“Rude but necessary,” said Stone. “For your own good. Make your gate, Danny. The longer I stay here talking with Veevee, the more extravagant the trouble I’ll get myself into.”

“I’ll tell Hermia we’re ready,” said Danny.

Because his gatesense already told him exactly where the gate he had made for her in Rio was—her latest hiding place, the theory being that if she had to keep moving around, at least she could go to warm and interesting places—he was able to make a new gate straight there.

She wasn’t in her hotel room. That was a surprise. She knew that it was nearly time for the making of the Great Gate. She was supposed to be waiting.

Danny immediately made a return gate and stepped toward it just as the shotgun blast went off. He felt the pellets tear through his body and then … no pain at all, because he had passed through the gate back to the barn. He still gasped from the pain he no longer felt, and the others turned toward him.

“They found Hermia,” said Danny. “She wasn’t there, and they weren’t waiting around to talk about it.”

“Are you hurt?” asked Veevee, fingering his tattered shirt.

“I was, for a moment,” said Danny. “I may still have all the pellets in me. I can work on that later. The gate healed the wounds, and I have to find Hermia.”

“It can’t be her own people,” said Stone. “The Greeks may do many terrible things, but they wouldn’t kill the world’s only living gatemage.”

“But they’re the only ones who could track her,” said Danny.

“They might be tracking the trackers,” said Marion.

“Or they might have a sniffer of their own, whoever they are,” said Stone. “The Greeks track Hermia, but a sniffer could simply have found your gate and then waited for you.”

“Some fanatic group that really thinks we shouldn’t go back to Westil?” asked Veevee.

“Or some minions of the Gate Thief,” said Marion.

“I’m going to look,” said Danny. He made a tiny gate, really just a viewport, that showed him the room where someone had shot him.

Two men were standing there, one carrying a shotgun. “I know I hit him before he disappeared,” said one.

Danny made a gate and pulled it over them.

They arrived twenty feet above some spot out in the Atlantic Ocean, far from the nearest land. Danny’s new viewport was in place before they hit the water. The shotgun sank at once; the men cried out for help as they tried to swim.

They weren’t good at it. In fact, one of them was panicking and clearly had no idea how to swim.

Not Greeks, then. Hermia’s Family were proud of their heritage among the thalassocracy, and they were all taught to swim as babies.