Ananke’s face strains under its expressions, cycling from modest dislike to bafflement to indulgent, gosh-the-dumb-animal-tries-so-hard amusement. Finally, as she sets the baklava in a spare oven, she says: “Why not?”
I consider the response. “Point.”
“Quality. It is about quality,” Ananke declares, abruptly, thoughtfully. “You humans have an aphorism about atheists and foxholes, do you not? A belief that death can make believers of the faithless? There is some truth to that.”
I arrange braised artichokes on an armada of plates. “Christopher Hit—”
“You’re complicating things unnecessarily.”
“I’m told I’m very good at that.”
“Do you ever stop talking?”
“Well, I’m frequently told—”
“Shut up.” Ananke leans against the counter, head canted towards the window, skin coruscating with the idea of scales. In the distance, an ambulance screams. “It is simpler than that. At the precipice of death, the body will fight for one more moment, one more taste of war, one last second of soiling itself, straining to eke out another heartbeat in this miserable world. And that need, that desperate hope to live, that hunger to be—we can sustain ourselves on it. It is just another flavor of faith, if not a particularly palatable one.”
“Like spam versus steak?”
Her lips shape a grin. “Yes.”
Nodding, I add melt-on-your-fork slabs of lamb and steamed asparagus to my little dioramas, balance poached egg yolks on the long green stems. A crumble of feta and black pepper follow, just for texture. “That doesn’t explain the soup kitchen.”
“The desperate will pray to anything for a warm bed and a hot meal. And they will do anything when you take it away.”
“But the point of a”—realization sets in—“are you actually pushing basic amenities? Like heroin? You’re—”
“I’d like to think of it more like cultivating foie gras.”
“We’re not geese.”
Circumstances rob Ananke of the final word, as a killing-chute scream guts the air. Ananke doesn’t wait. She’s out of the door in three fluid strides and I charge after her, poking my head out of the kitchen to see—
Smoke.
Garlands of black smoke rippling from a burning figure in the hallway, its hands cupped in limp supplication, arms trembling from the weight of the flames. Oil pours from its nose, its eyes, its mouth, like colorless blood, filmed with bluish-white fire. Poseidon is trying to quench the inferno, conjuring acres of water from nothing, the air clouding with steam and the smell of brine. But nothing works.
The silhouette continues to burn, to crisp, the fat in its arms popping under the spray. Everything smells of bacon and burning fabric. Someone is screaming, telling Poseidon to stop, even as the form sags—finally—to one knee, face charred beyond—no. That’s not right. Recognition coaxes bile from the pit of my stomach, even as it gives a name to the squat build, the mountainous shoulders.
Hephaestus.
The irony is spectacular, rhapsodic. A statement piece. To set a god of fire on fire is to create a point, rather than merely proving one. Hephaestus coughs once, hands moving to his throat, fingers fusing in place as the flames keep rolling. Coughs again, vomits fire down his front, and now, hell breaks loose. The blaze sears across the surface of the kerosene swamp, up the walls, along the ceiling. Alive, almost. Ravenous. It licks its way up to the feet of the crowd and then, all at once, reality fast-forwards into a horror show.
Gods and mythological bipeds go up in literal smoke, transfiguring into columns of phosphorescent white heat. Mouths and eyes gape black, tissues and humors cooked in a flash. Seven go down this way before the rest of them collect themselves enough to organize a stampede towards the front door.
Eight. Ten. Twelve.
In the commotion, someone crashes into Orpheus’ wheelchair, sending his disembodied head rolling straight into a pool of fire. I stare, rooted in place, in horror at the flame lapping up his screaming features, his eyes boiling trout-white before they sizzle to ash.
“Crap.”
As far as last words go, I suppose I could have done worse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE FIRST RULE of dealing with a burning building is—actually, I have no idea. I should have stayed in school. Filled with post-public-education blues, I paddle through the fumes into my room at the back of the apartment. The smoke rolls into the corridor behind me, surging in waves, as though propelled by some unseen heart.
