Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Gene lets her back hit the sidewalk. Atlas shuffles to her feet, sits, and drags her ankles up his lap.

  “Higher,” Samuel says.

  Arms shaking, Atlas lifts Gene’s feet as high as his head.

  “Den—” Samuel wrinkles Gene’s shirt up her waist. And exhales. He jerks his head to the side, closes his eyes, but soon jerks back, opens them again. “Gene, stay where you are. Think about chocolate and kissing Jared Leto.”

  Her eyebrows tense.

  Samuel opens his hand to Gene’s gash and heats it.

  “ ’S there a reason,” Gene grinds her teeth, “Jared Leto was your go-to? Have you thought about—”

  She screams. Atlas jolts. Samuel buckles four of five fingers under his hand and draws his forefinger down from one end of her gash. It sparks and glows. Flames lick up the sides of his hand, through his fingers, around his nails burning sunset glares. Scowling, Samuel pushes his finger into her wound and brightens his output to swell white foundations that stretch gradients up past drenched collars and sticky scalps. Fire illuminates Gene’s front and dances in Atlas’s frozen eyes. Her cries shatter his insides.

  Samuel reaches the halfway mark. Atlas squeezes Gene’s ankles with locked knuckles until she kicks. Breath burst out his mouth, he squeezes harder.

  One, two, three . . .

  The spasms ease. Gene’s shrieks deaden to moans as Samuel withdraws, dimming, curling his hand into the shadow at his side. The sidewalk darkens. Rain taps the street.

  Sucking air through his teeth, Samuel pulls down Gene’s shirt and skids his sweating hands across his thighs as he leans back. Atlas’s guts condense, eyes heat. His exhaustion and aching side lower under consciousness as he lowers Gene’s feet a notch and softens his grip.

  “Will she be,” he glares, “well?”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  Atlas quivers opening his mouth. He closes it.

  “Attie.” Between his first two fingers, Samuel holds up the last of his jacket’s stores, a square of adhesive gauze. “Your side. Switch me.”

  Atlas trades places with Samuel, who takes Gene’s ankles. Sitting cross-legged, Atlas takes the bandage. He unwraps it, peels up his tunic hem, and traces the bandage’s edges with a fingertip as he presses it to his skin, a clotting heap bulging gauze’s center. He clamps subsequent pain into his jaw and rolls down his tunic. And thanks Imperium for vestigial organs his eating ancestors deemed vital.

  Gene’s wound throbs with no such evolutionary advantage, naked and fragile. Rain rinsing it cleaner, the slit in her shirt frames the slit across her navel; swollen red frames the long depression of black exaggerating cut’s depth. It’s as his was weeks past, only horizontal instead of vertical. Atlas looks away before Gene can look to him. She lets her lazed eyes sift sky’s tears, and Atlas indulges his grimace.

  He grasps her hand. “Is there some word that expresses how sorry, saddened, relieved, and anxious I am all at once?”

  Gene turns her head toward him and whispers, “Crazy?”

  “I remember that feeling.” Atlas glances at her waist and, in several twitches, fails to loosen his frown. “Gene, I,” his voice breaks, “apologize.”

  “I remember that,” she budges a finger and winces, “soul sucking. Just both of us—no more painful, stupid things, ’kay?”

  Atlas scoffs through a sniff. “Not possible.”

  “How much time do we have before—” Gene casts her eyes toward both ends of the street. “You know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are we safe here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do we do?”

  Samuel turns to Atlas. “Yeah. We’re leaving, right? Getting out of this hellfire?”

  Atlas stares at him. Then Gene. A sinking hooks his heart still scorching and frigid and tired and another round of pain shoots through his side, up his back and around his front; he grabs his wound. Jaw tensed but mouth agape, he looks down the street, to the circular beam piercing clouds two blocks away, to its cerulean slicing open the storm, that brewing storm, that upside-down boiling whirlpool of sludge funneling ’round Pylon’s round. Electric arcs bound from sky to Pylon and back, and the portal stretches double the width it was when they left it. He draws down his narrowed eyes. Sideran sun severs night with blaring rays that scrape bobbing shoulders, heads, white mass shuffling gray in rain and wind-whipped pollution. Thunder cracks and Atlas shivers.

