The Acropolis, the “High City,” loomed five hundred feet above the modern buildings of Athens. Floodlights warmed the pale limestone slopes of the massive butte, illuminating every detail of the ancient temples still perched atop it.
The gate to the main path up the Acropolis was locked for the night—and thick with panicked guards besides. Selene directed her cabdriver instead to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the mostly preserved Roman theater that hosted performances all summer long on the Acropolis’s southern slope. At eleven, the show was just letting out—Aida, from the posters. Actors in Egyptian costumes mingled beneath the Odeon’s towering Roman facade, snapping selfies with the audience members in a disconcerting juxtaposition of modern and ancient. For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine coming back someday after things with Saturn and her father were finally settled. Apollo would want her to let art into her life. I wonder if Theo even likes opera? she found herself wondering before quashing the thought. It doesn’t matter. Because as soon as this is all over, he’s gone. He made that perfectly clear.
Selene took cover in the crowd, threading through the thick of it before ducking off the terrace and into the undergrowth. Scaling the tall chain-link fence took her seconds. From there, she hurried to the steepest part of the cliff, far from the path used by both tourists and guards.
She stared up at the sheer rock face. This is why the ancient kings of Athens built their citadel on top, she thought ruefully. But it would take more than a little rock climbing to stop She Who Dwells on the Heights. The only challenge lay in avoiding the floodlights.
Selene shimmied her way up a shadowed cleft, bracing hands and feet against the dusty limestone, then levered herself onto a shelf of rock no wider than her boots. The cliff continued above her with no visible handholds or accessible shadows. This time, there were no security cameras to worry about—just the millions of Athenians gazing lovingly up at their Acropolis from roof decks across the city.
If I’m going into the light, she decided, I better be falcon swift.
She eased her pack open, assembled her bow for the second time that night, and chose a steel-tipped wooden arrow. Fifty feet overhead, a single olive tree grew crookedly from the bare rock. From the width of its trunk, she figured it had grown there for at least three hundred years. Let’s hope it stays put just a little longer, she prayed as she tied her rope to the arrow shaft and aimed at a branch. She sent the arrow straight up with a gentle pluck of her bowstring. It reached its peak just above the top of the tree, then fell back toward her, fletching first, missing the branch entirely and nearly striking her in the face.
Her phone rang as she reeled back in the rope.
“What about ‘I’m sneaking up the Acropolis surrounded by guards’ do you not understand?” she hissed.
“That’s what vibrate mode is for,” Theo whispered back. “You need to hurry. Maryam’s losing it. She wants her spear.”
“Yeah, yeah, give me a minute.” She hung up and traded her wooden arrow for a hawk-fletched one. Does it make me less of a Far Shooter when I have arrows that do all the work for me? she wondered as she aimed for the tree again. The gold shaft rocketed into the sky, then curved in midair and flew around the trunk in a perfect circle. It looped two more times for good measure before burying itself six inches deep in the bark.
“Holy Roman Empire,” Selene muttered under her breath, borrowing Theo’s favorite curse.
Hand over hand, she scurried up the rope like a spider on its web, so fast an observer might’ve mistaken her for the shadow of a cloud passing before the moon. From the olive tree, it was a short, steep scramble to the top.
Several guards roamed the plateau with flashlights. After all, this was the biggest tourist destination in the entire country. During Athens’s Golden Age, the Acropolis had housed the city’s most important temples and shrines. Now it was the symbol of the modern nation.
The Huntress had come here often in antiquity. She had a shrine right beside Athena’s—a long stoa dedicated to the Goddess of Girls, an offshoot of her sanctuary at Brauron. Here, too, young girls dressed as bear cubs had danced in homage to Artemis. But as she stalked from temple to temple, ducking out of the guards’ line of sight, she noted that no trace of the Brauronia remained, only an expanse of bare rock and a few low, crumbled stones.
Not far away, Selene remembered, had stood the bronze statue of Athena Promakhos—Athena the Frontline Soldier. It had towered three stories in the air, its spearpoint and helmet crest so bright that sailors forty miles away off Cape Sounion could see it winking in the sun and know they were almost home. Looters had no doubt carried it off long ago—the courtyard stood barren. Selene thought of the corroded spearhead in her pack. Will it be enough to make Athena the tallest goddess once again?
She passed beyond the courtyard, where the mighty Parthenon dominated the plateau. Even with much of its facade covered in scaffolding, the floodlights still illuminated the yellowed marble so brilliantly that the entire building glowed with the power of a goddess’s aura. Statues of Athena and Poseidon no longer adorned the pediments, but the thick Doric columns remained, their careful proportions—swelling in the middle, tapering at the top—lending an illusion of lightness to the massive facade.
Three walls of the temple’s inner sanctuary, the cella, remained intact. A Venetian cannonball had collapsed the fourth wall in the seventeenth century, when the occupying Ottomans had used the Parthenon as a gunpowder depot. The Athenians, it seemed, had been trying to reconstruct the temple ever since. More scaffolding filled much of the interior, and a line of tarps obscured the far end of the cella.