“Crap,” I announce to the spare, shirt-strewn space, as I shoulder the door close. Black fumes glissade through the cracks. “Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap—”
Coughing, I grab an unwashed hoodie from my bed, try to swaddle my uninjured arm and fail. I stare at the puddle of black cloth, forlorn.
“Crap.”
One deep breath. One enormous regret. Wheezing smoke, eyes watering furiously, I charge the window, elbow first. Glass explodes in a shimmer of hard edges, sunlight turning the shrapnel into diamond. Like a lonely paramour finally come home, gravity hauls me into her embrace, dragging me over the window frame, down onto the balcony a storey below.
Whumph. The impact jolts the air from my lungs, and the world judders into watery smears of color, indistinguishable from whatever fiction my brain constructs in its flirtation with unconsciousness. I think I scream. I’m not sure. Pain ignites in bright blinding pops, skating between cuts and fresh-broken bones, expanding, crescendoing in a vivid fastigium of hurts.
But I’m alive.
I guess.
In the periphery of my hearing, I catch the sound of a balcony door opening, feet picking a shuffling path through a mosaic of glass. A silhouette looms over me, blocking out the smudged heavens. “Holy shit.”
I shakily raise a pair of devil horns. “Rock on.”
And with that, I finally pass out.
“WHAT AM I supposed to do with you, Rupert?” A man’s voice, two octaves too close to pre-pubescence, yet cold and slow, like a long death in ice.
I crack open an eye, see a landscape of plaster and bandages, my appendages dangling from straps in the ceiling. An itch of indeterminable size stirs, somewhere inaccessible, as sunlight fissures through ragged curtains. I twitch my fingers. Six respond; four spasm in bafflement.
I’d say that everything hurts, but that’s a lie. The world is cotton and clouds on a crinoline of gauze, so fluffy that I could, if you’ll excuse the reference, die. Truth be told, I’ve a nagging suspicion that this fuzzy, furry patina of morphine is the only thing keeping me from expiring of circulatory shock. I wiggle my digits again and try to raise the middle finger. It comes up half-mast. Good enough.
Sisyphus sits spread-kneed on the edge of a chair at the side of my bed, hands steepled against his lipless maw. His stare has the weight of court orders. The silence lengthens into awkwardness.
“I’m sorry?” Grudgingly, I fit words into the waiting quiet.
The damned king grins briefly, stroking the fleecy jut of his chin. Rubbing beard hairs between thumb and index finger, he looks at me appraisingly. I writhe away, propping myself up as best I’m able, which entails resting part of my weight on a sling and slouching the rest against a rickety headboard.
It is then that I realize that there’s a cat on my belly. Specifically, the Cat, a heap of mange and black-whipped fur, gray and white at unplanned intervals. He scratches at the stub of an ear, and opens lime-green eyes. I wriggle fingers at him, hoping the motion would communicate both my desire to scritch and my inability to do so.
“You don’t die. You don’t listen. You don’t do what you were meant to do. When destiny comes calling, you run away every single time. What am I supposed to do?”
“Man, if I had a dollar every time someone said that to me, I’d have enough to pay off the world.” The Cat nuzzles under my palm, and I scratch at the stiff hairs of his hackles. “Wait. What do you mean—are you the one working with Vanquis?”
That actually makes Sisyphus crack up, slight frame twitching with laughter. He leans back, stares out of the door as a nurse, dark and slim, black hair corkscrewing from a sharp-edged face, saunters past. The Cat rattles with sub-aural growling, walking a tight circle across my chest, and Sisyphus continues ignoring him. “Oh, please. If it helps, I’m not complicit in your suffering. I have no more reason to hate you than to hate the man on the streets. Sure, your torment generates revenue, but this world pivots on suffering; it isn’t personal. I am not your enemy. But I am unhappy. You stand at the fulcrum of change, but you don’t see how it works.”
“How what works? Cutting some random idiot open and rooting through his stomach to decide what’s going to happen? Trusting in the Ghost of Entrails Past Expiry? Hey, you know what would be an absolutely novel idea? Telling me things straight instead of jumping through wordplay. It’d get all of us where you want to go a lot faster.”
