“This is a two-person job, but Hades won’t be accompanying you this time,” Zeus said. “He’s taking care of business elsewhere.”
Hades. In her mind’s eye, she saw the boy’s face clearly. She remembered his vivid blue eyes and the way a smile had brightened his lips as he had watched their target bleed out. But behind that smile, there had been nothing at all. Complete darkness.
“Remind me, when does school let out for you?” Zeus asked.
“Two o’clock.” Slowly, her gaze rose from the ground and followed a pair of Goths leaving the front office.
The girl had clusters of green-and-silver cyberlocks pinned to her hair and wore a torn black T-shirt emblazoned with “DEATH IS BEAUTIFUL” in bold red letters.
Shannon bit her lip and wondered what the girl would think about the real Death. Not the one that came smelling of funeral flowers and brought darkness as soft as rose petals. The Death that was ugly and wept and lost control of his bowels after you stabbed him between the ribs and—
Stop! Don’t you dare think about that!
“Artemis?” Zeus’s voice broke through her daze.
“Yes, Zeus?” She realized she was gripping her knee so tightly that her nails had punctured the denim of her jeans. She flexed her fingers and examined them. Her ruby nail polish was beginning to chip.
A vagrant memory came to her: her fingers wrapped around the handle of a hunting knife that she did not own and could not remember handling before. Feeling dirty, she wiped her hand on her pants.
How many others were there? How many yet to come?
“Did you take the bus today?” Zeus spoke with the calm, patient tone that a teacher would use when instructing a particularly daft student.
“Yes.” She had her driver’s license and the use of a car, but with the city traffic, it took even longer to drive to school than it did to take the metro bus.
“Apollo will be picking you up. He’ll fill you in on the nature of your assignment. He’ll be driving a black Buick. Just stand in front of the school and wait for him. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Shannon murmured. She couldn’t recall who Apollo was, what he looked like, or even make a general estimate of his age or hair color. But she knew she would recognize him the moment she saw him. She knew that just as much as she knew the nature of her assignment, even before it was told to her. It was a truth as thoroughly ingrained as gunpowder beneath her skin, seared into her psyche.
“Once I hang up, using your own cell phone, you will call your foster mother and tell her that you will be going to a friend’s house after school. Do you have any questions?”
“No.” She never did. She trusted that whatever she needed to know, Zeus would tell her.
“Good girl,” he said. Although his voice remained as cool and impersonal as ever, at his soft encouragement, she felt pride well up inside her. Even the most eloquent and sincere compliment couldn’t compare to those two simple words. Good girl.
The line went dead. She turned off the flip phone and returned it to her purse.
By the time she took out her smartphone, the last five minutes had been completely erased from her memory. As she dialed her mom’s cell number, she thought about how much fun she was going to have with Victoria once school let out.
...
When the last bell rang and she and Victoria left biology class together, Shannon said, “See you tomorrow.”
“You’re not taking the bus?” Victoria asked.
“No, I…” She struggled to recall exactly what she was supposed to do. Oh right, a friend. She was going to a friend’s house.
“You what?”
“I’m not. Taking the bus, I mean.”
“Oh? Why?”
“I have a doctor’s appointment,” she said, sensing that if she told Victoria she was meeting a friend, it wouldn’t fly. Too many questions. But why? What must she hide? Where was she going?
“Ah, bummer. I hate doctors. Is everything okay?” She gave Shannon a keen look. “You aren’t preggers, are you?”
Shannon flushed. Preggers. She hated that word for some reason. It sounded like an STD euphemism, like crabs or the clap. “Do I look pregnant to you?”
“A joke.”
“It’s just a checkup.” She smiled and watched Victoria head toward the bus stop. Then she turned and went in the opposite direction.
It didn’t take long before she spotted the black car at the front of the pickup line. As she stepped up to it, the front window rolled down, and a voice from within said, “Get in.”
