by JL Bryan
“These are the new ones?” The lady of the house looked over the three girls with her disturbing gray eyes, and then she addressed the eldest of the slave women. “Do they work hard?”
“They need training,” the woman said. “Lots of training. And they only speak their barbarian tongue.”
The lady touched the shoulder of one of the girls who had accompanied Euanthe. The girl’s face lit up with a smile, as if she suddenly adored the gray-eyed Athenian lady.
“We shall break them in,” the lady said. “My husband, at least, will have great enjoyment of them.” She looked at Jenny/Euanthe, then leaned in for a closer look, her eyes narrowing. “What is your name?”
Euanthe said nothing, pretending not to understand.
“I don’t like the look of this one,” the lady said.
“Shall we dispose of her?” the lady’s servant asked.
“No, no, she’s already paid for.” The gray-eyed lady turned to leave, with her servant again at her heels. “At least they aren’t ugly. Ugly slaves are unacceptable in a fine household.”
“Yes, my lady,” her servant agreed.
Euanthe set her fingers to the hard work of weaving. The elder slave women slapped her each time she made an error.
Chapter Twenty
Tommy waited in the parking lot of Esmeralda’s apartment complex and watched her door as the sun rose behind him. He sat on his stolen bike, wearing gloves and a long-sleeve shirt though the weather was very warm, almost hot. He didn’t want to risk touching her and making her afraid of him.
Her apartment complex was ugly, built of concrete and cinderblocks, with wrecked car husks occupying a few of the parking spots. The outer walls, the dumpster, and the stop signs were all sprayed with gang tags.
Never mind the blue sky and the palm trees from the movies, Tommy thought, this city was crap. It was like Panama City Beach or some low-rent tourist trap like that, only stretched out for mile after mile and then slathered in smog.
When she stepped out of her apartment, Tommy cranked the engine of his motorcycle. The sound drew her attention, and she smiled immediately when she saw him. Then she seemed to remember herself, and the smile disappeared.
She turned away from him and walked toward the bus stop at the front of the complex.
Tommy swooped out until he was alongside her, then slowed down and walked his bike along with her, the engine grumbling beneath him.
“Hi, Esmeralda,” he said.
“You know my name.” She kept walking, kept trying to hide her smile.
“I couldn't search the whole country for you without learning your name,” he said. “Esmeralda Rios.”
“The whole country? Where did you start?”
“Forth Worth.”
“Wow.” She laughed. “That was years ago. Did you stop in Albuquerque, too?”
“Yep.”
“Arizona?”
“Flagstaff.”
“I am impressed.” She gave him a sidelong look. “And a little creeped out.”
“But you remember me,” he said.
“A little. I don't even remember your name.”
“I never told you.”
When she reached the graffiti-coated Plexiglas bus shelter, she finally turned to look him full on in the face. Tommy felt something move in his heart—but he pushed the feeling down quickly. He needed to handle his business, not stare all droopy-eyed at this gorgeous girl.
“Want a ride?” he asked.
“I like the bus.”
“My bike's a lot nicer,” he said. “Cleaner, too.”
She eyed his stolen Harley. “I doubt that.”
“More fun.”
The bus approached down Sepulveda, pausing only one intersection away to load and unload passengers.
“I don't ride with strangers,” Esmeralda said.
“My name is Tommy.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You have beautiful eyes,” he said.
Her eyes responded to the compliment by rolling upward. “You are so original,” she said, but she was smiling again.
The bus trundled towards them.
“Do you want the ride?” Tommy asked. He could take off his glove, grab her arm and make her do anything he said. But he didn't want to do that. He wanted her to choose to come.
“I still don't know your last name.”
“It's Krueger,” he said. It was a surname he often used. His favorite, actually.
“That doesn't sound very Spanish to me.” The bus arrived, and the door folded open. Esmeralda looked at the steps inside. “My mother won't approve of it.”
“We can change it. I just made it up, anyway.”
She laughed. “You chose to be named after a movie monster?”
“I always kind of identified with him.”
“You are crazy.” The bus door folded, and the bus lurched away. “Look, you made me miss my bus. Now you must take me to work.”
“Hop on.”
Esmeralda slid into the seat behind him. She wrapped her arms around his waist. He felt her fingers on his abdominal muscles, pressing him tight through his shirt, and now it was his turn to smile.
“You don't have an extra helmet,” she said.
“I'll have to fix that.” He took off his helmet and passed it back to her. “Just pull the chin strap under—”
“I know. You're not the first boy on a bike I've dated.”
“Are we dating now?”
“I didn't mean to say that. Okay, I'm ready.”
Tommy gunned the bike and they shot out into the road. He curved steeply, almost tipping over on one side, and she squealed and clamped her arms tight around him.
He straightened up the bike and drove.
The funeral home was only about ten minutes away, but when they reached it, Tommy didn't pull into the parking lot. He kept going, not stopping until the next red light.
“You missed it,” Esmeralda said.
“Take the day off,” he said. “We’ll have fun instead.”
“But I told Mr. Gonzales I would come in for a few hours.”
