The voice didn’t belong to any of my guys, and by the time I turned my head, Rome and Coen were on their feet, both of them blocking Cyrus from entering the cave. I stood, unable to see him through their bulk, but I needed answers, so I made to push through Rome and Coen. They both caught each of my hands at the same time.

“We can’t trust any of the gods right now,” Coen said, his voice terse.

I swallowed roughly. “I need to hear what he has to say.”

“You can hear from right there,” Rome countered.

With a loud exhalation, I stopped trying to move forward, and stopped attempting to pull my hands free. If I was being honest, I kind of needed the support anyway. Cyrus was relaxed, standing with ease; his bright eyes observing us all closely in the same calm and unaffected manner that he usually displayed. The disconcerting expression made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t even know why.

“Why are you keeping an eye on Emmy?” I asked.

He shrugged, his white robe lifting and shifting across broad shoulders. “I have a theory about how all of this plays out. I’m not going to ruin that by letting the dweller die.”

That made … no sense. Asshole.

Siret let out a low laugh from behind me, and I knew that my thought had been heard.

For now, I’d accept that Emmy was under Cyrus’s watch, and when he changed his mind about that—which no doubt he would—then we would deal with it accordingly.

“Why are you here, Neutral?” Aros bit out. He had moved close to my back, working with Rome and Coen to close me in.

Cyrus stepped to the side, revealing a crate sitting at the entrance to the cave behind him. It was made from wood and a golden, glittery metal: it was finer and more ornate than any storage crate I’d ever seen.

“I heard about what happened in the Sacred Sands Arena,” he announced. “Thought I would drop off some supplies and information.”

“Information first,” Yael demanded.

He was his usual, bossy self again, and there wasn’t a hint of the worry in his voice that I was sure he felt. I knew him well enough now to see the tension in his tight jaw and the muscles in his arms that were starting to stand out starkly against the dark tan of his skin.

Cyrus’s eyes flashed and his own casual geniality disappeared. “Staviti wants Willa. He is not going to stop until he gets her, and he doesn’t care how many dwellers and sols he has to destroy to make it happen.”

I’d already deduced most of that from what the servers had told me, but hearing it put so bluntly hit me like a punch to the chest.

“What does he want with her?” Rome was practically vibrating next to me, his huge body seeming to swell even larger as his voice boomed out.

Please don’t say kill me. None of the servers had attacked me. No Order Stick had been used on me, but maybe Staviti was waiting to do it himself. Maybe there was something specific he wanted from me before he did it. Maybe he wanted to turn me into a server like my mother, so that he would have a matching pair. No, that couldn’t be it, servers were made from dead dwellers. So what the hell was it?

Cyrus met my gaze full-on, his pupils burning through me with their intensity. “She is too powerful already, and will become the Chaos Beta when she dies. Rau has been trying to rally anarchy against the Creator, and if he gets the power of a Beta, he might just succeed.”

“So … he definitely doesn’t want to kill me then.” I laughed.

Cyrus’s brow wrinkled. “Of course not. If you die right now, you become the Beta.”

That was something I was aware of—but not in the same way as I was aware that I had blonde hair and a general lack of balance. It didn’t quite seem like a fact. It didn’t quite seem real.

“What is he going to do with me if he can’t kill me?” It was worth asking; being prepared was always a good thing.

“He will weaken you. He will make you wish and pray for death—but he will not let you die until you are too weak to cross into Topia.”

Everything inside of me stilled, fear seeming to attack my mind from all sides, prickling along the back of my neck. I fought through it, falling back on my usual coping mechanism.

“He’s not very original for an Original, is he? Torture and death, blah, blah. He needs a new bad-guy rulebook.”

Six sets of eyes locked onto me with matching expressions that I had become used to seeing. They were looking at me as though I was insane. Probably because I had a huge, beaming smile plastered right across my face. Admittedly, smiling in this situation made me pretty damn insane, but if I didn’t smile, I would lose it completely, and losing it wasn’t something I was ready for.

No one spoke; I wasn’t sure any of my guys could get words out from between their clenched jaws, so I tried again. “Maybe one of you should just kill me now? Then I’d be a Beta and it would be too late?”

It had been a random thought, but the moment I said it, it felt like a good plan. A great plan, even. Rome and Coen had let me go at this point, so I could turn and better see all of their faces. No one looked pleased by the plan.

