Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  Aphidnus knew nothing—nothing!—of how the city was managed, and those who followed his advice tended to end in ruin. And yet, so many of those soft-spoken men allowed themselves to be guided by his words. Once they left the city, we could be certain that we would never see them again…at least, not as wealthy, worldly traders.

  I watched this pattern repeat itself again and again, and I could not puzzle it out. It seemed a fool’s decision. Why, then, did these men who were not fools continue to make it?

  “Principle,” Aethra told me when I finally decided I could not resolve this question without her help. We were walking through the marketplace, the queen’s daily custom to allow her to assess the mood of the town. “They would rather suffer the outcomes of poor advice than consider that wisdom can come from an unfamiliar source. Placing principle above sense is so often the ruin of us.”

  “Because you are a woman,” I decided.

  “No.” Aethra shook her head. “Because I am not what they expected, or wanted, or felt they deserved. Most of those men think that the prince is wise, because why else would he be the prince? Those men decided the word of the prince trumps the word of all others long before they reached our walls. Wisdom from any other source is of no value to them.

  “Here is a lesson for you, Helen,” said the queen. “Men who refuse to hear women are easy to recognize. They are also easy to rule. Such men ask for a woman’s opinion, but what they want is their own turned into honeyed words to make it sound all the sweeter. Easy, then, to put your own thoughts in such a man’s head and make him think they are his own.

  “Those who follow principle?” Here, Aethra paused to inspect the walls of her city. They stood strong and tight around us. She placed a hand on my arm, and the two of us resumed our walk. “They are dangerous, because they feel in their hearts they know the right of it. You can change a mind with little effort; changing a heart is near to impossible. Listen to me: when you come up against a man who follows principle above reason, you must decide whether it is worth going to war with him, and if it is not, you step out of his way and let him follow his path to its end.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I coughed myself awake.

  Mike woke when I did, lifting his head from my shoulder like a sleepy wolf’s. He took a quick glance at our surroundings, determined we were still on the ferry to Rhodes, and stretched.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Helen,” I replied. “She’s back. Don’t worry!” I added quickly, as Mike’s face had fallen. “It was a good memory. Aethra was showing her how to be a queen.”

  “I hoped those dreams had stopped,” Mike said. “We’ve met her—twice! There’s no reason for her to keep ambushing your dreams.”

  Mike was right. About how we had met Helen a second time, that was. That very morning, in fact. The five of us were sitting in a café, planning that night’s raid on the Library, when the entire restaurant turned into a localized hurricane of flying glass and utensils.

  Helen doesn’t have a mute button, so Mike, Speedy, and I had a few frantic moments of lying and shoving and kicking the Petrakis cousins until they got the hell out of the café. We ended up in a (very) small supply closet, with my (very) tired husband who had just finished a (very) long day of congressional hearings and needed to grab a quick five hours of sleep before a (very) important meeting with the President of the United States and who was Not In The Mood For Such Shenanigans.

  The moment Sparky’s avatar popped into our space, I managed to blurt out that someone—a powerful dead ghost, most likely Helen—probably wanted to talk to us because stores don’t usually have maelstroms and maybe we should have set up some sort of communication system before we had disbanded at the Kos Asklepion.

  Sparky’s gaze moved from my face to a space a few inches away. “Yes,” he said coldly. “It’s Helen.”

  He held up a hand, as if halting someone mid-speech. “Speedy, please translate: Helen, we are doing our part to keep the worlds of the living and the dead separate. We cannot stop our activities to address your needs without notice, and disrupting the mortal world will cause undue attention. We thank you in advance for your assistance.”

  By the time Speedy was done translating, Sparky had linked my phone to his perspective. It allowed me to see Helen’s predatory eyes as they moved from his face to mine.

  I felt like I was being weighed.

  I stuck an arm out to lean on the nearest wall, my arm passing through my husband’s digital body, and the two of us glared in the same general direction.

