Project Pandora

by Aden Polydoros

  At a stoplight, his right hand crept off the handlebar and strayed to his left arm, where the infusion pump had left a throbbing knot of a bruise. The veins on his left arm were in better condition than those on his right, which were eroded from his early years with Dimitri, when he had been cannulated almost constantly.

  At one point during his first year at the Georgetown safe house, he’d even had an IV port inserted beneath his skin for ease of access. That had worked for a while, until he had developed a tendency to claw at the implantation site. The port had been removed, with a faint scar below his collarbone being the only proof of its existence.

  Even now, he loathed the thought of having a foreign object inside him, whether it be a feeding tube, IV, or a hypodermic needle. Sometimes, he hated it so much he felt like he was going to explode. Just having his blood drawn was an almost unbearable aggravation. As for the semiannual dentist visits that Dimitri forced him to endure, being sedated was the only thing that kept Hades from biting the dentist’s fingers off.

  The traffic light turned green, and he sped forward again. He enjoyed the sensation of the icy rain dripping down his neck and into his shirt. It was a good feeling, so different from the pervading warmth of the sensory deprivation tank. Instead of eroding his physical boundaries, the frigid chill reinforced them somehow, making him hyperaware of where his skin ended and the external world began.

  Fifteen minutes later, he pulled up in front of Artemis’s house and parked along the curb. Although he locked the steering column out of habit, he just set his helmet on the top case. He didn’t plan on being there long.

  As Hades walked to the front door, he thought he saw one of the curtains shift. It didn’t worry him. As long as he used the passphrase, Artemis would be as easily manipulated as clay. All he had to do was talk to her.

  And if by chance she had broken her programming, it was nothing that a bullet couldn’t fix.

  He rang the doorbell and waited. Although someone was clearly at home, nobody answered. He waited another thirty seconds before giving the button a second jab.

  He heard footsteps and a murmured voice. The lock clicked, the security chain was disengaged with a soft clatter, and the door opened a crack.

  The girl on the other side of the door wore no makeup and had her auburn hair all messy and half braided, but it was Artemis all right. Her eyes were swollen and red as if she had been crying, and they narrowed at the sight of him.

  Hades wondered if she remembered him from the subway. He would have to tell her that her flowers suggestion was spot-on and thank her for the good advice.

  “Hello, Shannon,” he said, smiling. “You were right. She loved the flowers.”

  She stared at him, speechless. Her gaze darted quickly to her right, to something beyond his field of vision. He wondered if her parents had returned home. Not like that would complicate things.

  He decided to cut the courtesies and get straight down to business. “Olympus is rising.”

  Her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open. Then, as though recovering from a shock, she stammered, “Pandora’s box is opening.”

  “Can I come in?”

  Again, she looked away from him. Then she nodded and opened the door the rest of the way. With the curtains closed and the lights off, it was darker inside than outside. Even with the frail light that gained entrance with him, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust.

  As she closed the door, someone pressed a gun against his head.

  Case Notes 32:

  Artemis

  “Don’t move,” Tyler said as Shannon engaged the dead bolt. “Hands above your head!”

  “Didn’t you just tell me not to move?” She had expected the boy to act robotically, but instead she was stunned to see the corners of his mouth rise in a cold smile.

  “Hands above your head,” Tyler repeated.

  Slowly, the boy spread his hands and raised them. He interlocked his fingers around the back of his head. Scabs crusted his knuckles. His damp hair streamed over his skin like streaks of ink, and his pupils were heavily dilated as if he were on drugs.

  “Are you armed?” she asked. When the boy didn’t answer, she took the initiative to search him. Like how she’d seen it done in the movies, she patted down his sleeves and shirt, feeling for a holster or sheath. Through his wet jacket, she was aware of the iron hardness of his chest and shoulders. His was the kind of body that was gained only through diligent, if not obsessive, exercise.

  “If you’re looking for a gun, I’ve got one in my pants,” the boy said, low and mocking. “Why don’t you cop a feel?”

  She didn’t have to resort to that. He also had one in a holster nestled against his waist. It was fully loaded, and the ID number had been filed off. In a pouch clipped beside the holster, she found a metal cylinder. A silencer.

  “Who are you?” she asked, taking the gun and silencer. She dropped the latter onto the ground to keep her left hand free.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “You still don’t remember my name?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Shannon circled back around and looked him in the face. His smile had widened to show a flash of white teeth, but his eyes remained as cold as ever. She didn’t know what was going through his head, but she was certain he must be planning something.

  “Answer the question,” Tyler said, cocking his gun. But just by looking at him, she knew he wouldn’t pull the trigger. He extended his arm as though the gun’s close proximity disturbed him. The hand that didn’t hold the gun was tightly fisted at his side. His nails dug into his palm.

  The boy’s smile faded a degree and his eyes narrowed. Anger flashed in them like hellfire. “Hades.”

  “I meant your real name,” she said.

  Hades just chuckled.

  Keeping his eyes on Hades, Tyler said, “Do you have any rope?”

  “Yeah, I’ll get it,” Shannon said. She wasn’t sure about rope but was positive she’d be able to find duct tape in the kitchen cupboards at the very least.

