“You are certain there is no chance the false Ares has found the aegis?” Athena asked again. “As one of the Perseides she would be able to decipher the poem—”

“No—I mean, I don’t know.” Lore’s fear grew fangs at the idea that she hadn’t been as careful as she thought she had. “It could be worse than that. Even as a god, she could be able to wield the aegis on Wrath’s behalf.”

And the flood might be only the first phase of Wrath’s plan to win the Agon.

Lore forced herself to take a deep breath. “I don’t think he has the aegis, at least not yet. We still have time to kill him and end this.”

Maybe a part of her was beginning to believe in the Fates again, and that there was a pattern to this. One that had always called for her and the goddess to finish this together.

Lore turned back toward Morningside Heights, her body straining with the need to move. “So we hunt.”

“So we hunt,” Athena echoed, and followed.

Lore had always taken a certain comfort in the unseen movement of her city.

Even when the streets were empty save for a handful of early-morning cabs, she knew they still had a pulse. That there was water rushing through the pipes below. That trains were pulling their empty cars from station to station. Buried power lines hummed a song that only the cement could hear.

Now the city’s stillness brought a feeling of decay.

From six stories up, Lore had a clearer view of the flooded city blocks and those New Yorkers brave enough to try to wade through waist-high water. City crews were trying to pump it out of the streets, but the rivers—both the East and Hudson—continued to swell. The stagnant water was so deep in some places that the NYPD and Coast Guard were using boats and helicopters to rescue those people who had become stranded, or to deliver supplies.

Lore could no longer feel the city’s heartbeat.

She and Athena had collected scraps of rumors on their slow crawl downtown, braiding them together to create the bigger picture of what the city had become. A historic storm. Mistaken weather predictions. Rising sea levels. A freak convergence of events. Everyone had a different theory.

Emergency workers and city officials were issuing directions over the radio while cell towers were down. Hospitals were being evacuated first as their backup generators failed one by one. Whole sections of Central Park were being turned into relief camps. Red Cross volunteers, along with the National Guard, tried distributing supplies, but as the hours passed, they were overwhelmed by demand.

Convenience and grocery stores were being pillaged by desperate city dwellers, and there was nothing anyone could or would do to stop them. Subway tunnels were inaccessible, and no trains could get in or out of the city. Bridges were closed to traffic. A constant buzz of police and news helicopters flew by overhead, crowding the skies.

New Yorkers were some of the best people in the world, but even Lore recognized they had their limits. The isolation had been instant and devastating.

This is what Wrath wants, Lore thought. To put the city on edge, to strain its resources.

She closed her mind and heart off to the flooded streets, the sight of injuries, the sobbing. She closed her heart off to anything but what needed to be done now.

She and Athena had spent the entirety of the night searching for Wrath’s hunters, continuing into the morning. Around ten o’clock, Lore had spotted a Kadmides lioness near the Empire State Building, recognizing her from the assault on Ithaka House. They had tracked her uptown until she’d disappeared into a small boutique hotel on the Upper East Side. Now they watched the entrance from the roof of the building across the street, waiting for her to finally reemerge.

“You love this city,” Athena said. “It is your pride.”

The goddess all but glowed in the midday sun. The brief respite had given them both the opportunity to dry their shoes and clothes, though it was pointless, given they’d be returning to the floodwaters soon enough.

Lore lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I might have to share it with eight million other people, but it’s always been my least complicated relationship.”

“Hm.” Athena’s presence was oppressive in more ways than one, but as the last few hours had passed, something had shifted. She was brimming with eagerness, or maybe just the simple anxiety of knowing that it was Wednesday morning, and they had less than half a week left to finish this.

“Hold on to what you feel for your home,” Athena told her. “It will never abandon you if you serve it well. It is not so fickle as mortals.”

Castor’s face rose in her mind. Lore stamped it out before it could linger there long.

“That’s probably true,” Lore said, finally. She leaned over the edge of the roof, quickly searching the sidewalk below. “Where is this girl?”

Athena drank the last of her water, tossing the bottle away. Lore sat back on her heels, and, for the first time, began to doubt their plan. They didn’t have time to wait for the lioness to rest or meet with whoever was inside. They needed another lead.

“What was it that your sister said?” she asked. “That there’s a monster in the river? A killer of both gods and mortals?”

“I would not spare any great thought to my sister’s words,” Athena said. “She was unwell, and did not know her own mind.”

There was something about that, though—something Lore couldn’t place.

“There is still much we do not know,” Athena said. “I feel as if the shards of the truth lie scattered before us. Hermes, the imposter’s desire for the aegis, even the false Apollo.” Her gaze sharpened. “Perhaps he is somehow a true god—or yet another god in disguise—and wished to enter the hunt to ascertain some information?”

“He’s Castor,” Lore said, more sure of it now than she had been with him standing before her. “Somehow . . . he’s Castor. He knew too much from my past to be anyone else.”

“Any god would know such things,” Athena said. “They would ingratiate themselves into your life, subtly guiding you onto a path of their choosing, all with you none the wiser. As I said, we appear to you as what you need or desire.”

“Like Hermes,” Lore said softly. The god had become the one person Lore would have trusted in that moment—a compassionate friend far removed from the world of the Agon. He had played to her fear and anguish.

“Perhaps you are correct and it is Castor of the Achillides,” Athena said. “Apollo is gone. The false god possesses his power, though the feeling is strange—I do not understand it. It has no logical explanation.”

Lore shook her head. Thoughts swirled in her, all those countless doubts and coincidences trying to connect like lightning whipping across the sky.

“There is a lesson to be had in even this. Take my counsel on this matter: it is acceptable, even preferable, to be alone,” Athena told her, “when those around you would hold you back or deceive you. The exceptional among mortals will always stand alone, for no one in the world was made for their task. Take confidence in that, and let it be a poison to your fear.”

A small smile curved on the goddess’s face.

“What?” Lore asked.

“I had forgotten what it felt like,” Athena said. “To take on the mantle of Mentor.”