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“No wonder he doesn’t want to help.He really thinks it’s useless.”

Pritkin didn’t say anything that time, but I could read the thinness of his lips, which hadn’t been plump to begin with.He knew his other half.He didn’t think we had a chance, either.

But he’d go if I said so.And I knew without question that Mircea would, too.And how did I, of all people, get in a position to tell two men like that to risk their lives?How did I have the right to decideanyof this?

I looked down again at the people doing what people do, just getting through life.Some had baskets over their arms, shooing a few random chickens out of the way while doing their shopping because someone was farming around here.Produce was piled high on tables and stuffed into great sacks in the case of corn, because I guessed it was harvest time.

A few were buying the fresh ears, still wrapped in their leaves, but more had clustered around a couple of guys working an old-fashioned, hand-cranked machine.One of them was feeding whole dried cobs into it, and the other was using a different part of the contraption to grind the kernels into masa for tortillas.Which several women were cooking up beside them, selling the fresh rounds in stacks, ready for stuffing.

Those people had fought and run and hidden and survived to rebuild their lives against all the odds.Who was I to tell them they couldn’t live them?That their children couldn’t be born, that their lovers, whom they might never have met without the cataclysm that had thrown them together, couldn’t be there, that the life they’d struggled so hard for couldn’t exist?That I was about to try to wipe it all out?

But if I didn’t, how did I face the ghosts, all the multitudes who had died who shouldn’t have, and who wouldn’t have if I’d been better, done more, tried harder—

“Stop it,” Pritkin told me, his voice low and dangerous.

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t right then.

“Don’t do this,” he said as if we were having a normal conversation, instead of me having my fiftieth nervous breakdown and him...

I didn’t know what he was doing, but it wasn’t working.I sank slowly onto my haunches, still staring at the crowd who had no idea,no idea, that the girl in the tattered-looking saffron robe and bare, dirty feet was deciding their fate.Even though she had no right to it, none at all, but still had to choose.

Or else that was a choice, too, wasn’t it?

“You did the best anyone could have,” Pritkin said because he desperately wanted to help; I knew he did.But no one could help me right now.

To be Pythia is to be alone, I heard Gertie say, and my mentor had been absolutely right, as usual.

We didn’t answer to anybody, she’d said, because no one sees the things we do or would understand them if they did.Worlds within worlds, timelines constantly changing, splitting, growing this way and that, like the gnarled roots of a tree.Like the world tree that the old legends had talked about, only which world, I wondered?

Which one was it to be?

Choose.

I didn’t know that time if it was Gertie’s voice or mine.Didn’t know if I was right.Didn’t know anything and had no right to decide any of this.

No right at all.

“Tonight,” I said hoarsely.“Before Zeus gets back.We go for Vegas.

“We go for Rhea.”

Pritkin, who had sunk down behind me without me even knowing it, tightened his arms and let his head drop onto my shoulder.“So be it.”

It rang like a bell in my ears, but whether of victory or warning, I didn’t know.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Thisis what you do with your time?”

The question caught me off guard.I looked up from the vendor’s stall, which was spilling out of a slouching Winnebago that should have had a meth lab inside it, and saw the silver prince staring at me.It was disconcerting, not just because I hadn’t heard him approach but because that pewter gaze could intimidate more robust people than me.

Especially now.

It was all I’d been able to do to keep my hands from shaking as I searched the market that sprawled along the town’s main street for something more suitable for a raid on god-central than rotting saffron robes.I’d told Pritkin we were leaving tonight because we had to—once Zeus arrived with an army at his back, it was game over.Yet I had no idea how we were supposed to make that work.

None at all.