Mortal Gods

“I don’t want to take that hope away from you,” said Hermes. “And I’ll admit, she seems pretty sure. Just in case, though … I don’t know how long I want to do this.”

“Do what?”

“This.” He kept his voice cheerful and gestured around to the trees and sky. “I mean, it’s scenic and everything. A once-in-a-millennium commune with nature. But that’s about how often I’d like to keep it. Even if I weren’t thin as a sack of sticks, I’m not cut out for all this … labor.”

Odysseus grinned. “Got someplace else you’d rather be? Leading a caravan of glitterati across the cities of Europe, maybe?”

Hermes lowered his eyes. “You have to admit, there are things … that one would wish to do once … or several more times, before dying.”

“Like what?” Odysseus asked softly. Hermes looked so tired. Let him daydream for a while. Let him out of the sweltering trees, and into someplace bright, and gilded, and marble.

“Like walking midday through the Piazza della Signoria. Like spending hours on a winter bridge over the Seine. Eating a meal that doesn’t show up at my door in a cardboard box.” He laughed. “And other things, too. It would be nice to feel things.” He cocked his eyebrow. “Like one last, sweaty fling with a beautiful boy. Under a canopy of stars, perhaps? In the Taman Negara rain forest?”

Odysseus’ eyes widened. “Believe me, mate. If boys were my fancy, I would be the luckiest bloke on earth.”

Hermes waved him off. “Straight or gay, I’m irresistible. We both know why you and I won’t be tumbling through the leaves. It’s the same reason that we’re here, in the middle of a sweltering, rotten jungle. The same reason I won’t see the piazza ever again.”

“What’s that?” Odysseus asked, even though he knew.

“We both love my sister.”

6

CIVILIAN RELATIONS

Andie and Cassandra cut a slow, straight, limping path through the crowded halls on the way to Algebra. Faster students edged around them like rocks in a stream, grumbling as they passed. But Andie could go no faster. She’d trained with Athena almost every day for a week. There wasn’t much left of her besides a patchwork of bruises, held tenuously together by frayed muscles.

“I play hockey year round,” Andie said. “Dry land practice, calisthenics, three ice practices a day during summer camp. And I’ve never felt this much like shit.”

“It’s because they’re muscles you don’t normally use.” Cassandra shifted their books in her arms as a frustrated freshman pushed by and knocked them loose.

“Muscles I don’t normally use,” Andie repeated. “Yeah. For like two thousand years.”

“You’re overdoing it. She’s going to injure you.”

“She knows what she’s doing.”

Cassandra narrowed her eyes. Athena probably did know what she was doing. But that didn’t mean she had any consideration for Andie’s well-being while doing it.

“Look at you,” she said. “Look how you’re walking. You’re like the Tin Man after a good bout of weeping.”

“Jerk,” Andie said. “She has a plan, okay? And I think that plan is to use up my body’s entire reserve of lactic acid.”

Cassandra sighed. “Brace yourself. Here come the stairs.”

“I want to take the ramp.”

“We don’t have time to take the ramp.” She let Andie put a hand on her shoulder like an old woman and listened to her bitch and moan her way up the first flight.

“You could take the heat off me, you know, if you’d let her train you, too.”

“Not a chance.”

“It wouldn’t even be hard for you,” said Andie. “You have all your memories already. It would be like riding a bike. It would all come back.”

Cassandra shook her head. There was still another long flight of stairs to go, and then two long hallways to the classroom.

“You and I had very different past lives, Andie. You were an Amazon married to a warrior. I was a crazy princess they locked in a basket.”

“You mean you don’t remember anything useful? You can’t shoot an arrow, or drive a chariot?”

Cassandra’s memories of Troy sat in the back of her mind like something she’d done in childhood rather than thousands of years ago. She didn’t like to think about it. Not only because of how it ended, in blood and despair. But because it felt normal to think about it, when it should’ve felt strange.