  He looks to the street’s other end. Soot swirls the horizon, twirling into cumulonimbus sags until rain rains char. Accenda could gather paces behind the mist, the dying fires and dust, overturned vehicles and smoking bodies. They may lurk steps behind their curtain.

  Atlas wrings his hands into Gene’s hand and his side. Water drops thicken and splatter his flattening hair and chilled arms.

  “What do we do, Attie?”

  He looks forward. A smaller alley, across the street, steps off the highway, lies uncluttered, clear, free into far distance. Atlas goes numb; his vision blurs; ears dip underwater. He forgets to breathe.

  What do we do?

  XLIX

  Morning Come

  Atlas’s lips move and breath escapes. “You explained them to me, both of you.”

  Samuel squints at Atlas and Gene squeezes his hand.

  “Love and courage.” Atlas stares across the street. “You explained them.”

  Rolling his eyes, Samuel inhales—

  “I haven’t been the most experienced or informed being on this planet, I know.” Atlas suppresses his side’s pain and reads the horizon through buildings blocking view. “I’ve w-wasted thirty-one full cycles in a dimension decorated as the universe’s center, repeated the lies, and looked at my feet until they bled, which occurred not rarely over the labor cycles.”

  Samuel shuts his mouth.

  “I don’t know exactly when the constellation walls grew taller or when Imperium guards grew harsher or instructors’ words began to smell like poison. Now that I consider it, I don’t know of anything.” Atlas’s brows tense, higher than their chronic cringe. “I feel. A current carried me over those fences because I opened my hands and lifted my chin at cycle’s end and refused to close my eyes while the others slipped into sleep. Sidera,” he lowers tone, “is disease. A voice in the depths of my mind whispers I brought it here.”

  Gene shakes her head against the sidewalk. “Atlas, no.”

  “I’ve wandered,” he scoffs, “into every ambush. I’m a moth, minutes out of infancy. I’ve done some indescribably stupid things, Gene. You know this.”

  Samuel nods and nods.

  “But I’ve discovered one thing—the only concept learned on my own.” Atlas rips his eyes from faraway clouds, uncovers his side, and looks at Samuel and Gene. “You explained them. Now, allow me to give you my definition of freedom.”

  He swallows and breathes in. The corners of his mouth turn up.

  “Gasoline terminals—”

  Gene lifts a finger.

  “Gasoline stations,” Atlas raises his voice over rain, “and motels and Rico’s Record Region and hills without fences, with the widest view of firmament reflected by a lake some place in Montana.” His throat constricts. “Running through forests as the breeze pushed us and winding between city towers as slowly as desired. Swimming in more water than—showering in a frigid, white box of a flickering room for the first instance and the sleep,” he looks to Gene, “that followed. A road journey because we chose it. Twenty games of ‘Press Buttons on Samuel’s Music-Playing Panel’ because we wished to laugh. A friend because I forgave.” He glances at Samuel; Atlas’s smile falls. “Freedom is love and courage, choice and truth, failure and success, the earth, the stars, and beyond because freedom is everything. Freedom is life.”

  Gene lets her hand slump around Atlas’s. She stares into sky; Samuel stares at the ground and its puddles, rain dripping from his hair clung to his face.

  “This war—” Atlas exhale
s a tremble. “The Siderans and Accenda threaten, in the most literal context expressible, everything in the universe. And such is why I’ve made the decision,” he looks down each end of the street, “to stay. Samuel, I ask you to take Gene and leave safely. Please understand me.”

  Samuel and Gene study each other. They purse their lips, meet the other’s eyes, and then laugh. Groaning, Gene stops as soon as she starts.

  She crinkles her eyelids closed. “We’re not leaving you, silly.”

  “Hey, now,” Samuel grimaces, “I never said—”

  “He’s staying,” Gene says to Atlas.

  Samuel pouts.

  “We all gotta be—” Gene winces. “Gotta have courage.”

  Atlas glares at her. “Gene, if you remain here, halfway conscious on the roadside while war approaches, then the probability—”

  “This’s me not leaving you.” She grabs his sleeve, dragging it down. “Death’s not the worst fate, ’member?”

  “Do you realize how frequently you irritate me?”

  She beams.

  Inhaling, Atlas sifts the rain from his hair with a hand, clenches his jaw, and then looks Samuel in the eye. He heightens posture till it tells him he doesn’t hurt. “Samuel, are you willing to fight very possibly to the death?”

