Fatebound

by S W Clarke

  “For your sake, I hope you’re right,” Erytheia said.

  On the floor, Justin’s wounds began to heal, too, though he didn’t look nearly as well as Hercules. Had water from the River Styx just healed both their wounds? A line from a textbook came floating back to me: “the river confers immortality.”

  Of course, immortality wasn’t possible in this GoneGod World. But it appeared that the waters of the River Styx still carried power.

  Hercules stepped close to Aigle. A strange pang of emotion passed through me as the two stared at one another, their bodies nearly touching. “Tell me where the apples are.”

  “Do not tell him,” Hesperia shrieked, and Cupid delivered another blow with his little boy fist. This one got her square in the shoulder, which she clutched like she’d been stung by a bee. Evidently he was much, much more effective with his bow and arrows.

  “Don’t tell him, Sister,” Erytheia entreated from beside Justin.

  “You need not tell Heracles,” Pythia said with uncanny calmness. “The encantado will not kill me. I have foreseen it.”

  “Don’t underestimate her,” Justin said, rising to a seat. One hand went to his chest. “She’ll do what she needs to do.”

  “I don’t need to kill her,” I said. “This is El Lobizon’s claw, terror of the angels. One cut from it will end her ability to use magic for the rest of her mortal life.” OK, I was exaggerating, but none of them knew that.

  “I will never tell you, Heracles,” Aigle said, glaring up at him.

  Hercules lifted one hand, drawing his finger down the length of Aigle’s face. Her entire body shuddered with the touch. Something floated in the air between them—that nameless chemistry that existed between some and not others. A compulsive attraction. “Do you remember ...” Hercules said, leaning close to whisper in her ear. The nosy, envious part of me wanted to know what he was saying to Aigle—whether it was the words or the whispering, the way his hair trailed along her shoulder and face like a veil as he spoke.

  “Sister,” Hesperia cried from beside Cupid, “don’t forget what happened last time.”

  “He betrayed you—all of us,” Erytheia said.

  Meanwhile, Pythia’s breath quickened under my arm. “I feel something,” she murmured to me. “I feel your fate, encantado.”

  “Quiet,” I said.

  “It palpates around us. I can almost reach out to touch it.”

  “If you so much as lift a finger, I’ll cut you.”

  “If you meant to cut me, you would have done it already,” she said simply. “And if I meant to escape, I would have done that.”

  I swallowed, gripped the claw harder. “You told the nymphs to kill us.”

  “I told them to kill the human,” she corrected.

  “First,” I added. “To kill him first.”

  Pythia reached back, her fingers touching my leg. She flinched away, almost as if burned. “It’s you,” she breathed. “I saw you would come to me, but I did not expect you to be an encantado.”

  “Stop it,” I said. She was trying to distract me.

  The hand touched my leg again, more gently this time. So much was conveyed by that touch; it wasn’t an attempt to escape my grasp, but a touch of solidarity. “Fate has brought you to me,” she whispered. “Finally, it has brought me you. You need not fear me, encantado.”

  “How do you know me?”

  “I know fate. I trust it. And I obey what it tells me: that you, with a greater fate than all of us, would come to me.” All at once, I understood: Pythia’s deepest allegiance wasn’t to the nymphs. It was to fate. “Look around you, encantado. Why have you come here, to find some apples?”

  “I …”

  “It isn’t about the apples,” Pythia rasped. “You follow Heracles because you sense his importance to your story.”

  My story. Cupid had called it that.

  “When she comes,” the oracle continued, “you must not run. They depend on you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. But a name flashed through my mind at once: Serena Russo. The name floated through my head always, but especially right now.

  She snorted. “Your lies would be transparent even if I wasn’t the Oracle of Delphi. Hear me now. If you heed your nature, they will die.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Her narrow shoulders lifted. “The visions come to me, and I must heed my own nature, encantado.”

  “What should I do, then?”

  “Face her. You must defeat her.”

  “Why?”

