by Simon Archer
I rolled my eyes at her practicality. “Okay fine, then you can come with Kari and me. Will you be okay with Arges?” I address Hailey with this question, searching for honesty with my eyes.
“If I bring the chariot to him, I can figure it out,” Hailey nodded with confidence.
She left us on the cliff and headed back in the direction of the cyclops. I turned to my two companions and clapped my hands.
“Alright, Kari,” I said, “we’re going to walk this entire property until you remember something.”
“The whole property?” Katlynn said skeptically. “In fifteen minutes?”
“Do you have a better idea?” I growled back at her.
“Nope,” she admitted, with a cheeky smile as she picked up on my desperation and frustration. “Let’s get going.”
We walked around to major parts of the property from the cliffs to the gates. I refused to take her down to the forges just in case she still did want to know where they were. As Kari walked around, she became more and more defeated as she couldn’t remember anything. All the while, the moon continued to rise, counting down our remaining seconds. My questions became more and more clipped, as did her responses. It was clear that the two of us were immensely unhappy with one another, and poor Katlynn just had to suffer through it all, right in the middle.
Our mounting frustration at one another spiked when we ended at the broken cliffside where Phae and I encountered Kari’s clay for the first time when we originally noticed the perimeter breach. Kari claimed to remember the incident with Phae nearly falling off the cliff, but not knowing it was the goddess herself because Kari wasn’t there physically.
“But it was my clay,” she claimed. “I was testing the perimeter and the wards to see how strong they really were.”
I rubbed my temples, no longer bothering to hide my frustration. “How did you even get in here this time around?”
“I hitched a ride on Hailey’s chariot,” Kari said as if this wasn’t the most baffling statement.
“Wait, what?” I said as I reached out and turned her around to face me. “How did you do that?”
“I put some of my clay in the horseshoes of her steeds,” Kari said, her voice changing as she spoke as if she were a student reading off their school paper. It was distant and passive, without a speck of emotion in it. “I just needed to get some of my clay beyond the barriers, and then I can transport to wherever the clay is.”
My stomach sloshed as if I was back on the Argo. I steadied myself, and my grip on her arm tightened, but Kari didn’t flinch. Pieces clicked together in my own mind, and I didn’t want them to. More than anything, I wanted my mind to be barking up the wrong tree.
“And how did your clay get on the horses’ shoes?” I asked with sharp consonants and a clipped tone.
“I remade the shoes the ferrier was working on, passed them off as hers after I killed her,” Kari reported.
The world tilted on its axis, and I fell with it. My body toppled into Kari before I realized what I was doing. Suddenly the pair of us were on the ground, and I lost my mind.
My vision went black as I laid into Kari. She wasn’t my former recruiter, fellow soldier, or even traitor. She suddenly became Sarah’s murderer, and I needed revenge. My fists collided with her head, breaking bone. I felt the warmth of her blood, but I didn’t care as I threw punch after punch against her. I had her pinned beneath my legs and leaned over her, so there was no chance of her fighting back.
I heard my name shouted from somewhere far away, but I ignored it. I refused to listen to the warning and only focused on the murderer beneath me who deserved to die for what she had done.
Suddenly, there was a burning sensation in the crux of my neck that caused me to howl in surprise and pain. I flopped backward, clutching my wound, and consequently, I fell off Kari, releasing her. But the soldier didn’t go anywhere. She nursed her own injuries from her spot on the ground.
We moaned in tandem when Katlynn floated above me, blocking the rest of my vision.
“What the actual fuck, Cameron?” Katlynn shouted in my face, completely appalled. “You can’t just lay into someone like that.”
“She killed Sarah,” I snarled. I sat up and got on all fours, intent on charging her again when Katlynn stepped in my path.
“I know. I heard her, too,” Katlynn assured me. She held out her glowing blue hands threateningly. “But we need her. She is regaining her memories, and that’s going to help us more than her dead body ever will.”
“She killed Sarah,” I cried, my voice weaker this time.
“I didn’t…” Kari said, suddenly interjecting into mine and Katlynn’s conversation. “Oh gods… I didn’t know… I didn’t… Cameron, I’m so sorry.”
Her nose was broken, and blood flowed from it, but she used her undershirt to stop the flow as much as possible. There were already signs of a black eye and a welt on her left temple. Even past all the injuries that I caused her, I could see the guilt on every inch of her face.
It didn’t soften any of my anger, but it did calm my urges to toss her off the cliffside or beat her to a pulp. I pushed myself to my feet and turned my back to the pair of them.
“We need to get back to the chariot,” I announced as I walked away. “The moon’s almost fully risen.”
I couldn’t bear to look at Kari the whole way back to Hailey and Arges. Katlynn tried to talk to me about it or, rather, get me to talk about my feelings, but I kept my mouth closed and my fists at my sides. My knuckles had been ripped open from my onslaught of blows, but I focused on the pain, so I didn’t have to address the pain in my chest.
I had been right about Sarah’s death. She hadn’t committed suicide. Somehow, Kari had come on campus and killed her. While I hadn’t been right about who had done it, I was correct about the suspicious circumstances. Now, more than anything, I wanted to get back to campus so I could finish the helm and bring Sarah back to the life that had been so wrongfully taken from her.
