Lucas had thought riding in a vehicle while blindfolded would have been nerve-racking to Dawn, but no, she was somehow more bubbly. He was blindfolded himself because for some reason no one trusted him to keep a secret, but he could hear the excitement in her voice as she blathered on and on about everything he had missed in her life since the last time he had seen her.

It had been four years since Dawn had gotten her Handle. The search for the remaining Champions normally happened every twenty years, but Dawn getting a hold of hers early meant that the search had to start early. Luckily the Gods had been merciful and had allowed them to wait a few more years, but it had still been a few years too early when the Eagle had sent His Message to begin while they had been asleep.

Lucas squeezed Dawn’s small hand in his, but it did little to calm his racing heart.

“How long is this ride supposed to be?” Lucas called to the driver, and it was not the first time.

He did not mean to be annoyed with the poor girl, but he could not understand why she was so unbothered by this trip when every muscle in his body was so tense that they were aching.

“Just a few more minutes, sir,” the ever patient driver said.

But all Lucas heard the man say was “Just a few more minutes until we begin training your niece to march to her death.”

Lucas sat back in his seat, and he drew in a deep breath to try to force his body to relax. Dawn went back to chatting with him, and he was lucky that she was happy as long as he gave an affirmation that he was listening every once in a while.

The only thing he knew about the place they were going to was that it was in the Northern Hemisphere and it was where the new Champion’s Compound had been built.

It didn’t belong to any one country. Hundreds of countries had given away their money to hire the world’s best architects to design and organize construction teams to build it, and it was one of the few truly neutral zones in the world, except that only a select few people were allowed to know where it was.

All governments were in agreement that the future of humanity rested on the shoulders of seven teenagers. Many generations had failed their mission already, but they were going to do everything in their power to get it right in this generation. The price the world paid every time they failed was too great.

All of the thirteen living Past Champions, including Lucas, had agreed to meet at the new place, and they would help in the search for new Champions and teaching them to fight the Gods. He had decided to keep it a secret from them that Dawn was already a Champion, but when the Eagle had spoken to them, he had been bombarded with angry texts and voicemails from all of them, including some of the calmer Champions.

Lucas knew he deserved all of it, but he was not looking forward to enduring that wrath in person— not from twelve people who had faced things much scarier than him.

Lucas felt the car come to a stop, and he put his hand to the black strip of cloth covering his face. He asked if they could take them off, but they told him they would have to be inside the Compound before they could do that.

Someone grabbed his arm and guided him along. It felt like an eternity before he heard metal clanking together and scraping against concrete, and they told him that they could finally take off their blindfolds. He yanked it off his head.

They stood on a wide concrete path that sloped downhill, and from his vantage point, he could see that the architects had decided to take that time to design real buildings instead of the concrete prisons he had seen when he had been a kid. There were three large buildings. One had to be the place they were expected to live; it looked like one of those million-dollar homes with floor-to-ceiling windows that only celebrities could afford, and it was about four stories tall. Another building reminded him of a sports stadium, where the roof could slide out of place and allow for playing under the natural light of the sun, but he doubted there were rows of thousands of seats inside it. The third building was this topsy-turvy building, like cups stacked on top of each other but were slightly tilted to the side, but it was only three stories tall, making it the smallest of the three.

In between each of those, landscapers had planted thousands of different flowers—summer flowers because that was the time of year it was in their hemisphere. He could spot places where there may have been statues or even fountains.

It was all for the morale of the kids, and he had to admit that even seeing it all from a distance made his muscles relax.

“Whoa,” Dawn said from beside him. “It’s so pretty.”

Lucas looked at Dawn. She had grown taller over the four years since she had taken her Handle, but she was still short at only one hundred and fifty-two centimeters, which was five feet in that weird system Emmerikans used. Her black hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, and she wore a knee-length dress that was—what she had called it—”coral” in color with light pink flats, which would be uncomfortable to wear, going downhill.

A man wearing an all-black suit handed Dawn a large duffel bag full of things that would help Dawn feel more comfortable in her new surroundings—although she was already quite used to traveling and being in new places every few months—but Lucas took it from her. Dawn put her hands on her hips and huffed.

“Uncle, I can carry my own things!”

Lucas just smirked at her.

A brunette woman wearing a black suit and mirrored sunglasses approached.

“Ah, hello, Lucas Driscoll, sir, and Dawn Schuler, uh, lady,” the woman said in a rather thick Javelain accent, and she was clearly uncomfortable with the Anglan language. “My name is Delphine, eh, and I will be showing you to your rooms in ze, eh, ze, eh, Compound.”

Lucas took pity on her and spoke in Javelain with her:

“*We both speak a little Javelain, if you’re more comfortable with it.*”

“Zat is good to know, but my superiors want me to learn.”

