Hey cuz! It’s been too long. Love to come out and see your digs.

The message hung in the air, glimmering in her Heads Up Display overlaid across the moss garden she was tending. The chill that swept over Euryale made the hair on her arms stand on end and her gut churn. Her cousin wanted to visit. The asshole favorite grandson who got away with rape and murder and incest and never had to pay any consequences.

She blinked the message off and stood up, looking into the sky at the ring that arced over her world. It glowed with the golden light of a sun that was a mere star back on Earth. The other two suns were still low in the sky, but her skin burned as if they were all overhead. Beneath her cap, her hair shifted in a reflection of her rage. How far would she have to go to escape the family drama?

If she didn’t respond to him, he would send someone to track her down. He always did.

She sent a message back, keeping it as short as she could.

Why?

With the lag to the relay station, then through the wormhole back to Earth, it would be a day and a half before she could get a reply from him. Euryale turned back to the garden, patting moss on the stone back of a man huddled on the ground.

She was peeling a pomegranate in the kitchen, knife cutting through the thick waxy skin when the new message arrived. Her hair slithered and hissed with agitation. Euralye put the knife on the counter and let the pomegranate sink to the bottom of the bowl of water. She could have the replicator create perfect seeds, but this one came from a plant grown from seeds gifted to her by one of her kinder cousins when she left. The imperfections gave her some of her few happy memories of home.

She wiped her hands and stepped back, turning her head to look at a blank spot of wall. The honied sunlight dappled through the triple shadows of one of the bamboo-like native plants that framed the house. She toggled the message.

I thought you might want to bury your sister. I have what’s left of her.

It was like him to not tell her which sister. The one long dead or the one still living.

Which?

She could have asked more but took petty satisfaction in making him wait for a single syllable. Hands shaking, she stepped back to the counter and picked up the knife.

The fat fuzzyworm nestled in her lap, thrumming with pleasure. Her sweet pet twined under Euryale’s hand, without eyes to see her. Their striped tawny fur rippled with sensory cilia that slid under her palm like silk.

“Are you the perfect little creature? Who is so good? Is it you?” She nuzzled Butterscotch under the chin and their thousand tiny feet made biscuits on her thighs.

A message pinged on her HUD. Tilting her head back, she felt one strand of hair lash out and bite the chair behind her. She closed her eyes, unwilling to let his words taint any more of her view.

The mortal one, of course. My daughter has decided to hang up her shield for the last time. So? May I come?

Lifting her hands from Butterscotch’s body, she ran them over her hair, trying to soothe the strands as if that would quiet her mind. The temptation to say “no” was strong. And yet, a chance to set her youngest sister to rest, even if only her head. Her cousin’s question was only the illusion of choice.

When?

The word was not an invitation, but he would read it as such. Opening her eyes, she lowered her hands to Butterscotch, trying to find comfort again in her little pet. Picking up the fuzzyworm, she cradled them to her body feeling the warm snuffles against her neck. She carried them outside into the garden. They liked frolicking in the moss.

A suborbital pod arced overhead with a muffled roar as it sliced through the air. Sighing, she watched the trajectory. That was going to land at her town’s small port. It did not have to be her cousin, but it would be like him to arrive without answering her question. It had been a week since she had asked. The timing was right.

She went into the bedroom of her habitat and opened the drawer of her headscarves. She wrapped one around the snakes, binding them tight to her head so their movement did not betray her emotions. They hissed in protest. She took a face mask out of another drawer and hooked it around her ears in case a mortal accompanied her cousin to her home. The people in town thought she was modest.

She just didn’t want any more statues haunting her home.

Light flashed in the garden, celestial blues and golds that had no place here. He could never abide walking and always needed a grand entrance. She waited until the lightshow died down, not granting him that pleasure. She waited until she heard him knock.

“Hey! Euryale? I’m here!”

“Who?”

She put lotion on her hands, rubbing it into the soft skin. His sigh of aggravation was music. “It’s me. Zeus.”

