by Diana Tyler
I was so bored and was glad I brought books to read. My mom doesn’t get bored. Neither do the other people who do what she does. She says there’s nothing she would rather do than uncover things from the past that can teach us about the present. One lady showed me an old broken oil lamp and some coins. Then we ate lunch. Then I walked around for a little while and took a nap under a tree.
After that, the page was nothing but doodles and random drawings. Ethan smiled and sighed through his nose, remembering clearly what his child’s mind had been thinking as his pen had meandered aimlessly, sketching geometric shapes and animals. He had been debating whether to write another word. But eventually the doodling stopped, and two pages later the text began again.
I go to school with a girl named Chloe Zacharias. Her dad picks her up from school every day, so I knew who he was when I saw him walking on the beach close to where I had just taken a nap. I don’t know what he was doing out there. We’re not supposed to leave Eirene unless we’re told to or you’re an archeologist like my mom. He looked like he was waiting for a ship to sail by or something.
I called to him, “Mr. Zacharias! Mr. Zacharias!” but it was windy, and he couldn’t hear me. I started to walk closer and then heard growling coming from behind me, where the tree was.
It was a wolf, much bigger than any dog I’ve ever seen! It was a yellowish-brown color and had short hair and orange eyes that looked like they were on fire. It showed me its teeth and kept growling, louder and louder. The hair on its back stood up like cats’ hair does, and its ears flattened backward.
I started to run for it, but it jumped at me and bit my arm. It would have eaten me, but Mr. Zacharias ran up to us and pulled the wolf off of me and onto him. I wanted to help him, but my arm was bleeding pretty bad and hurt a hundred times worse than the time I stepped on a nail on our back porch. The wolf was twice as big as him and took huge bites out of his shoulder and neck.
Mr. Zacharias didn’t yell or anything, even though there were some people not very far away who probably could’ve helped. He tried to wrestle the wolf, but I knew he didn’t stand a chance. Pretty soon Mr. Zacharias stopped moving. I couldn’t even see his face anymore. He was covered in blood and guts.
The wolf left me alone. I guess it was tired, or maybe I didn’t taste very good. It ran off toward the cliffs, and I called for help. And then Mr. Zacharias’ leg jerked up in the air like mine does sometimes right before I fall asleep.
He gasped for air and then groaned a lot and started to move his fingers. I didn’t know what to do. I tried not to cry, but I wanted to. My arm wouldn’t stop bleeding and I was feeling dizzy. Mr. Zacharias noticed me, and then he used all his strength to rock himself up. Then the weird stuff happened.
Mr. Zacharias sat really still and his shoulders sort of slumped. I thought he’d passed out again. But then all the gashes and bloody openings on his body started to close up, starting at his head and ending at his feet, which were missing their shoes. Even the smaller scratches from the wolf’s claws disappeared.
I was sure my mind was playing a trick on me, but then he crawled over to me and put his hands on my arm, right where the teeth had gone in. A few seconds later, the bleeding stopped. He took his hands off, and my arm looked like nothing had happened to it at all!
I asked Mr. Zacharias how he’d done that, but he just told me to keep quiet and not to tell anyone, not even my parents. He looked angry and scared at the same time, but I knew he wasn’t angry with me. He took my hand and walked me back to the edge of the site where my mom was. Then he told me to be careful and left.
I didn’t tell anyone. And I won’t.
And then Ethan’s heart missed a beat, for just after his handwriting ended, a typed note that had been stapled to the page began.
Dear Mr. Ross,
On behalf of the Fantásmata, I wish to express both our gratitude and our disappointment. We are grateful for your disciplined diary keeping, as without it we would have lacked the necessary proof with which to apprehend Mr. Zacharias. We are disappointed because you chose to keep your experience private, despite your awareness that all paráxeno theáseis episodes must be reported to a Religious Council member. However, due to the significance of your unintended assistance, we have chosen to overlook your unlawful behavior and categorize it as easily corrected youthful indiscretion. We hope, for your sake, that you choose differently in the future, should you ever again be subjected to what we are certain was a traumatic experience.
