Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  You took him from me, Lore thought, letting her pain feed the explosion of hatred building in her mind. You’re not going to touch him.

  “He might not be—” Iro pressed a hand to the blood streaming down her face, spitting a wad of it from her mouth. “You are not my enemy, Lore!”

  “You’ve made me your enemy!” Lore spun the dory high overhead, allowing Iro to block her strike so she could kick the other girl in the chest. The water saved Iro’s balance, but slowed her advance on Lore.

  She leaned right as Iro thrust forward—Lore tried to stab the sauroter down onto Iro’s foot, but it was almost impossible to see anything beneath the frantic shivering of the water. Rain poured over them. Iro stooped, pulled the knife from the dead hunter’s neck, and threw it. Lore repelled it with the metal body of the dory with enough force to cause a spark.

  The rhythm of the fight set in, and Lore disappeared into the strength of her body, into the past, until she found the little girl who would have clawed the heart out of her opponent to claim victory.

  Then she unleashed her in all of her ferocity. Every agonizing loss, every humiliation, every memory of that suffocating hopelessness raged in her like a tempest.

  Iro finally landed a hit, splitting the skin of Lore’s upper arm as she parried her attempt to shove the head of the spear through Iro’s chest.

  She deserves to die, Lore thought viciously. They all do.

  Let her become the monster who haunted their legends. Her kleos would be glorious infamy.

  Lore feinted a low hit to Iro’s stomach to skim her hand beneath the water in order to pull up the knife again. The whites of Iro’s eyes flashed as Lore stabbed it through the girl’s thigh and flipped the dory to bring the sauroter to Iro’s throat.

  Athena’s form appeared at the edge of the pond, not far from where the bodies of the other Odysseides were now scattered.

  Iro was struggling to back away with her wounded leg, looking for a quick escape. Blood ran down her face. Lore had the distant thought that Iro’s wound could be a twin to the scar the Odysseides’ archon had given her the night of his death.

  Lore stalked toward her again. The wound wouldn’t have a chance to scar.

  Iro held out a dory to ward her off, struggling to stand to her full height.

  The weapon began to turn a molten red. Heat seemed to radiate from its tip, turning the rain around them to steam. Iro stared down at it as the heat spread, the steel becoming soft in her grip. She flung the weapon away into the water before it could singe her hand.

  Lore turned.

  Castor rose slowly from the water, his face expressionless, his eyes burning gold.

  THE AIR SHIMMERED AROUND Castor, alive with power.

  As the dory slipped from Lore’s fingers, she lost all sensation in her body.

  Not real. This was . . . It was impossible.

  She had watched him die. Her gaze dropped to his chest, to the place the arrow had pierced his heart. Beneath the bloodstained tear in his shirt was new, unmarred skin where the wound should have been. Which meant . . .

  The light and power around Castor intensified. He took in the sight of the dead hunter, then Iro.

  “Leave,” he told her.

  “What—is—this,” Iro gasped. “Who are you? You were . . .”

  “Leave,” Castor thundered.

  This time, Iro had the sense to run. She struggled through the rain and water, clutching her wounded leg. Castor paid no attention to her, but looked again at the body of the hunter.

  “Did you do this?” he asked softly.

  Lore’s jaw clenched painfully at the distress in his voice. “Yes. And I would do it again.”

  His eyes closed and slowly opened again, as if waking from a dream.

  “It doesn’t matter what happens to me—you can’t do this to yourself.”

  The brief joy she’d felt turned to ashes in her mouth. How dare he—how dare he pass judgment on her like this, like they were children again and she didn’t know right from wrong?

  “I can do whatever I want,” Lore said coldly.

  “But you’re not,” he said. “I don’t believe this is really what you want—to kill people, to be a hunter.”

  “I make my own choices,” she said. “You’re the only one who won’t play by the same rules as everyone else. It’s not complicity. It’s survival.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “Do you hear what you’re saying? Do you think this is what your parents would want—for you to lose yourself avenging them?”

  “Don’t you dare use them as a weapon against me!” Lore snarled.

  Whatever Castor would have said next vanished as Athena stormed toward them.

  “What are you, imposter?” Athena demanded. “You are not mortal, which means you are no god. What are you?”

  “I’m . . .” Castor looked down at his hands, tendrils of power still wrapped around them like golden rings, then touched the place the arrow had passed through him.

  Artemis had asked the same question. What are you?

  “How do you live?” Athena demanded. “What are you keeping from us?”

  “Nothing,” he said, looking to Lore. “I can’t explain this—I don’t remember what happened that day—”

  “What do you know about the Agon that we do not?” Athena continued. “I do not believe that you remember nothing. If you are immortal these seven days, you have learned something—done something—and you have withheld it from us, your allies.”

  “I don’t—” Castor’s voice was low, rough. “I don’t remember. There was pain, and then darkness—and then I woke up.”

  “You lie,” Athena told him. “You are here, but not part of the hunt. Not truly. Tell me what you are. My sister was correct—your power feels different, somehow. It always has—it flows through you, but is not born of you.”

  Lore turned to her in shock. “What does that mean?”

