Overview:

---

Princess Ruana reveals the true nature of her power to Captain McKinley: her Gentle Waters are not merely enchanted water, but a body of water elementals capable only of healing the living, never harming them. With this revelation, ROBO4000 and Captain McKinley deduce that the fourth wave of Greek monsters must have slipped past them unnoticed. They realize that weaker electromagnetic disturbances can only be detected at close range, allowing the creatures to evade their long-range sensors. Meanwhile, Oppa Rockstar searches across the entire Mediterranean region for Ser Cerulean Arlentis. His pursuit leads him to a Hellenistic museum, where he comes face-to-face with statues of the Greek pantheon. In an instant, the museum transforms into the ancient land of Nemea. There, inside the ruins of a shattered tower, Rockstar confronts the legendary Nemean Lion. He initially relies on illusions to strike the colossal beast from the shadows, echoing the cunning and determination of Hercules during his famous battle with the invincible lion. However, as the fight escalates and his tricks prove insufficient, Rockstar is forced to abandon deception and face the Nemean Lion in direct combat.

Gentle_waters_never_strike.sav

The cube goes white, then wet.

That’s the part nobody warns you about. One second I’m standing in an empty room the size of a two-car garage, all seamless white panels and no corners worth mentioning, and the next second the panels are gone and I’m ankle-deep in a river that isn’t there. My sneakers stay dry. They always do. The sim gives you every input except the ones that matter.

Night in the mountains somewhere. Not Greece. Too much fern, too much rot-sweet smell of wet bark, and the insects are running that low three-note drone you only get in this part of the world. Water comes down a black rock face about four stories up and lands in a basin worn smooth as a soup bowl. Moonlight sits on top of it in a thin skin.

Two people stand at the edge. I know both of them better than they will ever know me.

Princess Ruana has her back to the falls. Her hair is loose tonight, red as struck copper, hanging past her shoulders in heavy waves that the spray has already gone to work on. Seafoam-green balloon long sleeves and waterlilies run all throughout her lavender bodice and catch what light there is. She has her arms folded, not defensively, more like a person standing at a bus stop who has decided not to complain about the cold.

Captain McKinley stands to her right, and he is standing the way he always stands, which is like someone photographed him once in a formal pose and he never quite got out of it. Cobalt blue and gray, the space gauntlet on his left forearm glowing faint along its seams. He is holding a slate. He has been holding it for a while. He hasn’t looked at it in a while either. 

There are supposed to be seven of them.

“You’re doing the thing,” Ruana says.

“What thing.”

“The thing where you hold the reader and don’t read it.”

McKinley looks down at the slate like it has just appeared in his hand through no fault of his own. He powers it off. The glow dies and the clearing gets darker by a noticeable degree.

“No new signals,” he says. “Nine days.”

“I know.”

“The Peregrine Lightyear sweeps the whole planet every forty minutes. Nine days of nothing.” He rubs the bridge of his nose. “ROBO4000 says the array is at full function. I’ve had him run diagnostics twice.”

“Twice.”

“Four times.”

Ruana snorts. It is a very undignified sound for a sea princess and it is my favorite thing about her.

“Come here,” she says. “I want to show you something and I want you to actually watch it.”

She turns and puts her hand flat against the surface of the basin.

Okay. So. I have watched a lot of screens do a lot of things. I have seen ray-traced water in games that cost more than a house. This is not that. What happens is that the color arrives from underneath, the way ink arrives in a glass, except it moves with purpose. The black water goes indigo. Not painted indigo. Lit from inside, full of tiny grains of pale light that drift and settle like the world’s slowest snow globe.

Then Ruana lifts her hand and the whole basin wakes up.

The indigo goes periwinkle, soft and dreamy, and threads of bright aquamarine chase through it, and the falls themselves catch the change and carry it upward, which is not how gravity is supposed to work and which nobody present seems bothered by.

“Still, it’s indigo,” Ruana says. “Glittering. When it settles all the way, it turns pearl-white, like the inside of a shell. Moving, it does this.” She rolls her wrist. A sphere of water the size of a grapefruit lifts out of the basin and hovers a hand’s width above her palm, turning slowly. “Two states. The profile says the true Princess Ruana could tell a lie by the color alone.”

“That in the file?”

“That’s in the file.”

“I read the file.”

“You skimmed the file.”

“I read the tactical portions of the file.”

She lets the sphere drop. It hits the basin and doesn’t splash. It rejoins, which is a different verb entirely, and I notice I have been holding my breath for no reason, since I don’t have to breathe in here and nothing I do with my lungs affects anything anywhere.

“Say the rest of it,” she says. “You know it. Go on.”

