The three command individuals receded on the platform, as if through the turning of some distorting lens. A scene appeared in front of the bubble, the interior of a house of human construction, though not any home Patricia might have found in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first century…

Rhita came out of a moiling eternity, where time was not so much lacking as non-linear and randomly arranged; true memories dancing with simulations, unorganized animal thoughts—disembodied hunger, pointless yearning, sexual desire—vying with brief moments of crystal clarity, in which she remembered her situation…and rejected it, returning to the turbulent eternity.

In one moment of clarity, she saw herself as a hero, consciously making herself useless to her enemies by eluding them within their own incomprehensible sanctuary. In another, she realized she might never recover from this jumble, that her enemies might keep her in this state forever, and a better definition of Hades she could not think of.

She was worse off than any shade thirsting for blood and wine; what she thirsted for was the sweet liquor of reversed history, second chances, doors to a past not so much dead as pickled and preserved, waiting for some inhuman feast of knowledge.

She no longer touched on the presences of Demetrios or Oresias.

Then, at no particular moment, the tempest of chaotic escape calmed. Her thoughts were still jumbled, but what she experienced and felt was crystal clear: she stood in her grandmother’s house on Rhodos. Typhōn was with her, still human in appearance.

She tried to escape again, back into her chaotic freedom, but suddenly noticed three human forms that did not seem to be Jarts. She did not know them. There was conversation of a sort; again, the voiceless talk of Jarts in a dream, disembodied, hideous.

Still, now and then, in her self-imposed confusion, she managed to listen and not reject what was being said.

There was talk of her grandmother.

Could the two actually be humans? People from Gaia…or…again the storm grabbed her thoughts and whirled them.

Grandmother’s Mystery.

A memory: sharp and demanding. The sophē explaining how she had loaned a part of her psyche to a man…Magic and mystery in the Way.

Suddenly, she stood not in a simulation of the sophē’s house, but on the stones of the temple of Athene Lindia—not in simulation, but in memory. The memory was so vivid she could feel the wind in her hair and hear the song of birds darting between the massive cream-colored columns.