Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Atlas swings his blade at Eden’s neck but she steps back through Pylon, flicking the last drop of Gene’s blood from her fingers. The ring bursts. Atlas cringes and squints through light sun would envy. Head stooped, he steps into it.

  One twitch of a wink and five iron hooks clamp around his wrist. They yank his equipped hand behind his back. Atlas winces. Eden’s fingers squeeze his arm, jerking it up, digging their nails into halfway healed bruises and burns, until the knife slips from his grasp. It clinks to the road. Eden spins Atlas around and, flinging her arm through the air, smacks Atlas’s mouth with the back of her hand. His lip breaks open; blood trickles from it. Atlas readjusts his pupils to Pylon’s original glow and blinks through pulsing pain.

  Then Eden clutches Atlas’s neck, slides her other hand up his shoulder blade, leans in, and presses her lips to his. She opens her mouth and the movement forces open his. She grazes his lip with her tongue.

  Eyes wide, Atlas snaps his bent elbows straight, his electric palms forward, and thrusts her and a gust from him. She stumbles backward, their lips parting, dissipating breeze twirling her hair. She smiles. With her sleeve, she wipes his blood from her mouth.

  Atlas sprawls his fingers and clenches his jaw. “Don’t. Touch me.” He burns his eyes into hers. “Again.”

  “But you can me.” Eden opens her fingers and flames dance off them. “Come to me.”

  Atlas shoots both palms above his shoulders and hurls an airstream ten times wider than her, five times taller, into Eden’s body. She flies across the street and slams a lobby window twenty meters away. Her back thumps sidewalk. She stops moving.

  “Gene.” Atlas flips around and peers through Pylon’s drifting auras upon auras. “Gene?”

  He runs past Pylon and spots her. Gene holds on to an SUV’s side mirror, paces from Samuel, who stands between four Accenda, the original two downed.

  Atlas sprints for them. One Accend, a female with a buzz cut, spouts a fire stream that washes Samuel’s arm and explodes on the SUV’s front tire. Blurting a noise, Gene ducks behind the driver’s door while Samuel pats extinguished his jacket. As the last flame snuffs from his sleeve, another Accend sprays a vortex that encircles Samuel, Gene, the four, and grazes Atlas’s toes and distorts his view waving in heat haze. Atlas hops backward. He leans onto the balls of his feet, whipping his head for a break in the flame wall; but before it disperses, a scream pierces his heart and he glimpses, through fire, Samuel kicking his leg off the road, swinging on his grounded one, and throwing his heel into an Accend’s cheek. The Accend collapses. Samuel then grabs the female by her shoulders. He yanks her down and drives his knee up into her forehead. She grunts, jerks backward, falls. The fire clears.

  Atlas steps forward—

  Samuel crouches and slides his hand into the unconscious beetle-eyed Accend’s jacket. He snaps his hand out again, straightens, outstretches his arms, and three booms split sound and echo thunder through alleys for kilometers. The last two standing Accenda drop to the road, bleeding.

  The revolver in Samuel’s hands whirls smoke.

  Jerking the bangs from his eyes, Samuel swings out his weapon’s cylinder, checks its contents, and grabs extra rounds from Beetle Eyes’ jacket. He loads the revolver. Clicking it into place, he looks at Atlas and nods.

  “All good there, Attie?”

  Atlas stares. He swallows and, jumping over a writhing Accend, runs to Gene.

  Mouth agape, she looks him up and down. “Are you—”

  “I’m satisfactory.” Atlas grasps her arm and walks her from Pylon. “Now we depart.”

  Gene glares past his shoulder. “Atlas, wa—”

  A jolt and white sparks seize Atlas’s head. It jars to his left and his body follows and pain after that. Vision blackens; ears deaden; muscles stop. Momentum flings the world onto its side, cheek to sky, cheek to road, and wetness trickles behind his ear. His hand slips from Gene’s arm. He gropes the air for her upturned palm, squinting through hundreds of stacked, blurred images, but his fingers only brush hers and then fall.

  He mouths one word. “Run.”

  Atlas plummets for an eternity, screaming the same words inside until his vocal cords shrivel and freeze. Gene, run.

  Run.

  XLVI

  The End of the Beginning

  Two gunshots rattle his bones and one scream fixes them in place. Its shrill timbre enthralls spine’s frequency till static and thick, encumbering it with the weight of skies till they press him flat. His head fills with the density of neutron stars. Spinning, orbiting, girum, girum, girum. The longer his vision whirls, the more mass his head obtains.

