Lights flickered through the yellow smog. Neon pinks and blues, greens and oranges from the signs, markers, graffiti and public notices that heaped upon the constructions of the city or wandered with half-hearted anti-gravity boosters just below the ship lanes. Cyllene used colour to hide her scars, but from the ground up all that the city was was ugly.
Quick feet and thin ankles slipped through the close-quartered sandstone streets, skidding between gangs of heavyset brawlers wading in and out of dingy metal-wrought buildings painted with the ham-handed fist of the giants. They swerved around the swaggering, armoured bounty hunters, protected against spark-bows that weren’t accurate and didn’t tickle. The figures in masks and helmets, hiding the illegal and unwelcome; the beaked nose of a strix, the amber and black bled eyes from artificial sphinx blood, or the scaled face and forked tongue of the half-dracaenae, were wisely avoided.
Tourists would be turning on their re-breathers, but Enodius – as he was currently calling himself, fleet of feet and thin of ankle – had been born here. The rumble of engines came and went as transports flew to low from dodgy signal lights and rarely had any tourist stepped off one into the slum city.
He slipped on the polished metal stairs that protruded from the discoloured sandstone, like some sort of trick to keep everyone on their guard, and knocked into a bald one-eye, avoiding both the turn of the white-pupiled gaze and the swipe of a meaty blue hand by inches. Stepping off the stairs, he retreated from the main ways into the alleys that sprawled labyrinthine to the banded tents at the edges of the city.
Two turns right, half a district over, one turn left, then shoulder open the third broken door at the end of the street; no one could be bothered replacing the sensor batteries. He had his hand on it, already gauging how much weight to shove against it. The cherry sign that read ‘Cyllene’ on the wall of the spice shop three blocks above blinked languidly with the same steady hum of energy that threaded through his dreams, as though anyone could forget. He could feel the splash of its glow on his cheeks like a blush.
A presence weighed in at his back. There was the rasping huff of a re-breather.
Tourists? Sweet Majesty, he thought with some derision, fingers grazing across the mark emblazoned, in laser-light blue to cut through the smog, on the third door at the end of the street. Two outlined feet with wings at the soles. The thief’s mark.
He had earned it, and he wasn’t feeling up to much more of it either, but he pasted a genial smile at the corners of his mouth, readied his swift fingers, and turned around.
A figure and a flash of gold. A jolt of surprise surged from his optic nerves to his brain and the world tilted underneath them.
‘Is it Charidotes or Enodius? I’ve heard it both ways, and a hundred others. Not even the Oracle can tell me who you really are.’
He watched a spaceship pass over the skylight framing the questionable mosaic he was sitting in the middle of, keeping his eyes upwards and biting his cheek to keep back the flinch at that voice when it spoke. It had been easier to be brave when he thought it was a tourist. Or hours ago when getting caught had just been another part of the plan.
Popping open the vaulted lid on his reckless courage, he let it trickle through the ends of his hair and warm his mouth. His artful skulduggery, while hardly exhausted and cheerfully taking a collaborative meeting with intelligence, invention, ambition and the planning board somewhere between the presently required functions of his brain and the inglorious but necessary ones that kept him alive; wasn’t what would save him from what came next.
It’s Hermes, actually. Had anyone even noticed the names of the royal elite that scrolled across the holo-screens and in the temples’ prayer projections across the four quadrants, twelve names instead of the original eleven? Or that Cyllene on Arcadia, moon of Delphi, and the planet itself, now thrummed with an ever-present aura of low atmospheric music, subtly turning and shifting the moods and whims of its peoples? Did they realise that someone must have hacked into the main data files and central mechanics of a whole star system to make that happen?
Well, now he was in a cell. But he’d done at least two things the night before that warranted being in one and, considering his jailer, he could guess which it was. The figure was less murky behind the crisp energy field than cloaked in the smog of Hermes’ Arcadian backwater, his unmistakable burnished reflection bouncing off the walls of fabricated adamant, all of it clashing heavily with the impression given by having a mosaic feature floor in a cellblock. No wonder the guards all wore black-screened helmets.
