Chapter 56:: Neomenon

“What did you do to him?” Harmonia whispers, crouching beside him, beside the man who calls himself Mark Middleton—and he knows that name is a lie—beside the man who had startled when he said as much, and answered dazedly, and stumbled to the floor.

I did nothing, he wants to say, but cannot convince even himself—old Saibalini Sen’s blood, on her sari and his hands—and the guilt-terror-frustration makes his words hostile. “I don’t know, okay?”

Harmonia does what her name suggests and she never has, and he can feel his anger leave—suppressed under enforced calm, not dissipated in the least. “Okay, little brother,” she says, and he hasn’t even the energy to fight that name, then, “fuck.”

“What?”

“That’s Mark Middleton,” she says, suddenly careful, hands gentle on the man’s face, fingers avoiding the staring eyes.

“So he said,” he says, slowly. The ‘Oh my god, Mark Middleton! In Daniel’s apartment?’ seems rather excessive, for all that the name now sounds vaguely familiar. “Is he famous or something?”

The glance Harmonia throws his way is full of condescension—he’s never had siblings, but thinks it a very sisterly look—and makes him feel—her emotion, not his—that he’s lower than the worms dotting the earth. “Or something, yeah,” she hisses. “But the thing is, Alex, that he died a week ago,” and there’s no change in her mocking voice, though her grey eyes, when she turns to him, glitter silver, “and this man isn’t a man at all.”

They are being watched, the three—two, really—of them, by the others, and where Daniel’s gaze is warm and familiar, and the Trojans’ feel like a welcome fire to warm himself near, or an amphora of aged wine, the last pair of eyes feel like the lashing, bitter cold of northern snow-storms he has never braved—god-eyes, harsh and unwelcome, and alien to both his Calcutta-bred body and Mediterranean spirit. Harmonia shivers beside him, as aware of the eyes as he is, and as determined to ignore them. “Can you bring him out of whatever it is?” he asks, feeling a sudden rush of relief that he needn’t expose himself in front of the old man—old god—watching.

“Can you tell me what he’s thinking?” she grits out, and they’ll fight forever, she and him, and she’ll not let him hold back if she must be exposed—he’s beginning to understand all the rivalries he’s read of. But the need in her voice and the apprehension-fear-bravado inside her have their usual bickering as a very faint patina, and he nods, curt.

And throws a line outward, far more cautious than he ever is, even walking in Harmonia’s mind. She, at least, is awake and aware, and this man, being, half-god, hero, so still on the floor, merely lets him in—no conscious act of will, this, just an echoing absence of sentries of the mind. He feels his way in, and sinks, pulled into the quagmire of clawed shadows chasing through shadowed trees, and blood staining—warming—his teeth and throat—free-hunt-food-mine, and long-stretching deserted streets—lost-lonely-alone-afraid—and, at the fore, vivid and fading and real and ephemeral, a man singing to a crowd, a mob, of screaming fans, and kissing, touching, fucking a woman—mine-mine-mine-mine, screams a frantic voice in his head—which him?—while the trees and the streets and nameless, faceless past wrap their claws-arms-teeth round the newest life and drag it down—drag him down and he’s trapped-hurt-defeated-desperate and he can’t get out, can’t move, can’t breathe.

“He’s dying,” he gasps, focusing on Harmonia’s hand round his wrist, nails digging into his flesh, “this person he’s pretending to be. Everyone thinks he’s dead, so he’s dying.”

“He’s not dead,” Harmonia says, eyes defiant, as always too-prosaic for someone who’s almost entirely a creature of belief.

He smiles at her, wraps his hand round her wrist. “Tell him that.”

He feels—how not—the cold gaze and the one step the old god takes towards them, before Harmonia smiles back and he lets himself be pulled back into the labyrinth, aware only of her as a flame in his mind—their mind—and himself as another—burning red and white heat, and he shows her all the places where death and doubt have invaded, and she smiles at the man and pets the beast and tells him (them) that he (they) is (are) alive, and why would he (they) think otherwise, and isn’t it simple, isn’t it obvious, that this is life and real and true? And the being that’s been screaming, fear-hurt-trapped-caught, opens its eyes and throws them out.

“Why, godlings,” drawls the bitter-cold voice, “what pretty tricks you play.”

He opens his eyes—it’s hard, so hard, to look at Daniel’s small, shabby, human room, when he has never felt less human, and Harmonia’s little spike of panic pushes its way into him, and he looks at her, and then, horror-struck, fear clawing at his throat, at their joined hands, where his skin and hers have alike faded to the same dead, unearthly white he dreamt of, two months back.

He has never felt less human because he never has been.