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1
ARTEMIS
When I was six years old, I shot a toy arrow from my favorite toy bow at the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.
He caught it out of the air before it touched him.
I’ve belonged to him ever since.
2
APOLLO
If you swear on your life that you won’t tell a soul, I’ll tell you a secret. Think about it before you answer. Carefully. Because if this gets out, I’ll know it was you.
Last chance. You can still walk away. You can still save yourself.
Well! Your funeral.
Here it is: world peace isn’t a real problem.
No, listen—it is a real problem in that thousands of people, most of them noncombatants, most of them innocents, die every day as a consequence of global unrest and/or violence. It would be tough to dream up a more vengeful god than one who’d stand for that kind of industrialized carnage.
But, like everything else in a world built on industry, that carnage is a machine. All it would take to fix it is a determined redistribution of resources. If people didn’t have to fight for food and water and housing, and if every sociopath with a mind for money didn’t funnel their brainpower into emboldening the gnashing maw of capitalism, it’s lights out for global instability.
And, subsequently, lights out for my job.
It won’t happen. There’s too much money to be made in instability and the resultant war machinery. The stated mission of my Manhattan think tank is to advance the cause of peace around the world, but everyone who works here—me included—understands that it’s a moonshot situation. We aim for world peace, and we land among the stars of cease-fire agreements and housing for refugees and policies that will hopefully take the boil of international tensions down to a simmer.
Some days, the moonshot seems within reach.
Other days, I sit in meetings with the vice presidents of our areas of focus and reflect their enthusiasm back at them, doing my level best to glow with approval, bright and warm and distracting so that no one ever notices my approval isn’t worth wanting, that all the shine is only an illusion to cover up what’s underneath.
Afterward, I come back to my office, turn off the lights, and sit very still at my desk.
Today’s a desk day.
I glowed like the sun all through the monthly meeting with the VPs, and now I’m paying for it.
Only kidding. I’m not just paying for the massive expenditure of approval. Don’t worry about my other debts. I have the situation well under control. I put my feet up on my desk and leaned back in my chair and everything.
Wondering if you, too, can become the president of your very own think tank dedicated to advancing the cause of peace around the globe?
Of course you can. It’s simple.
In my case, I started out by being born in a brothel. My mother?—
My mother.
She died when I was young, underneath a flickering fluorescent light in a room that smelled like bleach and blood. I tried to take something of her with us when my brother Ares—older than me, but still young, Jesus, we were young—ducked out and ran from a social worker with a stack of paperwork that might as well have been handcuffs. It’s anyone’s guess why we ran the direction we did. Maybe we just followed unbroken streetlights. I don’t know. The shelter was big and brightly lit, so maybe that’s why we went inside. We found a little room and barricaded the door because we’d had social workers on our heels before, and we knew better than to trust those wolves.
The social workers never got us in the end.
A few women came to the door and tried to coax us out, which Ares didn’t like. He panicked, gave our names, and regretted it instantly.
Then a man came to the door and said his name was Zeus.
He had the nicest voice I’d ever heard. It sounded warm, like the middle of the day. It wasn’t. It was nighttime, and it was Christmas Eve, and he didn’t seem to mind that we’d interrupted his evening.