“No.” He sighs, rises from his seat to narrow the distance between us. From his pocket, Sisyphus extracts two coins, verdigris-coated and old. Very old. The centuries reverberate within the discs, histories so sociopathically abhorrent that they refuse to lay down and die. He sets them between my collar bones, the metal chill. The Cat hisses, but Sisyphus ignores him. “I can’t. You must make this choice independent of outside intervention. This must be your decision, your choosing.”
“Again, if I had a dollar—”
“How I envy you. How I envy the things that Helenus had forseen for you.”
“I’m beginning to get very concerned here.”
“If only we still had his sister, things would be so very clear.” With a schwink of metal unfolding, a switchblade pops into view. I tense, straining between the urge to survive and the desire to have it all over with, to give this wretched carcass up, reboot the game and come back, shit-stained but whole. “But we do what we can. We play the cards we’ve been dealt.”
“Tell me. Was all that drama really necessary? Does it make you happy, Your Highness? Does it?”
Sisyphus carries on like I’ve said nothing at all, bending down to cut my face, but the Cat intervenes, slashing at the blade with a paw. Snarling at the impudence, faster than I could imagine possible, he pins the thrashing Cat against my broken ribs and slices the feline’s throat.
“Fuck—”
Calmly, Sisyphus wipes his blade through the geysering blood, the Cat twitching, his gaze emptying of animation. I gape, shellshocked, as Sisyphus strokes the flat of his knife over the coins, awakening whatever slumbers within them. A pale wash of impressions, like the dregs of a nightmare; eager, grotesqueries too vague to fully comprehend, full of hungry life.
“Collateral,” he announces, the Cat’s only eulogy.
“You cannot fucking perform an animal sacrifice in a hospital—”
Sisyphus rambles on, indifferent to my sentiments on the matter, bored of me: “Helenus made another prediction before it all went to shit, by the way.”
“And?” I’m sodden and sticky with blood. My uncovered ass, I realize, with a paroxysm of hysteria, is the only place still cold.
“You’re going to do great things. You’re going to change the tide of the world. You will win this war for—”
“You?” A laugh wrenches my lungs, a coyote’s wobbling giggle. “I”m going to win the war for you. Is that what you’re going to tell me? After randomly murdering a cat and god knows what else. Look, you understand the fundamental error in listening to a gibbering madman you’ve turned inside-out, right? The fact you take bets on his fortunes suggests that he’s not very good at them, so how are you even—what was I saying again?”
(Ang mohs, don’t do drugs at home. In fact, don’t do drugs at all. Unless it’s a matter of life-or-death, and as a general rule of thumb, you should avoid matters of life-or-death too.)
Sisyphus, a frown pinched between prodigious eyebrows, shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you will be responsible for changing the—”
I spin a fingertip in a tiny circle around my temple. “You are fucking nuts.”
“And you are an insolent little cow. If it weren’t for Demeter—” His scowl deepens.
“Excuse me? Excuse me? Now, I don’t know if you realize, but I’m not the one who walked up to an injured man to start cutting up his face. Because seriously, if you don’t get why this is a crazy thing to do, I— wait. What did you say about Demeter?”
Shoes clack over linoleum and we look over to see a silhouette in the doorway, clipboard tucked into the crook of an arm. A doctor, judging from the rumpled coat and the stethoscope dangling from his throat, the shadows hanging heavy from puppydog eyes. “Sorry. Am I interrupting?”
Statement masquerading as perfunctory apology. Sisyphus raps a chord against my rib, holding the physician’s gaze, neither backing down. But my doctor has the advantage of actual authority and they both know it. The undead monarch eventually capitulates, although not before migrating the coins to my eyes, a ferryman’s wages pre-paid in full, the Cat’s body dangled by its scruff. “This is not your story.”
“Fuck you. Wait. Come back here. You still haven’t answered me yet.”