  The goddess only stared at Castor until, finally, Lore looked back toward him, too. Her pulse spiked and she suddenly felt like she was drowning in the air as one clear voice emerged.

  None of this is real.

  “Your lost memory is a convenient lie to cover the truth of how a god might escape the hunt,” Athena said. “Is that why you did not present yourself in physical form these last seven years? Were you even in this realm at all?”

  None of this is real.

  Not Gil, not her life here, not even Castor and the shelter his familiar presence had given her heart.

  Castor didn’t acknowledge the goddess, but tried to catch Lore’s gaze again. “You don’t believe me.”

  Lore couldn’t be caught in another god’s deception. She couldn’t surrender to becoming a game piece moved against her will. But this was Castor.

  Wasn’t it?

  “We are just trying to figure out what’s going on,” Lore said.

  He watched Lore, his devastation clear.

  “We,” he repeated.

  Lore replayed her own words in her mind. Athena’s presence was steadying behind her. It bolstered her, giving her one last bit of strength to keep from unraveling.

  “We,” she confirmed.

  She and Athena would do whatever was necessary, whatever was justified, until the last breath left Wrath’s mortal body.

  Castor had never wanted to help them see this plan through. If he truly didn’t know how he ascended and that he couldn’t die . . . If he truly had no ulterior motives for working with them . . . Lore needed him to prove himself to her now. It would be her last offer: join us, or leave.

  With one last look at her, he turned and walked away.

  He crossed through the water, his head down and shoulders hunched. Panic seized Lore at the sight of him growing smaller and smaller and the rain engulfing him.

  Lore took a step forward, but Athena lowered an arm, blocking her. The sound of emergency sirens blared toward them, growing in intensity and pitch as they neared.

  “He is not
needed,” the goddess said. “We were chosen for this, you and I.”

  Lore’s body felt wooden as they climbed the stairs toward the quiet of Morningside Heights. As they reached the lookout point, however, Athena suddenly pivoted back toward the park, her face strained with concentration. She studied the red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles as they appeared below, racing down the street.

  “We need to go,” Lore said.

  Athena held out a hand to silence her.

  A tremor moved through the ground like a serpent through sand. The vibration raced up Lore’s legs and along her spine, setting every nerve ablaze. Thunder let out a low murmur of displeasure.

  Only, it wasn’t thunder.

  It stormed through the streets with a monster’s roar, overpowering everything in its path as it charged forward with a violence that stole the breath from her lungs.

  Dark water. So much of it—more than Lore had ever seen, rushing, rushing, rushing from the nearby river, tearing through the streets. The ambulances and cop cars along the park disappeared beneath the surging wave, rolled like toys, their lights suddenly gone. The officers and emergency workers ran, but they weren’t fast enough to avoid being carried away.

  And still, the water wasn’t satisfied.

  It rose higher with each passing second, swallowing signs, streetlights, and buildings—drowning the city whole.

  HIGH UP FROM THE lookout point, Lore watched helplessly as the punishing crush of water broke through brick walls and carried the debris like prizes of war. She heard screaming and started for the stairs. Athena caught her wrist in a steely grip, stopping her.

  “We have to help them!” Lore said, trying to extract herself from Athena’s impossibly strong hold.

  The goddess looked out onto the rising waters, taking in the sight and smell of it churning and churning.

  Lore closed her eyes, but the cataclysmic sounds of the water smashing through windows, the honking and crashing of cars, the small, distant voices begging for help, drilled into her mind until Lore thought she would scream, if just to drown it all out.

  Athena’s face was inscrutable. There was none of the horror Lore felt, or the helplessness. If anything, there was recognition. She had seen bigger, worse floods—floods meant to wipe humans from the face of the earth. Floods meant to begin life on Earth again after the failures of the doomed men of the Silver and Bronze Ages.

  “This can’t just be a storm surge,” Lore choked out. “There’s too much water, and it’s not stopping—this has to be unnatural. And the people who live on lower levels of the buildings and town houses . . .”

  Lore couldn’t bear to finish the thought aloud. None of them would have had time to get out.

  All along Manhattan and the outer boroughs, evacuation zones for hurricanes and other superstorms would be flooding. Manhattan’s natural elevation rose the further inland you were, but the lower-lying waterfronts—the neighborhoods along both rivers—and their southernmost reaches up through Thirty-Fourth Street were prone to flooding.

  If it was this bad here . . .

  All of those people, she thought, desperately.

  Fear sliced through her, stinging her down to her soul. If Van hadn’t gotten Miles far enough away, to higher ground . . .

  Lore pulled out her phone, but there was no service. Shit.

  “This is not the rivers,” Athena said, her face shadowed. “It is a god.”

  “Tidebringer,” Lore whispered.

  The goddess nodded. “Evander of the Achillides was mistaken. The false Poseidon lives, and she is allied with our enemy.”

  Lore let the venom of anger burn in her again at the sight of the dark water pouring through the streets. At the destruction the Agon had brought to her city.

  “You are certain there is no chance the false Ares has found the aegis?” Athena asked again. “As one of the Perseides she would be able to decipher the poem—”

  “No—I mean, I don’t know.” Lore’s fear grew fangs at the idea that she hadn’t been as careful as she thought she had. “It could be worse than that. Even as a god, she could be able to wield the aegis on Wrath’s behalf.”

