Atlas-Wake

He had never been that far north before. He was still unsure why anyone would ever want to be. The climate certainly didn't recommend it. So far north that even snow visited only on sufferance, and vanished with the first pale light. The skim of water it became lasted as long as full daybreak, rippling motionless silver waves across the stone, then all was grey, great slabs of black and grey to the sickly, see-through horizon. The wind, if it had come that far, would have boomed across hundreds of kilometres without tree or hill to slow its voice. The wind didn't come. The rain didn't come, except in one flash flood of legend that he suspected the original teller had invented for drama. Animals didn't come, though their screams echoed through black nights from their northernmost territories. No one and nothing with sense came, in short, so why was he there? Why, waking on his cot in a cold sweat with the screams of animals and the sound of no wind outside? Because he'd made a

Every day at sunrise, she wished she had been born in the other city. She knew it was ungrateful to wish so. Be grateful, her mother had exhorted her with echoes and gripping hands, to be at all. To have been born, to see the sun from at least one side. There were many who would never have the chance. There could have been many girls where she was instead. ‘Yes, mama’, was, of course, all she could say then, and lower her head until those gripping hands left her shoulders. But secretly, every day at sunrise, she wondered. Was it enough just to be born? To stand on one side of the world, the glassy floor of the sky beneath her feet, and look down at a girl who seemed so much realer than she? A girl who walked on ground that the light didn’t shine through. A girl whom the light didn’t shine through, black-haired and hasty, the sound of her footsteps echoing up among tall, shadowed towers of stone. Cities that wailed with power and life and stuck up from the earth like spines.

The association of roses with death was long-standing. She’d never thought to question it until that day. Standing like an individual wave in a sea of black, all staring forward at the funereal pedestal and the glass box displayed there. Nothing but the best for a queen, in terms of burial trappings or the magics that had kept her body fit for viewing a full week later. Or the roses. Mounds and mounds of roses in death’s white and void’s black and, rare, life’s red, a hurtfully bright reminder of what hadn’t passed away. The smell of them almost overpowered the various perfumes rising from the massed, honoured mourners. Among them, she was qualified only to stand near the back, and to wonder, for the first time, about the roses. They were dead as well, of course. The mounds and wreaths. But that could be said of any flower emancipated from its roots. Like the queen, they were preserved. Like the queen, their beauty would fade quickly once their duty was done. But why roses?

The sky was stripped naked, and seemed to know it. That was what was different about February. December and January were a body on a slab. Clinical, lifeless, cold flesh and thick, septic layers. February stretched under its skin, opened its eyes, and asked how long it had been asleep. And she did the same. She'd woken just earlier that day to find dust on her face and arms, dust and sawdust, and half the ceiling of her little shack collapsed. The snow had blown in, December and January gilding the fallen boards thick with ice. February might still have more ice to give, but it also had a sweet temper, sometimes, and the warmth of that day was melting the ice in rivulets. The warmth of that day had woken her. The sky stretched virgin blue across plates of snow, chromed in more ice. Melt and re-freeze she had missed. She stretched, sawdust sifting from her upraised arms. One of the fallen boards, ripped mean and splintered at the end, had fallen less than an arm's length from

“Four pounds,” he announced to the recorder. It whirred and stared at him with its pinprick red eye. “Four pounds, three ounces,” he clarified, leaning forward to scratch the figure into his notes with his other hand. “While more study is required, I believe it’s safe to conclude from this that wishes do, in fact, have weight.” Under very specific circumstances, and perhaps only certain kinds of wishes. His colleagues – ex-colleagues, he reminded himself – would undoubtedly shrug and ask what that information was good for. They would stand around, holding their mugs like badges of membership, smirking at one another from behind thin blinds of steam. Poor Theodore, their eyes had always seemed to say. The genetic differences between a horse and a unicorn, or the negligible weight of wishes. No research or military grant, no respectable journal would ever touch his work. Not like their very important studies of the average time elapsed between the ingestion of coffee and the need

The garden light stirred on trace breezes, the scent of summer lilies and the subtle menace of carbide orange. The hedges reached out of shape, untrimmed these last two months, to weave black shadows across the cobble paths. Not yet overgrown, but furred with grass and mongrel flowers. Blossoms white and hardy between the stones, swaying in a dance sparked by her passing feet. The growing-ragged edges of the garden all whispered around her. The light flickered, dropping through warm metallic shades before rising back to its firelight shimmer. The lamps lived on sunlight, and would for a while longer. Longer than the path would be visible, or the hedges recognizable as trimmed shapes. They might be the last evidence of the garden someday, rusted iron poles and cracked glass, solar gems crumbled to something like salt by wind and time. They swayed in time with the flowers as she passed. The hem of her cloak drew pollen from the tallest blossoms. The knife in her hand was a

He twisted midair to land upright, catlike and in motion as his feet landed. Gravity seemed to touch him only at off-angles, deflected by sheer speed and the edge of his sword. The gap that now yawned across the floor was no obstacle to him. Stripped wires and ruptured pipes steamed and sparked together below, mist rising like a freed underground thundercloud and pulling after him as he leapt. Over it lengthwise, two seconds longer than gravity should have allowed. The walls of the hallway slumped inwards, towards where the floor had been. His shadow flickered between them, batted by the spit of sparks and the first weak, mist-fighting lick of flame. He landed, rolled where the hallway gave on another ruined room. The walls stripped by fire and impact already, craters where blows had landed and bones had broken ahead of his arrival. So far, he was still alone. The fight was moving ahead of him, steadily, room by room. Chewing through the wood and concrete gristle of the

Gunfire cut at rough angles through the dark. A cat’s cradle of racket and death, and she sat beneath it, her back to the barricade of a heavy oaken counter. The air whined and tore inches above her head. Something that had been standing on the counter shattered in an explosive spray, shards of glass flung past her like rain in a hard wind. She knew the wood her back was pressed against by the scent bullets gouged out of it, splinters caught in her hair. The cutting dwindled from a cat’s cradle to single lines. Stopped. She heard something inside the counter crack and collapse where it had been shot. Splinters drifted down from her hair, speckling her shoulders with a slow turn of her head. The echoes diminished like doors slamming in sequence, more and more distant. The air they abandoned hung in tatters, but as black and whole to her eyes as before. No windows. No electric spark in the entire corpse of the hotel. They wouldn’t be able to see any better than she. They