As he fell asleep, Harman heard the rasp and sawing of Moira’s snoring. He smiled as he drifted off. A thousand years of post-human nanocyte and DNA-rearranging cleverness hadn’t cured them from snoring. But, of course, it was Savi’s human body that…

Harman fell asleep in midthought.

Achilles wishes he was dead.

The air is so foul and thick here in Tartarus, his lungs burn so fiercely, his eyes are watering and hurting so much, his skin and guts feel like they are ready simultaneously to implode and explode from the pressure, the Oceanids monster-woman is carrying him so rib-shattering tightly in her thigh-fingered fist, and his outlook for the future is so fucking dim, that he wishes that he could just die and get it over with.

But the quantum Fates will not allow him this option. That bitch of a goddess mother of his, that tart Thetis who’d professed love to his father—the man whom he’d always honored as his father, Peleus—and then lain with Zeus like the aquatic roundheels she was, had held him in the Celestial Fire and created a quantum singularity point for his death—to be reached only through the actions of the now dead and cremated Paris of Ilium—and that, as they say, is that.

So he suffers and tries to focus on what is going on outside his tight, rapidly imploding sphere of pain and discomfort.

The three Titan-giant daughters of Okeanos—Asia, Panthea, and Ione—are striding quickly through the poisonous gloom toward a brighter glow that might be a volcanic eruption, Achilles held tight in Asia’s huge, sweaty fist. When Achilles is able to open his burning eyes and catch glimpses of the landscape through his tears—tears from toxic chemicals in the air, not from emotion—he gets blurry views of high, rocky ridges such as the one the three Oceanids are now striding along, thundering volcanoes, deep chasms filled with lava and oddly shaped monsters, an escort of the giant centipede-things that must be related to the Healer on Olympos, occasional glimpses of silhouettes that must be other Titans crashing and bellowing through the gloom, and a sky filled with orange-limned clouds, wild lightning, and other electrical displays.

Suddenly the giantess Titan named Panthea speaks—“Is that the véiled form we seek who sits on that ebony throne?”

Asia, bitch-voice booming like boulders crashing down a rocky slope. (Achilles has not the strength to cover his aching ears with his acid-scalded hands.)—“It is. The veil has fallen.”

Panthea—“I see a mighty darkness filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom dart round, as light from the meridian sun.—But the Demogorgon itself remains ungazed upon and shapeless, neither limb, nor form, nor outline; yet we all three feel it is a living Spirit.”

The Demogorgon speaks then and Achilles buries his face in Asia’s huge, rough palm in a vain effort to muffle the subsonic pain of that all-encroaching voice. “ASK WHAT THOU WOULDST KNOW, OCEANIDS.”

Asia offers up her palm with the writhing Achilles on it. “Canst thou tell us what shape and manner of thing this is we have caught? It seems more starfish than man, and it writhes and squeaks as such.”

The Demogorgon roars again. “IT IS ONLY A MORTAL MAN, ALTHOUGH MADE IMMORTAL BY THE CELESTIAL FIRE’S MISTAKE. IT IS NAMED ACHILLES AND IT IS VERY FAR FROM HOME. NO MORTAL HAS EVER COME TO TARTARUS BEFORE THIS DAY.”

“Ah,” says Asia, seeming to lose interest in her toy and roughly setting Achilles down on a burning-hot boulder.

Achilles feels the heat all around and when he opens his eyes, he can see farther because of the glow of lava and eruption, but is horrified to see that lava flowing past on both sides of his steaming boulder. When he looks up toward the Demogorgon on its throne—the throne a mountain taller than the erupting volcanoes, and the hooded and veiled non-shape on that throne seeming to rise up for miles and miles—the shapelessness of the Demogorgon makes him want to vomit. So he does. None of the Oceanics seems to notice his retching.

Asia asks the huge form, “What else canst thou tell?”

“ALL THINGS THOU DAR’ST DEMAND.”

“Who made the living world?” asks Asia. Achilles has already decided that she is the most talkative, if not the most intelligent, of the three idiot Oceanids.

“GOD.”

“Who made all that it contains?” persists Asia. “Thought? Passion? Reason? Will? Imagination?”

“GOD. ALMIGHTY GOD.”

Achilles decides that this Demogorgon is a spirit-thing of few words. And fewer thoughts in its head, if it has a head. He would give anything if he could rise and pull his sword from his belt, unsling his shield from his back. First he would kill the Demogorgon and then the three Titan sisters… slowly.

“Who made that sense, which, when the winds of Spring in rarest visitation, or the voice of one beloved heard in youth alone,” asks Asia in her crackly, booming voice, “fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim the radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, and leaves the peopled world a solitude when it returns no more?”

Achilles throws up again. This time it is as an aesthetic statement more than a reaction to optical vertigo. He decides that he will kill the Oceanids first after all. He would like to kill this Asia bitch several times over. He visualizes hollowing out her skull and using it for a house, her eye sockets as round windows.

“MERCIFUL GOD,” intones the Demogorgon.

There is no Greek word for “ditto,” but Achilles thinks that the Demogorgon should coin one. It does not surprise the Achaean in the least that Oceanids and the formless spirit in the murk down here in Tartarus speak his form of Greek to one another. They’re strange creatures, monsters really, but even monsters in Achilles’ experience speak Greek. They’re not barbarians, after all.

“And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,” continues Asia, her voice as relentless as the babble of a two-year-old who’s just learned how to keep a conversation going with an adult by asking “Why?” a hundred times over. “Which from the links of the great chain of things, to every thought within the mind of man sway and drag heavily, and each one reels under the load toward the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate, and self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood. Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day; and…”

She breaks off.

Achilles hopes that it is some Tartarusian cataclysm that will end their world and swallow up Asia and her two sisters screaming like honey-covered appetizers at a Myrmidon feast, but when he forces his eyes open he sees that it is only a circle of bright light opening, pouring white brilliance into the red gloom.

A Brane Hole.

Something far from human is silhouetted against the light of that hole. It’s shaped roughly like a man, but it is made up of metallic spheres—not only a sphere where the head should be, but spheres for the torso, spheres for the outflung arms, spheres for the staggering legs. Only the feet and hands—wrapped in some lighter-than-bronze metal—look even vaguely manlike.

The thing comes closer and two brilliant lights stab out from the smaller spheres that are its shoulders. A red light, thin as a javelin, leaps from its right hand and plays across the Oceanid Sisters, making their flesh sizzle and pop. The Titanesses stagger backward, wading through lava, evidently unharmed by the red beam but shielding their faces and eyes from the painful white light flowing out of the Brane Hole.

“Goddammit, Achilles, are you just going to lie there?”

It’s Hephaestus. Achilles now sees the iron-sphere bubbles as some sort of protective suit, with iron-shod feet and heavily gauntleted hands emerging from the chain of globes. There is some sort of steaming, burping breathing pack on the back and the top bubble is clear as glass; Achilles can now make out the dwarf-god’s ugly, bearded face in the reflected light from his shoulder searchlights and handheld laser.