  And the flood might be only the first phase of Wrath’s plan to win the Agon.

  Lore forced herself to take a deep breath. “I don’t think he has the aegis, at least not yet. We still have time to kill him and end this.”

  Maybe a part of her was beginning to believe in the Fates again, and that there was a pattern to this. One that had always called for her and the goddess to finish this together.

  Lore turned back toward Morningside Heights, her body straining with the need to move. “So we hunt.”

  “So we hunt,” Athena echoed, and followed.

  Lore had always taken a certain comfort in the unseen movement of her city.

  Even when the streets were empty save for a handful of early-morning cabs, she knew they still had a pulse. That there was water rushing through the pipes below. That trains were pulling their empty cars from station to station. Buried power lines hummed a song that only the cement could hear.

  Now the city’s stillness brought a feeling of decay.

  From six stories up, Lore had a clearer view of the flooded city blocks and those New Yorkers brave enough to try to wade through waist-high water. City crews were trying to pump it out of the streets, but the rivers—both the East and Hudson—continued to swell. The stagnant water was so deep in some places that the NYPD and Coast Guard were using boats and helicopters to rescue those people who had become stranded, or to deliver supplies.

  Lore could no longer feel the city’s heartbeat.

  She and Athena had collected scraps of rumors on their slow crawl downtown, braiding them together to create the bigger picture of what the city had become. A historic storm. Mistaken weather predictions. Rising sea levels. A freak convergence of events. Everyone had a different theory.

  Emergency workers and city officials were issuing directions over the radio while cell towers were down. Hospitals were being evacuated first as their backup generators failed one by one. Whole sections of Central Park were being turned into relief camps. Red Cross volunteers, along with the National Guard, tried distributing supplies, but as the hours passed, they were overwhelmed by demand.

  Convenience and grocery stores were being pillaged by desperate city dwellers, and there was nothing anyone could or would do to stop them. Subway tunnels were inaccessible, and no trains could get in or out of the city. Bridges were closed to traffic. A constant buzz of police and news helicopters flew by overhead, crowding the skies.

  New Yorkers were some of the best people in the world, but even Lore recognized they had their limits. The isolation had been instant and devastating.

  This is what Wrath wants, Lore thought. To put the city on edge, to strain its resources.

  She closed her mind and heart off to the flooded streets, the sight of injuries, the sobbing. She closed her heart off to anything but what needed to be done now.

  She and Athena had spent the entirety of the night searching for Wrath’s hunters, continuing into the morning. Around ten o’clock, Lore had spotted a Kadmides lioness near the Empire State Building, recognizing her from the assault on Ithaka House. They had tracked her uptown until she’d disappeared into a small boutique hotel on the Upper East Side. Now they watched the entrance from the roof of the building across the street, waiting for her to finally reemerge.

  “You love this city,” Athena said. “It is your pride.”

  The goddess all but glowed in the midday sun. The brief respite had given them both the opportunity to dry their shoes and clothes, though it was pointless, given they’d be returning to the floodwaters soon enough.

  Lore lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I might have to share it with eight million other people, but it’s always been my least complicated relationship.”

  “Hm.” Athena’s presence was oppressive in more ways than one, but as the last few hours had passed
, something had shifted. She was brimming with eagerness, or maybe just the simple anxiety of knowing that it was Wednesday morning, and they had less than half a week left to finish this.

  “Hold on to what you feel for your home,” Athena told her. “It will never abandon you if you serve it well. It is not so fickle as mortals.”

  Castor’s face rose in her mind. Lore stamped it out before it could linger there long.

  “That’s probably true,” Lore said, finally. She leaned over the edge of the roof, quickly searching the sidewalk below. “Where is this girl?”

  Athena drank the last of her water, tossing the bottle away. Lore sat back on her heels, and, for the first time, began to doubt their plan. They didn’t have time to wait for the lioness to rest or meet with whoever was inside. They needed another lead.

  “What was it that your sister said?” she asked. “That there’s a monster in the river? A killer of both gods and mortals?”

  “I would not spare any great thought to my sister’s words,” Athena said. “She was unwell, and did not know her own mind.”

  There was something about that, though—something Lore couldn’t place.

  “There is still much we do not know,” Athena said. “I feel as if the shards of the truth lie scattered before us. Hermes, the imposter’s desire for the aegis, even the false Apollo.” Her gaze sharpened. “Perhaps he is somehow a true god—or yet another god in disguise—and wished to enter the hunt to ascertain some information?”

  “He’s Castor,” Lore said, more sure of it now than she had been with him standing before her. “Somehow . . . he’s Castor. He knew too much from my past to be anyone else.”

  “Any god would know such things,” Athena said. “They would ingratiate themselves into your life, subtly guiding you onto a path of their choosing, all with you none the wiser. As I said, we appear to you as what you need or desire.”

  “Like Hermes,” Lore said softly. The god had become the one person Lore would have trusted in that moment—a compassionate friend far removed from the world of the Agon. He had played to her fear and anguish.