They sat in silence until Ben’s voice came over the speaker. “You are now free to move about the cabin, fellow lawbreakers. We are clear.”
Alia released a shuddering sigh of relief, and Jason gave her hand a squeeze.
Theo unbuckled his seat belt and stumbled over to the jet’s bar by the banquettes. There was no turbulence, but Alia couldn’t blame him for being unsteady on his feet.
“You’re going to start drinking already?” said Nim, her tear-stained face bleak.
“No,” said Theo. “I’m going to continue drinking.”
“Theo,” Jason said warningly.
“Would everyone relax?” he said. “I just want some ginger ale. My tummy gets upset when I fly, and almost dying doesn’t help, either.”
Alia wanted to laugh, but she was afraid she might just start crying. She felt shaken and exhausted now that the adrenaline was leaving her body, but she also felt grateful. Theo was alive. Nim was alive. Once again, Alia had evaded death. They’d all made it out. Maybe Diana was right and they were destined to survive and reach the spring.
Alia knew they needed to talk, but she wanted a chance to gather her thoughts and get cleaned up. The jet was equipped with a shower, so she retrieved her small travel case from where it had been stashed beside Diana’s pack in the rear of the plane and headed into the bathroom to shed her golden scales.
The water was hot enough, but she didn’t linger beneath it. She stepped out of the shower and stared at herself in the mirror. Her body was covered in new cuts and scrapes, and she knew she was going to have more bruises from all the tumbling and falling she’d done during the fight. She had blisters on her toes from those ridiculous shoes Nim had picked out.
She looked at the heap of finery and again felt the events of the night, of the last few days, threatening to overwhelm her, but she pushed that panic away. In a day, this would all be over.
Alia pulled on the jeans she’d packed and a ratty old T-shirt with a double helix on it that she’d gotten at science camp years ago. She frowned at her reflection as a memory came back to her: a brawl that had erupted at the closing picnic that year. She and the other kids had thought it was hilarious. They’d called it the Great Nerd Battle. But when the fight had been broken up and some semblance of calm had returned, Alia had heard two of the counselors talking. A boy had almost been choked to death by one of the staff, and a fire had been set in the dining hall. They were just lucky it hadn’t spread. The camp had closed permanently after that.
At the time, it had just been something shocking for the campers to talk about, a story Alia brought home to her parents and Jason. But now she remembered her parents’ expressions when she’d told them about the fight, the look they’d exchanged. From then on, they spent their summers traveling or at one of the family’s houses. There were no more trips to camp.
Alia wasn’t sure what to do with the wreck she’d made of her beautiful dress, so she crushed it into a ball and shoved it to the bottom of her bag. No doubt Nim would be appalled, but she couldn’t bear to look at it. Thinking of how happy and hopeful she’d felt when she’d put that dress on, of how she’d imagined Theo looking at her in it, made her skin prickle with embarrassment. It seemed silly now, and dangerous, too. Diana had been right: The people pursuing her were relentless. They clearly had resources they were willing to use—on innocent people on a boat in the Aegean, and now in full view of some of the wealthiest members of New York society.
Alia untangled the pretty gold chain from her braids, pulled on her sneakers, and took a last look in the mirror. Warbringer. Had Helen’s legacy passed through her father’s bloodline? Through the Keralis name to Alia? It didn’t matter. She was her mother’s daughter, too. She’d thought it had taken all of her courage to leave New York and sign up for the trip aboard the Thetis without Jason’s permission, but she’d been so wrong. That had been just a scrap of her courage. Since then she’d faced shipwreck, a near drowning, and a gunfight, and she was still here, still standing. She was going to make sure no girl ever had to live with this curse again. And Alia knew it was because of the way her mom had raised her. For all her mother’s caution, she’d never wanted Alia to be meek. Look them in the eye, she’d always told her. Let them know who you are. When someone asked where you were from. When a new kid at Bennett wanted to know if she was on an athletic scholarship. Look them in the eye.
Another memory came to Alia—sitting in the office of the penthouse, her mother sliding a needle into her arm, the syringe filling with Alia’s blood. “Just for tests,” her mother had said, covering the injection site with a cotton ball and a Band-Aid, and planting a kiss on her cheek. Alia had never given it a second thought.
Her parents had believed something good could come from Alia’s heritage, that the terrible power inside her might be turned to better purpose. They hadn’t lived to make that a possibility, but Alia could at least make sure the world didn’t pay for their choice to keep her alive.
“I’m Alia Mayeux Keralis,” she said, surprised by how steady her voice sounded. “And I’m going to stop a war.”
