The strange thing about life was that some sun-cycles it gave you reasons to rise above your station and change the world around you, and some sun-cycles it just made you want to punch a girl in the face. That sun-cycle was now, and that girl’s name was Emmanuelle, formerly known as Emmy.

“Did you just re-name me to my original name?” Emmanuelle demanded, her pretty brown eyes narrowed as she jumped up from the bed and stalked toward me.

“Did you just read my mind?” I shot back, sounding just as angry as she had sounded, except that I was mostly just scared and pretending not to be.

Ever since Cyrus had stolen my soul-link from the Abcurses and started reading my mind, I had developed a completely rational fear of people suddenly growing the ability to hear my thoughts.

“No, Willa,” Emmy was almost groaning now, her hand rubbing over her face. Her posture was somehow both rigid and exasperated. It made her look like she couldn’t decide whether to slump back onto her bed or shake her fist at me. “You were speaking your thoughts out loud again. I haven’t magically learnt how to read your mind in the last five clicks.”

“You wouldn’t be the first one,” I grumbled. “It’s happened at least twice … that I know of.”

She ignored that statement, her eyes still steadily narrowed, her hands still firmly planted on her hips. “Why are you revoking my nickname?”

“I saw you with that guy.” I could feel the pout that had started to tug down my lip, and I tried to stop it. I tried really hard.

“Are you jealous?” she asked dryly. “You know I’m allowed to have other friends, right?”

“No,” I returned sulkily.

“Seriously?” She tossed her hands up and fell down onto the mattress beside me. “He’s just a friend, Will. I haven’t forgotten Atti already. I’m dealing with my—”

“You’re not.” I jumped up just as quickly as she had sat down, spinning to face her and adopting her earlier posture, my hands against my hips and my eyes narrowed. “You’re keeping yourself so busy you barely even have time to sleep, let alone grieve properly, and you’re hanging out with that friend—what’s his name again?”

“Fred.”

“Stupid name. He’s stupid. You’re hanging out with him way too much. You’re avoiding. It’s bad for you.”

“You’re not my mother.” She jumped up again, and the mattress seemed to squeak a little in protest this time. “You can’t tell me what to do! That’s my job!”

I tried to stop the sigh from escaping, but I was pacing and rubbing my temples and before I knew it, I was sighing like I really was her mother. “You’re acting out,” I reasoned aloud. “I get it. You went through something terrible. You lost—”

“Stop trying to fix it.” Emmy’s voice had turned cold, almost flat.

She wasn’t even looking at me as she walked to the door and pulled it open. She glued her eyes to the wall beyond, gritting out a goodbye from between her teeth before disappearing altogether. I wanted to scream, or pick up the little sundial that she had left behind and violently throw it at the rough, stone wall … but I wouldn’t do either of those things, because my sun-cycles of being immature and throwing fits to deal with my problems were over. If Emmy was going off the rails, I needed to be responsible.

I needed to … stalk her.

Responsibly.

I marched out of the room, swiping the sundial as I went and shoving it deep into my pocket. I could see her blonde hair through the scattering of dwellers that remained in the underground section of the dweller residence, and I hurried to catch up to her. I didn’t bother trying to hide myself from Emmy, because she was striding ahead with far too much purpose for me to think that she would turn around at any point—but I did keep my head down and my expression hidden from the other dwellers. I didn’t need anyone calling out my name and alerting her to the fact that I was maturely keeping an eye on her. Like a responsible sister. Like an adult that doesn’t throw fits. Like a dweller-sol-hybrid who knows how to weigh up pros and cons and save enough tokens to buy a little hut one sun-cycle halfway between Minatsol and Topia.

It didn’t surprise me in the least to spot Rome in the corridor right above where Emmy’s dorm room would have been on the lower floor. Even though I’d barely felt the tug of the soul-link while I had been in the room, moving toward the staircase had been a lesson in agony. We had figured out this trick a few sun-cycles ago, when I needed to speak to Emmy but refused to drag a contingent of Abcurses down into the dweller-dorms with me.

“Why are you walking like that?” Rome asked, running a broad hand through his short hair, his glittering green eyes flicking down my legs before settling on my face.