McKinley shifts his weight. When he recites things he goes flat and careful, like a kid at a spelling bee who has already decided he’s going to lose but intends to lose accurately.

“The gentle waters of the Primordial Sea of Atlan aren’t water,” he says. “They’re elementals. Thousands of them, moving together. They school like fish. They’re aware, in some sense the profile doesn’t define. In Ruana’s genre the Primordial Sea is where life started, so the waters go toward living things. They protect. That’s their whole disposition.”

“Good.”

“I did read the file.”

“You skimmed the file and then you read the interesting part four times,” Ruana says. “Which is fine. That’s what I did.”

She walks along the rim of the basin, and the light follows her, brightening under her feet like the water is glad she’s there.

“Here’s what they do,” she says. “They heal. They shield. They put out fire, any fire, including the kinds that shouldn’t go out. They push things away from me. They can seal something dangerous and hold it sealed. Their reflections hide whatever I ask them to hide. The weeds that grow in them will bind an enemy and keep binding until I let go.”

She stops walking.

“And here’s what they don’t do. They don’t strike. Not once, not ever, not if I beg. They won’t harm a living thing. Not a monster, not Echidna herself. They value her life exactly as much as they value mine.” She looks up at him. “I don’t have a weapon, Ben. Not one. Everybody else on this team got a sword or a blaster or a fist that goes through concrete. I got a very kind lake.”

The insects fill in the gap. McKinley doesn’t fill it. Give the guy credit. He knows when a sentence is still landing.

“Does that bother you?” he asks eventually.

“It used to.”

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s not a no,” she agrees. “It’s a not-tonight.”

She sits down on the rock at the water’s edge, tucks her legs, and trails two fingers through the periwinkle glow. Ribbons of it wind up her wrist and let go.

“When the Chimaera went down,” she says, “I didn’t land a single hit. Not one. I caught a scale out of the sea, and I kept the water off your jets, and I put your arm back together on the flight home. And on the way back I sat in the hold and did the math on what I actually contributed and the number I got was zero.” She flicks a droplet at the basin. “Which is a stupid number, obviously. I know it’s a stupid number. Knowing doesn’t help as much as people say.”

“Ruana.”

“I said it’s a not-tonight.”

He sits down next to her. Formally. Like a heron folding up.

“You want the tactical portion of my file?” he says.

“Desperately.”

“Nobody wins a war with only knives.” He considers. “That’s the whole thing. That’s all I’ve got.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It’s true, though.”

“It can be both.”

The falls keep going. Above the ridgeline the sky is doing that clear cold thing where you can pick out individual stars, and one of those points of light is a ship with two robots on it and four empty bunks, and neither of the people down here is going to mention that out loud, because there is a limit and they’ve both found it.

I sit down too, on rock I can’t feel, at a distance of exactly zero and also very far away.

Here’s the part that gets me. She said the waters go toward living things. She said they can’t tell the difference between a friend and a monster, that they’d nurse Echidna the same as they’d nurse her.

James is out there somewhere. Michael is out there somewhere.

The water doesn’t know that. The water just goes.

Candle_not_less_lit.sav 

The cube swaps the waterfall for a room with no weather in it.

Command center of the Peregrine Lightyear, and the sim drops me in behind the chair, which is where I always seem to end up. Cyan running lights along the floor seams. The main display curves across the whole forward wall, a Mercator projection of Earth in wireframe white, and every few seconds a cluster of coordinates blinks up somewhere and then times out and dies. Aegean. Adriatic. Gulf of Corinth. Old hits. Ghosts of hits. The system is dredging its own history because there is nothing current to chew on.

Captain McKinley sits in the command chair with the console, which is how he always sits around everybody else.

In his space armor. The gauntlet is off and parked on the armrest beside him like a watch on a nightstand, still breathing that slow standby pulse. His hair is doing whatever it wants. There’s a mug on the console that stopped steaming a long time ago.

Nine days of clean radar. Nine days of a planet with no monsters on it, according to a machine that has never once been wrong before.

He is not buying it. You can see him not buying it. His thumb keeps going tap-tap-tap on the armrest in a pattern of three.

ROBO4000 comes in behind him, and for something built out of two meters of alloy he is remarkably polite about floors. He stops at a respectful distance and stands there with his hands folded.

“Captain. You have been in that chair for six hours and eleven minutes.”

“I’m thinking.”

“You are marinating.”

McKinley’s mouth twitches. “Where’d you get that word.”

“I have four hundred million idioms and no one to use them on.”

Yeah. Buddy. Same.

McKinley sits forward, elbows on knees, and finally says the thing out loud.

