chapter 33
“Fire?” The word erupts from Ambrosia’s mouth as a cruel laugh. “That’s all you’ve got? The burning-bush routine? Hasn’t that been done to death? I’m shivering.”
A spit from Pallas Athena and the fire goes out. A trail of smoke snakes into the air.
“What’s next up your sleeve?” Ambrosia mocks. “Threaten them with a failing grade?”
Despite their positions on the high crags, I can make out every expression as in a close-up: the taunting smirk on Ambrosia’s lips, the antagonism etched on Athena’s features. Their battle is playing out before me like a movie, but a movie where there’s no popcorn and I’m tied to the seat and the screen is huge and my eyelids are propped open and the sound is blasted high.
Ambrosia arches her back. “Of course I didn’t forget to invite you. I knew you’d follow if we dangled your little teacher’s pet. You need your devotees. I picked this setting especially and lured you here. A mountaintop should be familiar to you, give you a little advantage, even. Isn’t that considerate of me? But enough dilly-dallying. Enough of your getting in my way. It’s time to end this forever. Here, now.”
“No more calling them awake,” Athena orders.
“No more putting them to sleep.”
“You know it isn’t up to us anymore. We’ve picked our weapons in the human realm. They must battle it out.” Athena points her baton at Raymond, and from a heap on the ground he floats several inches into the air before being set upright on his feet.
Ambrosia in a snide huff: “Ah yes, Pallas’s little kiss-up. All devotion. The living, breathing representative of all that’s good and merciful in mankind.”
“I’m not—” Raymond tries to protest, but Athena silences him with a smack of her baton against the rock. It thunders. “But you are. You must be all that! I say it is so.”
“I won’t!”
“You will! Finish the job!”
Ambrosia turns her attention to us, her voice, in contrast, steady and cool. “Girls, are you taking it all in? I sense a rift between our enemies.” She wags her finger, a miniature windshield wiper in the air. “No falling asleep on the job, right?”
“Question!” I shout. “This weapon you’re talking about? If he’s all that’s good in mankind, we must be—”
Athena sets another bush on fire, just for the light show. “You are all that’s bad!”
I feel both confused and hurt. “But aren’t we the good ones? Righting wrongs? Punishing the guilty?”
Ambrosia laughs again, tinkling like shattering glass, the moonlight shining off of her eerie, hairless face. “I understand your confusion, Megaera. I despise this good-bad distinction. It misses the whole point and the subtlety of the situation. I prefer to think of you Furies as the living, breathing, wailing, reprimanding embodiment of all that’s natural in mankind. Tisiphone, for instance. What do you do best?”
Stephanie extends her right leg in front, dips forward in a dancer’s curtsy. “I punish the guilty. Especially if they hurt Mother. Mother Earth.”
“Exactly! And you never stop punishing! You must be right all the time. You never let anyone off the hook. Isn’t that the essence of human desire? To be judge, jury, and executioner of anyone who disagrees and gets in your way?”
“Off with their heads,” Stephanie says in a strangely mechanical way.
“How about you, my invincible Alecto?”
Alix is hanging off the side of a crag with only two fingers in a hole. She bends her elbow and, as if she weighs nothing, her entire body moves straight up like she’s in an elevator. “Anyone hurts a family member, I pay them back. You can count on it.” She jumps down, stands by Stephanie, and performs a deep formal bow. “At your service.”
“My precious powder keg of vengeance,” Ambrosia says with admiration. “History is made up of revenge. It’s the stuff of world wars, ethnic cleansing, neighborhood spats, and fights between former best friends. If it’s so commonplace, how can it be wrong or bad? It’s what is. This is mankind au naturel.”
Her attention turns to me. “And Megaera. So damaged and distrusting—”
“You’re not!” Raymond shouts.
“So bitter about your past and envious of what you have been denied.”
“Don’t listen to her!”
