Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  He sucks a breath.

  A window to blue sky, Pylon vaults its archway taller than Pittsburgh’s tallest tower, stretching wider than three blocks; the portal sinks its flanks into several buildings and roofs and past them. Sideran sun rays warp in the rainbows that spark across Pylon’s ascending coastline of a dimension door. Though Sol hangs below earthly horizon, day tears into Pittsburgh and gleams green the hills overhanging Monongahela River reflections.

  A riseless sun rises. Two suns climb to combine.

  Atlas turns his head to the Accenda’s side.

  From wall to wall and beyond, their bodies flood the street, march jagged trails up the sidewalks, into and out of decimated storefronts and businesses. Accenda recycle their soot and reignite trees and debris and skies with upward streams sizzling rain into vapor. The front ranks twirl knives; the rear load firearms; all light their fingers that smear ember-orange over sharp shadows between bodies; and some Accenda drag bodies fully glowing, bodies not of their own, screaming women and men under the cobalt ghost of assimilation flame that melts insides unseen.

  One walker, a young woman, dangles from seven or eight hands yanking for her arms and legs, wrestling for her heartspace. The blue that illuminates her chest dies and she follows and they drop her beneath their stampede. A smaller walker thrashes mere meters from the woman. A child. He’s not yet dead.

  Burning flesh wafts up the street and, like flotsam tossed ashore, walkers scatter the recesses. Some fleeing, some squirming, shrieking under fiery grips, and some mid-river few gazing across the reflections on which their cheeks lie until the blood down their chins swirls into gutters and eight thousand heels beat their faces unrecognizable.

  Voices belt an ocean till they’re voice. Primary Absolute Praises shake one alley end, the other, self praises. An Imperium vigil yells. Hundreds of guardians and sentries echo him. The shouting roars into explosions on both sides and, flinging their flags to whip straight back, the Siderans charge toward the Accenda. The Accenda accelerate.

  Each side runs for the other. For Atlas, standing directly in between.

  “Atlas!”

  Gene’s voice cracks and Samuel’s strains.

  “—’s not the way to lower your life insurance rates.”

  Atlas faces the Accenda. He throws his waking weight forward and sprints for the walker child. The boy sinks into the horde; Atlas charges his palm. Squinting for tiny fingers behind bobbing heads, he outstretches his arm and swipes it right. Wind slams the three Accenda blocking view into six more, who tumble from Atlas’s path, and one last set of hands clutches the boy’s shirt. They burst a blue inferno at his chest.

  Twisting, Atlas turns his shoulder parallel with the masses’ motion and skids past barrages of limbs and to the child. Atlas grabs him, yanks his tiny body halfway out of the Accend’s grip, but his pull only staggers the assimilator stubborn to release his prey. Snarling, the Accend gropes after his thief; Atlas braces against incoming bodies, child to his chest. Chargers bulldoze the rearmost stander, whose grasp snaps loose and body falls as a shield for Atlas and the child, Accenda diverging around incident’s roadblock. Blue glow withdraws as the assimilator thumps road and sputters screams drowning in the flood that tramples his gut open for milliseconds too long.

  The boy flails and cries for his mother. Wading rumbles, sobs, peals of a demon river, Atlas hunches over him. He angles a shoulder and pushes through the Accenda’s current while countless elbows and knees pound, jerk his every limb. He cringes and gasps and locks his arms around the child no older than five and steps for the sidewalk while the assimilator’s groans gargle at his back and blurs whoosh before his front.

  “Atlas,” Gene yells.

  He turns toward her voice and jogs for it, shoving diagonally through the crowd. The child’s weight sags Atlas’s spine; but he glimpses clear concrete and his arms gather strength.

  Atlas emerges from the Accend river along the side of the towering, brown skyscraper he’s deemed his sanctuary, however untrue. Up the building’s steps and meters from the road, he places the child down under shade of a shrub-lined planter.

  “Go.” Atlas stands up straight and points over the child’s shoulder. “Run until a nice walker discovers you and takes you many kilometers away.”

  The child grimaces through tears. “Kilametar?”

  “I mastered the metric system by age six, little child. It’s not that difficult.” He prods the boy forward. “Enjoy the freedom you didn’t earn and engage in conversation with strangers.”

