The walk to the crystal was longer than it should have been.

Twenty-four meters of marble. He counted them. The other students had walked it without counting. Dante counted because counting was the only thing his brain would still do reliably.

The crystal in front of him pulsed with the residue of Leon's light. Slowly fading. Faceted. Patient.

He stopped in front of it. The half-circle behind him was now only him. The line of the Awakened across the hall was nineteen tall, glowing, transformed teenagers, most of them looking at him with a mix of pity and the small private relief of someone who has already had their turn.

Grace was at the back of that line. She had not stopped looking at him since he'd been called.

(Please.)

(Please let it work. Please let me be compatible with anyone. *Anyone*. Even one of the small ones. Even rank one. Just — please. Let something happen.)

He raised his hand.

Set it on the crystal.

A second.

Two.

Three.

Nothing.

The crystal under his palm was cool. Inert. None of the colors swirled. The marble under his feet did not crack. The air did not fold. No god emerged from anywhere.

The hall remained exactly as quiet as it had been a second before.

Five seconds.

Ten.

He didn't move. He couldn't move. His hand stayed on the crystal because if he took it away it would mean acknowledging that the crystal had said no.

(It hasn't decided yet. It's still deciding. It took a second for some of the others. It'll come. It'll —)

Twenty seconds.

The Awakened across the hall began to shift uncomfortably. Conrad coughed. Diana was looking at the marble in front of her. Sophia was looking at Solis.

(Why isn't it working.)

(*Why isn't it working.*)

The five gods behind the throne were looking at each other, and the look they were exchanging was new. Not anger this time. *Recognition*.

Aneos tilted her head. Her voice when she spoke was no longer sweet.

"Brother. *Go talk to him.*"

Solis did not answer her.

He stood. Stepped down off the dais again. Walked across the floor toward Dante, and this walk was different from the one he had walked toward Leon. Slower. More careful. The kind of walk a man uses when he is approaching something he has decided to deal with quickly and quietly so as not to disturb the more important business of the day.

He stopped in front of Dante.

Bent at the waist — not a kneel; the full kneel was reserved — and brought his enormous face down to roughly Dante's height.

The eyes up close were *unbearable*. Twin small suns. Dante felt the moisture in his own eyes start to pull.

"What is your name, child."

"D-Dante."

"*Dante.*" Solis tested the word. Then his attention shifted slightly, and he extended one massive index finger and laid it, very gently, against the center of Dante's chest. Just over the heart. Just over the folded note that Dante could feel even now, pressed between two layers of fabric that hadn't been there an hour ago and yet somehow held it anyway.

Solis closed his eyes.

The contact lasted maybe two seconds.

When his eyes opened, the expression on his face was one Dante would carry for a long time.

It wasn't anger. It wasn't disappointment, even.

It was *recognition*. Of a category. The face of a man who has lifted the lid of a familiar box and found a familiar disappointment inside. And under the recognition, fainter, almost masked but not quite — *distaste*. The small old distaste of a man who has met this kind of thing before and would have preferred not to meet it again.

"Ah," Solis said.

He withdrew his finger. Straightened, slowly. Turned half a turn, so that he was speaking to the Awakened and the gods in the same gesture. His voice when he spoke was warm again. Carefully warm. The kind of warmth you used when you wanted no fuss.

"This child is what we call a *Tainted Soul*."

Behind the throne, Selene's veil moved very sharply.

Kidora went still.

Gurtur's old face did something Dante couldn't read.

(Tainted —)

(*Tainted what.*)

(*What does that mean.*)

Solis went on as if he hadn't seen any of it.

"It happens, on rare occasions, that a soul is born — or, in this case, summoned — that does not resonate with any of the Heptarchy. The soul has the shape of a soul. It feels, it thinks, it suffers. But it does not hold a Blessing. The crystal cannot find a god to call for it, because no god calls back. It is not a punishment. It is simply —" he lifted one hand, palm up, the gesture of a man explaining weather, "— how the world is arranged. Some doors do not open."

(*No god calls back.*)

(I — what does that even — what did I do — what's *wrong* with me —)

(There were *twenty* of us. *Twenty*. And I'm the one. I'm the one the crystal looked at and went *no*.)

