Easier said than done, I thought, struggling to balance my oblong head atop my emaciated body.

  When I went to wipe my visor, my head tipped to the side, pulling the rest of me after it. With a rude splash, my foot plunged into a pothole. It was a minor miracle I managed to retract it before face-planting.

  Swearing softly, I corrected course and urged myself to do better.

  Ahead, the column slowed to take a left onto Murray Street, allowing me a chance to catch up. I fell in behind the group of four soldiers trotting in lockstep. Like me, they wore visored helmets and went shirtless beneath their armored vests. Below the cuffs of their military pants, gray feet pounded asphalt. By depriving them of boots, Persephone seemed to be reinforcing their slave status.

  I labored to match the soldiers’ footfalls and swing my weapon in time to theirs. Two carried rifles, the other two rods like mine. But while red energy squirmed around the ends of their instruments—energy that recalled feelings of being buried alive—my own weapon was inert. Hermes had assured me they wouldn’t notice.

  “Just be as they are,” he kept repeating. “Do as they do.”

  To my surprise, I was getting the hang of it. Enough that I could begin to take in our surroundings. We were in the civic center, beyond the formidable cement barricades and official checkpoints that ringed the entire government sector. Posters for the mayor’s referendum plastered the sides of buildings, and on every one, the energy-gathering sigil lurked around Budge’s grinning face.

  At the end of a canyon of low-rises, a wall of cement barricades fortified City Hall Park. Guards flanked the entrance. I took extra care mimicking the soldiers in front of me, step for step, swing for swing. The guards watched us approach, their visors all seeming to aim at me, the odd number.

  But I was more concerned with what was happening ahead. Each entering vehicle bent slightly, as though I was viewing them through a faulty monitor. The same effect happened with the lead soldiers.

  Persephone’s defensive field.

  When it was my turn, I braced myself. A brief sensation of dipping, like when a high-speed elevator starts down, and then I was through. More disorienting was the environment in which I found myself.

  In the actual present, the public park featured large shade trees, a handsome fountain, and plenty of benches where people ate their lunches or chatted idly over iced lattes. Here, everything had been uprooted and covered in ugly cement constructions that crowded the city hall building.

  While the vehicles turned left, the foot soldiers continued straight and onto the grounds of the former park. Lines of soldiers entered from every direction, while fresh columns headed back out in some form of shift change. The rain and incessant marching had turned the grounds to mud. It was all I could do to keep from slipping as we advanced on an oblong building to one side of City Hall.

  We filed through a narrow opening and into a dank darkness that smelled like a boy’s locker room in need of bleach and a fire hose. I was tempted to cock my helmet back enough to peer from beneath the visor, but then I would look out of place. With my next step, I collided into the soldier in front of me.

  Crap!

  I staggered backward, my vision adapting enough now that, amid the squirming knots of red energy, I could make out stony silhouettes. The soldier’s head swiveled. I held perfectly still, waiting for him to raise his weapon or broadcast an alarm to the hive mind. But in the next moment, he straightened and turned left.

  I released my breath and took quick stock. Hermes had called this a barracks, but it looked more like a charging station. Soldiers slotted weapons into ports along the walls, then stood atop rows of blocks. I sensed magic in the blocks and ports, terminal outlets in some mystical grid.

  Instead of joining the soldiers on the blocks, I resumed my robotic trot toward the back of the barracks. There, I fell in behind another line of soldiers who were freshly charged up and ready to patrol again. As Hermes promised, none of the soldiers coming or going gave me a second look.

  As my new unit squelched through the mud toward Broadway, I broke off to take a position at the corner of the building, out of view of the guards stationed across the grounds.

  “The guards are more sensitive to anomalies than the foot soldiers,” Hermes had cautioned. “And though your potion should be enough to escape their notice, there’s no penalty for treading carefully.”

  So far, so good, I thought.