“Like what?” I asked, as he fell into step beside me.

He was starting to blow my cover a little bit, because every person—dweller or sol—in our immediate vicinity seemed to be covertly sneaking glances at him as though they were too terrified to look him squarely in the eye. I understood the dilemma. He was kind of huge. Looking him in the eye was difficult, because his eyes were so far up.

“Like you’re scared of the ground,” he replied on a snort. He had taken a micro-click too long to answer, which meant that he had probably been entertaining himself with my thoughts again.

More specifically, my thoughts about how tall he was.

He might be tall but everything else about him is utterly unimpressive, I thought, as loudly as I possibly could.

He smiled, cutting his eyes sideways to look at me again. “Watch out, Rocks, you know what we say about multitasking—”

But it was too late.

One click I’d been walking along in perfectly acceptable sleuth-mode, and the next click I was colliding with another body and causing a domino-effect of toppling sols, books, dwellers and trays. The noise was jarring, as was the elbow in my stomach and the knee in my back. I had no idea how anyone had even managed to fall on top of me, since I had been the one to start the momentum and I had started it in a forward direction, but ever since the guys had told me their theory of me being Rau’s Beta, I had been forced to embrace the irrationality of my own personal brand of Chaos.

“We really need to stop meeting like this,” a voice rumbled out from beneath me.

I flinched, because the voice was familiar. I distinctly recalled shouting something embarrassing at it a moon-cycle ago, while attempting to disguise the fact that I had been hiding in a supply closet with five oversized gods and two unconscious sols. I had shouted because Yael had forced me to shout. Because Yael was an Abcurse. And the Abcurses didn’t like it when other boys touched me. Which made the fact that I was currently sprawled over Dru’s chest a particularly awkward fact.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, pulling my head up to try and spot Rome through the mess of tangled bodies. “We really should. For your sake.”

Rome was the only person in the hall still standing. He was up against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest, his foot pushed back against the stone, a small smile on his face as his eyes crawled over the people now struggling to get to their feet. He was enjoying the Chaos. I liked that. It was my Chaos after all. I wasn’t very good at making it happen on command, but I was excellent at making it happen by accident.

Dru started to grab me around the hips to help me up, but I quickly scrambled off him and leapt over the nearest fallen dweller. The mountain-sized sol seemed surprised to see me leaping around, all uninjured and unfazed. That made two of us.

“Can I walk you to class or something?” he asked, jumping to his feet and following me over the dweller.

I took another few steps back, until I felt an arm hook around my front. I glanced down, seeing a big hand settle across my right hip, fingers digging in. A bolt of heat travelled right through my body, and I tensed up and pushed back all at once, eliciting a small grunt from the body behind me.

“No,” I croaked out, before clearing my throat. “No, that’s okay! Thanks, though … Ah … I’ll see you later, alright?”

“Right.” He was frowning, apparently displeased that Rome had interfered, though he really should have been used to it by now. “Sure. See you.”

He turned, and I watched him walk off as the rest of the fallen people managed to find their feet and recover their dropped items. Rome didn’t release my hip until Dru was out of sight, and even then, it was only to spin me around to face him.

“You should—”

“Stop talking to boys,” I interrupted. “Yeah. We’ve had this talk before. It’s irrational. I can’t avoid all males.”

“Just the sols.” He frowned. “And the dwellers. And the gods.”

“So just … all males, then?” I arched a brow at him.

He nodded, once, short and sharp—as though we had just figured out our differences and come to a mutual agreement, and then he took my arm in hand and started to march me in the wrong direction. Wrong, because I was supposed to be following Emmy, who was now out of sight.

“Shit!” I pulled out of Rome’s grip, spinning around and quickly scanning the people again to see if I could spot her.

She wasn’t there, so I started off in the direction I had last seen her. She was going to see the stupid guy with the stupid name. I was sure of it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to stop it once I discovered that I was right, but that was a concern for Future Willa.

“Where are you going?” Rome fell into step beside me, but luckily didn’t grab me to turn me in the other direction again.

Luckily for him, because he would have been too strong for me to resist and it would have forced me to use my super special Beta-God abilities on him … or throw a tantrum. Always have a backup plan.

