Alia hovered halfway up the stairs in the entry as Diana strode from the kitchen. How did she manage to make a crappy drugstore T-shirt look regal?
“What did Jason say?” she asked. “Was he horrible?”
“Yes,” said Diana as she followed her up the steps. “I suppose his motives are good, but his manner makes me want to—”
“Stab him with a pencil?”
“Not exactly that,” said Diana. “But he’s certainly irritating.”
The phone buzzed, and Alia bounced on her toes with a happy whoop. “Nim is on her way!”
“It would be best if she wasn’t seen entering the building.”
Alia paused, her foot on the stair above her. It was too easy to slide out of the reality of her situation. It was like her mind couldn’t accept what was happening, so it just kept defaulting to the ordinary.
She sent a text to Nim telling her to take a car and use the private elevator. They could send Perez down with a key.
“Can she be trusted, this Nim?” asked Diana.
“Definitely. But let’s spare her all the Warbringer talk, yeah?”
At the top of the stairs, Alia hesitated. She longed for her room, her clothes, a good long nap. Instead, she made herself turn right and follow the hallway, the skylights casting squares of sunshine on the black-and-white paneled floor.
“The pattern is different here,” Diana noted.
“Yeah, the tiles in the entry hall make a fractal. This is a DNA sequence.” Alia shrugged. “That’s what happens when you give nerds money.”
She stopped before the double doors to her parents’ office, her hands resting on the handles, then took a deep breath and pushed them open.
There was a time when this had been her favorite room in the apartment. Its walls were lined with bookshelves paneled in the same warm wood as the staircase, and a huge fireplace took up half of one wall. A small table and two chairs had been positioned in front of the cold grate, and a paperback lay open on one of the armrests, just where Lina Keralis had left it. Death in the Air, by Agatha Christie.
“Mom loved mysteries,” Alia said, touching the cracked spine of the book lightly. “And thrillers. She liked puzzles. She said they helped her relax.”
Diana ran her hand along the stone mantel, pausing to pick up a photograph. “Are these your parents?”
Alia nodded. “And Neil deGrasse Tyson in the middle.”
Diana set the frame down gently. “This room is so different from the rest of your home.”
It was true. Her parents had kept the rest of the penthouse light and airy, but the office looked like they’d stolen the library from some English manor house. “My parents loved this kind of old-world stuff.”
“Well, old is relative,” Diana murmured, and Alia remembered her claim that the walls on her island dated back three thousand years.
“They said they worked in a sterile white lab all day; they wanted to feel like they were escaping when they came home.”
Again, Alia touched her hand to the spine of the book on her mother’s chair. A decanter with two glasses beside it sat on a low table. It all felt so immediate, as if they might return at any moment. Alia knew it was a little creepy, definitely depressing, but she couldn’t quite make herself close that book.
“I just can’t believe my mom would have kept such a huge secret from me,” she said.
“Maybe she didn’t want you to feel different,” Diana said. “Maybe she wanted you to have a chance at being like everyone else.”
Alia snorted. “Not much hope of that.” She crossed to the double desk where her parents had liked to work across from each other.
“Why?”
She plunked herself down in her father’s old chair and used the edge of the desk to give herself a shove, sending herself spinning. “Well, Nim and I are the only brown girls in my grade, and two of about ten in the whole school.” She switched directions, launching herself into another spin. “I’m a complete science nerd.” She spun again. “And I’m more comfortable reading than at parties. So, yeah, not much chance at normal. Besides, you should have seen me when I had braces.”
“Braces?”
“For my teeth?” Alia bared her teeth. “Let me guess, yours are just naturally straight and pearly white.” She tapped her fingers over the desk. “I know Mom had a safe for her jewelry and stuff, but I don’t know where it is.”
“There’s a panel beside the Faith Ringgold,” Jason said from the doorway.
He strode behind the desk and slid open a panel next to the framed quilt, revealing a heavy-looking safe set into the wall. He entered a long combination into its keypad, then pressed his fingertip to a red screen. Alia heard a soft metallic whir and a click. He pulled open the safe’s door.
“Here,” he said, handing Alia a flash drive. “Most of the files are on this. They kept hard copies, too, if you want them. And this.” He drew a slender metal case from the safe and set it on the desk.
Alia cast a wary eye at the box. “What is it?”
“A record of all the known Warbringers. I don’t know where they got it or how it’s passed from one family to another.”
Alia flipped the latch and lifted the lid. There was a scroll inside, yellowing parchment wrapped around a spool of polished wood. She touched her fingers to it briefly, then drew her hand back. How much did she want to know?
But that wasn’t the way a scientist thought. It wasn’t the way her parents had taught her to think.
She lifted the scroll from the box and began to unroll it. She’d expected some kind of family tree, but it was more like a time line. The inscriptions were made in several different languages, names and dates scrawled in different hands, different inks, one a rusty brown that might be blood.
The first words were written in Greek. “What does this mean?” Alia said, fingers hovering over the entry.
“Helen—” Diana and Jason began at the same time.
