Chapter Text
Daphne runs.
Behind her, machinery whirs, unrelenting in its pursuit. She knows she cannot outrun it forever, cannot perpetually avoid the man who sent it. But she can do nothing else, save for running, when she knows what dealing with one of the Olympians would mean.
The headlights of the Helius search drone wash over her, and Daphne searches, scanning for an alleyway too narrow for the machine. She slips down a side street and freezes as she finds another drone.
The lights of the second feel brighter than the first, burning into Daphne, the halogen glow seeming to illuminate every crevice of her soul.
She can only hope it hasn't registered her as she breaks into a dead sprint again, turning down yet another alleyway. The City is full of places for those who don't want to be found, if you know where to look. She just has to hold out a little longer.
Behind Calypso's- that should be a good enough resting point, for the time being. She'll have to keep running again soon, but for now she can stop and catch her breath. No one will come for her here, no one would expect an upper-city dweller to know her way to any sort of precarious safety down here.
Daphne sucks in a breath, the greasy, smoky sting of the City filling her mouth and lungs. It burns going down. It’s just like the rest of the City, just like the lotus Daphne's father had once tried to sell her future for. A part of her- the part not entirely focused on planning her next move- wonders how the old bastard is doing.
She can't outrun the drones forever, that much has already been made clear. But what else is there? She could never afford a way off-planet, if such a thing still exists. Not that there's anything out there, on the satellite moons that orbit the City. Only dust, and radio signals that echo Olympian propaganda out into infinite nothingness. The Acheron is out, too. She knows that would only serve the purpose of the one chasing her, with what she knows.
So that leaves hiding. That, too, is costly- How much for a cerebral transfer, these days- but it's better than being caught.
Her thoughts are interrupted by the electric whine of motors as the drones pull into the alley, and then she's running again. Faster, faster; down into the depths of the City she plunges. In her flight, her feet land on sharp stones, glass from bottles tossed and shattered thoughtlessly across the street, but she cannot stop if she wishes to secure her escape.
Behind her, the grating, synthetic voice of the drones warns her to stop. She ignores them. Why would she listen, when she is doomed either way? Certainly, letting herself be taken in by the Helius drones might not send her directly to the Acheron, but it would be a kind of death nonetheless.
She turns the corner, down a street that seems almost familiar to her. Another turn, and she spots it. There’s a shiny new smoke shop moved in next door, but it’s the same place. The Arcadia, the old Artemis-backed club where Daphne saw Leucippus’s head blasted through by the gang of high-class criminals she’d once called friends.
Daphne pushes through the door of the club, not really thinking. At this time of the night, it’s packed, the air filled to choking with smoke from the lotus pipes and haze from the machines by the mixer board. She stalks through the throng of people filling every inch of the dance floor. Sweaty, writhing bodies knock against each other, against her, but she pays them no mind.
She’d sworn not to come back here, after the Leucippus debacle, and for a while she’d been doing fine enough on her own. But desperation and exhaustion can drive even the greatest mind to insanity, and it’s too late to back out now. The moment she stepped foot in here, every one of Artemis’s bounty hunters that remembered Daphne’s name had started tracking her movements.
She’s not stupid. Daphne knows she’s not welcome here. But maybe that could work for her. Skirting around a wiry, long-necked dancer whose arms flowed through the air with an almost electric energy, Daphne approaches the great bear of a woman running the bar in the back corner.
Callisto doesn’t acknowledge her at first, though Daphne knows that she’s more than aware of the fugitive taking a seat at her counter. Daphne clears her throat expectantly and waits.
“Not you.” Callisto’s answer comes sharper than Daphne had anticipated, even considering all that had transpired leading up to her absence. She opens her mouth to say something, but Callisto quickly cuts her off. “I said no, Daph. The boss doesn’t want to see you, and quite frankly you’re lucky I didn’t shoot you the moment you walked in here. If I were you I’d leave now, before she gets wind that you’re here.”
That answers any question Daphne might have had. “So the lady is in tonight, then?” she asks, and the barkeep’s stubborn silence is all the confirmation she needs. “Right, then I guess I’ll head on out.”
And with that, Daphne slips on off her stool and pushes her way back through the crowd. She doesn’t leave, though, simply weaves through the crowd to wind her way out of Callisto’s view and sneak through the crowd toward a roped-off section hidden off to one side.
Artemis knows she’s here, probably has since the moment Daphne’s foot crossed the threshold. So Daphne doesn’t hesitate to duck under the velvet rope that cordons off the Lady’s private box.
“Another step, dear, and I will shoot you.” The Lady’s voice comes cold and clear from some shadowed corner.
Daphne freezes. If she’s close enough to hear the Lady, then chances are that Artemis already has a shot lined up, even if Daphne can’t see her.
