Danny follows his father, the musky old man lighting the way with an ancient Coleman lantern. Along the way they collect the Smiths from the next farm over. Their boy, Eric, is a few years younger than him, little more than a toddler trundling at his own father’s heels. The group follows the sky-streaked path above their heads for miles, to a crater the size of a lake, and the soil inside of it has been caramelized. It breaks like hardened wax beneath Danny’s tiny feet. His father grips him by the wrists and pulls his ankles free.
It’s not a star. It’s a city. An entire stone city, an alien Atlantis, and steps above it leading to a high place of battlements and thick walls. Danny’s eyes are drawn to it immediately. A castle in the sky…
* * *
Danneth is thirty-six and he still dreams of it. Five of them entered the Akropolis that night; the first ones. It should’ve been hot, but the stone was cold when they touched it. They wandered the empty city for hours before finally making the trek up the long, steep steps. They made their way to the highest room in the Akropolis. It was empty too, a room with veined walls, lines thick and twisting like petrified kudzu. The strange runes that they would come to know as runati surrounding the throne-like chair with its stone skull cap, the dome designed to open heads and burn the runati into brains.
Somehow it spoke to Danneth’s father. What it later took the scientists months to begin to decipher, the old man knew that first night. But he let them fumble with it, allowed them to study it, to begin to expose it to the world. He let them believe he was a simple farmer just happy to have made first contact with such a discovery. And when the time came that their inept ministrations were of no more use, he, the simple farmer, ejected the government from the Akropolis.
Danneth is awakened from the dream by a Summoning in the back of his brain. Arric’s there, his words that aren’t really words, but an intangible form of understanding, conveying a message:
“Two of our akropophytes are trapped in EV-Z-5. They were sweeping for rats and wandered right into an ambush. They’re panicking. It’s rendered them unable to cast. I would’ve interceded myself, but your orders are to be informed.”
Arric is his second. He is ambitious, powerful, and devoid of all human mercy. Danneth keeps him close. Yes, because he is useful, but also because he has to.
“I’ll meet you a hundred yards out,” is the message he transmits back.
* * *
Danny’s twelve and he knows that his father is no longer his father. Maybe he hasn’t been since that night. He comes to think of it as trial software. His father was the first human being to enter the Akropolis, that’s all. He was the connector to the human interface, the port that downloaded the Akropolis’ directions. But it’s more than a sterile program, it’s an entity, and when the old man finally dies, that consciousness dies with him. It is not passed on. It has served its purpose. It has done its job.
* * *
Danneth dresses quietly, watching Brya slumber in their bed as he does, listening to her breath, to the blood pumping warm and strong beneath her perfect breast.
The akropolia uniform is his second skin. The cassock with its sleek black lines, the non-conductive pauldron fitted over his left shoulder, guarding his heart, the half-cape draped from its edges that conceals his arm, the arm that is the reason for his single glove. It’s become a cephalopod appendage, suckered and shiny and pronged like a spade. The left side of his face has abscessed to match it, a new lobe forming with each spell cast, swelling as his power swells. His children do not know. His wife does not know. They see only the glamour he casts over that part of himself: Five perfect, strong digits, and a chiseled profile.
It begins in the second year of akropolia training, the runati changing dormant parts of their brains. Danneth has seen the resonance scans. Some think the new tissue looks like faces, like small alien cameos carved in gray matter. Danneth knows better. The physical manifestations are just a sacrifice, a side effect of power never meant for humans.
He leaves their bedchamber and walks along the Akropolis parapets with their jeweled eyes shut tight against the crater below. The crater’s soil is fertile again, but scorched patches of earth as tall as men are lined up like memorials atop it. A month after they established rule, the United States armed forces launched a coordinated assault on the Akropolis. The stone lids covering the eyes of the parapets scraped back and the soldiers were reduced to shadows of ash cast forever against the ground.
The akropolia, their families, and the first citizens of the city were never even roused from their beds.
Danneth arrives at the needleport chamber. It has a name in the Akropolis language, but they’ve come to call it that because it’s a literal translation of passing yourself through the eye of a needle. Microscopic beams of light transport them across the globe in minutes.
There is no navigational system. The akropolia controls his own destination.
* * *
Danny’s fourteen and he’s having trouble gripping a fork with his left hand. His fingers have begun to merge and his thumb grows suckers. But he can split tree trunks with invisible blades created by his mind, and more. He’s to be the first of the akropolia, an extension of the Akropolis itself, a force with the power to bring order to the world. His father laid the foundation for him before the stroke claimed him, and now the Akropolis will care for Danny until he comes of age, while he prepares.
Himself, and the others. More coming every day.
* * *
Danneth and Arric walk over the ruins of 57th Street. Danneth was here when the city still stood. New York was the last major American metropolis to submit to their leadership.
The rioters fall over each other like lobsters in a tank. They’re massed around one of the freestanding fall-out bunkers that are the only remaining structures intact throughout the city. The stragglers who infest these evacuation zones think they’ve formed some sort of resistance movement.
“Let me bring what’s left of these buildings down on their greasy heads,” Arric imports.
“I’m going to talk to them.”
Danneth can feel Arric’s eyes on him. The fact that he doesn’t voice the thoughts they’re conveying reassures Danneth, but only a little.
He murmurs at first, the verbal commands accessing those parts of his brain changed by the runati. The akropolia have come to call these commands “spells” and think of their effects in the same terms. The spell Danneth casts will enhance his vocal range and affect the waves that carry it.
“Disperse,” his voice booms across the ruins like an angry god. “Disperse, or be dealt with. The choice is yours.”
The strength of a mob is the strength of the sea, and they surge toward Danneth and Arric in the same way. Their obsolete guns crackle and pop, producing all the affectation of children’s fireworks. With a wave of his distorted left hand, Arric magnetizes a dented blue-flecked mailbox. The tide of bullets part from their chosen course and riddle the aging receptacle, followed by the weapons that fired them, flying from the hands of their owners. There’s a mashed chorus of screams as fillings are ripped from teeth.
This time when Danneth opens his mouth his voice turns into a nuclear-amplified shriek. The sonic wave brushes them back, peeling layers of bodies like a razor on skin. Limbs break and necks snap under its force. The ones left standing belong to Arric. He focuses on the emergency floodlights hung along the street. Their gas and luminescence are converted into laser beams that descend as Zeusian thunderbolts, striking down the rest.