  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t try anything.”

  She didn’t like the thought of turning her back to Hades, but she did it anyway. She hurried to the kitchen, set the gun on the counter, and began throwing open cabinets.

  As she searched, she replayed the last five minutes in her head. The more she thought about Hades, the more uneasy she became. There was something off about him.

  Hades had tried to use the code. He had smiled at her. He had made a joke.

  Just who the hell was he?

  Case Notes 33:

  Persephone

  Drifting at the edge of sleep, Elizabeth returned to the Academy.

  She recalled a dining hall with many rows of tables and a pole from which a pair of handcuffs always hung. Dim halls. The odor of pine-scented cleanser. The rustle of an ancient air conditioner and the groan of floorboards. A bleak place where she was called Subject Nine of Subset A.

  Faces passed through her mind. Stern-faced men. Women who smiled at her and gave her extra treats. A doctor who drew her blood and complimented her on the lightness of her hair, like moonlight or silver. But the person she thought about the most was Subject Two of Subset A.

  A-02. Two. Hades.

  They were the same.

  Back then, he had been like her guardian angel, defending her even at his own expense. But now he had fallen. He had rotted. And it was all because of her.

  Elizabeth remembered how she had spent her evenings with Two in the wildflower glade near the fence, where the alpine forget-me-nots and evening primroses grew in colorful profusions. Several months after he had taken her virginity there, she had unknowingly taken his future.

  On that evening, they had discussed her departure, scheduled for the next morning.

  “No one ever does,” Two had said when she told him that she would come back for him. He gripped her by the arms and leaned in for a kiss. He wasn’t gentle. He
shoved his lips up against hers and kissed her desperately, as if afraid she might disappear at any moment. Even so, she would have liked to linger like that for a moment or two, but by then he was pulling away. Yet he didn’t let go of her, just regarded her.

  The expression on Two’s face had become the same one he wore when handling a gun, whether it was loaded with paintballs or bullets. His mouth was a flat line, features without emotion, eyes as hard as chips of sapphire. “We can run away.”

  Her mouth dropped open, and she shivered in spite of the summer warmth. “That’s…that’s crazy! You’re crazy. We can’t run away!”

  Nobody ran away. Nobody even tried, ever since that one time when a boy in Subset C had made it past the gate. They’d dragged C-07 back and punished him in front of the entire mess hall. The Leader had hit C-07 with a switch until welts rose on his back, and then he had simply disappeared. Rumor had it that you could still hear his screams coming from the windowless brick building near the equipment shed.

  “You won’t come back and you know it,” Two said.

  “Yes, I will!” She tried to pull her hands away from him, but he held tight. He always got too physical and forceful with others when he was upset, like he thought he could dominate the situation with sheer force alone. She had seen the way he had beat up the jealous kids who tried to bully her, but until now she had never actually felt afraid of him. She had always been on the other side of his rage.

  “Bullshit,” Two said, raising her hands to his face. He brought them to his mouth and kissed the backs and then each knuckle, from pinkie to thumb. At first his kisses were hard and demanding. But by the time he reached her second hand, he acted with a kind of sweet, solemn reverence she had never seen in him. When he was done, he kissed her lips for good measure. Gently, with none of his characteristic hunger.

  “I’ve planned it all out,” he said, letting go of her. “I took a gun.”

  “You what?”

  This time, Two chuckled at her shock, as if stealing a gun wasn’t a death sentence. Like it was just another one of his war games, or another lesson, something he could easily dissect and dominate. But it wasn’t. Taking a gun, an actual gun, was just as bad as trying to escape, maybe even worse! And to do both…

  “You need to return it,” she said in a hurried whisper. “You need to bring it back before anyone finds out.”

  “Nobody will find out,” he assured her. While his confidence was usually reassuring, it aggravated her now. He didn’t seem to understand the seriousness of his actions, like he thought it was just a game.

  “Why do you need a gun anyway?” She couldn’t understand why he always jumped to violence. She had seen the way he performed, his brutality in sparring or gun training, but this was different. This meant actual killing.

  And yet isn’t that what he’s been practicing for all along? To kill other people on the battlefield?

  Two ignored her question. “We can do it tonight, even.”

  She shook her head, refusing to budge. “I can’t.”

  She was so close to having a real family. She wasn’t going to risk it all to escape, when she knew that she’d be able to convince her new dad and mom to take him in. Surely they would do it. He was so strong he could be like a bodyguard for her.

  “Just put the gun back,” she said.

  “Nobody even knows I have it, Nine,” he said. “They’ll never know it’s gone.”

  “Forget about this. It’s not worth the risk, Two. Please just return it.”

  “My plan’s foolproof. We’ll be able to get past the fence no problem.”

  She shook her head, dismayed that he wasn’t listening to her. He didn’t seem to hear a word she said. “I just can’t.”

  “You can.”

  You can. Those two words echoed in Elizabeth’s mind as she opened her eyes and stared up at the stuccowork medallion on the ceiling. Days ago, even mere hours ago, she might have thought she was going crazy, imagining events that had never happened. False memories. Now, she knew better.

