Sunny finished talking and Nephis was still looking at him.
He smiled, because there was nothing else to do with a look like that. "You really are crazy. That's an awakened demon we're talking about. Have you forgotten that we're just Sleepers?"
He was already reaching for something else to say when Quinn cut him off.
"We've had this exact conversation before. Right before we decided to kill the centurion."
Sunny pointed at himself. "And remember who almost died doing that?"
"But you didn't," Nephis said.
Sunny looked at her with the expression of a man who feels he is not being taken seriously and is correct about this.
Cassie drifted into the space between them and said something gentle and deflecting, and the tension loosened just enough for all of them to breathe. They talked it through. The plan that emerged was not a good plan — follow the demon, watch it, find the weakness — but it was the only plan available, and available plans have a way of becoming the ones you use regardless of quality.
That night, Cassie dreamed about the obsidian tree again. Quinn noticed her face when she woke and said nothing. He had reasons for not saying anything that had nothing to do with not caring, and everything to do with not wanting to change the shape of what was coming before it arrived.
Sunny had been quiet for a while in the way that meant something was moving behind his eyes. Eventually he said: "I have an idea. It's a bit wild. But it might work. Probably."
The three of them looked at him.
"It's not even that complicated," he said. "I actually got it from one of Nephis's stories. We build a..." He paused. "A trojan ass."
The two girls looked at each other.
Quinn said: "A Trojan horse, you nimwit."
Sunny nodded as though he had known this, though his look at Quinn suggested he had no idea what nimwit meant and was fairly certain it wasn't a compliment.
Before the planning could go further, Quinn dropped something else into the conversation.
"Also — don't say that phrase too much. The trojan horse one."
Cassie frowned. "Why?"
"Because it's part of an Honorific Name for a different god," Quinn said. "The full line is trojan horse of fate. Don't think about the rest of it."
Sunny stared at him. He thought about how a horse's rear end had anything to do with a god and arrived at no satisfying answer.
Cassie, carefully: "If the god you worship is different from the one you just mentioned... could that other one..."
Quinn cut her off before she could finish building the question. "If my god accidentally turns you into a pile of worms, the other one could replace you. Become you. Take everything connected to you. Simply put — you'd be a living vessel that lets it into this world."
The cold that went down Sunny's back had nothing to do with the temperature.
Cassie did not ask anything further.
Nephis, after a moment, said: "Then how do you know you haven't already been changed?"
Quinn shrugged. "You don't. Which is exactly why it's best that no one in this era knows anything about that one at all."
Nephis was quiet again. Then: "Can your god intervene in this world?"
Quinn thought about it. "Probably. Depends on whether the gods of this world can stop it. If they can, the intervention gets smaller."
Sunny said: "From what I've heard, our six gods are already dead. Or close to it. That might just be rumor."
"Rumor or not," Quinn said, "an Outer God has already touched this world. Mine is better than most of them, that much I'm certain of."
Sunny pressed: "How certain?"
Quinn gave him the version of the truth that was true enough to survive scrutiny. "Because it's what got me out of the maze at the start. And because every time something from another Outer God has tried to touch me, mine has pushed it back. The only evidence I have is that I'm still standing here. Make of that what you will."
Cassie said, quietly: "Could I know something about your god?"
Quinn didn't answer with words. He reached for the axe handle and crouched down and drew the symbol in the sand — the star at the center, the concentric layers radiating outward, the geometry of the Door pathway rendered in the ash of the Forgotten Shore.
Nephis and Sunny and Cassie gathered around it.
Then Quinn began.
He had never tried this before — constructing a theology from scratch in real time — but it turned out that years of reading fiction had prepared him for this in ways he hadn't anticipated. He talked about Mr. Door. The god of movement and connection, of distance made irrelevant, of every threshold between one thing and another. No distance could stop it. No seal in the world could hold it. A kingdom ten thousand miles away could appear beneath its feet if it wished, and an enemy could be exiled forever into the dark between spaces if it turned away. It walked the deep void between stars wrapped in their cold light, holding every forbidden secret, the beginning of every journey and the final door that closed on every fate. Don't look for it — it's already everywhere. It might already be standing behind you.
He stopped.
Nephis's expression, which rarely moved far from neutral, had acquired a crease between the brows that was as close to discomfort as she usually got in public. Cassie had pulled her knees up and was gripping Nephis's sleeve without appearing to notice she was doing it. Sunny looked fine from the outside. He was not fine from the outside. His face was the particular white of someone maintaining composure through effort, and Quinn noticed that his shadow had quietly relocated itself to somewhere behind him, away from the symbol drawn in the sand, as though it had made a private assessment of the situation and acted on it without consulting its owner.
Quinn had successfully lied to three people.
He let a moment pass. Then, in a voice that was low and level: "Only when you have truly run out of options — only then — should you recite the Honorific Name to ask for protection."
He paused.
Then he spoke it in the language of Hermes, each line landing in the silence like something dropped from a height:
*The Mysterious Ruler above the Gray Mist;*
*The King of Space-Time who wields Great Change;*
*The Embodiment of Every Entrance and Every End.*
The symbol in the sand moved.
Just slightly. Just for a moment. Then it was still again.
Nobody said anything.