“We have to stick together now, brother.”
Cassandra watched Hermes slowly sink back into himself, into his prominent bones and hollow cheeks. The light that had briefly flickered went out.
“This wasn’t your failure,” Athena said. “It wasn’t the way you hid them, or how fast you ran.”
“Right,” Hermes muttered.
The TV beside them was still on, and Athena struck the button with the side of her hand, hard enough to knock it back against the wall. In her frustration, she seemed to swell three sizes, and the space in the motel room grew small.
Hermes glanced at Cassandra.
“What use is she? If she doesn’t even give us time? What use are visions that you can’t change?”
Athena peered at her. “Do you feel any different now? Now that you remember your old life?”
“No.” Cassandra thought a moment. “The vision was a little strange, but they’ve been evolving since … I guess since you started looking for me. But I don’t feel any different.”
“Useless,” Hermes muttered.
“Hey,” said Aidan. “She’d be more than happy to be useless. Why don’t you face Hera and tell her so? Then you can leave us alone.”
Voices broke out, the voices of gods, and they forgot themselves. The sound of their argument rose over everything else. It thundered through walls and rang out across the nearly empty parking lot. Odysseus couldn’t do anything to shut them up, but he did try, with an elbow in each of their chests.
Cassandra and Athena looked at each other. The time for bargaining had come and gone. So had the time for laying blame.
“Quiet,” said Athena, and the room fell silent. Cassandra stared into the flowered wallpaper. Outside, the city of Kincade went about its business in cars and shops. Meals were made and eaten. TVs played too loud. Lights turned on and off. Just like every other Kincade evening.
This was her life. Her city. And they meant it to be their battleground, just like it was before.
“What good will running do?” Athena asked. “How far can we go before Hera burns up all the land behind us? We’d never be safe.” She looked at Cassandra. “They’d never be safe. We’d run until Hermes’ body eats itself from the inside out and I’m too stuffed with feathers to breathe. Our fall would be pathetic. Unworthy of an epithet.”
“So what?” Hermes shrugged. “Let it be. After we’re dead, it won’t matter anyway.”
“You don’t mean that,” Athena said softly. “And besides, what about them?” She nodded toward Cassandra and looked at the door. Cassandra edged into her view, like she could shield Andie and Henry from her thoughts, but Athena had already looked back at her brothers. “Will you let them try to stop Hera on their own?” No one had an answer. They stared at their feet.
“If you want to know the truth, giving up would be easy. As easy and comfortable as falling into a bed. Stopping these feathers … Saving my life doesn’t seem any more possible than it is important.”
“If it’s not important,” Cassandra said, “if you don’t care, then why are you here? What are you doing?”
Athena looked at her, and for the first time Cassandra saw less a goddess and more a girl. A girl who had fought a hard battle and still come up cornered. Athena smiled, a small smile, through closed lips.
“There isn’t much to me anymore that isn’t push me and I push back. There hasn’t been for a long time. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but there it is. And besides, I can’t do nothing, when they stand here looking, waiting for me to say what to do.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“We have to make a stand,” she said.
“What? Here?” Hermes sounded horrified.
“Kincade is as good a place as any for the world to end.”
Hermes shook his head. “It most certainly is not. Kincade is a place of unclean motel rooms and a mall that’s several dozen stores too small. I vote with Apollo. Running. Running I’m good at. We could run halfway around the world, to places worth seeing once more before dying: London, Paris, Florence. Maybe all the way to fricking Delphi.”
“More than that,” Aidan said. “Kincade isn’t the best place to face an enemy. It’s settled into a valley in foothills. Not exactly the high ground. You should know that. You should seek advantage.”
Cassandra swallowed. He talked so casually of war and strategy.
“Putting it off will only make us weaker.” Athena looked at Cassandra. “And I think she’s the only advantage we’re going to get.”
“What is it that you think I am?” Cassandra asked.
“You’re a weapon.”
Hermes crossed his arms.
“But what sort of weapon? An amped-up prophetess? What use is someone who tells you the boat is sinking when you’re already bailing it out?”
“I don’t know, Hermes. But Hera is afraid we’ll use her. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t go to so much trouble. I thought, maybe, after I made you remember…” She shook her head. “All I know for sure is she’s a link to the Moirae.”
“The Moirae? You mean the Fates?” Cassandra looked at Aidan. “Is that what my visions are? A link to Fate?”
Aidan shrugged. “It’s what we’ve always thought. But the Fates don’t talk to us.”
“Except through me.”
No one responded. They’d already moved past it to the matter at hand, thinking of strategies and contingencies, and not one of them looked like they expected to win.
“I suppose I should watch the waterways,” said Hermes. “Maybe check the river. That’s where Poseidon would come from. Or Nereids, if he sends them on ahead.”
Athena nodded like she was relieved. “I half expected you to refuse, or to go spend one last season in Paris or Rome.”
“Nah. I’ll stay.” When he breathed, the skin over his ribs stretched and the bone of his sternum was visible. “I wouldn’t have been able to run for that much longer anyway.”
Athena put a hand on Hermes’ shoulder. Cassandra watched the bones and tendons shift underneath his shirt. Most of the muscle had been eaten away.
Athena squeezed. “Not everything’s hopeless. If we throw Hera down, you might heal and grow strong again. I might escape this cage of feathers.” She looked at Aidan.
“I don’t think so.” He moved nearer to Cassandra. “If we stay here, and fight her … You saw what she did to those witches in Chicago. Do you even know what she wants? Is she trying to kill her or trying to use her?”
“Does it matter?” Athena asked, and glanced at Cassandra. Cassandra didn’t reply, but had to admit that one didn’t seem more desirable than the other.
“If we stay here, she could level this place.”
“If you leave, she might level it anyway, looking for you.”
Level it. Cassandra held her breath. Her hometown. The house she grew up in, and her family inside it. Everything up until then she’d managed to swallow, even the idea that she was once again just a tool, a toy for immortals to play with. The longer she looked at Athena, the more she disliked her. That reasonable face. That voice, so steady and unruffled. For her, leading battles was a matter of course. Never mind that innocent people would die. Never mind that a whole town might get caught in their stupid cross fire.
She thought of the freshman with the mop of brown hair who had watched her call the coin. She thought of Sam, unsinkable in his stocking cap, and sweet, sort of slutty Megan in her Bo Peep costume. Every one of them had lives, and plans, going on that very minute. And none of them had any idea it was days away from being ruined. That the gods’ mess was going to ruin it all.
“We can’t do this. Not here.” She looked at Aidan. “Our friends are here.”
“It’ll come to this eventually,” Athena said. “You know I’m right. We live or they do.”
“We live or they do,” Cassandra said. “Us or them. But it isn’t us that you mean. It’s you. Just you, and