“We’re not killing you,” Siret said. “Even if one of us was capable of doing that to you, Chaos would take you as soon as you became the Beta. That, or Staviti would find a way to end you with one of Crowe’s blades. You’d find yourself in the middle of a war. A war we might not be able to save you from.”

I pushed out my bottom lip, and for once, I allowed my face to show how troubled I was.

“Are you seriously pouting because we won’t kill you?” Rome blinked a few times.

I sniffled, and he threw his hands in the air, before whirling around on Cyrus—except Cyrus was gone, and all that remained was the crate. It looked like he had decided to bail before we started fighting amongst ourselves. My mother had no such qualms: she was opening the lid of the crate to reveal what was inside—from my vantage point, I could only make out the top of a bread loaf.

“Should I prepare some dinner?” she asked, her hands digging in and coming up with a bunch of carrots and a loaf of bread.

Of everything that had happened that sun-cycle, those words were the thing to finally break me. The shield I had erected around my heart shattered, and the pain I’d been trying to hold at bay threatened to burst out of me and send me crumbling under the intensity of it.

“Willa-toy?” Yael noticed, and I swallowed hard before waving him off.

“I’m fine. Just fine. I need to … you know, girl-stuff.” I stumbled toward the entrance of the cave as I spoke, needing to get away from everything. From my mother, who for most of my life would never have asked to prepare dinner. She was dead. Really, truly dead. “Be right back.” I was surprised that I even managed to sound somewhat normal.

Coen called after me. “Don’t go far, Rocks.”

I waved behind me before continuing on, stumbling only a few times as I broke out into the trees again. It was almost completely dark now, but I wasn’t scared. I was already full of grief—there was no room left inside of me for fear.

Hot, salty tears were making a slow trek down my cheeks. I didn’t wipe them away. More would come: the absolute soul-crushing pain that clenched my chest and had shooting pains crashing through my mind was too much. The tears wouldn’t stop for a long time. I had so little in my life. There had hardly ever been anything that I could call my own.

Except my mother.

She had been mine. My mess to clean up; my dweller to complain about. My memory to leave behind …

A damaged piece of my life that Staviti had no right to touch. Especially not before I had a chance to go back and say goodbye. Or go back and say anything. A scream built up in my throat, but I choked it down. If I screamed, there would be five pissed-off gods and one confused server out in the woods with me.

I just couldn’t handle the way the gods played … well god, singular. What fucking right did they have to meddle in the lives of others, to set the rules that everyone else had to live by—which they broke when they felt like it—and hand out punishments to whoever they wanted, for any crime they determined?

It had to stop: there had to be a way to stop it.

“Dweller-baby?”

Coen stood beside me. I had been so worked up that I hadn’t even heard him approach. His large hands cupped my face, and the pain in my chest increased further, the tears a veritable stream that I was almost choking on. I was struggling to breathe as they filled my mouth and nose.

“Baby, please, just stop.”

He was cupping my face, his thumbs wiping the tears away. I lifted my face to him, gasping breaths escaping out of me.

“She’s dead,” I whimpered. “Gone. Stripped away and reduced to a brainless server.”

It was too dark to see his eyes well, but I didn’t miss the flash of fury that carved his face up into hard lines.

“Staviti will pay for that,” he promised. “We’ll make sure that he learns not to mess with us again.”

I shook my head rapidly. “No, you can’t do that. He’s already proven that he can and will punish you five.” They needed to stay as far from Staviti as possible. “Promise me you won’t do anything to him.” I sounded desperate, but I didn’t care.

Coen dropped his hands down from my face, running them across my shoulders and wrapping his fingers around my biceps. “I can’t promise that, Will. He started this, and we aren’t going to let it stand.”

I forced myself onto my tiptoes, a brief flash of warmth brushing through me. Will. He had used my nickname.

I wriggled closer to him, desperate to get my point across. “If I lose you,” I started on a whisper, “any of you five, I won’t survive. My mother …” My voice broke, but I recovered. “My mother is killing me, but I’ll learn to live with it. I can’t lose you guys as well. I can’t lose anyone else.”

He dropped his arms lower before lifting me up, so that he could capture my lips. We were both a little out of control, and the kiss was hard and biting. His power licked across my skin, down my arms and across my waist where he was gripping me. The pain-pleasure thing was usually really enjoyable, but right now I had too much pain inside of me already.

