“But it’s not possible.”
Atlas blinks and breathes. He unclenches his fingers.
“So am I—because you—in order to open Pylon—” Gene contorts her face and levels her tone to a flatness unnatural. “Are you meant to kill me?”
“No,” Atlas says.
She looks at him. “Were you meant to kill me?”
He holds his swallow.
“The Cartographer mapped you to kill me. Right?”
Wringing his fingers, he drops his chin into a nod. Leaves rustle and a bird lands a couple meters from their feet and pecks between pebbles. Gene shakes her head.
“But I’m just me.” Shoving Atlas another fourth of the way off the rock, Gene stands and throws her hands into the air. “I’m—”
“Special,” Atlas says.
“I’m Gene. I’m Gene.” She jabs her forefinger into her other palm. “My parents named me Genesis because they named the dog Paul the Apostle, okay? I’m just an unemployed mess who has two weird friends she isn’t very nice to. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not even bad, because that’d mean I have capacity. No, I’m just under mediocre. I pretend to be a big help to the world, you, and myself while I’m telling Samuel to keep his Twinkie wrappers in a grocery sack and losing my 750-square-foot apartment and burying the past and—and I know what Samuel means. I only own one pair of jeans that really fits. Ha. ‘Jean Walker’ owns no jeans!”
Atlas stares.
Her hands slapping her sides as they fall, Gene says, “I got a C-average in school, go to church maybe twice a year, usually fail in showering every other day, and I never know where the lightbulb aisle is, even when the old lady in the fabric department explains it to me three times because apparently I’m the one who’s hard of hearing, and I haven’t told people this but I don’t know how to fold laundry correctly so I just throw all my clothes into my dresser and if they don’t get wrinkled or dirty or lost under the kitchen sink—that’s happened; don’t say it—then what’s the point of folding them anyway?”
Atlas opens his mouth. He shuts it.
“I’m me,” Gene whispers. “Why would—”
Atlas stands and steps toward her. “Because you’re ordinary.”
“Feeling better already.”
“Sidera defines itself paradise and yet slumps below the worst. Gene, you’re ordinary in a universe that feigns superiority, unafraid of your imperfect humanity and unafraid to reveal it, unafraid of vulnerability. To me,” Atlas ducks his head, meets her eyes, “your ordinary is more than extraordinary.”
Gene smiles and frowns and grimaces. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.” She diverts her eyes. “And threw dirt at you.”
Atlas shakes his head.
“It was,” her chin plummets, “not nice.”
Outstretching an arm, he swallows pulse’s jolt up his throat, flicks the tremble from his fingers, and takes her hand. He thinks he says something of forgiveness.
Gene turns her fingers and slips them between his. “You’re still annoying though.”
Atlas makes a face. She tugs on his hand and he steps closer.
“You brought me into your dumb war,” she says, “and made me the number-one target of two fanatic, superhuman dimensions and my car is still in Montana.”
Atlas’s half-smile decays in grades. “Why do you endure?”
“ ’Cause you’re cute.”
Gene smiles and knotted warmth shoots up Atlas’s gut. He grips her hand as they surrender to the rocking of breeze.
“Eden expressed—before I entered the portal in Pittsburgh—” He exhales. “Am I yet permitted to ask of your past? Not the ‘lightbulb aisle’ past, the more significant past.”
Her jaw drops. “Lightbulbs are very significant.”
He frowns; she mirrors him; she strokes his hand with a thumb.
“This imperfection,” her brow furrows, “I’m still afraid of. Maybe after all this—maybe after—” She scans the trees over his shoulder. “You know the rest.”
Atlas purses his lips. “No.”
Her eyelids soften and forehead smooths. Gene glances up at Atlas, turns, and pulls him toward the woods. They walk past the blue sedan, past the first shrubs, ducking under low branches, hopping over fallen ones. A clearing a couple meters wide glows stippling on their shoulders and scalps as warm dew. Aromatic wood sap rides Atlas’s inhale, serrated drapes of elms tickling his arm. Gene stops; she faces him.
Sun drips down her hair and Atlas holds his breath.
“How are you feeling?” Gene whispers.
