Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  Selene’s first time had been only a few months earlier, when she traveled from New York to Athens. Like Maryam, she’d been captivated by the view. Is this what it looked like when I rode the moon across the sky? she’d wondered, gazing out at a landscape carved of clouds. But whatever Maryam was thinking, she didn’t say. Her stony expression bore no resemblance to the gentle nun’s, nor did she evince any of Athena’s anger or pride. It seemed her entire personality had fallen away—and she looked to the sky to find it again.

  As for Theo, the awkwardness between them had returned as soon as their quest to find Athena was complete. He, too, had barely spoken on the flight to Athens; this time, he’d succeeded in buying a science fiction novel at the airport, and he’d kept his nose in the book the whole time. Occasionally, she’d catch him glancing warily in her direction, but he always turned back to the book without speaking. Such uncharacteristic reticence worried Selene more than any vitriol he could hurl at her. He didn’t even engage with Maryam. He seemed to have given up on the Olympians entirely. She would’ve thought him content to escape into his world of aliens and spaceships and the rest of his beloved nonsense if it weren’t for the fact that despite his usually phenomenal reading speed, he’d barely gotten through the first twenty pages by the time they landed. Nonetheless, he had the book open again in the baggage area, reading aloud to Zeus in an effort to calm his feverish murmuring. So far, it seemed to be working better than Maryam’s “miracles”: Either her father was a closet sci-fi fan, or Theo’s book was incredibly soporific, because the King of the Gods sat quietly dozing.

  Selene turned back to Flint. “So Maryam’s spear and helmet are buried. Please tell me you know exactly where, or am I going to have to dig up the entire Acropolis to find them?”

  “The archeologists already beat you to it. Her weapons are on display in the National Museum.”

  “You’re going to say I have to steal them, aren’t you?” Selene asked with a sigh.

  Flint raised a grizzled eyebrow. “The whole crippled thing means I’m no good at cat-burgling. And something tells me your professor wouldn’t approve of stealing priceless artifacts from a scholarly institution.”

  Yet when she told Theo the plan, he didn’t object. Nor did he volunteer to help. He said only, “Sure. Have fun,” as if he’d stopped caring one way or the other. “I’ll be right here with my book.” He gave her a tight smile and continued reading aloud to Zeus.

  Now, on the roof of the museum, Selene dropped to all fours and peeked over the edge to see the night watchman—watchwoman, actually—exit the building. The rest of the staff had gone home an hour earlier, finally leaving Selene an opportunity to sneak in.

  The search for Athena’s armor had meant missing their promised rendezvous with Scooter at the base of Olympus that afternoon. But the actual Gathering of the Gods wouldn’t occur until midmorning the next day. They still had time.

  The guard took out a pack of cigarettes and checked her watch. Her contract probably allowed ten minutes for a smoke break. Thank goodness for Europe’s strong union rules, Selene thought, affixing one end of a rope to an exhaust pipe on the roof. She rappelled down the side of the building to reach a second-story window. Thankfully, due to austerity measures imposed during the recent financial crisis, the Greeks didn’t have the money for the sort of security systems richer nations could afford.

  She unlatched the window with a narrow blade and crawled through. Silently, she padded through darkened offices filled with dusty books and dustier potsherds. When she reached the main gallery, she paused for a moment to reconnoiter. No guards, that was good, and the woman on her smoke break wouldn’t be back for at least another six minutes.

  Darkness shrouded the vast hall, rendering any security cameras nearly useless. Unlike a professional art thief, Selene hadn’t brought infrared goggles, but nor did she need them; the green light from the exit signs provided more than enough illumination for She Who Roams the Night.

  She sprinted full-out into the hall. The weaponry display, according to the map Flint had shown her, was at the far end, and she didn’t intend to stop until she reached it.

  Yet she skidded to a halt when the King of the Gods emerged from the darkness.

  Her father stood in the center of the hall, feet spread wide, one arm cocked to throw a weapon and the other extended before him to point to his target. He didn’t move.

