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.

Sophia came back to the atrium at dawn with a fresh roll of lapis weave and no illusions. The cyclops had shown her yesterday that her warp couldn't hold a squeeze from a hand only half divine. Today Hermes had promised her a god to hit it. She spread the new sample across the marble under the great globe and waited. She already knew the answer before he arrived. The fiber wasn't the problem. The material was. Hermes came in with a scrap of gold leather in one hand and a grin. He dropped a sandal on her desk, wings folded, straps still warm. "Test piece," he said. "Try not to burn it." Sophia laid her weave against the sandal's edge and pulled. The lapis thread frayed against the divine leather without leaving a mark on it. She pulled harder. Her fabric split. Hermes watched. "Told you," he said. "Your loom's fine. Your thread's mortal." She sat down. She had known it in her hands since the cyclops's fingers. Silk and steel wouldn't do. She needed a fiber that came from the same place gods did. "Then I need to weave something that isn't," she said. "Point me at it." Hermes tipped his hat back. "Adamantine. Hephaestus keeps the raw stock. He isn't lending." He paused. "But I owe you a god a day. I don't owe you clean methods." He whistled once. A white ram walked into the atrium, gold horns curled tight, saddlebags heavy with scrolls and something wrapped in oilcloth. Hermes lifted the bundle out and set it in front of her. Inside was a folded square of cloth that caught the light in every color at once. The weave was so tight it looked solid until she moved it. "Sample," Hermes said. "Off a shipment that took a wrong turn last week. Enough to prove the pattern. Not enough for three suits." Sophia touched it. The cloth didn't give. She pressed her thumbnail into it and left nothing behind. She took it to the loom in the alcove, the one Eliza had shipped up from London on her first day, her name carved across the top beam. She threaded a single adamantine strand into the warp beside her lapis and ran the shuttle. The two fibers took each other. The mortal thread held because the divine one carried it. She cut a strip and handed it to the cyclops. He squeezed. It sang and did not tear. She rolled the strip flat and looked up at Hermes. "I need the source, not the scrap. Get me into the forge, or get me a supplier who'll sell to the Alderwyne name." Hermes pocketed his sandal and smiled. "Forge is closed to buyers this week. Hephaestus is busy for Hera." He shrugged. "I'll find you a back door by morning." Sophia set the woven strip on the desk beside yesterday's torn one. The problem had a name now. The next one already had a shape.