Page 30 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)
Lethe announced he was heading upstairs for the change of clothes Ares had offered him. Cal must’ve noticed from outside because he burst through the door and ran up after him.
“I’m going to check the food.” Ana took advantage of the shift of movement in the room to scope out the house, standing and proceeding back into the kitchen.
She perused the kitchen, doing her best to investigate the house before returning back into the living room.
Her eyes lingered momentarily on Ares’s gun hanging on the wall, but she resisted the urge to take it.
Instead, she returned to the couch. Jasper had a dark look on his face.
Ana eased back down beside him as Lethe came back downstairs, wearing a blue button-down shirt and riding pants. Cal was now following after him, wearing Lethe’s coat that hung heavy on Cal’s thin frame. It dragged over the stairs behind him.
Lethe circled the staircase, writing something on a small notepad in his hand, the stopwatch hanging over his shirt. A cinnamon stick stuck out of the corner of his mouth. He noticed Ana and Jasper watching.
He stopped, raising his eyebrows. “What?”
“Where did you get that?” Jasper asked.
“I’m running out of cigarettes,” he replied, removing the cinnamon stick as if it were a cigarette before walking back into the kitchen.
Jasper and Ana exchanged glances. Jasper looked horrified. “He went through my stuff. Again.”
“Looks like you’re one of the pack,” she said, slapping Jasper on the back, eager to have something akin to comic relief. “You and Ares, initiates into the new Riders.”
“You’ll say that until he gets something of yours.” Jasper grimaced.
Cal ran back through the living room in Lethe’s coat, fumbling up the stairs and then dropping his Atlas. It bounced down each step; Cal chased it as it rolled out the door and off the porch.
Jasper rubbed his forehead with a groan. “We’re all going to die.”
He stood up as Lethe entered the room again, passing through before meeting Ares back out on the porch.
“I’m going out back to get some air,” Jasper said, leaving her. Everyone in the room kept moving, restless but unable to channel their restlessness around Ares’s unspoken rules of nonviolence and non-escape.
As soon as Jasper was gone, and with Ares distracted by something off in the mountains, Lethe glanced back at her. In that moment of reprieve, he caught her eyes with a knowing, lingering look before he scanned her over and looked back out at the mountains.
Ana wrapped her arms around herself and then rubbed the back of her neck nervously. Not completely sure what it meant, and not wanting to dig deeper, there was a single message that was hard to avoid: You and I are not done.
Lethe offered Ares a cinnamon stick, which he accepted.
“You know, I saw the Last Supper,” Lethe said at one point, catching her attention and drawing her from her distracted thoughts.
“Did you?” Ares replied, voicing the question with a high lilt that expressed he was clearly impressed.
“I was twelve years old. My dad sold art and would drag me to art museums, shows, and whatever else. We went to see it when his job took him to Italy. Of course, I was too busy talking up a high school student who was there for a class or something like that.”
“Quite the memory.”
“Yeah, she wasn’t into it, but it was a numbers game,” he said and Ares chuckled.
“I had this pretentious hat I wore all of the time at that age anyway—bright red.”
Ana tried to imagine it. Lethe in that hat as bright as an alarm, chasing a woman several years older than him instead of admiring one of the world’s most famous artifacts in human art.
“You’re a true Rider of Saint East.” Ares’s compliment, heavy with admiration, jarred her from the image.
“How do you mean?” Lethe leaned back against the doorframe. He tapped his fingers behind his back against the frame.
What does he mean? Ana wondered the same thing.
“I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who enjoys human beings more than you seem to, despite it all.”
Lethe laughed, a full, deep laugh. “I’m flattered.”
“I mean it. You seem to love people—how they work, what they feel, the mess of it. I, frankly, do not like the mess of it,” Ares said, a quick study of everyone and always ready to give his analysis.
Lethe stared up at the sky and walked out to the edge of the porch. He leaned up against one of the porch posts, craning his neck as if to catch sight of a bird or a specific cloud.
“You know, what’s funny is that I used to want to be a lawyer,” Lethe said, and this certainly shocked Ana. For a moment she thought he was joking.
“But The Eating Ocean invaded, I take it?” Ares replied.
“Something like that,” Lethe said. “Acute psychosis. I had a break my freshman year of college, spent the next few years in and out of psychiatric units.” He glanced over at Ares, gesturing with his hand as if he were explaining something simple and casual.
“My mutation healed my illness when it came. I woke up sane. I think it’s why I adjusted so well to society just collapsing like it did.
When you start to lose your mind, you realize there are very few things in the world we can actually own.
You let go of everything—reality, control.
I love holding onto it just to let it go.
That kind of tension is how music is made. ”
He nodded over toward the mountains. “It’s one of the things that got me hooked on the Riders. They didn’t hold onto anything, not even their own lives. It felt real to me in a world where no one could admit they were chasing after illusions.”
“I think you would enjoy creating art,” Ares replied in that way that reassured Ana that most things he said were an assessment or leading to one. “It’s helped me release my own jealousies. I learned how wonderful it could be by watching Ana.”
Much to Ana’s surprise.
“She’s a proficient artist, you know,” Ares finished.
“Is she?” Lethe said, looking back at her and raising an eyebrow.
Ana waved them off. “Neither of you feel like you have to include me in this.”
“She’s very good,” Ares continued. “I’m surprised the two of you haven’t discussed it given your shared appreciation of the arts.”
“Ares, I’m not that good,” Ana objected. “Seeing as Lethe was there when the Riders went underground, I bet there are a few questions you want to ask him.”
“Ah, I do!” Ares said enthusiastically.
“Well played,” Lethe whispered with a playful smile.
“I will only ask one,” Ares said as if politely correcting his previous expression of enthusiasm. “Is it true? The story about Anne Rue? Where the Dear Annes on your arm got their names?”
Anne Rue had been a beggar, and the first person to show any public resistance to the Strike after their dominance in the war had been established.
As the story went, she’d been executed, one of many executions meant to serve as a systematic noose of any still lingering resistance among humankind.
As she’d bled out in front of the crowd, she’d crawled toward the base of the Bleeding Grin, marking it in a stripe of red blood.
It had been a resurrection of an old ROSE warning that victory against the Strike would be built on generations of bodies.
“Yeah. I was there actually,” Lethe said. “It’s why I joined the Riders. It got into me then.”
The revelation started a rapid and in-depth exchange of details and questions between them. The discussion continued without ceasing until the door opened to the back garden.
“Breakfast ready?” Cal called after Jasper as he walked stiffly inside. Jasper leaned over the couch where Ana sat.
“Is breakfast ready?” Jasper’s tension was obvious by his white-knuckled grip on the back of the couch. The extended time in this bizarre setup was clearly wearing on him. Time spent outside with Cal obviously hadn’t helped.
“Ah.” Ares lifted a finger as if he’d forgotten all about it. “Yes, everyone! Sit!” he said, hurrying into the kitchen. The table was already set, and Ana helped Ares distribute the meal as everyone took a stiff seat.
No one could ignore the sensation of preparing a stage, and Ana half-expected Ares to hand out scripts as each person took a seat. Once he was assured that everyone was seated, he made his way to the head of the table, pulling back a wooden chair and easing slowly into it.
The stage was set, the roles divided. Sitting around a table of steaming food and empty plates, they all waited in motionless silence for Ares to issue the first lines of their final performance.