Chapter 4
The meeting should have beenfine.
It should have been fine.
This isn’t the first meeting I’ve taken with a sitting senator. It’s far from the first time I’ve had someone weasel their way onto my schedule at the last section. I’ve mediated conversations that take place in the back rooms of bars, at twenty-four hour diners, and once at the intermission of La Rondine at the Metropolitan Opera House.
But from the moment Walsh said I need to ask you a favor, I was fucked.
“Crickets,” I say to my steering wheel, and clench my hands as tight as I can. It’s not the ideal time to be driving in Manhattan, not personally and certainly not in terms of traffic. The traffic light stays red for so long that more bile creeps into the back of my throat, then slashes to green.
The meeting wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine. I watched from outside my body while I listened and nodded and took notes on a white legal pad. I texted Artemis with casual detachment. I remember briefly wondering if I could go into the hall in my spirit-form and beg Delphi for help. Time bent and expanded and skipped like a scratched DVD. I still don’t understand how it took so long.
And then, when it was finally over, I walked Senator Walsh to the door and shoved my notes into Delphi’s hands and said something that I know didn’t make any sense.
I’m supposed to be with my dad and my uncles and my cousins and my brothers getting ready for the party at an event space that’s been converted into spas and dressing rooms—some unbelievable level of luxury—for my aunts and my mom and my sisters and my cousin Daisy.
I can’t go there now.
I should have called for a driver and had Delphi get my tux from my apartment, but I didn’t do that, either.
I just need a few minutes alone, and I’ll be fine.
I’ll be fine.
I’ll be fine.
I spend the entirety of the elevator trip up to my penthouse apartment pretending not to be nauseated, then turn the air conditioning down to fifty-five and stumble into the shower.
It doesn’t help.
I feel worse with every minute that passes. More of me is on fire with every second that goes by. My heartbeat tolls like I’m inside a doomsday clock and there are no more minutes to midnight.
Cold water doesn’t help.
The second time I throw up in the shower, it occurs to me that this isn’t because of the meeting. It can’t be because of the meeting. It’s because Artemis is across the city in a spa or luxury dressing room and not here. It’s because this isn’t a bizarre manifestation of a panic attack. It’s an episode.
Which is impossible.
These episodes happen on a schedule. Yes, the schedule has changed over the years, but never like this. I’ve never had two in one day. And never this early.
If I feel like this, Artemis might be in dire straits at the spa.
No—at the party. It’s time to be at the party.
It’s that thought that propels me out of the shower and into my closet. Putting on my tuxedo is a miserable, disorienting experience. I can’t get my eyes to focus properly to make sure I look normal, and it’s only when I’m in the building’s lobby asking the doorman if I’ve dressed myself that I realize I can’t drive myself to the gala.
The doorman wants to call an ambulance, but I charm him into calling my driver instead. He wants to drive me to the nearest hospital. I make an eloquent and convincing argument for why that will actually kill me.
That’s what I assume happens, because the next thing I know, he’s opening my door and helping me out of the SUV.
We are not at a hospital.
A few scattered flashes hurt my eyes. Of course there are press. I knew they would be here. At some point, I’m sure I knew they would be there.
I expect more flashes, actually, because I rarely appear in public when I’m five seconds from death. They must be photographers who have a sense of decency, then.
For a few seconds, I manage to focus on the hulking shape near the sidewalk.
Why is there an aircraft carrier?
“I can’t join the Navy,” I tell my driver, the Hudson bulging in my fever-skewed vision. “I didn’t join the Navy. You understand that, right?”
He says something that has the cadence of English, but no understandable words.
Finally, he points, his lips moving out of sync with his voice. The sentences get shorter and shorter.
“Party,” he finally shouts.
Oh. Oh. This is where Calliope and Orion’s party is. On an aircraft carrier. That has to be my Uncle Poseidon’s fault. There’s no other explanation for the party being on an aircraft carrier.
“I’m late,” I mention.
“Hospital,” he shouts.
I wave him off and proceed toward the aircraft carrier.
The way to get to the deck of the aircraft carrier is via a long, metal ramp. I start climbing with the full knowledge that I will die before I reach the top. My lifeless corpse will tumble over the railings into the Hudson River, which will make for a closed-casket funeral.
During the climb, I focus on the details of the meeting.
It was only so strange and threatening because of the episode I had just before. That’s the only reason for the Senator’s shadow-face and my brain’s insistence on making a connection between parts of the past I’d rather not remember and the innocent, innocuous words that came out of his mouth.