  It’s just a statue, she thought, catching her breath. Yet it perfectly captured Zeus at the height of his power. His sharp beard jutted forward, his lips unsmiling. The muscles of his lean, naked body were molded in high relief, taut and chiseled. The sculptor had cast the figure in bronze, and the eerie light of the exit signs only intensified the green of the metal’s swirling patina. Where the statue’s inlaid eyes of ivory and precious stones should’ve been, only empty holes remained, and his right hand grasped empty air rather than a braided lightning bolt.

  Your stormy gaze is gone, Father. You can no longer wield your own weapon. The statue made a mockery of all her father had become—trembling and age-spotted, his mind creeping forward where once it had soared on eagle’s wings. But all hope is not lost, she vowed to Zeus’s image. Your daughters will be your eyes. We will be your strong right arm. Together we will cast Saturn into Tartarus and save you from death.

  At the end of the gallery, a large case held a trove of weaponry. Selene’s heart sank as she scanned the artifacts inside. The arrow points and spearheads were mottled green, their edges pitted and blunt, brittle enough to shatter in a strong wind. The bronze helmet in the center of the case was dented and black with corrosion. No divine items would decay like that. Yet Flint had been clear: Take the helm and the largest spearhead.

  She removed the glass cutter the Smith had whipped up at the airport using a compass, a suction cup, a carbide blade, and a small reservoir of lubricating oil. Scooter, as the God of Thieves, would’ve probably had the right equipment on hand, but he was already at Olympus, waiting with the other Athanatoi he’d gathered from around the globe. She placed the cutter on the case and sliced out a perfect circle of glass.

  She reached in and pulled out the spearhead. Sixteen inches long, tapering like an elm leaf. Flakes of bronze fell like green snow. Even if Flint could somehow remove the corrosion, it wouldn’t be much use without a shaft, but she took it anyway. She wrapped it in an old shirt and placed it into her pack with a small smile of satisfaction. Hah. Who needs Scooter? Piece of cake.

  She reached for the helm next. It was far more ornate than Hades’ simple dark headgear. Its long, curved cheek guards had been flipped upward like wings, and several narrow, broken stumps protruded from the crown—the remains of three griffin statues that had served as its crest. Selene lifted the helm an inch off its stand—pulling at a steel filament that immediately triggered a screaming siren.

  A panel of overhead lights at the other end of the hall snapped on, then the next panel, and the next, a wall of light cascading toward her. In less than a second, she’d appear on the security camera overhead.

  She tried to rip the helm from its tether, but the steel held fast. Cursing, she let it drop back onto its stand and dove for cover beneath a large Roman table of purple porphyry marble, crouching behind a wide, lion-clawed leg as the lights burst on above her.

  Pounding feet echoed on the marble floor. She could see the guard now, a stout woman with a walkie-talkie in one hand and the remains of a cigarette in the other. The watchwoman skidded to a halt in the middle of the hall, spinning in both directions, looking for the intruder. She finally dropped the cigarette, called for help on the walkie-talkie, and drew a gun from her belt.

  Selene sighed. Another Athanatos would’ve just shot an arrow through the woman. That would’ve made things easy. But after accidentally wounding Theo in the mithraeum, Selene couldn’t bear the idea of maiming an innocent woman just for doing her job. She’d have to come up with some more creative way of escaping—without getting shot herself. />
  The guard stutter-stepped down the length of the hall, gun held firmly in both hands. Selene scooted a little further beneath the large table and reached carefully for her pack, thinking to knock the gun from the woman’s hand with an arrow. But the sound of the zipper would have the guard running forward before Selene could remove and assemble her bow. She cursed silently, then pulled Flint’s gold necklace from her pocket and unclasped it. She grabbed one end while the other telescoped silently outward into a long golden whip.

  The guard’s footsteps came closer. Selene dared not lean forward to see, so she depended on her ears alone to judge when the woman stood only a few paces away. She slung the whip forward. The tip lashed out, wrapping around the guard’s ankle and yanking her leg out from under her.

  The woman slammed face-first into the ground with a cry, twisting backward to squeeze off three shots as Selene ducked once more behind the table leg. Chips of purple marble flew from the table like hail. Selene kept one hand on the whip and held her pack like a shield over her face until the guard ran out of bullets.

