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The fever peaks into a raging fear that I won’t be able to find her. Climbing a ramp was so difficult that searching the entire night sky for one celestial body is going to be impossible. I’ll run out of air before I get to her. I’ll run out of brain before I get to her. I’ll be molten metal sinking into the deck of this aircraft carrier before I get to her.
But becoming molten is not an option. That would pull focus from Calliope and Orion and their chosen charity, which I could not name with a gun to my head.
More lights glow, ascending from the horizon of the aircraft carrier. A rippling, plasticky sound might be the rotation of the stars, but no, no, it’s the Hudson hitting the side of the Intrepid. I didn’t know I’d be able to hear that from the deck. I shouldn’t be able to hear it. Should I?
Don’t know.
I eventually determine that I cannot see the moon. Not the actual moon, and not the Artemis-moon.
The new goal—or the same goal as always, repeating endlessly until my brain boils and I die—is to move until I find her.
Glitter splits in my path, whirling out of the way. Auroras, someone says. Over the city. They’re mistaken. There’s too much light pollution to see the auroras. And it’s not time yet, according to?—
Something. An alert on my phone, or something I scrolled past at work. A news item I can’t picture now.
I glow at what I hope is an appropriate level for a birthday gala for my sixteen-year-old sister and my sixteen-year-old cousin. The music is deafening and discordant, and so are the voices. I startle away from a man who leans in and says you’ll do him a favor, right? directly into my ear.
No. No favors tonight.
Not tonight.
Crickets. Have I missed the cake? Have I missed the singing? No one in my line of vision looks familiar. Their smiles are all uncannily wide and white, filled to bursting with sharp teeth.
I stop looking at the faces. My stomach lurches. Nothing comes up. Good for me. I don’t want to throw up on an aircraft carrier. It’s not moving. I can’t be seasick.
The sea of people parts again, and there she is.
There she is.
I know the moon. Even in this half-dead state, I remember what the moon is supposed to look like.
Artemis looks like the designer of her gown has seduced moonlight into becoming fabric and let it cascade over every curve on her body.
It’s a relief just to look at her. A moonlit cool on my skin that makes the fever bearable. I can see her, so I can get to her. How far can it be? Not light-years. Twenty-five steps. Twenty, if I’m lucky.
Five steps closer, and it hits me:
She doesn’t look like the moon.
She looks like a bride.
I want to grab the nearest person and ask them if I’m at my wedding. If my life up until this point has been a hallucination, and I missed the part where I wasn’t Artemis’s adoptive older brother, I was her boyfriend. I don’t know how I missed my own proposal, but there’s not a single memory in my head of putting a ring on her finger, and there should be.
Three more steps, and a black shape leans in, dividing Artemis’s gown like a lunar eclipse.
A man in a tux.
Four more steps.
My whole body turns inside out and splashes on the deck of the aircraft carrier.
The eclipse is Senator fucking Walsh.
He cannot be near Artemis. He cannot be—from the disgusting expression on his face—flirting with her. He can’t. He’s too dangerous, and she’s too perfect, and every second in his presence is a threat.
My feet carry me the rest of the way.
Why is he here? I didn’t know he would be here. If I’d known he was going to be here, I would’ve stopped him.
