by Laynie Bynum
If I had learned anything as an orphan, it was that destiny always had a way of catching up with you.
“I pulled a few strings to get us in a cell together,” Mica said. “The cells are horrible, but I’ve tried to make it look a bit homier.” She gestured to her side of the cubicle, which looked slightly less empty than mine. A few paintings and drawings decorated the walls, most of them portraits of Mica in various positions: looking to the left, to the right, straight ahead.
I frowned. “Never took you for an artist, but you’ve got some skills.”
“Just good teachers.” Mica got up, pulling me along with her. “The muses can teach anyone the basics of arts, even when your lack of talent is as spectacular as mine.”
My frown deepened, and I looked at her curiously. “Did you just say ‘muses’?”
“Yes.” Mica walked to the end of the cell, where steel bars separated us from the outside world. She held her hand on a device hanging at waist height, and the bars screeched open.
“We can hang out in the common areas for the majority of the day,” she explained while I followed her. “So, in that sense, it’s not all that bad. And I learned a lot… About who I am, where I got my powers from.”
“Let me guess,” I joked. “We’re part of a trinity of witches that goes by the name Halliwell and we lost our sister years ago, but now we’re reunited, and our magic will increase save the world?”
“Life isn’t like Charmed, Aiden,” Mica reprimanded me with a chuckle. “So no, nothing like that. In fact, we’re not witches at all.”
At least a dozen people were perched on top of chairs—some on top of tables—in the common area outside our cell. They all wore the same uniform Mica and I did, the stereotypical orange prison attire.
“I know this is going to sound crazy, and I had trouble believing it myself at first…” Mica stopped walking and looked at me. “But I’m… we are… demi-gods.”
I started laughing, thinking she was joking, but then my laugh died in my throat at the expression on her face.
“You’re serious?”
“As serious as ever,” Mica replied. “I’m the descendant of Aphrodite.”
Again, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Tears filled my eyes. “Mica… You? The descendant of Aphrodite? Isn’t she supposed to be a blonde-haired, Greek beauty? Not that you’re not beautiful, you are, but you look nothing like how Aphrodite is always depicted.”
The tears dried on my cheeks and my laughter stilled again, because Mica still looked absolutely serious. Mica was good at telling jokes, but not good at keeping up pretense.
“You’re serious.” This time, it wasn’t a question but a statement. I looked around us, at the predicament we were in, and wondered if maybe Mica had lost her mind.
Having powers no one else had was one thing. I knew that Mica could manipulate almost anyone into doing everything she wanted, and that she had a charm that made guys fall for her like flies. But being the descendant of a famous Greek goddess was something else entirely.
“Absolutely serious,” Mica confirmed. “I think I take after my dad for my looks, but my mother is Aphrodite herself. And I’m not the only one here—all of us here have gods and goddesses as our parents on one side.”
“Gods and goddesses procreating with humans…” I delved into my mind trying to remember everything I knew concerning the ancients gods. I vaguely remembered stories of Zeus, the ruler of the gods, wooing young women—and sometimes young men—and fathering demi-gods like Hercules, but that was the stuff of fiction, not reality.
“Let me introduce you to the others. You’ll see.” Mica pulled me along to one of the nearest tables, occupied by a group of fellow inmates. One of the inmates, a girl with hair the color of liquid gold, flawless skin and lips that screamed to be kissed, looked up at us when we approached. She was sitting on top of the table, no doubt the leader of this little gang.
“Is this your friend?” the girl asked Mica. Her tone wasn’t unfriendly, but didn’t sound very welcoming either.
“Yes,” Mica said. “Aiden, meet Keres. Keres is the one who helped me persuade the guards into letting you become my new roommate.”
“Well, thank you for that.” I offered a hand, but Keres looked at my extended hand as if she would rather crawl through mud than touch it.
“Sorry, Mica, but she’s definitely not one of us.” Keres shrugged.
