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I hadn’t believed him. Not truly. But somewhere between that bed and this dust-choked room, I had decided I would act as though I did. That I would carry on, and be of use, and save the woman who had saved me. To let the rest of it lie quiet for now, if I could not yet set it down entirely. It was the only way I knew to honor what she had done. The only way I could think of to keep from becoming the ruin that grief had made of my father.

“It reminds you of them, doesn’t it?” Aster’s voice came softly from the doorway. “Him and Alex.” It wasn’t really a question.

“It does.” I closed my fingers around the stones. “I think a love like that frightened my brother more than any army ever could. After what it did to our father… I think it became the one thing in all the world Atlas was truly afraid of. Wanting something that badly. Standing to lose it.” I let out a slow breath. “So, I wasn’t surprised to hear from you that he fought it.”

“For three years, he fought it, but he still searched for her, regardless. Oh, he would try to convince me that it was solely to use her to see if she was the key to opening the Rift, but I knew it was all bullshit. He was too obsessed with her, and not with just snatching her up but with her safety. Refusing to let others hunt for her, in case something went wrong.” Aster paused as if seeing the memory, “I remember what he was like whenever a new report came in, a new sighting of her. The look on his face, as if this would finally be the day he captured her. And thank fuck he finally pulled his head out of his arse when he finally did.”

A startled laugh escaped me. “Another of your charming earth-sayings?”

“You bet.” He grinned. “Picked up all the best ones over there.”

I shook my head, chuckling despite the weight of the room, despite all of it.

“Enough reminiscing, we will have plenty of time for that when she is cured of this darkness,” I said and crossed back to him with the two stones cupped in my palm. He held out one great hand. I pressed a stone into it, and he closed his fingers over mine, crushing it between our palms.

The chamber dissolved around us.

When the Way Stone crumbled to dust between our hands, the world snapped back into being. Wet heat struck my face, and I opened my eyes to find the incredible and admittedly intimidating sight looming ahead of me.

The Gorgon King’s fortress rose up before us.

Towers of dark stone twisted toward the sky, their walls wrapped in flowering vines and thick, black-rooted creepers. Massive roots coiled through the stonework like veins through flesh. Strange silver flowers bloomed from cracks in the battlements, their petals opening and closing in slow breaths, despite there being no wind at all to move them.

The whole place felt alive. Not in the warm and comforting way of a forest, but in the way of a thing that watches you from the dark and weighs up, very carefully, whether you might be worth the trouble of eating.

And given that I am irresistible to absolutely everyone, I was almost certainly on the menu.

“Cheerful place,” I muttered, brushing the dust off my hand.

Beside me, Aster finally released his death-grip on my arm, his face gone a sickly grey.

“Hate…. Fucking…. Portals,” he muttered, smacking his lips together like a man deciding whether to be sick.

“Not overly fond of them myself,” I admitted, as my stomach felt as though it had been left behind in Theïkós.

“We’ve only the one stone left now. So, whatever happens in there…”

“We come out with Theron,” Aster finished. “So. How are we doing this exactly?”

“I reckon a good old-fashioned snatch and grab,” I murmured. As for Aster, he shrugged his big shoulders and said,

“Works for me.”

We came in low, off the road, picking our way through the strange wet jungle that crowded the fortress on every side. Past trees that wept sap the colour of old blood, through undergrowth that seemed to lean in toward us as we passed. We found our cover at last in the gap of a crumbling outer wall, half-buried in flowering vines, with a clear line of sight to the gates and the courtyard beyond.

I crouched there, studying the fortress, the guards, the rhythm of their patrols. Aster crouched beside me, doing the very same. For all his complaining and his terrible jokes, the Minotaur had been bred for the battlefield every bit as much as I had. As much as Atlas had in leading armies into it.

“…fifty-eight, fifty-nine.” I pointed toward the front wall. “That one’s back is turned for exactly fifty-nine seconds at a stretch.”

Aster followed my finger.

“Hm.”

“Second guard changes direction fifteen seconds after.”

“Yeah.”

“The third vanishes behind that tower every forty seconds. Like clockwork.”