  A hand slides under Atlas’s shoulder and yanks him halfway up. It pushes on his back.

  “Not your time to lose it.” Samuel snaps his fingers before Atlas’s eyes. “Come on. Help me out.”

  Atlas moans.

  “I’m bleeding like crazy and Gene needs you.”

  His words plunge deep and surface thought. Quadruple vision focusing into a single beam, Atlas flattens his feet and inhales the first breath in minutes that expands his lungs enough to budge his chest. His skull lightens. He bends his knees, presses his heels into road, and stands.

  He blinks through a cringe that simmers nausea relaying his headache. Pain clusters; ears ring. He touches the blood thickening behind his ear: a small split upon swollen skin, bones beneath intact.

  He grimaces into darkness now darker.

  Samuel’s arm drips. Slits in his jacket and shirt expose the hand-wide gash across his shoulder. He clutches it, blood seeping through his fingers.

  “She swung at you with some hunk of metal, then just got her—” Samuel cringes. “Shot’s too risky and aiming’s impossible. Go.”

  Atlas squints past Samuel. Thirty meters away, Eden drags Gene by her neck and waist toward the light pillar glowing a new brilliance a few paces farther. Gene sees it and writhes and flails; but Eden yanks her elbow around Gene’s neck, lugging her backward, and Gene’s cries gurgle. Night roosts in full. For blocks in every direction, streetlamps cradle jagged glass craters devoid of the flares meant to buoy sky’s sag and skyscrapers become nightgougers. Their one-way mirrors perfectly reflect scattered fires, cracked concrete, toppled dwarf trees, police cruisers beached onto sidewalk. Pylon glares anew in matured darkness, drenching every near facet until midtones radicalize. Atlas locks his narrowing pupils onto Gene’s and Eden’s silhouettes bobbing against Pylon’s rays, and runs.

  He runs for Pylon and wobbles to the left, the right. He opens his mouth, strains voice, but whispers only. “Gene.”

  Eden speeds and Atlas throws his thighs to cycle his knees to cycle feet; but he sways left off his course and trips over his own heel. He staggers. Slows. He outstretches his arms, swings back onto his path, hauls his feet that stick to road. Eden pulls Gene to Pylon’s edge. Their bodies swallow a section of light as they enter the ring.

  Atlas shakes out each foot’s weight, one after the other, and his senses speed. He unsticks his joints. Grows his voice. “Gene.”

  Clawing air, Gene extends her arm from Pylon’s glow but half a second and she and Eden disappear behind it.

  Atlas’s heart jolts. His momentum accelerates, legs loosen, palms charge. He angles them down and behind and releases a current that bursts against his calves. It thrusts him forward a step, dissipates. He gasps deserts. Pylon’s outline expands, approaches. Three meters—two away.

  One figure behind the light hurls the second to the road. A blade flashes. A scream erupts; and it’s Gene’s.

  His stomach drops. Boulders sawing down his throat, heart quaking up, Atlas leaps the last meter and falls through Pylon’s ring. He slams the standing figure. They collapse.

  Atlas props himself gripping the shoulders beneath him and whips his head right. Gene lies centimeters from Eden, who lies facedown under Atlas. He squeezes Eden’s arms to her sides, his legs bordering her thighs, her hands empty, blade gone. He pins her to the brick th
at scrapes his knees.

  He scans Gene.

  Propped on an elbow, Gene glares at her inner right arm; it streams blood. She grinds her teeth and, eyes wide, face white by more than ring’s reflection, hovers her left palm before her gash. Thick wine flows down her elbow and kisses Pylon. It explodes.

  This time, the surrounding light swells higher than the City-County Building. It shoots through night sky for troposphere’s limits, blinding stars, out-scaling skyscrapers. The ring, interrupted at Eden’s legs and Gene’s head, hums crystalizing sparks on Atlas’s tongue and impales clouds.

  “Gene,” Atlas ducks toward her, “you must move from the circle. I can’t—do you understand?”

  Eden heats her palms and twists them upward.

  Atlas glances behind him and, darting his narrowed eyes, yells, “Samuel!”

  He exhales. He faces forward and peers through the glow’s break above Gene’s head. The Accend army shouts and stomps two blocks away, their heads distinguishable, thousands of torches bulged swinging, oscillating in thousands of hands. With forward eyes, they burst a collective roar at Pylon’s swell. Some scream chants.

  “—never stop. We will never stoop.” Their voices tangle. “—stack the bones of oppressors for a ladder. We are free.”