She pulled her braids into a knot atop her head and returned to the front of the plane. Theo was sprawled out on one of the padded banquettes. Nim was still slumped forward with her head in her hands. Alia sat down next to her and gently bumped her shoulder against Nim’s. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Nim said into her palms.
“Gemma—”
“I watched her die,” said Nim, still not looking at her. “No, that’s not right. It happened too fast to watch. We were just talking. I was looking at the butterflies on her dress. I was thinking about the color, the bead count. I was thinking Gemma was pretty but”—Nim hiccuped a sob—“pretty but boring. And then people were screaming. We heard the gunshots. We tried to get down. Why did they shoot her?”
“I don’t think they meant to,” said Alia. I don’t think they cared. She barely knew Gemma Rutledge, but she’d seemed nice enough. All of those people she’d been complaining about having to talk to had seemed nice enough. How many had been hurt? Killed? She held tight to Diana’s promise that there was a purpose to this mission, that all of it would mean something if they could just get to the spring.
“There’s a shower,” Alia said. “And some Keralis Labs gear if you want to change.”
Nim sat up, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes like a child woken from a deep sleep. “I don’t want to change. I want to know what’s going on. What just happened?” Her voice was pleading. “Why did Jason have a gun? Who are we running from?” She turned to Diana. “And how did you do those things?”
Diana sat cross-legged on the banquette, methodically untying the knots in her lasso. She said nothing, only shifted her gaze to Alia, waiting.
“Well?” said Theo, resting his glass of ginger ale on his stomach. “I think it’s fair to ask what the hell is going on. Even if Nim is the one asking.”
“Just shut up,” said Nim. “What are you even doing here? What if your father didn’t make it out of the party?”
“My father wasn’t there.”
“What?” said Jason. He’d disappeared into the back of the plane and emerged in jeans and a T-shirt. He set a pile of sweats on one of the seats and began to dig through the jet’s medical kit.
“My father took off,” said Theo. “He said he had to be on a call to Singapore or something. Good timing, right?”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know,” Theo said. “He wanted me to come with him. ‘You’re going to embarrass yourself, Theo, blah, blah, blah.’ The usual stuff. It was right around Alia running off and us being shot at.”
Alia felt something cold uncoil in her stomach. Could it be a coincidence? She met Jason’s gaze and knew he was thinking the same thing. Could Michael be involved? What if he knew what she was? He’d been like a father to them both, but “like a father” wasn’t a father. Maybe he’d been willing to make the sacrifice Alia’s parents hadn’t.
“Don’t look so worried, guys,” Theo said. “I’ll call him when we’re on the ground.”
“No!” they said in unison.
Theo’s brows shot up. “Why not?”
Jason pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefingers. “It’s just really important that no one know where we are or where we’re headed.”
“Okay,” said Nim. “Fine. How about you tell us why?”
Jason and Alia did their best. They answered question after question from Theo and Nim. At first the queries came fast and loud, one piling on top of another: Who had attacked them? Why? Were the gunmen terrorists? What did they want? Was it because of the Foundation? But as Jason calmly explained that these people had a different agenda in mind and Alia was at the center of it, Nim and Theo grew quiet.
Jason set the medical kit aside and handed around some of the files he’d printed, a copy of the scroll, and a laptop with the documents from the flash drive. Big chunks of text had been redacted from some of the files, and others seemed to be incomplete, but there were more than enough to make the point.
Alia felt a little like she was standing naked in the middle of Times Square. The story sounded so much less far-fetched with Jason telling it—especially with all of those documents to back him up. But that only made it worse. She’d pretty much accepted the fact that Theo was never going to see her as more than an annoying kid, but what if he looked at her now and saw a monster? And Nim had been her friend through everything, but “everything” had never included bringing about the end of the world.
When Theo finally looked up from Jason’s files, he focused his attention on Diana. “What about you? What’s your deal? Right now, my best guess is government super soldier.”
“Government what?” said Diana.
“You know…like, genetically altered killing machine.”
Diana clenched the pile of gleaming rope in her lap. “I’m not a killer.” She said it with such conviction, her chin tilted at an almost regal angle. But the words of the vow they’d spoken still resonated through Alia. Diana would honor it.
“Okay, okay,” said Theo. “Member of a bionic-ninja fight squad.”
“I’m not trained as a ninja, either.” Diana looked down at the lasso and said, “Where I come from, we train for war.”
“Why?”
“Because men are incapable of living without fighting, and we know that one day the fight will come to us.”
“But the things you did—” said Nim.