“Well, then, let’s get going, shall we?”

Dawn looped her arm through Lucas’s, and she nodded at him.

As they walked closer to the building, Lucas saw that there were many footpaths that branched off the main path, and they wound through the garden around benches. He thought he saw a couple of decorative ponds with things swimming in them.

Dawn gasped at some of the flowers, and she let go of his arm to skip toward them, tucking her dress around herself as she crouched to get a closer look at them. Lucas was not a man who knew much about flowers. He knew that some of them symbolized certain things, but he never cared enough to remember what flower sent which message. There were so many different varieties of them in the courtyard of the Compound that he stopped trying to count them

“Oh, Lucas, it’s such a shame we can’t take pictures!” Dawn said.

“Uncle Makani might be here already,” Lucas said. “You might be able to borrow his camera.”

“Yeah, but I can’t send it to Grandma.”

“Oh, right.”

Because the Champion’s Compound had to be kept a secret, no cell phones were allowed. They would have Internet access, but everyone’s activity would be monitored to prevent an accidental breach of privacy.

Dawn snorted, and she skipped back to his side, looping her arm through his again. Delphine continued to guide them down the path, which was big enough for vehicles, he realized, and he wondered why the vehicles had not just taken them right up to the front of the building.

“I can’t believe you already forgot that we can’t send pictures to anyone outside of this place,” she said.

“Hey, I’m not used to having to be so secretive,” Lucas defended himself.

“You’re supposed to be a good example to us kids, and you just suggested that I break the rules.”

“Listen, I’m an old man—”

“But you keep saying that thirty-two isn’t old, Uncle Lucas.”

“Fine, then, I’m old.”

“Don’t tell Uncle Ethan that. He’ll be angry.”

“He is a rather vain man.”

They made it to the front steps of the house. With the tall glass windows, he could see straight into the front lobby, and there were two staircases, and he assumed the two doors in between hid an elevator for a certain old man who would be moving into the building with them.

There was also a small pack of dogs rushing into the lobby.

“Oh, my gods!” Dawn squealed, rushing up the steps. “There are puppies!”

“Eh, zey are trained zerapy dogs,” Delphine said to Lucas because Dawn was already inside trying to wrap her arms around one extra large dog, one regular large dog, and two small dogs, “to, eh, help you cope wiz ze, eh, ze zings.”

Delphine sighed as she struggled to find the right words. Lucas patted her shoulder, chuckling.

“It’s a hard language,” he said, “so don’t be too hard on yourself.”

“*Merci.*”

Lucas went into the mansion, and the dogs stopped wagging their tails at Dawn’s affections to greet him—or sit on him, as they all tried to do on his feet.

They heard a loud, bellowing laugh, and they looked up to find an old man sitting in a wheelchair. He sat in front of a door, which was slowly closing behind him. His hair was snow white from age, but he had a full head of hair, which was thinner than it used to be, due to his age. There was a tiny white fluff ball of a dog sitting in his lap.

“Lucas Driscoll,” the old man said with a Southern Emmerikan drawl, “judging by the way those dogs are acting, you’re a little bit scared of what’s going to happen to you today.”

“Uncle Ethan!” Dawn cried as she rushed to the old man and threw her arms around him.

“Hey, there girly,” Ethan said, patting Dawn’s shoulder, and there was a sad note in his voice.

Before even Lucas had been born, Ethan, a Champion of the Gleeful Fish, had been like a mountain man—broad, rugged, and tall—but in between traveling from the Temple of Temperance to the Temple of Charity, they had gotten into a vehicle accident—one that may have carefully been orchestrated by a group of anarchists—that had resulted in the death of his brother and taken Ethan’s use of his legs.

Like Dawn, both of Ethan’s parents had been Champions, but he had been lucky that both of them had survived—lucky until he had become a Champion himself. He was not the first descendant of two Champions to be selected as a Champion, but before him, it had been uncertain if such children were guaranteed to be chosen.

“By the way,” Ethan said to Dawn, “I was told that these dogs were supposed to be for everybody, but Princess here is mine and mine alone. Got it?”

Dawn giggled, and she patted the white fluffy dog in his lap.

“Got it.”

“Good, now that that’s settled, Lucas, let’s go,” Ethan said, wheeling his way toward the elevator in between the staircases. “Grab one of those dogs, and no one will hurt you.”

Lucas snorted. He passed Dawn’s backpack to Delphine.

“Is that why you have a dog yourself?” Lucas teased as he followed Ethan into the elevator, hoping that it was permitted for him to be there as well.

“Princess and I have a special bond, and we cannot be separated from each other.”

“Or you ran her over with your chair.”

“Lucas, she is smaller than my foot. Of course, I ran her over with my chair.”

Ethan pressed a button to the top floor of the mansion. Dawn waved at them until the doors closed.