Mica nodded slowly. “I kind of figured already. Anyway, I wanted Aiden to meet all of you. She has a hard time believing all of us here are demi-gods.”
The guy sitting next to Keres, who looked as if he had just stepped out of a beauty magazine, with bronzed skin more perfect than even a Photoshop brush could accomplish, snorted. “We all find it hard to believe at first, but the longer you’re here, the more you realize it’s true.”
“So… You’re all descendants of gods?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. I thought Mica had lost her mind, but with these people confirming the same thing… What if she was right?
“We are all descendants of Aphrodite,” Keres answered. “Tristan here, me, the twins Gina and Gaia.” She nodded at the two girls sitting on the bench below her.
They were all beautiful. Despite how rude Keres had been not to shake my hand, she had a charisma that was almost impossible to resist. Her looks were a perfect replica of how one would imagine Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to look like… And Tristan looked perfect too, so pristine and flawless it was scary.
My body turned into sludge and my pulse rocketed to sky-high limits. They were telling the truth. Which meant Mica was telling the truth too.
“I… I believe you.” I turned to Mica. “But how is this possible? How can we all be descendants of gods?”
“In your case, I’m still wondering,” Keres replied while she inspected her nails. “In our case, it’s because our goddess mother slept with human men. Once she gave birth to us, she dumped us in various orphanages around the world, or sometimes with our fathers, if she was feeling kind.”
“She just abandoned you?” I reached out for Mica, trying to grab her hand. We had always thought—hoped—that our parents hadn’t just left us by the side of the road for no reason at all, that they had been forced to give us up due to an unforeseen tragedy. But if her mother was a goddess, then she hadn’t abandoned her because she was ill or dying, but simply because she wanted to.
“Hey, don’t act all high and mighty,” Keres shot back at me. “Your parent, whoever the hell that is, straight up abandoned you too.”
She was right, and the knowledge hit me like an arrow to the heart. I had always thought my parents couldn’t take care of me, not that they didn’t want to. But Mica and I were simply the result of gods having fun, and then casting aside the consequences of their outbursts.
“Come on, Aiden, I’ll give you the rest of the tour.” Mica guided me away from Keres and her gang of Aphrodite-descendants. We spotted various other groups, most of them located around their specific table. “These are the descendants of the Poseidon, the god of the sea, rivers, floods, and earthquakes.” She pointed at a table occupied by people only slightly less perfect than the Aphrodite-clan.
“So, what are their powers then? And while I’m at it—what are yours? Do all the descendants have the same powers?”
“No.” Mica shook her head. “Blood does tricky things like that. Our powers are mostly related to manipulation and charm, persuading people to do what we want. Keres is obviously the most talented of all of us.” She nodded towards the table where the descendants of Poseidon were gathered. “If you put them near water, they get dangerous. They can bend the water to their will. If you take into account most of a human’s body is made out of water, well…”
She didn’t finish the rest of her sentence, letting me figure out the consequences for myself. As we walked, I felt prying eyes on my back from Poseidon’s offspring. I glanced over my shoulder and caught one of the guys staring at me.
Na
rrowing my eyes, I turned away, focusing back on Mica. “Who’s that guy? The one with the sandy blonde hair, who looks like a Ken doll.”
“That’s Lycus,” Mica replied. “He has the whole beach-surfing-dude looks down to a T, but he’s much smarter than he looks like.”
I grunted in response, while Mica led me through a hallway located to the right of the common area. We passed by various guards, none of which seemed to be paying any attention to us whatsoever, and all of them marked with the tattoo of the MMCA: the letter ‘M’ entangled with an upside down ‘M’, a ‘C’ to the left and ‘A’ to the right of the twisting ‘M’s.
“Here is the gym.” A glass window running from floor to ceiling separated the hallway from the sports area, which was crowded by male inmates doing heavy-lifting and women running on treadmills or lifting smaller weights. Most of them had the upper half of their uniform tied around their waists: most of the men sported a bare chest, while the woman wore tank tops.