“Robo. Why is the sky empty.”

“Two hypotheses.” The robot’s optic ring brightens a notch. “One. The Greek monsters have ceased manifesting on Earth. The waves have concluded.”

“The prophecy said seven.”

“Then hypothesis one is unlikely and I offer it only for completeness. Two. They are manifesting exactly on schedule, and the electromagnetic disturbances they generate have fallen below our detection floor.”

McKinley goes very still.

“That’s possible?”

“Theoretically. The array is calibrated for the signature we recorded at the Sirens’ island, which was enormous. A disturbance one or two orders of magnitude weaker would not resolve at orbital range. It would still exist. It would simply be quiet.”

“Quiet.”

“Quiet,” ROBO4000 agrees. “A candle is not less lit than a bonfire. It is only harder to see from here.”

McKinley stands up. He goes to the display and puts his palm flat against the Aegean, and the wireframe warps a little under the contact, which is a rendering artifact and not a big dramatic thing, but I clock it anyway.

“Say it plainly,” he says.

“The Fourth Wave may have already occurred.”

The word already does something to his shoulders.

“Under our noses,” McKinley says. “While I sat here running diagnostics.”

“While you sat here running diagnostics correctly. The equipment is not faulty. The equipment is deaf at that volume. Those are different problems and only one of them is anyone’s fault, and it is not yours.”

“That’s a very well-constructed sentence, Robo.”

“I had six hours and eleven minutes.”

McKinley almost laughs. He doesn’t get there, but he almost does.

He turns back to the map, and now he’s working, and it’s a completely different person in the room. Shoulders down. Voice quicker.

“If the Fourth Wave was quiet, the Fifth will be quiet.”

“Probable. There is no mechanism by which they would grow louder again.”

“So global sweep is useless.”

“Global sweep is useless for weak signatures. It remains adequate for strong ones, of which there appear to be none.”

“Then how do we find them.” He’s not really asking the robot. He’s asking the wall. “How do you find something that only shows up when you’re already standing next to it?”

“You stand next to it,” ROBO4000 says. “You cannot search a planet. You can search a neighborhood. The disturbances appear to cluster near sites where monsters have previously been sighted. Return to those sites on foot, with a handheld unit, and the signal that is invisible from orbit becomes trivial at two kilometers.”

McKinley pulls up the old markers. Crete. The Underworld gate. The Balkan ridge where the Harpies came apart. A woodworking village in Batangas with a Medusa flag still pinned to it.

He stares at that last one a long moment.

“Someone would have to be down there,” he says. “Walking around. Alone.”

“Yes.”

“With a tablet.”

“Yes.”

Neither of them says the name. I say it, in my head, in an empty white room forty thousand kilometers from either of them, and it doesn’t help anybody.

The map keeps blinking its old coordinates. Nobody in the room knows that one of the markers has already been used, three days ago, by a boy who left them a video and a locked door and no forwarding address.

Twelve_thrones_one_clover.sav

 The cube dumps me in Venice at four in the afternoon and the first thing that hits is the noise.

Not the water. The people. A hundred and something islands stitched together with bridges, and every bridge has a bottleneck on it, and every bottleneck has somebody’s cousin holding a phone up over the crowd. The Grand Canal splits the whole city like a lazy S. Palace fronts crowd both banks, some of them Gothic with those pointed arches stacked in rows, some of them Renaissance and smug about it, all of them with their bottom two feet stained green from the lagoon. Vaporettos churn past. A gondolier in a striped shirt is arguing with a delivery barge and neither of them is really mad.

Then the sim slides me off the water and into an alley barely wider than my shoulders, and the noise drops by half, and there’s James.

Civilian. Plain gray tee, dark jeans going pale at the knee, a canvas backpack with one strap fraying. No visor. No guitar. He looks like any kid who got separated from a school trip. He also looks like he hasn’t eaten a full meal in a while.

He checks both ends of the alley. Twice. Then he digs the triangle out of his pocket.

It’s small, palm-sized, matte white with a cyan seam running each edge, and when he flicks his wrist and lets it go it doesn’t fall. It hangs, spins up, and unfolds into a portal shaped like a pentagon, standing on one point, edges burning that same cyan. Through the opening there’s no wall. There’s somewhere else entirely, out of focus, moving.

He steps through. The pentagon collapses behind him with a sound like a struck cymbal caught in a towel.

Nobody in Venice notices. Two American tourists walk past the exact spot eleven seconds later arguing about a restaurant.

Here’s the thing, and I want to be fair to him, because I like this kid.

He didn’t find anything in Venice. Not one flicker. His tablet has been flat the entire time he’s been there.

