“No, no—you’re thinking of the wrong place,” Miles was saying. “It’s where we used to play soccer, not at the school. . . .”
The bedroom door shut, making his muffled words inaudible, but his voice still hovered in her mind, ringing clear as a bell.
It’s where we used to play. . . .
Of course. Apodidraskinda. Hide-and-seek. The game they used to play as kids.
“Clever, Cas,” she whispered. His message hadn’t been a challenge at all.
It had been instructions on where, exactly, to find him.
AMAZINGLY, LORE HADN’T REALIZED she’d developed a fear of heights until she found herself three stories off the ground, balanced on a narrow cement ledge of a former warehouse in Tribeca.
“Fantastic plan as always,” she muttered.
Her body shook from the strain of the climb, and her fingertips were raw from clutching the brick. Lore angled her head to the right one last time, making sure she was still outside the nearby camera’s frame.
While the Achillides owned other properties in the city, this building, known as Thetis House, had been the only place she and Castor had ever played apodidraskinda.
When they were kids, Castor had shown her how to approach the building from behind without being spotted by the security cameras and snipers on the roof—a feat that involved sneaking into a service elevator in the separate parking garage to the rear, crawling through a disguised hole in an electrified fence, and using a line of dumpsters as a shield.
After that, there was only the small, death-defying matter of free-climbing the corner of the building using the decorative brickwork as grips and footholds. But there was one significant difference in this climb compared to the last one she had made seven years ago.
Now Lore knew to be afraid—not just of falling, but of what she would find inside the building’s walls.
She drew herself up another four bricks, passing the third-floor balconies and windows. Before she could continue to the next floor, her ears picked up something else. Airy music, accompanied by the clink of crystal and a low rumble of excited voices.
Lore shifted her weight, glancing up, then down, before leaning to her left to peer through the blacked-out windows of the balcony’s door. Someone had left them cracked open.
You have got to be kidding me, she thought.
A party.
Inside the building was like a dream of another, ancient life. Lore caught glimpses of it as the Achillides passed by the balcony. Women glided through the space, their bright silk gowns made in the ancient style of the chiton and peplos. Their glittering jewels were complemented by crowns of laurel leaves, real and gold.
The men mingled with one another around the ample platters of food and cascading towers of champagne and wine glasses, all wearing either a chiton or more modern robes over loose silk trousers.
Parties, the kind that turned into hazy revels of wine and ritual, were common enough—what good, after all, was a glorious destiny if you were never allowed to luxuriate in it? Some involved ceremony, such as the favor-seeking sacrifices to Zeus in the days leading up to the Agon, and more rituals later, after its completion, when it was time to bury the dead.
This was neither.
You’d better be here, Cas, Lore thought, annoyed, though she was surprised to feel a jolt of eagerness, too.
Inside the brick walls were countless rooms—bedrooms, training facilities, conference spaces—and closets and cabinets to get lost in. Officially, Lore had only ever been invited to the third floor, a vast open space filled with weapons racks, and where she had trained with the Achillides young.
While both her mother and father had tried to train her to fight as a child, they had struggled to find the time between the jobs that paid their rent and kept food on the table. Lore had never thought about what it must have cost her father to approach the archon of the Achillides about her training—the true price wouldn’t have been the cash exchanged or favors promised, but the loss of pride that came with needing to ask.
Lore drew in another breath as she finally reached the fourth floor. In the past—and hopefully still—the top story had been used for storage, and with hunters patrolling the roof just above it, it had never had the same level of security as the lower, more accessible levels. That included the not-quite-secret underground entrance from the building immediately to the right of Thetis House.
There was a half-inch ledge that ran from the edge of the building to the closest balcony. Lore held her breath as she shifted the very tips of her toes onto it. Her shoulders and arms screamed in protest, but it was her fingertips she worried about now, numb from the strain of clawing at the brick.
Before she could allow herself to truly think about how incredibly stupid this was, Lore quickly shuffled along the ledge over to the balcony.
The late-morning sun burned against her back. As it had climbed up from the horizon, it had brought the city’s thick, damp heat to a boil, leaving her light-headed. Lore blinked away the sweat dripping into her eyes as she stretched a hand out for the stone railing of the balcony.
She was trembling by the time she hauled herself over it, dropping softly onto its narrow block of concrete. Lore drew herself close to the doors, out of the sight of anyone patrolling above, and knelt there for several moments, waiting for feeling to return to her upper body.
You don’t have time for this, she thought. Get going.
Blackout curtains obscured whatever and whoever might be in the room. Lore pressed her ear to the door’s hot glass to listen for movement, but heard only the party downstairs and her own pounding heartbeat.
The glass panels on the doors were bulletproof, but the alarm attached to them posed the bigger problem. Or would have, if an eleven-year-old Castor had been even slightly more resistant to a ten-year-old Lore’s diabolical strategy of only making bets she knew she’d win.
There was a single loose brick just above the doorframe. Lore used her pocketknife to ease it out and gave silent thanks to that lovesick hunter—the one Castor had spied using this trick to meet the man he’d been forbidden to marry.
Lore pulled out the Wheelz 4 Totz magnet from the pocket of her jeans, unwinding the shoestring she’d taped to it. Carefully, she dropped the magnet down through the opening in the wall and used the string to move it back and forth until she heard the telltale click of the magnet kissing the alarm’s sensor.
Please work, she thought. Please let this one thing be easy.
The alarm sensors had always been magnetic and were triggered when the magnet on the door was separated from the stationary half. It was a simple system that was usually effective, so hopefully they hadn’t upgraded to new laser-based devices.
Lore reached back into her pocket for the thin piece of plastic she’d cut from an empty Pepsi bottle. It took her a moment of maneuvering to wedge it in between the doors and pop the lower, weaker lock. She had to wait for the hunter to pass by overhead again before she inserted the blank bump key she’d bought from her neighborhood hardware store into the dead bolt. Wrapping the brick with the bottom of her T-shirt, she hit the key, forcing it in enough to be able to turn it, and, mercifully unlock the door.
Lore stood off to the side, her back flat against the other door, and pushed it open into the heavy curtain behind it with a satisfied smile. “You predictable idiots.”