#floatfoot

                The fact was, Artemis had trained many girls.  Before she’d asked her darling, generous father for the rights to her own chastity belt – and, with it, her freedom to be a vicious little sliver of a girl forever – she had crept down from Olympus by night.   She got where most of them were coming from.  Her Hunters had wanted to get away.

Artemis herself had run off from her father’s hollow laugh way back when, escaping his fancy suits, his looming halls that shivered with aurora borealis one day and heaved with storm clouds the next.  He owned the whole freaking sky, after all, and he wasn’t the only one with control issues.  That greedy Aphrodite threw temper tantrums whenever she couldn’t snag a person’s heart and toss it around like a dog’s chew toy. 

Absolute power, that’s what these Olympians wanted – everyone remembered what happened to Hades when Aphrodite learned he didn’t have googly eyes for anyone.  Shot with Eros’s strongest arrow, wasn’t he?  Doomed to kidnap ditzy little flower-pickers.  He was blamed for dragging darling Persephone down to the underworld, but Artemis knew the truth, and she was no one’s pawn.  That’s what being a virgin goddess meant, really, especially in her pantheon.

 She used to become a whisper of silver through the trees, moonlight and death all by herself in the forest, free and loose and alive and hunting.  She had always been hunting, ages before the Hunters came.  She was restless like that, and so were they.

They came to her because sweaty men tried to wrestle them down and running away was the surest way to fight; they came to her because their fathers had tried using them as bargaining chips, painting little girls up into golden coins.  They came to her because they wanted to be defined by their own power –by their ferocity, their speed, their hope – and not by their father’s sex drive (cough, Zeus, cough) or whether Aphrodite managed to write them a juicy love story.  Artemis had left her calling cards in places where sad girls went for ages, just in case.  They needed someone to teach them to look after themselves, to wear moonlight in their hair rather than mud or scented conditioner.  Girls always needed that, back in ancient Greece and here in the US of A.  Perhaps they always would.

Thalia came, too, as so many of the others did – she came carefully, because she had a lot to prove to herself.  She came because she smelled freedom from her pain, her identity, the prophesy gripping everybody by the short hairs.  She looked worn down, with her leather-studded bracelets and stormy eyes, her too-confident smiles that hid quite a lot behind them.  She told Artemis how she’d felt kicking Luke to what should have been a grisly doom.  Artemis said she could almost understand.

“He betrayed you.  You knew him as an ally, but you looked away and when you turned back he was warped, somehow, all wrong.  Angry and hating the whole world.”

“I was a tree for years.  I don’t know him anymore.”

“No.  And he has become very twisted.” 

“I have no memory of, you know, being a tree, but they say he poisoned me.  He tried to kill me to bring down the camp.”

Artemis bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling – it was just the way Thalia talked about herself as a tree.  She rolled her eyes, bemused and sarcastic; she was all jazz hands and pretend understanding.  It’s likely she couldn’t imagine herself with branches dangling over the camp, a dozen spread, beseeching arms, skin covered in bark like an enormous scab.  How could someone with so much spark imagine herself waiting motionless for years, standing as nothing but a monument to herself?  Zeus took her human form as a kindness, gave her roots because he thought she stood for courage and loyalty and all kinds of good things.

 It’s not like she’d asked to be a tree, but their father always did like turning people into plants.

“He did,” Artemis said.  “He put his new goals ahead of his old ones, ahead of the alliance you shared.  It’s normal to attack allies that let you down.”  Whether she meant to or not, Artemis was sort of talking about her own Hunters, here.  If you slept bundled up in a man’s arms, you were out, you were gone, and they’d drive you away.  It was like in the modern story Peter Pan – if you left the fold you were condemned to grow up, get boobs and become boring. 

“He poisoned me.”

“You aren’t at fault for fighting him with all you have, Thalia.  You aren’t the traitor here.”

“And, you know,” Thalia massaged her temples, fingernail polish looking kind of scuffed up, eyes squeezed shut.  It was like she didn’t want to meet Artemis’s eyes for this part, didn’t want to feel obligated to look the goddess in her face.  “I had a crush on him, once.  You know that.”

“I know.”

“So you understand?”

