“I was busy,” Lore protested. “They seemed fine.”

“How did we get on this subject?” Castor asked, digging out a small package of pretzels and tossing it to Van.

“How did you know I had a hankering for the mini twists?” Van asked, plucking one from the bag.

“Because we’ve been eating like subway rats for the last two days and you had the cheese puffs for breakfast this morning,” Castor said.

“Subway rats at least get the occasional slice of dropped pizza,” Lore said.

“Can we please stop talking about rats?” Van asked, pained.

Lore and the others circled up around the bags, stretching out across the warm roof as the sun finally dipped beneath the horizon.

As Miles went on about the updates he’d gotten laying out Columbia’s delayed start of the school year, Iro caught Lore’s eye.

Okay? Lore mouthed.

Iro nodded. There wasn’t a bruise or scratch on her that Lore could see, and that didn’t seem possible, given the fight she’d likely had in the hotel. Castor must have healed all of them after caring for Lore.

She leaned back and turned her gaze upward, toward the heavens. Without the city’s usual glow, it was easy to make out the stars.

Castor, Miles, and Van went to the edge of the roof, and the new god pointed out all the same constellations Lore had quietly noted to herself.

Her father had taught them to her and Castor, telling them the myths behind each. Like the heroes of old and so many others, she had believed that the only greater honor than kleos was for the gods to place you among the stars.

Sometimes Lore caught herself searching for her family in those lights. When the heaviness of that grief visited her, when she missed them with the kind of pain that made sleep impossible, she had made up her own constellations for each of them.

Lore pressed a hand to her chest, rubbing it. In time, she knew she would see them again, but not now. She’d outrun death so many times she’d stopped counting, but it wasn’t lost on her that the one being who had destroyed her life had also given her a second one.

Iro came and lay beside her, taking in the dark sky. Lore turned to look at her.

“Is everything all right with your line?” Lore asked. “What happened in the hotel?”

“The Odysseides are wounded, but mending,” Iro said. “We lost only one hunter in the fight. Once the Kadmides discovered the tank of sea fire, and that they had been locked in with us, the fighting stopped and they were willing to show us how to smother the flames. It was all so strange, in a way.”

“The Odysseides were lucky to have you there to lead them,” Lore said.

Iro shook her head. “If only it were that simple. I want them to listen to me, but there’s still a small part of me that feels like . . . I am not meant to lead.”

“You are,” Lore told her.

Iro breathed in deeply. “I don’t know how to convince the elders that we have to find a new role to play in this world, but I’m hoping my mother can help. She’s meeting us at the estate in the Loire Valley. We’ll fight for the soul of the Odysseides together.”

“Good,” Lore said. “That’s good, Iro. I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do to help you, but I’ll try.”

Iro scoffed. “What can’t you do?”

“Beat you in sparring?” Lore offered.

“Do not ever forget that,” Iro said. “No matter how many eternities you see.”

“If I’m lucky enough to have that long,” Lore said quietly.

“Do you . . .” Iro seemed uncertain of how to ask her question. “Do you want this for yourself?”

“I don’t know what I want, or what I really feel. Mostly sad, I think,” Lore said. “Maybe that’s not even the right word. It’s like I’m missing everything, and all of you, and I’m still here. I can’t shake this feeling that having Athena’s power will only create more problems. That, no matter how hard I try, I’ll lose touch with my humanity and find myself in the same destructive patterns the old gods fell into.”

Lore didn’t want ages to feel like moments, or for time to lose its meaning for her. She didn’t want to decide how and when to use her power and know she would inevitably make mistakes.

She didn’t want to be alive after all her friends were gone.

“We don’t know what will happen until the hour comes,” Iro said as the others made their way back over to them. “But until then, we’ll stay here together as long as the night will have us.”

Lore nodded, but both of them knew exactly how long that would be. The day would turn at midnight.

They ate and drank as night fell. Finally, Lore told them what had happened in the tunnel, and what Athena had done. She answered what questions she could, even as she had more of her own.

As the hours passed, the night felt dreamlike to her. The flow of conversation and laughter, the faces lit by candlelight. Lore watched, too afraid to look away in case she missed a second of the life she loved.

LORE FELT THE MOMENT the moon neared the summit of its arc through the sky.

Extracting herself from the comfortable warmth of Castor’s arms, she sat up. The others slept around her, sprawled out beneath the stars. Van and Miles with their hands intertwined, Iro with the soft look of dreaming.

She reached for her phone, checking the time. 11:50 p.m.

Lore had promised Miles and the others that she and Castor would wake them up before midnight. Yet as her hand hovered over his shoulder, she couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. She had already faced so many good-byes in her life, all painful, and none of them on her own terms.

Instead, she picked up Miles’s phone where he had left it beside him, made a face, took a photo, and set it as his background. Then, in a draft email, she left him instructions on how to access the untouched bank account Gil—Hermes—had left to her and where to find the keys to the safety-deposit box that held the brownstone’s deed.

“What are you smiling about?”

Castor had been dozing for the last hour, but he must have felt the shift in the world, too. He stood and stretched now, rolling his shoulders back and swinging his arms, as if to remember the feeling of it.

Lore put her finger to her lips, quieting him as she set the phone down beside Miles’s sleeping form. She reached up to take the hand Castor offered to her. They walked, their fingers interlaced, to the other side of the roof.