Wonder Woman: Warbringer Read online

  “And if she’d remained in New York, she might have been targeted here.”

  Now Jason was on his feet. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I’ve had about enough of being scolded by a teenage girl.”

  Diana rose and met his eye. “I could be a man of fifty and you’d still be just as wrong.”

  Jason snatched up the red backpack and started toward the door. “We’re leaving, Alia.”

  Diana stepped into his path. “No.”

  A muscle ticked in Jason’s jaw. “Get out of my way.”

  “You said yourself that she’s in danger. If people are watching you—”

  “I can keep my own sister safe. We have an extensive security team of trained professionals.”

  “And you trust these people?”

  “More than I trust a stranger in sweatpants who slammed me against a wall and speaks Bulgarian.”

  “Tell me,” said Diana. “When Alia called you from Istanbul, did you relay her location and the details of her situation to your security team?”

  “Of course. I—” Jason stopped and his face turned ashen. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, then paced slowly back to the bed. He sat down heavily, his gaze stunned.

  “Jason?” said Alia.

  “It’s my fault. There must be someone on staff…But I don’t get it. Why would they go after Alia? I’m closer to the company. Why didn’t they come after me?”

  Diana almost felt sorry for him. “You’re fighting the wrong battle,” she said gently. “I know you think this is about your family’s business, but Alia is the real target.”

  “Diana—” Alia said warningly.

  “What are you talking about?” said Jason.

  Alia tugged on Diana’s wrist. “Just leave it be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you sound insane when you talk about that stuff,” Alia whispered furiously. “Oracles, Warbringers, magic springs—”

  Jason’s head snapped up. “What did you say?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Alia. “Just some goofy new age stuff Diana got from…her weird family.”

  “What do you know about Warbringers?” Jason was on his feet again, and his face was deadly serious.

  Alia cut her brother a baffled glance. “What do you know about Warbringers?”

  “It’s…it’s something I found in Mom and Dad’s papers. After the accident.”

  The information seemed to strike Alia with physical force. She took a half step backward. “What?”

  “I had to go through all of their documents. There was a safe in the office. I can show you.”

  “Why didn’t you show me before?”

  “Because it was all so out there. I didn’t…There was enough to deal with after they died. I had my hands full. And this was just so wild, all of this bizarre stuff about Dad’s Greek ancestors. I didn’t want to put that burden on you.”

  “What burden?” Alia said, her voice rising, panic creeping in.

  “The burden of your bloodline,” said Diana. She wasn’t angry anymore. If anything, she felt only regret. She remembered visiting the Soldiers’ Pantheon at the Armory, walking hand in hand with her mother past the glass cases, surrounded by blue light, listening to the stories of the Amazons, the courage they’d shown in battle, the greatness of their deeds, their homes, their families, their people, their gods. What’s my story? she’d asked her mother. It hasn’t been written yet, Hippolyta had said with a smile. But as the years passed, Diana had started to hate that memory, the knowledge that her story had been flawed from the start.

  “Jason?” Alia asked, her fists clenched.

  “It’s just a bunch of legends, Alia.”

  “Tell me,” she demanded. “Tell me all of it.”

  Jason looked to Diana almost helplessly. “I don’t know where to start.”

  Alia ground her teeth together. She wasn’t mad exactly—no, that wasn’t true, she was angry, off-the-charts angry that Jason had kept this from her—but more than needing to punch him in the face, she needed to know what he knew.

  “Just start,” she said, leashing her rage.

  But it was Diana who spoke. “Warbringers are descendants of Helen of Troy.”

  Of all the things Alia had been expecting, that wasn’t one of them. “Helen,” she said skeptically. “As in ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’?”

