and ash swirls around his sleeves. “Does a surveyor create mountains or streams? We all choose our own fates. I just map them.” He meets Atlas’s eyes. “You were meant to be her protector until the time came.”

  “Until the time called for Gene’s slaughter? ‘Protector’ doesn’t hold much significance by your definition.”

  “Protector of freedom. You’re meant to do what others won’t.”

  Atlas scoffs. “Are you aware that Corvus uses Pylon for the exact opposite of its intended purpose? Yes, you truly know how to map fate.”

  The Cartographer shakes his head. “You’re still meant to uphold the sky.”

  “What, by the Imperium, does that mean?” Atlas flourishes his clawed fingers. “Uphold Sidera’s citizens? The Imperium? Help them destroy Earth?”

  The Cartographer frowns. He shakes his head again.

  Atlas ducks a notch. “To which part?”

  Outstretching an arm, The Cartographer steps forward and presses his hand to Atlas’s chest, to his heart. Warmth floods Atlas’s body. A stillness swaddles him from scalp to toe, as a blanket upon Gene’s couch, a swathe in a crib, an injection between the ribs of undiluted serenity. Sun rolls through his tissue the acceptance of a thousand loving touches his thirty-one years somehow omitted. He thaws in one swelling, hour-long breath, and wonders why waking feels the more touchless.

  “Imperium took them but, after you fell, your dreams were restored through humanity,” Cartographer says, “and you have more than you know.” He lets his arm fall and steps back. “The Presage is yours now, as it should be. Remember to dream.”

  Warmth ebbs in sustain as Atlas reassumes isolation, if by an arm’s reach. Shifting heavy feet upon plush turf, he looks at The Cartographer’s hands, their lifegiving power, but The Presage isn’t in them. He holds up his own hands and stares into his palms. They pulse a charge.

  He whispers, “How do I close it?”

  “War will begin and you’ll have one option before the sun rises. One option to close Pylon.”

  “Which is?”

  “The ultimate sacrifice.”

  A chill hooks a chunk of warmth from Atlas’s chest. “The ultimate sacrifice opens Pylon—Gene’s blood.”

  “That’s not the ultimate sacrifice.”

  “Adequate. Further sacrifice. To close Pylon, do I have to die also?”

  “You know as well as I that death isn’t the worst fate.”

  “Tell me, Cartographer.”

  He turns from Atlas and walks through the mist that tastes of cold pyres.

  “All must end in a circle.” Cartographer twirls his finger at the sky, Elisium’s walls of trees containing its woodsmoke pool; Atlas looks up and circular towers and constellations, coins and portals flash before the moon so round. “The universe is mapped into a globe: one celestial sphere. It’s your fate to keep it high.”

  Atlas waves the ash from his face as he lowers his chin; but The Cartographer’s gone. Soot rains shimmering black through skies and Cartographer’s voice quakes Atlas’s chest, webs through bone, again heats his heart to brim tears free of debris for four last words.

  “Don’t close your atlas.”

  * * *

  He wakes gasping. Atlas jolts up, cl
utches the firm fabric padding under his hips, and groans. He freezes, posture straight. There they are: the aches in his back, legs, core, the cuts and burns, the throbbing behind his eyes. He sucks breath struggling to expand lungs and tastes air’s impurities he’d forgotten. He digs his fingers into upholstery.

  Upholstery. Atlas looks past the red-daubed bandage tying his arm and to his hands; they grapple the fabric of an unfamiliar vehicle. He tenses his brows and retraces memories and touches the light across his leg. This angle of sun could never belong to Sidera.

  “Took you long enough.”

  Atlas jerks his head twenty degrees left. Halfway hidden behind the driver seat’s backrest, Samuel reclines with his feet on the dashboard, ankles crossed, hands cradling his neck. Atlas grins a skewed grin. Gut constricted, he gazes at Samuel’s profile, at his black jacket and hair, swept out at the shoulders, until Samuel meets his eyes in the rearview mirror and Atlas blanks his face.

  “You really did sleep sixteen hours.” Samuel purses his lips. “Denim’s been radiating neurotic episodes and the disgusting things are contagious.” He nods to the side window. “Go tame your girlfriend.”

  Atlas opens his mouth.

  “Nope.” Samuel narrows his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Chatting later. Put a leash on Denim first.”

  Her wellworn nickname spasms the spasms behind Atlas’s ribs, a volatile chemical mixture of stinging and soothing. He exhales. Then drags his body by the aching centimeter to the car door, opens it, and plants his feet on gravel. He cringes. He wobbles to a stand and slams his door shut.

  Air thick and ragged rasps along his cheek an untempered, once-alien charge, and every shift in breeze fluctuates from coolness to swelter and back again. Raw earth beneath Atlas’s feet; raw particles in his lungs. He grimaces through sun and at the dirt path waving his soles. Branches sag overhead; midday wind rustles them. Varying shapes and sizes, color and luster, a spectrum of earth-tone pebbles underfoot glimmer gently between shadow’s sway, never dreaming of Sideran brilliance. Atlas darts his eyes across fallen leaves and to the vehicle in which he slept: some dark blue sedan, bushes at its front bumper, twigs scraping its side tilted by a slope the tires straddle.