Apollo, the god of sunlight and plague. It was a fitting moniker for the slender teenage boy leaning against the dark leather, with his burnished-blond hair and leonine eyes, his tanned skin and refined beauty. He didn’t smile when she opened the door, though he did give her a lingering glance as though to confirm her identity. He seemed strangely familiar, although she couldn’t place where or when she had last seen him.
“Artemis,” he greeted, smiling wryly. A dimple appeared near one corner of his mouth, accentuating the expression.
“Apollo.” As soon as Shannon said it, a hint of confusion slipped across the boy’s face.
“No, it’s Ty…” He trailed off, then shook his head. “Never mind. There’s an envelope in the glove box. Get it.”
His last sentence was more of a command than a suggestion, though, unlike with Zeus, she felt no compulsion to obey. She did as she was told, however, and retrieved the manila envelope from the glove box.
She opened the envelope and pulled out two papers.
The first sheet had no writing on it, just a grayscale scan of a pale woman whose brown hair was pulled back in a tight bun. The woman stared at the camera with a fierce boldness that was at odds with her starched white lab coat. She, too, looked vaguely familiar.
After examining the photograph, Shannon turned to the next page. She was not surprised when all she found was an address with directions on how to get there and, below that, the numbers 4891.
“4891?” she asked as he pulled out of the parking lot.
“The code for the alarm system,” Apollo said, glancing over at her.
As she stuffed the papers back into the envelope, she realized there was something else inside. She turned the envelope upside down and shook a small silver key into her hand.
“For the front door,” he explained.
“How will it end?”
He smiled thinly, without amusement. It wasn’t even a real expression, just a death leer frozen in rigor mortis. “Homicide.”
As they stopped at a red light, he sighed and looked down at his bandaged hands. On his knuckles, where the gauze would have ridden up, he had used round adhesives. He flexed his fingers then clenched them around the wheel, tight.
“How will it end…” he murmured, less like a question than a lament.
They drove in silence after that. In the hour drive, they exchanged fewer words than the minutes it took to arrive at the upscale suburban neighborhood where the target lived.
He drove past the target’s house and parked five doors down, under the shadow of a massive cherry tree.
He took a cell phone out of his pants pocket. It was identical to the one Shannon owned, a burner you could buy in the electronics section of any major retailer. He dialed a number and put the phone on speaker.
It hadn’t rung more than once before Zeus picked up and said, “Olympus is rising.”
“Pandora’s box is opening,” Shannon and Apollo answered in unison.
“We’re here,” Apollo said.
“Good boy.”
At Zeus’s encouragement, a smile touched his lips.
For no clear reason, Shannon felt a stir of jealousy, then disgust. Then as Zeus continued, nothing at all.
“The target has left work and is on her way home,” Zeus said. “She should arrive there in less than twenty minutes. Search her home thoroughly for any records or files. Anything that looks like research data. Apollo,
use the device I gave you to access her computer files. Delete them once you’re done.”
There was a short rift of silence, where Shannon heard only a faint buzzing sound. Then, calmly and concisely, Zeus told them how to commit murder. He sent them off with one last encouragement. “Kill.”
After returning the phone to his jeans, Apollo unzipped his navy field jacket. As he reached inside the tented fabric, she saw that he wore a pistol in a shoulder rig.
Fear struck her like a hammer against an anvil. In a moment of irrationality, she felt certain he would shoot her and grabbed for his hand. As her fingers locked around his muscular forearm, he unbuttoned an inner pocket.
“What is it?” he asked, glancing at her. The grayish sunlight revealed gold flecks in his eyes but failed to shed light on what was going through his mind.
“Nothing,” she muttered, allowing her hand to fall.
He didn’t pull out the gun. Instead, from the coat’s inner pocket, he extracted a pair of leather gloves.
“Do you have any?” Apollo asked, sliding them on. He smiled like he was trying to convince himself that everything was all right.
Shannon shook her head.
