Apparently, cult kids had really good manners, too.
“No problem,” Alia said, embarrassed by her outburst. At least this meant no more piggybacks. Diana led her along the cliff to the beginning of a steep, narrow path. Alia swallowed and did her best to feign confidence. “Much better.”
“My way would be faster,” Diana offered.
“Slow and steady wins the race.”
“That is almost always untrue.”
“Take it up with Aesop.”
“Aesop never existed. The stories credited to him were the work of two female slaves.”
“That sounds about typical. I’ll ponder it on the way down.”
Alia started along the path, carefully choosing each step, afraid she’d lose her footing and go right over the side.
“It’s going to take you an hour if you do it that way,” said Diana.
“I’ll get there when I get there. I’m not part goat.”
“Could have fooled me.”
At that moment another small tremor struck, and Alia pressed her body to the cliff side.
“You’re sure you want to take the path?” Diana said.
“Positive,” Alia squeaked.
“All right. Wait for me on the sand.”
“You aren’t coming?”
“I’ll go my own way.”
Diana tossed her pack over the side of the cliff to the cove below. Then, as Alia watched in disbelief, she sprinted the length of the cliff top. Alia clapped her hands over her mouth. She can’t mean to—
Diana leapt, silhouetted for a moment against the thunderheads, toes pointed, arms outstretched. She looked like she might sprout wings and simply take flight. Stranger things have happened today. Instead, her body arced downward and vanished over the cliff side.
“Show-off,” Alia muttered, and continued down the path.
As she shuffled along, she alternated between trying to find the next place to put her foot and gazing out to sea to try to locate Diana in the rocking gray waves. The surf was huge, beating at the cove with ceaseless rage. What if Diana had simply been dragged under? What if she’d cracked her gorgeous head open on a rock?
The farther Alia went, the worse her own head ached and the sicker she felt. By the time she reached the bottom of the cliffs, her thighs were shaking and her nerves had frayed to nothing from fear of the fall. There was no sign of Diana, and Alia realized she had no idea what to do if she didn’t return. Climb back to the top? She wasn’t sure she had the strength. Hope one of those hippie weapons collectors found her and was friendlier than Diana had suggested? And what about everything Diana had said about Greece and Alia being dangerous?
“Girl is addled,” said Alia decisively to no one. “That’s what growing up in a cult does to you.” Yeah, and you’re the one talking to yourself on a beach.
Even so, Alia felt the knot of worry in her chest loosen when she looked out to sea and saw Diana cutting through the ocean, her arms slicing through the water at a determined pace. There was something behind her, a massive shape that appeared and disappeared in the spaces between the waves.
When Diana reached the shore, she emerged with water streaming from her dark hair, ropes thrown over her shoulders, feet digging into the sand, every muscle in her body straining as she strode forward. It took Alia a long moment to understand that the ropes were rigging.
Diana had hauled the Thetis from the bottom of the sea.
A bone-deep shiver quaked through Alia. One of the masts was still intact; the other had snapped free close to its base. The prow was completely gone. The explosion had left nothing but a jagged line of wood and fiberglass where the rest of the boat should be. You are being hunted….Because of what you are.
Diana didn’t understand. Alia’s family had been targets for so long, first when people accused them of “playing God” with their research, then because of the rules the Keralis Foundation attached to any grant for aid. There was still speculation that the crash that had killed her parents had been an assassination plot. A thorough investigation had proven that there was nothing more to that terrible night than a slippery road and distracted drivers. But every few years, some newspaper or blog ran a conspiracy piece on the deaths of Nik and Lina Keralis. Alia would get an email from some curious reporter, or she’d walk by a newsstand and see her parents’ wedding photo looking back at her, and the wound would open all over again.
She remembered sitting in the backseat with Jason, his profile lit by streetlamps, her parents in the front, arguing about which bridge to take home. That was the last memory she had of them: her mother drumming on the steering wheel, her father jabbing at the screen of his phone and insisting that if she’d just taken the Triborough, they’d be home by now. Then the strange feeling of the car moving the wrong way, momentum carrying them across three lanes of traffic as they slid into a skid. She remembered the car hitting the divider, the shriek of tearing metal, and then nothing at all. She’d been twelve. Jason had been sixteen. When she’d woken up in the hospital, she still had the smell of burnt rubber in her nose. It took days for it to dissipate and be replaced by the cloying stink of hospital disinfectant. Jason had been there when she woke, a big slash on his cheek that had been stitched closed, his eyes red from crying. Their godfather, Michael Santos, had come, and his son, Theo, who had put his arm around Jason and held Alia’s hand.
Looking at the remains of the Thetis felt the same as waking up in that hospital bed, like grief rushing straight at her. You are being hunted. Was Alia the reason for the wreck? Was she why Jasmine and Ray and the others were lost forever?
Diana had set about disentangling the rigging and was now tearing the hull apart as easily as if she were digging into a lobster dinner.
“What are you doing?” Alia asked, eyeing her nervously. Maybe the cult members mixed steroids in with their chewable vitamins.
“We need a craft to get out past the boundary.”
“What boundary?”
Diana hesitated, then said, “I just meant open sea. The hull is useless, but I think we can salvage part of the deck and the sail and use it as a raft.”
Alia didn’t want to touch the boat. She didn’t want anything to do with it. “A raft? In that surf? Why don’t we wait for the storm to pass?”
“This storm isn’t going to pass. It’s only going to get worse.” Diana peered out at the water. “We could try swimming, but if we got separated—”
“It’s fine,” Alia said, helping Diana brace a piece of the hull against her shoulder and tear it free.
At that moment Diana doubled over in pain.
“What is it?” Alia asked, panicked. Without realizing it, she’d started to think of Diana as invulnerable.
“Maeve,” she said. “The others. We have to hurry. Soon it will be too late.”
They worked for the better part of an hour. The earthquakes were coming more frequently now, and occasionally bits of the cliff would shake free behind them. Alia had tried to help for a while, but eventually she’d given up and leaned against the makeshift raft, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Diana could see just how ashen she looked beneath her brown skin.
She’d seemed better when they were climbing and Diana had been close to her. Your proximity may prolong her life, may even soothe her, but it cannot heal her. She will die, and the island will live. Alia was dying, and though Diana still felt well, she could sense the pain and bewilderment of her sisters through the blood tie that connected all Amazons. What one of them felt, they all felt, and to fight, even to spar, meant to endure the pain of your opponent, even as you dealt the blow. If one of them died…No, Diana would not allow it.
“Hold on, Maeve,” she whispered.
They lashed together the raft as best they could, and then Diana raised the sail, tying strands of Khione’s mane into the knots of the rigging. With each knot, another section of the raft vanished. It would be invisible from the shores of Themyscira and the southern coast of Greece. Diana hoped to put the raft in as close as possible to Gytheio. From there it would be a two-day journey on foot to Therapne. She doubted Alia could make faster time than that in her current state. Perhaps they could acquire one of the machines she’d read about.