  Selene reeled in her whip, dragging the guard beneath the table like a fish on a line. The woman released the gun to grab onto the slick floor, but Selene didn’t give her the chance. As soon as the tabletop hid the guard from the camera’s view, she lunged forward and pinned the woman’s cheek to the ground, her rolling eyes averted from Selene’s face. A very strong grip on the woman’s carotid artery knocked her unconscious in seconds.

  Selene grabbed the walkie-talkie from the guard’s belt and said with exaggerated casualness, “Pseudopura. Pseudopura,” hoping the Greeks hadn’t changed their word for “false alarm” some time in the last two thousand years. From the bewildered, panicked voices on the other end, she was out of luck. Beneath the continuing din of the museum’s security system, she could hear the police sirens, still far away but getting closer by the second.

  With a curse, she peered out from beneath the table at the brightly lit hall. She couldn’t afford to have the Greek police seeing her face; she’d prefer if they didn’t even know their thief was a woman. She unwrapped the whip, twisted the handle so it shrank back to necklace size, then assembled her bow and grabbed a fistful of wooden arrows. Shooting from beneath the table, she knocked out three of the security cameras in quick succession. Only the one closest to her hiding place remained, and she couldn’t aim for it without crawling out and exposing herself to the camera’s eye.

  At least, not with a normal arrow.

  She looked at the hawk-feather shafts lying inside her pack. She’d left Apollo’s silver plague arrows behind—her twin had long ago rejected his role as the Plague Bringer. He’d tried to live as the Healer, instead, and using his arrows felt like a betrayal of his memory. But she’d kept her own leaf-bladed, black-fletched arrows. If I shoot one, she wondered, will it somehow curve back on itself to kill the guard? The squeal of car tires outside the front entrance decided for her. She pressed her face against the floor so she could just see the camera from the corner of her eye.

  Okay, listen up, arrow, she prayed. I’m aiming for that camera way up there, even though it may not look like it. She loosed the shaft.

  It shot straight across the ground, then swooped upward in a hyperbolic arc. The second she heard the camera lens crack, Selene dashed from beneath the table, arriving just in time to pluck the tumbling arrow from the air.

  A minute later, she was back on the roof, reeling in her rope. She took off along the ridgeline at a trot, then slipped down a gutter pipe and into a thick evergreen hedge. She crouched there until a small troop of cops jogged past, then crawled out and ducked onto a side street. She patted her pack, making sure she still had the spearhead, and called Flint. To her surprise, Theo answered instead.

  “What?” he demanded without preamble.

  She tried not to feel the sting of his disregard. “Mission accomplished. Mostly. Why are you picking up—”

  “Flint’s busy.”

  “Well, tell him to come get me and we’ll head to Mount Olympus. If we leave now, we’ll still make it to the summit before the Great Gathering tomorrow morning.”

  “We can’t really do that right now.” He sounded distracted.

  “Why not?” They’d had a very specific plan, and it wasn’t like either Flint or Theo to ignore it.

  “Because we’re chasing after Sister Maryam.”

  “Chasing? I left her sitting meekly next to you in the airport! Where’d she go?”

  “All of a sudden she sort of woke up and looked at a map on the wall and then just took off. To the Acropolis. We couldn’t stop her. We’re on our way up there now.”

  “What about Father?”

  “Don’t worry—he’s asleep in the rental car. We parked below and slipped up the path while the guards were all distracted by news of a break-in at the museum on the other end of town.”

  “Ah, see, setting off the alarms was all part of my master plan.”

  Theo snorted, unamused. “So the Lady of Clamors shook the hornet’s nest. They’re below us now, swarming all over the base of the Acropolis. You’ll never get past them.”

  Selene was already hailing a taxi. “I’ll bet you one very unimpressive ancient spearhead that you’re wrong.”

  Chapter 39

  ATHENA

  The Acropolis, the “High City,” loomed five hundred feet above the modern buildings of Athens. Floodlights warmed the pale limestone slopes of the massive butte, illuminating every detail of the ancient temples still perched atop it.