I wrenched my mouth back, a salty taste on my lips as I stared up into his shadowed face. “Pain … I need less pain right now,” I tried to explain, and Coen seemed to understand. He dropped me gently to the floor, before pressing a more gentle kiss to my forehead.

“I’ll get one of the others,” he said, stepping back. I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. “I can’t control my Pain around you tonight, but you shouldn’t be alone. Tonight, you need one of my brothers.”

He didn’t sound upset—which was a huge relief—but I knew that Coen was great at concealing his thoughts. Before I could double-check, though, he was gone, striding back toward the cave.

The agony was building inside of me again, now that I was back on my own, so I started walking. I headed toward the sound of water that I could hear through the trees. I expected Coen to send out Siret or Aros, since they were the happiest of the five brothers, and Aros especially had a power more suited to easing pain. What I didn’t expect was to see the same volatile duo that had been nominated to babysit me the night before. Rome and Yael appeared on either side of me as I walked, their profiles only just visible in my peripheral vision. They didn’t say anything, but kept pace quietly, until we hit the bank of the river that I had been walking toward. It was much bigger than I had expected, and the sound almost roared in my ears, a mist floating up toward my face.

“There must be a waterfall nearby,” Yael commented quietly.

It was the first thing that any of us had said, and the sudden sound of his voice shocked me a little bit. I stared toward the inky spill of water churning a short distance below me, and started to cry. It was gentle at first, but soon began to evolve into heaving sobs that crumbled me into a ball on the damp grass. Arms wrapped around me, holding me together as I lost myself to the grief, pouring it all out into the night until my tears ran dry and there was nothing left to give. I pushed myself away from the tangled embrace that I had ended up in—not because I didn’t want to be close to them, but because my skin was flushed, my face and neck were uncomfortably soaked in tears, and my hair was matted to the damp skin. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to tear the clothes from my body and submerge myself in the cool, churning water before me.

“Do you guys know how to swim?” I asked, taking another step closer to the water and feeling the bank give way a little beneath my feet.

“I don’t see how that question is relevant when we all know that you definitely can’t swim, which would mean that we’re definitely not going swimming right now,” Yael answered cautiously.

I almost smiled at the hint of trepidation riding his tone. My hands were already playing with the hem of my shirt, so it was barely even a conscious decision when I started to lift it. It was halfway up my torso when Rome spoke.

“It might be dark out here, Will, but we can still tell the difference between a black shirt and a whole lot of bare skin.”

“Oh good,” I answered, quickly pulling the shirt all the way off, and then slipping my fingers into the waist of the kickass fighting pants that Siret had made for me. “If you can see me, you can stop me from drowning.”

“Not going swimming.” Yael sounded disgruntled—as though he already knew that he had lost this particular fight.

“Want me to start crying again?” I asked.

He released a heavy breath, and I almost started to feel bad for him, until the breath turned into a curse as I slipped the pants the rest of the way down my legs and stepped out of both my pants and my boots.

“Maybe we should just let her get naked,” Rome said quietly. “It seems to make her feel better.”

Maybe he was right; maybe taking my clothes off did give me some weird sense of freedom. Maybe it was all a by-product of living a smothered, rule-bound existence, or maybe it was just my way of preparing for the inevitable naked accidents that came about as a result of my clumsiness.

“Don’t even pretend you’re doing it for her,” Yael snorted.

I ignored them both, stripping my underwear off and stepping away from the discarded items. I crouched down a little, trying to get closer to the water, but the dirt along the side of the bank wasn’t so much dirt as it was mud, and I didn’t so much walk down the short incline to the water as fall directly on my ass and slide down the short incline to the water.

“Now we actually have to go swimming,” I announced, as Rome and Yael cleared the slope-of-death and landed beside me in what I assumed would have been a lithe and graceful way, if I had been able to see it.

“Are you okay, Rocks?”

I wasn’t even sure which one of them had asked. It was too dark for me to see much of anything clearly, which was probably why neither of them had been able to catch me—the way they usually would have—before I went down.

“I’m fine,” I huffed out, as hands plucked me up and held me out so that I was dangling somewhat. They turned with me so that I ended up further out into the water, but facing back toward the bank. “I just have mud in places that mud should never be,” I admitted, as the hands carefully set me down again.

My feet were lowered into water this time, instead of mud. It was something they appreciated.

Yael chuckled, and judging by the proximity of the sound, he was the one to have picked me up. “We can fix that. Can you stand right here without falling over, drowning, stabbing someone or setting the forest on fire?”