“Uh.” He darts his eyes. “Concerning which aspect?”
“Concerning your health aspect.” She floats her hand over the bloodstains on his sleeve, the bruises underneath. “I just assumed. You know, because you heal so quickly.”
His breath lets and flush recedes. “The pain is exceptionally dulled. I feel fatigued at most.”
Gene touches a sore spot on his hand. He winces. And blanks his face before she sees it.
“Atlas, I’m so sorry.”
He watches a leafy cluster sway its shadow across her arm.
“I’ll be here—with you and Samuel—even if Corvus’s groupies take over the world and has everybody like us burned. I didn’t come this far for no reason and, to tell you the truth, it’s not as scary as I thought it would be,” Gene says. “Now, how are you feeling?”
“Concerning my health?”
“Concerning your emotions.”
“I’m terrified.” Atlas crinkles his eyelids shut. “I’m so afraid, Gene. I began this. If I hadn’t escaped or—”
“Mm-mm. None of that.”
Opening his eyes downward, he bares his teeth at the soil. “I began this. I fear I must end it. I’m not courageous and don’t see myself growing to be so, if—when I have to face Eden and the others. Once they discover what I did to their Sovereign, once they discover you—”
She touches his jaw and he lifts it.
“Courage doesn’t mean being unafraid.” Gene squeezes his hand. “It means standing when you’d rather be sitting.”
Atlas searches the highlights in her irises. “How do you speak as if you’ve spent a lifetime contemplating what to say at the correct moment?”
Gene stifles a smile. “I have an app for inspirational memes.”
Fragments of amusement weather to a smile softer, toned by lines of pain, saturated by a glimmering depth only recently unveiled; and something behind Atlas’s sternum swells with reverence in being present to see its birth: the emergence of the cusp of her wholeness. The sun escaping a sheet of overcast. Purity, wet in her eyes. He wonders what she sees in his, before diverting them.
“It seems I’m less trustworthy than you believed,” Atlas whispers.
“Because of your secret Sideran mission?” Gene’s smirk tugs at one cheek. “Atlas, you’re an open book, just a really frustrating, reckless one.”
He peeks at her and opens his mouth and freezes. He leans a centimeter forward, a centimeter back, and again looks down the shadows between cracks of their waltzing roof.
“Was Sidera like you remembered? Was it beautiful?”
“It was perfect.” Atlas’s lips twitch upward. “The land glistened and sky shone. The air was like nothing else. Nothing other than—it—it wasn’t—couldn’t compare to—”
Gene lowers her chin but looks up through her lashes. Two breaths she waits.
Atlas meets her eyes. He inhales to his limit and says in one exhale, “I’ve missed you, Gene. Every second of every minute of every earthly hour I’m away and my hand hangs empty. I am, in all meaning of the word, bound. Bound without walls, without barriers, without the highest ceiling to close me in, under sky as stretching as view allows, and it terrifies me. It exposes me. And it remains the most warm, euphoric, brimming cyclone worlds inside the humanity I never knew I had. So, believe me when I express I would, without thought, have every bone in my body crushed into powder finer than sand until my most grue
some, unimaginable death if only you asked me to.”
Gene pales.
“And I believe—I know, at least by Samuel’s definition—” Atlas swallows. “I am in love with you, Genesis Walker.”
“Thanks,” she whispers.
He leans into her. “What?”
“What?”
“No, what did you express?”
“I,” Gene’s eyebrows tense, “don’t know.”
Atlas smiles and lifts his hands to her arms. “Te perdite basiare volo.”
“Seriously,” she stares at him, “what are you saying?”
Atlas slides his hands under Gene’s shoulder blades, and she steps her feet between his. Breaths shallow, cheeks red, she grips his primary sash slung across his back.
“Diu, dum sol descendit,” Atlas rests his forehead against hers and, closing his eyes, brushes back her bangs with a thumb, “te basianda es—”
A raven caws.
Atlas’s eyes open and Gene’s follow a second after. Ice down his spine, Atlas withdraws and whips his head scanning the branches for sooty invaders. His pulse beats back’s chill hot. He grabs Gene’s hand.
“—out here. We got to go. Now.”
