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Pen. That was real. What you’ve seen here isn’t real.”
    I don’t know how my little brother gets us all off of the demon ship full of the dead but I know it has something to do with our stories, pictures, and songs. All I remember next is being back in the pink house with tears from my unstolen eye wet on my face.

 
    4
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    PEN’S DESTINY
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    W E GATHER IN THE LIVING ROOM and eat some canned minestrone soup Merk brought; no one is up to picking fresh vegetables tonight. My head hurts, like my brain is swollen, edema, pressing against my skull. Venice found another patch to cover my eye.
    It’s Hex who speaks first, rubbing his temples; I guess he feels like I do. “What the hell was that?”
    Merk focuses his eyes on my brother, who flinches a little. “Why didn’t it get you?”
    â€œI have no idea.”
    â€œThere’s something special about that kid.” Merk slurps down some soup and scowls out the window. “He’ll be helpful when we go back out.”
    Hex almost jumps out of his chair. “What the fuck are you talking about? We’re not going near that ship again. If anything, we’ll set fire to it.”
    â€œHow else will we get to the new world?” Merk replies, very calm. He wipes his nose on his filthy sleeve.
    â€œThat thing almost killed us,” Hex growls; he sounds like Argos. “ You almost killed us with that gun. And the six of us couldn’t man that ship even if it wasn’t bewitched.”
    Merk stands and goes to the window. He puts both hands on the glass, leaving greasy smudges. “The ghosts will sail us there,” he says.
    He’s gone over the edge for sure this time.
    â€œYou need to rest,” I tell him. “Why don’t you lie down?”
    Merk turns and saunters out of the room like an old-time cowboy. First a pirate, now this. He really missed his calling as an actor but it’s too late for that now. “Wait and see,” he says over his shoulder. “We will board that ship again and the ghosts will sail us to the new world. Pen will be the founder of a civilization. It is her destiny. The star spoke it. As her father, I must accompany her.”
    I think about the shooting star we saw. Though I was too out of it at the time to realize, Merk interpreted the star as another omen. In The Aeneid it was a sign that Aeneas’s father Anchises should join Aeneas on his journey. Merk certainly sees the star as a reason to go.
    I look over at Hex, wanting to touch him but I’m not sure if we’re okay. The venom with which he spoke to me on the ship still scares me, even if he thought I was his mother at the time.
    â€œI thought Luther was there,” Ash says. Luther is the choral director Ash lived with when his mom threw him out for being gay. Luther the pedophile, the one Ash thought I was when we were under the ship’s spell. Why did they all think I was someone they hated? The question makes me cold from my skin to my insides, as if I’m still out in the wind.
    â€œI thought I saw my mother.” I wonder if Hex is avoiding eye contact on purpose when he says this.
    â€œPen thought she saw Kronen,” says Venice. “And Merk thought it was sea snakes that wanted to kill him.”
    Like the sea snakes in The Aeneid that killed the Trojan Laocoön and his two young sons, when Laocoön tried to convince them not to take the Trojan horse in through the gates. Once again there are parallels with the epic but none of it makes any real sense in this mad world.
    Hex rolls his eyes. “Figures he’d be the one to see the snakes. He’s fucking insane even without a spell.”
    â€œBut Ez saw Eliot,” I say. “Not someone he hates, obviously. Why was that?”
    â€œWhy did he leave me?” Ez says under his breath. “Sometimes when I’m not thinking clearly I hate him for dying. He should be with us.” His