“Not going to make any promises.” I sniffed.

I could hear Rome’s low laugh, then, and I turned to the side to try and make him out. It was dark, but he had been right about what he said before: it wasn’t too dark to be able to tell the difference between our arena clothing and the sudden expanse of bared skin as he swept his shirt off. I swallowed as I stared at what I could make out of the muscles lining his torso, and then I had to quickly blink and look away as he pushed his pants off and threw them toward the bank with his shirt and boots. Yael had taken a step back from me, and was pulling his clothes off, too … and now I was starting to realise why they overreacted every time I got naked.

It was … a lot to take in.

I turned in the water, my heartbeat trying to rip out of my chest, and took a hesitant little step further in.

“I said not to move,” Yael cautioned me, his voice muffled behind the clothing he was pulling off.

“How’d you even see that with a shirt over your face?” I complained. “I barely moved!”

“I just figured you would try as soon as I wasn’t holding you back anymore.”

I grumbled in response, digging my toes into the riverbed. There was a strange combination of soft sand and sharp little rocks beneath my feet. It wasn’t unpleasant, but each small prick of discomfort was enough to keep me feeling alert. It wasn’t the sort of river that you could lay down and doze off in, or the sort of river that you could lazily float through while you basked in the sun …

“You couldn’t do that in any river,” Rome announced, suddenly appearing right in front of me as he spoke to the thoughts in my head. “Why do we need to keep reminding you that you can’t swim?”

“Maybe I can,” I countered, taking a step further into the water again—this brought me directly into contact with him, and before I could stop myself, my hands were on the bare skin of his stomach.

I could feel his muscles contract at my touch, and I could hear the deep breath he pulled in above my head.

“Maybe all beta-sol-dweller-hybrids can swim …” I continued. “Maybe it’s a secret skill of mine, just like disappearing people’s clothes and starting little fires.”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Yael sounded from directly behind me.

I couldn’t see the evidence that they were both completely naked, but Rome was pressed tightly enough to my front for me to be able to feel it, and when Yael’s heat draped across my back, I knew that they had both stripped down. Did they do that for me? A show of naked solidarity?

“You like being naked,” Rome said, answering my thoughts yet again. “And you threatened to cry. We thought this was the safer option.”

I laughed—the sound sudden and light. I hadn’t laughed that easily in a long time, but I found his statement hilarious. There was nothing safe about the three of us standing naked in a river, with mud stuck to places on my body that would need to be washed sooner or later. Nope. This was not my version of a safe scenario. As though catching on to what had set me off, Rome started to chuckle along with me, and then Yael was laughing, too. That made me laugh even harder, until I was slumped against the hard chest in front of me and the laughter naturally died away. It was almost a relief, being able to laugh as much as I had just cried: I tilted my head up to the sky, trying to catch sight of the stars hiding behind what seemed to be a dense cloud cover. I stayed that way while the other two quietened, pulling in deep breath after deep breath. I felt like an open box: my emotions spilling out everywhere. All I wanted was to be submerged in the water, to cool the burn of intensity that seemed to be leaking out of me in a constant stream.

“Can I swim now?” I asked the shadow that loomed over me.

“Yeah, Will.” Rome looped an arm around the small of my back, pulling me up off my feet as he stepped further back into the water.

He drew us out into the middle of the stream and I saw Yael’s shadow following us—I could also still feel him close by. It seemed that they had both forgotten their rivalry, at least for the moment. They were putting aside their own needs to take care of mine. It warmed something inside my chest, and I looped my arms around Rome’s neck, pulling my legs up around his waist. I had intended to wrap myself around him in a hug, but his sudden grunt and the way his hands slipped down to my butt was enough to make me pause and re-evaluate the heat of something huge and hard pressing between my legs.

Whoops.

“Just ignore it,” Rome growled, “or this is going to be a very short … swim.”

“I don’t even want to know what it is,” Yael spoke up, only sounding a little agitated.

“Wouldn’t it be a him?” I asked, before I could stop myself. “I mean … an it has no gender, right? So wouldn’t it be a him? Wait … wouldn’t it be a you? Shouldn’t it be a you? But if it’s not a you, then does it have a name or something to separate itself from you?”

