Cade felt his anger seep from him, soon replaced by pity.

“I am the last of my kind,” Song said. “And as soon as the pantheon return, my life will be extinguished. Perhaps they will torture me first. Tear me apart, atom by atom. But I do it. I do it so you can have this chance. To save your species. Save the universe, because I could not.”

Cade swallowed. “Can you give me a chance to escape the detonation?” he asked. “Five minutes?”

Song shook his head. “I could lie to you and say I can. But I will not. I have watched you ever since you were brought to this planet. It is you, not any other human, who I chose to bring here and task with this mission. When the time comes, I know you will do the right thing.”

He pressed the toy into Cade’s hand and strode out of the antechamber.

“It is time,” the voice echoed as Song walked away. “Do your duty.”

CHAPTER

30

Cade stumbled through the hologram wall, back into the darkness of the tunnel. The Codex, now clutched in his arms, seemed to stare at him with its blank lens.

He hurried up the slope, his heart full of mixed emotion. Hope and despair. Bittersweet in his mouth. A chance to win, and a chance to die.

But there was no time to think on it now. He had to find the others. Tell them what he had seen before the pantheon reawakened.

His legs, weighed down by armor and exhaustion, burned and shook as he staggered uphill. He called to the others. Screamed their names.

None came. He could only stagger on.

Worst of all, he was lost. The tunnels branched in myriad ways, left, right, up, and down. He could only guess, turning back at dead ends, cursing through snatched, ragged breaths.

It felt like an hour before he made it back to the large, central chamber of the fortress. A legionary was there, slumped at a table, his eyes gazing ahead in a thousand-yard stare.

He mumbled something in Latin, but Cade ignored him. He knew where to go, as more legionaries moved in from a tunnel to his right, arms full of spears, armor, and shields. The looting had begun.

Cade shouldered past them, an outstretched hand balanced against the wall like a drunk’s. He kept on. Even as his vision darkened at its edges, and the nausea of overexertion made his face twitch and his stomach roil.

“Quintus,” he wheezed. “Amber.”

Light. He could see it at the end of the tunnel, and he forced himself to push on. Past the gouged walls, where the falconets had torn them. Past the blood that pooled through the cracks of his armored feet.

He fell. Crawled, one handed, the other clutching the Codex and the toy. His hands were sticky with blood.

Then, light. Fresh air, intoxicating as he gasped.

Only, his friends were not there. Just the smoldering embers of the Roman funeral pyre. Ash and bone, strewn among the long grass like an open wound.