  “Ooo,” Samuel shivers, “it’s been months since someone’s asked me that. Yeah. Let’s do it. I’m set to be the Christian-Bale Batman to your Burt-Ward Robin. No, wait, the Michael Keat—”

  “Yes, okay. No time and your voice is a nail scratching glass.” Atlas points over Samuel’s shoulder. “Inspect each end of the street. Return and inform me of how many, how close, and how prepared the Siderans and Accenda are. Give me news of Pylon. I’ll move with Gene toward that tower,” he points to the skyscraper over his own shoulder, “a few meters from the road, out of direct sight.”

  “What are you gonna do?” Samuel asks.

  Atlas narrows his eyes. “I am going to sleep.”

  “And that’s slang for?”

  “I failed to mention that The Cartographer and I are linked through dreams, in which he can convey additional prophesied information—most particularly and hopefully, the technicalities on how I can close Pylon—because I’m the chosen one.”

  Gene gazes into nothing. “In third grade I won a stuffed salamander.”

  “Go,” Atlas waves a hand at the road, “Samuel, with haste.”

  His eyelids droop. “When did you become boss?”

  “It was amphibian week,” Gene whispers.

  “When you repeatedly asked me what we should do.” Atlas flattens his feet and stands, cringing anew. “I will not rest for longer than a few minutes, if achievable.”

  “Put the brake on that big rig.” Samuel leans back. “There’s no way you’re getting dreams out of a nap like that.”

  “I must try. Go.”

  Laying Gene’s legs flat, Samuel too stands, glances down both ends of the street, and then runs for the Accend side. His heels kick up water as his silhouette shrinks. He blurs into darkness.

  Atlas crouches and slides his arm under Gene’s shoulders. “Can you walk?”

  She pushes herself onto her elbows. “Maybe.”

  Biting down, Atlas hooks her back and straightens her knees straightening his; they wobble and flinch and press into their feet until they manage some balance. Then stagger along the sidewalk for the next skyscraper down the road. Gene’s hand slips from his shoulder. Atlas pulls her taller and she grips one of his leather bands instead.

  “I was so angry.”

  Her words release softer than expected and it takes Atlas seconds to string them together.

  “It wasn’t hard.” Gene watches her shaking step. “I wanted to do worse to her. Much worse.”

  Atlas’s forehead crumples. “I know.”

  She grimaces. “What an example of humanity I am.”

  “My same sentiment after contemplation of my first killing. Mea aurea, this is how you, too, are human. Beyond equal.”

  “What’s going to happen, Atlas?”

  “You will heal, forget Eden, and this world will thrive.”

  “What about Samuel? He’s Accend. I mean, he’s not gonna be a dementor fresh out of Azkaban and suck a b-bunch of people again, right?”

  Atlas limps onward.

  “What about you?” Gene says.

  He shakes his head close to his chest, rain routing rivers around his ears. Squinting past his brow, he walks with Gene toward the tallest tower in Pittsburgh, for its higher stories that slip behind its lower ones on approach, by the singed branches of its plaza and over its expansive sidewalk. The tower’s glass lobby and brown steel skeleton glow yellow in the entryway’s lights, some of the last unbroken.

  “As long as I choose my fate, I’m satisfied,” Atlas says.

  They stumble up the skyscraper’s first steps and between its support beams, similar to those which Atlas, a laborer of steel-forging Taurus, hoisted till calluses took shape. He and Gene head for the second, drier staircase under shelter of the building’s overhanging stories. Light warms their scalps; their outlines illuminate and faces regain detail. Atlas pulls Gene into a cone of shade, where burnt out a couple overhead bulbs. LEDs’ coppery range skimming their elbows, he helps her lie down behind a steel beam, at the bottom of the dry staircase, and moves her feet up its stepped slant, sustaining Samuel’s request for leg elevation. He sits at her side.

  He glimpses her waist and frowns. “How are you?”

  “Okay.”

  “Gene.”

  She too frowns. “I’m scared.” Pressing her lips tight, Gene looks past Atlas’s shoulder. “I’m cold. I’m hungry and nauseous and achy. I’m all sticky. And e’rything’s, like, fuzzy and, like, confusing and,” she sighs, “why do people always ask that question? Tha’s a hard question.”

  Atlas takes her hand and presses it between his. “You were drained of your blood. The results are certain to be unpleasant.”