  She nodded to us before she spoke in Greek.

  Speedy chuckled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She says that the kings and queens of her time announced themselves at the first meeting, not the second.”

  “Tell her we had shit to do,” I said. “Now, what does she want?”

  Turns out that Helen had gotten in touch with Archimedes’ ghost, and had arranged a meeting for us on Rhodes. She was vague on the specifics, but the gist of it was that when Archimedes was in our world, he divided his time between Rhodes and an island somewhere out at sea. Archimedes had agreed to meet us on Rhodes to discuss the Mechanism.

  (Personally, I thought that a teleporting ghost could come and see us much more easily than we could go to see him, but apparently Archimedes hadn’t become any less reclusive or geeky after his death. Still, I’d never been to Rhodes and I wasn’t about to look a gift eccentric hermit ghost in the mouth. [15])

  After that, it was just a matter of coming up with a story that Atlas and Darling would believe.

  They were standing outside the café with the staff and the rest of the patrons. Helen had wrecked the place. Wrecked it. There was nothing left untouched except the windows and the counters. Mike, Speedy, and I were the only living things that had stayed inside during Helen’s page, and passing off what had happened was…uh…difficult.

  Not with the locals, mind! With them, we shrugged and gasped and thanked our lucky stars we hadn’t been hurt. But Atlas and Darling wanted a good reason to explain why we had spent hours plotting out a strategy for our second search of the Library, and now we were ditching that entire plan to go to Rhodes. Especially when I claimed to have received a hot tip that new information had turned up on Rhodes (true), and we had to get there as quickly as possible or we could lose our source (also true).

  Then, Darling pointed at the café and wanted to know how in God’s name I had managed to take a phone call when all of that had been going on!

  The discussion got a little heated. Eventually, I had to apply the “Because I said so!” brakes, and sent everybody to their respective hotel rooms to pack.

  After they were gone, I went to write a substantial check for damages to the café. Bad economy, rampaging guilt, faulty ghost-paging system… Pick a reason. Ben Franklin made me stupid-rich so I can deal with stuff like this when it comes up.

  Which it does.

  Usually three times a week or so.

  Since I was nineteen.

  (I used to drink. A lot. Then I helped expose a conspiracy theory and got famous. Now, I just write checks and take an aspirin.)

  The journey to Rhodes was a short hop between the islands. We took the ferry. The cousins disappeared with Speedy to discuss the best way to approach a “hot tip” on Rhodes, and, after a quick preventative sweep of the boat for Smiling Goon and his two remaining buddies, Mike and I crashed on a bench in the sun.

  Sunlight, Mediterranean sea air, and a smooth-running ferry is the perfect recipe for a nap.

  Hello again, Helen.

  “She shouldn’t be coming into your head,” Mike said, after I had described the dream. “It was understandable before we made contact, but now…” He trailed off, looking across the water. The thin haze of an island was starting to emerge on the horizon.

  “I don’t know if ancient queens have the same opinions about psychosocial boundaries that we do.”

  “That’s i
rrelevant,” he said. “If she can invade your mind to the extent where she can send dreams to you, she could talk to you directly. She’s decided she’d rather impose her thoughts over yours. In my opinion, that’s an unforgivable violation.”

  I grunted and pretended he wasn’t completely right.

  He paused before he said, “I got a reply from my mother.”

  “Oh?” I said in a very small voice.

  Let me tell you about the Old Families.

  I’m a terrible psychic because I shouldn’t exist. There’s maybe three hundred of us—real psychics, that is, not the carnival step-right-up! kind—in the entire world. Those traits that make us psychic are hereditary, so with very few exceptions, psychics tend to be born into the same families.