“I know that even you aren’t stupid enough to come here unarmed and alone. Either you’ve got some kind of plan in coming here, in which case you really shouldn’t bother, or you’re desperate.” the Lady continues. “And you were never the planner, were you? Always leaping before you look. Am I wrong in assuming that it’s finally caught up to you?”
Daphne still can’t see the Lady, but she knows that the best option is to say something, anything. Still, the fugitive struggles to word any sort of response.
“Tick-tock, tick-tock.” the Lady purrs from her vantage point. “If you’d rather not answer, that’s fine, but I do fear that it may become rather messy if you-”
“Help me.”
Daphne still hasn’t turned, but she can feel the Lady’s smile curl, knows she has sprung a trap she didn’t even know was there. All she can do is rush on, continue to tangle herself in the Lady’s web as she stumbles over her words.
“Please, I know I’m not welcome here, but I didn’t know where else to turn.”
“You’re really not off to a good start, my dear. But I must admit I’m intrigued as to what could possibly be bad enough to come running here even with the promise of a bullet in your head.” The Lady of the House pauses. “It wouldn’t happen to have something to do with my dear brother, would it?”
Daphne’s blood runs cold. Of course Artemis would know. Even if the private room of a nightclub like this weren’t the perfect spot to eavesdrop, even if her Hunters weren’t constantly gathering information about this threat to the business and that, everyone in the City knew how the Far-Shooting Star had risen, and much a role her brother had played in it.
Though Daphne has only ever known her as a titan of the Metropolis in her own right, Artemis’s early days had been spent the same as many of Zeus’s spawn- gunslinging and hired muscle for the Padre. She and her brother, however, had grown to be a distinctive duo among his children. Immortality they had earned, of course, but they found notoriety, too, in the form of old Pan.
Pan the Lech was an aging tech mogul, famed not only for his top-notch gadgetry, but the uses he put it to: partying and revelry that lasted weeks, if not months, on end; drunken debauches that wound up with participants of all sexes waking up in locations they’d hardly known existed; tricks that ended with new minds in the Acheron at best. The last bastion of a dying era, Pan had been a mean old thing, but he’d taken an odd sort of liking to the sharpshooter twins.
That had been his undoing, in the end. It had been easy enough for the twins to slip a narcotic into the man’s lotus pipe one evening, at the tail end of a party. From there, Apollo had used the 0RA-KL algorithm embedded in the old man’s computer one night to steal every last one of the Sinoeis corporation’s designs, patents, and launch plans. Meanwhile, Artemis sent a pair of Pan’s own Canis-class security drones, carefully rewired to view the aging god as a threat, into his bedroom as he slept.
The old man never saw it coming.
So yes. Artemis and her brother had been close, once.
“I wasn’t aware you were still on speaking terms.” Daphne says as she returns to the moment.
“We aren’t.” Artemis replies with a smug lilt to her words, and the thought is somehow less comforting to Daphne. And the Lady continues. “The whole City’s been quite abuzz, you know. Little Miss Whistleblower, trying to take down the big, bad, Chrysaor Corporation from the inside. You had it made, you know. His favorite engineer, his favorite designer. Why stop for a little thing like morals?” Another pause, and this time, Daphne swears she can feel herself shaking. “And more importantly, why shouldn’t I just shoot you? Not only would it send a message, but it would get me back in my dear brother’s good graces.”
“Because of Leucippus.” Daphne blurts out. It’s stupid, and reckless, but everything she’s done tonight has been stupid and reckless thus far. She may as well push her luck. “Because you owe me, after Leucippus.”
The Lady is silent, and for a moment, Daphne is certain that she’ll simply pull the trigger and be done with it.
Instead, she laughs. It’s a cold sound, one that seems to echo even in the plush little corner the two women stand in and reverberate its way into Daphne’s very bones.
“You, my dear, have some nerve.” she says. “You walk into my club, into my private room, and demand recompense for a death that you caused with your stupidity? You knew the rules, Daphne, and yet you brought that cross-dealing bastard into our ranks. I owe you nothing. But you have caused my brother some distress, and so I offer you this: I know a man who… runs a private server, if you catch my meaning. Separate from the Acheron. Calls it the Genesis-Assisted Ending Alternative, or GAEA. Helljumper hackjob piece of shit, but I have a feeling you would rather that than the main servers, or you would have welcomed my shooting you.”
It’s a terrible deal, and Daphne knows it- isolated from the main Acheron, she would never interact with anyone she’s loved again, even in death. And there’s no guarantee that she’ll have a happy eternity, far from it. But her other alternatives are far worse.
“Helljumper hackjob it is.” she says.