The method he’s using is real, and it’s smarter than anybody upstairs has figured out yet. Back in Santa Jovita, that woodworking village where Medusa turned up, his handheld caught a weak signal from close range and walked him straight to Victorino and the Sphinx sitting on a construction site. That worked. That was clean. Weak signals don’t reach orbit, but they’ll reach a kid standing in the right barangay with the right tablet.

The problem is the part that comes after the good idea.

Because now he’s guessing where to stand.

And so the trail goes: Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Ankara, Athens on the first pass and nothing there either, then Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, Damascus, down into the Balkans and back around. Capitals, mostly. Old cities with a lot of marble in them. Three days and three nights of stepping out of a pentagon into a plaza at dawn with a cold tablet in his hand, and then stepping back into the pentagon again.

I watch most of it. The sim doesn’t let me skip and I wouldn’t anyway.

He sleeps twice. Once on a bench under a fig tree, jacket over his face. Once sitting upright against a wall with the backpack in his lap, and I’m pretty sure that one doesn’t count.

Day two, somewhere with a lot of blue shutters, an old woman hands him a piece of bread. He tries to pay her. She won’t take it. He does that little bow with his hand on his chest, the polite Batangas thing that his mom drilled into him, and eats the bread walking.

Day three, near sundown, he comes out of a portal and stops and just looks at the sky for a minute. He doesn’t do anything with it. He just looks.

I have a whole sim room that can put me anywhere in the universe and the one place it will never put me is next to him. So we look at the same sky from opposite ends of nothing, and then he checks the tablet again, and it’s still cold, and he keeps moving.

***

Fourth pass at Athens, and this time the tablet isn’t cold.

It’s morning, early, the light coming in low and orange off the Aegean and turning the stone the color of a peach. He comes up a flight of shallow marble steps into a colonnaded chamber, and he’s got the tablet gripped in both hands now, screen tilted up, and the display is doing something it hasn’t done in seventy-odd hours.

Concentric rings, pushing outward from a point. Rippling. Coordinates scrolling under them faster than they can resolve.

He’s transformed on the way in. White spiky hair, magenta visor down over his eyes, the white and gray jacket with those glowing cyan city outlines running up the sleeves, butterscotch guitar slung across his back. Oppa Rockstar. Yellow sneakers on two-thousand-year-old marble, which is a sentence I’ve now witnessed.

Halfway across the floor he stops and crouches.

There’s a clover leaf on the marble. Four lobes. Bright green against all that white, and it has absolutely no business being in this chamber, in this country, at this hour.

He picks it up and turns it in his fingers, and something goes across his face that I can’t read through the visor. He doesn’t say anything. He tucks it into his jacket.

The tablet flashes.

FIFTH WAVE.

He straightens up fast and finally looks at where he actually is.

Twelve of them. Statues, seated and standing, running the length of the chamber in two facing rows. Zeus. Hera. Poseidon with the trident laid across his knees. Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, Demeter, Dionysus. Every one of them taller than a bus. The Pantheon of the Twelve Olympians, and the morning light is coming through the columns in bars, so half of every face is lit and half is gone.

Rockstar’s eyes go to the throne at the far end.

Zeus. Seated. Beard carved in coils, one fist closed around nothing where a thunderbolt used to be, eyes blank the way all these eyes are blank.

Then the room moves.

Not shakes. Moves. The columns slide out of true, the ceiling goes translucent and then gone, the marble under his sneakers turns gritty and dark, and the whole chamber peels away like a level loading badly on purpose. Everything goes.

Except Zeus.

The statue stays exactly where it is, dead center, unbothered, while a Greek temple disassembles itself around him.

When it settles, Rockstar is standing on the packed dirt floor of a tower.

Round. Enormous. Twelve stories of it going up, floor plates and broken stairwells and gaps where whole sections have come down, and no ceiling at all at the top, just a hard clean circle of sunlit sky. Dust hangs in the shafts of light. West, through a collapsed wall, the ground is all rock and scree. East, forest, packed dense right up to the stones.

Zeus sits at the base of it, throne and all, in a building he does not belong to.

Rockstar turns a slow full circle, visor catching the light, and looks at his tablet one more time.

NEMEA.

Your_victory_is_mine.sav

The tower has an acoustic problem.

I notice it before I notice anything else, because that’s the kind of thing I notice. Twelve stories of round stone with no roof on it and half the floor plates missing turns into a drum. Every pebble that comes loose up top arrives at the bottom about two seconds later and announces itself three times. Oppa Rockstar’s sneakers on the packed dirt make a sound like somebody clearing their throat in a church.

So when the growl starts, it comes from everywhere.

