“You had to be cruel to be kind?” Cade asked, then realized the Codex would not capture his sarcastic tone.

“Correct. Do not mistake me. I know I was wrong about your weapon. But I was right that you lied to us, yes? That Codex was with you the whole time.”

Cade conceded the point with an inclination of his head.

“And Quintus?” Cade asked.

Atticus shrugged. “I have done a lot worse for a lot less. If there was one chance that he could give us the Codex, I could not afford to miss it. And I was right about that too. It was the Codex that allowed you to make your gunpowder, was it not?”

Cade bit his lip. There was guile in this man’s words. Yet there was a sick logic to his decisions too. What he had done to Quintus was unforgivable. Now though, Cade could understand why he had done it.

“I am not perfect,” Atticus pressed on. “I have made mistakes. But it was the steel in my spine that kept us alive. It is easy to drag down those who stand strong above, holding back the darkness. Much harder to take their place, as Marius will soon learn. Do we have an understanding, pup?”

He extended his hand, and Cade stared at it. Finch had held his hand out to him, back in New Rome, just like this. Then he tried to kill him.

Cade took his hand.

“Call me Cade,” he said.

CHAPTER

42

They woke to the sounds of the jungle. Hoots, screeches, and deep lowing echoed through the hollow of the ship, a dawn chorus that greeted the broken sunlight of the morning.

The soldiers were already outside, formed in a neat square of nine, with Atticus at the helm. But as Scott and Cade emerged from their shelter, they saw the legionaries looked quite different from how they had looked before.

“Our guide, Cade, made an excellent observation yesterday about our armor,” Atticus announced. “So we have taken steps to correct that.”

Their armor was smeared with mud so that the bright sheen was gone. Stranger still, the armor itself looked different, somehow bulkier, with patches of cloth poking from some of the gaps.

“Sacking,” Atticus said, noting Cade’s confused expression. “Stuffed where the metal scrapes, to silence its noise.”

Cade was impressed. Atticus had saved both his own and Cade’s face—while simultaneously demonstrating his willingness to listen to reason, something he had failed to do in Jomsborg.

He couldn’t say Atticus did not learn from his mistakes.

“So, Cade”—Atticus emphasized his name, though not unkindly—“are you ready to depart?”

Cade shouldered his pack.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They found a trail at midday. A deer trail, as Scott described it—though it was much more than that. The thoroughfare was as wide as a freeway, pounded to mud by the feet of a thousand animals.

It did not follow their intended direction exactly, curving instead by the path of least resistance, worming its way between slopes and copses of trees. But it was the same general direction, and they made more progress in an hour than they had that entire day.