Chapter 29
The stairwell behind us dripped with blood. My shoulder burned where the sutures had torn, and the gunshot graze on my side leaked warm against my waistband. We'd left a trail of bodies from the armory to here, and my hands still shook from strangling Zeus's doctor with his own stethoscope.
I hit the courtyard with the katana drawn.
Diego grabbed my arm. "Jasper, stop."
I yanked free. Eight sat at a table with a teacup in front of her and Zeus at her side, like this was a fucking garden party.
Zeus pushed up from his chair and put himself between me and the table, one hand on his sword hilt.
I planted my feet. Blood ran down my arm from the shoulder and dripped off my fingers onto the stones. "Move or die."
Zeus kept his sword sheathed. "You're frightening her," he said quietly.
Eight had closed a fist around a butter knife and gone rigid in her chair. She looked ready to spring. In a few seconds she'd gone from a content little girl back to a weapon.
I'd done that to her.
I lowered the katana and looked away.
Diego kept his shotgun shouldered. "She's not who we're aiming at."
"Diego," I said quietly and pushed the barrels down. "Don't."
"He's using her like a shield," Diego insisted. "Let me shoot him, guapo. Let's end this."
Diego was right. But Eight sat two feet from Zeus's chair, and I could still smell the blood on my hands from the last room. She'd endured enough.
Diego lowered the shotgun.
"Good," Zeus said, though he kept one hand near the sword. "Now we can talk like civilized people. Tea?" He gestured to the table behind him.
Eight still gripped the knife. She stared at me the way a child stares at the monster under her bed.
I looked at the table. At the tea. At Zeus standing there with his hand on a sword and a smile that said he already knew I'd sit.
I sat. The katana went across my lap, where I could reach it. Eight's knuckles had gone white on the butter knife, and if I kept standing with a blade in my hand she'd keep looking at me like that.
Diego lowered himself into the seat beside me, shotgun across his knees. He moved stiffly, one arm guarding his ribs.
I pressed my hand against my side. Blood seeped between my fingers.
Zeus returned to his chair and picked up the teapot. "I take it all my men upstairs are dead?"
"Da," I said stiffly.
"The doctor as well?"
"Very," Diego added.
Zeus sighed. "A pity. I always liked him. But you did what you thought you had to do. What you were trained to do. I suppose that means the blame falls on me."
"We wouldn't be here at all if you had a shred of decency," Diego blurted.
"Decency," Zeus said, sliding a steaming cup in front of Diego, "is what brought us here, to this crossroads. Isn't that right, Hephaestus?"
"It's Jasper." I said it through gritted teeth.
"Perhaps." He set his cup down. "Or perhaps there was never a Jasper at all. Just Hephaestus in better clothes."
I tightened my grip on the katana.
Eight set down the butter knife. She shook when she reached for her cup.
Zeus poured more tea and slid it in front of me. "Do you remember the cage?"
The cage had smelled like piss and rusted iron. The memory hit before I could stop it. The cold of the bars against my ribs as I squeezed through. The wet floor under my too-big shoes. The dart punching into my neck before I reached the armory door.
"You ran for the weapons," Zeus said. "Six years old, half-starved, and you went straight for the armory. That's when I knew."
"Knew what? That I'd make a good dog?"
"That you'd make a good weapon. There's a difference."
"Not from where I was standing."
"No. I suppose not." He turned his teacup in its saucer. "So I forged one. A warrior who could fight and think. It never occurred to me that the life I'd have to sacrifice would be my own daughter's."
"It wasn't supposed to go down like that." I looked at my hands on the table. Blood had dried in the creases of my knuckles. "I told her not to go too deep on the left flank. She wouldn't listen. I made the call to abandon her in the field. But if she'd listened to me..."
"So fucking arrogant."
I flinched. He didn't sound angry. He sounded like he pitied me.
"We made the same mistake, you and I. I looked at a boy and thought him a weapon. You looked at a casualty list and drew a line." Zeus shifted his hand closer to his sword. "And my Nadia ended up on the wrong side of it."
Eight picked up the butter knife again. She turned it in her fingers under the table, the same grip I'd corrected at the olive tree.
Diego's knee pressed against mine under the table. He kept his eyes forward, on Zeus, but the pressure stayed.
I stared at the teacup. My thumb traced the rim and left a red smear on the porcelain.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. The gears that should have caught on that kind of thing ran smooth.
I'd saved the rest of the team. One life for five.
The math worked. It had always worked. That was the problem.
"Your papa pulled the lever," Zeus said to Eight. He said it the way he said everything, like he were explaining the weather. "Someone you love on one track. Five strangers on the other." He looked at me. "Except it wasn't a trolley. It was a bullet. And your mother was on the other track."
"That's enough," Diego said quietly beside me.
Zeus ignored him.
The courtyard went silent except for the wind through the arches.
Eight's hand had gone still on the butter knife. She gripped it the way she had when I'd walked in.
My pulse thudded in my throat. The katana trembled in my lap.
"Did you love her?" she asked.
I looked at her. She stared back with Nadia's eyes in my face.
