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Even if I could have spoken, I wasn’t sure I’d know what to say. It may not have been the most comforting of advice, but I wanted togentlypoint out to Bullet that the weakness might not just be from lack of sleep. That he may need to come to terms with having less strength and energy, but that it was worth it because he was alive.
“I have a good song for this,” Bullet mumbled. I glanced at him, waiting for him to continue and surprised to find him looking almost… frustrated? It was a very un-Bullet-like action. Why would he be frustrated about singing? He loved to sing. “Agreatsong,” he reiterated.
I grabbed his hand, clumsily tracing the lettersS-I-N-Gon his palm.
“I will,” Bullet replied petulantly. “Soon. I just need to think about it a little more. I need to… just make sure I have the right lyrics.”
I forced my muscles not to tense, frantically shutting down my rising concern before Grace could pick up on it, while the same three words looped around my brain on repeat.
This isn’t normal.
Bullet wasn’t acting normally. Then again, he’d come back from the brink of death. Grace had dragged him back from the brink of death.
What did that mean for both of them? What had I really been asking of her when she’d followed the bond to him?
My muscles burned with a frustrated rage I had nowhere to direct. I protected people; that was what I did; that was who I was. Whole networks and systems existed in Milton to look after Keres daimons I barely even knew, and yet when it came to the two people I cared about the most, I may very well have failed more spectacularly than I’d ever failed at anything.
Bullet stayed silent, shoulder leaning heavily on my bicep as we trudged on, Grace now sandwiched between Riot and Dare in front of us. Occasionally, a vehicle would race past, and we’d turn off our flashlights and hide under the cover of the trees, but it wasn’t frequent. Had people already gotten to where they wanted to go in the past few days? Did they not have access to gas to travel? For the millionth time, I wondered how this was all going to end. Even if we convinced Nyx to lift the darkness, I wasn’t sure Gaiacouldundo whatever it was she’d done. By the way everything had shut off, we assumed she’d destroyed all the cables and pipes in the earth, and I doubted she could undo that destruction even if she wanted to.
Was this our permanent new reality?
I swallowed down the panic that arose every time I contemplated that idea. I relied heavily on technology just tocommunicate. Life without it was a more frightening prospect than I wanted to acknowledge.
The sealed road eventually turned to orange dirt, the grass lining the road becoming coarse brush as we headed further inland, closer to the temple site.
Bullet shuddered, his grip on my arm tightening. “That is… potent. Can you feel it in the air? There is a lot of power here.”
Grace glanced back at him over her shoulder, too far ahead to hear his words, but giving him a knowing look as though she could sense it too.
“I don’t think we’ll be alone,” Bullet added under his breath. “It’s a pilgrimage site. There’s a very good chance that agathos will be traveling here to ask for guidance or hoping they can find some kind of sanctuary on ancient soil.”
I nodded, hearing the unspoken warning. Keep your guard up.
Hopefully, if there were any agathos, they were of the Foster and Orion variety, rather than the Bellamy family variety.
We passed through an empty parking lot, the silence of this place deafeningly loud. Riot, Grace, and Dare slowed down, allowing Bullet and I to catch up so we could enter the ancient site as a group.
“It’s too quiet,” Dare murmured, looking around anxiously as we walked through a dark, tree-lined path to get to the archaeological remains.
“It’d be convenient for us if everyone was just avoiding temples after Grace’s light show,” Bullet chuckled, the sound unusually loud in the stifling quiet. “But historically, we have not been that lucky.”
Grace hummed quietly. “The perils of being bonded to a Eutychian agathos, I’m afraid.”
I was pretty sure all four of us were thinking that Grace being a luck-bearing agathos was the smallest burden she had to bear, but none of us said anything.
The murmur of voices reached us as we continued on the avenue and we all stiffened. I dragged Bullet forward to stand with the others, gesturing at them to turn off the flashlights before pointing at myself and then the direction the sounds were coming from.
“You can’t go alone!” Grace hissed.
“You can’t fight an agathos and Bullet is in no shape to fight at all,” Dare said placatingly. “None of us want to leave you undefended for even a moment, and Wild knows what he’s doing.”
I gave Grace’s arm a quick squeeze, sending reassurance at her through the bond as I stalked into the darkness, following the noise while keeping my eyes out for any signs of trouble. The site was bigger than I thought, the hum of conversation coming from the remnants of a theater. Pressing my body behind a column, I stood there for a few minutes, assessing what I was seeing and trying to decide whether or not they were a threat.
They were definitely agathos. They had a few torches and candles burning, and the unnaturally pale eyes were obvious even from here. The stage area of the theater had been set up with makeshift housing—a few tents, but also a lot of rudimentary shelters made of blankets. They spoke in hushed tones, bustling around, making food and boiling water on a camp stove, working as a community unlike everyone else we’d seen so far since the world went dark.
That didn’t necessarily bode well for us. Not if they were the kind of agathos community Grace had been raised in. As tempting as it was to storm in there and beg, borrow or steal hot food and a place to rest, if we could get past them without attracting attention, that would be the better option.
I snuck back, finding the others where I’d left them.