Dante's throat closed around something he didn't have a name for. His hands were trembling. He pressed them flat against his thighs to stop them. They didn't stop.

He looked up at Solis.

The god was looking at him with something that was meant to be kindness and wasn't.

"You have my deepest sympathies, child. Yours is a small and sorrowful inheritance. You will need to rely on the protection of your companions, who, as you have seen, have been generously equipped. I am sure they will look after you."

(Sympathies.)

(He's *sorry* for me.)

(He's sorry for me the way you're sorry for a stray dog with three legs. The way you're sorry for something that's *broken*.)

Dante's chest had stopped knowing how to move air. He took a small breath. Then another. They were both wrong sizes.

(Twenty of us. *Twenty.* And every single one of them — every single one — got something. Even the quiet ones. Even Theo. Even Marcus and Conrad who'll probably use their gifts to break someone's nose by next week. Even *them*.)

(But not me.)

(*What is wrong with me.*)

(What is wrong with me that even the gods looked and didn't want it.)

His vision was going small at the edges. Not from fainting. From something else. From the way the world goes small when you have been looked at by something enormous and it has decided you are not worth keeping.

Solis was already half-turned away.

"As a final courtesy," he added, almost as an afterthought, "since the projection you wear cannot be solidified by an Awakening that did not occur — I will return to you the body you arrived in. The body you wore in your old world. A small mercy. It is what I can do."

He raised his hand.

Light folded around Dante. Brief. Warm. Not painful.

When it faded, Dante looked down at himself.

Same gray robe. Slightly tighter now, fit to a body that was — he knew without looking in any mirror — exactly the body he had walked into school with that morning. The narrow shoulders. The sharp wrists. The collarbones a little more visible than they should have been. Same height. Same weight. Same skin.

Same Dante.

Around him, a hall full of taller, stronger, glowing teenagers and six gods and a crystal still pulsing faintly with light meant for someone else.

He looked up.

Solis was already walking back to the throne.

(That was it.)

(*That was the whole conversation.*)

(He didn't even —)

Dante's hands, at his sides, closed into fists.

The fists shook a little. He squeezed harder until they didn't.

(Don't cry. Not here. Not in front of him. Not in front of *them.*)

(*Don't.*)

He felt the wet at the corners of his eyes anyway. It came without permission. He blinked it back without lifting his hand to wipe, because lifting his hand would have been a movement someone might have noticed. The note against his chest, through the robe, was the only solid thing in the world.

(*Mom.*)

(Mom, what did I do. What did I ever do that the universe took one look at me and decided —)

He shut the thought down.

He pressed his hand briefly, hard, against the place where the note was. As if to confirm it was still there. As if to say *one thing*, *I still have one thing*.

It was still there.

He let the hand drop to his side.

No one had seen the gesture. The Awakened across the hall were already drifting out of the line, gathering closer to Leon by some unspoken centripetal pull. Even Grace — Grace, who had looked at him so steadily through everything — had her face turned now toward Aneos, who was speaking to her in a low pleased voice about wind and what wind could do. Conrad and Marcus and Theo were grinning at each other and admiring each other's marks. Diana was examining the silver flecks in her own eyes by the polished surface of the crystal.

Dante stood alone in the middle of the floor.

He looked at his right hand.

For a second, nothing.

Then —

A small dark whorl on the back of it, near the base of the wrist. Like ink being mixed into clear water, very slowly. Spinning. Coalescing. Forming itself out of nothing.

He stared.

It tightened. Resolved. Took shape.

A sun.

Half of one.

The left half was gold — a clean, simple disc of gold light, a smaller cousin of the sun on Leon's hand. The right half was *gone*. Not dark, not black, just *absent*, as if the artist had set the pen down halfway through and walked away. The line where the two halves met was not clean. It looked broken. Cracked. The way a plate looked when it had been dropped and badly glued.

A broken sun.

He scrubbed at it with his other thumb. It didn't smudge. It didn't lift. It was *in* his skin now, the way the others' marks were in theirs.

He looked up sharply.

No one was watching him. No one had seen.