  “It wasn’t her face,” said Diana. “Helen’s power lay not in her beauty but in her very blood. The birth of a Warbringer signals an age of conflict. If the Warbringer dies before Hekatombaion in her seventeenth year, no war will come. But if her powers are allowed to reach maturity—”

  Alia held up her hands. “I know you believe this stuff, but Jason—”

  Only Jason didn’t look scornful. He wasn’t scoffing or curling his lip in that contemptuous way that made Alia want to smack him. Instead, he was looking at Diana with deep suspicion. “How do you know all of this?”

  Diana shifted uncomfortably. “It’s a story…a legend among my people.”

  “And just who are your people?”

  Why did it matter? Why was he asking these questions? “Jason, you can’t possibly believe any of this.”

  “I don’t know what I believe. Mom and Dad had references to what your friend is describing, these Warbringers. They also called them hap…hap-something.”

  “Haptandrai,” Diana finished.

  “That’s it. There were other names, too, in almost every country.”

  “Mom and Dad were scientists,” protested Alia. “We’re scientists. This is…this is a bunch of superstition. Bedtime stories.”

  Diana shook her head, but she didn’t look frustrated, just sad, almost pitying. “After all you’ve seen, how can you still say that?”

  Alia’s eyes fastened on the metal bracelets at Diana’s wrists. She remembered the feel of the metal beneath her fingertips earlier that day, cool and solid. Real. But she’d seen that same metal move. She’d seen palaces that shouldn’t be, phantom horses. She’d traveled through the heart of a storm. “There’s an explanation,” Alia said. “There’s always an explanation. Even if science hasn’t found it yet.”

  “It was the science they were interested in,” said Jason. “They’d traced the Keralis line all the way back to ancient Greece; other families and offshoots of Helen’s bloodline, too, charting the lives of Warbringers, linking them to world events.”

  Alia shook her head. “No.”

  “They thought they might be able to help you with the right science.”

  “And you believe all of this?”

  Jason threw his hands up. “Maybe. I don’t know. Have you looked outside, Alia? Have you watched the news?”

  Alia planted her hands on her hips. “We’ve been in the city less than twenty-four hours. Running for our lives. I haven’t been keeping up.”

  “Well, something is happening and it isn’t good. You must have seen the soldiers on street corners.”

  “I thought there’d been a bomb threat, a terrorist attack.”

  “Attacks. Plural. All over the world.” He took out his phone and poked at the screen, then handed it to her.

  She flicked through the headlines, one after another, Diana peering over her shoulder. Coup Attempt. Civil War Erupts. Bombings Increase. Talks Break Down. Twenty Believed Dead. Hundreds Believed Dead. Thousands Dead.

  A fistfight had broken out in the middle of the UN General Assembly. Emergency meetings of Congress had been called.

  “It’s beginning,” said Diana, gazing at the screen, her eyes wide. “It will only get worse. If we don’t reach the spring by Hekatombaion, the tipping point will be reached. World war will be inevitable.”

  The images slid by: bombs exploding in cities she did not know, homes reduced to rubble, bodies on stretchers, a man standing in a field with a gun raised over his head, stirring up an audience of thousands. Alia clicked on the next image—a video—and heard people shouting in a language she didn’t unders
tand, screams. She saw a crowd surge past a barricade, police in riot gear opening fire.

  “You’re saying”—she cleared her throat—“you’re saying I did this.”

  “It isn’t something you did,” said Diana.

  Alia choked out a laugh. “Just something I am?”

  Neither Diana nor Jason seemed to know how to respond to that.

  “It’s the way of men to make war,” Diana attempted. “You’re just…”

  “There was another word in the records Mom and Dad left,” said Jason. “Procatalysia.”

  “Precatalyst?” Alia asked. It sounded like a scientific term.

  “It refers to the original meaning,” said Jason. “From the Greek. To dissolve. To break apart.”

  “Procatalysia,” Diana murmured. “She who comes before the world dissolves.”

