Midnight Kingdom

by Amelia Wilde

  It’s false, obviously. There’s a lot happening on the factory floor. Jewelry being made. Diamonds being polished and cut. This is where Hades makes his fortune, but where is it going to go? Worry follows at my heels. Without the trains, all of this is stuck on the mountain. How long can we go without money coming in?

  And what the hell am I going to do about my mother?

  Hades is fine with making this about the fight between him and Zeus, but that’s not really what this is. I can sense it. I can sense my mother’s hand in this the way I used to know when she was about to come home from the greenhouse. A shift in the air. Only this one seems more like the storm that lulled me to sleep last night. I don’t know what I was thinking, following Hades down to that room, but when I woke up again I was back in bed. It could have been a dream.

  There’s no time for dreams now.

  Conor knows where he’s going, at least. We reach the end of the factory and go in a door off to the side of the main entrance to the mines. This is where they live.

  All these people. Here. I thought that most of them went home on the train, but it turns out the people who travel back and forth are a small percentage of the workforce. There are more, hidden away beneath all that rock. I’m a little short of breath at the thought of living so far underground. Do they ever see the sun, or walk on grass?

  The hallway narrows then widens again—wide enough for me and Conor to walk alongside three or four other people, if we wanted. Another hallway crosses in front of us and Conor nudges me to the left.

  Once again, always, I’m taken by surprise.

  It’s not a hallway down here. It’s a village.

  A big, tall village. Like a city street carved out of a cave. That’s exactly what it is, I realize. Three floors, one stacked on top of the other. Balconies out front. People go back and forth between the doors, disappearing into staircases, footsteps bouncing off the walls in a friendly rhythm.

  So. Many. People.

  I want to know all of them.

  Conor wags his tail and I wipe my hands on the front of my dress. When Hades told me to come down here the people seemed like an abstraction, but now I’m seeing families. Mothers, walking with daughters. A dad, hurrying down the street while he waves to a small son.

  The man I saw in the moonlight on that train platform would never have done this. But he already had done this. It was in progress before he brought me home. And it’s only now that he’s mentioned it. That he let me see.

  This, of all things, is an enormous risk. The air has gone thin, my pulse jagged, off its regular pattern. I should cover my eyes. I shouldn’t see this. It’s too much.

  I think of that tower falling, the fool at the center of it.

  Because that’s what it means, to know someone like this. I can’t wrap my mind around it. It’s like holding a beating heart in my hands, and my hands aren’t big enough.

  “That’s bullshit.” A guy coming down the side of the street misses a step then keeps going. But I’m right. It is bullshit for me to think that Hades, of all people, would have sent me somewhere he didn’t want me to go. It’s dangerous to stand inside someone’s living soul. I’m going to do it anyway.

  I’m not my mother’s daughter anymore.

  Or I’m really my mother’s daughter, and she’d burn down the world to get what she wanted.

  Either way. Conor’s getting impatient so I go down the street. Hades didn’t give me much of a plan. Knocking on doors doesn’t seem very queenlike. I pass by a tiny café, set back under an awning, and—he was hiding this entire place. It’s not just housing. It’s places to eat and places to buy clothes. An honest-to-God jewelry store.

  All those rumors about the mountain being worse than hell, and it’s just...an economy. Like the ones we learned about in school. Smaller than a country, obviously, but...it’s just people. Living here. Because they want to live here. A man comes out of a house up ahead and when he comes level with me I notice his eyes—too black for the gentle light that comes from inset lights in the ceiling.

  Someone sniffles on the side of the street, and Conor stops, leaning out toward the noise.

  A girl—a little blonde girl in a blue dress, a matching bow in her hair. She can’t be more than five, and when she sees me looking her eyes go wide.

  I look up and down the street. It’s not like she’s going to get hit by a car, but she’s alone, and nobody seems like they’re watching her. Conor and I cross to her and I kneel down to her level. “Hi.” How do you even talk to small children? I have no idea. My life is one surprise test after another. “My name is Persephone, and I live here in the mountain, too. Are you lost?”

  She sniffles again, and my heart breaks for her. This girl is adorable. It’s unreal, how cute she is. If I’d known that people like her were living down here, I’d have killed Zeus myself. Or I would have tried.

  “I’ve never seen you before.” She swipes her hand over her eyes.

  “I live on another floor.” That’s accurate. “What’s your name?”

  “Jill,” she answers, and her lip quivers. “I don’t know where my mom is.”

  I fight back an awkwardness so intense that I want to run back to Hades and demand to know what he was thinking. Obviously, I can’t abandon a girl here alone. “Um. Is she...at work, maybe?”

  “At home. I came down because my ball rolled across to the other side.” Jill opens one hand and shows me a pink ball the size of an egg. “And now I can’t find her.”

  “We’ll find her together.” I offer her my hand and she takes it, and now I am knocking on doors. What else is there to do? The second door opens on a man who tells me that Jill’s mom lives five doors down. In a place like this, a ball could roll pretty far before it stopped.