“Ares’ descendants,” Mica explained. “God of war and violence. They’re a hot-headed bunch, and I suggest you stay as far away from them as possible.”
“What are their skills?” I asked, peering at them curiously. One of the guys was sitting on a bench and lifting weights, sweat clinging to his muscled chest. The male descendant of the goddess of love, Tristan, might have been flawlessly beautiful, but I preferred the gruff, masculine look of the guy in the gym.
“Stop drooling over Dryas.” Mica poked me in the ribs.
“Dryas.” I quite liked the sound of that name; it had an old-fashioned ring to it.
“And don’t get any ideas. He’s ruthless. You might find him handsome now, but the moment you see him in action, you’ll wish you had never met him. The children of Ares are bloodthirsty. They barely have any control over their own strength, and they can handle any weapon with almost no training,” Mica said.
“Yikes.” Just as we were about to leave, Dryas looked up from the weights he was lifting, and stared right at me.
I thought a smirk appeared on his lips while he looked at me, but I could’ve imagined that, because Mica already dragged me along to the next spot, and I only had a split second to interpret his stare.
“There is the crafts room.” Mica gestured at a room to the right, the walls of which were decorated with paintings and aquarelles. A piano, harp, and a variety of other instruments were standing in the corner of the room.
“Mostly used by the children of Apollo,” Mica explained to me, “and the muses. They form part of one team. A lot of people think the muses are actually direct descendants of Apollo, but that’s wrong.”
“The muses are the ones that taught you how to draw?” I remembered our conversation earlier after I had woken up in the prison cell.
“Exactly.”
The crafts room was the most pleasant area we had visited so far. The light, blue paint of the room, mixed with the artwork, gave it a tranquil feel, a stark contrast with the harsh grey concrete decorating the rest of the prison.
“To the left is a library, usually occupied by the children of Athena,” Mica pointed at the shelves overcrowding with books. “They’re always complaining we don’t have enough to read.”
I raised my eyebrows at the impressive amount of reading material in the cramped library, wondering how anyone could get through all that and still complain there wasn’t enough. “Any other cliques I should know about?”
“There are plenty of other gods and goddesses represented here,” Mica explained as we continued down the hall. “You have the children of Demeter; they’re usually at work in the gardens. She’s the goddess of agriculture and harvest, and those little munchkins sure have an affinity for letting anything grow, even when it normally shouldn’t blossom in our climate.”
“Demeter, got it.” I followed the direction Mica was pointing at. A giant-sized wall separated the courtyard from the outside world. In a shadowy corner right before the wall, a group of inmates were busy planting crops.
“We have some descendants of Dionysus, but those are probably still in bed, sleeping their hangovers away.”
“How can you get a hangover in here?” I asked.
Mica shrugged. “We get to party every Wednesday night, so you’ve arrived just one day too late. I don’t know what the exact reasoning is behind it, except that maybe it’ll make us calmer and more compliant? Anyway, the children of Dionysus know how to turn any situation into a party, and I suppose that if you’d had enough to drink, any room looks like a disco.”
I sincerely doubted that, and it also struck me as odd that the guards would allow lavish parties in a prison.
“The spawn of Artemis.” Mica gestured at the other side of the yard, where four people were practicing with bows and arrows.
“Are those real?”
“They can’t hurt you, the end of the arrow is blunted,” Mica said. “Still, getting shot by an arrow should be the least of your concern. Half of the people here is more lethal without weapons than with them. There’s two more factions I haven’t told you about yet.”
My best friend escorted me back inside, through another hallway, and back into the common room we had first visited. Keres and her group were still sitting exactly where we had left them, occupying themselves with a task of utmost importance: checking if their hair was still looking gorgeous by glancing at a mirror from various angles.
I couldn’t believe Mica belonged with that lot.
“See those two tables at the end—one left, one right?” Mica asked.