  Eden laughs into the road. Her hands gleam orange.

  Clawing Eden’s arms, Atlas bends down and meets Gene’s eyes. “Do you understand me?”

  She nods, though her acceptance resists understanding, of leaving him before the mounting throngs. Cringes taking her daze, Gene rolls onto her other side. She holds her gash for minimal spill and crawls out of Pylon’s ring. She vanishes behind the light.

  “Samuel,” Atlas yells.

  Beams burst in the corners of his eyes; engorged will-o’-the-wisps writhe blocks away, swimming stoked their fire and fat their smoke, but two separate, lumens smarter, blocks closer, tear from Eden’s fingers and up Atlas’s sides. He leans forward on curled toes and Eden’s flames brush his tunic before fizzling into air. He flips Eden onto her back. He kneels on her hands. She winces and grins.

  And says, “I know you’re a little upset but there’s—”

  Atlas throws his fist into Eden’s nose. Her head bangs the road with aftershock that equals the force of his blow. He hits her again. And again. She grunts and grimaces and spins her sightless eyes from under crinkled lids; and Atlas snaps forward his knuckles and her grunts morph to sputtered groans. Atlas’s blood burns. Wind pulses. He clutches both of her ears, funnels two currents into each, and, pressing his palms flat, her ears flatter, wind stretching her canals overflowed, lifts her head and bashes it into the brick. She spits a second’s scream before he repeats.

  “Samuel!” Atlas pauses. Knuckles throbbing, he cuts his streams wafting his tunic and Eden’s hair and looks behind a shoulder. “Assist Gene and provide me your weapon or, so help me Imperium—”

  “You’re a moth,” Eden says.

  He narrows his eyes.

  Eden clears her throat, blood trickling from her nose, smeared across her lip. Her voice breaks and falters. “Countless dimensions you’d wander, looking for one thing, one enticing torch.”

  Atlas turns to her and digs his fingers into her shoulders. “I wouldn’t advise speaking.”

  “It’s night and you need it: the wander. You go in circles because the thought of the taste of embers rushes your blood and flutters away fears of enclosing darkness you don’t understand.” She shifts her shoulders, grimaces with glistening eyes. “It heats your heart. You fly in darkness because you long to soar straight into extremity never known—into the blinding knowledge and pleasure, power, control—the devouring risk forbidden from your youth. This.” Eden bends her thumb in and out caressing Atlas’s knee. “You seek fire.”

  He rolls his knee up her fingers; she flinches.

  “Spend your last breath with importance,” Atlas says.

  “We’re identical.” Eden stretches her jaw. “Humanity is something special—Imperium knows it. Accenda know it. You and I crave, dangerously, the passion, the emotion, the raw vulnerability so many walkers kindle. It’s why we’re incomplete without Earth, why Accenda drain their life. How else could we fuel ourselves? The soul is fire.”

  “And you’re cold.”

  “Loved one, you’re who’s crouched on top of me, beating my skull into the ground, when you could be helping your Genesis.”

  Atlas’s throat contracts. He twists around and squints through Pylon.

  “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.” Eden eyes his lip. “You’re the moth that wanders over constellation walls, just to be consumed by night’s fire on the other side. That’s the meaning, beloved.”

  Atlas grips Eden’s right shoulder with both hands, lifts his body, and thrusts her to the side, stepping over her as she rolls from the ring. He stands up straight. He kicks Eden’s settling side and she flips once more from Pylon.

  Jaw bitten to steel, he runs from the light pillar and whips his head around for Gene. His pupils dilate her figure into being paces off the intersection. She sits on the curb, slumped over, clutching her arm pale enough for Atlas’s blindness.

  Samuel jogs up to her when Atlas does. He waves Atlas off.

  “Don’t need to say it. I’ve got her.” Samuel throws an object toward Atlas. “Go shoot my girlfriend.”

  Atlas catches the revolver at his stomach. He folds his hand around its grip, rubbing its texture, feeling its weight. He clicks back the hammer with his thumb, as he’s seen Samuel do, and strokes the trigger’s crescent with the tip of his forefinger. He spins around, jogs for Pylon, shrinks before its glare that nears too quickly; he blinks for too long.

  Something slides under his ankle.

  He teeters. Atlas falls backward and, finger around its trigger, squeezes the revolver. It booms, snaps in his elbow. His rattled back thuds the road. Panting, he gropes for the weapon’s hammer and again clicks it back.