Hailey immediately caught on to the tension, which wasn’t so hard to spot when she glanced at Kari’s beaten face and my bloody knuckles.
“What the hell happened?” Hailey asked worriedly.
“Don’t worry about it,” I grunted as I hopped up onto the chariot. “Let’s just go before this place becomes a minefield.”
Hailey tried to ask Kari the same question, but to her credit, she waved her off as well. Hailey appealed to Katlynn, who gave her a short shake of the head, telling the soldier to drop it. So she did. She proceeded to show us how she had created a carrier for the cyclops.
Arges, who was awake though woozy, appreciated the sentiment but insisted that he wanted to stay with his land.
“I go where these lands go,” Arges protested. “I haven’t left them in thousands of years.”
“Well, maybe it’s time for a change,” I argued as we situated ourselves on the chariot.
“I told you already, Cameron, I cannot die, not really,” the cyclops countered. “I will spend some time in Tartarus, but then I will come back. Maybe these lands will have regrown by then.”
“I’m not sending you off to Tartarus when I have a chance to save you, do you understand?” I snapped at Arges, whose eye grew wide at my tone. But he didn’t resist anymore, sensing that I needed this more than he did.
It took longer than I would have liked, but just before the bottom of the moon rose over the horizon, Katlynn jumped back into my locket, and the other three of us stood in the chariot. Hailey ushered the flying horses upward, and they immediately complied.
Soon, we got to see the full effect of Hailey’s contraption. Arges hung below the chariot in a rope swing of sorts, and the horses carried him along as if the extra weight was nothing more than a bag of feathers.
We rose up into the air, and the scarred villa shrank beneath us. We stretched out over the ocean just as the moon came into full view.
Then there was a pop that rang through the air as loud as a gunshot.
Hailey, Kari, and I looked at one another, all sharing the same worried expression.
“What was that?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.
“Daughter of Apollo?” Arges called up from his perch below the chariot. “Is the bottom of your contraption supposed to be smoking?”
Hailey immediately looked over the side of the vehicle and cursed loudly. “Shit! What is that?”
“Oh gods,” Kari said, and I groaned in response.
“Every time you say that I swear we end up in deeper shit than when we started,” I spat through a clenched jaw.
“I got here on the chariot, and I think I might have rigged it--” Kari explained, the words not coming out fast enough as there was another pop, this one louder than the last.
The horses neighed in shock, and the chariot jolted towards the water below. The three of us crouched low and grabbed onto the sides. As we did that, Hailey and Kari recoiled and waved their hands as though they had been burned. When I saw the redness from even the pale white light of the moon, I realized that was exactly what happened. I moved my hand down from the side of the chariot to the floor so I could feel the metal. Even though it was made of gold, an element that I couldn’t sense, I hoped that I could see past that to the mechanism itself.
Sure enough, in the undercarriage of Apollo’s chariot, there was a bomb filled to the brim with explosives.
“She rigged the chariot to explode!” I shouted at the pair of them. “We have to get off the chariot.”
“What?” Hailey shouted. “You mean jump?”
“It’s either that or we explode,” I shouted back at her. “Which would you rather do?”
Hailey looked at me with horror in her eyes. “My father’s going to kill me,” she said, clearly not thinking about the real consequences here.
“If we survive this, I’ll build him a new chariot, okay?” I offered. “I’m going to free Arges, you two go ahead and jump.”
“Cameron--” Hailey protested.
“I’ll be right behind you,” I assured her as I yanked the knife from my boot. “Now, go!”
In a rare moment of clarity, I leaned over the open back of the chariot. I began sawing at the ropes that attached Arges to the vehicle.
“Cameron, what are you doing?” Arges called up at me.
“Saving our lives,” I shouted back as I hacked away at the ropes in order to free Arges from the time bomb that was the chariot. “Tell me you know how to swim?”
“I am an excellent swimmer,” Arges said with a grin, knowing where I was going with this. “Save yourself and your woman, Cameron. I’ve got this.”
Then the cyclops pushed himself out of his rope swing and fell down into the ocean waves below.
After I watched the cyclops hit the water down below, I realized exactly where I was. I was willfully hanging hundreds of feet up in the air over open waters.
My throat went dry as fear crawled up my throat and held my esophagus hostage. My fingers gripped the edge of the chariot, and my eyes refused to look away from the death drop that awaited me. I couldn’t move.
Somewhere in my peripheral, I heard the murmur of voices. But my brain couldn’t process what they were saying. Fear completely gripped me as I stared down at the waters below.
A third pop came from below the chariot, and there was another stomach-jolting drop where I screamed but never closed my eyes or took them off the water. My lungs heaved with panic and the certainty that I was going to die.
Suddenly Kari appeared beside me. She was crouched in the same position, with her own hands wrapped around the open edge of the chariot.
“What are you doing?” she said casually as though she were greeting me in the hallways at the Academy.
“I’m going to die,” I croaked.
“Not if you jump,” she reasoned.
“I can’t do that,” I countered without hesitation.
“You can’t stay on this chariot either,” Kari said, her voice still annoyingly calm.
