There were groans all round, and then they were off again, Quintus snoring in one of the sleds.

As they trundled over the drawbridge, circling to the other side of the fort, Cade kept his eyes peeled for any Gray scouts. To his relief, he could see nothing but endless fields of purple grass, swaying against a soft breeze. It might have been beautiful … were it not for the timer, ticking away.

“Codex,” Cade said as they rounded the opposite side of the fort. “How long do we have?”

00:96:01:54

00:96:01:53

00:96:01:52

It was an ominous number, but there was nothing he could do. Only trudge on, ignoring the pain from his aching, blistered feet and the exhaustion that weighed his body like a suit of lead.

“What’s that smell?” Grace groaned, wrinkling her nose.

“It can’t be what we’re looking for,” Cade said. “We’ve hardly left the fort.”

But as he stepped farther into the grass, he noticed a well-worn path had carved a furrow, leaving black soil exposed. People had walked here, many times.

They followed the path, more for ease of travel than anything else, and the stench grew stronger. It was not the smell of death, of that Cade was certain. He had smelled enough of that in the previous rounds of the pantheon’s game to know that.

Soon enough, they discovered the source of the scent. An enormous, round pit, rimmed on one side with a bench of wood, holes cut into its top.

He almost choked at the smell. It was a cesspit—where the Romans defecated and urinated.

“My god,” Amber said, her voice nasal from her fingers pinching her nose. “That is disgusting.”

“I bet they missed the toilets back at the keep,” Scott said. “I know I do.”

Cade shuffled closer, the fetid air almost muggy as he peered over the bench’s edge. The pit was deep and wide, so much so that you could drop a double-decker bus in and it would hardly touch the sides.

“Come on,” Cade said. “We should keep moving.”

They saw it as a smudge on the horizon, hardly an hour after they left the fort. But it still seemed too far off. The going was tougher, for they had to wade through the tall grass with every step, and the struts of the sled kept tangling in the grass.

The smudge was a good sign, but the contenders were flagging. There was only so much they could ask of their bodies. Fueled on strips of hard jerky and a few mouthfuls of water, with hardly any sleep for two days, each step was a torment, and their progress imperceptible.

Cade almost wanted to give up—to return to the Romans and plead his case again. Perhaps they were wasting precious time, precious energy on this endeavor. Worse still, as doubts plagued his mind, Cade began to wonder if it was his own curiosity driving him more than logic.

If curiosity drove him to walk on, perhaps it would the others.