  It turns out that Jill’s mom isn’t at home. We knock on the door at the same time the next one opens, and two women come out into the hall, faces set. They’re on a mission. One of them, with the same blonde hair as Jill, drops to her knees and pulls her close. The other gives me a quick wave and disappears back behind the door. “Jilly Bean, where did you go?” The woman looks up at me and startles. “You’re—I’m sorry.”

  She’s nervous. About me.

  She stands up and sticks out her hand to chase. “I’m nobody, really, and you’re Persephone. Thanks for bringing my daughter back.”

  “You’re not nobody. I came to talk to you, actually.”

  She frowns and pushes Jill slightly behind her. “About what?”

  “About whether you’re okay,” I say quickly. “About whether you need anything. Food. Medical—you know, assistance.”

  Her gaze darts up and down the hall then comes back to mine. “I know he was here. Zeus. It wasn’t for any of us, was it?”

  “No. Of course not. Why would he be here for you?” Mortifying. I’m supposed to know these answers already. “You work here, don’t you? So Zeus would have nothing to do with that.”

  She leans closer. “I used to work for the man.” Her eyes search mine. “You know what he does for a living. You’re with Hades, so you know.”

  My mouth goes dry. “I do know.” Zeus, for all his fancy things and nice parties, is as much of a threat as his brother. “I’ve been there.”

  “I don’t want to go back there.” The edge in her voice tells me exactly how much she doesn’t. “I don’t want to do that kind of work anymore.”

  “Really?” I put a hand to my forehead. “I’m sorry—that’s not something to ask. I only meant...”

  “I’d rather work here. I didn’t have a job when I came here. Blacklisted, because of Zeus.” A dark flash in her eyes. “Hades let me sign a contract. Now I set stones into the bigger pieces he produces. We’re both safe here.”

  For now, I think, as we exchange quick good-byes, the conversation coming to an abrupt end. The woman is gone, with her daughter, before I can ask for her name.

  9

  Hades

  There is a small balcony, more of a
n outcropping, near the lookout. There’s nothing between it and the sea, and the salt spray occasionally gets carried up here on the wind and hits me in the face. Every time it does, Conor barks at the window. He’s going to keep that water in its place, everything else be damned.

  It’s been a week.

  It’s cold as fuck, and the food is running out.

  Persephone came back from the mines a week ago wearing a strange expression. For once, she didn’t ask any questions. Instead she pulled her dress over her head and let it fall to the carpet. There was little discussion after that.

  Maybe there should have been some more discussion.

  Poseidon laughs when he’s at sea. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs, like the crazy motherfucker that he is. I’m certain it won’t extend to the land. I know it.

  “I didn’t think I’d find you out here.” Persephone comes out on the balcony, one of my coats around her shoulders. Good girl. She’s phrased it so carefully. Three nights ago she learned an important lesson about pity and scolding. Sadly, I don’t think she learned it well enough. She gets too much pleasure out of pain. “The sun is still up.” Conor nudges my leg like he agrees. The two of them are apparently co-conspirators now.

  “It’s setting.” I curl a hand around her shoulders and push it beneath the coat, finding her nipples already peaked. What has this filthy thing been thinking about? She was probably wondering just how much she could ask me without earning herself another punishment. And then, because all this business with Zeus has made her a hundred times more desperate for me and a hundred times more ashamed about it, she thought about how she could tempt me to come inside and shut the door on the world with her. I pinch one of her nipples, hard, and she makes a little noise at the back of her throat that’s essentially a call for me to shut down the entire mountain and spend the rest of my life in bed with her. “You’ve been so good, Persephone. Don’t fuck it up.”

  She presses herself against me at the warning, which—fuck. I’m not even going to be able to watch Poseidon’s ship come in if she keeps this up.

  The ship is still a shadow out on the sea, getting closer with every second. Persephone shades her eyes to look for it. “He’s bringing everything, right?”

  “Fresh produce. Meat. Medicine. Everything.”

  I can feel her uncertainty in the way she stands. “That’s a good thing. Isn’t it?”

  “You don’t know my brother.”

  “I didn’t know you had another brother,” she says, shivering. The wind off the sea is a cutting cold. “But I know you.”

  “Knowing me doesn’t tell you anything about him.” I don’t want it to tell her anything about Poseidon. I hate him as much as I’ve ever hated Zeus and Demeter. Maybe more. He’s the wild card, the literal fucking pirate with too much money and not enough to lose. Zeus calculates the odds. Poseidon takes being outnumbered as a delightful challenge. “I don’t want him on the mountain. I only want what he’s bringing.”

  It’s for this reason that the dock—of course I own a fucking dock, I’m not stupid enough to cut myself off completely from the water—is built with plenty of space between it and the mountain. It’ll be a long, frigid walk before Poseidon can get inside.

  I keep my face angled away from the sun as much as I can, but it’s too much without Demeter’s pills. Still. I want to see this. I want to know exactly when that ship makes landfall, which it does about ten minutes later. It is not, as I suspected, an oil tanker. He’s moved to a smaller ship. It’s still fucking enormous, probably some ex-military castoff. Or, knowing Poseidon, not even a castoff. He either stole it or he paid for it on some illicit seafaring black market.

