"After fifteen years? After all that's happened? Hah! You must be joking."
Cronus looked saddened but not surprised. "I thought I should offer. You've refused. So I'm afraid you leave me with no choice."
Seizing Zeus's shoulder with one hand, he produced an oscillo-knife with the other.
"Let the punishment fit the crime," he said, and before Zeus could so much as blink, he plunged the buzzing blade into his son's crotch.
A sideways torque of the wrist.
A blossoming of blood across the front of Zeus's robe.
"Dad…?" Zeus said, his voice wavery, strangulated.
Cronus worked the oscillo-knife like a saw, hacking away at Zeus's genitals with a cold and remorseless efficiency. His other hand bore down, keeping Zeus planted firmly in place.
"This is the fate of kings of pantheons," he hissed. "And of fathers."
"Dad…"
The lightning began to coalesce. The brightness overhead grew as though a new sun was forming within the mist.
"Oh shit," muttered Hyperion.
Cronus was concentrating too hard on what he was doing to notice. Relishing the moment too much. "You took mine." The words were a hoarse hiss, only just audible. "Now I take yours."
"Daddy," Zeus moaned. "Please. No. Stop."
But Cronus paid no heed.
The lightning swelled into a vast, lambent sphere. Plasmic sparks wormed and veined across every surface in the agora. The air felt alive with power.
"We gotta get out of here," Hyperion said.
And Sam knew he was right, but she couldn't move. Couldn't turn. Couldn't tear herself away.
"Daddy!"
Something plopped wetly onto the flagstones between Zeus's feet. He was shuddering. The lower half of his robe was nothing but redness.
"Daddeeeee!!!"
Then the lightning broke, and the world went white. Not the filmy white of the mist. A pure, bleaching, incandescent white that penetrated every crack and corner and left no room for shadows, no dark crevices, nothing unilluminated. A whiteness like the beginning of Creation, or its end. Accompanied by a bang that was beyond sound, beyond comprehension, loud enough that it made any other noise a whisper by comparison — and a wave of intense heat and pressure that came like a giant, sweeping hand and drove all before it. A hurricane of burning brilliance that picked up Sam and Hyperion and whirled them and tangled them and tossed them aside, and left only a howling blackness in its wake.
EPILOGUE:
The L-Day event in Lincoln Park was the usual contrasting mix of solemn memorial and joyful celebration. At noon on a baking-hot June day several thousand Chicagoans gathered, some to sing hymns, some to light candles, some to sit in quiet contemplation, some to share beers, some to play music and dance, some to march in circles and chant slogans, and some just to spectate from the sidelines. It was disorganised, rowdy in places, not sanctioned by the authorities, and with no point of focus — no special monument to rally around, no single person to conduct the proceedings, no distinguished figure to stand up and make a speech and be a mouthpiece for all. Similar improvised assemblies were occurring all over the world on this, the third anniversary of the overthrow of the Olympians.
Despite much campaigning and petitioning, not one government would overtly acknowledge Liberation Day as a formal annual calendar occasion. There was a desire among the powers-that-be to move on from the age of Olympian rule, draw a line under it, act as if it had never happened. The people, however, disagreed. Let their elected representatives sweep that decade under the carpet and the dust of political cowardice with it. They might wish to forget, but seven billion others did not.
Furthermore, many felt that their leaders should be held to account — the ones, at least, who had bent the knee most abjectly to the Pantheon. Here at Lincoln Park voices called for ex-president Stavropoulos, whose term of office had just ended and not been renewed, to be retroactively impeached. Similarly, at Trafalgar Square in London where an L-Day event had been held some six hours earlier, there'd been renewed demands for Catesby Bartlett to face prosecution in the High Court. Bartlett had stepped down as prime minister not long after the Olympians' demise, citing health reasons, but the vilification of him in the press and online — criminal, coward, collaborator — continued unabated. For all that he was currently serving in an ill-defined role as some sort of goodwill ambassador for the UN, he was seldom seen in public, and had not set foot on British soil since leaving 10 Downing Street, perhaps for fear of being arrested, or lynched.
At this same hour, in New York, a big band struck up show tunes on Governors Island at the spot where the giant statue of Zeus no longer stood, and people started to dance. In Paris, where it was evening, a firework display splash-painted the sky above the recently restored Eiffel Tower. In Sydney, where day was just breaking, the Australian prime minister delved a spade into the ground, declaring building work on a new Opera House begun. In Bruges, a statue was unveiled with all due pomp and circumstance — and the imbibing of a great deal of pale lager — in the centre of the Markt. It was a memorial to the Unknown Titan, to add to the countless other similar memorials that had been erected all across the planet.
Meanwhile, a breeze off Lake Michigan kept the throng of Chicagoan L-Day celebrants cool as they milled about. Conversations returned again and again to that day three years ago when it had become apparent that the Olympians were no more, all killed at the hands of Sir Neville Armstrong-Hall's little impromptu army and the last remaining Titans. Where were you when you first heard the news? Wasn't it amazing to see those interviews with troops who had taken part and listen to their accounts of shooting monsters and combating a metal giant? And how about that footage of the JDS Inazuma Maru bombarding Olympus from just off the coast, razing the Pantheonic stronghold to the ground? And the helicopter shots of the smouldering ruin afterwards? The long-distance images of the mountain with smoke billowing up from its summit?
Armstrong-Hall's name received repeated mention. After the attack on Olympus the distinguished old soldier had gone home to face the music: a court martial, and even the possibility of trial at the Hague on charges of being a war criminal. A vast international public outcry, however, had soon put paid to that, and he was quietly discharged and pensioned off instead. Now in retirement at his home in the Cotswolds, Britain's erstwhile Chief of General Staff divided his time between penning his memoirs and cultivating rare strains of apple in his orchard. On L-Day it could be guaranteed that at least fifty different TV stations and newspapers from all over the globe would ring him up to ask for a comment, but all he would say was: "I did what I had to do and what was right. It isn't me you should be talking to. It's the soldiers I led. They did all the work and took far greater risks than I. They and the Titans — whoever they were."
And of course there was much discussion of the Titans at Lincoln Park, as at every other L-Day event, most of it favourable, some of it speculative. The Titans remained anonymous. Identities, nationalities, origins — all a mystery. Even the bodies of the ones killed in action had never been found. Ghostly, they had appeared. Ghostly, they had gone. In a way, that was preferable to knowing everything about them, every last personal detail. They were blank slates, everymen who had emerged from nowhere to fulfil a function, then melted away back into the shadows. What they'd helped bring about meant more than who they'd actually been.