‘Your Oracle obviously didn’t mention that you’re in dire need of a skilled interior decorator either,’ he remarked with practised disregard, prying up a loose tile and flicking it point blank at the energy field, watching it turn into a whisper of smoke, the reckless courage sweet on his tongue. He looked through the energy field to one of those who could spark galaxies and turn worlds; looked him in the eyes and gave him a feral smile.
‘My name is Hermes and if you’re lookin’ to execute me, you’d best be asking yourself whether or not you want that shipment back, Lord Apollo.’
For that, they dragged him in front of the royal council.
Eleven holodecks circled an open-topped tower beneath Delphi’s suspended star sphere, blinking in the violet night with illuminated copies of all inhabited planets throughout the system. Braziers threw fire across the marbled floor, the holodecks casting long shadows, the figures in them glowing with more than just electric light.
Apollo’s hand, clasped tight around his arm, squeezed; conveying an array of suppressed emotions stuffed into tendons and muscle, as he listed sideways to get a look off, from the tower to city way down below. His stomach turned to think of the distance to the ground. All he could see was vague flares of colour amidst a veil of black. Before his courage could barrel its way into a deadly flirtation with his curiosity, he was jerked back by Apollo’s grip.
‘If your life is the price of retrieving my merchandise, I’ll not allow you to do me the dishonour of throwing yourself off this tower.’
Hermes clinked his cuffs together, with just enough nonchalance to set the other’s teeth on edge.
‘You really care about those sentient, shambling pear-hairs, don’t cha?’
One by one, the holodecks started to flicker out. Hermes was too busy watching the tension coil up tight between Apollo’s shoulder blades at every word he threw tauntingly between them with his pronounced Cyllene accent, in an effort to see what it would take before Lord Apollo developed an impressive migraine. So he didn’t notice.
Apollo spared him the honour of a withering glare.
‘They’re sacred,’ he spat.
Hermes hummed and clanged his cuffs together again, turning around. He craned his head back to see the expanse of violet sky, putting his back to the only holodeck whose light still shifted behind him, close enough to Apollo that their shoulders brushed as he swayed on the balls of his feet.
‘Well, they are incredibly hard to steal, so congrats on that.’
He’d put a lot of thought into getting to this moment; he should have been less surprised when Apollo went for his throat. Shifting his weight back in reaction to swift-striking fingers, the graze of nails skidded across his skin before latching onto his collar, sinking in and hauling him over.
Apollo’s breath sailed sweet across his face in heated puffs and his eyes were whorls of fury, molten and gold.
‘Stop talking like that –’
A deliberate clearing of the throat came from the one lit holodeck.
They both froze.
Apollo looked up briefly and then away in deference. Hermes dared to meet His eyes, praying that the spark he deciphered within them was amusement and not anger. It was the first time Zeus had seen him all grown-up, Hermes wanted to make an impression.
‘Father –’
He used Apollo’s distraction to break from his hold, twisting around to approach the holodeck, dragging Apollo, moving both their weights by sheer force of will, but Apollo recovered quickly, forcing their eyes to meet with one hand cinched tight at the bottom of his jaw.
‘You admit to the theft,’ Apollo retaliated, casting a look towards the throned holo figure across the floor, his mouth tilting in vindictive expectation.
Hermes stuck his nails into Apollo’s flesh and pushed until he felt it give, pulling them free to wipe bloody fingers across the golden lord’s face. Apollo reeled back in disgust, his hand slipping from Hermes’ throat and then fisting in his hair. Hermes bit him.
Apollo growled and shoved him away.
‘I don’t recall saying that I stole them,’ Hermes snarled between pants. He wiped his mouth and spat onto the clean marble, cracking a victorious smile when he was done.
Apollo returned, murderous, ‘You have no honour –’
‘– And I find it in poor taste to accuse your far-born brother of being a dishonourable liar.’
A low voice rang out from the holodeck, catching them under the weight of it before Apollo could speak again and commanding them to peace.
