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“As soon as I get my leg, I am leaving these fucking apartments. And I don’t think I can stomach seeing you again, Cassius Jones. Not for a very long time.”

“I’ll have Leo bring the acceptance letter to you,” I whisper, and stand.

“I wish we’d never met you.”

I know, I know, I know. I can’t blame Fred for anything. I can’t blame God, who has abandoned me, or from whom I have strayed.

There is only Cassius Jones to blame.

EPILOGUE

The ceremony for the letters is short and sweet. Of the three hundred applicants, half or so are dead. When I think about how many actual graduates there are, I suspect this number will continue to dwindle in the coming years.

Fantastic.

Only ninety-three students stand ready for their letters. The rest are still healing. Rumours circulate about the other trials: another Nemean Lion. Cerberus, a D tier teras for the survivors of a smaller room. Peter Drike was given to a Stympahlian class teras. C tier, a step above the python we faced in the first trial. It was a cruel thing. The Stymphalian are man-eating birds. With one leg down, and on his own, it is no wonder Drike did not survive.

But perhaps, if Victoria has joined him, they’d have had a better chance.

It is clear we had the worst of it. I bargained for ours lives and the dean rose to my taunt; I doomed us all. I did that.

Every one of us survivors is broken in some way. There are a lucky few without visible injuries, but most of us have broken limbs, or severed ones. Only four of us have working limb replacements. The rest are waiting for the Artificers working overtime.

I swear I blink and there is a paper in my hand granting me and my family the safety of London’s wards—so long as I can make it to graduation. I look beside me to Leo, whose head is bandaged in a way only his right eye is exposed. It lolls over to me and there’s a storm in there. So the moment we are congratulated by the dean—all background noise—I go to him.

We stumble out of the introductory hall, that first place we heard Dean Drearton’s words before the bloodletting. Leo crowds me against a wall. He can hardly speak with the bandages, but he wheezes out a, “Cass.”

He links his fingers through mine and slips open his jacket. I glance back up at him but he’s only edging out something wrapped up.

“A gift?” I murmur.

“Weapon.”

I don’t understand until I’ve opened it up. And I realise what he wants me to do.

“Leo, I can’t.”

“You can,” he says, voice muffled. “You must. Please.” His eye implores me, his hand squeezes hard to keep me here in this moment until I relent.

“And then what will happen?”

He shrugs. “We will figure it out.”

I know I am meant to be feeling anger. Or fear. But in the wake of the hybrid, in the ride back to London, I felt nothing. I still feel nothing. I look at Leo, at the emotion in his face, and I can identify the desperation. I understand that he wants it.

But I feel nothing.

“Alright,” I say, but I’m not sure I mean it, until Leo hands me the bundle and I think of my father. Not how he is now, but how he used to be.

I think about what I didn’t do, and what I begged Thaddeus to do.

How good would it feel to chop the head off the snake.

* * *

Dean Drearton’s office is past the Janus lock, and without the ceremony—or whatever it is that allows me to pass—I have to wait to catch him. I plant myself in the courtyard by the door and wait for him to meander towards it. I still have my acceptance letter clutched in my hand. He spots me and quirks a brow, and thinks I am there for praise.

“You did very well,” he murmurs. “Manticore’s head’s already being put in the library. Wings, too.”