“Well, it’s still going better than my plan did.”

“You look bored, Mustang!” I shout out with chattering teeth. “Come in for a swim.”

“And get hypothermia? I’m not stupid. I’m in Minerva, not Mars, remember!” She laughs from the shore. “I’d rather warm myself by your castle’s hearth. See?” She points behind us and speaks quickly to three tall boys, one of whom looks as big as an Obsidian—shoulders like a huge thunderhead.

A thick column of smoke rises in the distance.

Finally.

“How the slag did those pricks pass the test?” I ask loudly. “They’ve given our castle away.”

“If we get back, I’m going to drown them in their own piss,” Cassius replies even louder. “Except for Antonia. She’s too pretty for that.”

Our teeth chatter.

The eighteen raiders think House Mars is stupid, horseless, and unprepared.

“Reaper, Handsome, I must leave you now!” Mustang calls to us. “Try not to drown before I return with your standard. You can be my pretty bodyguards. And you can have matching hats! But we’ll have to teach you to think better!”

She gallops away with fifteen riders, the huge Gold reining his horse in beside hers like some sort of colossal shadow. Her followers whoop as they ride. She also leaves us company. Two horsemen with stunpikes. Our farming tools lie in the mud on the shore.

“M-mustang is a s-sexp-p-pot,” Cassius manages to shiver out.

“She’s s-s-scary.”

“R-r-reminds m-m-me of my m-mother.”

“S-s-something is wrong w-with y-ou.”

He nods in agreement. “So … the p-plan is sort of w-w-working.”

If we can get out of the loch without being captured.

Night falls in earnest, and with the darkness come the howls of the wolves in the misty highlands. We begin to sink as our durobags leak air from small stress holes. We might have had a chance to slink away in the night, but the remaining Minervans are not lazily sitting around a fire. They stalk through the darkness so that we never even know where they are. Why can’t they be stupidly sitting in their castle infighting like our fellows?

I’m going to be a slave again. Maybe not a real slave, but it doesn’t matter. I won’t lose. I cannot lose. Eo will have died for nothing if I let myself sink here, if I let my plan fail. Yet I do not know how to beat my enemies. They are clever and the odds are stacked heavily against me. Eo’s dream sinks with me into the darkness of the loch, and I’m about to swim to shore, regardless the outcome, when something spooks the horses.

Then a scream slices across the water.

Fear trickles down my spine as something howls. It is not a wolf. It can’t be what I think it is. Blue light flashes as a stunpike flails in the air. The boy screams another curse. A knife got him. Someone runs to his aid and electricity flares blue again. I see a black wolf standing over one body as another falls. Darkness again. Silence, then the mournful whine of medBots descending from Olympus.

I hear a familiar voice.

“Clear now. Come out of the water, fishies.”

We paddle to shore and pant in the mud. Mild hypothermia has set in. It won’t kill us but my fingers are still slow as mud squishes between them. My body shakes like a drillBoy at work.

“Goblin, you psychopath. Is that you?” I call.

The fourth tribe slides out of the darkness. He’s wearing the pelt of the wolf he killed. It covers his head to his shins. Damn small kid. The gold of his black fatigues is coated in mud. So’s his face.

Cassius crawls from his knees to clasp Sevro in a hug. “Oh, y-you are b-beautiful, Goblin. B-beautiful, beautiful b-b-oy. And smelly.”

“He been nibbling on mushrooms?” Goblin asks over Cassius’s shoulders. “Stop touching me, you Pixie.” He pushes Cassius away, looking embarrassed.

“Did you k-kill these t-two?” I ask, shivering. I bend over them and take off their dry clothing to exchange for my own. I feel pulses.

“No.” Sevro cocks his head at me. “Should I have?”

“W-w-why are you asking m-me like I’m your P-praetor?” I laugh. “You know what’s what.”

Sevro shrugs. “You’re like me.” He looks at Cassius with disdain. “And somehow still like him. So, should I kill them?” he asks casually.

Cassius and I share startled glances.

“N-n-no,” we agree just as the medBots arrive to take the Minervans away. He hurt them badly enough to end their time in the game.

“So what, p-p-pray tell, are you doing w-w-wandering ab-b-bout in a wolfsk-k-kin all the way out h-here?” Cassius asks.

“Roque said you lot would be out east,” Sevro replies curtly. “Plan is still a go, says he.”

“Hav-v-ve the Minervans arrived at the castle?” I ask.

Sevro spits in the grass. The twin moons cast eerie shadows over his dark face.“How the piss should I know? They passed me on the way. But you have no leverage, you know. It is a dead-end plan.” Is Sevro actually helping us? Of course his help begins with listing out our inadequacies. “If the Minervans get to the keep, they will destroy Titus and take our territory.”

“Yes. That is the point,” I say.

“They will also take our standard—”

“That’s a r-risk we have to take.”

“—so I stole the standard from the keep and buried it in the woods.”

I should have thought of that.

“You just stole it. Just like that.” Cassius starts laughing. “Crazy little sod. You’re prime mad. One hundredth pick. Prime mad.”

Sevro looks annoyed. Pleased. But annoyed. “Even then, we cannot guarantee they leave our territory.”

“Your sug-g-g-gestion?” I ask, still shivering but impatient. He could have helped us before.

“Get leverage to get them out after they do their job of taking Titus down, obviously.”

“Yes. Y-yes. I get it.” I shake off the last of my shivers. “But how?”

Sevro shrugs. “We’ll take Minerva’s standard.”

“W-wait,” Cassius says. “You know how to do that?”

Sevro snorts. “What do you think I’ve been doing this whole time, you silky turd? Wanking off in the bushes?”

Cassius and I look at each other.