  Alia clamped her lips shut. A cold sweat had broken over her skin, and her clothes suddenly felt too tight. She thought she might be sick. Her eyes registered the horrors on the screen, but her mind was full of other images, too. The riot in Central Park when she and Nim had gone to that free concert. The brawl that had broken out at the junior dance. Nim and Theo, usually so cheerful and easygoing, screaming at each other in the backseat when they’d all tried to drive up to Maine together. The arguments—so many arguments and breakups and accusations that had seemed to come from nowhere. Class debates that turned nasty. Teachers who suddenly went into a rage. Mr. Kagikawa had slapped Kara Munro. They’d all been shocked. He’d been fired. But then they’d forgotten, gone on with their lives.

  Alia had never thought to question it. That was just the way life worked. It was why she liked being home, why she didn’t like crowds. The world was a hostile place. Maybe she’d been sorry she and Nim didn’t seem to be able to hold on to friends, told herself it would get better when she went to college. She’d spent more time on her own and convinced herself that was a choice. But had she ever added it up?

  Recently, she’d felt the tension rising around her, and she’d hoped that a change of scene, getting out of New York, would help. Then things had been just as bad aboard the Thetis. In fact, even on the flight to Istanbul, the passengers had been snapping at one another. Again that voice in Alia’s head had clamored, Go home. Hit reset. Things got loud and ugly out in the world. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if things had only been that way in her world?

  On the screen, a woman ran from a burning building. She held the limp body of a child in her arms. Her clothes were smeared with blood, and her mouth was open in a silent howl. I did that.

  Alia stumbled past Jason and Diana, bolting for the bathroom. Her knees knocked painfully against the tiles as she collapsed to the floor and vomited a sludge of candy and bile into the toilet.

  Warbringer. Procatalysia. Haptandra. They could call it whatever they wanted. It sounded a lot like monster. She couldn’t remember much about the Trojan War. She’d thought it was all mythology, old poetry. She’d thought Helen was just a character from a story. Maybe she was. And maybe Alia was a character in a story, too. The kind that got people killed. The monster that had to be put down.

  “Al?” Jason asked quietly from the doorway.

  “Don’t call me that,” she muttered into the bowl, flushing away the mess she’d made.

  “Alia—”

  She didn’t look at him when she asked, “Do you believe I’m…do you think it’s true?”

  He was quiet for a while. “I think it might be,” he said at last. “Yes.”

  “Because Mom and Dad believed it?”

  “That’s part of it. Some of the work they were doing…They had a team searching out ancient battlegrounds, looking for the blood of ancient heroes and kings, extracting biological material. They believed, Alia. They thought they could do good with the knowledge. And they wanted to protect you. I wanted to protect you.”

  “So all this time—”

  “The threats to our family have always been real. But—”

  “But you knew people might come for me, try to kill me before I could, y’know, destroy the world.”

  “Yes.”

  Alia pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. She felt ridiculous sprawled there on the bathroom floor, elbows resting on the edge of a toilet bowl, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. She kept seeing that woman running from the flames. She could feel the limp weight of the child clutched in her arms. “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

  She heard footsteps, and then Jason was crouching beside her. He put his arm around her shoulders. “Yes, it would. Wars happen, Alia. Even in generations when no Warbringer was born, people still found plenty of excuses to kill each other. And you know what? Humanity survived it all. Maybe Mom and Dad were right, or maybe it’s all just a legend, but the one thing I know is they told me to keep you safe, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Alia shrugged him off, forcing herself to her feet. “What makes you so sure you can?” She picked up her toothbrush and squirted a huge dollop from the travel-sized toothpaste they’d bought, scrubbing the sour taste from her mouth. “Someone blew up my boat. They killed innocent people to get to me.”

  “The company owns a cabin up in Canada. It’s isolated, secure. We’ll go there, try to figure out what’s happening, if there’s a way to fix this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Diana said from the hall. “I can’t allow that.”

  Jason whirled on her. “If you try to hurt her—”

  “I risked my life to save her,” Diana said. “I risked everything.”

  “Then you should know the safest place for her is far away from all of this.”