Third floor. There’s a slab still intact up there, maybe two thirds of the original ring, and the shadow along its inner wall is deep enough to hide a bus. Something in that shadow shifts its weight, and the dust that’s been hanging in the sunbeams for the last minute goes sideways all at once.

Then it steps out.

The Nemean Lion is not lion-sized. I want to be precise about this because people say lion and picture a zoo. This thing has the shoulder height of a delivery van and the length of two, and every strand of its coat is metal. Not metallic. Metal. Gold, worked fine, lying flat in overlapping courses like a roof done by somebody very patient. The mane is darker gold, near bronze, and it moves wrong. It moves stiff, in sheets.

The face is the part that gets me. It’s not snarling. Lions in stories are always snarling. This one comes out of the dark with its mouth closed and its ears forward and looks down at the small bright person on its floor with the flat professional interest of a guy checking whether the delivery is the right size.

Rockstar looks up.

He’s standing in the middle of the ground floor with the tablet still in one hand. White spiked hair, magenta visor, that white and gray jacket with the cyan city skyline running its sleeves, orange shirt underneath with the sun blazed across it, apple green fingerless gloves. Yellow sneakers. He’s the loudest thing in a hundred kilometers and he knows it.

He puts the tablet away. Slowly.

“Okay,” he says, to nobody. “Okay okay okay.”

Then he glances up past the lion, and so do I, and this is where I get a small cold feeling I’d rather not have.

Zeus is on the seventh floor.

He was not on the seventh floor. Twenty minutes ago that statue was sitting at the bottom of this tower, throne and all, dead center on the dirt, and I watched a Greek temple come apart around him without him so much as tilting. Now he’s seven levels up on a slab that shouldn’t hold him, same posture, same closed fist, same blank carved eyes, looking out at nothing over a drop.

Nobody moved him. The tower moved.

I file that under Things To Think About Later and go back to watching the kid.

Rockstar takes one step back. The lion tracks him without moving its head.

“Right,” he says. “You’re the first one. Hercules, the twelve labors, you’re number one on the list. Weapons don’t work on you.” He’s talking to keep himself upright, I think. “Bronze didn’t work, iron didn’t work, arrows bounced. That’s your whole deal. Impenetrable golden pelt.”

The lion’s tail moves once.

“Cool,” says Rockstar. “Cool cool cool. Great. Love that for me.”

He swings the guitar around from his back.

It’s the butterscotch one, worn honey-colored under the lacquer, edges rounded from being played by somebody who plays a lot. He gets his hand around the neck and he does not strum yet. He just holds it, and something in his shoulders changes, and it’s a shift I’ve seen exactly twice before and both times it meant he had stopped being scared and started being something else.

Then he hits the strings.

The chord goes up the inside of the tower like water up a straw. Light comes with it, cyan and magenta and yellow braiding around him in a silhouette, and his sneakers leave the dirt. He rises. Not fast at first. Past the second floor, past the third where the lion swings its huge head to follow, past four and five and six, past Zeus on his throne at seven without looking at him, past eight, nine, ten, eleven.

Twelve.

He stops just under the broken lip of the tower, where the sky is a hard circle of blue and the sun sits in it like an open door.

The technicolor glow around him spreads out flat and becomes a floor.

The stage builds itself in about four seconds. Black deck, edges lit in a running seam of color. A rear wall rises up out of nothing and the lights on it dim down to almost dark. Then script appears across it in looping cursive, letters drawn one stroke at a time the way a sparkler writes on a long exposure.

ROCK N’ ROLL ENCORE

Six shooting stars flank the words, two cyan, two magenta, two yellow, each one dragging a tail that doesn’t fade. Above, a black grille lowers on nothing at all, hung with spotlights that snap on in threes. Cyan. Magenta. Yellow. They cross on the deck and where all three overlap the light goes white.

A microphone stand rises through the boards.

He takes the mic off it.

Down below, the Nemean Lion has come to the edge of its slab and is looking up at all this with an expression I’d describe as personally offended.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Rockstar says, and the tower carries it to every stone in the place, “thank you for coming. It’s just the one of you tonight but that’s fine. I’ve played smaller.”

He drops the mic back on the stand and brings the guitar up.

***

Here’s the thing about his illusions, and I know this because I have watched him build them since the first time it happened by accident in a school music room.

They’re not real. That’s not a knock. It’s a specification. Whatever he makes out of music is visual and only visual. It can’t hold a door. It can’t catch you. You could walk right through the middle of the best thing he ever built and feel a temperature change at most.

Which means whatever he is about to do down there has to hurt for reasons that aren’t the illusion.