  Though City Hall’s columned entrance was presently outside my view, I’d noted the heavy security. According to one of Hermes’s informants, the clearance process could take thirty minutes. That spelled no go, even with a stealth potion.

  “Fortunately, there’s a hidden entrance,” Hermes had said with gleaming eyes.

  From where I stood, I could see the courthouse behind City Hall—at least its upper stories. The large historic building was ringed by cranes and construction fencing. Big vehicles trundled in and out along a muddy track. Persephone was repurposing the courthouse into a temple to Cronus. The hidden entrance, according to Hermes, was an underground tunnel that connected the two buildings.

  “Cunning, no?” he’d said.

  Sure, Danny Ocean, but where the hell’s my next prompt?

  It was all I could do to keep from shifting my stone feet. Only they weren’t so stony anymore, I saw in alarm. The skin was paling, the toenails starting to show color. The same was true of my arms, my hands. My head throbbed inside my helmet as my skull began to expand out again, returning to form.

  Are you freaking kidding me? No, no, no!

  The copycat potion was petering out.

  13

  I cast my eyes around in a desperate search for a departing column of soldiers. One I could join and then make my way to the meeting point, ideally before the copycat potion expired. But the columns were gone now and only guards remained. I couldn’t risk running back out through the gate. Not while I was morphing.

  Do I pull the ripcord and activate Hermes’s magic?

  It would get me out of there, but it would also alert Persephone that we’d breached her inner defenses. We’d never get this good of a shot again. I licked my stony teeth with a tongue that felt alarmingly human.

  I only had a few seconds to decide.

  A loud horn spanked the air, making me jump. A second horn answered. Ahead, two construction vehicles rumbled toward one another, one leaving the site, one entering, and neither one yielding.

  I drew a steadying breath. Okay. That’s gotta be the prompt.

  “I’ve planted some subtle enchantments,” Hermes had told me. “But that’s all I’m willing to risk. Anything bolder, and I’ll out myself. Be alert for a standoff. A spirited standoff that will seem natural, given the participants. It will attract just the right amount of attention, and that’s when you’ll move.”

  The two vehicles—a dump truck and a cement mixer—arrived nose-to-nose, the drivers laying full on their horns now.

  I stepped from my post and walked toward them.

  The drivers jumped down from their vehicles, a bearded man, sleeves rolled up to his burly shoulders, and a much shorter man who managed to appear the more menacing. They stalked forward bellowing, their fingers jabbing at the vehicles, the makeshift roadway, and increasingly at one another.

  By the time I reached the far side of the idling trucks, the men were grappling in the mud. Shouts rose from the site, and workers spilled out, possibly to break up the fight, but more likely to cheer it on. I used the distraction to edge past the dump truck’s rear tire and enter the construction zone.

  With a row of porta-potties for cover, I made my way toward the office trailers, eyes trained on the second to the last one. I arrived behind it, heart thudding in my softening chest. At a window, I peeked inside, then ducked back, cursing silently. A figure had been facing me. But as my mind processed the image, I saw the glow of a screen on the man’s face. He’d been looking at a monitor.

  The operation seemed a helluva lot easier in the planning, I thought, catching my breath.

  As I reached into a pocket for a potion, twin bolts bored into my temples, doubling me over. Son of a bitch! With my head returning to form, the helmet was threatening to become a permanent fixture.

  I pried it off with a low grunt, ripping out some hair. Even so, the relief came instantly. And without the visor screening my vision, the shadow realm suddenly appeared vibrant. That wouldn’t last.

  I listened toward the brawl. Still a lot of shouting, but it was being punctuated now by calls to get back to work.

  Speed it up, man.

  I pulled the potion from my pocket and activated it. As it began to bubble, I slipped around to the front corner of the trailer, held my breath, and poured the sleeping potion across the doorway in a line. A curtain of pink mist drifted up. I capped the potion, rapped on the door, and returned to the back.

  “Yeah?” an irritated voice called from inside.

