The dark wasn't dark.

This was the first thing Dante understood, or almost understood, in the instant after the swallowing. It wasn't the dark of a windowless room, not the dark of a night. It was something fuller. A dark that had thickness. A dark that pressed on the body the way water presses in deep water, and through which — this was the strangest part — something was moving.

He was falling. Maybe. He wasn't sure the word *falling* still made sense in a place without up or down, but his body remembered gravity, and gravity was what he was feeling. A direction of motion with no floor in sight. A trajectory.

Beside him — or above, or below, it wasn't clear — he could feel the others. He couldn't see them. But he could feel them. The light had taken the whole class and was carrying it together, a compact bundle of bodies sliding along the same invisible track, and Dante was still part of that bundle.

More or less.

More or less, because the lateral tug from the classroom hadn't gone away.

It was still there. Small, sideways, patient. Like a hand quietly tugging a sleeve, no force, just to remind you it was there. It wasn't deflecting him. But it was *marking* him. It was telling him — without words, without language, only through pressure — *I see you. I've got you. You're mine.*

(What are you—)

(What are—)

The thought didn't finish forming. He didn't have the time, didn't have the mental space. The dark was full of other things filling his head to keep him from thinking clearly — fragments of sound, pieces of images that weren't his, what sounded like a voice from very far away saying words in a language he didn't know. For an instant he thought he heard a *laugh*, small, female, ancient, coming from somewhere very distant and very low. Then it was gone.

Dante tried to understand where he was going.

He couldn't. The dark had no information. The dark only had direction — a common direction with the others, and inside that common direction a very small lateral current that belonged only to him.

The chant changed.

Until that point it had been one chant — single, communal, collective, the kind that carried all of them the same way. Now there were two. The first kept going, low and indifferent, carrying the bundle. The second was new. Deeper. Slower. It had started somewhere far below the first, far below the dark itself, and it was rising — not toward all of them. Toward one of them.

Toward him.

Dante felt the lateral tug *firm up*. No longer a hand on a sleeve. Now a hand on the wrist. The grip was patient and absolutely certain, the grip of something that had been waiting a long time and had no need to hurry, because the prey had already arrived where it was supposed to arrive and only had to be lifted out of the wrong line at the right moment.

But the moment was not yet.

The grip held him without pulling. As if it were waiting for something to finish.

The bundle continued to fall.

He continued with it.

For now.

---

Cold stone under his cheek.

Dante opened his eyes. White marble, veined with something that wasn't quite gold and wasn't quite silver. He pushed himself up onto his elbows. His shoulder throbbed where he had landed, dull and distant, like a bruise loaned to him.

He looked at his hand.

It was his. Same knuckles, same chipped nail, same little white scar across the base of the thumb. But the edges of it were *soft*. Not transparent — he couldn't see through himself — only thinned, as if drawn carefully and then rubbed at with an eraser.

Around him, the others were doing the same thing. Sitting up. Touching their own faces. Conrad was patting himself across the chest with both palms, hard, the way people do to check if they are still there.

"What the *fuck*," Conrad said. "What the fuck."

Dante got to his knees, then to his feet. The body moved, but lighter than it should have — like wading in shallow water without the water.

Twenty of them, scattered across the floor of a hall that wasn't a hall.

*Cathedral* was the wrong word. Cathedrals were made by people who'd seen the sky and tried to put a roof on it. This was something else. White columns climbed past sight into a haze that might have been a ceiling. The floor stretched out in every direction without an edge. There were no doors. There were no windows.

At the far end, raised on a dais of the same pale stone, sat seven thrones.

Six of them were empty.

The central one was occupied.

Dante had to drag his eyes up to take in the scale of the figure on it. Seated, the head still cleared ten meters off the ground. A man, if *man* was the word — long blond hair that moved as if underwater, the tips burning faintly orange where they brushed the throne. Bronze skin. The kind of face statues tried to copy. And the eyes —

He looked once and looked away. Even at this distance, the eyes had been too bright. The windows of a furnace.

The figure had been waiting for them to wake up.

Now, with no signal Dante could see, the noise in the hall — the cursing, the half-words, the small shocked sounds — *stopped*. Not because anyone decided to stop. Just stopped.

When the figure spoke, the voice didn't come from his mouth. It arrived behind Dante's ears, inside his ribs, against the soft places of him.

"Children of the old world."

A pause that let the words settle.