He leaves, sandals slapping a sullen beat across the floor. I contort my face, hoping to dislodge the coins; one falls, the other does not, pulsing someone’s misery across my skin. The young medic walks up beside me and plucks the remaining doubloon from my eye, mouth undecided between a grimace and an encouraging smile. It flickers fully to the latter, even as he rings up Security, his manner efficient and terse, composed to minimize the risk of alarm.
“Did you know that man?” His accent is glass-cut, prim, predominantly British except for an inflection of the exotic, a liquidness that suggests time on other continents. He raises the coin to the light, inspects the surfaces but neither numbers nor insignias reveal themselves, no clue as to a beginning, all legibility eaten away by green-blue rust.
“Nope. Some random crazy.”
We clinch stares. I wait for him to call my bluff, but he doesn’t.
“How are you feeling...” He sets the coins on my bedside table and scans his sheaf of papers, tongue poked from the corner of his lips. “Mr. Wong? That was a bit of a fall.”
“You could say that.” I stiffen, cagey as a pet-shelter feral, acutely and abruptly conscious that I’m alone, incapacitated, and in the presence of Schrödinger’s threat.
“Multiple fractures, two broken ribs, some thoracic spinal lesions, a concussion—and that’s just the current inventory. Still, nothing irrecoverable. Bed rest, physical therapy, and good life decisions should have you up and running in no time.” He skims a finger along my IV drip and examines the bag of clear fluids, before fumbling through a dresser for supplies.
Rubber gloves go on. With enviable dexterity, he carves me from my bandages, begins the cleanup process, all the while maintaining a conversational lightness to his chatter. “You’ve led quite the life, Mr. Wong.”
“Led?” I wince as he paints antibacterial fluids over my stitches. “I don’t know if I appreciate the use of past tense.”
“Mr. Wong, I understand that things may still be confusing, but you can trust me, I promise you. I’m only here to help.” He swaddles me in fresh bandages, manner still calm.
“Yeah. That’s what they all say.”
He sighs. “Okay. So what can I do to change your mind?”
I don’t miss a beat. “Yorkshire pudding with Cumberland sausages, onion gravy. A side of biscuits. Fried bacon. Properly fried. Like, unhealthily crispy.”
“How about something from Tesco and I’ll see if the cafeteria will fry you some bacon?”
“Deal.”
HE COMES BACK.
He actually comes back. With onion mash and sausages dripping in hot gravy, Yorkshire pudding stuffed with crumbled bacon. No biscuits, unfortunately, but he substitutes a slice of lemon tart, lumpy with white chocolate. I don’t know why he didn’t return with Security, a
nd how I’m not swimming in policemen, but I am not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Isn’t this against terms and conditions?” Gingerly, I clamp trembling fingers around the spoon, losing my captive twice, cutlery falling onto my blue woolen blanket.
“Probably.” The doctor—Sunil, according to a discreet nametag—shrugs a shoulder, grinning, fingers raking through prematurely gray hair. “But hey.”
“Hey.” I grin back and dig in.
OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING, THE meal wasn’t great. Store-bought sausages are always criminally overstuffed and woefully under-spiced, porcine detritus given a last shake at self-worth. And the gravy is invariably a watery, one-note disappointment.
The bacon was chewier than it was crispy and the tart too sweet, but the fact it was there, steam lacing the air, savory and rich and resplendently greasy, made all the difference.
Subjectively speaking, it was the best meal of my life.
I’m pretty sure that means I’m about to die.
Permanently.
IT’S LATE AND I’m still awake, walking one of Sisyphus’ coins along my knuckles, counting as I go. Metacarpals and phalanges twinge from the exercise, but I press on, coercing joints to flex, to bend. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty—
The disc slips between my fingers, hits the floor with a decisive clink.
Bracing, I lean down, ignore the pain shooting across my oblique as I twist to collect the fallen coin. There has to be a secret here, some metallurgic cantrip leavened into the gold, something useful. But the coins relinquish no answers. In frustration, I thread a schoolyard charm together under my breath, the magic flickering limply, an unflattering mirror of my health. It gutters out before I can even breathe it into being, and I sigh.
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