He plays the opening figure and the electric guitar comes out sounding like an acoustic, warm and close, no distortion at all. Then he sings.

Somebody drew a road for me and never asked me first

The tower fills with color. Notes come off the strings and don’t dissipate, they drop, hundreds of them, cyan and magenta and yellow, big as basketballs, bouncing down the inside of the tower off the broken slabs and popping with little melodic reports every time they hit.

Told me where the ending was and told me it was worse

A neon-orange musical staff unspools out of the stage and pours down the wall, five glowing lines running in a wide spiral, wrapping the tower from twelve down to three, and the notes come with it, riding the lines, gathering.

But I have got a stubborn streak that runs from here to nowhere

On the third floor, the falling notes swarm.

And they take a shape.

He builds Hercules out of music in front of me and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t beautiful.

The man who assembles himself on the right side of that slab stands maybe a head taller than the lion’s shoulder. Bare arms. Beard, laurel, olive branch, all of it, and the whole figure has a faint color separation at its edges, like a printed image where the plates didn’t line up perfectly.

The Nemean Lion sees him and every hair on that gold pelt comes up in a wave.

Then it roars, and this time it does snarl, and the sound puts real cracks in the wall behind it.

Hercules sets his feet.

And a voice that says go on, so I go on

They hit each other in the middle.

I’ve seen a lot of monster fights. I’ve seen a boy in cobalt blue armor cut a rock-plated Chimaera out of the sky.  This is different in a way I don’t have a good word for, because there’s a soundtrack, and the soundtrack is being written live, and the fight keeps time with it.

The Lion swipes and Hercules is not there. Swipe, gone. Swipe, gone. He moves like the beat tells him where to be, which, fair, it does. Every miss puts claws into the stone and takes a chunk out of it the size of a car door.

I’ll walk it out, I’ll walk it out, however far it goes

Hercules gets inside the reach and drives a shoulder into the Lion’s chest and the thing actually slides. Six feet, on stone, screeching.

Every mile of it is mine, and every mile of it is mine

Up on the stage, Rockstar’s head is down over the guitar, hair in his eyes, mouth right on the mic. His right hand is doing something ridiculous. His left is doing something worse.

The Lion comes back with the full weight of its body and Hercules meets it and they lock, and hold, and the whole third floor slab groans under both of them.

***

Now. Watch closely. This is the good part.

Because Hercules isn’t touching anything.

The Lion swings and connects with the illusion and staggers back, and the reason it staggers back is that in the exact instant of contact, forty musical notes hit it in the same spot at the same time. They burst on impact, every one, splashing color across that gold pelt like paintballs, cyan across the ribs, magenta over the shoulder, yellow down one foreleg. Each pop carries its own little snatch of melody. The whole beating has a tune.

The Lion is fighting a swarm and seeing a man.

I’d give this a nine out of ten as a strategy. The one point off is that eventually somebody notices.

Somebody drew a road for me

The Lion breaks the lock and reels and Hercules steps back and now he has a bow, ash and horn, quiver over the shoulder, arrows fletched in yellow. He draws.

The first shaft goes wide, deliberately, herding. The second and third come in fast and the Lion twists both times, dropping its shoulder, quick for something that size. Fourth one hits. Right in the flank.

It skips off. Doesn’t stick, doesn’t scratch, skips off the pelt and clatters away, and the popping burst it makes on contact leaves nothing behind but a smear of yellow.

Fifth, sixth, seventh. Same. Same. Same.

and never asked me first

The Lion stops dodging.

That’s the moment. It just stops, plants itself, and lets three more arrows come in and bounce off its face, and then it looks at Hercules and something in the geometry of the fight changes.

Rockstar sees it from up top. I watch his jaw set.

Hercules throws the bow away.

Down goes the quiver too, and the illusion rolls its shoulders and comes forward flat and low, and the Lion charges to meet it, and Hercules jumps.

Onto the back. Both arms around the throat, one knee braced in the mane, hauling.

This is how it happened. This is the actual myth, the whole reason the story is famous, that the arrows and the club and the sword all failed and the only thing left was a man’s arms and a lot of stubbornness. Rockstar’s been sitting on this move the entire song.

The Lion bucks. Slams itself sideways into the wall hard enough to drop half a slab from the floor above. Hercules holds.

I have got a stubborn streak

The Lion’s front legs go out from under it.

It goes down on its chest with an impact I feel in a room I’m not standing in, and its head sinks, and its eyes half close, and for about a second and a half every note in the tower rings the same chord.

Then its eyes open.

They are blue-white.

Not glowing at the edges. Full, blank, blue-white, lit from behind like the sun through frost, and the light comes out of them in a pulse that travels the whole length of that gold body.