  The oracle didn’t answer; she and I both knew why, it seemed. Serena Russo would never stop. Not just because I’d stolen her research and destroyed most of what remained. Not just because I had taken her super soldier with me.

  It was something else.

  From the moment I’d met Serena Russo, that black hair lapping over her shoulders, those crystal-blue eyes sizing me up from crown to toe, I’d been dazzled. Overwhelmed. That day, and every day after, she asked me about my progress.

  Serena wanted to know every detail, every microcosmic step forward.

  She worked all hours, never seemed to leave McGill’s biology building. She was a woman possessed by her research—her mission to map the strand of DNA that made Others Others. She took no prisoners, bore no fools. And even as her research assistant, I couldn’t quite understand her drive, what made her so single-minded. She was a force of nature, which was why I knew I couldn’t stay in Montreal.

  Empty Hell, I couldn’t even stay in Canada.

  “I don’t know if I can,” I whispered. “She’s …”

  “In love,” Pythia finished.

  I blinked. “What?”

  The oracle’s fingers squeezed my leg. “Allow me to show you what you missed.”

  “What? I thought oracles foretold the future.”

  She shook her head. “Past. Future—the visions don’t distinguish. Take my hand.”

  “What will happen?” I breathed.

  Pythia’s face turned toward me, her profile enveloped in shadow. “You will see.”

  I lowered my arm, but I kept El Lobizon’s claw at her throat. When my fingers touched hers, she clasped them at once, her grip a vise.

  Around us, the champagne room melted into a boy’s bedroom.

  Chapter 15

  The oracle still held my hand, but we weren’t in New York City anymore.

  Well, we were in a boy’s bedroom in a house in … Montreal. Yes, we were back in Montreal. Somehow I knew that.

  Across from me, a map of the city spread across the wall; I spotted McGill’s campus right there along the river. I could set my finger on the biology building I used to work in. The building where I’d done all my research—and ultimately stolen that research.

  Sunlight from the two windows dappled across the map, a large tree’s leaves casting their shadows over the glossy surface. When I glanced outside past the blue curtains, I recognized suburbia. A mown lawn, a wide swath of driveway, a street separating this house from the facing ones.

  All of them nearly identical. All of them safe, secure.

  My gaze returned to the map. Beneath it sat an expertly made twin bed, the blue coverlet spread smooth. A small side table sat next to it, the reading lamp fixed up with an odd on/off switch trailing right onto the bed, which had railings.

  All around me, the evidence of boyhood. Gleaming trophies in soccer, baseball, football. (How could one boy play so many sports?) Plaques for achievements in school. A bookcase with books, yes, and a prized baseball in a small plastic case. Beside it, a partially opened closet, clothes pressed flat as they hung in exact striations of colors. Every hanger’s head faced the same direction. Beneath my feet, the wooden flooring gleamed with a recent mopping.

  A beautiful room. And yet …

  “Where are we, Oracle?” I whispered.

  She lifted one hand, pointed toward one of the plaques.

  I let her hand go an
d stepped forward, leaning in with squinting eyes. When I read it, I gasped. COLLIN RUSSO, the plaque read in gold lettering. FIRST PLACE - ST. GEORGE’S HIGH SCHOOL MATH BOWL.

  Russo. Collin Russo.

  He was smart. He was athletic. And he had a very particular last name.

  I spun toward Pythia. “Who is this boy?”

  The ghost of a smile touched her lips before her eyes swiveled toward the door. All at once, I noticed the mechanical noise emanating from the hallway. It droned on, halted. There followed two muffled voices. They were nearing.

  I straightened, my entire body as stiff as a wireframe, hands resting on the bookshelf behind me. “Take me back,” I whispered.

  Pythia didn’t respond, didn’t acknowledge I’d spoken. She just stared at the door. And as the voices grew in volume, I recognized one of them.

  It sent dread rolling through me.

