I want it on the record that I made it about four seconds.
Face down on the bed, one whole week of freedom in my pocket, the Demon Centaur defeated and the greatest victory of either of my lives still warm — and then the canoe lake exploded.
The whole room went gold. The window I refuse to close, the one Chiron has given up arguing about, lit white, and a sound came in with it — a long descending WHOOOOM that hit my back teeth and the floor and my chest all at once.
I was off the bed before I'd finished being on it. Sword off the floor, through the door, down the stairs three at a time. Missed the fourth step, caught the rail, kept going.
Chiron was already at the window. Hooves planted. Tail still.
"What —" I started.
"Apollo," he said, and the lake answered for him.
I got to the porch and stopped.
There was a school bus in the canoe lake.
Gold. The whole thing gold, the colour of a trophy nobody asked for. Nose down at a hard forty-five degrees, back wheels still up in the air and turning. Steam came off it in sheets. The headlights were underwater and lit, turning a patch of the lake a sick glowing green from below.
The dock was gone. Half the boathouse was gone. Water was still coming down out of the sky in a wide curtain onto a stretch of woods that had not asked for any of this.
A flaming gold school bus. In the lake. At a forty-five degree angle. Wheels spinning.
I stood there in a t-shirt and bare feet on the cold porch boards and looked at it. My brain offered no comment, because there was no comment to make.
Then the doors opened.
Hunters came out first — silver parkas, bows already slung, formation holding even as two of them bent over the side and vomited into the lake. A boy I didn't know, maybe ten, came down clutching a backpack and a fistful of little figurines. Grover behind him, green and unwell, moving like the ground was a suggestion.
Then Percy. Soaked(how I still have no idea), furious, walking trainwreck that he is, half-carrying a girl I didn't recognise: dark hair, green cap, dazed.
And then the sun god himself. Golden, gleaming, grinning, stepping off the wreck of his own bus without a hair out of place, surveying the steaming lake and the half-melted canoes like a man admiring a parking job.
"Well," he said brightly. "Let's go see if we boiled anyone important."
The last person off the bus was also green.
She came down the steps with one hand on the rail and the other pressed flat to her own chest like she was holding her heart in by force, planted both boots on solid ground, and stood there breathing like she'd been pulled out of the lake instead of the bus.
Thalia. Daughter of the Lord of the Sky, afraid of heights, and somebody — I had a guess who — had put her behind the wheel of a flaming aerial chariot and told her the sky was basically hers.
"You," Thalia said.
Apollo turned, beaming. "You did gr—"
"You put ME. Behind the WHEEL."
"You're a daughter of Ze—"
"I am going to take a celestial bronze spear," Thalia said, advancing on the sun god across the steaming shore, soaked and shaking and starting to crackle at the edges, "and I am going to teach you a brand new thing about your own anatomy. They'll write a MYTH about it. There will be a CONSTELLATION, Apollo — children will look up at night and learn the SHAPE of what I am about to do to you."
She got within arm's reach of an actual immortal Olympian, four thousand years old, lord of plague and poetry and the sun itself, and jabbed a finger into his golden chest hard enough that he took a step back. Lightning was running down her arms in thin blue threads now. The hair on the back of my neck stood up from forty feet away.
And Apollo put both hands up and smiled, a beat too late, the way you smile when you've just remembered that the daughters of Zeus do not bluff.
"Tell you what," he said. "Free archery tips. Anytime. Standing offer."
Thalia glared at him — definitely glared — and spat, "...FINE."
"Great chat!" He clapped his hands. The crackle in the air did not entirely go away.
I stood on the porch in the afternoon cold and watched my one week of freedom end with a teenage girl threatening to turn a god into a star chart, and I did the only reasonable thing available to me.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the steps.
Apollo didn't stick around for the clean-up. Gods don't — they make an entrance, drop a catastrophe in your lap, and leave before anyone can hand them a mop.
He climbed back onto the wreck of his bus, struck a pose with one hand raised like he was about to address a stadium, and announced that the occasion called for a haiku.
"Sun bus meets cold lake," he declared. "Steam and screaming fill the air. I parked it just fine."
"That last line was six syllables," said a Hunter, flat.
Apollo frowned and started counting on his fingers — I crushed the landing, no, that's also six — and was still muttering when the whole gold bus lit up bright enough to white out the lake. Heat rolled over the shore in one wave. Then the bus and the steam and the half-melted canoes and the sun god were simply gone, and the lake slapped back down into the empty crater where two tons of flaming chariot had just been.