“I’m following Emmy,” I whispered, hurrying to the end of the passage and then kicking into a run toward the dining hall.

It seemed like the sort of place a guy named Fred would ask to meet a girl, because it was the most obvious and unoriginal meeting place in the whole of the academy, and I didn’t have very high hopes for Fred’s originality or subtlety.

“You’re stalking her,” Rome corrected. “Following is far too innocent a description for the look on your face right now.”

“This is the face I wear when you shouldn’t mess with me because I mean business.”

“Ri-ight.” He drew the word out, but the smile was back. I liked it. I was pretty sure I wanted him to smile all sun-cycle. I was pretty sure I would do almost anything to keep the smile there, just so that I could keep looking at it.

The smile grew.

I mean who needs a fancy smile anyway, I thought, even louder than before. It’s just a smile. Lots of people have smiles. That guy has a smile. That guy has a smile. Oh that guy is—

“Pay attention to where you’re walking,” Rome snapped. “We don’t need another accident happening.”

We were back to the bossing around, apparently. Well, two could play that game.

“How about you pay attention for me, and that way I’m free to multitask and maturely follow my sister around to make sure she’s not doing anything stupid.”

“What level of stupid are we talking here?” Rome asked, ignoring the first part of my bossing. “Are we talking stupid like a Beta who can’t seem to stop talking to other males, forcing me into ‘crusher’ mode, as she so eloquently phrases it? Or is it more like Trickery when he decides that his little amusements are more enjoyable than letting us all know what he’s up to?”

My feet tangled up again, but I managed to right myself before falling. Progress? Damn right it was! I knew Rome was referring to my latest rebellion against the Abcurses, during which I had walked around the halls of Blesswood semi-naked. Only … they didn’t know that I had been walking around semi-naked, because Siret had used his Trickery to mask the fact.

“Coen almost put Siret through a wall!” I burst out. “Are you telling me that is the lesser level of stupid?”

What was he going to do if I didn’t stop talking to other guys? No, Willa! A small part of me was suddenly determined to find out, but that was almost definitely the Chaos part, right?

Rome was nodding, his eyes locked on me. “Yes, he went easy on the bastard. I would have put him through ten walls.”

With a shake of my head, I started walking again, hoping I would forget the last conversation we’d just had. The violence of his words and actions stirred something inside of me, almost as though it was calling to the budding Chaos contained within me. Either that, or I was hungry and my stomach was trying to tell me to eat.

The dining hall was reasonably empty when we entered, which meant that it wasn’t quite lunchtime, yet. There was no sign of Emmy—no, Emmanuelle. She was most definitely not earning her nickname back until she returned to the rule-loving, responsible, solidly-upstanding dweller that I knew her to be.

I could pretend to be mature and rational for a little while, but it definitely wasn’t the best long-term solution. The real me would break through at some stage and go on a rampage to get back at the mature, rational me for locking her up for so long. The real me was a wild animal, and she needed space to … roam. Or hunt. Or sleep on tree branches. Or just space to not be forced into a polite, sol-driven social structure.

Rome let out a small bark of laughter at my side, which I ignored. I actually had a good grip on my ability to shut the Abcurses out of my head … though it only worked when I really wanted them to stay out—which wasn’t right now. We’d already come far too close to losing our soul-link, and I needed the comfort of knowing that the connection was still there.

“Doesn’t look like she’s here,” Rome surmised, his amusement growing with each word. “Where to next?”

My snort of annoyance acted as an answer, until my brain had a chance to catch up. “If you’re not going to be helpful in this situation, maybe you could … like, give me a bit of space. Everyone is staring and you’re ruining my cover.”

The breath knocked out of me as he stilled and locked those unnatural eyes on me. His irises were even more gem-like than usual. They were almost glimmering, and it made me uneasy, for just a moment. I had never been able to afford rare things before. Or glittery things. Not that I was considering purchasing Rome’s eyes … because that would require some kind of underground, organ-harvesting group of eye-collectors and I wasn’t sure I could handle any more secret groups or secret meetings after the dweller uprising.

