Page 137 of The Gods Order

I huff and rub my palms up and down my face.

“The truth is I’m tired of not knowing. Not just with him. With everything.” I let my hands fall and stare up at the changing sky. “We’re stuck.”

“Stuck? Who’s stuck?”

I chuckle despite her seriousness. I know that was a choppy thought spoken out loud.

“We’re stuck in this…phase of the plan. We’re learning.” I gesture loosely between us, Val, and Meridamus. “I know we are. But damn. It feels like we’re running out of time even though we just got started.”

“We did just get started. It’s day two of the seven days planned,” she says, and my gaze drops to the grass.

“I know that,” I mutter. “I know we’ll wake up tomorrow, start the next phase of training, fail, figure out why we failed, then do it again.”

“That’s literally the point of training.” She snorts. “I feel like there’s a point you’re trying to get to, but you can’t quite put it into words.”

An unflattering sound comes out of me.

“You know me so well,” I say, leaning into her. “Too bad you can’t see inside my brain and piece it together for me.”

“I don’t have to. Your mind and mouth may not be on the same page, but I understand.”

“Do you really? Pray tell if so ’cause I’m just as frustrated with myself now as I am with everything else.”

She shakes her head and smiles as she leans back on her elbows.

“This is what you wanted. You—we—agreed to give Val our all for the next week. That’s the plan. But the plan isn’t meeting the expectations you had in your mind. You came into this thinking that since you put the whole ‘he’s my father and the God of Boundaries’ debacle to rest with your power, everything was supposed to click. It isn’t clicking right away.”

My nose scrunches at how right she is.

“Every time we fail and start again, you look for the clock you can’t see. Each failure feels like a setback rather than progress. So now you feel like we’re crawling toward day seven while everything else is running. You literally just said you always look for the outcome. You had the outcome of these trainings already laid out in your mind and now you feel knocked off balance because it’s not going that way.”

A heavy huff falls from my chest and her snicker makes my eye twitch.

“I’m adding you to my shit list.”

“Yeah, okay.” She laughs, nudging me. “That was your issue. Now you adjust your expectations and everything will be fine. We aren’t running out of time and we’re nowhere near the end. We’re just scraping the middle.”

Gods, she’s annoyingly right.

When I grow up, I want to be as positive as she is.

“You’re infuriatingly right, but I don’t know if adjusting my expectations is enough, Yem. I still feel like I need…”

More…

I sit up slowly as my mind finally races around a plan that satisfies me. The more I think about it, the better it sounds. My grin spreads across my face as I settle all my attention on her. Her smile flips into a frown.

“Uh-oh. I know that look. What? What are you about to do?”

“Something I should’ve already done.”

“Seismet, can you hear me?”

His presence vibrates around my mind and I shimmy in excitement.

“I can. Everything okay? Haven’t killed a Beginning God, have you?”

I snort. “No, not yet. Are the meadow hands already rounding the herd up?”