Chapter 10 A Feat of Engineering
A Feat of Engineering
Ithought maybe I hadn’t heard him right. “You kidnapped me to be an engineer?”
“Yes,” Hades said.
There was so much wrong with this, I didn’t even know where to start.
And my mind was still fixated on the whole feeding-you-to-Chaos thing.
I couldn’t untangle my thoughts, couldn’t calm my petrified, banging heart.
My palms had begun to sweat. “Don’t you have engineers already? I haven’t even been to college.”
Hades sighed. “Well, first of all, we don’t have college, so no one cares.
I only even know what a college is because I read so many books, and some of those books are from the Lümerlund.
” My mind flashed on the full bookshelves in the room he’d stashed me in.
“Second of all, no, not really. People here don’t…
I mean, yes, they have jobs, but we don’t treat them the same way you treat jobs in the Lümerlund. ”
“And you know how we do our jobs because of… books.”
“Yes.”
Would that humans wrote as many books about the underworld as the underworld seemed to have about us. Then maybe I’d know what was going on. “Elke seems to do her job,” I pointed out. “Your maidservant.”
“Elke is devoted to me, and her job is an extension of her devotion. It’s different. But finally, even if we did have better engineers, no one has had the idea to use the water from the Primordial Mountain.” He hesitated. “No one except for you.”
A warmth was kindling in my stomach. A softer, lighter, more dangerous warmth than the heat I felt whenever Hades glared at me or threw me over his shoulder.
That heat was powered primarily by fear — he was my kidnapper — and this warmth was, too, but…
worse. I tried to quash it. “How did you know I’d had that idea? ”
Hades was silent. I was beginning to realize that he stayed silent when he didn’t want to answer a question but didn’t want to lie.
“You were watching me,” I accused him. “You listened to my conversation with Calix when I told him about the blueprints for my reservoir system. You said you hadn’t been!”
“I said no one had been watching you this whole time,” Hades corrected. “But yes, Persephone. I was watching that conversation.”
Persephone. He knew my name. He had learned it while eavesdropping on me and Calix. He shaped the syllables with his smooth, square accent. My name in his mouth. I had never heard it spoken like that. I swallowed. I had to keep talking so I wouldn’t ask him to say it again.
I said, “Is this why you usually kidnap healers and midwives? Because we’re better at our jobs than you?”
Hades smiled a little bit. “I told you,” he said. “You’re smart.”
“Stop. Just answer the question.”
“Not always. But sometimes, yes. Twenty-six years ago, the last tribute midwifed my own birth. Typically my people, um, hatch. But my mother… took after our human ancestor. As do I. Our own midwives did not know what to do with her… parts.” His eyes flicked down to the triangle between my legs.
His discomfort was hilarious. “Do you know what to do with them?”
I thought he would blush. Instead he smirked. It was like getting punched in the face. “Trust me,” he said. “I really do.”
Suddenly it was hard to swallow. “From the… midwife?”
Hades’s smirk widened. “No.”
Okay. I shifted uncomfortably. He was still looking at me, his blue eyes bright and smug, his broad shoulders back, his black hair framing his gorgeous face. No, no, he’d kidnapped me from my family! From my home! He was going to sacrifice me to a monster-god! He was bad!
Bad in a good way? whispered a vicious part of me.
The part that was excruciatingly aware of the heat in my own loins.
I couldn’t stop thinking of how he’d glanced at my groin a second earlier.
The urge to glance at his, too, was almost overwhelming.
I wanted to take his clothes off. It sounded insane, but I wanted to see if he had a human cock or something else.
And if he had a human cock… what would it be like?
I had to get away from this. This was just the terror, desperate for something else to latch onto. My thoughts had turned into cotton. I managed to spit out, “What happened to your mom?”
Any sexual energy evaporated at once. The smirk dropped off Hades’s face.
I almost apologized. But at least I wasn’t thinking about his cock anymore. Ugh, come on.
“She died,” Hades said. “In childbirth.” And then: “My father didn’t like her anyway. It was a marriage of convenience. She was a cousin of the Vizeking’s.”
“And easy to boss around,” I guessed. “Easy to use as a pawn. Because she looked human, like you, and you godlings don’t like the ones who look human, do you? The human-looking ones are second-class citizens.”
Hades had stiffened. Again he gave me only silence.
I coughed. “Sorry,” I said. “That was mean. But it’s true.”
More silence, and then he said quietly, “Yes, it is.”
Now I felt bad. To give him some space, I turned in a circle, evaluating the dried-out reservoir.
A few godlings were literally lying in it, like they thought that if it started to fill up again, they’d be the first to have a drink.
It was so pathetic it made my heart twist. They might be monstrosities, but their suffering was real. They just wanted to live.
“Well, you didn’t kidnap the last woman,” I said finally. “Not if you weren’t alive yet. So why was it you who stole someone this time?”
Hades flinched.
I knew it. “You weren’t supposed to kidnap me at all, were you? That’s why the Vizeking was so angry. You weren’t supposed to make the decision about a tribute. It wasn’t up to you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“So, what? Have you burned everyone’s only chance at a tribute for the next quarter-century?
” Probably the Vizeking really would have rather had Josie.
The thought made me sick and angry. I wasn’t even good enough to feed to a god as a meal.
“There’s a chance the Monarch won’t even accept me, isn’t there?
Because I’m not pretty enough, not special enough. ”
“There’s one way to find out,” Hades snarled.
I had no idea what gave me the courage to tip my chin back and stare at him challengingly. “But you need me to eat your food first. Because otherwise there’s some chance I’ll get away. Well, fuck that, Prince.”
“You have no choice.”