Selene stole up broad stairs worn smooth by countless Athenian pilgrims and ducked under the scaffolding. The murmur of urgent voices floated from behind the tarps.
She pushed aside the plastic sheeting to find Flint and Theo standing on either side of Sister Maryam, who knelt with her hands clasped before her, every inch the prayerful nun, right down to the black habit and wimple.
“What the hell is she doing?” Selene asked in an angry whisper.
Flint just grunted in answer.
Theo, of course, was more specific. “We tracked her up here, but now she refuses to leave.” His eyes kept roaming to the tall walls of the cella. Despite the precariousness of the situation, he looked positively enraptured. All signs of his earlier apathy had vanished. With the temple’s interminable restoration, even a classicist of his stature had likely never stood in the Parthenon’s interior. “This is where her statue was, you know,” he said, his voice hushed with more wonderment than caution. “Athena Parthenos, Athena the Virgin. A spear in one hand and winged Victory in the other. Forty feet tall with flesh of elephant ivory and a helmet and gown of beaten gold.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Selene said, unimpressed. “But it’s long gone, just like the bronze statue of her as the Frontline Solider that used to stand in the courtyard—the Athena Promakhos. The Athenians ripped the gold sheets off their Virgin to pay their army in the third century BC. They probably abandoned my Brauronia even earlier.” She strode over to her half sister. “So whether you’re praying to your Christ or your missing statue or someone else entirely, snap out of it, Maryam. Because none of it’s real anymore.”
To her surprise, Maryam looked at her with an expression more wrathful Olympian than pious Christian. “I’m not praying to my missing statue. I’m listening to the Athenians’ prayers to it.”
Selene looked around the empty cella. “You can do that?”
Maryam closed her eyes. “As Athena, I heard their prayers. As Mary, I did the same. You might’ve stopped listening long ago, but I never did.”
She said it more as a fact than an accusation, but Selene felt its sting nonetheless. Until recently, she’d shown little care for the mortals around her.
Maryam’s head tilted as if to listen more closely to voices only she could hear. Flint opened his mouth to protest, but Selene gestured him to silence.
After a moment, Maryam’s stern mouth softened into a smile. “They never stopped praying to Athena,” she murmured. “They come by the hundreds of thousands to my Parthenon, even now. They visit by day; they light it up by night.” She took a quick breath, her eyes twitching beneath closed lids as if watching history play out before her. “The Nazis occupied it—they knew what it symbolized. But rather than lower the Greek banner that flew over the Acropolis and raise the swastika, an Athenian soldier wrapped himself in his country’s flag and jumped from the cliff. Freedom or death.” She shuddered visibly. “That’s what this place means to those who still bear my name.” Her eyes flew open, and she thrust her arms straight out before her. “Give them to me now,” she said urgently. “My spear and helmet.”
“I don’t have the helmet,” Selene whispered to Flint while digging through her pack. She unwrapped the pitted spearhead. “But the prophecy only mentioned the spear, so let’s hope this does the trick.”
Flint pulled his hammer from the sling across his back and an awl from a pouch at his waist. Wielding the massive hammer with a jeweler’s care, he began to knock away the green corrosion from the blade. Selene and Theo both moved closer to watch.
Theo whispered, “I thought divine weapons never rusted.”
Flint grunted. “They don’t.” He didn’t explain further.
“Wow.” Theo cast an awed glance at Maryam. “At some point, she must’ve covered it in normal bronze to hide its true nature. That’s pretty brilliant.”
Selene rolled her eyes, trying not to feel jealous of his obvious admiration.
“Stop talking, Schultz,” Flint said. “And find me a shaft.”
He chipped away another large flake of green. The centimeter of gold beneath gleamed brilliantly even in the dim light. Selene caught her breath as the full spearhead came into view: Now she knew their delay in Athens had been worth it. The blade was smaller than it had looked when encased in bronze, but sharper. It bore no intricate engravings or inlaid designs. Instead, Metis’s hammer marks had rippled the gold like the surface of a sun-bright lake, glinting and glimmering while hinting at a vast depth and darkness underneath.
Theo unfastened a long wooden support pole from one of the scaffolds and handed it to Flint, who widened the blade’s base just enough to slip the pole inside. He handed the spear to Selene, who placed it in her sister’s hands.
Maryam’s fists closed over the shaft. The light from the spearhead played over her face, illuminating its sharp planes. “Where’s my helm?”
“I … couldn’t get it,” Selene admitted.
Maryam’s lips tightened. She reached for her nun’s wimple and pulled it off. She ran a hand still stained with clay over hair as black as Selene’s but chopped short against her scalp. “My mother gave me this, too. It will be my only helm.”
She rose to her feet in one graceful movement and turned to stand before her kin. With her spear clutched in one hand and the other outstretched toward them, she mirrored her ancient statue’s pose. But surely no creation of ivory and gold, even one forty feet tall, had eyes that flashed like storm-shrouded lightning.
“Take me to Olympus. You have found your Promakhos.”