A few naiads surfaced, looked around, and started swearing in Ancient Greek.
The dock was still wrecked. That part he left for us.
It took most of the afternoon for the camp to settle, mostly because a flaming chariot had rearranged the entire waterfront and somebody had to deal with that.
By the time the worst of it was sorted, the Hunters had taken Cabin Eight. This is apparently a tradition — the Hunters of Artemis occupy Artemis's silver-glowing cabin whenever they descend on us — and they moved in the way a military unit takes a building. No wasted motion. No acknowledgment that the building had previous tenants such as the air.
Within an hour the cabin had silver lights in the windows and silver-clad teenagers doing pull-ups outside it in the cold, like the cold was a personal challenge they'd already won.
And by dinner, the dining pavilion had the temperature of a knife fight.
You have to understand the geometry of it. Campers on one side. Hunters on the other. A no-man's-land of frost between.
Two species that should never share a watering hole.
The Campers: loud, sunburnt, armed with whatever they'd grabbed on the way in. The Ares table was flexing. Literally. Sherman kept finding reasons to stretch so his arms caught the torchlight.
Nobody was impressed. The Hunters had seen Ares kids before. The Hunters had probably buried Ares kids before.
The Hunters' side: silver. Still. Eating like soldiers who'd been told mealtime was NINE MINUTES and had decided, out of spite, to finish in six.
And between them — frost, tension, and a Demeter kid who I am fairly sure was deliberately growing the Hunters' strawberries WRONG.
Small act of war. Strawberry-based. Extremely camp.
I sat at the Big House table. Where I sit. Because I'm an anomaly and the cabins don't have a slot for hidden transmigrated solar Indian demigod with a dragon heart, and Mr. D decided years ago that the simplest filing system for me was not my problem, sit over there.
Thalia sat alone at the Zeus table. Where she sits. Because the cabin's hers and she's the only one in it and that's just how it is.
And across the frost the Hunters sat in their silver ranks, and at the head of them — bow across her knees, running the string through her fingers the way she does when she's thinking — was Zoe.
I hadn't seen her since the Sybaris fight.
Months. A whole timeskip of months, in which I'd grown two inches and a back I didn't recognise and an archer's draw I was unreasonably proud of. Somewhere in there I'd stopped expecting to see her again, because the Hunters move and the world is large and that's how it works.
And there she was. Sitting in the cold.
And — fine. I'll say it. She was beautiful. Dark hair pulled back tight, copper skin, the kind of face that gets carved into temple walls and outlasts the temple. The kind of face you write wars about. The kind of face that—
Nope. Uh-Uh. Reel it in. Reel it ALL the way in. That is the lieutenant of Artemis. That face has watched empires die. That face would turn me into livestock for the thought I just had.
Reeled in. Locked down. Good.
And then I committed the single greatest blunder of either of my lives.
I decided to greet the lieutenant of Artemis.
I want to be clear that I did not plan it. It happened the way breathing happens. Before any part of my brain that handles diplomacy or self-preservation could file an objection, I lifted a hand.
"Evening, Zoe."
Easy. Genuine. The way you greet someone you're glad to see.
The pavilion didn't stop. Conversation kept going. Nobody at the camper tables even looked up.
But there was a pocket of the room — a silver pocket, eight or nine Hunters wide — where time developed a problem.
Because Zoe answered.
"Good morrow."
Two words. Automatic. Three thousand years of courtesy firing before the part of her that should hate all men on principle could reach the switch.
Good morrow. To me.
And then she heard herself.
And she went very, very still.
So did the rest of the table. For exactly one second.
Then it all went off at once.
"HOLY SHIIIT," said Naomi — full volume, no filter, the whole pavilion's worth of volume — clapping both hands over her own mouth a half-second too late.
Atalanta's eyebrow went up. Just one. But on a face that hadn't changed expression since the Bronze Age, one eyebrow was a fireworks display.
Phoebe stood. So fast the bench scraped. Two Hunters beside her shot up with her — hands going for bows that weren't there, scanning the room for the threat, because their lieutenant had just said something kind to a male and the only explanation the reflex could find was ambush.
And Bianca — new, still in her green cap, twelve hours into the Hunt — just stared. Mouth open. Looking from Zoe to me and back like she was watching someone break a law of physics on her first day at the job.