“Let the dead bury the dead,” Tommy said. “Isn't that what they say?”
“It’s a bad plan,” Esmeralda said. “The dead don’t work very hard.”
The light turned green, and Tommy opened up the throttle.
She never asked him to turn back.
Jenny dreamed she was Euanthe again, bringing food to her new master’s dining hall, accompanied by a few other slave girls. One girl carried a platter of roast lamb, another a skin of wine, another a loaf of bread. Euanthe herself carried a wooden platter with an assortment of olives.
The gray-eyed lady and her husband reclined on couches near the fire. Her husband had the same gray eyes that she did, as if husband and wife were somehow related.
Euanthe and the other slave girls stood near them, ready to serve food and drink on demand.
“Your plans are too bold,” the man said to his wife. “Pericles remains popular, despite all the talk we’ve spread of corruption and impiety. We have removed a few of his supporters, but the man himself remains in power. The moderates in the assembly will not turn against the leader in a time of war.”
“Pericles is weaker than he seems, Cleon,” the gray-eyed young woman said. She held out a cup for a slave girl to fill it. “People will blame him for the Spartans ransacking our countryside. This is the opportunity we’ve sought for years. We have undermined his support in the assembly, we have gathered embarrassing information on his most powerful friends, and soon we will topple him. Athens is nearly ours, whether you see it or not.”
“Athens may soon belong to King Archidamus and his barbaric Spartans,” the man called Cleon said. “And then the internal politics of Athens, whether Pericles rules or I rule, will no longer matter.” He bit into a meaty leg of lamb.
“Cleon, that is why you should lead Athens,” his wife said. “This will be our argument. Pericles is too weak, too
old, too much a lover of peace. Athens needs a man with fire in his blood. A man who can make the Spartans quake in fear.” She took his hand and smiled.
Euanthe tried to wear a bored look while listening carefully to the conversation. The politician against whom these two were plotting, the man named Pericles, had been leader of democratic Athens for decades. He was Euanthe’s target, too. Her instructions were to keep herself quiet and invisible until she had an opportunity to infect him.
She knew how to make her plague contagious—the old priest Kyrillos had helped her discover this, using both sheep and convicted criminals. Pericles would die, and then Athens would follow.
The gray-eyed lady gestured to Euanthe and opened her mouth. Euanthe approached and fed her an olive, careful not to touch her lips.
The lady stared up at her, holding the olive between her teeth. Euanthe tilted her head forward, so that her hair covered her eyes, and she looked down at the floor. She knew the lady didn’t like her, and she didn’t want to draw more of the lady’s wrath.
“These olives are of poor quality.” The lady spat the olive on the floor, having never bitten into it. “Go and feed them to the swine.”
Euanthe pretended not to understood her words, so one of the Athenian slaves snapped her fingers in front of Euanthe’s face, and Euanthe followed her out of the room.
As she departed, she heard the lady say to her husband, “I do not want that slave girl touching our food again. She has an evil look about her.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Jenny and Seth hiked through the woods, towards a place they liked to go, while Rocky bounded on and off the trail around them.
“Have you had any weird dreams lately?” Jenny asked.
“Um...there was one where I was standing at the counter at Hardee's, and I had to order something, but I couldn't remember what. And I couldn't read the menu. And then I realized I was naked and everybody was pointing at me. And then I ordered a cheeseburger.”
“That's sort of not what I meant,” Jenny said. “Anything flashing back to past lives? Like we saw when we were dead?”
“Not that I can remember. I don't usually remember my dreams for long after I wake up, though.”
“I’ve had some strange ones,” Jenny said. “Weird ancient history stuff. I actually looked it up at the library—”
“—because you're the last person on Earth who doesn't have Internet at home—”
“—anyway, some of it checks out. Especially the name 'Pericles.' There's a lot of stuff about him.”
They rounded a bend in the trail and arrived at a high, sprawling rock formation, nestled in a valley of the hilly, stony Morton land. Jenny climbed up the biggest rock, using the rock beside it for leverage. When she reached the top, she looked down at Seth, who was just standing and staring off into the trees.
“Come on, don’t be a turtle,” Jenny said.
“Sorry.” He shook his head and began to climb after her.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Just my dad. He’s really being a dick.”
“Because of me?” Jenny asked.
“No...” Seth reached the top of the boulder and brushed dirt from his hands. “They don't really know I'm still seeing you.”
“That's probably best.” Jenny sat down on the rock.
“He says I have to major in international business, economics, something like that.”
“I thought you wanted to do physical therapy, so you could heal people.”
“Not good enough for him. Also, he says I have to learn to speak Mandarin. Or Hindi. My choice.” Seth gave a thin smile. “I barely made it through Spanish.” He sat down and put an arm around her, drawing her close to him.
Jenny leaned against his strong, warm body and listened to his heart. She didn't want to think about him moving out of town, or about the future at all. She was having enough trouble figuring out the past. “So, Pericles,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry,” Seth said. “What’s up with Pericles?”
