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expected something gorier, more chewed. It felt like it should belong to the shark bite school of wounds. But this shark had bitten with only adozen or so very small and scattered teeth that had left behind oozing golf ball puckers in his leg. Still …  ow .
    “Ricochets!” Horace yelled, the hair above his ears lashing his bald scalp in the wind. “You’re lucky. Not much worse than a BB gun! You’ll be fine! Where are Skelton’s globes? Or was all of this without purpose?”
    Nolan laughed. Cyrus snorted, and then shouted back, “How ’bout I shoot you twenty times in the leg with a BB gun!” He peeled the soggy paper off his shoulders. Horror flooded Horace’s eyes. “They were in the pool!” Cyrus yelled. “I don’t think they ripped, but the ink is pretty bad.”
    Antigone looked like she was going to be sick. Cyrus draped the two paper mats over her knees. Then he smiled at his mom and limped into the cockpit. He wormed down into the pilot’s seat and slipped on his headset.
    Diana looked at him. Her voice crackled in his ears. “Is that fat monk dangling from the plane?”
    Cyrus nodded.
    “I knew we were dragging something heavy. Can we drop him? Or should we tilt these rotors down and flap him off at three hundred miles per hour?”
    Cyrus shook his head. “Find somewhere close and set it down. He’s one of the good guys.”
    Diana nodded. She banked the plane back over theroad toward a low, flat-roofed building with a cracked and weedy parking lot. Cyrus knew it had once been a grocery store, but the windows had been boarded up longer than he knew.
    “How’s the leg?” Diana asked. “Didn’t look great.”
    Suddenly, Cyrus’s leg didn’t feel quite as bad.
    “Still attached,” Cyrus said. “Hurts. But I’ll be fine.”
    “Good,” Diana said. She began to lower the plane toward the parking lot. “They got Jeb with a shotgun, too.” Cyrus watched her profile—soot-streaked freckles, flexing jaw, angry, angry eyes. “In the chest and face. I … we—” Her voice broke off in Cyrus’s headset. He felt sick. His leg was nothing. He watched Diana sniff. Swallow. “We even knew some of those bastards, Cy. Eric the Red trained us both.”
    “I don’t think Eric made it,” Cyrus said. “He was mad about Jeb. Then he helped me, and they shot him.”
    Diana said nothing. But she nodded, turning the plane as she did. Cyrus felt Niffy’s weight release. The plane surged up slightly, and then Diana set it all the way down.
    “Are you going to be okay?” Cyrus asked.
    Diana nodded. Then she wiped her cheeks again. “Get the chunky monk in if you’re gonna. We’ve got a long flight.”

    Not too far above an altitude of ten thousand feet, Cyrus blinked, squinted, and shielded his eyes. Flying due west, the little plane had caught up to the setting sun.
    “Bright,” Diana said simply. She reached beneath her seat and handed Cyrus an old pair of aviator glasses. “Push her a little faster and climb. This is the only way you’ll ever see the sun rise in the west.”
    Cyrus put on the shades and did what she said. He pushed the plane harder and climbed higher, until the sun rose above the horizon. Diana actually laughed, and even though the sound was quiet and crackly and filtered through a headset, it made Cyrus feel better.
    The plane shook a little more at this speed, battering its way through rough air.
    “Did Rupe ever tell you about the Sun Chaser?” Diana asked.
    “No,” Cyrus said. “He doesn’t do a lot of telling.”
    “It was the first time Jeb helped him,” Diana said. “There was this Greek family, in the O of B but never that active. Close with some of the goofier, more harmless transmortals. Big money. Not just private-island people. Private-islands-all-around-the-world people. But they went nuts. Decided they were descended from the god Apollo and would only let their kids marry kids from families as wacked about descending from gods as they were. So