Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  And?

  Last but not least, the Labyrinth didn’t belong to us. It was a sanctuary for the ghost of Archimedes, and there might have been others who dropped in from time to time to visit a lonely Minotaur. Who were we to come along and throw them out? We decided to leave it up to them as to whether they’d allow the cave to be rediscovered now that Helen’s protection had been removed. Archimedes had the juice to keep it hidden, if that’s what he wanted.

  Speedy was too quick to agree that we had to leave the mountain to its ghosts. I think he was hoping to return someday. I had snapped a few photographs of the grand orrery with my phone, but he had thrown a fit over the resolution and nearly refused to leave. It was only after I reminded him that we knew a legion of cyborgs with digital avatars who could walk through walls that he consented to being carried home. But he kept looking at the photos until my battery died, and I got the feeling he wanted to explore the Labyrinth until he found the notes Archimedes had used to make that amazing celestial calendar from the other side of our galaxy.

  (Ben’s assurances to the contrary aside, I also think that if Time doesn’t like to be made into anybody’s bitch, Space is probably just as strict. Speedy will never get any real information out of that cave. It’ll be like Ben said—lost, until we’ve thoroughly explored and gotten bored with Alpha Centauri, and then the grand orrery will be discovered and scholars will come up with all kinds of explanations to justify how something that can’t exist, does.)

  We slept in a heap at the base of the mountain until the wee hours of the morning, and then we dragged the headless body down to where we had left the speedboat. We loaded what was left of Atlas onto the boat, and drove around until we found a likely spot for a shipwreck. Then, I left Mike and Speedy on a good-sized rock, turned the boat around so it pointed towards a second good-sized rock some distance away, and changed into my skimpiest bikini.

  It took a few horrible minutes to wrestle Atlas’ body into the driver’s seat, and another few heart-stopping moments to get the boat up to its maximum speed while I worked the controls around it. I was beyond happy when I finally jumped ship.

  Mike says the crash was quite excellent; the explosion, not so much. That was fine; by that point, the body was definitely more battered than burnt.

  Once everything was wrecked to hell and I was safe on the island with the boys, I pressed the button on my fancy future ring.

  Sparky stayed with me until the Hellenic Coast Guard picked us up.

  None of us needed to fake how close we were to collapse. I babbled something about Atlas and the crash and oh God just find him! and when they did, they quietly told me that his death had probably been quick.

  Very true.

  Ambassador Goodwin met us in Athens. We stuck around for an extra day to answer questions, [27] and he told me how very sorry he was that our stay in Greece had been so…eventful. He seemed really glad to see us get on the plane to go home.

  Sparky and Ben were waiting for us at the airport.

  Speedy and I fell into Sparky’s arms; Ben was nowhere to be seen, but I felt him nearby. Mike and I staggered downstairs to the baggage claim while Sparky navigated Customs for us: sometimes it’s good to be the Cyborg Queen.

  We watched the endless parade of suitcases and trunks and duffle bags, all spinning around on the International carousel, and we leaned against each other to stay on our feet.

  My hand went to my neck, as if searching for three beads on a lanyard.

  “You miss her?” Mike asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I watched her grow up, you know? It’s not as if we were friends, but…”

  He dipped his head so it rested against mine. “I’m sorry, Hope.”

  “Eh.” I shrugged. “I’ll reread The Iliad. I haven’t read it since junior high, and now that we know what Helen was really like, I’m sure it’ll be good for a laugh.”

  “You want to know what I can’t figure out?” Mike asked.

  “Oh God, no.” I sighed. “No, I don’t.”

  “Why Ben sent us to Greece in the first place,” he said. “It’s not like discovering one more fragment of the Mechanism would change its history.”

  “He wanted to know its origins,” I said. “To learn if it disappeared as an accident, or as the result of someone tampering with time.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” he said. “What I don’t understand is why this was important enough to send us to Greece now.”

  “Because…time…thing…” I muttered.

