Sophia Alderwyne's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Sophia Alderwyne had never touched a demigod's power up close, and by Friday she owed three heroes a suit that could survive one. She sat at a borrowed desk under the great globe of the messenger god's atrium, in London by breakfast and on Olympus by lunch, spreading her sketches across the marble. Lapis blue swatches. Gold thread. The eagle and thunderbolt she stitched onto her own chest, claiming Zeus as father because everyone, including the gods, agreed she was his. Her fashion line launched in a season. If the first suit tore open in a fight, the Alderwyne name would tear with it. Hermes leaned on the column behind her, iridescent robes catching the light off the globe overhead. "Your seams are pretty," he said. "They won't hold a punch from anyone half divine." Sophia didn't look up. She knew. She had guessed at tensile loads from old temple carvings and her adoptive mother's physics tutors. Guessing was how prodigies died in the field. "Then let me test it on something real," she said. "Lend me a god to hit it." Hermes laughed once, short. "Gods don't volunteer as pincushions. But I'll do you one better." He crossed the atrium and spoke to the one-eyed giant working a bellows in the side alcove, on loan from the forge. The cyclops set down his hammer, pulled a scrap of half-cooled bronze from his apron, and flexed it between two fingers until it sang. Sophia watched the metal bend and remember its shape. She had read about divine alloys. She had never seen one breathe. She pulled a strip of her lapis weave from the roll and handed it over. The cyclops wrapped it around the bronze and squeezed. The fabric held. He squeezed harder. It tore along the warp, clean as paper. "Warp's wrong," the cyclops said, and dropped the ruined strip in her lap. Sophia turned the fibers over in her fingers. She saw the failure now, plainly, in a way no book had taught her. Hermes sat on the edge of the desk, close enough that his sandal wings brushed her knee. "Stay," he said. "Work here. I'll bring you a god a day. Ares owes me. Apollo owes me more." Sophia looked up at him, at the easy grin, at the offer that would either build her house or bury it. She rolled the torn weave into a ball and set it aside. "Start tomorrow," she said. "And Hermes — I'll need to touch your sandals too." He tipped his hat. She picked up her pencil and began the new pattern, the old one already dead on the desk beside her.