  “Are you,” he sniffs, “like Captain America?”

  “I’m like Miss America allegedly.”

  The boy hugs Atlas’s legs. Atlas freezes and stares into the child’s dark, unruly hair, stares down his thin, quivering frame, and glimpses himself. He twitches his scowl soft.

  “This woman I know—” Atlas grabs the child’s shoulder and pushes him back a step. “She represents the human race and they, like colors of a sunrise, are so—” He shakes his head, bends down a notch, and looks into the boy’s round eyes. “You are,” his voice snags, “very significant. Look to the skies. Remember,” Atlas jolts him and glances upward, “to look.”

  The boy trembles.

  “Will you remember?”

  He nods.

  Atlas too nods and shoves the boy, who bursts into wet wailing, spins around, and runs along the skyscraper’s side, into distance, out of sight. Cloud’s sprinkling thickens into splatters that strew dark spots along the path the boy ran, now empty, quiet for the second Atlas glares with glazed eyes.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Atlas whispers.

  Something touches his arm. He jolts. Pivoting, Atlas breathes out; Samuel drops his hand and Gene stumbles up behind him, panting between gritted teeth.

  Samuel yells, “What kind of stupid was that?”

  “It’s begun,” Atlas yells back.

  “What?”

  The masses cry and chants rupture.

  “It’s begun.”

  “I have eyes.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Motioning from the road, Atlas jogs under the skyscraper’s cover and then slouches against the lobby glass. Samuel and Gene follow. They stop a centimeter too exposed before him. He clutches their arms and pulls them to his side, their shoulders to his wall.

  “Gene, Samuel,” Atlas eyes the street, “I’m returning.”

  Samuel raises an eyebrow and Gene leans around him.

  “Returning where?” she asks.

  “Be courageous, Gene, as you always have been. Be humanity’s example.”

  “Returning,” her face contorts, “where?”

  “Sidera,” Samuel says.

  Gene’s eyes freeze on the concrete, wide, watering. She slumps into Samuel, who grabs her shoulder and holds it up.

  “If I can slip past the armies and into Pylon, Imperium will imprison me. I will live my life’s remainder in the Corrective Stronghold because death isn’t the worst fate.” Atlas rubs one of his armbands between his fingers. “The aureus coin is lost somewhere in this dimension. I would have no means of return to Earth.”

  Samuel’s forehead crinkles. “Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s the only way to close it.”

  “Pylon?” He scoffs and leans back. “No. There’s gotta be—”

  “I am the exchange for their exodus,” Atlas says. “The liberator’s travel into Sidera is the only means of defense for this world. Merely a fraction of the Siderans prepared for battle have stepped foot on Earth and Accenda cannot fight this war without them. Time is with us still.” He tugs straight his armband. “I must hurry.”

  “How much time do we have?” Samuel asks.

  “Until Earth’s sun touches horizon, and then Pylon will remain permanently open, continuing to stretch until Sidera merges with Earth. But I won’t allow it.” Atlas looks up and drops his arms. “I depend on you, Samuel, to scatter the lingering Accenda and Siderans once I’m aw
ay. I know it’s much to ask—”

  “Understatement.”

  “Be cautious. The most loyal citizens are likely to have regained their abilities and the bolder perhaps experiment with them. You know the Accenda can only be pushed into remission but you must take the lives of as many Siderans as you’re able. They’re not their own. The chances of Minkar rallying a new opposing army are too great. I apologize for this.”

  “You kidding?” Samuel folds his arms. “Apologize for getting Eden 2.0 lost in Canada, not this. I haven’t crashed a wedding this big before but it shouldn’t be—”

  “Back where we started.” Gene stiffens posture, limps around Samuel, and faces Atlas. She raises her voice. “We’ll all be back where we started. What, for the love of all that is good and holy, are you thinking, Atlas?”

  He frowns.

  “How—” She chokes the tears from her eyes. Her words warble and cheeks glisten. “How can you do this?”

  Atlas squeezes his lips together holding throat’s constriction. “No force in this universe can undo the change in me. We can never go back.” His stricken brow arches. “One earthly month ago, I wouldn’t have had the capability to say I do exactly this for you.”

  Samuel looks down and skirts the lobby. Slumping against the glass a couple steps from Gene and Atlas, he shoves his hands into his pockets.