The gods were arguing — quietly, in a row behind the throne, in a language Dante didn't know but understood the temperature of. Solis was responding without turning his head, sitting very straight, very calm, and very obviously winning whatever argument he was having on the basis of size and rank rather than reason.

Dante closed his hand. Made a fist around the broken sun.

(Don't show them. Don't show *anyone.* Not until I know what it is.)

(Especially not him.)

He let the hand drop to his side.

---

Solis raised his voice.

"Children!"

The Awakened — and Dante, who counted himself less as a *child* and more as a leftover in this moment — turned.

"You have been Awakened. You have been Blessed. You have been transformed. The hour has come for you to descend to the world below this hall and begin the work that we have summoned you for. The enemy that rises down there will not wait. Your Hero will lead you. Your Blessings will protect you. The Heptarchy, in our wisdom and our generosity, releases you to the green earth."

He spread his arms.

The other five gods — even Selene, even Kidora — moved into a slow loose semicircle around him on the dais. Whatever they had been arguing about a moment ago, they had agreed, for now, to perform unity. The performance was not even very good. Dante could see it for what it was. He doubted any of the others could.

"Take with you what you have been given. Wear it well. Carry the names of your gods. And —" he smiled, with all the warmth he could manage, "— *make us proud.*"

The six gods began to chant.

It started as a low hum that Dante recognized — recognized in the bones, the way he had recognized the hum under the floor of his classroom that morning. It rose. Layered. Each god picked up a different thread of it, and the threads braided together into something that was not quite music and not quite language and was, he suspected, slightly older than both.

The marble under the Awakened began to shimmer.

A circle of light formed under the cluster of nineteen of them — Leon at the center, Grace near the front, Conrad and Marcus shoulder to shoulder, Diana and Sophia close, Ethan a little behind, all of them flushed and tall and glowing — and the light began to lift them, gently, off the floor.

Dante was not in the circle.

There was a smaller circle under his own feet. A pale one. An afterthought.

He almost laughed.

The chanting deepened.

The light intensified.

The other students were lifting now, and as they lifted they became less *real* — not transparent, not yet, but indistinct. Edges blurring. Grace was looking at him as the light took her. She had turned. He could see her mouth moving — *Dante? Dante.* — but the sound wasn't reaching him through the chant.

(Frog.)

(Frog, I'm here. I'm right here.)

The light around the cluster *flared*.

Then they were gone.

Not faded out. Not dissolved. Just — *not there*. Where there had been nineteen Awakened a moment ago, there was only the marble of the empty hall, and the slow afterimage of golden light, and a small pale circle under Dante's feet that hadn't yet decided whether to do anything.

Solis was looking at him.

"Down you go, child," the god said. Not unkindly. Almost gently. The way you might address a stray dog you were releasing into a park you didn't own. "Do your best."

The pale light under Dante brightened.

He felt his weight leave him.

The chant of the six gods rose around him without addressing him, the way you sing in a kitchen for your own pleasure, not for the bowl that happens to be on the counter. The hall began to fade — the ceiling, the columns, the thrones, the dust on the seventh seat, the gods themselves — softening, unraveling, going pale.

Then the dark.

He had time to register that it was the same dark as before. The dark of the fall from the classroom. Thick. Patient. *Full*.

And then —

The lateral tug came back.

Strong this time. Not a hand on a sleeve. Not a hand on the wrist. Both hands, gripping firm, and pulling.

The current that should have been carrying him toward wherever the others had gone — a faint pull he could feel underneath everything, the gravity of nineteen souls already arrived somewhere — *bent*. Bent in a way no current should bend. Around him, the dark thickened, *narrowed*, became less a sky and more a corridor, and the corridor had a direction that wasn't theirs.

He tried to think Grace's name and couldn't form the thought.

Around him, in the dark, the *feathers*.

Black. Huge. Coming from nowhere. Folding around him like a closing palm. Where they touched the projection-skin of him, they were warm — the warm of an animal, not of a fire — and they were *many*. More than birds had. More than anything had. They closed over him and through him and around him until the pale circle of the teleportation light was gone, until even the chant of the six gods was gone, until there was nothing left of where he had come from and nothing yet of where he was going.

Just black feathers.

And the patient grip of something that had been waiting.

The fall began in earnest.