Samuel’s voice through the trees. Atlas jerks to it and hops over shrubs and under sprigs whipping his cheeks and pulls Gene behind him. She stumbles at his heels as he breaks onto the sunlit path. They stride for the blue sedan.
“What, good heaven, is going on?” Gene says.
Atlas shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have come for me. We shouldn’t be here.”
He flings open the vehicle’s back door and they jump in. Samuel starts the engine. Atlas wraps an arm around Gene’s shoulders and pushes her ducked, his hunch one eye above hers.
Samuel throws the vehicle into reverse, jars them backward and up the path’s slope before he twists to look. Atlas reads him.
“Did you see it?”
“There’s more than one,” Samuel says.
Through his side window, Atlas glimpses three ravens flapping out of forest canopy, toward the hills on horizon. His insides condense.
He asks, “Have we been discovered?”
They bump and bob and their tires spray volleys of dirt at siding ferns. Gene looks over her shoulder, over Atlas’s hand; her eyes widen with Samuel’s. Atlas follows their gaze.
Out the rear windshield, a few hundred black beasts explode from the trees and soar above the sedan. Shadow washes the glass. An onyx river swirling into flight, the ravens block the sun as they brandish great cleavers of wings in a morbid twister around Samuel, Gene, and Atlas. The birds drench their vision dim and skin cooler than seconds past; and dusk descends early. They croak in unison. Their cry bounces off every tree trunk, every rock and leaf, until thousands of victims’ moans in Elisium chains dungeon-deep trill, drill through Atlas’s bones. Starless night writhes among the writhing of their feathers and steals day under bellowed, billowed, thrashing cinder clouds that rain breathlessness.
The eye of the storm has passed.
Samuel nods once. “Oh, yeah.”
He wrenches the steering wheel and skids the sedan around, the three commuters jolting as the tires settle parallel with an asphalt road. He steps on the gas.
XLIV
Memories
Are you prepared? All must end in a circle. They call me Absolute because I—I bring them bread—in girum imus nocte—I bring—because I—order out of chaos. What is truth? Absolute Savior. It’s because—Absolute, save us. Deliver us from choice. Progress us without pain. He raises the blade to her waist—her blood spills onto Pylon between hums of bounding beams oscil—don’t spill theirs, they’re allowed to keep it. Absolute, save us. They call me Absolute, Atlas, because they want me to be. Give, enforce, transform. Give, enforce—give—giving the life. With my life. Blood’s always the way to get a revolution going, Attie. Important. Blood is so—shh. Oh, now look, you caused him sadness. They build a pyre. The time of fire. Yours—you are not—kill your Genesis for Pylon’s opening because you have never been—wind to spread. For the majority is reality and the one is—the one—seven billion earthly cattle—none. A fire comes. Cooked into a sweet charcoal, red, filthy decay for the sky to swallow.
Fire. Moths don’t like the dark. A fire.
Are you prepared? Onward to constancy. Are you prepared? Are you prepared? Are you prepared? Are you prepared?
“Atlas! Listen to me!”
He blinks at the glaze of his own agape mouth in the rear windshield, hundreds of ravens behind it, and then looks to Gene. His ears break water’s surface and the vehicle’s purr explodes them. He cringes.
“Atlas, where are we going?” Gene asks. “Samuel will drive where you tell him to. It’s your call.”
Atlas budges his head left, right, heaviness dicing its range.
Gene pries his fingers from his pants and presses them between hers. “You’re shaking.”
His throat shrinks, breath sticks. His heart beats to raven wings and their cries ring with Gene’s voice.
“Atlas,” she whispers, “we’re here for you. Tell us what we should do.”
He hyperventilates. “I’m not prepared.”
Gene ducks her head and frowns at him. “Hmm?”
“I’m not—” Atlas blinks. “Don’t leave me.”
Brow tensed, she says, “I won’t.”
“You don’t understand” is what he thinks he whispers.
His eyes blur her and sharpen the shapes beyond her shoulder, out the window. Fluttering char envelops the road from forest wall to forest wall; the ravens flap for the sedan’s taillights and veil the green of woods, gray of asphalt. The closest graze the windshield as they dive, splaying their feathers, puppeteering shadows across the dashboard. They pick up speed.