“I’m stronger, faster than…well, than ordinary people. All of my sisters are.”
“And you can shrug off bullets like mosquito bites, knock over temples, and survive fiery explosions?” said Nim.
Diana opened her mouth, then closed it, as if uncertain what to say. In that moment, she looked less like the brave, self-assured girl who casually wrecked the egos of subway-going bros in business suits. She looked dazed, a little lost. Like a girl who’d stayed too late at a party and missed her ride home.
“Honestly, I’m not totally sure what I can do,” Diana said. “I’ve never done it before.”
“Well, you’re one hell of a quick study,” grumbled Jason as he extracted a roll of gauze and packets of what looked like aspirin from the medical kit. Alia wanted to reach across the aisle and slap him. She knew he was hungry for concrete answers, but Diana had saved their lives. She deserved to keep whatever secrets she wanted to.
“Let’s say I choose to believe all this,” said Nim. “What happens next?”
“We get to the spring,” said Diana.
“In Sparta,” said Theo, “where dudes run around yelling in leather undies.”
“I’ve never heard that particular story,” Diana said. “But Sparta is where Helen was born and raised, and where she was worshipped after her death.”
That didn’t sound right to Alia. “People worshipped Helen? I thought everyone hated her.”
“There were those who did. But Helen wasn’t just the cause of the Trojan War. She was a mother and a wife, and a girl once, too. There are stories that she used to run races along the banks of the Eurotas.” Diana smiled slightly. “And she won.”
It was strange to think of Helen before she was Helen. “Her tomb is in Therapne?” Alia asked.
“That’s right,” said Diana. “It’s called the Menelaion, but before that it was known as Helen’s Tomb. ‘Where Helen rests, the Warbringer may be purified.’ ”
Nim tapped her fingers against the frayed knees of her jumpsuit. “Okay, so we just have to get to the spring before the bad guys get to Alia.”
Alia wanted to say a long prayer of thanks that Nim seemed to be taking all of this in stride and hadn’t tried to throw herself out of the airplane. But if they were going to tell the truth, they should tell all of it.
“Actually,” said Alia, “I’m not sure they are the bad guys.”
“They blew up the Sackler Wing of the Met,” said Nim. “They’re monsters.”
Theo took a sip of his ginger ale. “Or maybe just not art lovers.”
“They’re people willing to do anything to see Alia dead,” said Jason grimly. “And a lot of people lost their lives because of it.”
“Right,” said Theo softly. “Sorry.”
Jason wasn’t wrong, but Alia also knew that they were all dealing with their fear and horror as best they could.
She gestured to the laptop propped on the banquette. “From what I can see, plenty of people are looking to identify and eradicate Warbringers—”
“In other words, you,” said Theo.
“Yes, me. And they have pretty good reasons.”
Nim tossed her sheaf of black hair from her eye. “How good can their reasons be if they’re trying to kill you?”
Alia sighed. “They don’t know about the spring. They’re just trying to stop a world war. So, according to everyone but present company, they’re pretty good.”
“That’s perfect,” said Theo, sitting up.
Jason crossed his arms. “How’s that exactly?”
“We’re the villains! It’s always cooler to be the villain. You get to wear black and have a lair and brood. Besides, girls can’t resist a bad boy.”
“You are such an idiot,” said Nim.
He tapped his temple. “It’s not my fault you lack the vision.”
Nim opened her mouth to reply and Alia cut in with a sharp, “Hey! Have you guys ever noticed that you get along fine except when I’m around?”
“That’s not true,” said Theo. “We have never gotten along.”
“Think about it. Do you go home and rant about how much you hate Nim?”
“I—” Theo hesitated. Even his locs looked like they were thinking. “Well, no. It’s just when—”
“Just when you’re around me. So next time you guys feel like killing each other, maybe take a break and go to your corners. Literally, just get away from me or each other.”
Theo and Nim shared a skeptical glance.
“See?” said Alia. “You both think I’m nuts so you have something to agree on already.”
“What will your people make of the attack on the museum?” Diana asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Jason, his voice weary. “There’s a lot of bad stuff happening around the world right now. They’ll probably chalk it up to terrorism, an attack on the Foundation because of its international policies. We’ve had threats before, problems at some of our facilities abroad.”
“But nothing on this scale,” said Theo.
“No,” said Jason. “Nothing with a body count.”
“And do we have any idea who those particular good guys were?” Nim asked.
“They were speaking German,” said Theo. “Ich bin ein blow the museum up.”
