Wonder Woman: Warbringer (DC Icons #1)(50)

“No,” said Diana. She braced her hand against Alia’s shoulder. “The Warbringer is a catalyst. Not a cause. You cannot take the blame for the violence men do.”

Alia drew in a sharp breath. “Look,” she said, jabbing her finger at the year 1945. Next to it was an annotation: Irene Martin. B. December 1. A series of small peaks followed in the same pattern as the other entries, moderate at first, widely spaced, then rising in irregular lines, each closer to the next. They reached an apex in 1962 and then abruptly dropped off. The inscription there read Irene Martin. D. October 27.

Alia frowned. “What was happening in 1962? I don’t remember—”

“I didn’t, either,” said Jason. “I had to look it up. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets and the Americans came to the brink of nuclear war.”

“But then the Warbringer died?”

Neither Jason nor Diana met her eyes.

“Oh,” said Alia quietly. “She didn’t die. She was assassinated.” Alia touched her fingers to the date again. “She never got to turn seventeen. They found her and they killed her because they knew it would just keep getting worse.”

“Alia, there were still wars after the Warbringer died,” said Jason. “Vietnam, Cambodia, the Balkans, countless wars in the Middle East and Africa.”

“But who knows how much worse it would have been if Irene Martin had lived?” Alia brushed hastily at her cheeks. When had she started crying?

Diana squeezed her shoulder. “Listen to me,” she said. “We’re going to reach the spring. We’re going to change all of this.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. We’ll reach the spring. We’ll break the line. And there will never be another Warbringer. No girl will have to bear this burden again. Including you.”

“That’s right,” said Jason.

“You don’t even believe there’s a spring,” Alia said, sniffling loudly.

“I believe…I believe that if there was a start to this, then there has to be an end.”

A buzzing sound broke the quiet of the room. Alia looked down at the phone. “Nim’s here.”

“Go wash your face,” said Jason, taking the phone from her. “Perez will let Nim up. I’ll have the files put on the jet, and we can look them over during the flight. Both of you should pack a travel bag, too.” He put his arm around her. “Alia, we—”

She shook him off and stepped away from Diana. “Don’t,” she said, ignoring the flash of hurt that crossed Jason’s face as she headed for the door. She couldn’t bring herself to let him comfort her. He couldn’t fix this. The only thing that would make this right was the spring.

She closed the door on Jason and his files and the long shadows their parents had left behind.





Diana found Alia flopped on a canopy bed heaped with snowy linens in a large chamber at the other end of the hall. This room had a floor inlaid with wood in the pattern of a huge sunburst, and one wall was painted with a misty view of a lake dappled with pale pink water lilies.

“Monet,” Diana said, finding the name in a memory of one of her art history lessons.

“I was really into that story ‘The Frog Prince’ when I was a kid,” Alia said to the ceiling. “Mom wasn’t big on princesses, so we compromised with a lily pond.”

But the wide windows that overlooked a vast swath of parkland had already captured Diana’s gaze. From this height, the city was transformed. It was like looking into her mother’s jewel case—a city of silver spires and mysterious ironwork, windows that glinted like gems in the afternoon light. The park was rigidly symmetrical in its boundaries, hard lines demarcating where it began and the city ended. It was as if someone had set a door into another world at the center of the city, someplace lush and green, but contained on all sides by strong magic.

Alia’s room seemed full of small magics, too. Her desk was stacked with textbooks and a little hourglass sat beside the lamp, but the sand in it seemed to be lodged at the top. Diana shook it, then flipped it and gasped.

“Is the sand in this flowing upward?”

Alia rolled her head listlessly on the pillow. “Oh. Yeah. It’s because of the density of the liquid inside it instead of air.”

A framed photograph sat on the corner of the desk: a young Alia and Jason on a boardwalk, their hair braided into tight rows, Alia’s head studded with plastic barrettes. Behind them stood the same couple Diana recognized from the photo in the study—a man with a craggy, friendly face, his blue eyes sparkling, his cheeks reddened by the sun, and a woman with dark-brown skin and a soft cloud of hair held back from her face by a cheerful red headband. They were all striking a silly pose, flexing their muscles like comic strongmen. Jason’s smile was broad and open, his dimple carved deeply into his left cheek. Maybe Alia was right about how much he’d changed.

“And what are these?” Diana asked, pointing to a shelf of neatly stacked patterned boxes.

Alia groaned. “It’s super nerdy.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m trying to collect the element that corresponds to my age every year for my birthday, like Oliver Sacks. He was a neuroscientist.”

“I know. We have his books.”