Castor had a faint smile on his face as he said, “I imagined us stealing it to check if the stories were true and the inside was still stained with his blood.”

“I really was a bad influence on you as a child,” Lore said.

He winked at her. Lore flushed, turning her head away so he wouldn’t see the wash of pink spreading over her face. She lay down again beside him, her fingers brushing where his gripped the cement ledge. Castor shifted his hand, curling his pinkie finger over hers.

“You really thought about that?” she asked quietly. “Us going together?”

Back then, Lore had mostly thought about setting the place on fire and watching the Kadmides flee like rats from their dark booths—probably more than was strictly healthy for a child of ten.

“Stupid, I know,” he said, “considering how little time I had. But you were like this invincible force to me, even then. You were a safe place to hide my hopes.”

Her lips parted and her body flooded with sensation and sudden awareness. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she looked out onto the street again.

“Come on, big guy,” Lore said, pushing up off the roof. “I just hope it’s still there.”

They climbed down the fire escape. Lore kept herself alert, one hand on her small blade, as she crossed the street.

The gate protecting the narrow path to the courtyard behind the old restaurant was blocked by trash bags and fallen scaffolding. Castor broke the padlock on it with ease.

Filthy water swirled around their ankles as they trudged forward. The stench of trash instantly brought her back to this same place, seven years ago.

Lore searched the wet ground, making her way toward the piles of construction supplies in the courtyard. Dread ran a cold knuckle across the back of her neck.

Where is it?

“What’s wrong?” Castor asked.

“The storm drain—” she began, only to notice that the water was slanting down, toward the stack of plywood lined up against the restaurant’s wall. “Can you help me? We need to move these out of the way.”

They made quick work of it together. As they removed the last of the wood, water rushed around her feet, pouring through the rusted iron grate covering the storm drain.

When she tried to lift the cover, it wouldn’t budge.

“If you’re not too busy standing there looking pretty . . . ?” she said, gesturing to Castor.

He pretended to push up his sleeves. The movement only highlighted how his shirt clung to the ridges of his shoulders and chest. A warm thread curled low in her stomach as she watched him bend over to grip the grate.

He grunted, bracing his feet. The muscles of his arms strained as he pulled at it, until, finally, he used his power to heat the rust seal that had formed. Castor set the cover aside with a look of relief. “How did you lift this as a kid?”

“Panic,” Lore said, crouching beside the opening. The force of the water flowing by her nearly pushed her in.

She shifted, sitting at the edge to lower herself into the drain.

“Wait,” Castor said, suddenly serious. “You’re actually going down?”

It wasn’t much of a drop; the darkness made the drain pipe seem much deeper than it actually was. Water roared around her, racing down to meet the bigger drain it connected to. It was fuller than the last time she had done this, but she wasn’t afraid.

Lore looked up, shooting a visibly worried Castor a reassuring look.

Instead of following the path the water took, Lore went the other way, crossing through the waterfall created by the drain. There was a small alcove-like space where the drain met the wall of the restaurant’s basement. She stopped, staring at the dark garbage bag resting there, exactly where she had left it.

There was a sound like whispering, a thousand silky voices talking over one another, urging her forward.

Lore moved, and the world fell silent. Power seemed to burn through the bag, making her fingers spark where she touched it.

“Lore?” Castor called.

She shook herself out of the stupor. “I’m going to pass it up to you.”

Lore fought the rushing water to lift it into his hands. Castor let out a small gasp of surprise as his arms locked and he nearly tipped into the drain.

“What did you put in here with it?” he asked, struggling to draw it the rest of the way up.

“Very funny,” Lore said, accepting Castor’s help as he hauled her out, too.

She sat for a moment, trying to force her breathing to settle.

“I’m serious,” Castor said, giving the shield an accusatory look. “It must weigh close to a thousand pounds. How did you lift it?”

Lore shot him a look of disbelief, reaching over to untie the knot in the garbage bag. She pulled it down to reveal the curve of the round shield and the gold key pattern inlaid into the leather.

Then, with another breath, she pulled at the bag until Medusa’s ferocious face glared back at them from the center of the aegis.

I remember you, it seemed to say.

The first time she looked upon the aegis, Lore had seen a monster made into a god’s trophy. Now, as Lore met Medusa’s sightless eyes, she only saw herself gazing back.

Castor did not seem to be breathing. “You put Zeus’s shield in a trash bag.”

“And hid it in a storm drain,” Lore confirmed.

“You . . .” he began, only to let the words die off with a strangled “How?”

“I told you,” Lore said. “I put it the one place they would never think to look—the same place I had taken it from. Well, on the other side of the wall.”

Lore touched the edge of the aegis, feeling that same buzzing sensation move through her fingers, to her hand, to her heart.

It was hers. How she would use it now was up to her, and her alone.

Castor said nothing, but she felt his eyes on her all the same.

She turned it around so the inner curve of the shield faced them. Feeling along the edge of the soft, worn leather that covered the interior, she found a small catch and pulled it away. There, just as Tidebringer had said, was the inscribed poem, written in the ancient tongue.

Castor let out a soft gasp at the sight of it, pulling closer to read it over her shoulder.

“It’s almost exactly the same—” she began.

Except for the final lines.

“So it shall be until that day,” Lore read, loosely translating them, “when one remains who is remade whole and summons me with smoke of altars to be built by conquest final and fearsome.” She glanced up at his pensive face. “What do you think that means?”

“I have no idea,” Castor said. “But I don’t like the sound of conquest final and fearsome.”

“Summons me . . .” Lore read again. “Athena said the aegis could be used to call down lightning. I wonder if Wrath wants to hedge his bets when it comes to summoning Zeus, and use the shield to call on him to witness whatever he has planned?”

“Maybe,” Castor said. He drew in a long breath.

“What is it?” Lore asked him.

“I don’t know. . . . This has given me even more questions than I had before. I’m still stuck on whether or not there can only be one of us left alive,” Castor said. “And how can a god be ‘remade whole’ if they don’t have access to their full powers even while in their divine form? And is this act—whatever it is—something only one god can perform to win the Agon? Or do all of the surviving gods have to individually perform it to release themselves and the hunters from the Agon?”