  The trailer creaked with shifting weight. At the window, I watched the project manager hitch his pants to the top of his crack and amble toward the door. He opened it, stuck his head directly into the potion’s mist, looked around for several seconds, and closed the door again. I drew back and listened.

  The trailer creaked some more, and then came the expected thud. And not a moment too soon. My pale arms told me I was ninety percent Everson Croft again.

  I slid the window open and wriggled my way over a window-facing desk. Folders and papers spilled in my wake. I managed to grab a thick cable before the computer it powered crashed to the floor. I arranged everything back in its place before approaching the manager, who was slumped against the wall, fast asleep. I took a second to size him up. Larger than me, but the proportions were close enough.

  The process of removing my clothes and then shucking and donning his took a good fifteen minutes. The movies always made it look easy. At last, I knotted the boot laces, then stood and shook out my legs. His jeans hung baggy on me, and his work boots bobbled on my feet, but as long as I looked the part…

  I dragged the man into the trailer’s bathroom, propped him beside the toilet, and locked the door. The Iron Guard disguise went behind a filing cabinet. All except for the rod.

  I released a small clasp, and the rod opened vertically on a hidden hinge to reveal a hollow space. Nested inside was a slender tube like the kind architects carried. I removed it, took a hardhat from a shelf, and turned the ID badge on the pocket of my flannel shirt around so the man’s photo and name—Jake Reilly—were hidden.

  Pockets clinking with potions, I ventured outside. The fight had since broken up, and workers were ambling back to the site. I turned away from them and hastened toward the courthouse building.

  “Given the pace of construction, there will be people everywhere,” Hermes had said. “Different companies, different teams. Just look like you’re in too much of a hurry to be bothered and proceed directly to the tunnel.”

  I nodded to myself. He’d gotten me this far.

  I circled construction equipment, ducked under scaffolding, and entered the courthouse through a back door. Shouting and jackhammering reverberated from all sides. I proceeded down a corridor hung with sheets of industrial plastic, consulting my mental map of the courthouse as Hermes had sketched it.

  At the building’s rotunda area, which was being dramatically expanded, I peered into a fresh pit that cored out the basement levels. Brown water pooled at the very bottom. High overhead, an octagonal skylight allowed in gray light, but that wasn’t all. The metal framing had been configured into a casting symbol, not unlike the one on the “Budge Train” posters, and it was channeling a column of raw energy into the pool below. This was the energy Persephone was siphoning from the city.

  I resisted the urge to stare. None of the workers had given this wizard in disguise a closer look yet, and I wanted to keep it that way. My chest clenched now as I approached a ladder to the lower levels. I’d thought having a basement-level lab would relax my underground phobia some, but not yet.

  Relax, I coached myself. You’ll be out of here before you know it.

  While waiting on a pair of workers to ascend the ladder, I forced several deep breaths. Too soon, the workers were moving past me, and I took their place on the ladder. I climbed down two levels and hurried along a catwalk to a ploughed-out room that ended at a metal door. A posted sign read: RESTRICTED ACCESS. Then, in a smaller font, TRESPASSING PUNISHABLE BY DEATH.

  Wow, that’s all?

  I tested the door handle to find it locked. I pressed my ear to the damp metal. Nothing sounded from beyond. I began looking around for the key. Hermes had claimed it would be within “easy reach.”

  “Jake!” a man shouted above the noise.

  Crap, that was me—or rather the person whose clothes I was wearing.

  Without turning, I pretended to survey the wooden beams supporting the room, even pressing on one several times. In my peripheral vision, a figure hustled down the catwalk, a keychain jangling at his belt.

  “Jake!” the man repeated. “What the hell are you doing down here?”

  I turned toward him with a surly face. “You got a problem, buddy?”

  He stopped suddenly, his mouth faltering. “Oh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.” He turned, then stopped as though something had just occurred to him. “Who are you?”

  “What the fuck is it to you?” I snarled in my best Hoffman voice.