“Daughter of Nemesis,” Diana continued. “Goddess of divine retribution, born with war in her blood, first of the haptandrai.”
“Wait a minute,” Alia protested. “I thought Helen was supposed to be the daughter of Zeus and Leda. You know, the swan?”
“That’s one story. In others, Helen and her brothers were the children of Zeus and Nemesis and were only fostered by Leda.”
“Divine retribution,” said Alia. “That’s…cheerful.”
“She was also known as Adrasteia.”
“The inescapable,” said Jason.
“I bet she’s fun to have around.” Alia furrowed her brow. “You said that word before. Haptandrai.”
Jason nodded. “The meaning is a little cloudy. The root can mean to ignite or to assail, but also just to touch.”
“The hand of war,” murmured Diana.
Alia stared at Jason. “Did you brush up on Greek because Dad was Greek or because of this Warbringer thing?”
“A little of both,” he admitted.
Alia wasn’t too surprised. Jason had always been more interested in their Keralis side than their Mayeux side.
“Your translation isn’t entirely accurate, though,” Diana said. “The root can mean other things. To grab, to grapple with, to couple with.”
“Couple with?” squeaked Alia.
“I did not need to know that,” said Jason.
Diana shrugged. “It makes a kind of sense. Helen wasn’t just one thing, and there can be many reasons for war.”
Alia didn’t want to ponder that too deeply. She turned her focus back to the scroll, unfurling it a bit more. She was wrong; it looked less like a time line than a cross between a seismograph and an EKG. Each girl’s name was followed by a series of peaks tagged with incidents of conflict, each peak larger than the last, like foothills rising to mountains, culminating in a sharp apex of violence that ran in a spiky range across the top of the scroll until at last it dropped off again.
“Evgenia,” Alia murmured, touching her finger to one of the names inscribed on the parchment. “The Peloponnesian War. It looks like it lasted nearly sixty years.”
“Longer,” said Jason. “It was the beginning of the end for Greek democracy.”
“Livia Caprenia,” she said. “The Sack of Rome. Angeline de Sonnac, the Seventh Crusade.” Her fingers jumped from era to era in no particular order, from girl to girl, tragedy to tragedy. “The Hundred Years’ War. The Wars of the Roses. The Thirty Years’ War. Did they know?” Alia’s voice sounded shaky to her own ears. “Helen knew she was the cause of the Trojan War, but did these girls know what they were? What they caused just by breathing?”
“Maybe,” said Jason. “I don’t think so. How could they?”
“Someone was keeping these records,” Diana said.
Alia kept her eyes locked on the scroll. “Oh God. World War One. World War Two. You’re telling me we were the cause of that?”
“No,” said Diana. She braced her hand against Alia’s shoulder. “The Warbringer is a catalyst. Not a cause. You cannot take the blame for the violence men do.”
Alia drew in a sharp breath. “Look,” she said, jabbing her finger at the year 1945. Next to it was an annotation: Irene Martin. B. December 1. A series of small peaks followed in the same pattern as the other entries, moderate at first, widely spaced, then rising in irregular lines, each closer to the next. They reached an apex in 1962 and then abruptly dropped off. The inscription there read Irene Martin. D. October 27.
Alia frowned. “What was happening in 1962? I don’t remember—”
“I didn’t, either,” said Jason. “I had to look it up. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets and the Americans came to the brink of nuclear war.”
“But then the Warbringer died?”
Neither Jason nor Diana met her eyes.
“Oh,” said Alia quietly. “She didn’t die. She was assassinated.” Alia touched her fingers to the date again. “She never got to turn seventeen. They found her and they killed her because they knew it would just keep getting worse.”
“Alia, there were still wars after the Warbringer died,” said Jason. “Vietnam, Cambodia, the Balkans, countless wars in the Middle East and Africa.”
“But who knows how much worse it would have been if Irene Martin had lived?” Alia brushed hastily at her cheeks. When had she started crying?
Diana squeezed her shoulder. “Listen to me,” she said. “We’re going to reach the spring. We’re going to change all of this.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. We’ll reach the spring. We’ll break the line. And there will never be another Warbringer. No girl will have to bear this burden again. Including you.”
“That’s right,” said Jason.
“You don’t even believe there’s a spring,” Alia said, sniffling loudly.
“I believe…I believe that if there was a start to this, then there has to be an end.”
A buzzing sound broke the quiet of the room. Alia looked down at the phone. “Nim’s here.”
“Go wash your face,” said Jason, taking the phone from her. “Perez will let Nim up. I’ll have the files put on the jet, and we can look them over during the flight. Both of you should pack a travel bag, too.” He put his arm around her. “Alia, we—”
She shook him off and stepped away from Diana. “Don’t,” she said, ignoring the flash of hurt that crossed Jason’s face as she headed for the door. She couldn’t bring herself to let him comfort her. He couldn’t fix this. The only thing that would make this right was the spring.
She closed the door on Jason and his files and the long shadows their parents had left behind.