"Welcome to the Hall of the Heptarchy. The bodies you wear are not your bodies — not yet. You stand here as souls, in a place where souls cannot keep their shape without a courtesy from those who own the place. What you see of yourselves is the memory of what you were, projected forward by mercy. Do not be alarmed."

The smile on his mouth did not quite reach the eyes.

"My name is Solis. The First Among the Divine. God of the Sun and of Life. Protector of Men. There is an explanation owed to you. I will give it now."

---

The class drew into a loose half-circle on the marble. Twenty translucent teenagers in soft gray robes none of them remembered putting on, facing a god the size of a clocktower. Nobody spoke. Nobody knew the word for the noise they wanted to make.

Solis settled back on the throne.

"What I am about to tell you," he said, "I would have preferred to tell only one of you. The fact that I am telling all of you is, I am sorry to say, a regrettable error on my part."

His eyes moved over the class. Slow. Cataloguing.

"In the world below this hall, an enemy is rising. The Heptarchy — the seven who govern this world — have, in our wisdom, agreed that the time has come to call champions. Heroes. One soul, summoned for each of us, to carry our names against the dark. It is an ancient practice. We have done it before. We will do it again."

He folded his enormous hands together. Almost human, the gesture. Almost.

"The instruments of the call are precise. They are designed to lift one soul cleanly from one world to another. The hero I sought — *my* hero, the soul I wished to call to the side of the Sun — could not be found among the souls of this world. So I cast the call wider. Across the dark between worlds. Toward yours."

A small pause.

"I sensed the soul I wanted. I called it. I succeeded. But the call —" his voice did not change, his face did not change, and yet something underneath the words tightened, "— took with it everything around the soul that resembled it. Every young human in proximity."

He looked at them.

"All of you."

Murmurs. Confusion. Heads turning toward heads. Theo from the back row — quiet, freckled, the kid who never raised his hand — said *what does that mean* very softly to no one in particular. Sophia put a hand to her own mouth. Conrad swore again, just the one word, drawn out long.

Arthur was the one who stepped forward.

Dante hadn't even realized Arthur was here. Captain of the football team, red hair, broad shoulders, the kind of boy who got things done through sheer refusal to think too hard about them. He took two steps clear of the half-circle, looked up at Solis, and lifted his chin.

"Then send us back."

His voice cracked once and recovered.

"You said it took us by mistake. So put us back. Keep the hero. Send the rest of us home."

Solis considered him for long enough that Arthur, despite himself, swayed slightly on his feet.

"What is your name, child?"

"Arthur."

"Arthur." The god repeated the name the way a man might repeat a word in a language he'd just learned. "I would. Believe me. If I could, I would."

He paused.

"The call is one direction. It always has been. The instruments were not built to send you back. They could not be. The dark between worlds does not run both ways."

Arthur didn't move. The color was leaving his face in pieces.

"There has to be —"

"There is not."

Two words. Quiet. They landed on Arthur like weights. He took a step back.

"My deepest sympathies," Solis said. "For all of you. The lives you have left behind are over. Your families will not see you again. Your homes will not know what became of you. This is a wound and I will not pretend otherwise."

The half-circle came apart at the seams.

Diana made a sound Dante had never heard a person make before — half cry, half laugh, the sound of a body that had been told something the body refused to let the brain process — and she folded down onto the marble with both hands over her face. Sophia knelt and put an arm around her shoulders. Conrad turned his back on the throne entirely and walked three steps and stopped, because there was nowhere to walk *to*. Aurora stood very still and very straight, the way she did everything, but her hands had become fists at her sides.

Arthur stood where he was. Pale. Not crying. Not anything.

Grace was on her knees on the marble, both hands flat in front of her, eyes closed. Breathing.

Dante didn't cry.

He noticed, with a small distant sort of shock, that the first thing he had thought of was not his mother. The first thing he had thought of was the unfinished match. Two hundred points from the top ten on the server, and now no top ten, and now no server, and no apartment, and no fridge with the magnet shaped like a strawberry, and no —

The note.

His hand moved on its own toward his chest. Through the soft fabric of the robe he could feel it. Folded small. Pressed against the place where his heart was. The robe had no pocket and yet the note was *there*, the way it had been there in the inside pocket of the jacket, the way it had been there on the fridge for weeks before that.

(They left me my mother.)

(They left me my mother and they left me nothing else.)

He did not take his hand away from his chest for a long time.