“I didn’t know she existed until now.” He frowned, staring over at the herm where the children were still dodging and squealing. “This is all terribly awkward. I was intending to pay court to your sister.”

Plato has extremely harsh things to say about jealousy, which I repeated to myself. I was struggling hard with this in my soul, as well as feeling all the physical symptoms, heat flushing my cheeks and hands and my stomach tightening. Then Pytheas appeared beside me. One instant he wasn’t there, the next he was, as if he’d taken a step from nowhere. He didn’t look the way he did in his statues—he was dressed normally, for one thing—but he didn’t look like the old man he’d been when I saw him a few days before. He looked not so much young as ageless. Yet I recognized him immediately as my grandfather.

“I thought you were in Alexandria,” he said, frowning at Hermes.

“Moving rapidly is my specialty,” Hermes said, with a teasing smile.

“Yes, but—”

“I’m here now,” Hermes said.

Pytheas was still frowning. “Well, it’s good that you came, you can test something for me. I was going to find Porphyry, but you’ll be better.”

“Let me finish with this first.”

“No, it’s important,” Pytheas said.

“So is this.”

“What, dallying with my granddaughter? Surely that can wait.” Pytheas smiled at me.

“We weren’t dallying,” I protested. My voice sounded strange in my ears.

“Necessity has me by the foot,” Hermes said.

I instinctively looked down at his feet. He had wings on his sandals. He hadn’t had those when I’d met him before. As I was looking down, the children noticed Pytheas and came running up, crowding round him asking questions.

“Joy to you, yes, I’m here, yes, but go inside now. You can tell everyone I’m here and I’ll come in and talk to them, but I need to speak to my brother first.”

They protested, of course, but Pytheas shooed them inside, some laughing and some crying. He closed the door and turned back to us. The garden seemed very dark and quiet without the children and the bar of light from the door. I realized that Pytheas was much better lit than anything else, as if the starlight were concentrating itself on him.

“Necessity?” Pytheas said to Hermes, as if there had been no interruption.

“Your step-granddaughter Marsilia is the mother of my daughter Alkippe, but I’ve never been here before today. So I need to discover how this came to be and set it straight.”

Pytheas winced. “I appreciate how uncomfortable this is, but—” he began.

“No, wait,” I said, wanting to clarify things. “You died, and you’re here, and that’s not the most important thing that’s happened today. I’ve found out the father of my daughter is the god Hermes, and that’s not the most important thing that’s happened today either. Even this time loop, disconcerting as it is, isn’t the most important. You have to know, there’s a human ship in orbit.”

Both gods looked at me with the same infuriating lack of expression, the same air of fathomless calm indifference.

“A human ship!” I repeated. “Recontact with the wider universe! A chance to rejoin the human mainstream and influence it!”

“Yes,” Pytheas said, with a wave of his hand. “But you can deal with that perfectly well yourself.” I gasped. “You’re a Gold of the Just City, you can deal with it, or what have we been doing here? Hermes, I can’t find Athene.”

“Can’t find her?” Hermes looked down shiftily.

“Try reaching for her.”

“Can’t I sort out this mess first?” He gestured towards me, sounding petulant.

“It’ll take less time than arguing. If you can find her, then—”

Hermes shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Go outside time and try.”

“Look, let me talk to Marsilia for five minutes and then stay here for two heartbeats while I sort this out, and I’ll do all the running around looking for Athene you want,” Hermes said.

“She’s missing?” I asked. I had a really bad feeling about this. “Lost?”

Suddenly I had all of their attention. Hermes seemed particularly intent.

“It seems so. Have you seen her?” Pytheas asked.

“About two years ago, after the Panathenaic Festival, she came to me and Thetis in the sanctuary when we were putting the new cloak on her statue.” I could remember it clearly. She’d come into the room carrying her owl, and it turned its head to watch us as she moved. She was much taller than any human. There are lots of stories about Athene in the City, some good, some not so good. Thetis had clutched my hand so tightly I’d had marks for days. “She said we were her worshippers, and this was her city. I was a priest that year, remember?”

“Priesthood is a civic function here, like in Rome,” Pytheas put in. Hermes nodded dismissively.

“She gave us a kind of woven box to look after,” I went on, remembering the weight of it in my arms and the strange weave, and the tilt of her head as she spoke. “She told us not to open it unless we heard she was lost, and then we had to both be together. And she asked us not to tell you until that happened.”

“So which one of you opened it, and how long did it take?” Pytheas asked. “And why in all the worlds didn’t you tell me?”

“How did you know we already opened it?” I asked.

“Human nature,” Pytheas said. “What was in it?”

“Hilfa,” I admitted.

“Hilfa!” Pytheas repeated. I had never seen him look so taken aback.

“Who’s Hilfa?” Hermes asked. “And where is he?”

“He’s a Sael,” Pytheas said. “One of the aliens. I’ve met him a time or two. He seems perfectly normal for one of the Saeli, which is to say very peculiar indeed.”

“We didn’t expect it would be a living being,” I said. “We thought we could look to see what it was and close it again until it was necessary. Or if it was something dangerous to the Republic we could tell somebody. Athene hasn’t always been our friend.”

“And don’t you know the story of Pandora?” Hermes asked.

I looked at him blankly.

“No, that’s one of the stories they left out,” Pytheas said. “Not a good example, and Plato didn’t believe people learned excellence from awful warnings. So what did you do when you opened it and it turned out to be Hilfa?”

It was my turn to look down guiltily. “We arranged for him to have somewhere to live and a job and education, as if he were any Sael who had decided to stay behind.” I glanced at Hermes. “That’s always happening. The Saeli like Plato, and lots of them stay, though usually they live in pods, not individually. But it was easy.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?” Pytheas demanded.

“I’m not completely irresponsible. It was two years ago. I told Dad and Klymene.” They had been consuls that year.

“And Neleus and Klymene didn’t tell anyone? Didn’t tell me?” He sounded aggrieved.

“Evidently not. I don’t know if they told anyone else.”

“I can’t believe you all kept it from me!” Pytheas said.

I shifted guiltily. “Athene specified that we shouldn’t tell you. So we decided to wait and see what happened, and keep an eye on Hilfa, which we have been doing. I started working on the boat with him. He hasn’t done anything unusual.”

“Let’s go and find him,” Hermes suggested.

“Why would she choose a Sael?” Pytheas asked, ignoring Hermes. “The Saeli have a strange relationship with their gods. Why would Athene have had one in a box? And why would she leave it here with Neleus’s daughters in case she was lost? And what use could it be, in that case? And did she expect to get lost?”

“She must have, if she took measures against it,” Hermes said; and then after a moment, “How strange.”

“If she was here on Plato, why didn’t she simply come to me and explain? And where is she, anyway? She must have known Thetis would open the box.”

“I didn’t say it was Thetis who opened it! And it wasn’t. We did it together.” Though if I hadn’t agreed, she would have done it anyway. When we first opened it, for a second it looked like a snake coiled tightly around a human baby. Then it resolved into an egg, which immediately hatched into Hilfa, much as he was now: curious, earnest, alien. “I don’t think he’s a god.”