  But it was the wrong tactic. Instead of cowing him, my verbal challenge set the man’s chest heaving and his nostrils flaring like a bull’s. He wasn’t a small man, either.

  “I’m the site manager down here, you little turd.” He stalked forward. “And I wanna know what you’re doing in my pit.”

  When he lunged, I raised an arm thinking he was preparing to take a swing. Instead, he seized my ID tag and yanked it from my shirt. I watched, stunned, as the man brought the card toward his screwed up face.

  Before he could turn it around, I thundered, “Stop!”

  According to Hermes, my potions would be safe if used sparingly. They released magic in a measured manner over time, not rising to a threshold that would alert Persephone. The same couldn’t be said of invocations, though, which emerged as noisy blasts. And in my panic, I’d just set off a cherry bomb.

  The man blinked at me slowly.

  “Give it back,” I said, drawing down my wizard’s voice but not abandoning it.

  I didn’t see an alternative. If he learned I was impersonating Jake, he’d sound the alarm. And if I splashed him with sleeping potion, he’d collapse in plain view of a dozen workers. As it was, our standoff was already drawing some looks.

  The ID was inches from the man’s face, but his gaze remained on mine.

  “Give it back,” I repeated, compressing my power into a tight, forceful current.

  At last, he extended his arm. It took two tugs for me to remove the ID from his grip. I returned it to my shirt and was about to send the man on his way when I connected his credentials to the keys at his belt.

  “There are a few ways to access the tunnel,” Hermes had said, “but the safest will be the most straightforward. Don’t worry. When you arrive, I’ll place a key within easy reach.”

  I gave a bitter inward laugh. Like with the obstinate truck drivers, Hermes had hit the man with a subtle enchantment, probably the night before, to ensure he would keep a suspicious eye on his pit. Hermes had trusted me to do the rest. Maybe I should have been flattered, but the god was also amusing himself.

  I snapped my fingers at the man and pointed at the door. “I need that opened for inspection.”

  The man nodded as though he’d been shot full of Sodium Pentothal and fumbled through his keys. The one he finally produced was black and crusty, and I picked up a thin skin of magic along its length. The bolt released, and the man withdrew. But he remained standing there, staring at me dimly.

  Oh, for the love of…

  “Let’s get back to work, huh?” I suggested.

  He stared for several more moments before nodding slowly. At last, he turned and ambled away.

  With no idea how long he would remain under the thrall of my voice, I opened the door and slipped inside. Cold blackness pressed around me. I pawed my helmet until I found the switch for the small headlamp seated in the hard plastic. The tunnel it illuminated had been drilled straight through the bedrock. Dark gray walls, buttressed every several feet by wooden beams, glistened with moisture.

  I listened for a moment, rotating the cardboard tube in my sweaty palms. Hearing nothing, I started down the tunnel, boots splashing through puddles. Within ten steps my headlamp dimmed to a series of concentric rings.

  Are you kidding me?

  Jake had allowed the batteries to run down. Swearing, I sped my pace, but it was a losing race. The light was fading too fast. Before long, it was a single tan ring, so faint against the tunnel floor I might as well have imagined it. And then the light extinguished altogether. I stared into the darkness ahead, ears ringing.

  From the deep void, a low growl sounded.

  14

  The growl that followed was lower in pitch and a little closer.

  Two of them… at least.

  As I felt for the plastic cap on my cardboard tube, I recalled what Hermes had said. “I don’t know what Persephone keeps down there, if anything. According to an informant, noises have been heard, but only on the days no tunnel work is scheduled. I would listen before you enter. If it’s quiet, you’re likely clear.”

  The growls were accompanied now by the scrape and patter of approaching footfalls. At last I located the plastic cap. Digging my fingernails underneath the rim, I pried it open, nearly fumbling the tube in the process.

  “But I’ll pack extra help,” Hermes had finished, “should you need it.”