  “There’s a spring in Therapne, near the boundaries of ancient Sparta. If Alia bathes in its waters before the sun sets on the first of Hekatombaion, the world need not suffer an age of bloodshed, and the cycle of Warbringers will be broken.”

  “Therapne?” said Jason. “In Greece? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Alia,” Diana said softly. “Please.”

  Alia met Diana’s gaze in the mirror. She’d pulled her from the waters. Brought her back to life. I risked everything. And what if Diana was right? What if there was a way to stop this? What if Alia could fix this instead of letting the world descend into war?

  As if sensing her thoughts, Jason said, “No. Absolutely not. I’ve never even heard of a spring. It wasn’t in any of the files Mom and Dad left.”

  “The spring is real,” said Diana. “It’s near the Menelaion, where Helen was laid to rest.”

  “I’m not dragging Alia halfway across the world and betting her life on a magical spring.”

  Now Alia raised a brow. “You think I’m a walking, talking teenage apocalypse, but you draw the line at a magical spring?”

  “It’s too big a risk.”

  He didn’t believe Diana; why should he? He hadn’t witnessed what Alia had. Alia didn’t know what was real or imagined anymore, what was fiction or fact. And it didn’t matter. This was her reality now. “It’s a risk,” she said. “But it’s my risk to take.”

  “How much do you even know about this girl?” Jason said, waving at Diana. “We have to be careful. People—”

  “She doesn’t want our money, Jason. She isn’t a reporter. She isn’t a gold digger. She saved my life.”

  “That doesn’t mean you get to go traipsing off to Greece with her. I forbid—”

  Alia turned and jabbed a finger at his chest. “You do not want to finish that sentence. Jason, you’re my big brother and I love you, but this is on me. I’m the one who has to live with being the biggest mass murderer of all time if this plays out the way you seem to think it will. You can’t expect me to just go hide in the wilderness.”

  “Alia,” he said desperately, “this isn’t your responsibility. We go to Canada. Wait it out. We—”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Diana, but we only get one shot at this, right?”

  “Yes,” said Diana. “You must reach the s
pring before the sun sets on the first day of Hekatombaion. After that—”

  “After that a lot of people die.”

  “That’s less than a week away!” Jason said.

  “You weren’t on that boat. Those people would be alive if it wasn’t for me. I’m going to have to live with that forever. I’m not going to have Armageddon on my conscience, too. You can lock me up. You can try to stop me, but I’m going to do this.”

  “No,” Jason said, hands cutting through the air in a decisive gesture. “I made a promise to Mom and Dad. You don’t know—”

  “Are you so sure you can stop us?” said Diana.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  Alia almost laughed at the indignant look on his face.

  “Diana did just put you on your butt,” she said. “I’m pretty sure she can do it again.”

  “You cannot make this kind of decision,” he said. “Go off with someone you barely know. You’re seventeen.”

  “And you’re the guy who got drunk on eggnog last Christmas and danced to ‘Turn the Beat Around’ in Aunt Rachel’s wig, so stop acting like you’re in charge.”

  “We agreed not to mention that ever again,” Jason whispered furiously.

  “Jason, I’m doing this.” For the first time since the bomb had exploded aboard the Thetis, Alia felt like she was making a choice, not just being cast about by the sea. But the truth was that they needed Jason’s help if they were going to get to Greece in time. She reached out and took his hand, squeezing it tight, trying to make him understand. “Mom and Dad would want me to try. I know they would. You know it, too.”

  She could feel the grief they shared around them like an unwanted shield, an invisible wall that separated them from the world. Sometimes it felt unbreachable, as if no one would ever know what they’d been through, what it was to have your world crack down the middle.

  At last he squeezed back. “Okay.”

  “What?” The word leapt from her lips. Jason never changed his mind. Mules could take lessons in stubbornness from him.

  “You’re right,” he said with a sigh. “Mom and Dad would never hide from doing the hard thing. Not if it could save lives. We’ll take the company jet.”