  He kissed me on the cheek as our bags popped out from behind the plastic flaps. “Thanks for the wonderful Mediterranean vacation, Hope,” he said. “Call me when you want to do this again. I’m going to need to spend about a month hiding under my bed to prepare.”

  I stood by the carousel for another few minutes as I watched my bag go around and around on the track.

  Speedy had figured it out—the instant I had told him Ben was sending me to Greece, he had figured it out.

  I grabbed my bag, and turned in Ben’s direction. I could imagine my best friend shrunk down to the size of a dime, smiling at me in his flying blue pixy form from a concealed hidey-hole.

  I think I had figured it out, too, but that was one of those things I didn’t want to hear spoken aloud. If I was right…

  Well.

  That was a problem for another day.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  That would have been the end of the story, except Helen wasn’t quite done with me. My dreams had been my own since we defeated the Minotaur, and I had assumed that meant she was satisfied with the way things had turned out and had moved on.

  I still missed her.

  “Hey, Hope?”

  I was tired. I mean, I was tired. I was catching up on two weeks’ worth of missed classes. I didn’t need to open my eyes and see the black bulb of a koala’s nose pressed up against mine.

  But Speedy was whispering, and since he’s got no problems waking Sparky and me up whenever he damned well feels like it…

  I slipped out of Sparky’s arms, tucked my new copy of The Iliad onto the nightstand, and followed Speedy down the hall.

  During our three-week trip to Greece, the contractors had gotten plenty of work done on the greenhouse. The glass was in, the irrigation was down, and some of the landscaping was beginning to take shape. Sparky and Speedy had this master plan to put a free-flowing stream down the center of the room, ending in an enclosed rocky pool.

  A grotto, if you would.

  Dawn was just starting to come through the windows. The light hit them just right, the two objects lying on the flat rock in the center of the pool.

  A Finnish Puukko knife and a piece of polished bronze in an olivewood frame.

  I felt my heart catch.

  “How—”

  “Dunno,” Speedy replied, as he hopped from rock to rock. He landed beside the mirror. “But she’s here.”

  I took a moment to run my hands through my bedheaded hair. Not because of vanity (…mostly…), but because I needed time to think. Why did she track us down? And why bring these two items? It must have required a massive amount of energy to move them halfway across the planet and into alien territory. Why not bring gold or gems or…

  She hadn’t brought the Damascus sword I had used to fight the Minotaur. I was okay with that: once you butcher someone with a weapon, that’s pretty much all it is to you. I didn’t need a constant reminder of how easy it had been to cut off Atlas’—

  Right. No sword. Good thing.

  The Puukko knife belonged to me. Maybe Helen had decided to return it. Ghosts had no use for mortal weapons, after all, and the beads that I had left wrapped around its hilt were gone.

  Fair enough; those beads had been hers anyhow.

  The mirror, though…

  “She wants to talk to us?” I asked Speedy.

  “Kitten,” he replied, “how the fuck would I know?”

  “Right,” I said, and I yanked my pajama pants up t
o my knees so I could stand in the water and talk to Helen of Sparta through her magic mirror. [28]

  I paused before picking it up, because…

  Well. Some things are easier than others.

  When I did, a woman’s face stared back at me.

  It had more soft edges than I remembered, or maybe Helen had changed her appearance. In either case, she looked happier than the last time I had seen her. She nodded when she saw me, and brought her index finger to her side of the mirror.

  I thought maybe I was supposed to touch it, like an E.T. thing, but no; her finger brushed against the surface of the mirror and left a burning blue trail in its wake.

  Helen was writing something.

  “Can you see this?” I asked Speedy.

  “All I see is a blue haze,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, and dipped my own fingers in the water. I began to write on the rock, mimicking the shapes of Helen’s letters.

  “Charita katatithesthai tini,” Speedy said, before translating this to: “Lay up a store of gratitude. She’s thanking you for a mighty favor done on her behalf.”

