Cassandra’s head cocked over her shoulder. “Athena. You’re here.”
“I am.” Athena kept her eyes on the tips of Atropos’ shears. Not even Hermes would be fast enough to snatch Cassandra out of the way from that distance.
“Do you see her? The disease in the middle?”
Atropos hissed. Aside from the bloodred eyes, her face didn’t look diseased at all. It was only below her chest, where her legs had grown into her sisters’. Where her stomach had absorbed Lachesis’ arm all the way to the elbow.
Athena trembled. She was afraid. She stood before the failing, dying gods of her father, and she was afraid.
Zeus rose up to throw down the Titans. I can rise up against the Moirae.
Cassandra leapt forward and Athena screamed. Atropos’ shears took aim for Cassandra’s throat, ready to open her up like a slaughtered pig. Athena’s hand fumbled at her side for a knife: it wasn’t much, no weapon of legend, but in her haste to get to Cassandra, it was all she had.
She ran full force, even as Clotho and Lachesis took hold of Atropos’ arms with surprising strength and jerked them back tight. Athena ran so fast that she and Cassandra struck the Moirae at almost the same time. Hermes would have been proud.
Her knife stabbed into Atropos’ shoulder. Atropos shrieked. Athena shouted, too; her hip had bumped Cassandra and pain sprang sharp from the bone along with a rush of hot blood. Feathers. A mass of them by the feel of it. Pain sent her to the floor.
She looked up. Cassandra had latched on and Atropos was screaming, but not enough. Atropos’ lungs heaved underneath stretched skin, but didn’t shrivel. She didn’t flake away, or turn to dust. She was the Moira of death. She weakened, but she resisted.
“How do I help her?” Athena shouted, and Clotho and Lachesis answered in her mind:
(With the shears. Help her. Help us. With the shears.)
Athena ran in and grappled with Atropos, careful to avoid Cassandra. The edges of the shears sliced into her cheek and made her vision swim, as if the edges were poisoned. But even through the drug of the Moirae she heard Atropos hissing.
(TRAITORS! SISTERS! BETRAYORS!)
Athena chuckled groggily.
“Strong words coming from someone who’s been eating them.”
(DOWN, GODDESS.)
Athena heard the words, and her legs buckled even as her fingers closed around the handles of Atropos’ shears.
“Stay up!” Cassandra shouted, but she didn’t try to pull her. The girl was thinking clear. Both hands stayed on Atropos’ chest. Cassandra’s teeth bared and clenched. Sweat stood on her forehead. She and Atropos traded death back and forth.
(Help us. Cut her out. Help us.)
Athena groaned and forced her legs to stay. She turned the tip of Atropos’ shears inward and sliced. The sound Atropos made was inhuman and terrible. When her sisters’ shears joined her own, it became a wail.
Three sets of razor edges cut through Atropos. Lachesis hacked her own arm free, leaving a gaping red wound across Atropos’ stomach. When they started on her legs, the brutality was too much to bear. Athena and Cassandra stepped back. Clotho and Lachesis cut and cut until one mangled form became three, each bleeding from the hips down.
Clotho and Lachesis lay on their bellies, legs damaged, their faces and arms withered and graying as blood left them. Atropos wavered on her feet, wobbly as a mermaid who’d lost her tail. Blood covered her in a broad skirt.
“Athena! I’ve got the rope!”
The rope dropped and almost at the same time she saw Odysseus’ foot, ready to climb down.
“No!” she shouted. “Thanatos! Don’t let him come!”
“Athena! Don’t you do it,” Odysseus shouted as Thanatos pulled him back up. “Don’t you leave me!”
There was so much love in his voice. He was wrong, what he said on the widow’s walk. She would have been with him as long as she could, if there had been a choice.
“Cassandra!”
“Cassie!”
Andie and Henry up there, too. They were all right. How Athena wanted to see all of their faces again. Just once more. But Atropos wasn’t dead yet.
“Now what?” Athena asked Clotho.
(The shears. She dies by her own shears. The one who kills her will take her place.)
Clotho and Lachesis lay sprawled, clutching their own shears in their hands.
“You heard them,” Cassandra said. “Give them to me.”
“What?”
“Give them to me.” She held her hand out. “It’s what’s supposed to happen.”