But I hear myself say simply, with acceptance, “I am all that.” One of my legs slides behind the other. My fingertips hold out the edges of a nonexistent skirt and my knees bend in a curtsy.
“No!” Raymond shouts again.
I feel pressure in the small of my back, like a firm hand of wind that moves me away from him and ushers me to where I belong. With them. With the Furies. With my true self. With my others. If Stephanie is unforgiving, it’s because people are unforgiving. If Alix is cruel, it’s because human nature is cruel. If I am bitter and envious, so be it! Who made me that way?
The three of us hook arms, lean in, and clink together at our foreheads like magnetic kissing dolls. Our powers come together as one.
“The world is corrupt and evil,” Ambrosia reminds us. “You three speak its language of greed, hate, and delusion.”
“Don’t be her puppet!” Raymond shouts.
Athena’s voice now, like the rumble of a hundred trucks on a freeway exit ramp: “Let Raymond’s pure goodness take them on. Destroy the Furies permanently! Banish them for all eternity. Let it begin.”
He turns on Athena, defiant. “I’m not your puppet, either. I’m not your weapon. I’m not pure anything! I’m just me.”
Here, in their argument, we find our opening. Alix, Stephanie, and I come apart only long enough to close in on him. There’s nowhere for Raymond to go, no place to run in this empty terrain. He’s on his own.
He speaks again, but the words sound weak and clouded. “Meg, your power! It’s up to you how you use it!”
Then no more words. We are beyond that kind of communication. To protect himself, Raymond hums his melody. He gives it a good shot. But alone on a mountaintop, his simple song is porous, a cloth of notes that’s full of holes.
We sing ourselves in. We come into his light.
So much light. Too much light. SPF 25,000 sunscreen bright. His thoughts are filled with it; his brain sparks with it. His memories glow under the polish.
This is unlike any of our other Fury experiences, and we flail around. We’re used to landing in people’s shadows, seeking out gullies, gloomy corners, and deep coves of depression. We are unwelcome visitors who never leave.
Raymond’s light, though, blinds us in a way that darkness doesn’t. I struggle to stay close to the others, but we keep losing our connection. We break apart, come together, break apart again. I find myself hunting alone in this space of endlessly reflecting mirrors and refracting lenses, and understand what Raymond meant when he said that he isn’t perfect. He’s not all goodness. I see his mistakes, the ways that he hurt others and caused pain.
But here’s what’s different. Raymond hasn’t buried his memories and mistakes like other people do. They haven’t shaped him into something mean and ugly. Eagerly I head into what looks like a warped road of defensiveness, only to find a straight pathway leading to an open door of apology. An old embarrassment explodes in a bright moment of insight. Everywhere I search, there’s forgiveness requested and forgiveness given. Instead of blame, he has accepted others and accepted himself.
Still, I am not fooled. I remind myself that we got in, and I know what this means. A jar of jam with a tiny crack isn’t sealed. It’s as vulnerable to bacteria as a jar left wide open on the kitchen counter in the heat. Somewhere there is a chink in Raymond—a lie, a moment of guilt and self-doubt. All I have to do is find it.
I catch a glimpse of something then. A blink and it’s gone. Another blink and it’s back in sight. What is it? A lie never confessed. With a tinge of shame and a hint of regret.
That’s all I need. With it I can summon the others and we can bring him down. And once he is down, nothing will stop us. Athena will be powerless, and we can give the whole world our kind of law and order. We can bring it to its knees.
Sing!
I hear the command from Ambrosia. She orders me forward with every bit of rage and hate from our combined pasts. Her will comes over me through deafening shrieks and rank smell and putrid taste, all of that, but nothing like that, not anything I have ever experienced with any of my senses before.
Call the others! Join together. Sing and destroy!
It’s up to me. We’ll swarm over him, pumping all of our darkness until we transform that tiny pinprick of a lie into his personal black hole.
Do it! Now!