  “Damn,” I whispered. “I thought she had left without saying goodbye. Tell her she’s very welcome.”

  Speedy did. His voice was low and—I swear!—respectful.

  Helen nodded, and wrote another word.

  “Goodbye,” Speedy said, and Helen began to pull herself away from the mirror.

  “Wait!”

  Helen stopped moving.

  “Speedy, translate for me. Please.”

  I began talking. I really didn’t want to flub all over myself in front of freakin’ Helen of Sparta, but she seemed like one of those people with things to do and my words came out in a chattering flood.

  “I’m sorry the only thing we remember about you is that you were beautiful,” I said. “I don’t know if you plan to stick around after this, or if getting rid of Theseus is what you needed before you felt you could leave this world and move on, but I’d love to know what the real deal was with the Trojan War.

  “I think…” I paused. “I think it’d be a great shame if nobody ever learned your side of the story.”

  In the mirror, the woman moved her dark eyes from mine to Speedy’s; even though he couldn’t see them, he still shivered.

  When he had finished speaking, Helen looked back at me. A finger tapped on the reverse of the mirror, an unconscious gesture, as if the ghost were thinking.

  She nodded.

  ENDNOTES

  [1] Anna Kendrick played me in the movie. She did right by me, I guess, but I still think she needed to put on more muscle. I was really worried about her during some of those action scenes.

  [2] Speedy says the Parthenon has always had some version of a snack stand. Go figure.

  [3] Okay, so there aren’t nearly as many ghosts as there are different types of bacterium. Sorry. I just like that analogy. They’re still everywhere, though. Ghosts and bacteria. Now go wash your damned hands.

  [4] I’m getting grumpy about it, by the way. Filling out police reports is really time-consuming, and there’s always someone to lecture me on how I should make an effort to not get kidnapped. It’s gotten so bad that when a stranger throws off a kidnappy vibe, I run at them while shouting, “Hey, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?”

  [5] It’s χλωροφόρμιο, which I found to be rather intimidating until Speedy said it’s pronounced chlorofórmio, so there’s that.

  [6] I have no idea what they said, but let me translate that for you anyhow:

  “No animals in the store!”

  “Fuck you and the dog who cooks your dinner.”

  “Don’t talk about my wife…like…koala…what…thing…”

  [7] Okay. Say you’re a man, and you have a really good male friend. You and your friend strike a bargain that the first one of you to die will be skinned from the waist down. This skin has to be removed in a single flawless piece. Then, go steal a coin from a grieving widow, and put it in the scrotum of your new skin pants. Add some ancient Icelandic mumbo-jumbo rituals, and the scrotum will fill with money. Also? You can never get out of these pants or the magic will stop working, unless you convince another really good friend to wear them for you while you go and set fire to your own body while muttering, “Unclean, unclean…” So. Infinite moneymaking best friend corpse pants. That’s a nábrók.

  [8] *sigh* I know, right?

  [9] Or potted plant. Speedy’s not picky.

  [10] All right, all right. We might have been committing a little bit of data theft. Semantics. We’d leave all the originals where we found them.

  [11] Koalas have the best poker faces, but they have terrible poker ears.

  [12] Sparky asked me once why I wanted to go into medicine when I felt these things so clearly. I said it was because I planned to go down fighting with the corpses of disease and injury in my fists, because those fuckers didn’t deserve to keep getting away with their shit.

  [13] Seriously. We’re a bunch of schmucks and a talking koala, and we know firsthand what happens when you go public with a major conspiracy. Based on humanity’s track record, taking an even bigger Full Disclosure Bomb to modern civilization will end in blood. War. Probably mass genocide as various factions decide to resolve their old religious disputes. Like hell that’s our call to make.

  [14] There are more than fifty recent unsolved monkey attacks in the Washington D.C. area. Sparky and I have a monkey in reserve, just in case. Don’t worry about what might happen to the monkey. That monkey knows what it did.