“I can’t, really.”  It’s possible Artemis might have loved a man, once – poor old Orion.  It was also possible he was just a dear friend, like Zoë, like her other Hunters.  That spot was not lesser, friend vs. lover.  Sometimes Artemis wasn’t sure she knew the difference between friend-love and romantic love.  Perhaps she kept herself stuck at too young and age, running around as a twelve-year-old – perhaps she would always be too young.

Thalia didn’t seem to know what to say, at first.  She just waited, and Artemis sighed.

 It wasn’t like Artemis to turn girls away, not when they needed her, but it was like her to test their resolve.  Running with the Hunters wasn’t for every little girl who wanted to get out, just those who were willing to shoot to kill, willing to give up maturity and childbirth and the haunting beauty of weathered skin and silver hair.  She wasn’t going to steal little girls away for her army the way some fairies did in stories, the way Peter coaxed the children out their window in Peter Pan.  She’d be no better than Aphrodite if she did that.  

“What do you need from me?” Artemis asked.  It was simple enough.  She’d taken plenty of requests in the past – she’d driven people to the airport, she’d sat with sad strangers in grimy old fast food joints in the middle of the night.  Hadn’t Artemis been willing to hold the weight of the world for a little girl she didn’t even know, this Annabeth?  She would defend girls and their freedom to choose what they were, because it wasn’t like a Hunter to stop fighting.  She also just kind of liked doing favors for people who genuinely deserved them.  Thalia was strong and sharp, slicing her way through a world that hadn’t exactly been doing right by her so far.  Waking up from treehood into a terrifying prophesy would be enough to mess with anybody.  

Thalia said, “I must join the Hunt,” and it was the “must” that struck Artemis.

“Must?” she said.

“Zeus thinks he –” Thalia began, but Artemis cut her off.

“It’s Zeus,” she said, “And Luke.  And Zoë Nightshade – one of my bravest, my best.  You’d leave the world for all these reasons, reasons they provide.  Right?  But it’s not their actions that matter, here.  Only yours.”

Artemis knew about Zeus, anyway, and what Thalia must have felt looking up at that cold, heartless statue of him in the Zeus Cabin back at Camp Half-Blood, searching his face for something safe and finding only staring marble.  Really, Artemis got it.  They were sisters.  Maybe they walked the same way, sometimes, and maybe they wrinkled their noses when they tried food they didn’t like.  Hadn’t she had Zeus’s name super glued to hers, too, until he gave his almighty blessing to be her own person?

He “owned” so many people’s lives, really it was kind of sick.  Artemis knew Thalia was well aware of that lovely little fact.   It wasn’t fair, but it made sense that she would want to flee her life to escape her birthright. 

Plenty of people were defined by their ties to Zeus, among the pantheon.  He was sort of the smug cornerstone, wasn’t he?  Dionysus could drown out the reasonable chatter in people’s brains with floods of wine, the croon and the roar of Maenads, the gluttonous, furious whir of hedonism, but in the end he’d still be Zeus’s little boy.  The only reason he got super vine-powers and the ability to make people go bonkers on command was because Zeus thought wine was a pretty nifty invention.  Apollo could strum a lyre like nobody’s business, but if he hadn’t been Zeus’s son he wouldn’t have ever gotten the keys to the sun chariot; he wouldn’t have had the right to shine as brightly as he did. 

Thalia and these demigods had a point, getting pissy because of gods messing with their business, screwing up their plans and taking over their free will, but even most of the gods didn’t get freedom.  Even Artemis had to ask for hers.  Could she have snatched up this Hunter’s life for herself if Zeus had refused her request, or did her destiny hinge on him the way he thought it did?

Prophesies.  Fate.   Permission.  Their world was written out for them, but the Hunt was a game of chance, of skill, of hope.

 It was a little girl’s game, a game for someone who couldn’t map out the world according to their stupid eternal wishes.  Little girls born ready to change society for the better, made to sew and prattle on about babies and the way to wear their hair.  Girls born in the bodies of little boys, too, unseen by their families, maybe, but seen by the goddess that protected them and knew how scary it was to be like them. 

In the end, Zeus didn’t matter here.  Thalia said, “Yeah, I think so,” and then asked, almost aggressively, “Is that so bad?”

