Skyborn The Divine

26: Demon

He'd been sitting in the dark so long he'd forgotten what time it was. Or what day it was. Or when he'd last eaten. He'd settled into a steady routine of training and retiring to his quarters, which had begun to resemble a nest more than an apartment. Ever since Alice had left three weeks ago, there'd been precious little to distinguish one day from the next. The sunshine outside would have told him it was the barest beginning of spring, but Ethan hadn't seen the sun, the real sun, since he didn't remember quite when.

He'd been trying to grind through a battery of training videos he'd been assigned to watch by Athena. They were tedious instructional films about the appropriate use of force. Things Athena seemed to think he needed to review. He stared blankly at the monitor, not absorbing a thing. A stab of pain in his skull soon convinced him to give it up.

Ethan grabbed his Motherboxx and selected the music list he got from Alice. He'd been listening to it every day since she left, and somehow it gave him comfort to hear it. It reminded him of those times when they'd listened to it together.

He thought then about the last thing she'd said to him, about leaving this place and finding his family. There was a stabbing pain in his heart as he realized that he should have told her the truth then, the honest truth of why, no matter how badly he wished he could, he simply couldn't follow her advice. This place was the only home he'd ever had. These people were the only family he'd ever known. He thought of the photo he had folded and tucked away in his pocket, the one of the couple holding a baby. He used to love pretending it was a photo of him, of a family that was waiting for him out there somewhere, but he had to face facts: it was nothing more than a stock photo that came with a picture frame, a pleasant fantasy that had given him hope of some life beyond this place. But that's all it was: a fiction.

He wondered what she would think of him if she knew what he really was. She was so sure the two of them were equals, that they were the same kind of creature, but Ethan knew better. She was like some kind of heavenly being walking the Earth, a goddess come down from Heaven, chosen by fate or by God to be something more than mortal.

And him? He was just Frankenstein's monster, wasn't he?

The thump of a steady bass and the high voice of Eminem rattled out of the speakers of his Motherboxx, the rapper's lyrics so tightly packed into each line that they seemed to fall over each other in their haste to come out. He rapped about feeling like the world was on his shoulders, about the pressure and stress of notoriety and fame.

He'd once listened to this song with her while they ate in the galley. It had been just after their mission to St. Louis, and the two of them had spent much of that day holding up a bridge with their bare hands. She'd shared her earbuds with him, and the two of them absorbed the lyrics while they finished hot plates of chicken carbonara and fresh, green salads that looked big enough to feed a horse.

"Hey," she'd told him, suddenly perking up during the chorus of the song.

He looked up quizzically at her, and she told him to listen.

There it was again, the line about feeling the world on his shoulders, and also about the world being nearly over.

"That's you," she said. "That's totally you."

He shook his head, not understanding.

"Atlas," she answered, smiling at her own cleverness. "You know, the guy who holds the world on his shoulders? Earthquakes happen when he shrugs? That's you. That's your new call sign."

He'd loved it. It hadn't caught on with the others, though. They still had their own name for him.

The sudden stab of headache brought him back to the present.