  [15] If I could see him. Which I probably couldn’t. Whatever. I got to go to Rhodes.

  [16] Smithback really should have asked Mike if this was okay with him first, but what can you do? Last requests are last requests, regardless if you’re still able to check in and make sure those requests being followed.

  [17] Teary on my part, since I had convinced myself I’d finally straighten out my head while I was gone and I’d never see him again. Ben just smiled and said he hoped I’d have some good stories to tell him when I got back. Which I did.

  [18] It’s straight from the koala’s mouth and I didn’t pay him to do it, so it’s likely Speedy has taken some liberties with the word choice and phrasing.

  [19] Like so.

  [20] And if I stepped outside of the room, then it would be outside, and if I went back inside, than it would be inside, and if I went back outside…

  [21] Maybe. While we were researching locations, we found a lesser-known myth called “Helen Dendritis,” or “Helen of the Tree.” In this myth, Helen came to Rhodes after the Trojan War, was betrayed by a friend, and was hanged from a tree until dead. So, yes, there is a dedicated shrine to Helen of Troy on Rhodes, but we decided against using that one because of the part where it celebrates her murder and thank you, but we were actively trying to not piss her off, so no. Just no.

  [22] I’ve always been a little worried about the cult status of serial killers. Once, Ben and I got drunk sat down and had a long talk about what might happen if a psychopathic ghost built up some serious fame. We decided the odds were against it, but also that I should stay the fuck out of London’s Whitechapel district, just in case Jack the Ripper was waiting for a lady psychic to come along.

  Also? History is full of murdering assholes, and I’ve never heard of most of them. It’d really, really suck to be wandering alone down a country road in Southeast Nowheresville and find out the hard way that it was haunted by the ghost of Somebody-Something the Mangler. Sticking fame into people is dangerous for so many reasons.

  [23] More than once.

  [24] I know, right?!

  [25] It’s not like we left her body where she had died. We buried her as best we could, and each of us said a few words over her grave. Funeral services performed by psychics and super-geniuses are fairly unique; our eulogies were all different versions of Sorry, but I told you so.

  [26] We buried them, too, and their eulogies were mostly apo
logies about poor life choices and how it sucked to be on the receiving end of Not Thinking Things Through.

  [27] I also used that time to track down Darling’s mother, because more guilt. Turns out she’d already been dead for a couple of months, so take that to mean whatever you want about the state of the Petrakis family, or Darling, or my shitty judgment.

  [28] I KNOW, RIGHT?!

  NOTES

  As always, this book wouldn’t have been possible without my husband, Brown.

  My thanks goes to the beta readers who were so very generous with their time. Gary, Tiff, Joris, Kevin, and Jean, your help is deeply appreciated. Also, thanks goes to those who helped Hope find her voice in the earliest drafts. I was struggling with how to best write a character with Attention-Deficit Disorder, and your feedback put me on the right path.

  Danny, thank you for the copy edits, even though one day we will come to blows over your insistence on italics.

  Some lunatic calling herself T. Kingfisher wandered into my garden one day, said something cryptic about moths, and handed me the cover art before vanishing in a cloud of vivid orange agastache. I bet she’s been up to remarkable things—you should probably go check out her books out as soon as you’ve finished mine.

  My heartfelt thanks goes to everyone who’s supported me over this past year. It’s my first year of being a full-time writer and artist, and I couldn’t have done it without you.

  Finally, the story of Helen of Troy has been retold here in very broad strokes. I’ve stayed within the landmarks of her early life—her childhood in Sparta, her kidnapping by Theseus, and the years she spent in Aethra’s house—but have otherwise taken full liberties with her history and personality. In this, I have kept to the storytellers’ long tradition of using Helen as the plot demands. I hope, in my version, she has at least found some peace. As for the spelling of Greek names, Joris recommended the Loeb Classical Library, and I found this resource to be invaluable. Any error is mine.