The entire silver rank was experiencing what I can only describe as computational failure.
Zoe's jaw tightened. She looked at her bowstring. She did not look at me again.
But she'd said it. And we'd both heard it.
And because I am an idiot with a self-preservation instinct that switches off at the worst possible moment, I opened my mouth.
"Don't worry," I told the frozen silver rank. "She says that to all the boys she's about to shoot."
The divide-by-zero broke. One Hunter made a strangled sound.
Naomi got her hands off her mouth. The filter did not come back with them.
"She does NOT," she said — youngest or not the youngest of them anymore, but definitely the fastest mouth, the only one who treats me like a fascinating lab specimen instead of a war crime.
"The whole point is — that in Three thousand years she's been in this Hunt, and the entire recorded history of her greeting boys is: she doesn't. She turned one into a—" she snapped her fingers at the air, "—Phoebe, the Colorado one?"
"Jackalope," said Phoebe, not looking up from her glare.
"A JACKALOPE. And you got good morrow." Naomi planted both elbows on the table and fixed me with the bright unblinking focus of a girl about to take notes. "Do you understand how much data this is? Has she said anything else to you? Made eye contact? Has your divine blood concentration done anything weird, because I have THEORIES—"
"Naomi," said Zoe. Very quietly. The kind of quiet that has a body count.
"Right. Sorry. Continuing observation silently." Naomi did not continue silently. She mouthed the most interesting thing in a DECADE at me across the table and pointed at Zoe with both hands.
Now. Here is where a smart person changes the subject to something safe.
Here is where I, instead, decided to change the subject by bragging.
"Look," I said, spreading my hands, going for casual, going for let's all move past the Zoe thing, "the greeting's not that deep. The Hunters respect skill. Professional courtesy." I leaned back. "I've put in the work. My draw weight's up past anything in the Apollo cabin now. I out-pull every archer at this camp."
I had said the words I out-pull every archer at this camp. Out loud. At a table of nine professional archers, the youngest of whom hunts monsters for a living and the oldest of whom is older than the as a concept.
The pavilion got quiet in a different way than before.
"Every archer," Naomi repeated. Slowly. Delighted. The way you repeat a number someone has just handed you by mistake.
"At this camp," I clarified, hearing the trap close roughly one full second too late. "Camp. Campers. I meant—"
"He out-pulls every archer," said Phoebe, to no one, looking at the ceiling like she was thanking a god.
"I MEANT CAMPERS—"
"Twenty paces," said Zoe.
The whole table turned.
She had not looked up from her bowstring. She said it the way you'd set down a winning card — quietly, with no need to raise her voice, because the room had already gone silent for her. "Afterwards. The range. Thou and I." A pause. "Unless draw weight is all thou hast."
Oh no, said the smart part of my brain, the part that gets outvoted. Oh no, oh no, oh NO.
Draw weight is strength. I had strength in stupid, dragon-hearted quantities. Archery is not strength. Archery is the thing Zoe Nightshade had been doing since before there were clocks — and I'd just challenged her to it in front of her whole unit. By accident. While trying to make a romantic problem go away.
One problem. Now two. One with a scheduled start time.
"...Twenty paces," I heard myself say, because apparently the doofus part had seized the controls and the doofus part does not back down. "Sure. Yeah. Love to."
Naomi made a sound like a kettle. Phoebe was writing something down. Somewhere to my left a Hunter I'd never met was quietly taking bets.
Crack in the armour. Mine, mostly. All mine.
And THEN — because the universe is never satisfied — I felt it from the Zeus table.
A look. The kind you feel land on the side of your face like a thrown pebble.
I turned my head.
Thalia. Alone at her table, watching the whole thing — the greeting, the gremlin, the boast, the challenge — with an expression I couldn't read, which was alarming in itself, because Thalia's expressions are normally extremely parse-able and run the full range from I'm going to electrocute you to I'm going to electrocute you affectionately.
This was a new one.
She caught me looking. Held it one second too long. Then her chin came up — that small defiant tilt she does before a spar — and she said, across the whole pavilion, loud enough to carry:
"After you lose to Nightshade, Sunshine, you and me. Spears. I'll remind you what you're actually good at."
A couple of campers oooohed.
See, said the doofus part, smug, filing it instantly. Competitive. Rivalry. She just wants the rematch. Totally normal.
