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But he still looks worried. I don’t want him to look worried.
“I’m not joining the Navy,” I promise.
“You are so good at the Navy,” he answers.
Not a cut you can stitch up. Delphi again. She really wants me to understand about the cut. And I do. I get it. Sometimes you can’t use stitches on a person. Sometimes you can’t do a medical on them and fix it up. Sometimes you’re just like that. Forever.
And sometimes forever isn’t that long. Being alive seems like it goes on and on and on, but it’s short. Don’t forget that. Remember that, next time it seems long. It isn’t. That’s an illusion. The universe is doing an illusion on you, and it’s not real. You don’t have as much time as you think. You have to find her now and let her shoot you with an arrow. Don’t catch it. Let it fly right into your heart.
My mom is there. My mom, but not my mother, because she’s dead. And then she is there, with her dark hair like Ares’s and her dark eyes like Ares’s and even a younger Ares, hugging her around the waist, and he’s terrified. He doesn’t want them to take me to another room.
I try to reach for him, but I can’t lift my arm.
I put everything I have into it and get my hand off the bed. My fingers brush his forearm but they go right through.
A promise. That’s what he wants. A promise.
“I won’t go.” I say it as clearly as I can. “I won’t go with them this time.”
Ares’s brow furrows. He opens his mouth like he’s going to answer me, but then Real Ares, my brother Ares, my real brother Ares who is not young, he’s not hugging my mom, he’s here, bursts through the two of them and they dissolve like a fine mist. He shouts at someone nearby, and then he’s very close. His hands are on my face, I think, but I can’t feel them very well.
“You have to do something,” Too late, I realize he’s shouting it at someone else, that he’s turned his head, but my brain took a long time to deliver that image. “You have to do something. You have to help him.”
It’s boiling, so. What can he expect? What can I expect?
There’s some kind of tussle. Some kind of scrap. It’s hard to see with all the bodies melting into one another. Ares with his face in my dad’s shoulder, his shirt crumpling in his fist. Poseidon with both hands on Ares’s face, talking to him in a low voice. Ares throwing a punch. Hades catching it like Ares is a weakling.
He’s not, though. That’s the thing about Ares. He’s very strong.
There’s more chatter, like crickets, like the Hudson lapping against the aircraft carrier.
I’m hot again. Burning. Boiling.
Frozen. Why is there ice?
“It’s so cold in here,” I tell Artemis. “Why is it so cold?”
“It’s summer,” she says.
It’s not summer. It’s spring. It’s the part of spring where Manhattan starts to get warm on certain days and you think, this is it. All the cold weather is going to break, and it’s going to be warm and sunny until the end of time.
But it doesn’t break, and the cold wind comes back, and you’re in that room again with a man’s hand on your shoulder and his voice in your ear. You’re still doing someone a favor, and the man after that, and the man after that. The calculation is simple. It’s not a complicated backchannel negotiation. It’s simple. It’s either you or your mother, and Ares puts up too much of a fight.
You’re the pretty one, and Ares is the strong one. Nobody wants the strong one. They want the pretty one. They want the one who glows.
So you smile at them and glow at them and shine at them. You do as many favors as it takes. You convince yourself that it doesn’t hurt. That none of it bothers you at all, because every alternative you can imagine would be worse. You couldn’t possibly survive it.
And what breaks you in the end in that they were liars. They didn’t keep their word. You did all those favors, and it didn’t make any difference. You couldn’t glow enough to tip the scales.
It was all for nothing.
You still lost her.
I lost her.
My mother?—
My mother.
