dust, and rings of armpit sweat grew larger on his gray t-shirt. She glanced down and brushed at dirt marks on the belly of her black tank top. Her hair hung down her back in dark, rough tangles.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I just got the idea that when we saw her, we shouldn’t look like … such punks.”
He laughed and flicked a lock of her hair over her shoulder. “Then you should’ve dyed over those purple streaks before we got here. It’s too late now. We look how we look.” Despite his words, he brushed at his jeans. “We’re really going to see her. Aunt Demeter. After so long.” He smiled. “And much sooner if you’d just call a damned owl.” His breathing was slightly labored, but hope lit up his eyes for the first time since they’d started their search for answers.
Still, he had a point about the owls.
“You win.” She lifted her hand toward the nearest group of saguaros.
It was like pulling a string. A tiny, yellow-eyed bird dove out of the cactus and made a beeline for them. Athena lowered her hand and it flew around and around her in a tight circle, clicking its small beak. It would have liked to land on her. She could feel that. The owls were still her servants, and the fact that it was their feathers that were killing her would probably have saddened them more than it did her, if they had been able to know.
In a flash of eyes, she told the elf owl what she wanted, and it zipped off across the expanse of skin. It would search for days until it found Demeter’s mouth. It would search until it died of exhaustion.
“Was that so hard?” Hermes asked, and plunked himself down in the dirt to wait. He squinted up at the sky, blazing so brightly it appeared white. “About five more hours of daylight, you think?”
Athena snorted. “I could do with less. The sun is making my nose ring so hot I might accidentally brand my face.” She lowered down to the sand and propped her elbows on her knees.
Hermes, always one step ahead when it came to relaxation, stretched out, arms crossed behind his head. “If Apollo was here, we could ask him to turn it down.” He turned to her. “Where do you think he is, anyway? Off in the jungle with Artemis, maybe. Twins of the sun and moon, hanging out in some Mayan temple.”
Athena smiled and said nothing. It was nice to imagine. But the truth was probably far uglier.
Hermes reached into his pack for some beef jerky. He wanted to ask a million questions; Athena could see that. But they’d been over most of them before, and she didn’t have new answers.
“Have you thought about what comes next?” he asked.
“One thing at a time, brother.” It was a stupid question anyway. She thought about it every minute. Where they were going, and what must be done. The thousand what-ifs and maybes, and finally what might be at the end. The ultimate end. Dying was a strange, almost invigorating feeling. She couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so desperate before.
The owl returned in the dark. Its yellow reflector eyes floated toward them, sinking slowly, and disappearing when it blinked. Hours had passed while the sun sank below the sand, and she and Hermes talked of idle things that had nothing to do with the task that literally lay before them.
As the bird dipped lower, she could feel the whisper of its exhausted wings. She gave it permission with a tilt of her head, and it landed on her shoulder in a soft, grateful clump. Hermes jerked. Cold came on quickly in the nighttime desert, and the two had taken to resting back to back, staving off the chill. He turned and regarded the drowsy owl.
There was no moon. The scene in the sand, two gods speaking to a bird at the edge of an expanse of stretched skin, was invisible to anyone else. But Athena could see into the owl’s eyes clearly.
“Where is she?” Hermes asked. “Er, where is her … mouth?” He didn’t ask whether the owl had found it or not. It wouldn’t have returned if it hadn’t.
“A few hours’ walk,” Athena replied. “That way.” She stretched her arm out and pointed southeast.
Hermes sighed. “A few hours. Everything used to be so much easier. Do you remember when I could fly?”
She laughed. “Of course I remember. It isn’t easy to forget someone running all over the place like the damned Flash. It was pretty geeky, frankly.”
He snorted. “Even when you’re dying, you’re still a bitch.”
“What are you complaining about anyway? You can still catch a bullet.”
Athena heaved to her feet; the owl on her shoulder gave a shudder. She glanced sidelong at it and whispered, “Rest now, little one. And be well.” It blinked and ruffled itself, then flew off into the black to disappear into its cactus. She held her hand out. Hermes took it, and she pulled him up.
She looked back. He lingered on the edge, looking guilty or anxious, she couldn’t tell which. Then he shrugged and carefully put his feet down until he was by her side.
“At least she’ll know we’re coming,” he said.
“We should be getting there soon. The sun’s coming up. What do you think she’ll say? Do you think she can hear us? Where are her ears?”
Athena walked on in silence. After six hours of traveling on the skin, it didn’t feel any less unnatural beneath her boot heels. She wished Hermes would shut up. But he was nervous, and when he was nervous, his tongue moved as quickly as his wings used to.
“You’re lucky I’m stretched flat.” Demeter’s voice was a rasp, thin as the wind that raced across her leathered body. “If I had any decent lung left, I would’ve sucked in your bird and you’d never have found me.”
Athena scanned the skin beneath them. Hermes had zipped to her side and was doing the same.
“We’d have found you eventually, Mother of the Earth,” she said. “We would have just had to put more boot prints into your hide first.”
Demeter laughed, and when she did there was more air to it, more force. Athena wondered briefly if the goddess wasn’t sandbagging, and the pun almost made her snort. But the idea that Demeter was stronger than she seemed, that the skin could snap over the top of them at any moment, trapping them like a great bat’s wing, kept her quiet. She and Hermes both carried small pocketknives, but she didn’t want to think about what it would take to slice their way out should Demeter decide to try and keep them.
“Sit, children,” Demeter said.
Hermes did so immediately. The walk had been long, and his gray t-shirt was black with sweat. But after only a few seconds, he stood back up and looked at Athena with an odd expression.
She paid him no mind. She was still looking for the mouth, an eye, anything. Had all of Demeter’s features been spread out as she was stretched?
“How did you come to be this way?” Athena asked, stepping slowly toward the sound of shallow breathing.
“I am used as the earth is used,” Demeter replied. “Pulled thin across the land and consumed. Sucked dry, bleached white. And so I have been laid thin for decades. For centuries.”
“Why didn’t you seek us out for help?” Athena asked. She saw what looked like a ragged wrinkle in the skin, like an elephant’s kneecap. And then it opened, revealing a glassy, dark eye, which swiveled sickly toward her and fixed her with a sharpened pupil.
“We are not all like you, Gray Eyes,” Demeter whispered. “Goddess of battle, fighting through the millennium. Unable even now to lie down and accept your fate.”
Hermes walked to the eye and peered down at it. “We’re
