Discord's Apple

“I know,” she said, thinking of Hera, of the apple that started a war that changed the world. What would happen if the apple went back into the world?

A calm smile softened his face. “I know you do.”

She knew, the same way she knew to find the glass slippers and that nothing in the basement would kill Alex. The same way she knew she couldn’t let Hera into the house.

For each thing she knew, for every new insight she learned about the Storeroom and everything inside it, her father slid a little closer to death.

Evie waited for someone to knock at the door. Someone would. She’d done nothing but answer the door since she got here. Well, that wasn’t true. It only seemed like it. But if she worried about the door and who’d be at it next, she wasn’t worrying about her father. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence, speculating about what Arthur would be like and when he would return, speaking with an awe-inspiring certainty that it would happen, that it wasn’t just a story.

She left him alone, went to the living room to lie on the sofa, and sobbed into a pillow so she wouldn’t wake him up. Mab came and put her chin on Evie’s leg, gazing at her with sad brown eyes. Evie wondered where she’d come from, if she was another piece of the magic that protected the house and bound her and her father to it. Another magical artifact, emerging when she was needed.

She wondered if Alex would come back. She still couldn’t guess who he was, but she kept returning to the descriptions of the fall of Troy in the Aeneid. He might have been part of Aeneas’s crew, which sailed to Italy and founded Rome. But he’d said the language on the apple was Greek. She’d even found a book on the shelves, a coffee table book with lots of photos and illustrations, and a chart showing the script from the apple: Linear B, the language of Mycenae from around the time of the Trojan War.

Virgil provided a solution to what Evie had always thought was a supreme failure of logic in the story: Why had the Trojans been so eager to bring such a bizarre and suspicious object as the horse into the city? The answer: The Greeks must have left behind a spy to convince the Trojans that the horse would bring them luck. Odysseus, master of the plan of the horse, chose his friend Sinon, a persuasive and credible speaker.

Evie could see them: they must have known that if Sinon failed to tell his story convincingly, the Trojans would kill him along with all those within the horse. It was not just his own life he was offering to sacrifice. He must have known that the lives of all his friends and comrades rested on his words. He would have been honored and flattered that Odysseus had asked him. He would have been afraid. But Odysseus’s hand on his shoulder, his intense gaze, would have made him confident. Odysseus would have given Sinon the bruises and chafed wrists that lent proof to his tale. It was hard, beating his friend, but he would not have given the task to another. For his part, Sinon would have thrown himself into the role. So much depended on it.

At least that was how Evie would write it, if she were telling the story.

While many tales traced the fates of the heroes of the Trojan War, she couldn’t find out what happened to Sinon. Not in any of the stories, not so much as a line from a poem that said he was among the company that traveled home with Odysseus and was caught up in those adventures. She would have expected to find him there, if he had survived the sacking of the city. His name faded from the record. He might even have been a pure invention of Virgil’s, an ultimate example of Greek treachery, a well-wrought piece of propaganda. He could have been killed—but surely the story would have said so.

Or he could have dropped out of history. The gods who backed Troy must have been furious with him. Any one of them could have laid a curse on him. If they were anything like Hera . . . Evie’s skin prickled, thinking of what they could do to him.

Sinon, then. The Liar. Why didn’t that make her feel any better about Alex?

She thought about going to look for him. Hopes Fort wasn’t that big. He might even have been hanging around the house still, watching, as he’d been doing all week. She could go into the yard and yell Sinon and see if he answered. But she didn’t leave the house, because she wanted to stay near in case her father needed her.

She didn’t have to stay and do nothing. She had work. She’d left Tracker in a fix. She pulled her laptop to her and returned to the story.

Tracker, alone on the tundra, hoped she would be able to keep her bearings. She felt right on the edge of losing herself. And if something happened out here, the chances of the others rescuing her were slim.

Now how was she going to get out of this fix? Talon could sweep in and rescue her. It wouldn’t be any more unlikely than a dozen other storylines she’d done. It would return the characters back to the main plot. But this was supposed to be Tracker’s story. This was Tracker’s chance to shine.

She couldn’t spend the whole time wallowing in self-doubt, either. So all Evie had to do was get her to the bunker at the gulag, then see what happened next. Her hands paused over the keys. She looked over the back of the sofa to the kitchen door, waiting for someone to knock.

Her father emerged around suppertime, moving slowly but appearing alert. Evie rushed to help him, and of all the wonders, he let her. She heated up soup for him. He ate half a bowl and a few crackers, and seemed pleased with the accomplishment. They spoke little, commenting on the weather, passing on the gossip from town.

“Did anyone stop by?” he said.

“No.”

He limped back to bed, stopping on the way to scratch Mab’s back. Evie was proud of herself for not asking, yet again, if he needed help, if he was all right. She just had to hope she could get to him in time if he stumbled.

She returned to the sofa in the living room and tried to write. How long could she keep Tracker wandering on the tundra? Because when she reached her destination, Evie would have to figure out how she was going to beat up the bad guys and rescue the prisoner. All by herself.

Both she and her laptop fell asleep after midnight.

In the morning, her mobile phone and the house’s landline rang at the same time. Evie started awake, remembered where she was, and sat frozen while she decided which one to answer first. In the end she answered her mobile, which was closer and didn’t require a mad dash to the kitchen. Then the house phone stopped ringing.

“They’ve done it,” Bruce said as greeting. “They’ve fucking done it.”

Bruce kept harping on about the world, the news, everything, when her own world had shrunk to this house and her father. She ought to care—the world situation was going to hell. Even without watching the news, she could sense the tension in Bruce’s voice. She ought to care. But she only felt tired.

“Who’s done what?”

“Congress voted to back China. Who’d have guessed? Ten years ago, China was the fucking ninth level of hell, and now we’re allies? It’s unreal.”

She winced. “Wasn’t China backing terrorists? The Mongolians? We’re not supposed to be backing a country that backs terrorists.”