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“Two minutes now,” she says, and heads out of my office, flicking the lights on as she goes. “If there’s anything you need, just shout.”
An X-ray of Senator Walsh’s thoughts would be nice, but Delphi can’t get that in the next two minutes. I get to my feet and swipe my suit jacket off the back of my chair.
My fingers are on the button when sweat breaks out under my collar. I didn’t have a fever five seconds ago, but I feel it down the sides of my neck. Something’s off about my heartbeat. It’s pumping too much blood to my head, or not enough. The timing on this is bad, and not just because I have a meeting in thirty seconds.
“Fucking crickets.” I lean a hand on my desk. “Delphi.”
She reappears in the doorway without her guitar, takes one look at me, and rushes over to the fridge, where she pulls out a bottle of water. Delphi delivers it to me with the cap undone. It’s so cold that I think I might puke up ice all over my desk. While I focus on not vomiting a bunch of water in front of Senator Walsh, Delphi gets another bottle and wets a paper towel. She presses it to the back of my neck.
“Should I say you’re sick? There’s still time to intercept.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to be manly about it.” This isn’t the first time Delphi’s been on hand for one of these episodes, but I go to great lengths to make sure it’s a rare occasion. They don’t usually take me by surprise at the office. Up until now, I’ve been able to work around them, keeping the symptoms out of the public eye. And out of the college campus and think tank eye. This one is days early.
“I’m not being manly.” I’ll be fine momentarily. The wet paper towel is helping. And if I feel like this, I won’t be alone in it for long. Sometimes, if I picture the ideal situation—any situation, really, as long as my adoptive sister Artemis is close enough—I can get the fever and dizziness or whatever else to subside.
I think about her in her kitchen, with her golden-blonde hair in one of those floppy buns on the top of her head, eating ice cream. Really cold ice cream. Frozen, like ice cream usually is.
I think about the matching dishware my dad, Zeus, and both of his brothers have. I don’t know why they all have the same plates and bowls and cutlery at each of their houses. Maybe it’s because they all live in a row and our big, weird family is always in and out of each other’s houses and the dishware tends to travel, too. My favorite bowls are the red ones. They hold a lot of ice cream.
I picture one of the red bowls until I can feel the cool seeping into my palms.
“You’re less red now.” Delphi takes the paper towel off my neck. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I take a deeper breath. “I’m fine.”
My heartbeat counts down a few more beats. Tick tock.
Delphi whisks the empty water bottle out of my hands and drops it into the wastebasket next to my desk, then straightens up.
“You must be Senator Walsh,” she says, her tone smooth. Navy suit. American flag pin on his lapel. “Can I offer you anything? Coffee? Water?”
“No, thank you.”
Senator Walsh strides into my office, passing through the square of light from the window. For a moment, it hits his face at an angle that throws the angles into a relief that’s too sharp. His eye sockets look too big, and his eyes look too wide, like he’s a caricature of fear.
Then that’s gone, and he’s at my desk, his hand out to shake, and Delphi finishes closing the door. He’s at my desk, his hand out to shake, before Delphi’s finished closing the door. My stomach turns. He has the same mousy hair as his Senate headshot, but there’s something about his face that makes me wish I had a knife. Or, better yet, a bow and fifty razor-tipped arrows. I’d even settle for a gun.
It has to be because I had an episode. I’m on edge, that’s all. I shake Senator Walsh’s hand and gesture him into the seat across my desk, then sit. I glow minimally at him to project confidence. Light doesn’t shine from my face, or whatever you’re picturing. It just feels like that sometimes.
Chris Walsh isn’t much older than I am. He is the generic ideal of a young Senator. I don’t know why I reacted that way. What was I going to do, shoot him through the heart with an arrow and prance off to Calliope and Orion’s party.
“Appreciate you meeting with me on such short notice,” he says.
“It’s no trouble. What can I do for you, Senator Walsh?”
He folds his hands on the desk, his perfect Senator-headshot smile warping strangely at the edges. That neck-prickling get-me-a-weapon-for-fuck’s-sake-get-me-something-sharp sensation scratches down my spine like a rusty nail. Another face swims over Walsh’s, vague and blurry, half in shadow, like a man standing in the doorway of a room that reeking of carpet cleaner and fear and watching while a second man leaned down to whisper you’ll do him a favor, right? into my ear. I blink it away as hard as I can without giving myself away. The shadow-face disappears, revealing Walsh’s thoughtful Senator expression.
“Well.” He looks me in the eye. “I need to ask you a favor.”
3
ARTEMIS
It’s an old-person thing to say, but it seems impossible that the women of the family—plus Castor and Pollux, Orion’s teenage twin brothers, who are currently having pedicures done in an adjacent room—have gathered together at a private event space in Hell’s Kitchen to ready ourselves for my baby sister’s sixteenth birthday party.
A second old-person thing to say is that it brings a tear to my eye to see Calliope glancing over her makeup with a critical eye while her stylist hovers, bright-eyed and attentive, ready to move on to hair when she gets the go-ahead from the birthday girl. Calliope was, like, just born. I’ll never forget how tiny she was the first time I held her, with her wispy blonde hair and her little button nose and the pink onesie that looked like it could also fit a doll. Daisy and I had, of course, met our cousin Orion by then and marveled at how doll-sized Uncle Poseidon and Aunt Ashley’s son was.
