Chapter 2
If you swearon your life that you won’t tell a soul, I’ll tell you a secret. Think about it before you answer. Carefully. Because if this gets out, I’ll know it was you.
Last chance. You can still walk away. You can still save yourself.
Well! Your funeral.
Here it is: world peace isn’t a real problem.
No, listen—it is a real problem in that thousands of people, most of them noncombatants, most of them innocents, die every day as a consequence of global unrest and/or violence. It would be tough to dream up a more vengeful god than one who’d stand for that kind of industrialized carnage.
But, like everything else in a world built on industry, that carnage is a machine. All it would take to fix it is a determined redistribution of resources. If people didn’t have to fight for food and water and housing, and if every sociopath with a mind for money didn’t funnel their brainpower into emboldening the gnashing maw of capitalism, it’s lights out for global instability.
And, subsequently, lights out for my job.
It won’t happen. There’s too much money to be made in instability and the resultant war machinery. The stated mission of my Manhattan think tank is to advance the cause of peace around the world, but everyone who works here—me included—understands that it’s a moonshot situation. We aim for world peace, and we land among the stars of cease-fire agreements and housing for refugees and policies that will hopefully take the boil of international tensions down to a simmer.
Some days, the moonshot seems within reach.
Other days, I sit in meetings with the vice presidents of our areas of focus and reflect their enthusiasm back at them, doing my level best to glow with approval, bright and warm and distracting so that no one ever notices my approval isn’t worth wanting, that all the shine is only an illusion to cover up what’s underneath.
Afterward, I come back to my office, turn off the lights, and sit very still at my desk.
Today’s a desk day.
I glowed like the sun all through the monthly meeting with the VPs, and now I’m paying for it.
Only kidding. I’m not just paying for the massive expenditure of approval. Don’t worry about my other debts. I have the situation well under control. I put my feet up on my desk and leaned back in my chair and everything.
Wondering if you, too, can become the president of your very own think tank dedicated to advancing the cause of peace around the globe?
Of course you can. It’s simple.
In my case, I started out by being born in a brothel. My mother?—
My mother.
She died when I was young, underneath a flickering fluorescent light in a room that smelled like bleach and blood. I tried to take something of her with us when my brother Ares—older than me, but still young, Jesus, we were young—ducked out and ran from a social worker with a stack of paperwork that might as well have been handcuffs. It’s anyone’s guess why we ran the direction we did. Maybe we just followed unbroken streetlights. I don’t know. The shelter was big and brightly lit, so maybe that’s why we went inside. We found a little room and barricaded the door because we’d had social workers on our heels before, and we knew better than to trust those wolves.
The social workers never got us in the end.
A few women came to the door and tried to coax us out, which Ares didn’t like. He panicked, gave our names, and regretted it instantly.
Then a man came to the door and said his name was Zeus.
He had the nicest voice I’d ever heard. It sounded warm, like the middle of the day. It wasn’t. It was nighttime, and it was Christmas Eve, and he didn’t seem to mind that we’d interrupted his evening.
And then another man said—through the closed, barricaded door—that there wasn’t anyone from social services out in the hall.
At the time, I didn’t have the words to describe Hades’s voice. He wasn’t loud, but there was something icy and unbreakable in his tone.
At the time, I thought he was dangerous.
At the time, I was right. He and Zeus and their third brother, Poseidon, are all dangerous.
But not to us.
Zeus and Hades gave us food and bought us more of it when Ares and I got into a fight and ruined the first takeout bag.
She was a liar. I can still feel the words in my mouth.
My mother had said?—
My mother.
She hadn’t meant to lie. That wasn’t her fault. That was mine.
By the time Zeus and Hades suggested a drive, I was at the end of my rope. Both Ares and I were. I forced food past this horrible sharp grief in my throat and stared at the men who’d whisked us away from the shelter—which, we learned later, was Zeus’s shelter, and Zeus’s project, and Zeus’s penance. Zeus looked exactly like he sounded. Warm. Golden. Hades was just as tall, but pale and blond, with black eyes. He didn’t flinch when Ares called him a freak right in front of him. He told us about his eyes and the pain—Does it hurt? Like a motherfucker.—in a level tone that was starting to sound less cold and more…solid. Steady.
They drove us out to the farmhouse where they grew up and told us about that, too.
And then Zeus took us back to his massive, sprawling house, where his whole family was gathered for Christmas. He gave us clothes. He gave us bedrooms.
Before Zeus’s wife, Brigit, could even introduce us to everyone, her daughter, Artemis, popped up from behind a couch and shot a toy arrow at me with a toy bow.
Most of what I remember about that moment is her eyes. Golden and bright, just like Zeus. I knew from the glint in those eyes that the arrow wouldn’t miss. And I knew, without really knowing, that I wouldn’t let it touch me. Couldn’t.
So I put my hand up and caught it before it could. Artemis smiled at me, and there was a pull at my ribs, and I smiled back. Smiled, because I wanted to, and smiled to cover up that my heart was racing and my vision had gone dim at the edges and I felt my heart beat and beat and beat like a clock ticking down.
When we woke up the next morning, there were presents for us under the tree. The adoption was official before the new year.