  This is hugely advantageous, by the way. You’ve learned from birth that puberty is going to be Especially Awkward for you, because once your hormones come online, so will your ability to talk to caterpillars or whatever. You’ve got a built-in support network of people who know you’re not crazy, and who teach you why hiding what you can do is smarter than parading it around in public. Your family is usually filthy rich, as they’ve been around for a hundred generations and they’ve been able to use their abilities to build themselves a tidy fortune. You tend to marry others who are like yourself, who come from similar families, and the two of you produce children to carry on the cycle.

  There’re only two Old Families in America, and I try not to make inbreeding jokes around Mike, because he’s from one of them. Me? I’m a sport. I’m one of those exceptions that pop up from time to time, a psychic who doesn’t come from an Old Family.

  They don’t like people like me very much.

  For a long time, I thought this was because sports could blow their secret. I was lucky to fall in with Benjamin Franklin as soon as I did. He helped talk me through my new weird life, and helped me to see that some decisions (e.g.: freaking out and making a huge scene) didn’t have as many positive outcomes as others (e.g.: talking to a psychiatrist who had to respect patient confidentiality). If it hadn’t been for Ben, I would have gone to jail or worse. I have unlimited sympathy for sports who weren’t lucky enough to trip over a Founding Father.

  But that’s not why the Old Families don’t like sports. See, we don’t fit into their worldview. After all, you’ve spent years telling each other that your family is special because you’ve got superpowers. You can make plants grow. You can heal injuries. You can understand animals. You can pierce the veil between life and death! Why wouldn’t you think that the Old Families are leaps and bounds better than the rest of the human race?

  It’s a knock to this image when a complete genetic fluke pops up out of nowhere who can do the exact same things.

  (And? Frankly? I’m much better with the dead than any of them, and they fucking know it.)

  They made excuses when I tried to contact them. Oh, they were plenty pleasant, but no means no.

  No, they wouldn’t help me learn what psychics can do when properly trained.

  No, they wouldn’t tell me anything about their history, or what notable feats psychics had accomplished in the past.

  No, they wouldn’t help me figure out why psychics are able to see OACET’s projections.

  No, no, no. Thank you for calling. Please lose this number, you should never have gotten it in the first place.

  Ben wouldn’t interfere on my behalf. He said that the Old Families are respected among ghosts: sometimes the dead need the living, and vice versa, and there are lasting friendships that crisscross the mortality line.

  That’s fine. I get it. Besides, Mike walked away from his family when he was just a kid, and that’s about all the proof I need that I do not need those people in my life.

  He did, you know. Mike got the hell out of there when he was twelve. Decided that his family’s traditions were built on a pack of lies and self-delusion, and that being born a psychic was like being born an albino; there was nothing authentically special about it, only how it was perceived and packaged.

  Twelve. He decided this when he was twelve. Psychic-ness doesn’t even turn itself on until puberty, so he walked away from a future of wealth and magical powers. He went from living in mansions and summering in the Hamptons to living on the streets, and that’s all I know about that time in his life because he doesn’t talk about it.

  Oh. I do know he kept up with his aikido training while he was homeless.

  Mike is amazing.

  His family? Not so much.

  Mike’s late uncle, Richard Smithback, had been instrumental in helping Sparky and me unravel the OACET conspiracy. He passed away a few months ago. Despite what he did for us, I don’t miss him—he was a dick when he was alive, and dying didn’t change that.

  His last request to his sister, Mike’s mother, was to let Mike back into the family. Both Mike and his mother were trying. [16]

  It wasn’t going well.

  “My mother says that psychometry is a myth,” he said.

  I sighed. “Lot of myths going around these days.”

  “I mentioned that,” he said. “I also told her we think a ghost has been sending you her memories.”

  He didn’t need to tell me what his mother had said about that; it was in his voice.

  I shook my head. “What hoops do I have to jump through to prove to her that I’m the real deal? I’m not making this shit up!”

  “It’s not you,” Mike said. “It’s her—it’s them. Nobody in my family has ever been sent a dream by a ghost. Therefore? It can’t happen. It’s a culture where isolationism and close-mindedness are—”

  He suddenly lifted himself off of the bench with a fighter’s grace and walked away, too angry to remember to make noise when he moved. I stayed put, and watched the fuzzy edges of the island begin to turn into buildings.