If our note remains unseen, we can only hope that your conscience matures and guides you toward the path of unity and obedience, two tenets of our society that we proudly uphold and enforce with fervor.
Kind regards,
The Fantásmata
With chills spreading throughout his limbs, Ethan flipped through the rest of the diary to see if anything else had been left for him. Nothing.
His heart pounded as he hurried from the bed to the box of stuffed animals and searched it, too, throwing the toys over his shoulder until he reached the bottom. Nothing.
Whoever had taken the trouble to trespass onto his parents’ property and sneak into his room had done so only to leave that note, that…warning.
Ethan leaned his head against the edge of the bed, closed his eyes, and made his heart rate come down as he thanked himself—his ten-year-old self—for not journaling the second part, the part he’d hoped he would forget, but never had.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ASHER
Chloe’s alarm began its staccato beeping at six thirty a.m. She rubbed her eyes as she turned and punched the snooze button. When she opened her eyes, she could hardly see. Her window, dresser, and reading chair were only discernible by the morning light that traced them. The rest of her bedroom was black space. It was as if she’d been lost in a cave and gone half blind.
The cave…
Chloe sat up and felt for the lamp on her desk and flicked it on, then winced as the brightness burned her eyeballs. She knew she was indeed at home, in her own bed, yet she felt so far away, as though her throbbing head was underwater and her body was detached from it, swimming around below it. She remembered a cave, though.
She remembered meeting a boy named Orpheus, who led her to the cave. And after a few minutes, she remembered the strange, sad animals, Circe and the pomegranate seeds, and falling into a deep sleep as Orpheus played a song on that odd little instrument.
Please let it have been a dream, she thought, as she stumbled out of bed and braced herself on the back of her desk chair to keep from falling headlong onto the floor. She shook her head, willing herself to feel normal again. If being drunk felt anything like this, she could understand why drinking wine had been outlawed. And then she turned to her wastebasket and vomited.
“Are you okay?”
Chloe peered at Damian’s bare feet out of the corner of her eye. She groaned and retched again as she remembered the wine from her non-dream.
“I take that as a no,” he said.
“Get out!” she shouted when she’d finally stopped heaving.
Damian backed out, then returned a few moments later and set a glass of water next to her knee.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll send this in to Dr. Leandros,” said Damian, as he kneeled down and held out his phone to record her.
“You’re going to make him sick if you film it this close,” Chloe said, as the waves of nausea rolled again. But as she threw up a third time, she had a feeling that Damian was purposefully making the footage as detailed as possible.
“Awesome,” he said. He patted Chloe on the back and stood up. “I’ll text this to school and bring you some meds, k?”
Chloe gave him a thumbs-up as she drank the water and grabbed a tissue from her desk.
“Did you eat something bad last night?”
Chloe shook her head. She drank something bad. She crawled up onto her bed and curled into a fetal position. It was then it dawned on her that she was stil
l wearing her jeans from yesterday, and they were filthy.
“I went for a walk after school yesterday and went into a cave,” she said as convincingly as she could. “Maybe I inhaled something.”
“Do you need to go to the hospital? I can take you as long as it’s before wrestling practice.”
“You’re very kind, but no, I’ll be fine.”
Her brother gave her a long look. He actually appeared concerned. But then, it’d been ages since either one of them had been sick. And when they had been ill, it was because their bodies were responding to routine vaccinations.
“Damian, I’m fine,” she said, managing a smile. “You can have my room if I die.”
Damian raised an interested eyebrow and smiled as he scanned the room, which was much larger than his. “Thanks.” Then he carried out the wastebasket and returned a minute later with a handful of pills.
“Finally.” Chloe sighed when she heard Damian pull out of the driveway. Had he lingered any longer she was sure she would’ve said too much and given herself away.
