“What are you complaining about anyway? You can still catch a bullet.”
Athena heaved to her feet; the owl on her shoulder gave a shudder. She glanced sidelong at it and whispered, “Rest now, little one. And be well.” It blinked and ruffled itself, then flew off into the black to disappear into its cactus. She held her hand out. Hermes took it, and she pulled him up.
We should be at the mouth by morning. The strangeness of the idea made her pause, but after a few seconds, her boot found its way back onto the skin. It sank down like the surface of a trampoline. She couldn’t feel the dirt or gravel beneath it, but couldn’t help imagining the grinding that had to be going on beneath her heel. Maybe Hermes’ idea of flying wasn’t so ridiculous after all.
She looked back. He lingered on the edge, looking guilty or anxious, she couldn’t tell which. Then he shrugged and carefully put his feet down until he was by her side.
“At least she’ll know we’re coming,” he said.
* * *
“We should be getting there soon. The sun’s coming up. What do you think she’ll say? Do you think she can hear us? Where are her ears?”
Athena walked on in silence. After six hours of traveling on the skin, it didn’t feel any less unnatural beneath her boot heels. She wished Hermes would shut up. But he was nervous, and when he was nervous, his tongue moved as quickly as his wings used to.
“You’re lucky I’m stretched flat.” Demeter’s voice was a rasp, thin as the wind that raced across her leathered body. “If I had any decent lung left, I would’ve sucked in your bird and you’d never have found me.”
Athena scanned the skin beneath them. Hermes had zipped to her side and was doing the same.
“We’d have found you eventually, Mother of the Earth,” she said. “We would have just had to put more boot prints into your hide first.”
Demeter laughed, and when she did there was more air to it, more force. Athena wondered briefly if the goddess wasn’t sandbagging, and the pun almost made her snort. But the idea that Demeter was stronger than she seemed, that the skin could snap over the top of them at any moment, trapping them like a great bat’s wing, kept her quiet. She and Hermes both carried small pocketknives, but she didn’t want to think about what it would take to slice their way out should Demeter decide to try and keep them.
“Sit, children,” Demeter said.
Hermes did so immediately. The walk had been long, and his gray t-shirt was black with sweat. But after only a few seconds, he stood back up and looked at Athena with an odd expression.
She paid him no mind. She was still looking for the mouth, an eye, anything. Had all of Demeter’s features been spread out as she was stretched?
“How did you come to be this way?” Athena asked, stepping slowly toward the sound of shallow breathing.
“I am used as the earth is used,” Demeter replied. “Pulled thin across the land and consumed. Sucked dry, bleached white. And so I have been laid thin for decades. For centuries.”
“Why didn’t you seek us out for help?” Athena asked. She saw what looked like a ragged wrinkle in the skin, like an elephant’s kneecap. And then it opened, revealing a glassy, dark eye, which swiveled sickly toward her and fixed her with a sharpened pupil.
“We are not all like you, Gray Eyes,” Demeter whispered. “Goddess of battle, fighting through the millennium. Unable even now to lie down and accept your fate.”
Hermes walked to the eye and peered down at it. “We’re immortals,” he said loudly. “Why should we have to accept this?”
“Immortal doesn’t mean forever, Messenger.”
Hermes scoffed. “We shouldn’t have even come here. She’s as useless as that old turtle from The Neverending Story. Nothing but riddles and double-talk.”
Beneath their feet the skin quickened, tightening like the muscles of a snake before a strike. They were lifted three inches, and Athena cast him a sharp look. He was always impatient, always twitchy. Someday it would get them into trouble they couldn’t get out of.
“You say I am the goddess of battle, and so I am,” Athena said, careful, unlike Hermes, to keep the modernity out of her voice. “But wisdom was also my charge. And I can’t understand this. That is why I come to you. To learn what you know.”
“I know many things with my ears pinned to the dirt. They walk across me and spill their secrets into the sand. But you cannot escape this. You shouldn’t.” Demeter’s voice was low, spoken through tense lips and teeth. Her eye swiveled up and down the length of Athena’s body. “Look at you. Ink marks your skin. You bear a whore’s jewelry in your nose. Why should you escape when my daughter is already gone?”