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Too bad there isn’t a deal to save me.
I move through a narrow outer room that smells like gasoline and past another hallway into the back, where a man sits behind a desk lit by a small oil lamp. It looks like a movie set. All this could be fake, and what a relief that would be. The man at the desk is writing something on a piece of paper, and he doesn’t look up when I come in.
I make my footsteps as sturdy as I can and come to a stop at the edge of the desk.
He looks up from his paper and smiles.
Everything—the shadow-face on the Senator, the background menaces in the photos from that envelope, the voice in my ear—comes together in one sickening thud.
“Apollo,” the man says, and his voice is exactly the same as it was in that room, when his hand was on my shoulder and my brother was chained up in the other room and my mother— “I see you’ve come to do me a favor.”
15
ARTEMIS
Being afraid of the dark is a common—some might say universal—fear for a reason. We’re probably wired to be fearful and cautious about places we can’t see because people who got cavalier about the dark didn’t make it in the days before we had things like fire.
So, it’s true—occasionally, being in the dark does make my heart beat faster. I do feel those old urges. The ones that tell me to get to the light.
But they always disappear, because you can’t grow up with a cousin like Daisy and be afraid of the dark. Not the way other people are. If the dark meant anything growing up, it only meant that someone big and strong was close by and willing to defend us at any cost.
I know better than to think there’s nothing dangerous in the dark of Mociar, but I’m not afraid.
Separately, I wish the sun would rise.
It doesn’t seem possible that we flew for so long, that Mociar is nine hours ahead and dawn is taking its sweet time.
I stand outside the door of the brick building, the cold seeping through my jacket. I spend the first ten minutes balling my hands into fists and trying to warm them up in my pockets.
Twenty minutes goes by.
“It’s been twenty minutes,” I tell the guards.
They ignore me.
At twenty-five minutes, I wander back to the car and get my bag. It’s a hard case covered in fabric with straps that I can use to wear it over my shoulders. I put one strap over one shoulder and let the bag dangle behind me like my school backpack.
Half an hour.
Forty-five minutes.
Voices rise from the other side of the building, but they quiet almost immediately. The guards on this side glance among themselves in little flickers of their eyelids disguised as blinks. No other reaction.
An hour.
The guards ignore me some more.
At an hour and ten minutes, the guard gestures to the car. I give him a scornful look and remain in place by the building.
At ninety minutes exactly, I square my shoulders and march past the guards.
They don’t stop me.
That’s one of the many signs that something has gone wrong.
The front room of the building—why does it smell like gasoline?—is empty.
The back room contains one man who sits at a desk, writing. He has a small lamp that gutters like a candle.
