“I forgot how cheerful kids are when they first get here,” Ethan said. “I lost that after the first Temple.”

“Yeah, we all did. She will, too.”

“That kid would smile through anything, I think. I don’t know how I got the Gleeful Fish and she the Feathered Serpent.”

“I disagree. She should have gotten the Falcon.”

“No one is as stubborn as you bastards.”

Lucas only grinned at that.

The elevator door opened with a ding, and Lucas waited for Ethan to exit first. The hallway they entered was long but wide.

“Anyway, you don’t need to worry about this meeting we’re having,” Ethan said. “Including us, there are only five of us here right now.”

“I see. We came earlier than I thought we would.”

“Although Eun-Ji is here, so you’re definitely going to be fighting for your life.”

Eun-Ji was one of the five surviving Champions in Lucas’s generation, and the Falcon had chosen her as the Lunar Huntress’s Champion, representing the sin of wrath. She and Lucas were in the generation that had gotten farther than any of the previous generations, meaning Eun-Ji had passed the Trial of Patience, yet she had the least patience of anyone he had ever met.

“Oh, no,” Lucas said, and he cursed under his breath.

“Should have grabbed a dog,” Ethan said.

The old man pressed a button beside the last door down the hallway. It opened slowly, revealing the other three older Champions. First, it was Makani Manunui, a muscular man with tribal tattoos covering his entire body. He was so tall that Lucas could have sworn the man got taller every time he saw him, even though he had just turned thirty-one a few days ago and should have stopped growing. His dark hair used to be long and wild all about his head, but he had chosen to cut it short sometime before he had arrived at the Compound.

There was also Asim Fahkry. His beard was long and well-groomed, and the white taqiyah on his bald head contrasted with the dark suit that he wore. Out of all the living Champions, he had expected—and would have been understanding of it—him to agree to come the least. He had a wife and many children to care for, but Lucas was glad to have him on board, anyway.

They could use all the help they could get.

The fifth Champion in the room was Eun-Ji Kim. She had always been short, standing at just one hundred and fifty-five centimeters in height, and she remained just as broad with muscle as she had been on that day they had lost Rudi, Dawn’s father. No face in this world had ever conveyed so much contempt for one man as it did now.

The room itself was just a meeting room like he had seen in movies set in office buildings. There was a long table in the center of it, and there were twenty chairs sitting all around it. They had a nice view of a large pond under the large windows. No one was sitting in the chairs.

“Lucas Driscoll,” Eun-Ji spat, and he realized that she had impressively lost her Achimian accent since the last time he had seen her.

That must have been five years ago. Eun-Ji had always made it a point to visit Dawn a few times a year, but when it had come to the other Champions, she had always avoided them like the plague.

“Eun-Ji, I’m sorry,” Lucas said before she could rant at him.

“You let an eleven-year-old get a hold of the Handle, Lucas! That is too irresponsible!”

“Ah, don’t be angry at him,” Ethan said, rolling his wheelchair to sit in between Eun-Ji and Lucas. “Do you know how hard I tried to hide my Handle from my kids when I had it? I kept it locked in a fancy safe with this complicated code, and they still got a hold of it.”

Eun-Ji shifted her glare to Ethan.

“And besides that,” the old man continued, “we all knew the kid was going to become a Champion, anyway.”

“But she was eleven, and if we had been able to take the normal amount of time, we would have been able to wait until she was twenty! She would have at least lived a normal childhood!”

“And I was fourteen when I was chosen,” Makani cut in. “Before her, that was the youngest age anyone had been chosen, and she at least got to wait until she was fifteen.”

“And it takes a couple of years to find all the Champions,” Ethan added. “She’ll get that normal childhood.”

“A normal childhood while isolated from everyone her own age?” Eun-Ji said, breathlessly. “This place is a gilded prison, and she—”

Asim, who had been silent until then, set his hand on Eun-Ji’s shoulder, and she turned to cast her glare at him instead.

“Eun-Ji, we all love her,” he said in his lilting Mizran accent. “None of us wanted this to happen, but it was inevitable that it was going to happen.”

Eun-Ji shrugged Asim’s hand off her shoulder, and she turned back to Lucas.

“We all made a promise to Angela that we would give her the best life that we could,” she said, “and we didn’t even keep it.”

Eun-Ji continued her venomous glare at him, and everyone was silent for a long minute. It felt like an eternity passed, but Eun-Ji dug into the inner pockets of her jacket. She pulled out two Handles and tossed them on the floor, and she turned her glare on them instead.

“Angela gave me her Handle a month before she died,” she said, “so those are mine and hers. I’m going to go see Dawn now,” she added as she stalked toward the exit.

Asim sighed as the door closed behind her.

“She beat the Trial of Patience,” he said, “and she’s still the most bloodthirsty out of any of us.”

Makani snorted.

“Can’t blame her, though,” Lucas said, sighing. “I’m still struggling to accept it myself. That’s why I didn’t tell you until it was time to start searching.”

Makani strode over and clapped a hand on Lucas’s shoulder.

“Listen, brother,” he said, “I was pissed when I heard about it, too, but I don’t blame this on you. I don’t even blame the Gods. I blame those idiots who decided to test a nuke on a God. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be sending kids to the Gods’ Temples to die or get PTSD if they survived.”

Those words were meant to make Lucas feel better, but now he felt an acute ache in his chest. He nodded, anyway, and he thanked him.

“Now,” Ethan said, picking up Princess from his lap to hold her in his arms, “let’s get to discussing who’s going to be traveling around to find the next generation of Champions.”

“I’m willing to go,” Asim said, holding up his hand.

“I also volunteer to go,” Lucas said, “and I think we can assume to Eun-Ji is going to stay here. She can’t back out of helping us now, whether she realized that when she agreed to come here or not, and I don’t think she wants me around right now.”

“Ah, she’ll calm down,” Makani assured him. “She always does.”

“I think I’ll stay here,” Ethan said, and he patted his wheelchair as he continued. “As much as I like being a pain in the ass, I’m getting a bit too old to travel.”

“And I just hate traveling. I’ll stay here, too, unless we don’t have enough people willing to go.”

“All right, good, and while we wait for the other eight slowpokes, we have some security nonsense to talk about.”