Jason shuffled through a stack of files. “There are a number of international organizations who make it their business to try to track the Warbringer’s bloodline. There used to be more, but either they’ve gone to ground or just died out. There’s the Order of Saint Dumas, and a splinter group called Das Erdbeben that once operated out of Hamburg, but it’s hard to tell which are real and which are fiction.”
“Those bullets seemed awfully real,” said Nim.
“But why now?” asked Alia. “Why wait until so close to the new moon to try to…get rid of me?”
Jason shifted uneasily in his seat and looked down at his hands. “I think that may be my fault.”
“As long as it’s not my fault,” said Theo.
Alia waited, and Jason smoothed his thumb over the knee of his jeans. “Mom and Dad hadn’t transferred a bunch of the old files to digital. I thought I should back everything up, make a record. So I scanned it all in—”
“On a Keralis Labs computer?” Theo said, sounding genuinely horrified for the first time since they’d started talking. “Were you even running encryption?”
“Yes,” said Jason. “And we have all kinds of confidential information on those servers. Research. Proprietary data. It should have been safe.”
“But someone in the company could have recognized something,” said Diana. “All it would take was one word, one mention.”
“I’m sorry, Al,” Jason said. He looked physically ill. “I never really believed in all of it. Not the way they did. I should have been more careful.”
Alia sighed. How could she be angry with him for something he couldn’t possibly have understood? “I don’t know whether to smack you for being so stupid or do a victory dance to celebrate the fact that this time you’re the one who screwed up.”
“You could incorporate a smack into your victory dance,” suggested Nim.
“Efficiency,” said Alia. “I like it.”
“Efficiency,” Diana repeated thoughtfully. “It’s possible these organizations are exchanging information now. It would be the strategic thing to do. As near as I can tell from the scroll, tracking and identifying Warbringers was no easy task. The first recorded assassination of a Warbringer happened in the modern world. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“One more thing to blame on the Internet,” said Theo.
Alia held up one of the folders. “What about all the text that’s been blacked out? Are there complete versions of the files anywhere?”
Jason shook his head. “Not that I’ve found. I think Mom and Dad may have been pursuing separate lines of research at some point. I’m not sure.”
Theo refilled his glass. “Okay, we get to Greece, we find the spring, we’re all good.”
So they weren’t going to run screaming. Alia could have hugged Theo. But that was pretty much always true.
“Theo, this isn’t your fight,” said Jason. “Or yours, Nim. I’m going to have Ben put us down at an abandoned landing strip near the airport in Araxos instead of the airport in Kalamata. From there, I can arrange for a flight back to—”
“Stop,” said Nim, holding her hands up. “If people are willing to blow a hole in the side of the Met to get to you, then they know who we are, and as soon as we pop back up on the grid they’ll be coming after us, trying to find out where you went.”
“She makes a good point,” said Diana. “We can’t afford to underestimate these people again.”
“All right,” Jason said, considering. “We’ll find a safe house. Someplace secure—”
“You’re going to find some olive grove to stash us in?” said Theo indignantly.
“I was thinking a hotel,” said Jason.
“Forget it. If our roles were reversed, would you just sit around sipping ouzo while I was in danger?”
“No,” conceded Jason.
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“Me too,” said Nim.
Alia shook her head. “No way. You saw what we’re up against. You could get hurt. Maybe killed. I couldn’t bear that.”
“I know,” said Nim. “It would be a terrible loss for you and the world. But you’re my best friend. And honestly, I’d rather be shot at than spend a week in a hotel room with Theo.”
Alia knew she should argue harder. Tell them to hide out, do what Jason had suggested, make a real effort to ensure their safety. But despite the danger and their constant sniping, she wanted them with her. She and Jason had lost so much, and Theo and Nim had become their family—loving, supportive, and, occasionally, completely insufferable.
Alia met Diana’s eyes. “Can we keep them safe?”
“I don’t know,” Diana said honestly, and Alia felt grateful for that truth. “But I’m not sure leaving them behind somewhere would be much better. If they were caught…”
Diana didn’t have to finish the thought. If Theo and Nim were caught, maybe it would be by one of the good good guys. Or maybe it would be by one of the groups who wouldn’t think twice about torture.
Alia didn’t like it, but they were out of real choices. “All right. You can come. But let’s try not to do anything too stupid.”
Nim reached out and gave Alia’s hand a sharp squeeze. “Don’t ask Theo to make promises he can’t keep.”
Maybe Alia’s warning had gotten to him, or maybe Theo was just in a good mood, because all he did was grin and lift his ginger ale.
“A toast,” he said. “To the villains.”