And Hercules is gone.

Not knocked off. Not thrown. Erased, front to back, in one pass, the color plates separating and blowing apart into loose notes that scatter and go dark and fall like ash. The neon staff wrapped around the tower snaps at four places and whips away. Two hundred hanging notes pop out at once.

The music stops.

The silence in that tower is the loudest thing in the scene.

Rockstar stands on the twelfth-floor stage with his hand flat on the strings, killing the last of the ring.

Below him the Lion rises, and the blue-white is not just in the eyes anymore. It runs the seams of the pelt now, thin veins of it, and it pools in the claws until each set burns like a pilot light.

“Right,” Rockstar says quietly. “So you’re smart.”

He unslings the guitar and lets it go and it dissolves behind him in a puff of yellow.

“Cool,” he says. “Cool cool cool.”

And he steps off the stage.

Twelve floors. He just walks off the front of it, and drops, and the stage goes out behind him like a screen at the end of a movie.

Somewhere around the ninth floor he throws his hand out and the surfboard is there, white, sleek, absurd, the shape of a car’s exhaust pipe if you flattened it, and he lands on it at speed and a fresh orange staff unrolls beneath him to catch the board. He carves down the inside wall of the tower in a tight spiral, one hand out for balance, notes trailing behind him and popping off the stone.

The Lion is already coming.

It doesn’t take the ramps and it doesn’t take the stairs. It goes straight up the inner wall in three bounds with those claws punching handholds where there weren’t any, and it comes off the third-floor slab into open air with its jaws wide and both forelegs out.

Rockstar bails off the board.

They pass each other in the middle of nothing, close enough that the pelt actually brushes his jacket, and he hits the third floor rolling and comes up on one knee with both hands crossed at his chest.

Two thick glowsticks. Cyan in the left. Magenta in the right. Fortified grips, the kind of chunky plastic you get in a concert kit, and for one full second that is genuinely all he’s got.

Then they extend.

They thicken and stretch and go from toy to weapon in a single motion, and what he stands up holding are two short swords made of light, one of each color, throwing a mixed glow across the whole floor.

The Lion lands behind him and turns.

“Okay, big guy,” Rockstar says, and his voice has gone flat and easy in a way I don’t love. “Encore.”

***

The next forty seconds are the fastest thing I have ever watched a human body do.

The Lion opens with a straight overhead swipe and he doesn’t dodge it, he catches it, both blades crossed above his head, and blue-white energy meets cyan and magenta with a crack that puts a ring in my ears in a room where sound isn’t real. The force drives him down to one knee. The stone under him spiders.

He rolls out. Comes up under the jaw. Both blades in, twice, three times, fast, and every hit lands on that pelt and skids off in a shower of sparks and leaves a bright smear of paint behind.

Not a scratch. Just color.

The Lion swings its head and he ducks it by nothing. Swings the other way and he goes over it, plants a sneaker on the bridge of its nose, kicks off, twists in the air and lands backward on the broken lip of the floor.

Then the Lion raises one paw and the claws separate the light between them and it throws.

Three blades of blue-white energy, curved, wide as a door, crossing the whole floor.

Rockstar goes up.

He doesn’t jump so much as convert. He gets over the first one with a hand plant on the stone that turns into a full rotation, threads the gap between the second and third at the top of the arc with both legs tucked, and comes down out of it already moving forward. The three blades hit the wall behind him and take out an entire section of the tower, and daylight comes through where daylight has not come through in three thousand years.

Second volley. Six blades this time.

He’s on the ceiling. Actually on it, running four steps along the underside of the fourth-floor slab on a strip of orange staff he’s laid down there without me seeing him do it, and he drops off the end of it directly onto the Lion’s back.

Both swords, down, into the base of the neck.

They stop dead. Nothing.

The Lion throws him. He hits the far wall shoulder-first and something in the way he lands is wrong, and he gets up anyway.

There’s a tear in the jacket now. Across the ribs on the left side. The cyan skyline running that sleeve is broken in the middle and the light in it has gone out.

He’s breathing hard. He’s got one arm tucked. And he does a thing I don’t expect.

He reaches into the jacket and takes out the clover.

Four lobes, bright green, no business being anywhere. He looks at it in his palm for about half a second.

Then he lets it go.

It doesn’t fall. It hangs, and then it’s four clovers, then it’s forty, then the air on the third floor of a ruined tower in Nemea is full of drifting green, spinning slow, catching the light.

The Lion charges through them.

And this is where the fight quietly stops being fair, because Rockstar throws the cyan blade and it should miss by a foot and it doesn’t. It curves. It goes in past the shoulder into the soft angle of the joint and sticks there, first thing all day that has stuck in anything, and the Lion screams.