  I should feel better when it pulls in at the dock and stops. It means we’ll have food. It means my workers won’t starve. But it also means that Poseidon will be here. Those are part of the terms. He can stay while we’re under our agreement.

  And there are things I haven’t told Persephone.

  “Let’s go in.” Her teeth chatter now, loud enough to hear. “I’m freezing.”

  The moment slips away and I don’t get it back.

  It’s almost an hour later when Poseidon meets us in what’s meant to look like a den on the main floor of the mountain. It’s nowhere near my private rooms, it just looks like it is. While I’m standing here with Persephone, waiting to play host, Oliver’s got people in every corridor, making sure nobody from Poseidon’s ship gets any brilliant ideas. Conor sticks tight to my feet, standing so close I had to move him off my shoes several minutes ago. I can’t think of another time something of this scale happened on the mountain while Conor was with me. I don’t think it ever has. It’s a tectonic shift, something on the scale of the earth’s layers, and I can tell he feels uneasy about it. Don’t we fucking all. I test out my knee and the bruise at my ribs out of a new habit. I fucking hate new habits. I should be able to discard them soon enough. But I won’t ever be able to discard Persephone, or this simmering tension with Zeus. That will have to be ended through violence or a contract of some kind to replace the old one.

  But before we can do any of that, we have to stop bodies from piling up in my corridors from a lack of food. The people in the mines told Persephone they were fine, they can make it weeks and weeks on what they have, but fights will break out before then, and we’ll lose more people that way.

  I hear him coming before he reaches the door. Persephone does, too. “I think I should go upstairs,” she whispers.

  “You can’t provoke me now.” I put my hands in my pockets and force myself into an easy stance. “You’ll greet our guest with me.”

  “But what if he thinks—”

  She never finishes the question because Poseidon bursts in with a fist to the door, hitting it with enough force to splinter the wood. It holds, because I built this place, but any other door would be off its hinges.

  Compared to Zeus, Poseidon is a giant. He’s all muscle and suit and glittering eyes. Oliver comes in behind him and a knot of tension in my gut releases. Poseidon looks me up and down, his eyes narrowing when he looks at Persephone. “I brought all that for you, and you didn’t bring me any women?”

  “If you want women, you should ask Zeus.”

  Poseidon rolls his eyes. “Can’t very well do that. It wouldn’t be honorable.”

  “Nothing you’ve ever done has been honorable.”

  He laughs, but I can’t relax at all and I don’t fucking want to. Zeus isn’t the only one I fought with in that house. Poseidon is slower, but he’s also bigger, and sometimes he gets a blank look on his face that better translates to run. Now he looks mildly suspicious, eyes traveling slowly over everything in the room. There’s nothing particularly threatening here. A collection of furniture made to look like wood but reinforced with steel so they’re harder to break. A bar, tucked into one end of the room, fully stocked. I had the glass bottles replaced with some that are made to shatter into dull edges. If Persephone knew all that, she would ask me why I would take such measures in a den that we barely use. Persephone never met my father.

  Poseidon considers all this. There’s no way for him to know about anything I’ve done here, but perhaps he senses it. In his younger days he would have torn a place like this apart just to test the theory.

  I wait it out.

  That is a skill learned in my father’s house, though it was only successful part of the time. One thing I will never admit out loud—not to anyone—is that the man has caught me in a permanent trap, even after we sent him to the underworld. He’s made us all inadequate in one way or another. I don’t want to see Zeus or Demeter or Poseidon. I’d prefer to forget their faces and everything that came with it. Such twisted games we play. I idly wonder if it bothers them to see me. Demeter, definitely, though she’s managed to keep her distance all this time. She has, after all, broken our contract. And she knows what I do to people who break contracts.

  Poseidon huffs a breath and his shoulders move down an inch. It’s obvi
ous he’s dressed for the occasion but he’d rather be in sea clothes on the deck of some ship fighting for its life. I’ll never understand it. But when he steps forward and puts out a hand, I shake it without crushing it. Cold, like he’s recently been out on the deck.

  “I didn’t want to come,” he says. “But here I fucking am.”

  “Yes.” We’re still pretending to be civil. “Poseidon, this is Persephone. Persephone, meet my brother.”

  He does not put out his hand to her. Instead, he sweeps his eyes over her like he’s just now noticing that she’s there. “About that. What the fuck is Demeter’s daughter doing at our meeting?”

  10

  Persephone

  He really just said that.

  I want to step behind Hades and hide, but there’s not a chance in the world I’d embarrass him like that. It’s just that Poseidon said it with such scorn and suspicion. About me. During our introduction. This is not getting off to a great start. My cheeks heat with shame. Was there something I did? A look I gave him? I don’t know. What do people normally do when an enormous muscled man who is clearly not meant for nice suits comes into a room and looks it over like he’s deciding which things to loot?

  Hades's eyes narrow a fraction of an inch, but otherwise he makes no move toward me. That must mean that this is all right. That I’m not in any actual danger from Poseidon, though it feels like it. It feels like he’s brought the whole sea into the room with him and it’s slowly rising from my ankles to my shins to my knees and soon we’ll drown in an angry storm.

  All that from a man in a suit.