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The Artificer stops and turns to him. I feel, ridiculously, jealous of that stare, because whatever she sees in his face makes her hardened gaze soften. She folds her arms. “We didn’t. . .” she gestures outside. “It wasn’t like this.”

The Lins exchange a glance. Fred says, “No teras?”

“Not B tier. That didn’t really start until. . .” she gestured to me, and I knew she meant Thaddeus’ year.

I glance away. “How long have you been graduated?”

“Long enough. I’m not here for small talk.” A sigh. It sounds defeated. “Tell me what you have.”

“Hemlock,” Silas says.

The Artificer raises a brow. “Okay. And your plan is to feed the Nemean Lion hemlock, and wait until it goes to sleep?”

As a chorus we say, “Yes.”

I amend this with, “It’s the only advantage we have.”

“No, no. It’s a fine one,” she says. “How much of it do you have? They’ll starve it. Send it out ravenous. If you had any meat. Or a corpse—”

She stops herself, perhaps realising we’re not on the field; we don’t have an abundance of bodies around us. Except, perhaps, the bodies of our fellow students.

Victoria and I lock eyes. She quivers; I think she hears me, somehow, or has the same thought.

“Where do they take the corpses?” Victoria whispers. It’s the first time she’s spoken since we were outside. Bellamy moves to her immediately, and she holds him back with her hand. “I suppose they feed them to the teras?”

“Yes,” the Artificer says. She does not elaborate. Momentarily, a heist unfolds in my head: whatever dark pits our bodies are discarded in is on campus. We could spend the night finding it, fighting back the hungry teras, stealing a body of a dead comrade to feed the lion tomorrow. It falls apart easily, but for a moment it’s almost pleasant thinking of all the ways we might survive this. All those impossible ways.

“We don’t have time,” Fred says gruffly. “Whatever you’re thinking of, we face this thing tomorrow. So it can’t be anything that takes more than a few hours to put together.” She rubs her hands over her face. “Christ, I don’t know. We don’t know anything else. We don’t know where we’ll be facing this thing, what the landscape will be. . .”

She trails off, likely aware of how harrowing it is to hear how many unknowns we’re meant to face tomorrow.

“Just make it drinkable,” I say, gesturing to Silas. He nods and roughly pulls out the hemlock from his knapsack for the Artificer. “Maybe a salve. We’ll figure out the rest tomorrow.”

“What, staring down the lion?” Bellamy scoffs.

“If you have a better idea,” I start. “Hell, any idea, I’ll take it.” And he shuts up, obviously, because none of us know what we’re doing.

So we hand over our saving grace.

The Artificer looks down at the bunch and nods. “The teras that are vulnerable to this—it doesn’t take much. This should kill it.”

“Should?” Leo prompts.

The Artificer stares at him. “At the very least it will be so sluggish you probably won’t die quite so easily.”

Leo concedes with a murmur. “Good enough.”

“I need two hours. Maybe three,” she says. She looks to the Blood Hunter, says, “You owe me, bastard,” and steps back through the veil.

Within moments, she’s gone.

No one speaks, except the Blood Hunter. “Go on, now. Sod off. You can come back in two, but I’d prefer if you gave me three.”

He’s kinder than I thought, I realise; but maybe that’s a front. He’s hunted down another student. He won’t hesitate to do it again.

I keep catching myself slipping, thinking there is beauty and hope and friendship in amongst all this. I know that if I let myself feel any of it, it will kill me. If I let my guard down, it will kill me.

And Cassius Jones must live.