 Artemis raised her hand, like, Shh, I’m going to tell you a thing, and for a second it looked kind of serious.  Then she just said, “We can go on a hunt right now, if you want.”

“You know what I meant,” Thalia said.  “I can’t go back to camp now.  I don’t want to be the one in that prophesy.”

“I don’t blame you,” Artemis said.  “Come on.”

 She and Thalia wore silver-grey, maybe the color of a cloudy moon, maybe the color of dust, and they went into the forest.  These were the same mystic woods where Actaeon stumbled accidentally long ago, from his Grecian world to Artemis’s own, to the place where she was bathing hidden away from mankind.  He’d come here when he wasn’t supposed to, and of course he’d paid the price.  Artemis had just willed the woods closer to them, now, close and ready for action.  She knew Thalia wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between one of California’s forests and one of Artemis’s own.  Thalia didn’t even say goodbye to her friends; they were busy, they were off doing other things and she’d tell them her plans later.  This wasn’t going to take long.

They carried arrows on their backs.  Everything smelled alive and rotting at the same time, the ground carpeted with dead and dying leaves, the trees around them covered with bugs.  Thalia didn’t seem afraid of touching sap-soaked bark, getting her black fingerless gloves dirty; she leaned forward as she walked.  She stepped more carefully than Artemis had been expecting, as though she didn’t want to snap even a single pine needle.  She seemed very aware of herself, tense as a taught bow string, gaze darting all around; she had gel or something in her hair so it looked defiant.  Birds dove between branches, their voices shrill and their wet eyes glinting.

Eventually, Artemis whispered, “Do you know what we’re stalking?”

“There’s a deer family,” Thalia said, “A mom and two kids.  There’s also something weird here – I keep almost seeing it.  I dunno what it is.”

“We’re hunting the weird thing,” Artemis said.  “It’s far crueler than the deer, and would feed on us, too, if it could.”

“What is it?”

“Have you ever fought a drakon?”

“Have I,” Thalia chuckled.  She had a merry smile even when her eyes seemed kind of sad and far away.  Artemis liked that.  This girl might be fun around the campfire.  She probably had some funny stories, and some others that would make everyone shiver a little.

“This is kind of like that.”

“But not really?”

“We don’t only hunt Greek monsters,” Artemis shrugged.  “We hunt some things humans haven’t even thought to name yet.”

They crept on, Thalia looking a little less at home, now.  She glanced over her shoulder and her brows furrowed, aggressive, challenging the forest, challenging the unknown.  Sometimes she walked very close to Artemis, their arms brushing just the tiniest bit, but that was fine.  Her Hunters were family, choosing to defy the laws of aging to represent that which cannot be restrained, the mad and desperate spirit that had always fed gods and humans, people and beasts, everything.  They usually worked as a good, solid team, but sometimes they got scared and clumped together.  Sometimes they told stories about their old families late at night, all those people that used to love them that had probably died a few generations back. 

Thalia wasn’t afraid.  Artemis could tell.  Part of her thought this little girl, not Zeus’s girl, really, was getting ready to throw herself in front of the goddess if she had to, reaching for the shield at her side before thinking to touch the arrows on her back.  Thalia wanted to prove she had the stuff.  She kept close, kept vigilant, but she looked more angry than nervous.  This wasn’t safe ground, but the sport was on and she was going to win.

Artemis thought you could get to know as much as you needed to learn about anyone by taking them on a hunt like this.  She decided to calm Thalia down, reassure her.

  “You have good stance,” she said.  “Some of my Hunters might not even hear you coming.”

“I’ve been hunted – or hunting – a lot of my life,” Thalia said.  She swallowed, calculating.  “Jason and I had to hide from my mom, too, when she was really… Out of it.  There’s only so many times you can tell someone their godly sugar daddy is coming back when you know he isn’t.”

“She put too much faith in Zeus.  Needed his approval to keep her own head.”

“Yeah.”

“Put too much faith in a lover.  See?”

Thalia gritted her teeth.  “Of course I do.”