I lift the edge of the dark corner where Raymond’s trembling little lie waits in terror of discovery. Thrilled, I move closer to it. It quakes and shivers at my approach. It can’t hide from me anymore. I watch in fascination as his lie—our weapon against him, the means of Raymond’s destruction—replays itself, as if in real time.
Raymond and Ms. Pallas alone in her classroom. She shakes her head, her expression one of firm resolve. “Meg has to go. I must eliminate her.”
Raymond’s head down, accepting. “What will you do? What will happen?”
“They must never rise again. Meg is the third in the trio, the key, and I will banish her from both realms. She’ll be neither human nor goddess, orphaned into eternity, separated from family and friends, belonging nowhere and to no 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 bodies of unseeing children? Who are these sightless ghost horses pierced with arrows, riddled with bullets, and split open by knives?
I feel a bone-chilling wind as they move through me.
This is Athena’s army, the wailing, writhing, aching victims of senseless wars, blood feuds, family vendettas, and unrestrained revenge. These are the embodiment of eye for an eye.
I huddle with Raymond, Alix, and Stephanie. Through the chaos we see another cloud gathering force on the horizon and watch in awe the approach of what can only be Ambrosia’s army: the unavenged, the unjustly accused and punished, the unmourned, all of them silenced and unable to rest.
They, too, pass over and through us—millions of abandoned children with gags around their mouths, speechless slaves who built the pyramids and died in the fields, political prisoners rotting in chains, the raped, the tortured, genocide victims dumped into mass graves. They, too, are all skin colors. They once spoke in every language. Animals make up this army, too: songless birds, sea creatures struggling to breathe, and huge horned mammals, all the senselessly slaughtered creatures that have gone nameless and unappreciated to their extinction.
They all meet on the mountaintop, a thick crowd of suffering. I smell their stench of fear and death. Athena rips off the golden serpent from Ambrosia’s neck and replaces it with the circle of her hands. Ambrosia’s fingers hold tight to a clump of Athena’s golden hair.
And then victim grabs on to victim, and I can’t tell which side is which anymore. They are so alike. I wonder if they have grabbed each other not out of hatred but out of recognition, the need to touch and hold on to something as tortured and forgotten as themselves.
It’s a whirlwind then, above, below, all around us, a swirl of arms and legs, feathers and claws, tears and blood, a spitting, sweating, vibrating mass. They spin so fast that they create their own weather system, all weathers fighting at once for domination, wind giving way to snow to rain to blinding sunshine to lightning to hail to hurricane.
Through it all, we keep singing. We sing of these unsung victims. Of the earth, the ocean, and the whole scarred world. We sing of ourselves. Of our living, our breathing, our hopes, our right to be good and bad, angry and forgiving, not pure anything, not anyone’s puppet. Of our right to be full and human.
Our voices echo off the cliffs.
Locked on to each other, Athena, Ambrosia, and their armies drag each other into the vortex of the past, or maybe of the future.
It all goes black.
We are spit out into the darkness of ordinary night.
Solid ground.
The world returned.
The hold on me smashed. The hold on all of us undone.
Hours must have passed. I know this because the moon sits much lower on the horizon, making it hard to see in the dark. The wind has died down. It’s that slack time of night, the chilly, peaceful period right before a new day begins. I study the crags where Ambrosia and Pallas Athena tried to use us as weapons for their ancient feud. They are gone, but I feel their presence like the last sliver of something bitter slowly dissolving on my tongue.
The four of us who remain, our small group of exhausted and disheveled high school students, huddle close, shivering with sweat and chills. We are dazed, hungry, very thirsty, but near giddy with relief that what could have happened didn’t happen.
We are alone, except for so many names and designs carved deep into the mysterious rock. We stand and stretch. It’s time to begin a long, silent hike back to the car. Our shoes scramble over proclamations of love, hate, hope, and existence. Just as the sun rises, I pause and use a sharp rock to carve one more thing into the sandstone: THE FURIES WERE HERE.