Page 13 of Phoenix Chosen 3

“How did you even find us?” Tyler says. “That was some timing.”

“I’ve been on the hunt ever since I heard about a phoenix flying over the city yesterday. It might’ve been impossible had you not used your powers just now. And that light… Kalistratos, that was you?”

I shake my head and point at Tyler. Airos raises an eyebrow.

Tyler shrugs. “I don’t know how I did it.”

“There’s quite the story to tell,” I say. “You’ll never guess where we’ve been.”

I go to the downed swordsman and relieve him of his weapon. It feels good to be armed again.

“And here is not the place to tell it,” Airos says. “We need to leave, now.”

The cracks and crevices in the stone prison have turned a deep black and I can hear bits of it crumbling away from the inside. Praxis’s shadow weapon is working on breaking him free.

I grab Tyler’s hand, and the three of us make for the gate with haste.

6

TYLER

We pass a small graveyard outside the city walls with headstones that look very similar in style to the ones on Earth—some tall with spiraling carvings around their borders, some painted with fading red ochre lines, many chipped and eroded down to nothing but lumps of rock after centuries of being in the dirt, the names engraved on them long forgotten. It’s yet another reminder of how much I don’t know about this world that I’ve chosen to call my own.

I’m never going back.

At one point, I thought Circeana was a place I somehow manifested out of a deep longing to belong somewhere; it all came out of my head. My personalMatrix. I’m pretty sure that was just my brain’s way of coping with the shock.

I’m still clueless, but I feel like my eyes are open now, and I’m doing my best to allow myself to dive into the deep end.

“We buried you guys there,” Airos says, waving his staff at the ground as we run. He’s concealing our tracks and scentfrom Praxis and any others who may have it. “It was a beautiful funeral. Alyx may have cried. I couldn’t tell. Do cats cry?”

“You had afuneralfor us?” I say. “That’s cold.”

“It was purely for formality’s sake,” he replies, “in case you really were dead. You wouldn’t want to attempt to cross the river Theoheles without the proper offerings.”

“Right…”

He leads us off the road and straight into the woods. A small stream winds through the trees, and Airos wades in and begins to walk upstream, water sloshing around his ankles.

“It will help keep our trail hidden,” he says, beckoning us to do the same.

It’s dark, especially beneath the trees. I stumble around and nearly faceplant, but Kalistratos hooks his arm around mine and keeps me steady.

“Move it to your back,” Kalistratos says. “It’ll be easier to manage.”

“Here I thought I was used to carrying this weight on the front,” I grumble.

I pull aside my shredded cloak and shift the position of the egg sling so that it’s strapped securely to my back. It feels like I’m wearing a backpack stuffed with a boulder. Airos sees what I’m doing and stops.

“Gods be. Is that what I think it is?” he says.

“Freshly laid,” I say.

“Airos,” says Kalistratos. “Tell me what else happened after we were taken. How long has it been?”

“Not yet,” he answers. “Just a little further. We’ll speak where it’s safe.”

Airos’s hideaway is deep in the woods, inside an abandoned hunter’s dwelling. It’s not much more than a shack made of mud brick and logs, but it feels safe and isolated. He’s kept any potential visitors away with magic spells to make it seem haunted, and by the way it looks, it definitely feels like it could be the home of some restless spirit.

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