Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn by J. J. Malchus

Author:J. J. Malchus [Malchus, J. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pyxis Publishing
Published: 2021-08-09T22:00:00+00:00

XXVII

(Mis)communication

Light slips through the crack under Gene’s curtains. It streaks the grooves in her floor and, half a meter onward, the shards of some ceramic object and the rug fibers Atlas feels beneath his ankle, his pant leg wrinkled upward. The coffee table’s underworks sever his horizontal view. His forehead tenses.

He feels more. A hundred-kilogram rigidity under his shoulder and hip, a flat mass pressing upward, and pressure—

Atlas blinks and draws down his chin, his vision to his right arm: outstretched but unseen.

Gene lies next to him, facing from him, her head on his upper arm. Her hair drapes his shoulder and her back curves to his front but doesn’t touch. Atlas’s left hand rests over her elbow crease.

He stares. Gene’s side rises and falls; all else stills. The hardwood floor softens and his mind blanks.

It jolts. Mind touches last night and Atlas scans the room through his eyes’ corners. Samuel’s absent.

Gene mumbles. Atlas freezes.

She licks her lips and rolls onto her back, her neck curved to his arm. She opens her eyes.

Pressing his arm flat, Atlas lifts himself a centimeter, throws his free hand far from her, and inhales through his teeth. Gene rolls toward him and her eyes widen. He sits up. She follows.

“Hello, Gene,” Atlas says.

She pushes her palms into the floor. “Hi.”

Grimacing, Atlas stands and glances around the room. Gene frowns. She too stands with a wobble, stretching her neck.

“Are—” Atlas clears his throat. “Are you well?”

“Um. Yeah. I’m just gonna—” Gene points behind her. “For a—so that—sorry.”

She spins around, strides into her bedroom, and shuts the door. Atlas’s grimace embeds in his face. He stares at nothing.

Stepping around the place they lay two minutes past, he wanders to the window. He pulls back the curtains and his gut sinks with the metal rings’ compressing sigh.

Sunlight casts splotched red on Gene’s rug, table, far wall; the same drenches Atlas’s front, his eyes. Blood glazes the glass. From top frame to bottom, side to side, dark red made luminescent in morning seeps into molecules’ gaps and fuses to the window, distorting trees and sky and hills. Black shapes spot the blood. One, a feather glued to window’s corner, quivers in the breeze.

Eyes forward, Atlas sees the mound of dead ravens at vision’s outskirts, centimeters from his shoes’ toes, through the window’s floor-length glass, on the balcony he acknowledges for the first time. Wings snapped backward, this way, that, stick from the mound.

“It’s a message.”

Atlas flips around. Samuel leans against the entryway. Exhaling, Atlas yanks the curtains shut again and faces Samuel.

He gestures to the window. “Eden’s message. She knows we’re here playing games. Pretty birds can’t fly no more. Did just what they were told and she expects you to be the same.”

The wood beneath foot swirls and blurs. Atlas blinks.

“Harassment’s not gonna stop until we come looking for her. And we will. That cocky goddess—I mean, person. Bad person.” Samuel lifts a finger. “She’s got you down to a T. You’re itchin’ to run toward danger and she knows.

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