  Siderans and Accenda collide, clash somewhere away, somewhere down the chills in Atlas’s spine, somewhere deep under the tremors in his chest. The street’s battle escalates and hushes. The rain ebbs and its thrumming swells. Thunder tumbles over far hills. Lifting his head, Atlas peers into eastern sky and its gray lightening. Clouds split and blue pries through them; and, along sky’s dome, shades of navy grade down steps of atmospheric clefts between stratus ribbons until sapphire haze skims eastern rooftops. Sun rays dance at horizon.

  Gene’s breathing speeds. “You can’t.”

  Atlas tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear and says, “I must.”

  “No, uh-uh.” She shakes her head. “You can’t. Not again. Nope.”

  “Gene,” he whispers.

  “No.” Glaring at his arm, she shakes her head twice more. “No. No, you can’t,” she gasps, “leave me.”

  Atlas bends down and his frown deepens. “I don’t wish to.”

  Gene bares her teeth clamped upon some fragmented attempt at sound and collapses into her center, smothering her face with her palms. Atlas curves his hand around her ear. Breathing through distortions at his eyes’ bases, he wipes his grimace, grimaces, repeats, and Gene’s quaver leaks through wet fingers.

  “Will I ever,” she mumbles, “see you again?”

  She bursts her shoulders into earthquakes and sobs into weeping. Atlas slides his hands over hers and draws them from her face. He steps forward, wraps his arms around her back, and squeezes her chest to his, his jaw to hers, their abdomens’ scars—old and new—facing each other as equals.

  He angles toward her ear. “As long as the skies are blue, the stars bright, and the winds strong, you will.”

  “That’s a corny, stupid answer.”

  “Life will be stupid—”

  “Shut up.”

  Atlas inhales the scent of her hair and whispers, “I love you, Genesis.”

  She erupts shuddered gasps at his shoulder; her back jolts against his arms, tears soak his tunic. She grips his neck.

  “Will you try?” Gene raises her head off his shoulder, toward his ear. “Will you do what you’ve always done? Please.” She sniffs. “Escape for me.”

  Uncoiling his arms, sliding his hands to her sides, Atlas withdraws and looks her in the eye. He opens his mouth. A breath leaves it.

  “Will you?”

  Atlas again slides his hands up her back, pulls Gene toward him. And presses his lips to hers. He crinkles his eyelids tight together and she bunches the back of his tunic that catches sun glimmers. Tears touch Atlas’s cheek; one of his own streaks toward his chin he tilts as Gene lifts onto her toes, parts her lips, and compresses them against his.

  She pulls back. She takes the sides of his neck and leans against his forehead. “Atlas,” she looks down his chin, “will you try?”

  He breathes in. “Yes.”

  His hands graze her elbows as they fall. He steps back. He looks to horizon; it strokes pink through rain’s drizzle until air dries, paints gold across clouds until they sheathe their purple. Between buildings, beyond dimming stars and through the murk receding, horizon lights fire.

  Atlas turns around and wobbles for the stairs.

  “Attie.”

  Atlas pauses.

  “Jus’ so you know,” Samuel juts his jaw and says, “I like you also.”

  The corner of his mouth lifts. Atlas pushes off concrete and runs down the stairs, for the road. Explosions and gunfire and shrieks crash back through his ears and writhing bodies sweep back into view.

  Gene shouts his name.

  Atlas looks at his shoulder. Inhaling, he presses a hard blink and jerks forward again. He accelerates.

  Gene’s voice dissolves into the swoop of flames before his face, the stab of screams through his heart. Silhouettes sharpening into daytime detail pour along the street and overflow onto sidewalk beneath his rolling soles. He leaps onto road, into their river.

  His pupils focus. He runs with the armies; Accenda charge at his right and left, back and front. Meters ahead, Siderans sink between Accenda’s swinging arms and knives. White mixes with black with red with blinding orange flecked and smeared and gushed over ducking heads and upon thrashing limbs. The stink of blood rides that of char. Heat sweats Atlas with new dampness. Thousands of figures shuffle, blur about him, a mass of insects, swarming vultures, and, head down, he thrusts through them.