“Oh, absolutely I do. I don’t pretend I can stop you killing me. But the absolute last thing I’m going to do is make it any easier. If you want to force-feed me and drown me, then you can fucking work for it. And there’s absolutely no way I’m working on this reservoir. Got that?”
He didn’t answer. His brow was drawn together, his body hard and vibrating like it had been when he’d talked to the Vizeking at the Lake. He looked so angry he couldn’t speak.
I was almost cowed, but what did I care? He couldn’t scare me any worse than he already had. Couldn’t hurt me any worse than he was already going to. And he definitely couldn’t make me feel bad for him again.
“Great,” I said. “Then we’re done here.” I turned away. “I’m going back to the room.”
“You’ll never find it.”
“Then I’ll wander the halls until I starve to death. Who cares?”
He lost his temper. “PERSEPHONE!”
I whipped around and screamed, “HADES!”
I didn’t need my fucking spear. If he laid a hand on me I would claw his eyes out.
Fury boiled on his face. “It is forbidden for non-royalty to call me by my name,” he bit out at last. “Only my father has that honor, and my someday queen. You will call me Your Lordship or my Lord, when you address me at all.”
I said, “Fuck you. Can I say that” — I paused weightily — “my Lord?”
Hades did not answer for a moment. He took a very deep breath through his nose. Then he allowed, “There is… no protocol on that.”
Was he making another joke?
It was actually funny, but I was in no mood for laughing. “Fuck you,” I repeated. “I’m going back to the room. You can take me there, or you can let me find my own way. Your choice.”
“How amusing that you think it is up to you to offer me a choice. Let me enlighten you, goddess. You are not going anywhere. You are to be fed to the Monarch in three days’ time. Before then, you will fill this reservoir with water. End of story. You may begin now.”
“You’re delusional. You kidnapped me. You’re a piece of shit.
” I didn’t add, And I’m not a real engineer.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. “You can let me out, or you can kill me now. Your choice. But either way, I’ll go to the grave making sure there’s no version of this where you get what you want. ”
“I could torture you.”
I quailed for a moment. Hades was enormous. Certainly he was strong enough to torture me. And he’d thrown me around plenty.
But as Elke had pointed out, he’d always made sure I landed on something soft.
So I said very honestly to the Prince of Darkness, “I don’t think you have it in you.”
Hades’s expression was stormy. But even he couldn’t argue. I knew it: He was a big softie.
Probably his precious father and Vizeking didn’t like that either, any more than they liked his human form.
After a moment, he closed his eyes, as if praying for patience. Then he said, without looking at me, his voice soft and jagged, “What if you thought there was a way out?”
I scoffed. Did he think I was stupid? “I’d say you just said, You’re not going anywhere.”
“I don’t talk like that.”
“Yeah, you do. All booming and serious. Call me Your Lordship.” I pitched my voice lower. “I know how a vagina works.”
He smirked. “Would you like to find out how serious I am?”
“No thanks. Touch me and die, motherfucker.”
“Not about your vagina. I meant about letting you go.” He said the words like they hurt him. But: “What if I told you I would set you free in exchange for filling the reservoir?”
His words were like water. I wanted so badly to believe they were true. I knew they weren’t, that a prince who was capable of kidnapping me was also capable of lying through his teeth, but the back of my mind was already calculating wildly: What if? What if?
The Vizeking had given me three days.
“I only have three days,” I said, hating myself for even engaging with this. “Even if I could work that fast… well, I’ll starve if I don’t eat your food. And if I eat your food, I can’t leave anyway. So, no.”
“How long until you starve?”
He sounded serious. “I mean, truly? Maybe a couple weeks if I have water. But —” My voice cracked. I shouldn’t tell him this. But I felt, somehow, like we were negotiating in good faith. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “I’m not sure I can hold out that long. I’m afraid I’ll eat your fruit before that.”
Something sparked in his eyes.
I knew it. Why had I been so honest?
But he only asked, “How long can you hold out?”
“I mean… maybe that whole time. The whole three days. I don’t know. But Hades, even if I manage not to eat, I can’t build an irrigation system in three days.”
A brief shiver through his body at the sound of his name. Gods, what a baby. “I meant Your Lordship,” I corrected myself, sarcastically.
He closed his eyes. But when he opened them, the dangerous spark was gone. There was nothing left but that wide expanse of blue. “Yes, you can,” he said. “I believe in you.”
Now it was my turn to shiver.
“And you won’t have to do it yourself,” he added. “You won’t so much as lift a finger for the construction, obviously. I’ve recruited an army of workers for you. Those were the logistics I was handling before.”
“You don’t think I can do manual labor?”
“It’s beneath you,” Hades said flatly.
“Tell that to the Stammerers,” I muttered, but Hades either didn’t hear me or didn’t get it.
He went on, “I am the Prince. The workers will do as I say. And if you do this thing for me, then up until it’s time to sacrifice you to the Monarch, I will do as you say.”
I hesitated. “If I do it, I want permission to run pipes from your reservoir to Limer.”
“That’s not —” Hades began. But he took a deep breath. “Okay. Fine. Yes. I’ll figure it out.”
“Promise.”
“I promise!”
That changed everything.
It meant that if I stayed with him and did as he asked, I’d be saving my mother. And not just her. The whole village.
It was so tempting.
But while I considered, my stomach rumbled again. I almost moaned. I could feel my body hollowing out with hunger. The walls of my stomach grinding against each other, hollering for food.
But it was only three days. Three days of hunger, three days without sun, three days of putting up with this fucking asshole.
If I could bring myself to believe the Prince.
And if — and I tried to ignore, but couldn’t quite manage it, the smug little voice in the back of my head that reminded me I wasn’t a real engineer, that remembered Calix’s patronizing skepticism when I’d shown him my blueprints — if I could even do it.