“I’m heat resistant,” I said, pushing through my own absurd reasoning. “I’ll be fine.”
Kari snorted through her nose. “Even I don’t think you could survive the blast I had planned. Come on, now, time to get off.”
“Will you jump with me?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” Kari said with a reassuring smile.
For the first time, I was able to pull my gaze away from the ground far, far below and to her comforting brown eyes. These were the same eyes that had welcomed me into the Academy and trusted me to help Hailey when she went supernova for the first time around me. How could I have ever thought those eyes were evil?
Because they weren’t Kari’s eyes, some foreign voice told me.
Kari held out her hand, and I managed to peel mine from the edge to grasp hers. Where my hand was coated in a nervous sweat, hers was dry and smooth.
“One,” she countered down. She moved our clasped hands in time with her words. “Two.” Another anxious pause. There was a gentle touch at the small of my back that I barely registered because out of nowhere, Kari shouted, “Three!”
Then she let go of my hand.
I tumbled in the open air, completely and utterly alone. The last thing I saw was those piercing brown eyes, at peace, before the sky lit up with the black clouds of an explosion.
26
Irema was back.
She sat in my mom’s apartment again, this time lounging on the couch as though she had always belonged there. Her arm stretched out over the back, and her legs were up on the coffee table, confidently lounging.
“So I take it that I’m asleep again,” I said. It wasn’t a question, more of a statement because I recognized the setting this time around.
“You’ve been asleep for days,” Irema said casually.
“Days?” I balked, my jaw dropping open. “Like how many days?”
“Four,” Irema replied.
“What?” I blinked at my fellow soldier. “How?”
“Well, I think you were recovering from that nasty fall you took,” Irema said as she examined the nails on her right hands. “We managed to knock you out for the trip back to the Academy on the Argo after Olivia got word that Apollo’s chariot was destroyed, but you haven’t woken up since. I thought I would come in and check on you.”
“That’s…” I stuttered. I had to clear my throat. “That’s a lot to unpack there.”
“Why don’t you try waking up, and then we can go through it step by step with you?” Irema suggested.
“I… I don’t know if I can just wake up,” I said, unsure of myself. “You make it seem so easy.”
“You’re in control of your body,” Irema reasoned. She swung her legs off the coffee table and slammed them on the fuzzy rug. “You choose when to wake up. If you want to wake up, then you wake up.”
“What if I don’t want to wake up?” I said, sheepishly.
“Then that’s an entirely different problem,” Irema said as she snapped her fingers and pointed at me, all in one motion. “The Elemental Officials really need you to wake up, though. It sounds like you had an eventful time in Italy.”
“Yeah, you could say that,” I said as I scratched the back of my neck even though it didn’t itch in the slightest.
We sat in awkward silence as she continued to stare at me, and I looked everywhere other than at her. I tried to take in the weird decor of my mother’s apartment and have it comfort me with a sense of the familiar. But it was no use. I knew I was just avoiding the inevitable.
“Hailey and the cyclops are okay if that gives you the motivation to wake up,” Irema informed me.
“Arges?” I gasped at the name. “He’s at the Academy?”
“Yeah,” Irema said. “The Argo picked him up too, and he said he wanted to make sure you were taken care of. Wouldn’t leave until he was assured you were. So, needless to say, he’s still here. Waiting for you to wake up.”
Relief flooded through me at
the thought that both of them were okay. It had been a crazy time, those last few hours at the villa. Flashes of scenes ran through my mind. I saw the burning house, the change in Kari’s eyes, Agres being held hostage, the gorgon’s head turning to mush on the floor, Kari’s bloody nose as I beat her to a pulp, and the exploding chariot against the starry sky as I descended into the ocean.
I sighed heavily and realized that I didn’t want to wake up because I didn’t want to address the reality of the situation. I didn’t want to have to relay the story to the Elemental Officials, or anyone else for that matter. I didn’t want to try to convince them that Kari wasn’t evil and might have actually saved my life. But she did confess to killing Sarah, so maybe she was evil or possessed by something evil.
The whole thing was complicated, and it was much easier to stay asleep. I could settle on the couch and live there for a little while longer.
“Huh,” Irema said suddenly. She got to her feet and crossed to the front door.
“Huh, what?” I prompted when she didn’t elaborate.
“I didn’t take you for one to pick the easy road,” Irema said. And with that final pearl of wisdom, she walked out of the apartment.
But the scene didn’t dissolve with her disappearance as it had before. I stayed, all by myself, in my mom’s living room, running the daughter of Hypnos’s words through my head.
“Well, that’s just not fair,” I groaned.
Somehow Irema knew just what to say in order to motivate me into waking up and facing reality, no matter how bleak and hard it might be. What kind of soldier or demigod would I be if I didn’t face the challenge given to me head-on?
Still not quite sure how I was supposed to wake up in this state, I decided to take a page out of Irema’s book. I walked to the front door, and with one last glance at the room behind me, I exited the room.
My eyes fluttered open, and I was greeted with a bright white light right in my face. I held up my hand to block it and saw there was an IV hooked into the top of my hand.
“He’s awake!” a voice cried.