  An Accend launches into air, crashing to the road a step from Atlas’s front. Atlas twists right, hops past the body, past another Accend’s burning fist, and then twists left and ducks under a Sideran’s swing and an airstream that throws the female at his back.

  His foot hits something and he trips. Clawing at wind, he lurches, tips, rolls to the ground, and doesn’t stop rolling, tumbling between legs and undone leather sashes, until his feet find road again. He hurls himself forward.

  For as long as man can remember, The Cartographer said, the celestial spheres have perched atop this world, supported by an unfathomable force, and, for as long as I can remember, that force was given the name Atlas.

  Atlas curls his hands into fists and runs down the road’s center. An Accend grabs his arm. Atlas gasps. He pops his elbow back into the Accend’s nose and staggers onward, into a Sideran, who thrusts some pole of a weapon into Atlas’s gut. Gagging, he stumbles backward.

  He was neither man nor machine, but Titan, a son of Gaia, the Earth, and Ouranos, the sky. Condemned by his enemies as a prisoner of war, he was sentenced to stand upon Gaia and uphold Ouranos, impeding their primordial embrace.

  He reaches for the pole, grips its base, and jabs its head into the Sideran’s chin. Atlas tosses the weapon. Groping forward, he shoves the Sideran’s shoulder and the Sideran falls into an Accend.

  Atlas hops over the citizen’s legs, runs for the next intersection a few paces away, squints past heads. Rich cerulean, not a cloud in sight, swells from inside Pylon three blocks down the street. A sky he’s known since birth expands over the city and crawls its portal up earthly sky racing to shade-match. Pylon’s gateway stretches its multicolored, glowing frame so thin, the line between Sidera and Earth blurs. Pylon shrinks its hinges. Sidera grows.

  The Titan groaned for freedom beneath his bonds. The sky slipped from his fingers, to his palms, to his shoulders and, at the moment of collapse, he fell onto his knees. He had two choices: release the celestial sphere and obliterate Earth in one blow, or endure. He chose to go on. He was no longer a prisoner, but Earth’s silent guardian, scorned, unappreciated, unaccepted by the world under and the world above.

  Pylon’s glowing border dims. Atlas blinks
the ash from his eyes and swipes the smoke from his path, kicks from his feet road’s moisture, steam whirling through legs and toward midday sun ahead. Though it stretches still, Earth’s horizon still blooming, the rainbow radiance framing Sideran sky flickers like a dying lightbulb. Pylon departs; Sidera arrives. The window becomes a gap. Its trim narrows to a string of decaying light and Earth’s rising sun sears Sidera for permanence. Atlas flings his heel into road.

  Many of the ancients accepted sky’s title as Ouranos, many Caelus, but we took to calling it Sidera, as we longed for stars unseen in constant day. The legendary Titan became star and star became you. Sidera became your burden. Sidera became your sky to keep from Earth.

  Something hard jolts Atlas’s head to the left. He cringes. He grinds his teeth, stamps his next step, shoves another Sideran from his path, and snaps out his palms. He emits his power.

  You face two choices and you know what they are. Dear Atlas, what if I were to tell you of a third choice? A choice to get on your feet, push the sky off your shoulders, to the tips of your fingers, and live the punishment as sacrifice?

  His wind heaves a hundred bodies off the road and to its gutters. It clears a twenty-meter-long lane. Atlas swings his right arm back, his left forward, and sprints down it. His heart pounds. Forehead drips. He breathes nails.

  You love them and the choice is for none other. Because when the sun rises again, it’s always more beautiful than when it set. Because Earth is your home to beginnings, moved by freedom, by courage, by love, by smiles that transcend tears, and genesis is the most beautiful of all.

  Atlas gags on air. Siderans and Accenda fill in his lane, muddy his view, and birds dive their curved beaks into brunette scalps. Black raptors. Ravens soar out from connecting alleys and peck at Atlas’s head and cloud his clouded vision. He crashes into an Accend. Staggers, steadies, picks up pace. He veers around a fire burst and locks his eyes skyward; Pylon’s string of light diminishes to a thread. Midday blue melds to morning’s candied spectrums while a talon scratches Atlas’s cheek and wind blasts his side and heat invades his shoulder. Atlas glances at the flames spread down his arm. He aims a palm at himself and blows them out.