Gods of Anthem Read Online Free Page A

I’d laugh at the very thought.
    I find him at my bed each time I awake. His eyes are blue, sort of like mine, only brighter, and his are pressed into a face as masculine as a hammer. He seems unhappy with my regard now, and somehow that’s apparent, too.
    To remain stoic in the appraisal of this stranger is too hard. Even breathing has become a chore as my body’s long since given up.
    My message can only be sent with my eyes: I’ll be judged in my own good time, Pretend Man. I don’t need your approval, not anymore.
    His face relaxes into what one can only assume is his most lavish smile. But that mouth hasn’t seen a sincere grin—a real parting of the mouth, showing teeth and gums; one like my father’s, whose smile was like the heavens opening up through the clouds. No, this reveals some force that chills me; a twist of fate that reaches into my fuzzy, almost-dead brain cells like a flurry of snow.
    Skin and bones, and dressed like a doctor. But inside? A void.
    He watches me for a while before he nods to the nurse, like he’s decided something.
    They poke me so many times each session; I sleep during the process.

Eleven
    I’m feverish again today. It reminds me of summertime and the fire hydrants that used to keep us cool when the sun began to melt us all for our incompetence. When each day was a record high, and we lost power due to melted electronics, some people lost their minds, clawed at our door, wondering if we’d somehow found a way to stay cool. We soaked our sheets with a hose like everyone else.
    We Randuskys cried ourselves to sleep, just like they did.
    And then, after shunning us for so long, when they asked for our help, I dreamt of their horrible deaths.
    Maybe it was a sin. Maybe I’ll pay for that now.
    My dreams are the last remnants of my short and pathetic existence.
    Some are of when we first arrived at Bodega as paper children ready to blow away. But tonight, they’ve come as ballerinas poised in a studio.
    And she leads the class.
    My mother.
    Certain places had once regarded my mother as one of the best dancers in the world, back when people were still inspired by such things. My pensive and stoic parent, a stuffy citizen of the British Empire, held such a tenuous grasp on the idea of parenthood. But when she stepped onto the stage, her body would become water—pliable, flowing over anything in her way. Like a reed in the deepest canal bent almost to breaking, dancing for my mother was like breathing for anyone else.
    Then, I’m in my old room. The one facing the westward sun that perfectly lit my desk in the afternoon, and upon it is my old music box. Fragile and never to be wound again, it had been a gift from my father, the composer of modern times. When wound, the beautiful shell-carved box plays the most haunting ballad ever written. And a tiny ballerina spins across from her oval mirror.
    I’d once asked my father what he thought of the shuffling creatures replacing our neighbors, and he’d said they had no rhythm, no predictability. He, the maestro—his enemy was chaos, and he’d mumble into his teacup, head shaking, as we learned more about the tide rising around us threatening to drown everyone with dead people who just wouldn’t stay dead.
    “Chaos disrupts the compilation,” he’d often say, as if we were an orchestra and not nations and a populace. “It disrupts the melody!” he’d cry, then shut himself away to mourn.
    I’d wait in my room wondering at the fate of us Randuskys. Famous or not, we, too, would be lost in this limping world.
    And eventually we were …

    My eyes crack open to find Pretend Man watching me tonight, with a face as closed as a vault, while he searches my wrist for a pulse. He thinks I’m dead. I’m almost sure of it.
    Do my eyes not open far enough to show him I’m still alive? Do they not blink?
    Most of my body’s unresponsive. Maybe I’ve already expired and sight’s the final residue of my brain sparking.
    When he jabs a