straight in the eye. 'You think I'd go to all this trouble to destroy you and your Olympians out of some kind of jealousy? You're mad. You've turned into a power-crazed megalomaniac — a mass-murdering monster. Someone had to stop you. Someone had to end this tyranny of yours.'
'And it simply had to be you, did it?'
'I'm your father. I brought you into the world. I bear some of the responsibility for what you've done, what you've become. The blood-guilt is mine. Therefore it's only right that I should be the one who brings you down.'
The lightning flashes were coming thicker and faster overhead. Hyperion took a step towards Zeus and Cronus, levelling his coilgun, but Sam restrained him with a hand.
'This is their moment. Let them be.'
'I can take out Zeus while his guard's down.'
'It's a standoff. It might resolve itself peacefully.'
Hyperion let out a sceptical huff of breath, but stayed where he was, coilgun not fully raised.
'You're a danger to everyone,' Cronus told his son.
'No, only to anyone who opposes me,' said Zeus. 'Do you not understand what I've managed to do here? Do you not realise how good I've made life for billions of people?'
'Do you not realise how bad you've made it, Xander? So bad it makes me ashamed. That's all I've felt these past ten years, nothing but shame.'
'Your feelings aren't my concern. I don't seek your approval. I never have.'
'Your mother would have been ashamed too.'
'Don't bring her into this! Don't you dare!' Zeus bellowed. 'You never deserved her. She was worth a thousand of you.'
'You barely even knew her.'
'I remember enough about her to know that she loved me more than your ever did or could.'
'I loved you.'
'No, you tolerated me at first. Then you resented me, and finally you despised me.'
'I despise what you are now.'
It struck Sam how truly alike these two men were. Their faces, pressed up to each other, were mirror images, almost. The level of antipathy radiating from both of them was near identical too.
'Then here I am, Dad,' said Zeus, making the last word a vindictive snarl, a kind of accusation. 'This is your chance to finish me. Take it. You won't get a better one. Or a second one.'
'I don't want to kill you, Xander. I should, given how you did your level best to kill me. I ought to, in the light of all your crimes against humanity. But I don't. Can't you see that it's over? Your Olympians are dead. Olympus is overrun. You've nothing left. You're beaten. But you can still walk away from all this. Come back with me. Come home. Let's start again. I can protect you, look after you, give you a new shot at life.'
'After fifteen years? After all that's happened? Hah! You must be joking.'
Cronus looked saddened but not surprised. 'I thought I should offer. You've refused. So I'm afraid you leave me with no choice.'
Seizing Zeus's shoulder with one hand, he produced an oscillo-knife with the other.
'Let the punishment fit the crime,' he said, and before Zeus could so much as blink, he plunged the buzzing blade into his son's crotch.
A sideways torque of the wrist.
A blossoming of blood across the front of Zeus's robe.
'Dad…?' Zeus said, his voice wavery, strangulated.
Cronus worked the oscillo-knife like a saw, hacking away at Zeus's genitals with a cold and remorseless efficiency. His other hand bore down, keeping Zeus planted firmly in place.
'This is the fate of kings of pantheons,' he hissed. 'And of fathers.'
'Dad…'
The lightning began to coalesce. The brightness overhead grew as though a new sun was forming within the mist.
'Oh shit,' muttered Hyperion.
Cronus was concentrating too hard on what he was doing to notice. Relishing the moment too much. 'You took mine.' The words were a hoarse hiss, only just audible. 'Now I take yours.'
'Daddy,' Zeus moaned. 'Please. No. Stop.'
But Cronus paid no heed.
The lightning swelled into a vast, lambent sphere. Plasmic sparks wormed and veined across every surface in the agora. The air felt alive with power.
'We gotta get out of here,' Hyperion said.
And Sam knew he was right, but she couldn't move. Couldn't turn. Couldn't tear herself away.
'Daddy!'
Something plopped wetly onto the flagstones between Zeus's feet. He was shuddering. The lower half of his robe was nothing but redness.
'Daddeeeee!!!'
Then the lightning broke, and the world went white. Not the filmy white of the mist. A pure, bleaching, incandescent white that penetrated every crack and corner and left no room for shadows, no dark crevices, nothing unilluminated. A whiteness like the beginning of Creation, or its end. Accompanied by a bang that was beyond sound, beyond comprehension, loud enough that it made any other noise a whisper by comparison — and a wave of intense heat and pressure that came like a giant, sweeping hand and drove all before it. A hurricane of burning brilliance that picked up Sam and Hyperion and whirled them and tangled them and tossed them aside, and left only a howling blackness in its wake.
EPILOGUE:
The L-Day event in Lincoln Park was the usual contrasting mix of solemn memorial and joyful celebration. At noon on a baking-hot June day several thousand Chicagoans gathered, some to sing hymns, some to light candles, some to sit in quiet contemplation, some to share beers, some to play music and dance, some to march in circles and chant slogans, and some just to spectate from the sidelines. It was disorganised, rowdy in places, not sanctioned by the authorities, and with no point of focus — no special monument to rally around, no single person to conduct the proceedings, no distinguished figure to stand up and make a speech and be a mouthpiece for all. Similar improvised assemblies were occurring all over the world on this, the third anniversary of the overthrow of the Olympians.
Despite much campaigning and petitioning, not one government would overtly acknowledge Liberation Day as a formal annual calendar occasion. There was a desire among the powers-that-be to move on from the age of Olympian rule, draw a line under it, act as if it had never happened. The people, however, disagreed. Let their elected representatives sweep that decade under the carpet and the dust of political cowardice with it. They might wish to forget, but seven billion others did not.
Furthermore, many felt that their leaders should be held to account — the ones, at least, who had bent the knee most abjectly to the Pantheon. Here at Lincoln Park voices called for ex-president Stavropoulos, whose term of office had just ended and not been renewed, to be retroactively impeached. Similarly, at Trafalgar Square in London where an L-Day event had been held some six hours earlier, there'd been renewed demands for Catesby Bartlett to face prosecution in the High Court. Bartlett had stepped down as prime minister not long after the Olympians'
