"Perhaps." He set his cup down. "Or perhaps there was never a Jasper at all. Just Hephaestus in better clothes."
I tightened my grip on the katana.
Eight set down the butter knife. She shook when she reached for her cup.
Zeus poured more tea and slid it in front of me. "Do you remember the cage?"
The cage had smelled like piss and rusted iron. The memory hit before I could stop it. The cold of the bars against my ribs as I squeezed through. The wet floor under my too-big shoes. The dart punching into my neck before I reached the armory door.
"You ran for the weapons," Zeus said. "Six years old, half-starved, and you went straight for the armory. That's when I knew."
"Knew what? That I'd make a good dog?"
"That you'd make a good weapon. There's a difference."
"Not from where I was standing."
"No. I suppose not." He turned his teacup in its saucer. "So I forged one. A warrior who could fight and think. It never occurred to me that the life I'd have to sacrifice would be my own daughter's."
"It wasn't supposed to go down like that." I looked at my hands on the table. Blood had dried in the creases of my knuckles. "I told her not to go too deep on the left flank. She wouldn't listen.I made the call to abandon her in the field. But if she'd listened to me..."
"So fucking arrogant."
I flinched. He didn't sound angry. He sounded like he pitied me.
"We made the same mistake, you and I. I looked at a boy and thought him a weapon. You looked at a casualty list and drew a line." Zeus shifted his hand closer to his sword. "And my Nadia ended up on the wrong side of it."
Eight picked up the butter knife again. She turned it in her fingers under the table, the same grip I'd corrected at the olive tree.
Diego's knee pressed against mine under the table. He kept his eyes forward, on Zeus, but the pressure stayed.
I stared at the teacup. My thumb traced the rim and left a red smear on the porcelain. I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. The gears that should have caught on that kind of thing ran smooth. I'd saved the rest of the team. One life for five. The math worked. It had always worked. That was the problem.
"Your papa pulled the lever," Zeus said to Eight. He said it the way he said everything, like he were explaining the weather. "Someone you love on one track. Five strangers on the other." He looked at me. "Except it wasn't a trolley. It was a bullet. And your mother was on the other track."
"That's enough," Diego said quietly beside me.
Zeus ignored him.
The courtyard went silent except for the wind through the arches.
Eight's hand had gone still on the butter knife. She gripped it the way she had when I'd walked in.
My pulse thudded in my throat. The katana trembled in my lap.
"Did you love her?" she asked.
I looked at her. She stared back with Nadia's eyes in my face.
Diego's boot pressed harder against mine under the table. He knew the answer. He'd gotten that truth out of me in the dark, in our bed, in the only place I'd ever been able to say it.
"She deserved better than what I gave her," I said. "I'm sorry for that."
Diego exhaled beside me. His knuckles had gone white around the stock of the shotgun.
"I had to learn a lot of things too late." I stopped. Tried again. "But I'm here now. That's what I can give you."
Zeus slammed his cup down hard enough that tea sloshed over the rim.