Okay, yes. I was rambling. It wasn’t like I was completely inexperienced; there had been that one boy in my seventeenth life-cycle. But ten clicks of fumbling, pain, and an inevitable disappointment did not compare to me now having a god’s thing pressing right against my thing—

“Please stop,” Yael interrupted my thought. “Firstly, we don’t want to hear about you and a fumbling—soon to be dead—dweller. And please say the words, at least. That was one of the most uncomfortable inner monologues I’ve ever heard from you, Willa-toy. I mean it. Say dic—”

“Whoa!” I tried to twist out and hit him, but I only managed to push my torso back from Rome and create enough momentum to fall backwards. I might have flopped into the water if Yael hadn’t stepped up and caught me between the two of them. “That’s enough of that conversation,” I squeaked, once I was secured.

I didn’t even want to think about what I was now feeling pressed against the base of my spine.

“You’re still thinking about it,” Yael complained softly, his voice in my ear.

“I can’t help it.” I tipped my head back, letting it fall onto his shoulder. “It’s right there. He’s right there? You’re right there? Someone needs to help clear up the personal pronoun issue.”

“It’s a dic—” Yael tried again, but my knee-jerk reaction this time was absolutely no different to the last time.

I swivelled around to hit him again, and somehow ended up unbalancing us all. My sudden, swinging lurch was enough to tip Rome backwards, and I was forced to twist off to the side to avoid falling on top of him. I sank into the river, the cool water rushing over my head and the sharp little rocks biting briefly into my skin. Luckily, the water wasn’t very deep, so my head still broke the surface when I found my feet again, or else this might have been a very different night. Different, because I would have drowned.

I slicked the hair away from my face, glancing back and forth between the two big shadows standing near. Neither of them were reaching for me, even though I could see the bunching of their arms in the darkness—a sure sign that fists were being clenched.

“You really need to stop doing that,” Rome warned me. “We don’t know what might be in these waters, and if I can’t stop you from drowning, I can’t let you in the water.”

“But I can swim,” I protested. “I’m doing it right now! Look!” I spread my arms out, pulling my hands from the water so that they could hear the trickle of water dribbling back to the surface from my fingers.

“You’re standing, Willa-toy.” Yael sounded amused. “That’s not swimming.”

“Let’s agree to disagree.” I took another step backwards, and they matched it with a step forward. “How long do you think the others will let us stay out here?”

“Long enough,” Rome said, avoiding the question.

“I think we’re in the middle of the stream right now—it might not get any deeper,” I noted. “Do you think we could walk a little further up?”

“You want to see the waterfall?” Rome asked.

I nodded, before realising that they couldn’t see me. “Yes.” My voice was faint—smaller than I had intended.

I was standing there naked, in the dark, with two completely bare Abcurses and too much emotion for my rogue-dweller brain to handle. I felt vulnerable. Exposed. More exposed than if I had stripped and paraded my naked self in front of the entire academy and all of the gods. This was a different kind of openness. I was letting them in, inviting them into my grief and asking them to understand something that I couldn’t even explain.

“Of course we can walk to the waterfall.” It was Yael who spoke, his voice soft and understanding.

My mouth dropped open and my stomach flooded with warmth all at once. An understanding Yael? Wow. They really needed to stop surprising me.

“Lead the way, Will.” That had been from Rome.

When had they started using my nickname? I wasn’t sure, but I liked it. A lot. I turned from them and waited until the slow push of water against the back of my legs indicated that they were directly behind me. They weren’t going to go in front, or pick me up, or force me to get out of the water—they were going to follow behind and simply be there if I needed them. I started walking with a small smile curving my lips, and by the time the spray of the waterfall was raining over us, the smile had widened into something full of happiness. I laughed, again, and waded through the stream until the water was almost up to my neck.

“Am I swimming yet?” I called out, trying to be heard over the sound of the waterfall, even though they were both directly beside me.

“No,” Rome answered. I could hear the same low chuckle from him as before. “You’re still standing. Your feet aren’t allowed to be touching the ground.”

I pushed up from the riverbed, looping one arm around Yael’s neck, because it was easier, before using that leverage to pull my other arm up and around Rome’s neck. They helped to tug me up the rest of the way, their hands settling either side of my waist naturally, and I kicked my legs a little through the water.

“There.” I knew I sounded satisfied. “Now I’m swimming.”

“Now you’re hanging,” Rome clarified.

“You know what.” I turned toward his face in the darkness. “This is why I don’t ask your opinions on things.”

He grinned—I could see the white flash of teeth against the tanned skin of his face, and then, suddenly, I couldn’t take it any longer. I needed to be closer.

I needed more.