Diego's boot pressed harder against mine under the table. He knew the answer. He'd gotten that truth out of me in the dark, in our bed, in the only place I'd ever been able to say it.
"She deserved better than what I gave her," I said. "I'm sorry for that."
Diego exhaled beside me. His knuckles had gone white around the stock of the shotgun.
"I had to learn a lot of things too late." I stopped. Tried again. "But I'm here now. That's what I can give you."
Zeus slammed his cup down hard enough that tea sloshed over the rim.
"That's it?" His voice had gone cold. "That's what you have to say about my daughter? She deserved better?"
"She did," I said. "So does Mila."
The silence stretched.
Under the table, Diego laced his swollen fingers through mine and held on tight.
I looked at him. He clenched his jaw and blinked hard, eyes going wet. When he opened them, he looked at me like he'd never stop.
A tear ran down my cheek. I wiped it with my free hand and put it back on the katana.
Eight set the butter knife on the table. She lined it up beside her teacup, handle toward her, blade toward Zeus.
"And that's supposed to comfort her?" Zeus's voice cut through the courtyard. "That you showed up bleeding on her birthday and offered her platitudes?"
He stood. He took his time doing it, straightening his cuffs like a man excusing himself from dinner.
I stood with him.
Diego let go of my hand. He tensed, ready to move.
Zeus curled his fingers around his sword hilt. "You were supposed to be my legacy, Jasper. You and Nadia together. Instead, I got a dead daughter and a granddaughter I had to raise alone while you ran."
"You made me into this," I said.
"I know." He squeezed the hilt until his knuckles went white. "That's what makes it unforgivable."
Eight turned to Diego. She slid off her chair and crossed to him without a word. Diego pulled her into his lap and wrapped his arms around her. She pressed her face into his shoulder.
"When can we go home?" she asked, her voice muffled against Diego's shirt.
Diego tightened his arms around her. He looked at me, then at Zeus.
"Soon, pequena," he said quietly. "Real soon."
Zeus went still.
"Home," he repeated.
Eight lifted her head from Diego's shoulder. "I want to go home," she said again, louder this time.
Zeus locked his jaw. "This is your home, Eight. I built this for you. Everything here is yours."
"No." She shook her head. "Home is where Diego makes eggs. Where Jasper smokes on the porch. That's home."
Zeus tightened his mouth. Then his face went smooth and cold.
"I see." He kept his hand on his sword. "Nine years I've given you. Nine years of safety, of training, of love. And you'd throw it all away for what? Scrambled eggs and cigarettes?"
"Zeus," I said.
Diego shifted Eight behind him without letting her go. He brought the shotgun up with his free hand and winced when the motion jarred his ribs.
Zeus drew his sword. The blade caught the dawn light and threw it back sharply.
"You don't get to take her from me," he said. "Not after everything."
I raised the katana. "She's not yours to keep."
"If you want her," Zeus said, "you'll have to take her."
"Gladly."
We moved at the same time.
He came in high. I blocked on instinct, the way he'd drilled into me, and the impact lit up every wound I'd collected tonight.
I pivoted and swung at his neck. He ducked it.
He knew I'd go for the neck because he'd taught me to go for the neck, and the thrust he answered with nearly took me through the ribs.
I knew his patterns. He knew mine. Fighting him was like arguing with my own skeleton. Every feint I threw, he'd already corrected a thousand times.
So I stopped fighting his way. I dropped my guard and left the opening he'd spent a decade beating me never to leave.
It was ugly, wrong, the kind of sloppy shit that would have earned me extra drills at fourteen.
He committed to the thrust because the opening was too clean, and I sidestepped and brought the katana across his ribs. Blood spread through his shirt.
Zeus smiled. He'd taught me that trick too.
He closed on me faster than a man with that cut should have moved.
I gave ground because my body had run out of things to give.
My arms had gone heavy, and my shoulder had settled into a wet heat that meant something important had torn loose.
I parried once, barely. I parried twice, worse.
On the third strike, I stopped retreating and drove forward on spite and the stubborn certainty that I was not going to die here, not with Eight watching, not before I got her out.
His guard dropped, and I drove forward with everything I had left, katana aimed at his throat.
Then the wall behind the courtyard suddenly exploded inward.
Stone and dust and noise erupted at once, and through the smoke a shape moved that I recognized before my brain caught up to my eyes. The chain sickle whipped through the gap in the wall and buried itself in the courtyard stones. Achilles stepped through the breach.
Zeus pulled away from me mid-swing. He moved toward the far archway, and every calculation played out across his face: the compound, the defenses, the son he'd rejected, all of it collapsing into a single conclusion. He had to leave. Now.
I could have gone after him. Every muscle wanted to finish it, to chase him through that archway and put the katana through his back before he disappeared.
I turned my back on Zeus and ran for Diego and Mila.
The second blast hit as I reached them. I threw myself over Diego's back, over Eight, and the world tore apart above us.
Stone rained down. The courtyard table shattered.
Diego curled around Eight and I curled around Diego, and the last thing I registered before the white took everything was Diego shouting my name.