Wonder Woman: Warbringer (DC Icons #1)(49)

She plunked herself down in her father’s old chair and used the edge of the desk to give herself a shove, sending herself spinning. “Well, Nim and I are the only brown girls in my grade, and two of about ten in the whole school.” She switched directions, launching herself into another spin. “I’m a complete science nerd.” She spun again. “And I’m more comfortable reading than at parties. So, yeah, not much chance at normal. Besides, you should have seen me when I had braces.”

“Braces?”

“For my teeth?” Alia bared her teeth. “Let me guess, yours are just naturally straight and pearly white.” She tapped her fingers over the desk. “I know Mom had a safe for her jewelry and stuff, but I don’t know where it is.”

“There’s a panel beside the Faith Ringgold,” Jason said from the doorway.

He strode behind the desk and slid open a panel next to the framed quilt, revealing a heavy-looking safe set into the wall. He entered a long combination into its keypad, then pressed his fingertip to a red screen. Alia heard a soft metallic whir and a click. He pulled open the safe’s door.

“Here,” he said, handing Alia a flash drive. “Most of the files are on this. They kept hard copies, too, if you want them. And this.” He drew a slender metal case from the safe and set it on the desk.

Alia cast a wary eye at the box. “What is it?”

“A record of all the known Warbringers. I don’t know where they got it or how it’s passed from one family to another.”

Alia flipped the latch and lifted the lid. There was a scroll inside, yellowing parchment wrapped around a spool of polished wood. She touched her fingers to it briefly, then drew her hand back. How much did she want to know?

But that wasn’t the way a scientist thought. It wasn’t the way her parents had taught her to think.

She lifted the scroll from the box and began to unroll it. She’d expected some kind of family tree, but it was more like a time line. The inscriptions were made in several different languages, names and dates scrawled in different hands, different inks, one a rusty brown that might be blood.

The first words were written in Greek. “What does this mean?” Alia said, fingers hovering over the entry.

“Helen—” Diana and Jason began at the same time.

“Daughter of Nemesis,” Diana continued. “Goddess of divine retribution, born with war in her blood, first of the haptandrai.”

“Wait a minute,” Alia protested. “I thought Helen was supposed to be the daughter of Zeus and Leda. You know, the swan?”

“That’s one story. In others, Helen and her brothers were the children of Zeus and Nemesis and were only fostered by Leda.”

“Divine retribution,” said Alia. “That’s…cheerful.”

“She was also known as Adrasteia.”

“The inescapable,” said Jason.

“I bet she’s fun to have around.” Alia furrowed her brow. “You said that word before. Haptandrai.”

Jason nodded. “The meaning is a little cloudy. The root can mean to ignite or to assail, but also just to touch.”

“The hand of war,” murmured Diana.

Alia stared at Jason. “Did you brush up on Greek because Dad was Greek or because of this Warbringer thing?”

“A little of both,” he admitted.

Alia wasn’t too surprised. Jason had always been more interested in their Keralis side than their Mayeux side.

“Your translation isn’t entirely accurate, though,” Diana said. “The root can mean other things. To grab, to grapple with, to couple with.”

“Couple with?” squeaked Alia.

“I did not need to know that,” said Jason.

Diana shrugged. “It makes a kind of sense. Helen wasn’t just one thing, and there can be many reasons for war.”

Alia didn’t want to ponder that too deeply. She turned her focus back to the scroll, unfurling it a bit more. She was wrong; it looked less like a time line than a cross between a seismograph and an EKG. Each girl’s name was followed by a series of peaks tagged with incidents of conflict, each peak larger than the last, like foothills rising to mountains, culminating in a sharp apex of violence that ran in a spiky range across the top of the scroll until at last it dropped off again.

“Evgenia,” Alia murmured, touching her finger to one of the names inscribed on the parchment. “The Peloponnesian War. It looks like it lasted nearly sixty years.”

“Longer,” said Jason. “It was the beginning of the end for Greek democracy.”

“Livia Caprenia,” she said. “The Sack of Rome. Angeline de Sonnac, the Seventh Crusade.” Her fingers jumped from era to era in no particular order, from girl to girl, tragedy to tragedy. “The Hundred Years’ War. The Wars of the Roses. The Thirty Years’ War. Did they know?” Alia’s voice sounded shaky to her own ears. “Helen knew she was the cause of the Trojan War, but did these girls know what they were? What they caused just by breathing?”

“Maybe,” said Jason. “I don’t think so. How could they?”

“Someone was keeping these records,” Diana said.

Alia kept her eyes locked on the scroll. “Oh God. World War One. World War Two. You’re telling me we were the cause of that?”