I peered in the direction she indicated, my gaze falling on the table to the left, where a guy and girl were seated.
The guy looked like the image of a god personified. The mere strength oozing out of him was incredible. He seemed like liquid lightning, like thunder in a storm, like… “He’s a descendant of Zeus, isn’t he?” I asked Mica.
“His name is Amphion,” Mica said, as if that answered my question. “The girl is a descendant of Hera. Be wary of her, she doesn’t look the part, but she’s quite powerful. Her name is Eris.”
“And what about the other table?” I struggled to pull my gawking eyes away from Amphion. I had no doubt being the descendant of Zeus, the king of the gods, made him one of the most powerful beings here, but did it also have to make him look so attractive?
The other table was occupied by three guys and a girl, and the sheer power radiating from them made my legs and arms turn hollow. In particular from the guy seated on top of the table, with jet-black hair and midnight-colored eyes. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest, and a look of bored authority carved onto his face.
“That’s Charon. He’s the son of Hades,” Mica said, having read my mind.
“The god of the underworld?”
Mica nodded. “The girl sitting next to him is Macaria, and she’s the daughter of Persephone. The other two are Zagreus and Hypnos, sons of some lesser known gods of the underworld.”
My heart beat so strongly in my chest I feared my ribs would break. “So, if I get this straight, some gods like Ares and Aphrodite have multiple children, but there’s only one son of Zeus here, and one son of Hades?”
“Yep. Back in the day, Zeus was quite the player, but I guess his wife Hera has a better grip on him now.”
“And you never see them? The gods? Our… parents?” I asked.
“No, of course not.” Mica sat down at one of the empty tables, and waited for me to do the same. “Gods don’t live on this realm, and they only come down here if they absolutely have to.”
“Oh.” I was still awestruck with all the information she had dumped on me. I couldn’t believe it was real.
All my life, I wanted to be part of something. I wanted to know who I was, and where I got these freaky, time-bending powers from. I never realized I would have to go to prison before I could find out my true heritage.
“This is amazing,” I told my friend. “I’m so glad you’ve found out who your mother is.”
> Mica gave a sad smile. “Sometimes it raises more questions than answers, though. I have no idea why the gods come down from their own realm to toy with humans, only to then disappear again…I wonder if she left my father, and if he’s still alive or not, if he even knew he had a child…”
I grabbed my friend’s hand and squeezed it. “But at least you’re one step closer to figuring it out, and solving this puzzle.”
“True that.” Mica squeezed back, and I was glad I was reunited with her, glad we had found each other again, the two sides of the same coin, even if it meant I had to get locked up for that.
“How much longer are you supposed to be in here? I mean, how long is your sentence?” I asked her.
Mica shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that down here.”
“What do you mean?” I stared at her, bewildered. “You didn’t have to pass by a judge? You didn’t get a ‘x’ number of years?”
“No.” Mica scratched her chin, a habit of hers whenever she was about to tell me something she knew I didn’t want to hear. “There is no doing time—there’s only doing forever. But thanks to the Trials, forever isn’t quite as long as you’d expect.”
“What the hell are the Trials?” I crossed my arms in front of me, disliking every word that rolled out of my friends’ mouth. I could be in here forever? My entire life?
“Don’t worry about that yet. You’ve just arrived.” Mica smiled at me. “And I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Okay…” I wasn’t ready to discard the topic yet, but on the other hand, Mica had dropped enough bombs on me today that my head would be reeling for the rest of the day. “How did you figure out you’re a descendant of Aphrodite? Did they tell you?”
“I hung out with some of the cliques at first, got to know everyone, but I always pulled to Keres, Tristan, Gina and Gaia for some reason,” Mica explained. “I wasn’t sure why at first, but the test confirmed I’m the daughter of Aphrodite, and they’re my half-siblings.”
“There’s a test?” Like a parrot, I echoed everything Mica said.