  The gate to the main path up the Acropolis was locked for the night—and thick with panicked guards besides. Selene directed her cabdriver instead to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the mostly preserved Roman theater that hosted performances all summer long on the Acropolis’s southern slope. At eleven, the show was just letting out—Aida, from the posters. Actors in Egyptian costumes mingled beneath the Odeon’s towering Roman facade, snapping selfies with the audience members in a disconcerting juxtaposition of modern and ancient. For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine coming back someday after things with Saturn and her father were finally settled. Apollo would want her to let art into her life. I wonder if Theo even likes opera? she found herself wondering before quashing the thought. It doesn’t matter. Because as soon as this is all over, he’s gone. He made that perfectly clear.

  Selene took cover in the crowd, threading through the thick of it before ducking off the terrace and into the undergrowth. Scaling the tall chain-link fence took her seconds. From there, she hurried to the steepest part of the cliff, far from the path used by both tourists and guards.

  She stared up at the sheer rock face. This is why the ancient kings of Athens built their citadel on top, she thought ruefully. But it would take more than a little rock climbing to stop She Who Dwells on the Heights. The only challenge lay in avoiding the floodlights.

  Selene shimmied her way up a shadowed cleft, bracing hands and feet against the dusty limestone, then levered herself onto a shelf of rock no wider than her boots. The cliff continued above her with no visible handholds or accessible shadows. This time, there were no security cameras to worry about—just the millions of Athenians gazing lovingly up at their Acropolis from roof decks across the city.

  If I’m going into the light, she decided, I better be falcon swift.

  She eased her pack open, assembled her bow for the second time that night, and chose a steel-tipped wooden arrow. Fifty feet overhead, a single olive tree grew crookedly from the bare rock. From the width of its trunk, she figured it had grown there for at least three hundred years. Let’s hope it stays put just a little longer, she prayed as she tied her rope to the arrow shaft and aimed at a branch. She sent the arrow straight up with a gentle pluck of her bowstring. It reached its peak just above the top of the tree, then fell back toward her, fletching first, missing the branch entirely and nearly striking her in the face.

  Her phone rang as she reeled back in the rope.

>   “What about ‘I’m sneaking up the Acropolis surrounded by guards’ do you not understand?” she hissed.

  “That’s what vibrate mode is for,” Theo whispered back. “You need to hurry. Maryam’s losing it. She wants her spear.”

  “Yeah, yeah, give me a minute.” She hung up and traded her wooden arrow for a hawk-fletched one. Does it make me less of a Far Shooter when I have arrows that do all the work for me? she wondered as she aimed for the tree again. The gold shaft rocketed into the sky, then curved in midair and flew around the trunk in a perfect circle. It looped two more times for good measure before burying itself six inches deep in the bark.

  “Holy Roman Empire,” Selene muttered under her breath, borrowing Theo’s favorite curse.

  Hand over hand, she scurried up the rope like a spider on its web, so fast an observer might’ve mistaken her for the shadow of a cloud passing before the moon. From the olive tree, it was a short, steep scramble to the top.

  Several guards roamed the plateau with flashlights. After all, this was the biggest tourist destination in the entire country. During Athens’s Golden Age, the Acropolis had housed the city’s most important temples and shrines. Now it was the symbol of the modern nation.

  The Huntress had come here often in antiquity. She had a shrine right beside Athena’s—a long stoa dedicated to the Goddess of Girls, an offshoot of her sanctuary at Brauron. Here, too, young girls dressed as bear cubs had danced in homage to Artemis. But as she stalked from temple to temple, ducking out of the guards’ line of sight, she noted that no trace of the Brauronia remained, only an expanse of bare rock and a few low, crumbled stones.

  Not far away, Selene remembered, had stood the bronze statue of Athena Promakhos—Athena the Frontline Soldier. It had towered three stories in the air, its spearpoint and helmet crest so bright that sailors forty miles away off Cape Sounion could see it winking in the sun and know they were almost home. Looters had no doubt carried it off long ago—the courtyard stood barren. Selene thought of the corroded spearhead in her pack. Will it be enough to make Athena the tallest goddess once again?