Chapter 18
The thingabout dying is you never know when it’s going to happen.
Unless you’re me.
It’s happening right now. I know that. If I’m honest, I knew that from the second I walked out of that building, and I knew Artemis was going to be so pissed.
But the thing is, there were children. And women.
What was I supposed to do? Leave them there? No. All they needed was one more piece of the puzzle, and that puzzle piece was me. There’ll be hell to pay for someone, probably, but I’m already in hell.
So maybe that’s up to me, too.
All of this feels like a dream.
Did you know that if your fever gets too high, it can boil your brain?
My brain is boiling.
Feels like an uneven boil. Should have dropped the whole thing in at once instead of doing it in pieces.
Artemis leans over me in the woods. How are we still out here? How did we stay up all night? There were wolves. An entire pack of wolves. They were chasing us, and we were ahead of them, but they must’ve caught up to us. They must’ve bit me in the face, because my face hurts.
Are there more wolves?
No. That’s a helicopter.
The helicopter is so, so loud. Dead leaves tremble under my hands. The entire mountain is trembling. What little sky I can see through the branches is the color of thunderclouds or heavy smoke. Tendrils of Artemis’s hair whip around her face. She’s saying something. I think she’s saying my name, but I can’t hear her over the helicopter.
I can hear Delphi, though. Or a memory of Delphi. I don’t think she’s here. This isn’t the kind of place to have an impromptu guitar concert. Trembling earth. Ashen skies. Am I surprised, though? A little, because this clearing didn’t seem big enough to fit a helicopter.
This feels personal, I try to tell her, but there’s something over my face.
The signs were there before your eyes, standing on their own two feet in a patch of sun that glowed like light through a window
She’s right, though. I should have seen this one coming. The song becomes a ditty about how I didn’t invite her to the wedding, but I did invite her to the wedding. And she declined. Or she hasn’t sent her RSVP. She wants to know if it’s on an aircraft carrier.
Why does she need an aircraft carrier? I gave her my whole think tank. She’s the queen of the think tank now. She can do whatever she wants. She’s the boss.
Fine. She can sing a song and play her guitar while Artemis walks down the aisle.
If Artemis is into that.
If we ever get out of these woods.
Oh—the whole world turned around. Did you see that? It went head over heels. Artemis is upside down. Then she’s right side up. Maybe she’s taking me somewhere. Or maybe I’m going.
There are men with shadows in a circle around us when I land on the ground, but Artemis doesn’t see them. Or maybe she doesn’t care that they’re so close. She just looks at me with flecks of blood on her face.
That’s worrisome.
But it doesn’t seem to be hurting her, because she smiles. Artemis is dressed in black, too.
Oh, fuck. Is Artemis the Angel of Death?
No, that can’t be.
Unless…
It can be, and that’s why she killed those soldiers. One, two, three. Tick-tock. Time was up for them, and now she’s come for me, too.
Her face moves to a new angle.
The sky above the woods looks like metal, and extremely bright. Oh, fucking crickets. Did I climb up into outer space again and fall back down like a deflating balloon until the sun could shine in my eyes?
At least there’s no eclipse. That’s a plus.
Not a cut you can stitch up, Delphi sings.
I guess it isn’t. They didn’t cut me. They just took me away from Artemis.
And now she’s here, but she’s the Angel of Death.
No, no. That’s not it. Artemis is too bright and lovely to be the Angel of Death. Maybe she’s just…friends with death. She’s just here to keep me company.
Not a cut you can stitch up, Delphi sings again, insistent.
“I get it,” I try to say, but I don’t think I manage.
There are too many still shots to keep track of, most of them sheared off in the middle, like somebody wanted to forget the pictures existed so they chopped them in half with scissors.
My stomach hurts like it’s being chopped in half with scissors.
The sun is in my eyes.
“You’re not supposed to look at the sun,” I tell a shadow shaped like a person.
Shh, someone says. Don’t worry about it.
Well, I’m worried about it. I could get serious sun damage. I could go blind. What will I do if I can’t see and my brain is boiled?
It gets hotter.
I can’t stand it.
It gets colder.
Artemis has my hand in both of hers, squeezing hard. The heat doesn’t go away, but my toes are freezing.
“My toes are freezing.” The words come out wrong because my teeth are chattering so hard that my eyes are shaking. My eyes are going to shake out of their sockets. My eyeballs are going to fall on the ground, and do you know what that is? A disaster. People are busy. They don’t have time to look for eyeballs. They might not see, and then they’d step on them, and what’s the protocol for that? A handwritten apology?
“You forgot your socks,” Artemis answers.
“No, I didn’t.”
Her hand is in my hair. Her hand is back on my hand. Her voice warps.
There are lots of voices like crickets singing. Artemis’s voice blends in with the other. My dad leans into my line of sight, but his face is blurry like a deteriorating video.
“You and Artemis should make the plans you want to make, when you want to make them,” he says, looking into my eyes like this is the most important thing he’ll ever tell me. Like he has to make me understand, because he doesn’t have time to help me understand anything else. “You should go to Vegas.”
“I don’t want to go to Vegas, Dad.”
He looks like he’s about to cry. Because of Vegas? Maybe he thinks I’m here because I joined the Navy. Or because I wanted to join the Navy. I never did. That was never in my life plan. My life plan was to stay with Artemis for as long as I could, and I’ve done that now. That’s a wrap for life. I did it. Finished.
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.
She’s in the room again, her hand soft in my hair. She turns into Brigit, and then Zeus, and then Ares, and then back into herself. She doesn’t have any bruises, and she’s smiling. If that’s what it’s like to be dead, then it can’t be that big of a deal. It can’t be Very Bad. It can only be different from what’s happening now. Maybe, if I was dead, I wouldn’t be boiling.
Ares pushes through her again, and she’s gone. He’s at the side of my bed, leaning over. What bed is this? It’s so white and hard. It’s ice, and then it’s fire.
Ares says something I don’t understand with tears running down his face.
My stomach hurts, and it fights, and when I look down at the front of me there’s a lot of red on the blue hospital gown. There’s a lot of blood. My stomach lurches again, and then there’s more. It tastes like pennies. I have a mouthful of pennies.
Ares says something else.
Still don’t understand.
The room changes behind Ares. White walls darken like they’re going to burn, but they don’t. They turn into something else instead.
Gates. Big and black and shiny, like they were carved out of marble. Looking at them is like being inside a ringing bell. It vibrates all my bones. My toes vibrate. My teeth.
I know what those gates are.
I’ve never seen them before, but I know.
“Don’t let Artemis see,” I tell him. “Cover her eyes. Don’t look.”