The ask wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, either. Not when I’m a frequent participant and/or host for backchannel negotiations.
Backwater country, political unrest, etcetera. The good Senator assured me that a regime change to the opposition party would be for the good of the country. That country, Mociar? No, our country, he said, appealing to my patriotism. I gave him a little glow, as a treat. It bought me time—I pause on the ramp to breathe, because it’s getting harder to remember how—time I needed to think without his silver-tongued sell.
I’m familiar with Mociar. For all that most of the world probably couldn’t find it on a map to save their lives, it’s what we in the business call a linchpin state. Poised between one superpower and one super-union, both geographically and politically. It is good for our country not to let their balance tilt one way or the other. It’s in a strategic position.
It’s also right next door to a place I’d rather forget existed. The Republic of Rathbek was a linchpin, too. Right up until I pulled it, and I’ve been waiting for the grenade to go off ever since.
Walsh’s favor, despite my personal feelings, is well within my capabilities to grant.
Because of course he didn’t ask me to orchestrate a regime change. That was only the privileged background he laid out for me so I could see the whole picture. Those four words were loaded with the implication that an honest man like the Senator wouldn’t ask?—
Fucking crickets.
For a favor.
He wouldn’t ask for a favor without at least pretending he was invested in informed consent. And no, no, he would never presume to make foreign policy moves without the backing of—as he also heavily implied—the State Department and certain members of his own party who have regular communication with the Oval Office.
So what he’s asking for isn’t a foreign policy move, not as such, it’s simply a matter of asset management.
It’s simply a matter of turning down the heat between the two parties in Mociar so they can stop posturing about a costly civil war.
The Senator is only asking for a meeting. He’s only asking for me to sit in a room with the Mocian ambassador and a high-ranking member of the opposition party.
I can give him that. No problem.
As long as I don’t float away in the Hudson as a lifeless corpse.
I’m not sure how I make it to the top. Some hidden well of resilience, I guess.
And on the deck of the aircraft carrier?—
Outer space.
I’ve gone too far. Somehow, I climbed all the way out of the atmosphere and into deep space. There are stars everywhere.
But there are also people, who are star-like themselves. Glittering gowns and black tuxedos with winking accents. Stars coalesce out of the dark, expand, and die before my eyes.
So I haven’t climbed to outer space. Space descended for the party.
I summon the remains of my strength and start walking, focusing on balance. I cannot look wasted at Calliope and Orion’s birthday gala. It would have been horrendous to look wasted at their family parties, but the birthday galas are sought-after invitations. The last thing I want is to embarrass them in full view of a collection of the city’s richest people.
It also wouldn’t bode well for my think tank, but I don’t care about world peace right now.
I care about getting to Artemis.
And I can’t see her.
More troubling is that I can’t remember what her gown looks like. I’ve seen it—or photos of it—at least once. A bleary look down at my tuxedo informs me that my accents are bright.
Golden?
What am I supposed to be?
We’re all standing in the middle of outer space because the theme of the party is?—
The theme of the party is the sky. And heavenly bodies. Celestial shit.
I’m the sun.
Because I glow at people.
Ha.
And that means that Artemis is the moon.
I pick my head up and search the glitter-black blur of people for the moon.
The fever peaks into a raging fear that I won’t be able to find her. Climbing a ramp was so difficult that searching the entire night sky for one celestial body is going to be impossible. I’ll run out of air before I get to her. I’ll run out of brain before I get to her. I’ll be molten metal sinking into the deck of this aircraft carrier before I get to her.
But becoming molten is not an option. That would pull focus from Calliope and Orion and their chosen charity, which I could not name with a gun to my head.
More lights glow, ascending from the horizon of the aircraft carrier. A rippling, plasticky sound might be the rotation of the stars, but no, no, it’s the Hudson hitting the side of the Intrepid. I didn’t know I’d be able to hear that from the deck. I shouldn’t be able to hear it. Should I?
Don’t know.
I eventually determine that I cannot see the moon. Not the actual moon, and not the Artemis-moon.
The new goal—or the same goal as always, repeating endlessly until my brain boils and I die—is to move until I find her.
Glitter splits in my path, whirling out of the way. Auroras, someone says. Over the city. They’re mistaken. There’s too much light pollution to see the auroras. And it’s not time yet, according to?—
Something. An alert on my phone, or something I scrolled past at work. A news item I can’t picture now.
