All my life I’d heard people talk about Kebes and the Goodness Group and the Lost City as if they were all one thing, and it took a lot for me to take it in that they weren’t. Kebes was a person, a person now calling himself Matthias, and the Goodness Group consisted of a hundred and fifty people with divided opinions about things, and they weren’t one Lost City, they were a whole network of civilization. It was a bit of a shock. The other thing I had never thought about until I talked to Aristomache was that of course they had left during the Last Debate, or at the very end, at the moment when Sokrates turned into a gadfly. They didn’t know anything about what had happened afterward. They didn’t know that we hadn’t seen Athene since, until Father told them so. They didn’t know that theirs was only the first defection, nor that the rest of us had lived in a constant state of warfare. They hadn’t taken any art when they left, they hadn’t taken anything but the Goodness and their own skills. All this time they’d been doing what Mother had always said people ought to do and making more art instead of squabbling over the art we had. They’d been doing the same with technology too, starting with what they had and knew and going on from there.

I slept in my hammock on board, ready for my watch that began at dawn. I woke early and went up on deck before the sky began to pale. I had thought of a safe way of testing to discover whether I could fly, but I needed to be alone with my brothers to try it. Of course, wonderful as sea voyages are, being alone is almost impossible to manage. Even conversations are constantly being interrupted. I wanted to try diving from the deck, which I had done several times to go ashore, but instead of diving, fly. If it didn’t work then I’d hit the water as normal. I had forgotten that the deck lights would be on, and that Neleus and the other members of the Nyx watch would be around, even with the ship safely tied up at harbor.

I took my turn on watch, though it was as unlike the watch of the day before as anything could be. I sat at the masthead with nothing to see but Marissa on one side and the rippling sea at the other. Phaedrus came up part way through and told me the ship’s council were meeting, which didn’t surprise me. I hoped we’d go to Lucia and the music festival. I liked music, and I wanted to meet more of the Goodness Group. “Mother would have liked them,” I said to Phaedrus.

He nodded thoughtfully. “I think she would. Except maybe for the religious stuff.”