She rolled out bed and sat down at her desk. Where was her diary? She always kept it in the same spot, squeezed in the middle of her bookends between her favorite dictionary and the first volume of Mythologica she’d received in her first year of primary school.
Who would have taken her diary? Maggie and Travis never came upstairs, much less took interest in their niece’s private life. Damian, on the other hand, had stolen her diary plenty of times when they were young; it hadn’t mattered where she’d hidden it. But ever since she’d placed it in plain sight and removed the challenge, he couldn’t have cared less about it. Plus, he was too busy being popular to pester her anymore. And what did she have to hide over the past few years?
Chloe’s mind retraced her steps from two nights before, the night she’d eaten the walnut and written all about it. She hadn’t left the room, nor would she have slipped the book into her backpack, though she rummaged through it just in case. Her stomach had finally settled, but now there was a hammer pounding away at her skull.
She went to the bathroom and refilled her glass, then plopped into her desk chair and stared at the single walnut atop her mesh penholder.
“Carya,” she said, as she lifted her chin to the ceiling, “I need some help here. If someone has my diary, they’ll report me to the Fantásmata, and I don’t want to know what they’ll do when they find out.”
Chloe thought of Mr. Boulos, her history teacher who had been exiled for teaching about the true origins of Lycaea. She thought of Acacius, whose countenance alone had been proof enough that his Coronation was not what it seemed. And she thought of Ethan Ross, the classmate who’d never crossed her mind a single time before he’d given her the most unusual birthday present she’d ever received.
What are the odds that on the very day she visits the museum, Carya pops up, gives her mystical walnuts, and prophecies about Circe and the pomegranate seed? She pictured the look on Ethan’s face when she sat across from him at lunch and needled him about the Fantásmata. He was agitated, that was for sure, but it wasn’t because she sounded nuts. It was because he was afraid to act as though she wasn’t.
It wasn’t just a coincidence that he’d invited her to view those gigantic fossils and fragments of Iris’s scroll. He wanted her to know something, but didn’t know how to tell her.
Chloe took the walnut and held it between her fingers, eyeing it cautiously, as if it might crack open any second and deliver a rhyming message from its previous owner. She waited, almost wishing it would move.
Chloe, you are ridiculous. She set the walnut in the empty gap of her bookends where her diary had been. She didn’t need her diary anyway. The walnut would be the only memento she’d need if she ever wanted to reminisce about Orpheus and the Isle of Aeaea. But the question of where it was and who had read it made her feverish blood run cold.
She had to find Ethan. She had to make him talk.
Please meet me at Astrolux after wrestling practice. CZ.
Ethan got out of his truck and removed the note from under the windshield wiper. After he ripped it to shreds and dropped the pieces into his pants pocket, he got into the cab and dropped his head onto the steering wheel. Then he lifted it and dropped it again with a careless thud. He never should have given her the one-day pass. He’d wanted her to figure things out on her own, not recruit him for help.
He sat up in the driver’s seat and thought back to the seal at the bottom of the note left from the Fantásmata. The Próta form of the letter F was bold in the center, with a black circle around it and a thick red column splitting it down the middle. Surrounding this was a black-and-red serpent wrapping the perimeter, swallowing its own tail.
Ethan shivered. He’d been given a clear warning never to withhold anything from the government again. But he wasn’t in danger of doing that, was he? He hadn’t seen anything, nor had he heard anything escape Chloe’s lips that could incriminate her. The only thing he knew that would be of interest to the Fantásmata was the last thing Mr. Zacharias had told him just before a car accident took his life. It had been one of the few premature deaths in Ethan’s lifetime.
Ethan restlessly tapped his hands on the wheel, wishing he could go back in time, back to the day he’d seen Mr. Zacharias walking on the beach. He would have made himself stay put and mind his own business. Then the wolf never would have attacked him, Mr. Zacharias never would have healed him, and Ethan never would have written in his diary the words that got Mr. Zacharias arrested, and—Ethan couldn’t help but think—murdered.