“That’s the only reason you wouldn’t want my eyes harvested?” Rome grunted, a little disbelieving.

I shrugged. “Like I said: they’re staring. Maybe if you were dissembled into little packages or something, they wouldn’t be staring and I’d be able to carry out a full sleuth mission uninterrupted.”

“The other students aren’t staring at me, Willa.” The blunt words were just so Rome.

He never wasted his breath, and he didn’t particularly like to chase me down the tangents I often entertained. For a long time, I had considered myself a burden to him and his brothers, but we’d reached a turning point recently, after he declared that he wanted to keep the soul-link. I was pretty sure that we were friends now.

Large hands wrapped around me as he pulled me close to his chest. “What I actually said was that you are ours. I’ve claimed ownership of you, Willa Knight.”

I wanted to shove against him. Maybe kick him in the shins … but I knew that either option would be both futile and painful. Instead, I started calling him every curse I could think of, which had his huge chest shaking with laughter in no time.

Far more gently than I would have expected, he pushed me back to arm’s length. “We’re yours also, you know that. This isn’t a one-way thing.”

Oh. My. Gods. He had never said anything like that before. That was almost … sweet.

I let out a shriek as he tossed me over his shoulder and took off. “Don’t get used to it. I have a limited supply of that, and I just used up all of it to get you to stop looking at me like you want to stick a fork in my eye.”

“Put me down, you giant pain in my ass!”

So much for stealth-mode. My shrieking alone was enough to draw the eye of every single dweller in the kitchen area we had just entered. Rome ducked his head so that both of us weren’t clobbered by the large rack of cast iron pans hanging from the ceiling, before he continued to deftly manoeuvre through the room. We broke out into a garden outside, and passed through it, into another one.

“I know where your dweller-Emmy is.” His words penetrated through my annoyance, and mild panic.

“It’s Emmanuelle now,” I said, all snooty like.

“I don’t care,” he replied smoothly. Which didn’t surprise me at all.

The Abcurses weren’t big on giving a crap about dwellers or sols. Which made sense, since they were gods.

Without my link to them, I would die. If I died, I would maybe become a Beta god of Chaos, which would give the current main god of Chaos a lot of power—power that he would most likely use to take over Topia, the world of the gods; and Minatsol, the land of mortals.

“It’d just be better all-round if I didn’t die.” I must have muttered the last part out loud without realising it, because Rome ground to a halt and lowered me down to my feet.

“No dying,” he growled.

I was about to quip something back at him, but it died off when I finally noticed where we were.

“This is where Emmanuelle is?” I took a step closer, the freaky eyes of the god-statues most definitely following me.

Rome shrugged, before he pointed across to a sol hurrying toward the Sacred Sands arena. “I’m sure enough that I would bet that guy’s life on it.”

I followed the sol for a beat, before turning back to Rome. “So you have no idea, and you aren’t sure at all.”

He tilted his head to the side and hit me with that smile again. The one which should have been banned anywhere near a Chaos sol, or Chaos dweller … or whatever I was now. The point was, if he didn’t stop looking at me like that, Chaos was going to start happening. That was the only explanation for the tight pressure suddenly assaulting my chest.

Just when I was sure I couldn’t take another moment of it, Rome gently shoved me along the path, and we were walking beneath the statues of the gods outside the temple. Just like the last time, I could feel prickling across the back of my neck, and I had the same sensation of being watched. One of the statues was … paying attention. My first guess would have been Rau, the Chaos god, but he wasn’t the only god who was now paying attention. It could have been Abil, the Trickery god—and the father to my Abcurses—or even Staviti. Sure, Staviti was the great Creator and probably had a really busy life making new flowers and other things, but for some reason I felt like he might have been very interested in all of this new stuff going on between both of the worlds.

Cyrus. His name brushed across my mind, and with a heavy shove, I locked it back down again. The Neutral God … was an enigma, and I didn’t have time for one of those.

Rome led me along the same path we had taken to the secret dweller meeting last time, and we were both silent as we descended the stairs. This time I managed to stay on my feet, which was a bonus. Low voices filtered through to me the moment I landed on the lower level, stepping out into the darkness.