  Isa, you fool. The oracle must have burned magic to bring me here. All at once, my brain fired off with conclusions: she was a pawn of the World Army, a secret operative in a strip club in New York City. I should never have trusted her.

  My hand had just settled over the baseball in its case, ready to weaponize it, when the door opened. In came Collin Russo, and behind him, Serena Russo. The woman looked as overwhelming as the first day I’d met her, except this time her black hair hung from a workmanlike ponytail.

  But they didn’t enter in the way I’d imagined—not after staring at all these trophies. And now I understood why Collin Russo’s room looked the way it did: too neat, almost rigid. Clean to a fault. Railings on the bed.

  Collin Russo didn’t walk into the room. He was pushed in a wheelchair.

  And the woman pushing him was Serena Russo. His mother.

  ↔

  As they came into the bedroom, I expected the two of them to stop when they spotted the Oracle of Delphi standing there in her dark robes. After all, she stood not three feet from the door. Or, at least, one of them would spy me standing by the bookcase with my hand over a prized baseball.

  But neither of these things happened.

  “It’s the worst uniform,” the boy was saying. “They make us button it right to the collar all day.” The boy, who was actually a teenager, had inherited Serena’s blue-black hair, her eyes the color of the deep ocean. He sat rigid, neck at an awkward angle, legs pressed together at the left side of his chair. His school uniform, a sweater-vest and dark slacks, sagged almost everywhere.

  How thin he looked. Uncommonly so.

  “I think you look handsome.” Serena—who was the most dressed-down I’d ever seen her, in joggers and a pair of sneakers—pushed Ryan right through the oracle, who dispersed like sand as they passed through her. Pythia reformed at once, her gaze following the two humans.

  When they reached his desk, Serena leaned over and unbuttoned his collar with both hands. Such care, such devotion. She practically beamed with pride as her eyes flicked over her son’s face.

  I stepped toward the oracle. “They can’t see us.”

  “No, they can’t.”

  Serena removed his backpack from his wheelchair, set it on the desk and unzipped it. Out came the books, the papers, his laptop. Each of them she set up with perfect care as the sun played over the both of them.

  “Tell me about school,” she said.

  “Oh, you know, I just sat around all day.”

  She laughed—I had never heard her laugh like that. Full-throated, unrestrained—and her son couldn’t help his toothy grin. He had braces.

  My throat constricted; I wanted to close my eyes, turn away from this. But I couldn’t, because GoneGodDamn if the two of them didn’t make a compelling scene.

  Such is cognitive dissonance, when a grade-A bitch becomes a mother with a disabled son. You don’t want to look straight on; the world is already complex enough that some narratives need to remain simple.

  She’s bad. You’re good.

  She wants to hurt Others. You want to save them.

  Serena leaned close, one hand set on the crown of his head. Those long fingers threaded through his hair, and I knew she had once done this when he was young enough to lay in her arms and she could admire every strand.

  My eyes flitted to the trophies. Soccer, baseball, football. Things hadn’t always been this way. Which was what made all of this more painful.

  “She’s in love,” I said. I understood now what Pythia had meant.

  The oracle nodded. “Yes.”

  And finally, Serena Russo’s manic possession during her working hours made sense. The third strand of the helix, the obsession with mapping it. Justin’s gene editing, splicing in Other DNA here and there. She was searching for the key to Other reproduction, yes. She was making super soldiers, yes. She was bolstering the World Army, yes.

  But all of it was a cover, just as my research “goals” were a cover for my deepest desire.

  I wanted to have a child of my own.

  Serena Russo just wanted her son to walk again.

  “You both labor for the same kind of love. The love of someone from you, who is more than you,” Pythia said. “And in that way, you both are the same.”

  For a moment, my heart paused. Then it galloped on. “How do you know that I want—” I couldn’t even say the words out loud. A child. I wanted a child of my own. I wanted to be a mother. And the thought that such a thing would forever be denied me hurt deeper than any blade could ever hope to.

  Pythia turned to me. “After all this, you still ask me that?”

