Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

This was the thing with boys like him. What he was feeling just then, that rage, wasn’t the world falling in on him. It was an illusion shattering, the one that told him he deserved everything, and that it was owed to him simply because he existed.

Miles was doing that thing she hated where he waited for her to talk while looking extremely compassionate and understanding.

“It’s not always the truth that survives, but the stories we wish to believe. The legends lie. They smooth over imperfections to tell a good tale, or to instruct us how we should behave, or to assign glory to victors and shame those who falter. Perhaps there were some in Sparta who embodied those myths. Perhaps. But how we are remembered is less important than what we do now.”

“That was a good speech,” Van said, a smile in his voice. “Thank you,” Miles said, sipping his tea. “I thought you might like it. Everything is life and death and epic stakes with you people. I need to get on your level.” “It would be a far better world,” Van said, “if we all got on yours.”

You’ve never guided women,” Lore elaborated. “Not the way you did for your heroes. But you were always more than happy to punish them.” “Women and girls belonged to my sister and were beyond my responsibility,” Athena said, the words edged with warning. “I owe you no explanation.”

I gave her fury power,” Athena said quietly. Lore turned to her, confused. “I transformed Medusa,” Athena continued, “so that she would have protection against all those who would try to harm her.”

“And now history remembers her as a villain who deserved to die.” “No. That is what men have portrayed her as, through art, through tales,” Athena said. “They imagined her hideous because they feared to meet the true gaze of a woman, to witness the powerful storm that lives inside, waiting. She was not defeated by my uncle’s assault. She was merely reborn as a being who could gaze back at the world, unafraid.

“When we can’t change the past, the only thing left is to move forward.

“Have you ever heard of Track Sixty-One?” he said, pulling out his phone and quickly searching. “It’s a so-called ‘secret’ subway track beneath the hotel, built for President Roosevelt—the F. D. one, not the teddy-bear one—so he could move between Grand Central Station and the Waldorf Astoria without the public seeing that he couldn’t walk.

I’m determined, and you know what that means.” “You get a very intense look on your face and punch someone in the kidney?”