The smart part of my brain put its head in its hands. Nobody was listening to it anyway.
I ate my dinner. It was the only activity left that couldn't escalate into a duel.
So that was the situation.
In the span of one dinner I had, through no plan and considerable stupidity, signed myself up for an archery contest against a Hunter of Artemis who had been outshooting mortals since before Rome had walls, and a sparring match against a daughter of Zeus who could call down lightning when she was in a good mood.
Between a rock and a hard place is for people whose problems are merely geological. I was between a three-thousand-year-old archer and a thunderstorm with opinions.
I had roughly forty minutes to figure out how to survive both.
I got zero of them. Because that was when I found out about Annabeth.
They gathered us in the rec room — Chiron, Mr. D, the quest survivors, the senior campers. Percy did most of the telling, with Thalia filling in the parts where his voice stopped working and a Hunter named Phoebe correcting the tactical details like a woman reading out a parking ticket.
Westover Hall. A boarding school in Maine. A vice principal named Dr. Thorn who turned out to be a manticore — spike-throwing, three rows of teeth, the whole catalogue. The di Angelo kids caught in the middle. Artemis and the Hunters arriving. A fight on a cliff in the dark.
And Annabeth.
"She went over," Percy said. The room went quiet. "Thorn had her. The cliff. Artemis fired and —" He stopped. "She went over the edge. With the manticore. Into the dark."
"You searched." Not a question. I knew the answer was yes. I needed to hear it anyway.
"Artemis searched," Thalia said. Flat. "No body. She's not —" The word dead sat in the room. Nobody picked it up. "She's gone. Taken, maybe. We don't know."
And here's the thing I wasn't prepared for.
I'd known Annabeth for months. Somewhere in there I'd filed her — privately, in a folder I'd never admit existed — under little sister.
Fourteen. Terrifying. A brain like a war room. She corrected my Greek. She critiqued my footwork. She once spent forty solid minutes explaining why my battle plan was, and I quote, the dumbest thing a person holding a sword has ever said out loud.
Wise and strict and impossible. The way the clever irritating ones become family without asking.
And she'd gone off a cliff in the dark with a monster, and nobody knew if she was breathing.
It hit my chest like a stone going into a lake.
I didn't say anything. I'm not good at the saying part.
Percy was staring at the floor. Thalia had her arms crossed and that crackle along her shoulders that means give me a target.
And Percy said the thing I'd already decided to say.
"We go after her."
"No," said Mr. D, without looking up from his magazine.
Wine Connoisseur, I think. Or Pinochle Monthly.The point is he didn't look up.
Percy turned to him so fast I heard his neck. "What."
"No quest. Annie —"
"Annabeth."
"— is most likely dead. And even if she isn't, we don't send children blundering across the country on a sea-spawn's feelings. Sit down, Peter Johnson."
I've watched a lot of people insult Percy. I've done some of it myself. There's a wide and entertaining range.
This was not that. This was a god waving off Annabeth — alive or dead, blundering,no quest — in the bored voice you'd use to decline a refill.
Percy went white. Then he went the other way.
The green in his eyes flattened, hard, like water before a storm. And his body was already moving. Not for a weapon. Worse. Just forward. Straight at the most powerful being in the room with one thought behind it: make that mouth stop.
I was already moving too.
I'd been half a step behind him. Some part of me had seen it coming from the word Annie. My arm came across his chest and locked. I planted.
And I want to be clear about the physics. Dragon heart. Two months of Demon Centaur. A back Beckendorf personally called impressive.
Percy Jackson, thirteen years old and out of his mind, nearly pulled me along anyway.
Both hands on him now. One on the chest, one on the shoulder, heels skidding on the floorboards. I leaned in and said it low, just for him, under the noise.
"Not him. Not like this. He'll vaporise you, call it a Tuesday, and then there's nobody left to go get her. Breathe."
He shook. The room had gone silent. The lake outside, I swear, leaned in.
Mr. D finally looked up. The mild interest of a man watching ants decide whether to climb his boot. "Listen to the dragon, Peter," he said. "He's the only thing in this room with a survival instinct, and he's the one with a lizard heart."
"Dragon," I said. "Wonderful. Thank you."
Percy stopped shaking, slowly, the green going back to glass. I felt it leave him the way you feel a wave pull back, and I let go one hand, then the other, and stayed close in case the tide came back in.