  She was right about me, of course. Perhaps to the oracle, humans and Others alike were as transparent as glass. As was the past and the future.

  “If you know my fate, then tell me: will I ...” I hesitated. Asking this question felt fraught, like asking an Ouija board when I would die. Maybe I didn’t want to know the answer. Knowing could be devastating.

  Pythia shook her head. “You’re uncertain. Only those who have processed the consequences of learning their fate and still desire it may know.”

  I turned back to Serena, grateful that Pythia had made the decision for me. “How will being here make it easier for me to face her?”

  “Now you understand her mettle. She fights for her son’s future,” Pythia said. “And you fight for the possibility that your future offers. If she wins, you will lose your lover. You will lose yourself. You will suffer. But also, your mission will fail. And in that failure, you will condemn the fate of Others, sealing them off from the only hope they have to sire children of their own.”

  My eyes were drawn to Pythia. “Sire … children?”

  The oracle gave a deep, long nod.

  “How could that be?” I breathed.

  Her eyes twinkled as she gazed at me. “You are a scientist, are you not?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “But to give Others the power to have children is like wizardry.”

  “How does the saying go?” Pythia set a finger to her chin. “Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.”

  “You said I have to fight for the future I want,” I said. I didn’t fight. I wasn’t a fighter. And yet, the love I desired necessitated it. So perhaps Pythia was right, in that sense. “You can see multiple futures?”

  “I see every future,” she said simply. Her hand went out to Serena, swept back to me. “And in every one of them, your paths converge. They converge many times, and every time is combustive. Eventually, one of you will die to the other.”

  I swallowed, stared at Serena. She would die to me, or I would die to her. Did Serena know this? How could she? “How much time are you burning right now?” I whispered to Pythia.

  “A great deal of it. A great, great deal.”

  I turned to her. Did she look older than she had before, her hair whiter? Surely she had only appeared to be in her late fifties when I’d seen her in the champagne room, and now … Yes, she had changed.

  I understood the enormity of what she was doing; I had burned some time off the end of my
life to shift, but not years. Still, every time had involved a weighing, a painful anxiety about my own mortality. After five hundred years of immortality, death now sat like a specter before me. Before all of us, including Pythia.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do this for me?”

  “I am an Other, Isabella,” Pythia said. “Your success is necessary to the survival of Others. All of us, everywhere. I want you to arrive at that future.”

  “How can that be? I’m just one person.”

  “You will know.”

  Silence fell between us, and the sound of Serena and Collin’s voices came clearer. She sat on the edge of the desk, going over his homework with him. For the first time, I saw her without any affectation. She hunched, her back curled, shoulders pressing forward. She felt nervous, afraid, uncertain. Like a moon, she remained in close orbit, attending to her son’s every word, his every need.

  When I approached them, kneeling on Collin’s other side, I stared at Serena. “Are you certain I have to kill her to defeat her?” I asked Pythia.

  In that moment, Serena’s eyes met mine.

  I froze. Had she heard me?

  Serena rose from the desk, stepped around her son’s chair and right next to me. When I rose, her eyes remained fixed on mine.

  She reached out, swept her fingers through the air. I couldn’t step back in time to avoid it, but I only dispersed like Pythia had done, the swath of my chest she swept through reforming at once.

  I gasped, expecting to feel something. Pain, or the sensation of my body disassembling. But I didn’t feel any of that.

  It was like I had no body at all.

  “Who’s there?” Serena whispered.

  Her son’s head swiveled just a few degrees, within the range he was capable of. “Mom?”

  She kept staring at me, even as I backed away toward the window and my hands found the windowsill. She followed. Her eyes narrowed, her mouth hardened, and all at once, she was Dr. Serena Russo, the brilliant and uncompromising scientist at the head of the World Army’s efforts.

  She was terrifying. Even if she couldn’t see me—could only sense me—she would face this uncanniness. She would fight it. With her son present, she would fight anything.