Around me the others were trying to figure out a way past the Shadows in the boneyard.

“Even if you figure out a way to hide your marks,” Greta interrupted, sneering, “and you won’t because those marks are fresh, Hunter was the last—”

“Bitch,” he murmured.

“—it’ll be too late for Warren.” She bared her teeth, and it was hard to see where kindness had ever lived on that face. “You’ll never get to him in time.”

It was the last thing I heard for a while. The questioning and confused babble continued ruminating up and down the hall, and the voices laughing and groaning in my head fell into the background. I tuned them all out, but at length became aware of a dull but insistent tapping. I pried one eye open to find Tekla pointing at me from the other side of the glass again. Only I got it this time. She wasn’t pointing at me. She was pointing at the glass.

“You’re all lost,” Greta was screeching from her position across from me on the floor. “Hear me, Archer? They’ve already won!”

There was the report of flesh meeting flesh, a palm arching across Greta’s face. Then Chandra’s voice, as angry as I’d ever heard it. “Tell us where he is!”

She cackled. “I won’t, no matter what you do, and I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I did my job! You’re all marked! Do you hear me? Targets! You’ll never even reach his kill spot.”

Warren stirred inside me. He was alive, and if I wanted him to stay that way, I knew what I had to do. As my fingers searched, found my conduit sprawled next to me, the tapping on the window ceased. Forcing myself to keep my hand steady, I pointed it.

“Hey, Greta,” I said, and watched the satisfaction fall from her face as she turned to find herself staring down the pointed shaft of my arrow. “I’m not marked.”

I shifted and shot fluidly, and though it was the first time I’d fired this weapon, it was as if I’d been born to the motion. Greta shrieked and ducked, though she’d be lying in her own kill spot had I still been pointing it at her. Instead, the arrow cleaved through the window of Tekla’s cell, shattering the glass into hundreds of tiny pieces that fell like diamonds onto the hallway floor. Tekla’s face appeared a moment later, but her voice came first.

Warren’s voice.

“Come to Paradise, the Hall of the Slain, also the dwelling of those who never die. Where virgin warriors guard the gates of eternity. The palace with five hundred and fifty doors. Where dead warriors feast, where gods abide.”

“What is he saying?” I heard someone ask.

“Valhalla,” I said, and sunk back to the ground. “They’re holding him at Valhalla.” And I doubled over as Tekla cried out, Warren’s skull splitting inside of me with a blow meant to silence him forever.

25

Tekla, it seemed, had always spoken for the others. Before Stryker’s death, and Greta’s betrayal, she had been able to see, via flashes and images, when an agent of Light was walking into danger. It had been a marvelous, if disconcerting, gift. It was during one of these moments, Micah surmised, that Greta must have bound herself to Tekla, and thus began the downward spiral of Zodiac troop 175, and of Tekla herself.

The past six months had stripped her of her voice, and like a rewound tape, she began spouting all she’d seen while locked in her five-by-eight cell. It would take a while to catch up, but time was something we didn’t have.

Warren’s voice had fallen quiet inside me, and I didn’t need a psychic to tell me that Ajax was behind the stillness. I felt it as clearly as if I possessed the Sight. He’d silenced Warren to try and keep us from tracking him further, but hadn’t killed him outright. No, that was still the carrot dangling on a stick.

Which meant there was only one thing to do.

“Find a way to get me up the chute without frying,” I told Hunter, “and I can find Warren.”

A short argument ensued between those who thought I should stay put versus those who believed I shouldn’t, but ultimately what it came down to was this: the others were marked, and I wasn’t. I was linked to Warren, and they weren’t. And, finally, if I really was Warren’s beloved Kairos, I couldn’t be killed today, or anytime soon.

But if he was wrong? I thought as I headed back to my mother’s room in the troop’s barracks. If I wasn’t the person they all thought I was? Well, then they’d need Warren far more than they needed me. He was the troop leader. He could train the next generation. He could find the true Kairos.

But that didn’t mean I’d go down without a fight.

Sliding open the closet doors, I decided my mother had the fiercest wardrobe ever. Literally. Arranged on evenly spaced hangers were tops, slacks, and single-piece stretch suits in varying weights of silk, spandex, and leather. The uniformity came in two colors only, black or charcoal gray, with a hand that shimmered at the touch. This material, Warren had explained, would not burn through at the flaring of a glyph.

“Olivia would tremble with jealousy,” I murmured, running my fingers over the fine material. I wasn’t exactly steady myself, though that was probably nerves rather than reverence. After all, when my mother suited up, she at least had an idea of what she’d been about to face. I simply assumed I was facing the worst.

With the thought that this ensemble would be featured on the next series of Light and Shadow comics, I picked a long-sleeved V-neck T-shirt and fitted cargoes. Though comfortable enough, they fit me like they’d been sprayed on. I didn’t recall my mother being quite as curvy as Olivia, but then I didn’t remember her ever wearing a leather bra either, and here it was.

I dressed and looked at myself in the mirror. Other than my hair, which floated around me like a wavy bleached cloud, I looked like a shadow. A smudge on reality. Fitting, I thought, since that’s what I’d be.

Standing before the small square mirror, I slicked back my hair and rolled it into a tight club. I found a pair of chopstick combs, similar to the ones the Chinese used to secure their own glossy locks but sharper and steel-tipped, more lethal. A most fashionable backup weapon, I thought, studying myself from the side. The street fighter in me approved.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, pocketing my conduit. There was only one item missing from my supernatural arsenal. Unfortunately, I had to go to Greta’s holding cell to get it.

You had to give it to her, I thought, peering through the cell’s window. For a woman facing imminent death, she was admirably composed. Though chained to a concrete floor, hands and feet bound in front of her, she sat with her back straight against the stone wall, head back, eyes closed. She even looked relieved. Like she’d been performing the same play over and over and had been longing for some new dialogue. With a crisp turn of the key in the lock, I entered the room, intending to give it to her.

She didn’t look up.

“How’s it feel, Greta?” I asked, closing the door behind me, my voice reporting hollowly off the stone walls. “To be helpless, locked up, wondering what’s to become of you?”

“You should know.” She motioned with one hand, chains clanking as she indicated the entire sanctuary. “Your cell is just a little bigger.”

I advanced upon her, showing her that even a confined place could shrink upon itself. She just leaned her head back and closed her eyes again. “Tell me, what was it like knowing you were sending Warren to his death?”

“What, you’re the psychologist now?” She sneered. “Savior of the Zodiac didn’t fit quite right?”

I shrugged. “Just wondering.”

She pulled her knees into her chest. “Keep wondering.”

I shifted to lean against the wall, crossing my legs at the ankles. “You should tell someone, don’t you think? I mean, otherwise your deeds won’t get written down. You’ll be just one more stiff in the body count at the end of a comic book.”