Chiron stepped in then, because Chiron's entire three-thousand-year job is stepping in.
"The matter is not indifference," he said, with a look at Mr. D that Mr. D ignored. "There are laws. Ancient laws of engagement. A quest requires a prophecy, a prophecy requires the Oracle, and we do not send our people west on grief alone — least of all now."
"Now," I repeated. Because there was a now in there doing a great deal of work.
Chiron and Mr. D exchanged a look.
"Artemis," Chiron said carefully, "has not returned with the Hunters."
"She's hunting a monster," Percy said. "She told us. She went alone."
"Yes," Chiron said. "She did."
And he left it there. Just left it.
Artemis, who never hunts alone, gone off by herself after some great beast. And Chiron and Mr. D both knowing something about it they weren't saying.
I clocked it and filed it under later. The later pile groaned.
"So we just — wait," Percy said. "We do nothing."
"We hold the line," Chiron said gently, "until we know what line we are holding."
Which is the kind of thing that sounds wise and means I can't tell you yet. Percy knew it, and I knew it, and we both hated it, and there was nothing to be done.
So of course they announced capture the flag.
This is also tradition. When the Hunters come to camp, you play capture the flag against the Hunters — because nothing says we are processing a possible death and a missing goddess in a healthy way like arming a few dozen traumatised teenagers and pointing them at each other in the woods after dark.
The Hunters had a winning streak. Nobody would tell me the exact number, and the way people didn't tell me the number suggested the number was embarrassing.
Zoe would lead the Hunters. Of course she would. Lieutenant. Longer at this than most of the gods have been worshipped.
Percy and Thalia would co-captain the campers. Joint command. The two most powerful demigods at camp, both grieving, both furious, both constitutionally incapable of taking an order from the other.
I looked at that arrangement — Zoe on one side, Percy and Thalia at war with each other on the other — and thought, that is going to be a bloodbath, and I want to be in it. I was already rolling my shoulders, the Kavach humming awake under my skin, fire ticking up warm and ready behind my ribs.
"You," said Chiron, "are sitting out."
I stopped mid-shoulder-roll. Turned around very slowly. We'd done this exact choreography before — more than once. I turn around very slowly, Chiron tells me no. It's becoming our thing.
"Sitting out," I said.
"Sitting out."
"Why."
Chiron looked at me with three thousand years of patience and gestured, vaguely, at all of me. "You set things on fire when you are excited. This is a game played in dry woods, in the dark, between people who already want to hurt each other. I am not adding an open flame."
"I have control over the—"
"You have some control over the fire." He said it kindly, which made it worse. "And tonight there are forty campers, two dozen Hunters, a grudge older than this country, and two captains who are one bad call away from electrocuting each other into the creek. The variable I can remove is you. So I am removing it."
"That's not FAIR. I'd be careful."
"I'm sure you would intend to be." He let that sit. Then, with the small dry weight he saves for lines he's about to enjoy: "To be very clear — and I am quoting myself, so there is no confusion later — we do not want demigod crisps in the game today."
"...CRISPS."
"CRISPS."
Chiron continued on- "Sit out. Watch. Restraint is the one weapon you have never once bothered to practise — consider this a free lesson."
EMOTIONAL DAMAGE. CRITICAL HIT.
I sat out.
They put me on the ridge above the creek. Best seat in the house. Front row to my own benching.
And here is what I learned, watching from up there: the campers lost the game before the horn even blew.
Not to the Hunters. To themselves.
"High ground," Thalia said.
"Defensible ground," Percy said.
"That's the SAME—"
"It is NOT the same—"
Forty campers stood in the dark holding their weapons and watching their two captains discover, in real time, that joint command is just an argument with extra steps. Down the field, in the silver dark, Zoe Nightshade did not say a word. She lifted two fingers. Her Hunters melted into the trees.
That was the whole order. Two fingers.
The horn blew.
It went fast after that. It always does.
A camper went down at the treeline — netted, hauled up into the branches, swearing. Then another. No arrows in anybody, nothing lethal, just silver shapes moving through the dark putting people exactly where they wanted them. A Hunter dropped out of a tree, tapped an Ares kid on the helmet with the flat of a knife, and was gone before he finished turning around.
"FLANK — they're on the LEFT—"
"I KNOW they're on the left—"
"THEN MOVE—"
Forty yards out, Zoe came through the middle.