Then it was just a matter of school, which took a different kind of flattery than the brothel had. There was college, which took the opposite of flattery. I spent more time fending people off than I did glowing at them. I knew long before Ares decided to go to college in the city, and I decided to follow him, that I wouldn’t go anywhere out of state. I couldn’t.
And so, when my extremely wealthy adoptive father held charity galas and surrounded himself with people from the government and charmed them and made them feel safe—because he can, never mind how, nobody really knows the mechanics behind the power—I stood at his elbow and let him put his hand on my shoulder and ignored the shame that bubbled up into the back of my throat when he said my son, Apollo.
I smiled.
I glowed.
And now I’m on thirty-under-thirty lists, raising obscene amounts of funding, and stopping wars. I spend my days glowing to make up for the ruined rot of me in the hopes that someday it’ll all balance out and I’ll die without anyone knowing the truth.
Easy.
My office door opens with a coinciding strum of a guitar, followed by my CEO, Delphi, singing trembling earth and ashen skies.
I don’t open my eyes.
She strums a different chord on the guitar. “Trembling earth, ashen skies…”
Her footsteps are soft as she moves from one side of my office to the other, picking out a melody as she goes. “I saw it catch you by surprise?—”
“This feels personal.” I met Delphi when she stood up out of her seat to argue with me in our freshman U.S. foreign affairs class. She never cared about the glowing and was happy to remain in my orbit so long as I adopted a possessive stance whenever guys tried to hit on her. Our friendship—and working relationship—has always been one of mutual platonic benefits.
“But it shouldn’t have.” She strums more forcefully on the guitar. “The signs were there before your eyes, standing on their own two feet in a patch of sun that glowed like?—”
“Lava?”
“Light through a window?—”
I take my feet off my desk and open my eyes. Delphi stands at the edge of the square panel of light through my big office window, her guitar slung on its strap over the shoulder of her Armani skirt suit, dark curls shining in the sun. “Someday, you’ll be lauded for your direct environmental inspiration.”
“Not necessarily this window,” she sings, turning to face me. “A metaphorical window.”
“I feel like you’ve covered Pompeii before.”
“Who said I was singing about Pompeii?” Delphi sings.
“Trembling earth,” I sing back. “Ashen skies. Those facts about Pompeii are not a surprise.”
She rolls her eyes and switches to a minor key. “Hopefully your next meeting isn’t, either.” Now the singing feels ominous. “Since it starts in five minutes.”
“What? No, it doesn’t. I’m done for the day.” I’m only sitting here because I needed a few minutes to collect myself before I moved on to what’s next. My sister Calliope’s joint birthday party with my cousin Orion is this evening. I blocked out the late afternoon so I didn’t have to pretend I’m not exhausted at the party. The gala.
“Urgent request.” Delphi gives it a little tune. “So you’re not leaving yet.”
An urgent meeting request isn’t totally unheard of in my line of work, but I don’t like it.
“I need to hire a better assistant.”
“Good luck with that,” Delphi sings. My luck with assistants other than Delphi hasn’t been good. I know it doesn’t make sense to other people that I have a CEO who also keeps my schedule on track, but if those other people aren’t involved in the process of advancing the cause of peace, then I don’t care what they think. And even if they are involved in that process, I still don’t care what they think. Outside my family, Delphi is one of the few people I’ve met in my life who’s immune to my sun-god-like glow. So she gets to be my CEO and rule my schedule with an iron fist.
Except when I need to make sudden and sometimes catastrophic changes to said schedule. Then it’s Delphi’s job to keep everyone else’s attention where it belongs—world peace.
“Okay.” I rub my hands over my face. “Who has an urgent problem that only I can solve?”
Delphi raises her eyebrows. “Chris Walsh.”
“Who the hell is that?”
Her next strum makes the hair on the back of my neck stand. “Sitting U.S. Senator Chris Walsh.”
Chris Walsh’s senate headshot flashes into my mind. His main distinguishing feature is that he’s young for the Senate. He replaced an ancient senator who always reminded me of a tortoise in the last election. Mousy brown hair. Indeterminate eye color.
“Did he say what it was about?”
“Said he was in town for a meeting at the United Nations.”
“He’s not one of the congressional representatives.”
“No,” Delphi agrees.
This could be about virtually anything, then. A good percentage of our policy and research work is at the request of various members of Congress. Research-backed policy is a cornerstone of legislation that actually furthers the cause of world peace.
And then there’s…everything else.
Though my think tank is headquartered in Manhattan, we maintain strong connections with the United States government. And many other governments. When people talk about backchannel negotiations, there’s a not-insignificant chance that they mean a meeting with me. Or a meeting in my presence. I don’t host meetings between ambassadors from foreign countries on my own behalf. I host them because some of the cordial discussions escalate to raised voices and gritted teeth and, on one occasion, a fistfight, and it’s best if that kind of thing stays out of the Oval Office.
“Crickets.”
Delphi half-giggles, half-snorts. “I’m going to put that in a song.”
“Go right ahead. You can give me a cut of the profits when your first hit single has the word crickets in it.”
“You don’t need a cut of the profits.”
“It’s the spirit of the thing.”
“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.”