Your third choice is to gain enough strength to flick the sky off your fingers, send it to its permanently suspended place in orbit, and fly as you’ve always wanted.
He lifts his foot, throws it down, and repeats on the other side. Atlas runs. He runs faster. He grabs nearby bodies and pushes himself off them. Sidera creeps closer, buildings fly by as the ravens that dot them, and Sol’s first rays peek over horizon, through the alleys cradling a Pylonic dawn.
Look over constellation walls: you may someday escape them. The last of your pages remain maps uncharted.
He sweeps his hand up. Wind launches a hundred more bodies off the ground and clears another path, one that stretches through Pylon. That leads into Sidera. Twenty-five meters from it, he sprints.
When you awake, run. Atlas, run. Run for your prison.
Atlas’s legs numb; his arms go limp; his pupils dilate. His heart flutters pins through blood and his lungs expand and contract once per shock up his frame per third of a second. Pylon’s thread dies. Its glow gives out and Earth’s sun shines over distant trees and roofs and washes his face between building shadow. He bites down until every pain converts to adrenaline. Sidera nears.
Three steps away.
Two steps.
Atlas sees red mass inside Sidera: Imperium guards. They prod citizens forward. They see Atlas.
One.
Atlas leaps off the road and dives through Pylon. Charged warmth drenches his every muscle. His ankle bends under him and he flops onto Sideran soil, skids a meter on his shoulder and hip, and falls still. Pain returns. Groaning, he pushes onto his knees and spits golden dirt from his mouth.
He lifts his eyes.
Twenty thousand citizens overflow the landscape, Imperium guards scattered between their formations. They stop marching. The black of Eos’s walls framing the farthest figures, twenty thousand Siderans and their generals stop and stare at Atlas. Silence falls. Atlas’s panting steals the sound of all Sidera. Clacks of pebbles raining from his uniform folds, he plants one foot and rises to stand; but his legs buckle beneath him and bronzed kneecaps stamp soil again. He coaxes his last motes of energy as he eases halfway upright, no further, and scans the crowd through dust plumes he roiled. The cluster of Imperium guards closest to the front strides toward him. One sentry unlatches a set of shackles from his belt.
Atlas looks behind a shoulder.
Halfway up Sideran sky, a tiny shimmer of multicolored light swirls into itself, shrinking its tail toward its core, and then sparks and vanishes. Atlas glares into solid blue. The land under it—the cliffs of planar isles at which Sideran armies gawk—lies gold, dry, empty for kilometers. Earth has disappeared.
Atlas faces the Imperium guards walking up to meet him, their shackles ready, and smiles.
Acknowledgements
In my household, it’s no secret I’m difficult to live with, let alone encourage, but my mom and my sister, Kylie, and brother, Kasey, have been unendingly supportive and gracious. Without them, this book wouldn’t exist. Thank you for consistently heaving me out of puddles of pitiful tears and rekindling my stupid chipmunk smile. Thanks, Dad, for supporting my small publishing endeavors and encouraging me to read growing up.
Ralph Faneus is the kind of friend everyone needs. Here’s to Ralph for snatching Atlas out of my mind’s vault and swallowing it whole before my insecurities could object. This book would still live as a hermit in my documents folder without your emboldening feedback, if such a folder existed without your tech skills.
I credit my continued existence to my Aunt December and Uncle Terry, who’ve sustained me and mine for stretches of fruitlessness longer than tolerable. Thank you for having offered my present self security while I chase off-road futures like a hysterical romantic.
Thank you, Carissa Hinex, for sharing your superpowers we lowly aspire to. Thank you, Gordon Lincoln, for always being there. Family extends beyond blood.
The mental health professionals of the world are real-life heroes. Thank you, Dr. McCoy and SunDance Behavioral Resources, for helping to keep my mind whole while I muster thoughts into works.
Thanks to my English and Creative Writing teachers in high school. I was pretty sure their latent-talent detectors were defective, given my adolescent potato brain, but here we are with many pages of words, in succession even!
Brother David and Sister LaRene Gaunt were the warmest, most encouraging spiritual instructors a naïve young adult could ask for. Your scholarly wisdom and gentle kindness outlive your temporal forms. I rely on it.
I humbly extend gratitude to all the music wizards in the world who fuel wonder and ignite imagination. Eight years ago, a song by Jónsi took me out of the school bus home and elevated me to a higher world. This world became the basis for Atlas.
Thanks again to Kylie, for entrusting your underqualified, clammy little sister with editing your literary works and training me how to fine-tune my own. If you hadn’t written, neither would I have. Thanks for fangirling over stories with me.
I thank God for this life, the thorns and the roses, for the many mediums by which humanity attempts to unite in touching Your face.
About Author
J. J. Malchus is that girl in Utah with the massive canine and social anxiety, both of which keep her awake at night. She began writing her first book and installment in the Atlas series, Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn, as a nasty little teenager and finished some years later, after she mostly learned what a participle was. I like to eat food and floss my teeth, in that order. Are we still doing the third-person thing? Anyway.
Romans 12:21
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 67