“How did you know she was here?” I murmured, knowing his god-hearing would pick it up.

His voice was as low as mine, his breath brushing across my cheek as he leaned down. “We’ve been keeping an eye on her for you, she’s been seen around the temple a few times.”

My heart warmed at those words, because I knew how much they would have hated ‘lowering’ themselves to spying on a dweller.

He then straightened, and his hand wrapped around mine, lacing our fingers together as he started leading me. Ever since I had been hit with the curse from Rau, my senses had become heightened, and when Aros and Coen had stirred the Chaos into exploding out of me, my senses had improved even more. This meant that I could see where we were going just fine, but there was really no need to tell Rome that. Most probably he held my hand so that he wouldn’t trip and fall over. I was the one doing the guiding, so I needed to keep holding his hand just in case he had any accidents.

Once I had finished reasoning that out in my head, I felt much better about tightening my grip and clinging to his strength.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but judging by the direction of the voices, whoever was down here was back in the same secret meeting place that everyone seemed to use. Rome and I squeezed in behind the shelves that we had used to spy on the previous secret dweller meeting; he was forced to contort himself into a painful-looking shape to fit inside, but he managed it. Standing on my tiptoes, I found a nice little gap to peek through, and if Rome hadn’t managed to slip his free hand over my mouth, the gasp which I released when I saw the scene would have definitely blown our cover.

It was Emmy. And Fred. And Scrawny Dweller Number Two. Plus Slimy Dweller Number Three.

Emmy plus three guys? What the hell was happening? What were the worlds coming to?

Okay, so they weren’t having four-way sex or anything, and I was in no way curious about how she was going to manage sex with three guys at all. I mean, why would I need to know that?

My eyes strayed to Rome and my heart began to perform a complicated pattern of stopping and starting. He was so huge he was like three guys all on his own. Which made sense, since you don’t get to be the god of strength at a hundred pounds soaking wet. Which was definitely all that Scrawny Dweller Number Two was.

He was barely as tall as Emmanuelle—my best friend and sister who needed a serious lesson in how to pick a rebound guy. Or guys. Not one of her companions could hold a candle to Atti, which, come to think about it, was probably the reason she chose them.

Another sliver of my heart broke for her. I’d been losing slivers at a pretty frequent rate as I watched her grieve over the past moon-cycle—or not grieve, which was even worse.

She was shedding pieces of herself in her quest to run from the pain, and I needed all the pieces of Emmy. I needed her to be whole and bossy and smart. We were a team and I would not let her take herself out of the game like this.

“Didn’t think the dweller had it in her.” Rome whispered this in my ear and I found myself pressing closer to him, soaking up his warmth and the way our soul-link purred like a kitten at the contact. “Do you know who those three sols are?”

I was immediately paying attention—well, most of me, bar that small part still pressing against Rome. “Who?” I breathed.

“You’ve got the sons of three very powerful sols right there. Their fathers are all competing for the position of Vice Chancellor here at Blesswood, while the current Vice Chancellor takes over the role of Chancellor.”

Sols? Those creepy slimeballs were sols? I should have known. Only a sol would have a name like Fred.

Rome’s words reminded me that our school was in the midst of a change. The fight where Emmy had lost her love was the same fight that had seen the end of the last Chancellor of Blesswood. Afterwards, there had been pure chaos—much to Rau’s delight, I was sure.

In the end, Yael had used his Persuasion to calm the fighting down, but now there was a significant race to bring new leadership to the top academy in Minatsol, which of course meant that every sol with an ounce of power was crawling out of their rat hole, and had entered their name into the race.

They all wanted a chance. They all thought that running Blesswood would increase their own chances of becoming a god when they died. Or grooming future gods and thereby receiving power for their family in that way.

“When do they make the final decision?” My voice got a little loud, and I thought I saw Emmy pause, but then she just went back to quietly chatting with one of the trio. The other two were pressed very close to her. Actually, all four were standing in a tight circle, and too many parts of their bodies were touching. A lot of touching.

Before Rome could answer, I let out a great huff, and pushed my way free from the bookshelves.

This crap with Emmy had gone on long enough.