Artemis laughed.  She had no idea what her laugh sounded like to other people.  It probably wasn’t as bitter as Thalia’s, probably wasn’t as old despite her centuries.  “Do you see those parts of the tree that look sizzled off?”

“They’re oozing.  This ‘weird thing’ infected the tree?”

“Yes.”

“So we follow this trail, and then what?”

“We kill the monster.  Or we don’t.  I’m going to ask you to choose.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Artemis met Thalia’s eyes – she’d been told her own gaze was kind of disconcerting, sometimes, and she tried to milk that for all it was worth.  She always won staring contests with Apollo.  “You’re very welcome,” she said. 

The bits of the tree that had been ripped up were steaming, now, and soon the trees would crack inside, the bark shriveling and holes big enough to stick your fist through opening up.  The trees would die, and poison the ground beneath them.  That was okay, really.  Forests in Artemis’s head had endless trees, endless paths yet to be made.  At nighttime her worlds were drowning in moonlight, always crisp and clear and endless.  It’s too bad Pan couldn’t really come here, couldn’t have come here before it was too late.  It wasn’t his earth, though.  Only Artemis’s. 

Thalia and Artemis crept down a rocky hall, and Artemis flicked a few pebbles at her to see what she’d do.  She smiled and flicked pebbles back.  They waded across a too-clear, too-bright stream, and came out the other side smelling like a cold morning.  There were footprints in the soil, sometimes, or broken pine needles, or gashes in the ground and plant life that seethed and tore open as if being nibbled at by tiny insects.  Artemis let Thalia do the tracking for the most part.  At first she’d started off almost too violent, excited about giving orders to show she knew what she was up to.  She figured it out, though. 

“It went that way,” she would say, and then, nibbling her lip, “It has a weird way of balancing, doesn’t it?  Weird distribution of weight.”

“It is a weird creature.  I warned you.”

“You warned me,” Thalia said Heh like it was an actual word.  “What is it?”

“I don’t really know.”

They walked quite a long way, or so it felt.  The sun was setting before they heard the screech, or felt it, rather, rattling in their bones, shaking up their brains.  It burned in their ears.  It was something that died every time it spoke, this weird creature, this monster, this non-drakon.   Thalia met Artemis’s eyes, and Artemis whispered, “Ready your bow.”  She pulled an arrow from off her own back and handed it to Thalia. 

Thalia took the arrow and wet her lips with her tongue.  Artemis would have loved to see what she was imagining, how she saw this creature in her mind’s eye.  Zeus was nothing if not creative, and his children, both gods and men, had gathered up this trait in spades.  Who else among Kronos’s children was known for his crafty, crackling mind?  Who else was known for rigging the games he played?  Zeus, father of inventors, of tricksters.  Thalia had a mind that could be keen like his, sure, but even if she envisioned horrors she grit her teeth and said, “It’s coming from the east.”

“It usually does,” Artemis replied. 

It didn’t take them long to get where the beast was.  Smog rose from the smoldering earth and twined its way up their legs, soaked into their hair, stung their eyes.  Artemis blazed eerily silver through the sour dark, her skin lit up like moonshine.  Eventually she stopped walking, and told Thalia to go alone.  This is how it had to happen, she wanted to tell her, but she didn’t.  Maybe Thalia’s legs were weak; maybe her fingers were slick and shaking.  It didn’t matter to her, however she felt.  She strode on.  There was a sound in the air like a thousand flies humming, feeding, darting from one inch of a corpse to another.  It was a low drone, too deep and layered for the mind to fully wrap around it, too many flies, too much movement. 

Artemis was always there.  Whatever Thalia met in the smog, Artemis was behind her.

There was Thalia, with her tough-girl boots, and stretching before her, covering half the sky, was a creature of poison and fire.  The form it took would be different based on who was coming to meet it, whether because it was playing games with its food or because it sometimes just wore different skins for its own pleasure, no one really knew.  Today it had magma instead of blood, and sores across its scorched-leather hide that spat out lava.  It had a thousand eyes.  It had a dribbling tongue.  When it rose it clamped its hands down on two trees and they were infected; they would break, soon, like the ones that had come before. 

Thalia had her bow all ready.  She lifted it high, aimed at the beast’s mad eyes. 

