Above Us, Only Sky

Dawn and Flight

     It was clear from the way she walked that Sigma Parthenos was familiar with power and veneration: though they ducked into crowds and through dim alleyways, skirting out of the security cameras' view with every third step, she held her shoulders square and her head aloft. She was decisive, strategic above all else, and fleet, and her eyes held a wry glint like someone about to win their seventh consecutive game of chess.

     Io, meanwhile, felt like an old, weary cart horse running a chariot race. If there was a path, she couldn't see it; if Sigma was trying to aid her, tell her when to duck and when to press herself flat against a wall and when to run for all her worth, she couldn't tell. She did, however, have one moment of pride when a drone fly landed on her shoulder. Without thinking, she immobilized it by holding its thorax, rewired its antennae, and erased its memory of herself and Sigma. "Buzz off," she told it as it flew away, oblivious. Io glanced to the silver-eyed woman, but she was nowhere to be seen: before she could do anything else, a calloused hand clamped over her mouth and another held her shoulder, tugging her back against the wall and, somehow, through.

     The hands released her on the other side of what she'd concluded was a holographically masked door; feeling oddly calm, Io looked around. Instead of bricks and earth in every direction, there was marble: smooth tiles, bronze with white veins, covered by a lush cobalt carpet; elegant carved pillars; a swooping spiral staircase with shelves carved out from the side of every stair, filled with books and ancient artifacts; a foyer full of tiny fish that leapt and darted, guarded by a gracefully writhing olive tree. She sought the source of the warm, ambient light that flooded the air, but found no lamps, chandeliers or candles.

     "Look up." The voice that spoke was at once familiar and alien: it had Sigma's rough, lilting accent, but none of her strict military precision or power to command. Io turned to face her: she looked smaller somehow, more human than goddess, but the wry, knowing glint of silver in her eyes was brighter than before.

     "Look up. How long has it been since you saw the sky, Io?"

     She looked up.

     A smooth marble dome overarched the front room. Light glowed through a perfect circle cut out of its peak, and beyond the marble, beyond the light, was an eternity of blue, deep and bright and endless. As she watched, an owl fluttered down to roost in the olive tree: it was just past dawn-- dawn! How long had it been since that word had meaning and purpose?-- and the owl sought a place to sleep for the day, but as it settled its feathers, tucked its beak beneath a wing, it dreamed already of dusk, of returning to the great skies above. To flight, and to the familiar currents of air, and to freedom. 

     And, strangely, Io felt the same dream stir within her, emerging again after years? A decade? A lifetime? Three? spent entombed in stone.

     Reality struck with all the force of lightning. 

     "Why me? I'm a drone engineer, imprisoned for the last three years because I couldn't pay off my grandmother's, my mother's, and my own student loans to the Olympian Council. And you-- you're Athena. Why did you even notice me?"

     "Why did I take you with me, out of all the people Hera keeps in that prison, you mean?" The silver of her eyes sharpened into steel. "You're a time bomb, Io. I have a month at most to defuse you. You have the potential to survive and become an asset to our cause, but if left alone, a quick death by explosion is the best you can hope for." Her tone was flat, her words simple: she sounded, Io thought absurdly, like a drone repair manual stating the risks and warnings of a procedure. "Magic is real, you are a discarded genetic experiment like myself, and I am the leader of a mutiny against the Olympian Council. Hades, Hephaestus, Persephone, Artemis and your friend Proserpina are all in mortal danger if either of us is captured, or if you expose us. Questions?"

     "Why doesn't the Department of Information Regulation want us to know about magic if it's real and useful?"

     "The fact that there's a Department of Information Regulation should answer that well enough, I think."