I almost missed it. That was the point. While both flanks screamed and Percy and Thalia argued about the flanks, she walked the centre — unhurried, low, a silver thread through the dark — straight at the camper flag where it hung undefended because both its defenders had left to win the argument.
She didn't run. Running gets seen. She moved like the dark was a coat she'd had tailored.
One hand off the pole. Flag in her fist.
Turn.
Gone.
"THE FLAG—"
"WHERE'S THE—"
"SHE'S GOT THE FLAG—"
Too late. She was already at the creek. Already across it. Silver banner up over the Hunters' line before the campers' shouting had finished arranging itself into actual words.
A horn. The Hunters' horn.
Game.
I checked, later, on the streak. The number was fifty-six. Fifty-six straight. No wonder nobody would say it out loud.
And up on the ridge, hands still pinned under my legs, two thoughts hit in fast succession.
That was the best thing I have ever watched anyone do with a bow and zero arrows.
Then, alarmed: stop that.
A thunderclap of frustration went off down at the Zeus end of the field — close enough to feel in my teeth — and I added: and stop that too.
And then the argument that lost the game found its second wind.
Here's the part nobody wanted to say out loud: the campers hadn't lost to Zoe. They'd lost to Percy.
Thalia had called the play — hold the centre, let the Hunters overcommit to a flank. Percy decided he knew better and charged off alone. Exactly like she'd told him not to.
Which left the centre open. Which is the lane Zoe walked straight through.
Forty campers knew it. Thalia knew it. And Percy, soaked and furious, knew it most of all — which is the worst way to know a thing.
I was already coming down off the ridge. I knew exactly where this went. I'd held this exact storm back once already today.
"You didn't HOLD," Thalia said, low and shaking. "One job. ONE—"
"I almost had their flag—"
"You almost had NOTHING, you charged off ALONE—"
"At least I DID something instead of standing in the middle—"
"That was the PLAN—"
"It was a BAD plan—"
The air went tight. The hair on my arms stood up.
"Guys," I said, closing fast. "Guys—"
"Argh!" Thalia's hand came up before she'd decided to do it — a shock cracked through the air blue and white and Percy left his feet, flew ten feet back, and hit the creek flat on his back.
"—Sorry!" Thalia said, instantly pale. "I didn't—"
The creek answered for him. It stood up.
Percy rose out of the water and the water rose with him, a wall of it curling up over his head, his eyes gone hard and flat and bright, and I was three steps out with my arm already coming up to get between them one more time tonight—
And that's when everything stopped.
Because the Oracle walked out of the trees.
I had never seen her move. Nobody had — that was the whole point of the silence that dropped over the field like a tarp. Chiron told me later that the Oracle had not left the attic of the Big House in his recent memory. Which is to say in a long-long while.
And yet here she was in the woods.
A withered mummified shape in a tie-dyed dress, drifting across the frost-bright grass with green mist curling out of her mouth, while the water hung in the air over Percy's head and forgot to fall.
She walked past Percy. Past Thalia. Past me — and I felt the green mist pass close enough to taste, cold and old and stinking of snakes and dead flowers, every instinct I own screaming do not be on the menu —
And she stopped in front of Zoe.
Zoe, with the captured flag still in one hand. Who went rigid. Who looked, for one instant, not like the lieutenant who'd just dismantled us but like a girl being chosen for something whose shape she could already feel.
The Oracle opened her mouth, and the voice that came out was not one voice but many:
"Five shall go west to the goddess in chains,One shall be lost in the land without rain,The bane of Olympus shows the trail,Campers and Hunters combined prevail,The Titan's curse must one withstand,And one shall perish by a parent's hand."
The green mist curled back into her mouth. She turned, drifted into the trees the way she'd come, and the dark took her.
The water came down on Percy's head. Nobody laughed.
Nobody moved at all.
Six lines, hanging in the cold over a frozen field — forty campers, two dozen Hunters, the captured flag still in Zoe Nightshade's fist.
Nobody breathed.
Five would go west. Two wouldn't come home. The prophecy said so — sideways and certain, the way they always do — and it did not say which two.
I looked at Zoe.
She was already looking west. Out past the torches, past the trees, toward whatever the goddess in chains meant, the flag still hanging from her fist.
And listening to those six lines of destined suffering, one thing was certain.
My winter was about to get dastardly worse.