  “Three weaknesses.” Eden leans over Atlas and her hair drapes his view. “Siderans’ physical weaknesses. The cold, breathlessness, and dark. Not on high ground, dear.”

  Atlas raises the gun’s barrel and Eden pushes into the ground with one hand and off with the other. He pulls the trigger. Eden flips off Atlas, out of the bore’s path. The shot echoes through connecting alleys. Eden crouches an arm’s length away and, ears ringing, Atlas pushes himself to kneel.

  “And still, you wander back to me, to Pylon with an alien weapon, no aim, no plan, hours shot out of the homeland you thrive in and now breathing polluted, human air chilling by the minute. Mmm. All that risk.” Eden wipes the blood from her nose; Pylon glows her profile. “Fire seduces you.”

  Atlas jerks the revolver toward her chest. “Good Imperium. Are you and Corvus consistently this talkative?”

  He shoots—but squints and loses sight of Eden. He props himself on one hand, ducks into the revolver’s sights bobbing to his pulse, and sweeps the barrel across building bases, above rumbling ground. Road debris sticks to his palm; sweat burdens his eyelids. A shadow darts before his face. Atlas jolts. Eden kicks his jaw, pivots, and then runs for the figures in the distance: Samuel and Gene.

  Atlas groans. He lurches back, lurches forward, throws his chest down on the road, and grabs Eden’s lifted foot. He yanks it; she collapses.

  Eden rolls onto an elbow. She reaches for Pylon, her fingers brushing its outer rim, and draws her arm in with a new object. She swings it at Atlas. Glossed with prophesied blood, her blade slashes his cheek from cheekbone to mouth’s corner. Its pommel finishes the swing with a whack to the revolver. Metal clanks against brick, and Atlas clutches the gash seeping red through his fingers.

  “Not really,” Eden says.

  She gets on her hands and knees and pushes herself up. She throws her shaking legs into a sprint, her concaved posture into cycle, arms into swing. Atlas aims a palm at her back but she blurs with Pylon’s radiance. He winces through his head’s pounding. And crawls
after.

  A distant fire patch frames Eden’s silhouette and, beyond hers, Gene’s and Samuel’s a few meters smaller, farther. Atlas grounds his heel, then the other, and holds his breath through cheek’s delayed cutting deep down his nerves, through jaw’s throbbing webbed toward his toes he presses to road. He stands. And blood drips from his chin and iron soaks his nostrils and tremors creep from his fears buried beneath sand Eden shifted. He thinks of his first earthly gash, of the ones that followed, of Gene’s. He squints at the glint of a blade’s face extended from a white-capped silhouette and understands why Eden prefers knives.

  His knees buckle. He hits road’s brick on his hands. Looking up, beyond the splash of a blood drop, Atlas kicks for standing, claws for momentum forward, but can only watch as Eden reaches Samuel and Gene. Samuel withdraws his uninjured arm from under Gene’s shoulder and throws a weak punch at Eden. She recoils, dodges. Samuel shouts something. Gene steps backward.

  Eden sinks her knife into Samuel’s gut.

  She yanks out the blade in the same motion, with the same force, same path she used to drive it in, and Samuel falls.

  Atlas waits. Five micro-breaths tickle his tongue, shove through his windpipe, and Samuel lies in the street. Laurels of fire halo his silhouette.

  Gene and Atlas stare. Spinning stars explode into black holes where their minds and hearts should be and they stare at the body with a name they forgot. Atlas’s gut seethes remembrance. Under consciousness, remembrance braids his insides.

  A heartbeat passes and Atlas scrambles onto his feet and sprints for the figures before the fire. Howls crack the air. He shudders and glances over a shoulder, past Pylon, down the street. The closest Accenda stride meters away; he can see one or two smiling, another scowling, some female skipping over flames she streams, shrieking the melody to footfalls’ beat in a song of clashing, rending dissonance.

  The air shifts against Atlas’s neck. He feels and turns forward, to a wind fluxing heat.

  Blinding, furious heat. Fire cups its crest overhead, a maw of sun blossoms stretching its jaws around his body and view as it pounces down his path. Staggering to slow, Atlas snaps his arms up, palms out, and then throws them around his side. Wind mimics fire’s motion but lures it one degree off its trajectory till distance magnifies the error in forth-meter-wide derailment. Wind balloons a pocket in the flames’ wall. Atlas shrinks inside it and the fire sweeps past, past his elbows, crown, spine, smearing flames meters down the road behind him.