The Beloved of the God of War

3 - Mark

“I miss school, Astra.”

I tilted my head to shoot David a disbelieving look. “What did you say?”

“Listen, I’m just - we never got our graduation experience, have you ever thought about that?”

I frowned. “Last year, you said you were glad the world ended before you had to figure out what to do with your life.”

He shrugged as he continued to pat down the soil around the roots of a tomato plant. “Growing up kind of puts everything in perspective, you know? I’d rather be working minimum wage for too many hours than tilling soil for the whole day, or hoping our next meal doesn’t spontaneously wither in the dirt because of some passing witch’s curse. God, we don’t even have the internet anymore. You know what happened last night? I dreamed about Netflix.” He sat back to scratch his forehead with the back of a gloved hand. He succeeded only in adding more dirt to his soft brown curls. “Come on, don’t you ever think about the old times, Astra?”

Of course I did. It had been six years since the first signs of the merge, when we had been seventeen and halfway through our senior year of high school. But at least back then, we could still roam and expect to get home safely. All we had to do was stay out of the hazy, fragmented pieces of the Old World plane and keep to our own territory.

But a lot of things changed three years ago. For the whole world, that is, but especially for me.

Please forget me.

Now, I was hiding. I was glad to stay indoors in a fortified township, laboring quietly with hundreds of other people whose faces all faded together. I was one of them, faceless, nameless. Only David, a few old school friends, and my mother knew me here.

And of them all, only my mother knew what I was.

“Astra!”

I sat up and turned around, easing my long, black hair out of my face with a toss of my head so that I could see who was calling me. It wasn’t a voice I recognized. It wasn’t a person I recognized either, I thought when I saw her. Middle-aged and plump, she had her hair in a half-loose bun, with brown strands sticking out crazily as if she had been walking in a windstorm. Other than that, I could see nothing distinctive about her. She could have been any of the hundreds of women I’d met before. What did she want with me, that she would call for me by name?

 “Here,” I called back anyway, because I wasn’t brave enough to ignore her. I stood up. “One minute, David.”

He sent me off with a shrug and a wave.

“Astra, quickly!” The woman beckoned me over with a spirited flapping of her hands and the wild look of a chased animal. She was sweating under the camouflage cap she wore. I narrowed my eyes when I saw her throw a panicked look over her shoulder. “Astra!”

I quickened my pace out of the communal garden and joined her just outside the fence. “Yes? What’s wrong?”

Her jaw clenched as she forced a hard swallow, and her throat bobbed with an obvious nervous lump. “Let me see your neck,” she said suddenly. “It has to be you, but I need to check first.”

I gave her an odd look. “I’m not comfortable doing that,” I tried to say, but before I could even finish the sentence, she grabbed me by one shoulder and forced my head to tilt up with her other hand under my chin. “Excuse me - !”

She didn’t even register my shocked protest. “It’s you,” she whispered. “Oh, God. Come with me. This is your doing, and you’re going to take care of it.”

I struggled at first when she began towing me across the grass with a single-minded determination, but something in her voice made me falter. It was fear - genuine fear. I must have done something awful. She had even recognized me by the birthmark I bore between my collar bones, so it had to have been me. There was nothing else distinctive about me - not my dark brown eyes, my average height and build, or my dark hair - but the pale grey, nine-point pattern just below my throat was unmistakable.

Guilt and no small amount of nervousness washed over me. To think that I had messed something up so badly that a complete stranger would track me down like this, using only my birthmark as a reference to find me with. It couldn’t have been easy. She must have asked around until she found someone who knew me.

But she took me neither to the kitchens where I had worked my last shift, nor to the barracks where I slept. She didn’t even take me to the baths, the only other place that I regularly frequented. I kept out of everyone’s way: I rarely stepped foot anywhere except those three places and the communal garden where everyone worked.

“Will you tell me where I’m going?” I asked, panting as I struggled to keep up. She was squeezing my wrist and dragging me along, and I nearly lost a shoe several times on the way. 

“Out,” she said sharply.

Out? Why? No! I tried to pull away, but she was far stronger than I was. “Come here,” she insisted. “This is your responsibility. You meddled in the wrong thing, honey, so you’re going to fix it yourself.”

By now, we were nearing the large gates - why were they open? And there were two men at the top of the gates in their watchtower posts. They gave the woman a strange hand signal, and she shoved me forward in response. “Well, go on,” she said. “Take care of it, and then come back when you’re done. Don’t even think of bringing that business in here.”

What was she talking about? But I was powerless to resist as the woman continued to herd me out of the gates. I spun around and tried to follow her back in when she turned around, but she simply pushed me away once more. “Take care of it!” she snapped again. “Here, my Lord! Take her!”

Stunned by both the unexpected hostility from the woman and also by her sudden shout - who was she even speaking to? - I simply gave up and stood there as the men lowered the gates, locking me out.

What had just happened? I knocked feebly on the wooden barrier as if they would open it for me. When it didn’t budge, I stepped back a few paces until I could look up to see the men in the watchtowers. “Let me in!” I called up, my voice quavering, but they shook their heads - and climbed down from their posts, abandoning me to my own devices.

What was happening?

And then I remembered that the woman had been shouting to someone, someone far behind me. I turned around, my heart beating frantically in my chest as I tried to regain my bearings - 

And saw a man standing up from the grass thirty feet away. Hair as black as night, like mine, but with wine-red eyes and sharp, high cheekbones that I almost didn’t recognize, until I realized that yes, I had seen them before, just far more gaunt and bruised and filthy.

My breath caught in my throat when he got to his feet and turned to face me. He took one slow step forward.

I whipped around and hurled myself at the gate. I banged on it with my fists, and I could vaguely hear my voice begging them to let me in. But no one answered, and the gate didn’t move - I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had crossed half the distance already. With no other option, I did the only thing I could: I ran.

I ran to my left, scrambling along the side of the township wall to get away from him. I had never been a good runner, I admit, but how was it that I felt him crash into me just a few seconds later, sending me hurtling into the brick wall? I let out a cry of mixed pain, shock, and fear, but the man didn’t say a word. He simply forced me to stand straight against the wall, pinning me against it with a hand on my shoulder, and jammed my head back with two rough fingers under my chin. And just as the woman had done earlier, he stared down at the base of my throat with unblinking, crimson eyes.

“The Mark of Virgo,” Ares said, and his rough, resonant voice sent a shiver down my spine.

“It is you.”