Page 60 of Love, Nemesis
“Keep your ego in check. I want to see what he wants,” she replied, listening as Ares moved through the woods.
“What is he looking for? He’s leaving us wide open.”
“I don’t know. Let’s get the horses. Don’t try anything, all right? I’m serious.”
“You act like he has powers or something.”
“Something like that,” she muttered back as they approached the horses and saddled them up, linking Cal and Jasper’s horses up as well. “You could say he’s the State’s version of a Strike.”
Lethe paused as if thinking through the statement. “No,” he said after a moment, and then a bit louder, “You black bred human beings?”
“Shh,” Ana hissed back. “He can probably hear us.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?” Lethe said, leaning back as he scanned the woods. He hunched near her. “The State created human beings using Madness?”
“Ares declared a ban on it when the war with the Mystics ended. As long as they honored the ban, he’d work for the State,” said Ana as her fingers hastened to prepare the horses.
“That was over thirty years ago. He looks like a twelve-year-old girl. He’d have to be in his fifties at least.”
Ana hit him on the shoulder, glaring.
“Would he shoot me for saying that?” Lethe asked.
“I don’t know! That’s the point. Stop talking.”
Lethe searched the area again, longer this time, making Ana worry about the next statement he was preparing to say.
He leaned in again, glanced back at the woods, and then craned his head uncomfortably close to her ear. “What are his powers?”
Ana shoved his face away, hopping onto her horse. She pointed to his horse with a silent demand.
Lethe smirked, somehow smug despite her attitude toward him. He climbed onto his horse just as Ares came back through the woods on a blonde pony.
Ana ignored another glance from Lethe when he saw the horse. She was certain he wouldn’t be so relaxed if he knew how many people Ares had killed.
Ares started to guide them through the woods, the rifle strapped across his back, a dark complement to the black gear that covered his body.
No one spoke.
As the dawn light broke over the horizon, Ana glanced back to Lethe, finding him rubbing the sleep from his face. Lethe gestured at Ares, who rode ahead, and drew a line across his neck with his finger.
Ana shook her head and looked away.
She felt something hit her thigh and looked back at Lethe. He’d thrown something small, but she couldn’t tell what it was. He gestured to the knife on his belt. She noticed for the first time that he’d retrieved it, and then shook her head against any suggestion that he should use it now.
He shrugged his shoulders, and she waved him off, preparing to look away again before a small pebble hit her hand, clanked off the small canteen on her belt, and fell into her lap.
She whipped her head in Ares’s direction. He didn’t look back.
She glared at Lethe, noticing the handful of small pieces of rock he seemed to have peeled off the adjacent rock wall. He seemed very uncomfortable with her lead of not attacking Ares. They argued for a moment through hand gestures before Ana drew a line across her neck and pointed at Lethe in a threatening way.
Lethe rolled his eyes but stopped arguing, turning his hand out and dropping all of the pebbles. They pattered against theground, causing Ana to look forward at Ares again. When she turned back to Lethe, he was staring up at the mountains.
As the ride continued, Ana scanned the mountains of the Dragon’s Spine. They rose like walls of sheer stone around the path. The place was covered in bones, and tablets clad the mountains like an armor of gravestones.
The Riders had covered the mountains in writing, mostly names and creeds, list after list on the surface of rocks and mountain faces.
Ares navigated the path with a peculiar pattern, avoiding certain spots and instructing them to guide their horses in the same way. Lethe did not add to Ares’s words, keeping his sleeves down near his wrists as if to hide any indication he was a Rider. Ana watched as he kept glancing at a tattered orange flag waving on a distant peak and wondered what he truly saw among the scribbling of the rocks as they came through the mountains. By her calculations, these rocks had been abandoned for nearly a century.