The magenta one he keeps.

The Lion comes in wild now, head down, and he steps into it. Left hand up. He catches the cyan hilt as he passes under the shoulder, rips it free, and brings both together in front of his chest.

The two lights fuse.

Cyan and magenta wind into each other and a third color comes up through the middle of them, yellow, threading the length, and what he’s holding when it finishes is a staff as long as a spear, technicolor from end to end, humming at a pitch that makes the loose stones on the floor start walking.

The Lion rears up over him.

He drives it into the belly.

Nothing. For a full second, nothing. The point sits against that gold pelt and does not go in, and I watch his arms shake, and I watch his sneakers slide backward two inches on the stone.

Then he shouts something I don’t catch, and the CMY floods the shaft all at once.

The staff goes in.

The explosion takes out the ceiling.

Not the section. The ceiling. A column of white and color punches straight up through the fourth floor, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, out the broken top of the tower and into the sky over Nemea, and it makes a sound I can only describe as an entire stadium hitting the same note. Debris comes down everywhere. Half a floor plate lands twenty feet from him and stands on its edge for a moment before it falls flat.

The Nemean Lion drops.

It hits the stone on its side and slides, and the blue-white goes out of the seams one section at a time, from the tail forward, until the eyes are the only thing left lit.

Then those go out too.

***

Rockstar lets go of the staff.

It stays where it is, standing in the beast, still glowing, and he steps back off it and his legs don’t quite do what he asks. He goes down onto both knees on the stone beside the body.

The clovers are still coming down. Slow, green, everywhere.

He reaches around to his back and unhooks something from his belt and brings it into his lap.

It’s a belt. Not his. Golden laurel worked all the way along it, the leaves detailed one by one, and scorched black across most of its length where it sat in a crater in a forest until three people found it and one of them couldn’t let go of it. At the center is a medallion, and stamped on the medallion, in relief, mane and all, is a lion.

Rockstar looks at it.

Under the visor, water comes down both sides of his face.

He kneels there and I know exactly what he’s hearing, because I was there for it too.

Containment wing on the Peregrine Lightyear, a while back. Medusa’s head suspended in a sphere of Ruana’s water, turning slowly, and Michael standing in front of it with his arms crossed, looking at the thing the way a guy looks at a car he’s thinking about buying.

“You’ve been in here forty minutes,” James had said, leaning in the doorway. “Should I give you two some privacy?”

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying. She’s got a look.”

“She’s got snakes.”

“Some guys like that.”

And then Michael had stopped smiling, and turned around, and gotten to it, because Michael never could hold a mood for more than a minute.

“Kuya. Serious for a second.”

“Uh oh.”

“The Nemean Lion’s on the list. It’s on my belt. That one’s mine, I called it.”

“You called it.”

“I called it. But if something happens to me before I get there.” A shrug, too casual by half. “You take it. You finish it for me.”

“Michael.”

“I’m an action hero, Kuya. If I go, I want to go loud. That’s fine. That’s the deal I signed. But I want that lion dead and I don’t care whose hands do it.” He’d put out a fist. “Your win is mine. My win is yours. Brothers by blood, brothers in arms, all that.”

James had looked at the fist for a second too long.

Then bumped it.

“You’re so dramatic.”

“I learned it from watching you.”

***

Back in the tower, Rockstar folds the belt once and holds it against his chest with both hands, and says something too quiet for the sim to pick up. Three words, maybe four.

Then he stands.

He gets up off the stone, and he turns his back on the body of the first labor of Hercules, and he walks.

Six steps.

A crack runs across the left lens of the magenta visor. He doesn’t stop. Two more cracks fork off it and then the whole lens goes, all at once, a spray of magenta glass that catches the light on the way down. The headset comes off his face and hits the stone behind him and he doesn’t turn around for it.

Without the visor he just looks like a kid.

And now I can see what forty seconds of blue-white energy actually did to him, because there are three long tears across the front of the jacket and the shirt underneath is not orange anymore in those places, and the way he’s holding his left arm is not a choice.

He gets four more steps.

His shoulder finds the wall. He leans on it. Slides along it, one hand out, leaving prints.

Then his knees fold and he goes down in the corner where the wall meets the broken stairs, sitting, head back against the stone, the golden laurel belt still gripped in his right hand.

His eyes close.

The last of the clovers come down and settle on the floor around him, and the dust starts to settle too, and through the enormous new hole in the roof the sun comes straight down into the tower and lands on him like the last cue of the night.

Nobody claps.

I’m not allowed to.