It must be hard for him to bear my weight when he was, himself, weakened by blood loss.
I tried to hold myself up. I tried not to burden him. I wanted him to like me, and I wanted to cry at the foolish hopelessness of such a wish.
“Courier,” I said. “For a corporation.” Thinking of how glamorously my profession had been depicted in movies and books, I added, “Nothing romantic. Just a secure courier. No fighting, no dodging. Definitely no killing. Just a lot of driving and boring office work and occasionally finding people who didn’t want to be found.” I hissed at the pain in my leg and held on tighter. “This is the first time I saw death.” I took a deep breath. “Turn right.”
We staggered around the corner—like a strange three-legged animal. I put my arm out to the wall to help balance us.
“You’re free?” he asked.
I nodded. As though that would make any difference with someone like him.
“May I ask why… I mean… usually it’s for some great service… was it?”
I shrugged. “A lucky break. They wanted to replace me, but I was an outdated model and they couldn’t find a buyer. So they freed me and wrote me off on their taxes. Cheaper than continuing to feed me and less of a public relations blunder than having me put to death. There was a stink, twenty years ago when a company put a whole bunch of artifacts to death. Legal, but it looked bad.”
“Oh,” he said. “But you must have a… pension? The cruise is expensive, isn’t…?”
“I found a job with a university as an archaeological recorder, went on some digs and…” I took a deep breath, willed my vision to clear. It didn’t. “I have eidetic memory… to memorize messages. I got my doctorate and I teach… at a lower salary than anyone else in the same position… but I get enough to live on and for little pleasures like this tour of Greece.”
“Oh,” he said, again.
It took us hours to find the entrance. It felt like days. I dragged my one good leg forward while Pol supported my weight.
Our talk stopped. It took too much effort, too much breath.
Pain and ooziness clutched at my stomach. I swam in nausea and tried not to drown.
“Don’t faint, please. Don’t. Without you, we’ll both die here.” Pol dragged me forward, stopping only to ask me directions.
At last, the ugly dimatough door stood straight ahead of us.
Pol let go of me, leaned me against the wall.
Now, he’d leave me here, in this dark tunnel and pretend we’d never met. I’d be lucky if he told the people outside that I was still alive, wounded, in here. I would be lucky to get treatment and live.
I was so sure of what would happen that it took me a while to realize that he hadn’t opened the door, that he was talking.
“You’re not listening,” he said. “You must listen.” His voice had a high, whining sound—like a child begging something of a reluctant adult. “I’m going to tell them I belong to you. In the state I’m in, Nary’s daughter, her heir, will just have me put down. She doesn’t like me. But if they don’t check registration and I say I’m yours, they will just go ahead and regen my arm. And then she’ll be more likely to sell me than to kill me.”
He looked earnest and pleading.
“What? My what?”
He brought his right hand close to my face. The golden ring was gone from his middle finger. The red ring of an owned artifact shone in its place. “I had to remove the gold ring,” he said. “Otherwise, if I passed out and they found us…” He made a gurgling sound a suppressed sob, a scream of fear and pain. “I don’t want to die.”
This had to be a bizarre dream. Were he an artifact, he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to conceal it with that gold ring. Not when the penalty for hiding the ring of servitude was death, swiftly administered. And no owner would allow her artifact to conceal his ring. Artifacts were too expensive to squander and the civil penalties befalling the owner of a disguised artifact would have been prohibitive. Even our dear departed Nary couldn’t have been that dumb or that heartless.
“Please,” he said. His eyes overflowed with tears and I smelled the sharp tang of terror in his sweat. “Please let me tell them I belong to you. Even if they find out afterwards, at most they’ll rebuke me before shipping me to my legal owner. They won’t do anything to you, because you aren’t even fully conscious. I just don’t want you to unmask me too soon. It’s not like hiding the artifact ring.”
Which brought us to why he’d hidden the ring before. I wondered what would happen if the authorities checked the tour records. His legal owner couldn’t mean to have Pol killed, could she? Healed, he’d be worth a lot.
My leg hurt and my head felt stuffed with cotton wool. I couldn’t articulate any questions.
We must get out. We must get help.
Pol had to open the damn door.
He stared into my eyes. He waited.
“Yes,” I managed to say. “Yes. Whatever.”
While I sank into semi-consciousness, Pol carried me outside, stumbled onto blinding sunlight, straggled across the narrow path to the nymph clearing.
People surrounded us, swimming in and out of my field of vision, like faces in a nightmare. People screamed.
Through a fog, I heard Pol say, “This is Doctor Ariadne Knossos. She’s a free citizen and you must get her help.”
I wanted to tell these people I’d buy him. I wanted to yell that no one should kill him, that he had saved my life, that he was a person, too, artifact or not, citizen or not.
I’d never even asked his full name.
Shadows closed in all around and I let myself fall into oblivion.
I woke up to a woman’s heavily accented voice, “…terrorists. Their religion forbids artifacts. Or, at least, that’s how they interpret the rule against graven images. Your tour guide and the one of the tour before yours were members. They thought that if they replaced the Minotaur with a dangerous beast and it killed a few tourists, it would create fear that other artifacts might have been tampered with, cause a fall in tourism and a backlash against artifacts. Funny, though, how you two were the only ones who survived.”
A touch of edginess grated through Pol’s voice. “I assure you he showed us no favoritism.”
Pol was alive. Fast on the heels of relief, I remembered what he had said in the tunnel. Pol an artifact? It couldn’t be true. Hallucination, surely.
I managed to force my eyes open.
My leg didn’t hurt. I felt no worse than someone with a hangover.
Pol sat at the end of my bed, his arm encased in the pink bulk of a medsleeve. My leg was encased in one too. I lay in what looked like a hotel bed in a bland but pleasant bedroom with two beds, dresser, wardrobe, all of it white. Framed seascapes hung on the walls.
“The tourism administration will pay for your treatment.” The medical technician was young and female and better suited to a travel poster than to the blue uniform of a med. She sniffed, as if she resented having to treat us like people. “And for your lodging, of course. Both of you should be able to travel on within twenty four hours.”
She smiled—a tight smile—mumbled something about our getting better, and left me alone with Pol.
I pulled myself up to a sitting position. “I had the strangest dream”
I realized the significance of the two beds; of his being in my room.
He’d told them he belonged to me.
I looked down at his hand. The red ring of slavery shone on his long, square finger.
He took a deep breath. “My name is Apollo Doris.”
“Oh,” I said. He’d concealed the ring. No one concealed the ring. Had he done it of his own accord?
Sitting on my bed, wearing an institutional white robe, he looked beautiful still, but also more naked than he’d been in his tiny shorts. It was as if a layer had been stripped off his skin, leaving him flushed and hesitant, tongue-tied and vulnerable, like a child who wakes in the night amid strangers.