  She had thought her meeting with Hades had been a coincidence, but now she realized he must have recognized her and intentionally approached her. He really had been stalking her. And yet, that fact didn’t disturb her as much as it would have if he had been anyone else.

  I ruined his life, she thought, blinking tears out of her eyes. I forgot about him for so long, even though I told him I never would.

  The boy she remembered wouldn’t have laughed at the pain of others. Back then, he had been calm and detached during sparring and mock combat, but he hadn’t been sadistic. He had treated the paintball war games with great seriousness, and after being assigned leader of his team, had gone out of his way to ensure that there were no unnecessary “causalties.”

  If he was a monster now, it was only because she had helped make him into one.

  “Two,” she whispered. “Not Hades, Two.”

  Elizabeth could not reconcile the two names, no more than she could call herself Subject Nine of Subset A. Nine and Two were gone. They were figments of the past. Ghosts now.

  If I hadn’t told the Leader, we would be together. None of this would have happened.

  She remembered how she and Two had talked so much about the outside world, known only through lessons and videos. They had dreamed about the day they would finally leave the Academy and be brought into the roles they were born for. He would become a great military leader, and she would become an ambassador or a politician, and they would one day marry each other.

  We were supposed to leave together.

  It wasn’t too late for that, Elizabeth realized. They could still run away. Start a new life for themselves, just the way it was supposed to be. This time, they would choose their own names and futures, instead of being governed by the cruel ambitions of others.

  She could heal him. Two might be gone, but that didn’t mean the boy she knew was dead. A part of him remained inside Hades’s scarred body; she had seen his old warmth during their date and at the dance, and she would be the one to bring him back into the light.

  Now, if only she could get out of these damn cuffs!

  Case Notes 34:

  Apollo

  From the corner of his eye, Tyler watched as Shannon disappeared deeper into the house. He heard the squeak of hinges followed by the echoing crash of a door being slammed shut.

  “Look, we’re both in the same boat here,” he said, directing his full attention back to Hades. “We—”

  “Then put down the gun,” Hades said, meeting his gaze.

  Through a glass, darkly. Tyler couldn’t remember where he had heard the phrase or what it meant, but those were the words that came to mind as he looked into Hades’s eyes.

  It was like staring through a dark, smoky window as blue flames seethed against the glass on the other side. There was hatred in that fire, and anger, too, but also something as dead and charred as the wood the flames subsided on. Something devoured and totally unrecognizable. No longer human.

  “Just who are you?” Tyler asked again.

  “I told you.”

  “Not your real name.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “What do you mean?” Tyler frowned.

  “I. Don’t. Have. One.” Hades spoke each word as its own sentence, and each hit Tyler like a bullet, tearing into him. Not because the words themselves were startling, although they were, but because of the weight they carried—or rather, the lack of substance. Their deadness and emptiness.

  Tyler stared at him. “That’s impossible.”

  “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  “Remember what?”

  Hades didn’t answer. His gaze shifted to the floor, then across the room. Tyler couldn’t tell if Hades was trying to avoid eye contact or just looking for a weapon to use or an escape route.

  Tyler decided to change his approach. It didn’t matter what Hades’s real name was or even why the boy refused to give it to him. It wouldn
’t bring him any closer to figuring out why Hades was here and what he wanted. “Why did you come here?”

  “A new job.”

  “What kind of job?”

  Hades smiled, glancing up at him. “What kind do you think?”

  “Can you stop being so evasive?” he snapped. He knew if this was a movie, now would be when the antihero knocked the stubborn villain over the head. Except he wasn’t the hero or even the antihero; he was as guilty as Hades, perhaps even more so. The anger he felt at the boy’s cool, sardonic comments was misplaced.

  He couldn’t hit Hades, much less pull the trigger. Yeah, maybe he would if his life depended on it, but not like this, not when he was standing in front of someone who was unarmed. Just another kid, who at this very moment must be struggling to escape from himself.

  It made Tyler sick to his stomach.

  “I was sent here to pick up Artemis—”

  “Shannon, you mean?”

  “Right,” Hades said. “Artemis, Shannon, D-05, whatever. We were supposed to do a hit.”

  “Whose?”

  Hades shrugged his shoulders but kept his hands knit together behind his head. His smile was gone, and the expression he wore in its place was unreadable. It was just like his eyes and voice, completely void of emotion, as cold and dead as a body in a morgue locker. “I don’t know the woman’s name.”

  Before Tyler could interrogate him further, Shannon returned with a roll of duct tape.

  “This was all I could find,” she said, setting the gun on the table so she could pull the tape. She picked at the loose end, trying to free it.

  “Hands behind your back,” Tyler said. He’d feel a lot better when he knew Hades couldn’t make a grab for his gun or try anything.

  As Hades lowered his hands, his phone rang.

  For a moment, nobody moved. Then Hades said, “Want me to get that?”

  Shannon looked at Tyler. She rested her hand on the gun. “He’s unarmed.”

  “Put it on speaker,” Tyler said.

  When Hades pulled out the phone, Tyler was unsurprised to see it was the same model as the devices that he and Shannon had used. He was even less surprised when Hades answered the call and Zeus’s voice flooded the room like noxious gas.