I got up and paced the library furiously. I wanted to kill Kebes, now, immediately, with my bare hands, but I didn’t know where he was. Simmea had written that I’d have been upset, but she had no idea how upset I would have been. I had learned what rape was, what it meant. I was also furious with Athene for pairing her with Kebes. It had been aimed at me, and I knew it, and Simmea knew it too. I would have killed him and left his body for the dogs and kites. He had tried to own her, and he had hurt her, my Simmea, my friend, my votary. She had told him I didn’t try to own her, and she had told Sokrates that she and I wanted each other to be our best selves. It was true. Worship was easy, commonplace. Beautiful women were everywhere. People who understood what I was talking about and could argue with me as equals were incredibly rare. How could he have done that? And why didn’t she tell me? Was it connected to the reason she had stopped me saving her life?

I was also furious that he had called her a scrawny, flat-faced, bucktoothed Copt. It was true, and she cared so little that she had laughed, but it galled me that he had dared to say it to her, to try to hurt her that way, through her looks. I always put up with Kebes because he was Simmea’s friend, and all that time he had imagined he owned her, owned some imaginary person called Lucia. She was Simmea, Plato’s Simmea, as Sokrates had said to her, as close to Plato’s ideal Philosopher King as anyone was likely to get. She had never told me about that conversation either. She had told me about Sokrates’s plan for what turned into the Last Debate, but not about the rest of what she had written, and how they had talked about the way they both loved me.

I missed Sokrates. Not the way I missed Simmea, as if half of myself had been amputated so that I was constantly reaching out with a missing limb. I hadn’t entirely lost him, either; there were days of his life before he came to the City when I could still visit him, in Athens, once I was back to myself. But I missed being able to just talk openly with him. He would have had wise advice for this situation, and nobody else would. Nobody else could even understand it. There was nobody I could remotely imagine talking to about it, except Simmea and Sokrates, and I couldn’t have either one of them. Sokrates had flown to me, after Athene had transformed him into a gadfly, and perched on my chest for a moment, then he had stung me and flown away, and nobody had seen him since.