Rhita found her seat within the narrow fuselage, a thinly padded canvas square stretched across two parallel iron bars. Demetrios handed her the case containing the slate and helped her secure the clavicle in its box behind a net in an overhead rack. The whine of the jet motors directly overhead was hideously loud, disorienting. A crewman handed them ear-covers and motioned for all to be seated and strap themselves in.

Outside, the last of the supplies was being hastily piled into the second beecraft. The wagon drivers retreated to their vehicles and spun them away from the apron toward the military road. Rhita wondered what would happen if they were caught; why had things gone wrong? Had they gone wrong?

She clapped her hands over the ear-covers and closed her eyes. She had never flown before.

Oresias tapped her shoulder and she opened her eyes.

We’re going, he mouthed to her. She glanced out the square window between the explorer’s seat and her own and saw the ponderous jet nacelles blurring as the blades picked up speed. The roar seemed to turn her entire body to liquid. She hadn’t urinated in hours. The need was intense. She clenched her teeth.

The two beecraft left solid ground and drifted off the apron, accelerating north. She couldn’t see what the soldiers in the vehicles behind them were doing. She hoped they weren’t shooting.

Demetrios, sitting beside the Kelt across the aisle, grinned despite his gray face and strained expression. Rhita closed her eyes again.

She knew she would never again see Rhodes or Rhamōn or the sanctuary of Athene Lindia. The feeling came to her as an absolute certainty, beyond question.

For the first time, she actually understood the parallels between her grandmother’s journey and her own. Her grandmother had been young, too; only a couple of years older than Rhita was now. She had not just flown from her home, but had been lifted by rockets into space, away from Gaia—from Earth.

So who was responsible? What could she have done to avoid this misery? Rhita prayed, remembering the comfort and peace of sitting quietly in the shadow of Athene’s sanctuary, and for the merest instant she was back there, with Athene towering above her in the dark wooden shed.

Then the beecraft lurched sharply and she saw dazzling iron-pewter sandpaper through the window—ocean directly below them, hundreds, perhaps thousands of arms away.

“We’re turning east,” Oresias shouted in her ear. “I think we’ve gotten off without any damage. At least we’re not being followed.”

“What will we come back to?” Atta shouted. Even at high volume, his voice expressed dismal unhappiness. He flung his hands out and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “What went wrong?”

The question remained unaswered. As planned, they kept radio silence, staying five or six parasangs off the coast.