‘Hermes, you antagonise him.’
A spike of exhilaration shot through him at the acknowledgment of his name, despite the censure, and he jolted physically. Apollo’s head whipped towards him, drawn by the movement and understanding shot across his face. He’d been played.
Hermes’ eyes found their father’s, the star storms moving like clouds across the irises.
He did not say anything else and Hermes could hold his gaze no longer. He looked away, while a private smile crept its way onto the curves of his mouth. That had been all he needed to hear. The holodecked figure held them both under one last stern-eyed gaze and filtered away, the glowing braziers and the star sphere the only lights left on the tower.
Hermes breathed out into the night, trying to keep the fizz of jubilant triumph trapped within his bones; instead of it shaking out the front of his knees and sinking into the pull of his mouth and clouding his clear-eyed sights like it wanted to. He felt it trip into his toes, making him quicker, and shoot towards the pump of his heart and the calm of his brain, but he tamped it down somewhere around his calves. The night wasn’t over yet. Waving a hand at Apollo, he spun on his heel.
‘Let’s go.’
Cyllene had a pulse that others didn’t understand, threading through the walls and lights and smog, echoing inside Hermes. He’d always been a part of it, but after last night, he now controlled it. All its potential had already been within the city, he’d just made it his. It unnerved Apollo. The city obeyed them because he stood beside Hermes, he didn’t understand it, didn’t fit in to it.
The inhabitants of the slums felt it too. One-eyes seemed to catch them in the crowd but then their eyes kept turning and they continued on their way. An ornamented nymph wobbled wine-hazed into their path and then twisted, without miss-stepping a step, to pass between them and resumed her bacchanalian march towards a trimmed cyprian tent the other side of the ways. The black hooded royals dragging their cloaks across the tarnished stone passed unseen, treading the streets like ghosts.
Hermes held out a hand to stop Apollo.
‘Here.’
The door panel of the warehouse flickered dully green, one of few in working order. It connected to the ship bays by a back way though the industrial complexes, now mostly crime dens and hot houses, and had access behind the main ways. Hermes had also known it was empty and untouchable.
‘You –’ Apollo started.
‘Genius,’ Hermes interrupted.
‘– Asshole.’
The warehouse was branded. Helios and Sun.
‘It’s not like you were using it for anything and no one else was touching it,’ Hermes said, making an impatient gesture towards the control panel.
Apollo shot him a look, stepping up to the panel, and grumbled, ‘No one else.’
He tried the panel. There was a click and then a whirring as the door’s locking mechanism disconnected. The door remained stubbornly shut. Hermes hit it with a fist. Something released with a pop and the door fell in and trundled into the wall.
The inside was dim; crates were stacked in the middle of the storeroom under a weak skylight, and a screen-blacked window was installed in the back with panels of yellow light around the outside. Lights sputtered on behind the glass, illuminating a herd of miniature trees; sets of black eyes blinking slowly out, the floor littered with dropped pears from the blossoms in their coiffed foliage.
Apollo stepped inside.
‘No one was supposed to know about the child Zeus left behind on Cyllene. As if they thought I wouldn’t come for my birthright,’ Hermes said, as Apollo took careful stock of his merchandise.
Hermes turned back outside of the door.
‘Consider this your apology, it takes something quite dramatic to get father’s attention.’ He grinned and continued, ‘Lord Hermes, now I like the sound of that.’
He laid a hand over the control panel, still smiling wide.
‘They’re all yours, brother.’
The lights went off. The door slammed shut.
Quick feet slipped through the streets, ankles framed in a royal’s cloak, accompanied by the sound of laughter. Three districts over, two lefts, three rights, then shoulder-open the third broken door at the end of the street, emblazoned with thief’s mark.
He wanted to be easy to find when they came to claim him at last. After all, who else could get the drop on someone like Apollo and twelve was such a nice round number. One more royal, gutterborn and smart. How could they say no after this?
A sci-fi inspired retelling of the myth of Hermes ascension to godhood through theft and smooth talking.