“Look out!” I shout to her.

Luc fires.

I leap upward, creating a space between me and the phoenix for the bolt to pass through, but it hits her straight on. She explodes in a spray of fire and ash.

The bulk of her lifeless body crashes into the sandy Arena below.

I plummet through the air, surrounded by floating phoenix feathers. Things go eerily silent as I fall—silent enough for me to hear Luc’s taunting voice.

“Fly, Icarus. Fly.”

The Arena sand is just soft enough to keep me conscious, just hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Others land around me. At first I think it’s pieces of my poor phoenix, but the only sign of her are floating feathers of fire, falling to the ground and turning to ash in defeat.

The bodies dropping around me are Luc’s tirones, but they do it intentionally. An aerial dismount from their pterodactyls. The world spins in my vision, but I try to rise. I’m too sluggish. The tirones each grab a limb and stretch it out, so I’m spread-eagle in the center of the Arena.

“Hammer!” one calls.

A chill runs through my body. Are they going to crucify me or something? I picture metal going through my wrists. My feet. This is a Roman world.

I think of Jesus. No. I’m not that brave.

Another body arrives, and by now my vision is clear enough, despite the pain of fighting for breath, that I recognize him.

Crixus.

He holds a crude hammer and a handful of enormous metal spikes.

“Crixus,” I croak. “Please. No.”

He doesn’t look at me. He passes two nails and the hammer to a tiro. Someone wraps something around my left ankle. I fight it, but too many hands hold me down, and my body is too broken to put up much resistance.

Clang. The hammer hits metal. A shock goes up my arm. I cringe, but there’s no pain.

Clang. I try lifting my head, but it’s too much strain on my abdomen and ribs. The same movements with hammer and nail repeat at my ankle and then my right hand. Once they reach my wrists, I’m able to see. A tiro wraps a thick piece of leather around my wrist and hammers it into the ground with the long spikes until I’m a bug on a display mat.

Disconcerting, but a bit more comforting than crucifixion.

Crixus does my left hand. While he hammers the nail deep, he doesn’t double wrap the leather. There’s enough wiggle room that, with time and stealth, I could possibly get my wrist out. An oversight?

I look at him, but he’s already walking away.

He did this on purpose. He’s too efficient of a centurion to blunder like that. Especially when I’m the Emperor’s number-one enemy. But why would he do that when I left him to be killed by a Minotaur?

“Check his hands,” Luc orders from somewhere around my head. “And pockets.”

The tirones do so, emptying everything. One hisses and swiftly withdraws his hand. I barely make out the tiny kernel of wheat that rolls out. My last one.

Luc knocks it away with his foot, and it disappears into the mess of sand and phoenix ash.

“Prepare the Arena for this traitor. No food, no water. This won’t take me long.” He mounts his stingray and glides into the air, the airborne tirones following him.

I track their trajectory into the sky as much as I can, trying to gather my sense of direction. He flies away from the coliseum, opposite the Emperor’s box.

Toward the wheat field. Toward Castle Ithebego.

No!

Then they’re out of view. I think of Heidi’s mom and the Fears. They’re likely less than an hour from reaching the wheat field, and I won’t be there. They’ll be massacred.

“Crixus!” I manage to bellow.

No answer. A tiro mutters to another something about nightmist. He sounds wary, but cocky. Proud to have Icarus contained, but uncertain if I’m totally subdued.

I have no wheat kernels, and I’ve committed to the light too much to create out of darkness anymore. Nightmist no longer comes to my fingertips, even if I egg on my darker emotions. I don’t think it’s even in me anymore.

I’m truly helpless.

A few tirones move in and out of the stands, hauling big leather bags of something heavy. They set them up on the edge of the Arena, one filled bag every few yards. I’ve never seen these bags as part of the Games before. I recall Luc’s words, “Prepare the Arena for this traitor.”

The bags have something to do with me.

Though there’s no sun, the heat of the fire tower beats down on me, accentuating my thirst. The thirst is more from real life than from the strain in Tenebra. I’ll die from it in real life, but I’ll be forced to endure the torture of it for hours and hours in here. How long until the next Games?

I tug a bit at the leather around my right wrist—the leather Crixus nailed. It’s firmly nailed into the ground. There must be some sort of clay or stone beneath the sand to hold the spike so securely. I twist my hand a bit to test the looseness, but then a sandal presses against my fingers, crushing them so hard they’re close to breaking.

A tiro stands above me. “Keep doing that and I’ll cut off your hand.”

“Noted,” I retort.

He resumes his post, and I keep still, burning beneath the heat and shriveling like a raisin from thirst. I try to tell myself it’s all in my head and none of it is real, but that doesn’t change the dread of lying here vulnerable while Luc and his airborne minions attack my friends.

For the first time I understand why Stranna doesn’t want to risk her life to share the Adelphoi secret. Even though she knows she’ll wake up in the Real World if killed, the fear involved is constant. And didn’t Jesus do the same thing? When it was time for him to be captured, he kept praying that God would take the cup from him?

I suppose if Jesus could dread death, even knowing it would save the whole world and the pain would be temporary, it’s okay for me to dread it too.

Except I don’t know what’s on the other side. Well, I know about eternity. Nole and Mom brought it up All. The. Time. Now I understand why—they had the answer. Despite my hard-headedness and stubborn heart.

But when it comes to Tenebra, I’m not an Adelphoi. When I die, I’ll die.

I have the faith, but the nerves and anxiety still exist now that it’s being tested.

Hours pass before anything new happens. I lift my head a bit to see the stands through my spinning vision. People shuffle in early. Their curiosity is palpable. Many point and whisper. I hear the name Icarus a couple times as their tones get more excited. The Games are finally upon us.

What must it be like to look upon this as entertainment? Do they think they’re coming to watch some sort of stage show with an escape artist? Do they think I put myself here solely to amuse them?