“He was like the ruler of Athens for years and years,” Jenny said. “In ancient Greece. I looked him up, and they say he built up the city, the Parthenon, all kinds of stuff. And Athens kind of ruled the ancient world while he was in charge.
“But then Athens got into a war with another powerful city, Sparta. And there were all these rumors and accusations about Pericles and his friends, religious crimes and embezzling gold. And then the Athenians weren't happy with how the war was going. Another politician named Cleon accused Pericles of some crimes, which knocked Pericles out of power. And then Pericles died of the plague. And then Cleon took over Athens, and he controlled the city for years, until he died.”
“That's totally interesting.” Seth kissed her. His hand drifted down to the hem of her shirt, then began to pull it up. “I know you didn't sneak out in the woods with me to talk about ancient Greece, though.”
“Yeah, actually, I did.” She laid back on the rock, out of his reach, and tucked her hands behind her head. “In my dream, there was this gray-eyed woman who was Cleon’s wife. It seemed like she was behind a lot of the rumors and accusations, and basically destroyed Pericles’ reputation behind the scenes. And then I read today that Cleon, her husband, ends up as the most powerful man in the city.”
“Sounds like Ashleigh,” Seth said.
“Exactly like Ashleigh. I think it was Ashleigh. You see what I mean?”
“Okay,” Seth said. “Ashleigh was a manipulative bitch in all her lives. Gotcha. And who were you, in ancient Athens?”
Jenny didn’t want to say it. “I helped destroy Athens.”
“You should put that on your college application.” He lay down beside her and kissed her. Jenny wanted to just give in and let him do what he liked to her, but this was too important. She fought down her feelings and nudged him back from her.
“You’re the one going to college, not me. Anyway, I was working for the king of Sparta. His name was Arky…Archidamus. He sent me to Athens to spread a plague there, and to kill Pericles. And I looked it up, and Athens really was hit by a huge plague during that war, and Pericles died from it, too. And Cleon and his people took over Athens, and they were vicious. And eventually Athens lost the war against Sparta. It was called the Peloponnesian War. After that war, Athens stopped being a powerful, important kind of city.”
“Okay,” Seth said. “But I don’t see how it matters now. That was like hundreds of years ago.”
“Um, thousands,” Jenny said. “And it matters because of this guy Cleon. You know that guy who had Ashleigh’s eyes?”
“Old spooky-touch?” Seth said. “I don’t think I’ll forget him.”
“That was him, I think. I’ve got it worked out here.” Jenny leaned up on her elbow. She took a folded sheet of notebook paper from her pocket and spread it out on the boulder between them. “This is what I’ve figured out so far.”
The page had two columns of names:
Euanthe = Me
Cleon’s wife = Ashleigh
Cleon (politician, takes over Athens) = that scary guy (Ashleigh’s opposite)
Archidamus (king of Sparta) = Seth (???)
“Hey, how did I get on the list?” Seth asked.
“The king of Sparta,” Jenny said. “When he touched me, the Jenny pox didn’t infect him. He was immune. So it had to be you. Right?”
“I don’t know. It’s your dream.”
“I don’t know, either,” Jenny said.
“So who was Pericles?” Seth asked.
“I don’t know if he was one of us or just a regular person,” Jenny said. “Anyway, who else is there for me to recognize, besides you and me, and Ashleigh and her guy?”
“So…what does any of this mean, Jenny?”
“I just wanted to tell you. That guy and Ashleigh have a long history together. And he knows I killed her. So I think he’ll be back.”
“After that nasty infection you gave him? I bet he’ll stay away.”
“What if he brings a gun and shoots me?”
“Then I’ll heal you,” Seth said. “After I kill him.”
“I’m serious, Seth.”
“Me, too.” Seth folded up the paper and tucked it in his pocket. “I’ll study this stuff later, when I’m stuck at home. Right now, I’d rather talk about you.”
Seth kissed her again.
This time, Jenny didn’t resist him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tommy drove them out of the city, into the vast lonely universe of the Mojave desert, where the air was clear and the sky was a bottomless blue overhead. She gripped him tight with her arms and thighs.
He followed a narrow unpainted spur road up the top of a bluff, and then he stopped at the edge of the cliff, looking down over a sea of sand and rock.
“That was a long ride,” Esmeralda said.
“You loved it.”
“Maybe.”
She got off the bike and stretched her arms. He dropped the kickstand and killed the engine, then stood beside her, looking over the cliff.
“Why did you come looking for me?” she asked. “Why now?”
“I should have come years ago,” he said. “I keep thinking about you.”
“Thinking what about me?”
“Take off your helmet.”
Esmeralda took it off and shook her long black hair. She smiled at him.
“I have a magic touch like yours,” he said. He took off one glove.
“What do you mean?”
“You can talk to the dead when you touch them,” he said.
“Maybe when I was a kid. It kind of faded away as I got older.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You shouldn’t. I’m lying. But I can’t really talk to the dead.”
“Then how did you find out about the old man’s money?”
“What I do is more like listening,” Esmeralda said. “It’s like all their memories are left behind in their bodies. And I can find them. But it’s not like talking to dead spirits or anything. Their souls are gone.”
