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“Jesus fuck,” the mechanic spat onto the ground. “Your jack is absolute shit.”
“Thanks,” Silena said mildly, resisting the urge to say don’t you mean di immortales or o zeu kai alloi theoi? “Don’t you have one?”
“I do,” she rolled back onto her feet. There were a few more scars on her face than Silena remembered. Some big scratches, maybe from a talon, dancing along her cheekbones, which remained in their strong, long lines. Clarisse half-grinned at her, before seeming to remember herself and jumping into the back of her truck. Silena wouldn’t have blamed her if she had then crawled into the driver’s seat and run away — it was probably what she deserved — but Clarisse wasn’t like that. Running away was what cowards did. It was what Silena had done.
“I can call someone else,” she offered again.
“Not on your insurance,” she said, her voice a little muffled. Silena turned her head — her hearing was only really good in her right ear now — and peered at her.
“You don’t have to be so nice to me,” she said, then paused. “I mean, not so courteous.”
“You think this is courtesy?” The last time Clarisse had looked at her with those eyes, those big, dark eyes that used to make Silena say absolutely anything to make them look at her, she had been half-wrapped in bandages still, her skin an absolute wreck, her eyesight hanging on by a thread, her nose almost literally gone. Her mother had been kind enough — or she assumed it had been her mother — to organise her surgery for a new nose. Silena hadn’t really considered what she did or didn’t deserve from the gods these days, she’d left that behind in a pile of drakon acid and her best friend clinging to her body like it would keep her spirit from reaching the underworld. But she did care about what she thought Clarisse owed her, which, in her mind, was nothing. “Si— this is my job. I’m just trying to pay off some of my student loans before the interest gets too bad. It’s not— about anything else.”
“Right,” she said, trying to keep her hands at her sides. “What are you studying?”
“I’m currently a PhD in astrophysics.” Silena hadn’t been expecting that. It made sense, when she thought about it. She was twenty-five, Clarisse must have been twenty-three or twenty-four. Of course she had already finished at least one degree. Never mind that Silena was still working in her dad’s shop on stupid chocolates that no one with tastebuds even liked and had burnt her college acceptance letters the day they’d arrived.
“That sounds— I don’t really get it,” she said, once it seemed that Clarisse had got to the end of explaining her thesis about the… gravitational pull of binary and trinary stars. “But it sounds really cool.” She wanted to say that she was proud of her. She wanted to ask if she liked where she was studying — the places around here were all so prestigious but were they nice? and what she wanted to do when she had her doctorate and if she’d let Silena buy her a coffee sometime and if she could ever forgive her for leaving like she had.
“Alright,” Clarisse said, finally getting her jack going under the car. Removing the bolts was as smooth a move as it had been eight or nine years ago for Clarisse with her spear. Which version of Maimer was she on now? Or had she moved on to something else? Looking at her, at the muscles straining under her skin, slightly grimy with oil and dust, slightly slick with sweat in a way that made Silena want to just be close to her and breathe it in, she thought — or maybe she just hoped that hadn’t happened.
There had been a few times, before Silena had gotten with Charlie and before Clarisse had come to her with questions about Chris, when they’d been in the woods, Clarisse intent on showing her something in the defences, Silena trying to justify to herself that she was doing this for a good reason, when the conversation would drift too close to something that felt less like chat and more like flaying open her chest and letting her see that beating thing trapped behind her ribs. But it had never lasted. And Charlie had asked her to the fireworks. And she had let him see it too, she had let him hold it in his hands and tell her she was beautiful.
But Charlie had been dead for eight years now. His body had burned. His shroud had burned. His college acceptance letter had burned, next to hers. It was the only thing left that she could give up for him. Silena wasn’t dead. Not yet. And from the looks of things, Clarisse wasn’t either.
Maybe this was a stupid idea, but they lived in a world of gods and monsters. The fates had pulled her strings this far. She wanted to see where that might go.
“— for long?”
Silena blinked back into reality. “Sorry, what was that?”
“I— uh,” Clarisse straightened up, hoisting the wheel with the puncture back into the car trunk. “Are you in town for long?”
“A few more days,” she found herself saying. It wasn’t even true — she was supposed to be driving back to New York tonight — but she hardly felt guilty about the lie. “Why?”
“I— I’m presenting at a conference on Tuesday, it’s a paper I’ve worked on with my advisor and a few other people.” She dusted off her hands, but her shoulders were too tense to make Silena believe she was really all that nonchalant. “You could come. Since… you said you liked my topic, I mean. There’s gonna be— wine, and also a lot of old fucks who are mostly kind of annoying to talk to unless they like you but—”
“Sounds fun,” she said, trying not to give herself away. She forced the corners of her mouth to return to neutrality. “I’d love to.”