He reached into the door compartment, took out a second set of gloves, and handed them to her. She put them on. They were slightly too big for her hands but thin enough not to obstruct her movement.
He leaned across the center console. His shoulder brushed against hers as he reached into the backseat. From the footwell, he retrieved a backpack, and then got out of the car.
Storm clouds filled the sky. The temperature was in the mid-fifties, cool enough that wearing gloves wouldn’t have aroused suspicion. Still, Shannon shoved her hands in her pockets as she and Apollo walked down the sidewalk, side by side. Autumn leaves crunched under her shoes.
Although it was an old neighborhood filled with old houses, the same couldn’t be said for those who lived there. A bright-pink bicycle with training wheels lay discarded on one lawn. On the sidewalk, freshly drawn hopscotch lines stood out like crime scene outlines. The approaching storm would wash the marks away, along with whatever DNA evidence they deposited on the pavement.
As she smeared the chalk squares with her dragging feet, she thought about the children who had drawn them. She imagined that in the summer months they waged water-gun wars on the street and sold lemonade on top of cardboard boxes, like scenes out of a 90s movie. Strange. She couldn’t remember ever doing that herself.
The woman in the photograph had seemed chilly and standoffish, as sterile as the lab coat she wore. Her lawn told a different story. Rows of yellow tulips and orange carnations were planted under the windowsills, and rosebushes bordered the walls. The lawn was neatly manicured, but the grass wasn’t cut so short as to seem artificial. A ceramic giraffe smiled at them from the front step.
Shannon stopped at the door and looked down. The mat at her feet proclaimed Welcome!
She did not feel welcome.
Such feelings had no place in her mission, though. Before Apollo could urge her to continue, she withdrew her hands from her pockets and pushed the key into the keyhole.
The lock disengaged with a soft click.
Inside, the decor was warm and vibrant, with the same orange-and-yellow color palette as the landscaping out front. Although the umber walls should have made the foyer seem dingy and claustrophobic, a strategically placed skylight ensured quite the opposite.
But as she walked inside, her throat narrowed and her breath harshened. In the corners of her vision, she saw the walls edge closer. Their encroachment was a silent one, without the protest of crumbling plaster, heralded only by her booming heartbeat.
Swallowing the saliva that flooded her mouth, she turned to the alarm box. She typed in the code, and the blinking red light turned green.
She trained her eyes in front of her as she hurried down the hall. Even in the large living room, she felt suffocated. She returned the key to her pocket and eased her hands to her side. Slowly, the tension dissipated, and she began to feel calm again. Prepared.
Apollo unzipped his backpack and removed a black ski mask from the main compartment. He passed it to her before retrieving a second one for himself.
She held the mask, twisting the knit fabric between her fingers. She didn’t want to put it on just yet.
His face was expressionless, but as she watched him, his golden tan blanched into a sickly pallor. He took repeated glances at his wristwatch. Twice, he reached into his jacket to touch the gun, as if hoping to comfort himself. Each time, he jerked his hand back with a low, terrified moan, like his fingers had skimmed over a snake’s rattle instead of cool metal.
Even when they made accidental eye contact, neither spoke. Silence was their partner in crime, unseen and unheard but felt as heaviness in the air that was even more burdensome than gravity.
One minute passed, then two.
She put on her ski mask, and Apollo followed her example. Even with his face hidden, the wideness of his eyes betrayed his tension.
He began to pace, muttering to himself. Shannon could only make out the first two words. The rest had the same syntax and syllable count, though, so she had a feeling he was repeating himself.
“I’m sorry.”
Another lap of the second hand around the clock face, another suppressed twitch of the minute hand. Another circuit around the room. Numerous more harried looks at his watch.
“I’m sorry.”
She pressed her lips together and watched Apollo go. Her hands trembled, but she did not feel sorry. She felt nothing at all.
Four minutes had passed.
“I’m so sorry.”
Without thinking, she reached out to Apollo as he circled toward her again. Through her gloves, she felt the hard muscle of his biceps.