In the garden, she served Zeus a tea brewed from the leaves of the basil-lily, which grew abundantly near the waterfalls. It had a lovely floral scent, with a sweet minty-anise undernote of basil. On ice, cut from the glaciers on the northern continent, it was gloriously refreshing.

Her cousin lowered his glass and looked at it in admiration. “That is worth the trip alone.”

A bundle wrapped in silk sat on the ground next to his chair. She did not look at it, except in the periphery of her vision, but it still occupied the whole of her attention. Grey-green and crusted with old, dried blood, it drew all the light of the suns toward it and made the shadows deeper.

Euryale turned her head from it deliberately and pushed a plate of dolmas toward her cousin. There was a grain that was not rice and had a flavor more like puffed corn. But with lemon from a tree she had grown here and the broad brine-soaked leaves of the pricklegourd, they were a close approximation. In many ways, she thought their slight sweetness made them better.

“Thank you! Don’t mind if I do.” He looked around her moss garden, with its high walls and golden light. “This is a really lovely place you’ve made for yourself here. Design the whole place yourself?”

Euryale nodded, and picked up one of the dolmas for herself, so that having a full mouth gave her an excuse to not answer him.

He took a bite of his. “By Jove that’s good!” And then he laughed at his own joke.

The three suns were high in the sky, spread wide as if they were running a race along the rings overhead. The shadows lay tripled around them. They sat in silence, eating the dolmas and sipping the tea, and she was not going to be the one who brought up the reason for his visit.

Finally, Zeus sighed and set down his empty glass. She refilled it. He watched her as she slipped her own glass under her mask. “You don’t have to wear that with me, you know?”

She shrugged and the snakes writhed in their binding.

Her cousin sighed again, then clapped his hands. “Well.” He bent down and hefted the silk-wrapped bundle. “Here she is.”

For a moment, Euryale thought that he was going to throw her sister’s head to her. But he stood and carried it to her looking as if he was bringing her a great gift. As if she should be honored that he had brought Medusa’s head himself, instead of sending a messenger.

She cradled the bundle in her lap, as if it were her fuzzyworm. Running her fingers over the outside of the bundle, she could feel the limp snakes underneath. She did not want to see what centuries of death and battle had done to her sister’s features.

Zeus stood over her, blocking out the light of one of the suns and leaving her more chilled than a single shadow should warrant. “Well? Aren’t you going to say something?”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Thank you, maybe?” He put his hands on his hips, glowering like a sulking child.” Or did you want to leave her hanging on Athena’s wall?”

With a sigh, Euryale stood, holding the bundle against her chest with one hand and beckoned him. She led him to a hole she had prepared, lined with marble under a twisting snakevine tree. She knelt to place the bundle gently in its small tomb. Looking up at her cousin, she patted the ground beside her until he knelt as well.

He sighed but made a show of being respectful. But he shifted, clearly restless to be away. “Do you want me to say a few words?”

Euryale shook her head. She tugged off her head scarf, and the snakes tumbled free, writhing in frustrated joy at being released. She took off her mask.

And she looked at her cousin.

Zeus had time to gasp, “How?”

Then his body turned to pure marble, shot through with lines of blue and gold. A look of terror was frozen on his body. In those first moments, as the calcification worked inward, her statues could still hear.

“You ate food prepared by my hands from my world, and drank water that was thousands of years old, standing under the light of Gorgonea Prima.” She scooped up a bit of moss and pressed it onto the ball of his shoulder. “On my world, you are not a god.”

Euryale lifted the silken bundle out of the small tomb. She would not leave her sister buried under her cousin’s shadow.

“Where…” Standing in her moss garden, she turned holding the bundle and looked across the high-walled sanctuary. “Where would you like to be?”

She imagined her garden, as if Medusa were alive and they were looking at a vista together. Euryale ran a hand across the silk and considered the best spot for a beloved sister.

© 2025 Mary Robinette Kowal