  When Mike returned, he was calmer, a can of seltzer in each hand. He set one can on the bench beside me. I didn’t recognize the fruit on the label (orange with spikes?), but I popped the top and sipped. Pretty good.

  Then I settled in for a long wait.

  He surprised me. “It’s not that they think you’re a fake,” he said, almost as soon as I had set the soda down. “That’s the problem. You challenge how they think of themselves, and they can’t accept that.

  “They’re going to die out,” he said. Then, more quietly, “My family is going to die out. They could survive when the world was smaller. They can’t adapt—they’ve trapped themselves, and they don’t even realize it.”

  He let me cover one of his hands with my own, and the boat rolled on beneath us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Rhodes is pretty big.

  We were there for maybe an hour before I realized we probably should have asked Helen for more details about exactly where on Rhodes we were supposed to go.

  I mean, it’s not Texas-big. But I figured we’d show up, go to the largest ruins we could find, and then meet Archimedes.

  We showed up, went to the largest ruins we could find, and nope.

  The city of Lindos is ancient. Ancient. They could sell shirts with the slogan, “Lindos: Eleven centuries older than Jesus.”

  Darling loved it.

  “The Acropolis at Lindos is not just a single city,” she said, as she rested gentle fingertips on a column of the Temple of Athena. This building was fairly well-preserved. No roof, of course, but it had two walls and a stunning view of the sea. “Many civilizations built new cities upon the ruins of the old. You cannot walk a meter through the lower levels without turning up something of value.”

  Atlas sniffed at that.

  Darling ignored her cousin. “I come here often. Look,” she said, and pointed towards the walls surrounding the acropolis. These had been built from smaller stones than those used in the older ruins at their center. “The island made a natural fortress after the Crusades. The Knights Hospitallers came and established a base of operations, and it took nearly two hundred years of battles befor
e Suleiman’s forces succeeded in routing them. Would you like to see the gates to their fortress?”

  She didn’t wait to hear our answer. Instead, she turned and marched us across the acropolis, ending at a steep staircase that blended the natural rock of the island into its elevation. It was impressive, and Darling chattered on about great battles and body counts.

  I’m sure it was interesting, but honestly? I wasn’t listening.

  My ghost sense had started tingling the moment we had set foot on Rhodes. Not in a Hey! Look! It’s Archimedes! way, but more of a Hey! Stop walking through my invisible chess game! way. There were ghosts here—if Darling was right and this was a layered civilization that had seen a metric shit-ton of different wars, there were probably an astonishing number of ghosts here—but none of them were interested in making contact with us. And, as with the ghosts at the Acropolis at Athens, Mike and I couldn’t see them anyhow.

  Kinda frustrating.

  Oh, we also couldn’t call Sparky and have him act as an intermediary, because he and the rest of OACET’s administration had just gone into a meeting with the President. I have no doubt Sparky could split his mind and manage two important conversations at once, but I sure wasn’t about to ask him to do it.

  Time to put on my big-girl pants and find Archimedes.

  “Darling?” I interrupted her. She put down a chunk of rock, which she claimed had been used as a cannonball during a siege of the fortress. “I might have gotten the meeting place wrong. Is there another old ruin on Rhodes?”

  She and Atlas made that gaping-fish face that I’d come to associate with my stupid questions. “Ah—”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “There are bunches. Let’s narrow it down—where would Posidonius have set up shop in Rhodes?”

  “No one knows, but it is likely he taught here,” Atlas said, pointing at the castle and the ruins behind it. “Many of the other sites around the island were destroyed in a massive earthquake not long before Posidonius would have been born. Lindos remained relatively untouched, and the shrine to Athena became the most prominent on the island. It was believed that Athena had spared this city, and reconstruction was centered around it.”