“Run,” Jess heard Glain whisper. “Run, you idiots.”

But the group of eight standing in the shadow of the statue of Mercury, very near the golden wings on his sandals, just stayed where they were. Watching the lions come closer.

They’d be slaughtered.

“Something’s not right,” Jess said. “Glain—”

“I know,” she said. “They should have run.”

It was a plan.

And he sensed it was working.

Jess took it all in at a glance: the lions clustering together as they advanced to circle the eight in the square; the soldiers still on the steps, watching as the pride of automata stalked their prey.

No one was looking anywhere else.

It was only because he turned that he saw the first attack coming: an arcing bottle that came not from the group in the Forum, but coming from above, from the statue of Jupiter on the opposite side of the Forum, closest to the basilica. “Greek fire!” Jess shouted, and realized the bottle was tumbling end over end. The liquid bubbled inside the glass as it passed over his head, and he ducked instinctively, but it would miss them by a good margin.

The bottle slammed to the steps twenty feet away, landing where a grouping of others from Blue Squad had been standing just a second earlier. But Jess’s call had done its work, and they’d scattered. Only one was hit by cast-off drops; he went down, and another of their new squad mates yanked an emergency kit from her pack and dumped powder on the flames before they could bore through his coat.

Remarkable, how cool Jess felt, how focused. He calmly brought up his weapon, thumbed the switch to turn it on, and waited an instant until he felt the shiver of power run through it. The weapon fired in regular mode for closer range, but the bottle-throwing Burner was high up on Jupiter’s shoulder, well out of range of the normal setting of the weapon.

But not for this one. It took a steady hand and good eyes, but Jess had both, and as he sank down to one knee for stability, he aimed the gun sights directly on the man perched on the shoulder of a god, preparing another bottle to throw.

Below in the Forum, the lions were roaring and alarmed screams went up. More guns barked behind him, but Jess had one singular focus: this man. He could see the Burner’s sweating face—reddened from heat and exertion and excitement—and could see the large bottle he had in his hand, ready for a second throw.

Jess’s shot took him in the shoulder. The bottle tumbled out of the Burner’s hand, not toward the Library troops, but down, plummeting past the god’s muscled back and toga-draped legs to smash on the ancient Forum stones. It created a huge green blaze and a wave of sickly black smoke, but no innocents were in the way. They now scrambled to avoid the toxic spread.

The Burner stood up on Jupiter’s shoulder. His right arm was a bloody mess, but he held up his personal journal in his left hand—the same personal journal they all kept. The same as the worn little volume in Jess’s pack. “Tell your precious Artifex! A life is worth more than a book!” he shouted. “Vita hominis plus libro valet!”