For a moment, he just stared at her with those beautiful, tortured eyes. Then he murmured, “We don’t have to do this.”
A jolt passed through her as his words shattered her calm. This wasn’t the Apollo she knew. The pain and confusion in his soft, lulling voice was all wrong. It didn’t belong.
“Why are we doing this?” he asked. She thought he wanted to say more, but before he could continue, the creak of the front door stole his words.
Footsteps echoed down the hall.
He stared at her, his face hidden, but his gaze filled with despair.
Her throat clenched around a whimper. She wanted to comfort him, and that was wrong. It was against her orders. Unwanted and unneeded.
Violence is necessary, a voice whispered in her head. The future is built on bloodshed.
She must kill.
As the footsteps drew closer, Apollo’s lips pressed into a dispassionate line. A shadow descended over his amber eyes, clouding them. He reached into his jacket, took the gun from its holster, and turned toward the doorway. Shannon turned, too.
When the brown-haired woman saw them, she screamed, seemingly in surprise more than anything else. The cry was shrill and piercing in the house’s confined quarters.
“What are you doing in my house? How’d you get in here?” Bewildered, the woman looked at Shannon, then at Apollo. When she noticed the gun in his hand, her shock was eclipsed by immediate fear. Her face paled, and her eyes widened. Her nostrils flared in panic.
Apollo was the first to speak.
“Don’t scream, don’t move,” he said flatly. “If you run, I’ll shoot you in the back.”
The woman gaped at him. Her hand twitched, going for her purse.
Apollo cocked the gun. “I said don’t move.”
“What do you want?” The woman’s words were softer than before, almost to the point of inaudibility. “If it’s money, there’s—”
Apollo nodded toward the black leather couch. “Sit.”
For a second, she just stared at him.
“Sit down,” he said.
As ordered, the woman trudged forward like a condemned prisoner on death row. She sat down and folded her ha
nds in her lap. She made a deliberate effort to give Shannon a long, pleading gaze. “My name’s Eveline. Whatever you want, honey, just take it. I don’t want any trouble. I have money—”
“Do you have a safe?” Shannon asked.
Eveline dipped her head in a quick nod. “Yes. In my bedroom, behind the painting. I’ll show you.” She began to get up.
“Don’t move!” Apollo snapped.
Eveline quickly sat down again.
“What’s the combination?” Shannon asked.
She mumbled something.
“I asked you what the combination was.”
“It’s 129346.” Her hand edged toward her purse. “Please, I don’t want any trouble.”
“Just shut up and stay still,” Apollo said. There was a sudden tremor in his voice, a wavering note of distinct trepidation.
Shannon stepped forward and picked up Eveline’s purse. In the main pouch, she found a canister of pepper spray, which she put in her jeans pocket. As she returned to Apollo’s side, he handed her his gun.
“We don’t want to hurt you, Eveline,” she said, pointing the gun at the woman. “We just need some money. Okay? We need money.”
“I understand,” Eveline whispered.
“I’ll stay here with you while my friend checks the safe.” Shannon lowered the gun a little. “Please don’t try anything.”
“I won’t.”
Apollo went into the hall. Listening to his receding footsteps, she was pierced by a sudden regret for what they were about to do.
This wasn’t what you were trained for, a voice whispered in her head. This isn’t a soldier’s work.
“I have a daughter,” Eveline said quietly.
Shannon said nothing.
“A little girl. She’s only eight.”
When Shannon didn’t answer, Eveline fell silent. They listened to the faint creak of cabinets being opened. From deeper within the house, a door groaned on ungreased hinges.
A wary light entered Eveline’s eyes. “Wait, why is he going into the backyard?”
Before she could respond, Apollo returned to the living room. He had exchanged his windbreaker and jeans for dress pants and a polo shirt. The oxfords that had replaced his sneakers were muddy with garden soil.
Project Pandora Page 4