But why had she left Crocus and Sixty-One? Was it because she felt they had betrayed her in becoming philosophers? But surely that was the purpose of the City? They were Sokrates’s friends, and my friends now. Perhaps it was because those two had spoken up at the Last Debate, choosing the City? I didn’t know what she was thinking. I wondered whether I ever had. Athene seemed very far away as I sat on her seat in the library. People constantly debated why she had set up the City. I thought I knew that—because it was interesting, and because she could. When it ceased to be interesting she had abandoned it. I had projects like that myself. My oracle at Delphi was one of them. It had seemed as if giving people good advice would help everyone get on better. I hadn’t kidnapped people from across time to do it, but I had dragged a shipload of Cretans across the Aegean.

I looked at the last notebook, XII. Had she stopped after the Last Debate? Why? Twelve seemed an extremely round number—and Simmea had distrusted numerology and suspiciously round numbers. It wouldn’t have been an accident. But it might be as far as she had reached. I’d seen her writing in notebooks fairly recently—it irked me that I couldn’t remember when exactly. The book might not be finished. I opened it and checked. It was full.

I read everything she had written in the last notebook. Then I sat staring unseeingly at the bookshelves. She hadn’t written about the Last Debate. She had written about the conversation we had in the Garden of Archimedes, which I remembered very well, and then about the last Festival of Hera, the one in which she’d been paired with Kebes. My fingers clenched into fists reading it. She had told me it hadn’t been so bad. She said she didn’t want to discuss it, and I hadn’t pushed her about it. She had never told me that he had raped her, or I’d have killed him. I really would. I was ready to kill him now. She wrote that it wasn’t rape, that she had consented, but I knew better. She had said no, and asked him to stop, and he had gone on. He had bruised her. She had gone there willingly, for the City, like the philosopher she was, and he had tried to take her into his fantasy.