Gene exhales. She turns to driver’s seat. “Just drive as fast as you can.”
“Because I wasn’t already,” Samuel says. “Since when do ravens flock together for the sixty-mile-per-hour, five-generation Johnson family potluck?”
“Samuel, do not,” she widens her eyes, “make me take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“What—” He glances at her. “What’s your deal, woman?”
“Why are you only driving sixty?”
Samuel squints through ravens swooping near the vehicle’s hood. “It’s a little crowded. No, not even I have x-ray vision.”
“Step on it, smart-mouth.”
Samuel smiles and meets Gene’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “You’re becoming somethin’, Denim.” Accelerating, he says, “After everything, I hate to say, you’ve really gr—”
Three birds consecutively smash into the windshield and splatter on impact. Samuel, Gene, and Atlas scream together. Samuel veers the car to the road’s left and a semi-truck driving the opposite direction blares its horn. Samuel clutches the steering wheel, throws it right; the sedan flings back across the double yellow line. The semi-truck whooshes past, its grille scraping their back fender, and a dozen more ravens slam syrup into sedan’s right windows, bumper, doors. They scream again. Samuel skids the right tires off the road’s shoulder and onto dirt. Branches batter the blood from the vehicle’s side. He sucks cheek-huffs, jerks the steering wheel left, and remounts asphalt with a stomach-lurching bounce, one briary sprig snagged on the side mirror rapping window’s red remnants. Samuel switches on the windshield wipers.
Gene yells, “Who taught you how to drive?”
Samuel slams his fist into the passenger seat’s shoulder, snaps his fingers, then points at Gene. “Myself at age nine.”
“Turn around,” Atlas says.
Samuel and Gene glance at him. The ravens’ cacophony vibrates the vehicle.
Atlas sits up straighter and stares back. “Turn around. Such is what you should do.”
Samuel scoffs. “Not happening.”
“These ravens are not exclusively for scouting. Eden sent them to drive us toward her.” Atlas peers out the rear windshield. “There’s n
o other conclusion for this number.”
“If I turn around, we could spin off the road and die.”
“True.”
“So,” Samuel scans the receding asphalt through a feathery sheet, “anyone know any good jokes?”
Gene’s eyelids droop. “Samuel.”
“I want to leave this world laughing.” Samuel takes a hand off the wheel despite himself and gestures to them. “Come on, tell me a joke.”
Atlas glances at Gene, then Samuel, and says, “Two Imperium guardsmen—”
“Not you, Attie.”
“Two Imperium guardsmen meet in the rest area at the end of the labor cycle.” Atlas’s forehead crumples. “One expresses to the other, ‘How many dissenters did you correct?’ The second replies, ‘Four.’ The first expresses, ‘And how many did you execute?’ The second guard replies, ‘One. For the one was executed ’fore the four for example.’ ” He looks up from his lap. “The first guard became confused. This is comical.”
Gene coughs. A raven pecks at the trunk.
Atlas stares at nothing. “Those caught telling jokes in Sidera are burned alive.”
Samuel glares out the windshield and Gene stiffens. Feathers and blood bash the car, their thuds increasing in tempo with the vehicle’s speed. Talons and beaks scratch, stab, dent the roof, and Samuel nearly pedals for a nonexistent clutch as the accelerometer revolves.
He chuckles. And does again. Samuel grins, taps the steering wheel with a thumb, and laughs until tears wet his eyes’ corners. He squints through them.
Jaw jutted, he smiles into the rearview mirror. “Hold on to something.”
Samuel tenses his grip, swerves the vehicle onto road’s right shoulder, and then hurls his hands left. Atlas grabs Gene, a palm to her hair, and they jolt right. Gene collapses into Atlas; Atlas’s head hits the door. Groans and gritted teeth underscore burning rubber over road’s white line and the whacking of fender-bent weeds as the sedan yowls a wide U-turn. Samuel waggles the wheel straight, and they speed the way they came. The writhing black mass follows. All ravens remaining flail against momentum whirling around to chase the vehicle’s tail.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 57