She didn’t say anything.  Not, “Holy crap,” not, “Lend me a hand, will ya,” not, “How am I even supposed to kill a lava creature with a stupid arrow?” 

She waited.  The thing watched her.  Then it shivered a bit, as though wracked by a sudden surge of cold, and it was Luke. 

“Don’t shoot me,” the creature said, and its smile was all swagger and warmth, a strange combination of arrogance and love.  “Just let me win.  It will be so much easier.”

“You’ll eat me,” Thalia said.

“That’s what she told you,” the thing said.

“You’re not Luke,” Thalia said. 

“Is he going to eat you, too?” the thing said, and its laughter was like the drone of flies again, the whisper of a million tiny wings, the glint of a thousand multifaceted eyes.    Thalia lowered her bow from the thing’s eye to its heart.

“He would never,” she said, but it didn’t sound like she believed herself.  She let her arrow fly, and the creature, the weird creature without a name, lunged for her.  For a moment coals rattled in Luke’s throat, lighting up his skin from inside, and his eyes were stretched so wide the skull showed through.  It became a thing of tar and shadow, then a thing of steel and smog, and then it disappeared.

When Artemis hugged Thalia, her silver clothes were singed a bit and her eyeliner was running just a little.

“You’ll be safe with us,” Artemis said.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t know it would do that.”

“It was a test.”

Artemis thought, for a moment, deciding if Thalia sounded accusatory, if she sounded sad.  It was hard to tell.  Of course she’d known that Thalia, like so many other demigods, kept the brunt of her emotion smothered under a fighter’s spirit.  “Some people go for the deer with its babies,” Artemis said, finally.  “Some people need to get away, but hunting with us wouldn’t be for them.”

“Really?  The deer?  But it was more important to hunt that thing – the weird thing.”  The weird thing that stole Luke’s face.  Like Kronos.  Like actual Luke, really.  Everything’s just stealing the face of this guy she used to know, walking around looking like someone she trusted but not being him at all.  “It was going to eat people.”

Artemis nodded into Thalia’s shoulder.  “We do important work.”

They went back to the real world, hurried off to California.  Really, Artemis could have swiped her hand across the sky and brought them back just like that, a blink and a wish, but it made more sense to walk together as companions.  Thalia wouldn’t feel like family yet, but give it a couple hundred years and it would be like they were sliced from the same soul.  It always ended up that way.  Artemis thought of Zoë, of peculiar faces she made, of the darkest and most earnest secrets she whispered to the lot of them late at night, of the games she asked to play when she was feeling young and silly.  She thought about all the fallen Hunters sometimes.  They were the Hunters of Artemis, after all, and her name was part of their name.  They would always be part of her, her best and her favorites.  Sometimes, when she thought she would cry, she went off by herself for a while.  Probably Thalia was the same whenever she felt sad.  She didn’t seem like the sort who’d want to get all depressed with lots of people around.

“What should we do now?” Thalia asked, once the world was beginning to look normal again.  She would never include that line when she told the story to Percy and Annabeth, or anyone else, for that matter.  She would jump right to talking to her friends, to joining the Hunters for pancakes at IHOP that night.  They took up a few booths and felt like normal girls for a little while. It wouldn’t last long, and the waitresses rolled their eyes, thinking, At least they tipped well.  

Artemis shrugged.  The world was full of cryptic prophesies, pinning people down to paths they might rather wriggle away from – the Greek gods’ worldview said that everything was already charted, carved into reality from the beginning of time, and that fate cannot be avoided.  “I guess we go home,” she said.  “What do you want to do?”

Thalia would tell Percy and Annabeth that that was really what the Hunters were about – freedom, cutting loose the bonds of social expectations and seeing where the wind took you, deciding what was best as a cozy little team.  There were reasons Artemis didn’t just gallivant around by herself.  Reasons she wanted a family, a bundle of teammates to urge her on, to steal the whipped cream off her French toast.  The Hunters were about what they wanted to do, as free children.  Lost girls, girls wearing silver and filing arrows from chips of the moon.

“You don’t really do that,” Percy would say, his mouth full.  “You can’t really do that.”

“Just watch us,” Thalia would answer.  “You’d be surprised.”