one.”
I let any hesitation in me fall apart like a sand sculpture under the chop of the ocean. Orphan me? Toss me away again? Never! I open my furious mouth. I fill my furious lungs to prepare for our song.
I will take her down. I will take him down.
But in the nanosecond before the vibration of that first note can work its way up my throat, Raymond speaks: “I swear!”
This stops me. I close my mouth.
“Meg said she’s only playing along with Ambrosia.”
I listen. I see.
Ms. Pallas holds Raymond in her threatening gaze. “We have only a small window before their power solidifies. If we don’t stop them forever when we have this chance, it will be too late. Too late for you, Raymond. For me. For the whole world.”
“I promise. You don’t know Meg like I do. She would never go too far. She’s just fooling Ambrosia. She told me so.”
There it is, a bald-faced lie to a goddess, with guilt and uncertainty pressing in on him. A lie that puts everything, the present and the future, the whole world, at risk.
Raymond told it for me. To protect me and save me.
Remember, Meg! Remember!
He defied Athena because he believes in me. Because he knows the deepest part of who I am. Because he loves me and trusts me and would never let anyone throw me away.
I press my palms over my ears, trying to ignore Ambrosia’s bellowing order to sing. I need to think. I must understand what’s happening more clearly.
Ambrosia won’t stop clamoring, though. She must keep my fury burning, and to do that she lashes me to memories of my own humiliation and abuse. I’m forced to relive it all, my whole history of cruel foster parents and promises broken and the parents who threw me away. I see and hear it like each episode is happening for the first time. My body spasms and my mind thrashes feverishly with the loneliness and loss.
I hear Athena, too, issuing orders to Raymond. “She’s weak now, and vulnerable. Shut her down! Do it!”
But underneath my pain and exhaustion, through it and despite it, I start experiencing other things: a whisper, then a whiff, a tingling, and the thinnest sensation of Raymond’s touch on my hair. He’s here. For me and with me. He won’t let go. He’s steady and loyal. I sink into the comfort and strength of his love.
Together we repeat his words like a mantra: “This power. It’s mine. It’s up to me how I use it.”
“No!” Ambrosia and Athena roar in unison.
Their anger makes us more determined to defy them. I hum a chorus of Raymond’s song with him, and the notes fill me with another kind of power. It makes my mind bright and clear. Ambrosia tries to pull me back. I feel the deep sting of her nails as they claw at my flesh. But I push through the agony and follow Raymond’s melody out and back to the mountaintop. I have escaped from a dark and terrible place.
We keep singing, and Alix, adding her own harmony, comes to us. We are three in the night air, individual voices but together. We sing Stephanie out of Ambrosia’s grasp and reel her safely to our side.
A scream then, high-pitched and animal-like. In outrage, Ambrosia jumps to the ground and stamps her foot, stamps it again and again with a deep, dull thud that makes the ground quake.
Athena, too, lands with a crash that echoes along the mountaintop. The goddess of war, justice, and strength raises her right arm. She points her scepter at the horizon.
A rumble of thunder.
That’s what I think it is at first, because there’s also what looks to be a storm building, a solid bank of gray-white cloud, iridescent in the dark, moving toward us. I squint to bring it into focus, and that’s when I make out moving shadows in the cloud, and as they get closer the shadows become individuals—people large and small, old and young, naked and in uniforms and tattered clothing, people of every race, eye shape, and hair color. People crying and moaning. They are all blind. Animals, too, hoofed, feathered, and clawed. I fall to my knees and cover my head as these sightless figures swarm us.
Who are these hideous corpses marching in blind unison, an endless stream of bloody soldiers in ripped military gear of every nation that ever existed throughout time and space? Who are these moaning, skeletal women lugging the torn and limbless