Kallikles blew a raspberry, and she swooped low and set him gently down beside me on the rock. Then she made one last circuit and perched again by my other side.

“I’m glad I had the chance to try that,” she said. “I don’t feel tired at all. I think it’s less tiring than running or swimming the same distance.”

“You did it yesterday,” I pointed out. “I saw you fly down onto the stage, and also fly over an attacker.”

“Erinna said it was a mighty leap,” she said. “Nobody understood it was flying.”

“Be careful if you want to stay secret,” I warned. “You all three used your powers yesterday. You need to be careful, even in front of people who believe in the gods. Once they know, there’s no going back from it.”

“I didn’t know whether the lightning would come,” Kallikles said. “They were getting ready to swarm up the side of the boat. I was out of arrows. I just struck out.”

“I think it was a splendid thing to do,” Arete said, admiringly.

“You weren’t wrong to do it, but it’s good you didn’t blast all the attackers that way,” I said. It was difficult to have powers and not use them, and they were very young. If they revealed themselves, they’d also be revealing me.

“It’s electricity, you know,” Kallikles said. “When we get home I’m going to experiment cautiously with what I can do with electrical things.”

“Be careful around Crocus and Sixty-One,” I said.

“I won’t hurt them. But I want to try something with their feeding stations. There are enough stations to feed all the workers we had at the beginning. If I mess one up it won’t hurt them.”

“It would hurt all of us and kill them if you destroyed all the electricity in the city, and you could. I think it all links together. Or you could kill yourself the way you killed the attacker yesterday.” I knew that lightning was akin to electricity, but I had never thought about it in that way before. “Be careful experimenting.”

“I will. But I think it can just flow through me.”

“And I’ll talk to Phaedrus about being careful about people noticing the healing as well,” I said.

“He couldn’t just let people die,” Kallikles said.

“Too many died as it was,” Arete said. “Poor Ficino.”

That reminded me that she had had her back turned and she might not properly understand what had happened. “Did you see what he did?”

“Who do you mean? Phaedrus or Ficino?”