I glow at what I hope is an appropriate level for a birthday gala for my sixteen-year-old sister and my sixteen-year-old cousin. The music is deafening and discordant, and so are the voices. I startle away from a man who leans in and says you’ll do him a favor, right? directly into my ear.
No. No favors tonight.
Not tonight.
Crickets. Have I missed the cake? Have I missed the singing? No one in my line of vision looks familiar. Their smiles are all uncannily wide and white, filled to bursting with sharp teeth.
I stop looking at the faces. My stomach lurches. Nothing comes up. Good for me. I don’t want to throw up on an aircraft carrier. It’s not moving. I can’t be seasick.
The sea of people parts again, and there she is.
There she is.
I know the moon. Even in this half-dead state, I remember what the moon is supposed to look like.
Artemis looks like the designer of her gown has seduced moonlight into becoming fabric and let it cascade over every curve on her body.
It’s a relief just to look at her. A moonlit cool on my skin that makes the fever bearable. I can see her, so I can get to her. How far can it be? Not light-years. Twenty-five steps. Twenty, if I’m lucky.
Five steps closer, and it hits me:
She doesn’t look like the moon.
She looks like a bride.
I want to grab the nearest person and ask them if I’m at my wedding. If my life up until this point has been a hallucination, and I missed the part where I wasn’t Artemis’s adoptive older brother, I was her boyfriend. I don’t know how I missed my own proposal, but there’s not a single memory in my head of putting a ring on her finger, and there should be.
Three more steps, and a black shape leans in, dividing Artemis’s gown like a lunar eclipse.
A man in a tux.
Four more steps.
My whole body turns inside out and splashes on the deck of the aircraft carrier.
The eclipse is Senator fucking Walsh.
He cannot be near Artemis. He cannot be—from the disgusting expression on his face—flirting with her. He can’t. He’s too dangerous, and she’s too perfect, and every second in his presence is a threat.
My feet carry me the rest of the way.
Why is he here? I didn’t know he would be here. If I’d known he was going to be here, I would’ve stopped him.
He’s not safe.
A part of my brain tries to argue that he’s just a man. A sitting Senator, but a man nonetheless. He came to my office to ask for a favor and what I saw was?—
Was nothing. It wasn’t real. It was the past casting a shadow onto the present. It had nothing to do with him.
Those thoughts are nothing compared to my furious need to get him away from Artemis. No doubt I look crazy now. I’m too close to the people around me, bumping into them, bouncing off. How many steps left? Not many.
I think she’s with people I know.
Daisy and Hercules.
I think.
Artemis turns, her honey-gold eyes going wide. Her forehead creases with worry. Her eyebrows shoot up. She opens her mouth, and I know what she’s going to say.
She’s going to say Apollo?
Artemis doesn’t say that because the Senator is still talking. His voice sounds like an older man in a room that made my skin crawl, that made my voice knot up like a knife in my throat, that made me want to be dead and knowthat I couldn’t be dead no matter how much I wanted to be because it would mean that my mother?—
My mother.
I put my hand out, aiming for her elbow. My arm aches from the effort of lifting it. Aches like the muscle has been exhausted several times over and it’s done. It doesn’t care about my attempt to save myself.
My hand slides onto Artemis’s lower back.
I keep the sound that comes out of me behind my teeth. Cool rolls into me like some of the Hudson leaped up onto the deck. It’s like being pulled back from the edge of a cliff. The heat shudders and starts to retreat. Artemis blinks, and that honey-gold color disappears for a heartbeat, then returns.
“And of course,” the Senator finishes. “I’d need a First Lady.”
The pickup line lands on both of us. An entirely different kind of heat erupts in my chest. It’s not a fever. It’s a solar flare. An enormous wave of radiation.
No one seems to feel it but me. There’s no disruption in the party. The music and voices continue, sounding normal for the first time since I narrowly avoided my death in the Hudson.
It’s not often that I have to hold myself back from glowing. I have the sense that if I loosened my grip at all, it would burn through Senator Walsh’s skin and turn all his internal organs to ash.
Instead of turning Walsh’s internal organs to ash, I concentrate on how my hand is on the small of Artemis’s back—not his, he’s not touching her, and if he tries, I’ll cut his hand off and make him choke on it—and face him with a fully intact smile and a confident glow. My fever is low enough that I can pull together a response.
I’ll need a First Lady.
Who does Walsh think he is? What he’s offering is for Artemis to be his First Lady.
The hubris.
His expression falters when I make eye contact.
“You’ll have to look elsewhere for a First Lady.” I give the words the slightest edge of scorn. “Artemis is mine.”