Still feeling chilled, Ethan started his truck and turned on the heat. How could he live with himself if he ignored Chloe’s note or, worse, lied, telling her it must have blown away? He might have been innocent, but he still had her parents’ blood on his hands. And for all he knew, hers might be next.
Ethan opened the center console and pulled out a small leather bag, the one Mr. Zacharias had given him. Ethan had placed it there after discovering the letter inside his diary, planning to mail it to the Fantásmata with a note expressing his apologies for remaining silent as a boy. Perhaps they would consider it an olive branch and he could sleep a little easier at night.
But now, holding the pouch in his hand, he didn’t feel fear, but inexorable shame. Was he really going to just roll over and hand the bag off to the Fantásmata so they could “apprehend” Chloe as they had her father? He could forget sleeping altogether if he buried his head in the sand without at least telling her what he knew.
He had to meet her. It was the least he could do for the man who’d saved his life.
“He took his time deciding,” said Orpheus, as he watched Ethan’s truck pull out of the school parking lot. “What do you think he’ll do?”
Orpheus had spent the night in Hades’ palace, watching the past literally unravel before his eyes while mists, created by Hermes for the occasion, rose from an ephemeral stream. Scenes of the life of the woman named Iris flickered within them, and even glimpses of her gifted predecessors paraded across the gossamer-like screen. He saw men and women with astonishing powers, ones that put his talent for music and poetry to shame, and each one aligned with a color of the Moonbow.
The first man he saw, the one called Asher, had turned ochre earth into a bright red tablet on which he wrote his prophecies. Asher could make tablets from any part of nature he wished, be it grass, or sand, snow, or salt. And with them, he obediently recorded what the All-Powerful told him to for the rest of his days.
Another, a man named Icarius, had Herculean strength combined with superior combat skills. He’d used them to singlehandedly slay an Alpha phalanx when they’d laid siege to Eirene; the indigo arch of the Moonbow was represented by the veins of his massive arms. Icarius’s daughter, Erigone, was a builder of siege engines the pale yellow color of the Moonbow’s third arch and the desert sands they rolled upon, weapons that had routed the finest Alpha armies.
But not all Ashers were glorious
. Iris’s aunt, Corinna, had a doma that transformed her into a fearsome gryphon, a destructive weapon in and of herself. But she’d run away from home as a child, well before her eighteenth birthday, the year the gifts manifested. And with no one to guide or teach her, she fell prey to one of Apollo’s men. She became assassin of her own people. The color of her doma was blood red, as was the doma of the last Asher, the one called Mania; Próta for “fury.”
Iris had the ability to create fire with her hands, whether a minuscule spark or a blazing inferno. With it, she’d killed the man who’d corrupted Corinna, wounded the monster that tried to steal her child, and led her people through a fiery tunnel to escape Mania the day she razed Ourania to the ground.
It was Iris who had provoked Apollo’s wrath. It was she who had lived to see the fulfillment of the prophecy about Phos, Duna’s son, who had been sent to free the Eusebians from evil and tyranny. It was she who had tried to outrun the Moonbow, the symbol of hope that was now appearing once again, calling to the Vessel named Chloe.
Hermes nudged Orpheus’s arm. “I wager that the boy will side with the Vessel. I’ve observed men long enough to know which are noble and which are spineless, and this one has a mild obsession with the heroes of long ago.” Hermes looked away and filled his immortal lungs with the fresh fall air. “Beat him there. I’ll fly you to meet her.”
“And what of the boy?”
“If you do your job well, he’ll back off,” said Hermes, every word an admonishing jab. “He may have a spine, but he has a heart, too. He won’t want it broken.”
“He has romantic feelings for the girl?” Orpheus asked.
How much did Hermes and the other rebels know about the personal lives of mortals? Was childish eavesdropping how they spent their time when they weren’t scheming and carrying out Apollo and Hades’ plans?