  “This?” Head rolling forward, she looks at her stomach and spits a short laugh. “I dunno about you, but we women go through this same time each month. ’S nothing.”

  “You remain indescribably stronger than I.”

  “Not the reaction I was lookin’ for but,” she smiles, “it’s take-able.”

  Her smile drops. Gene moans and her hand goes to her middle; but she gasps and recoils from the touch, as if her waist were still on fire. Atlas flinches as she does.

  “Doesn’t feel summer.” She scans their ceiling and inhales a shudder. “ ’S so cold.”

  Atlas glances down her arm, her bristled skin. He curves his hand around the inside of her elbow and its uneven pulse. He eyes her; she looks at him. He diverts his eyes.

  Gene presses her hand around the back of his, presses it into her arm.

  His eyes return to her. Atlas swallows down constricted pipes too loud and, forcing the air through his nose to slow, leans onto his elbow. Then lowers onto his uninjured side and lies down next to her. He cringes and balances his feet on the edge of a step that upholds her legs. A chill tripled by the dampness of his uniform zips up his spine; concrete drives ice into his back, jabs rocks into his shoulder blades, scuffs his hip. Gene frowns at him.

  “Your side,” she whispers.

  “Is adequate.” Atlas turns to her, to her face and eyes and flushing cheeks worlds closer than expected, and mouths, “I am well.”

  Light limns her hair’s wetness curving with her silhouette. But, between steel beam and elevated feet, soft shadow veils the wedge in which they lie. Atlas drags clinging wrinkles up his sleeve as he slides his arm under Gene’s neck and around her far shoulder. He tilts her toward himself. She settles carefully into his neck. She rests her arm on his chest.

  Rain drums the skyscraper and thuds road brick and taps metal street signs, laying dynamic layers for a song without rest, without measure, that rummages streets kilometers in every direction. Gene and Atlas shiver. But their free sides welc
ome the numbing cold, and their taken ones, the warmth. Pittering floods their ears until adaptation softens the volleys that soften their pulses.

  Atlas presses his cheek to her hair.

  “Can they find us here?” Gene whispers.

  “No.” He blinks a second too long and strokes her arm. “No, they cannot.”

  She bunches his tunic between her fingers. He listens to the undulation of her breath and feels it in her side.

  “Some part of me, deep down,” Gene pinches a crinkle in his tunic, “thought you were lying. Samuel too. And Eden an’ the rest. Thought my eyes’re lying about it all.” She closes, opens her mouth and the click of her lips rides exhale’s flux. “It’s real. It’s really real.”

  Atlas gazes past his cycling thumb, past her stroked arm. “Siderans must be expressing the same about Earth in this moment.”

  “Before—what were they chanting?”

  “We will abolish the dissenting,” he says. “ ‘Onward to communal—universal uniformity’—aequitas. Aequitas means fairness—equity. Such also means sameness. To Siderans, justice and conformity are inseparable.”

  Gene hums a noise.

  “They also sang of collapsing sky’s columns and,” brow furrowing, Atlas slows, “casting it down to Earth.”

  “Why’re we the only ones in three dimensions who fight this?”

  “A representative from each dimension perhaps best represents individual freedoms.”

  “Can the individual really make a difference?”

  Atlas closes his eyes and brushes his fingers up and down Gene’s arm. The cement smooths its upward jab as his back slumps flat and assimilation sickness masks pain with disreality swirling his head heavy.

  “Ask me these questions when the conflict is ended.”

  “When this’s over,” she says, “we should see a movie. Your reaction’ll be funny.”

  Atlas sinks into her hair. “Mmm.”

  “And we should go to a museum because then we’d be smart.” Gene mumbles into him; her words blend. “. . . teach me Latin and I’ll brag about my vocabulariness over all social media. Then we’ll go ice skating but I’m jus’ there for the ice cream after and you’re jus’ there with perturbed face and see? Tha’s why i’s so great—’cause we get to watch peoble fall on their butts together. Oh, an’ we should—we should,” she winces, “paint a mural. ’Ve always wanted to paint a mural. I don’ know how to paint. I honestly don’t. But then you’ll read to me while the sun sets and we sit on the floor by the window and you’ve no clue how perfect the changing seasons are from a blanket in the nook of our house. We’ll rarely invite Samuel. He’ll hate that.”