“Not everything.” Her arms dropped to her lap. “But it was a stupid thing to do.”
“Did you expect me to just stand there while he touched you?” He slammed his eyes shut and raked his hands into his hair, cradling his head as if his scalp ached as badly as hers.
“Do not despair on me now, medicus. We do not have time for that.”
Felix slowly lifted his head and dragged his hands down the sides of his face, beard crackling beneath his palms. “I am not despairing. Not... all the way. Only trying to find a way out of this.”
“These are the games. We knew we would fight tomorrow. Perhaps not this way, but it changes nothing.” She shifted closer to the bars and lowered her voice to a whisper, lifting a finger as she spoke. “Escape is still possible.”
Felix stared at the floor, granite eyes blank and distant and she could nearly see his mind pulsing with ideas. “In fights to the death, the victor lives. And sometimes, in big spectacles like this one, the victor is awarded freedom—if they can win the crowd.”
She nodded. “So, we win the crowd during the opening ceremony, and then one of us wins the match while the other—”
“Is wounded and sent to the medical bay.”
“As long as your pater and the monks are successful in getting inside, wewill both survive.” Her tone was more certain than her heart. But she was a master at making her heart believe things that couldn’t possibly come true.
There were other plans in place too: Several gladiatrices could request to use the latrine and get out of the holding cell with minimal guards. Ruso could faint at will, requiring a medicus, or two trainers to haul him to one. The number of guards and trainers in the holding cell would dwindle, allowing, in the darkness of the tunnels, beneath the roar of the crowd, the ability to steal away in ones and twos and find their way to the liberators disguised in ushers’ uniforms and sewer tunnels. It would still work. It had to work.
“He... Pater will come through.”
He did not sound certain. Not in the way she needed him to. “Why do you hesitate?”
“It kills me to wait and hope someone else will do their part.” He looked up. “I fear if I do not have my hands in everything, it will fall apart. Is that arrogant?”
“Yes.” She smiled slightly. “We share the same fear. The same need to... to not have to rely on others. There is nothing more terrifying or fragile than the hope that someone will do as they have promised.”
“And few things more hurtful than when they do not.”
“So where does that leave us?”
His mouth twitched. “Forced to face our fears and arrogance?”
She nodded. “And reliant upon God to come through.”
The hardest thing for the both of them, she knew. The same reasons that kept her from trusting others had kept her from fully trusting God. He had not seemed to care for her desires, so she’d met them herself. Or tried to. And for a while she could trick herself into believing she’d done it, found purpose and independence and worth all on her own. But now? That illusion lay shattered.
“Perhaps God allows us to reach such depths to teach us to trust Him.”
“Perhaps.” Adel sighed. “But why must it be so deep?”
“Because onlyweare capable of digging so deep.”
She nodded. “Like you said,arrogant.”
He sighed and shook his head. “And where does that leave us?”
Adel met his gaze, the answer swelling with an obvious certainty. “In desperate need of prayer.”
XXXVI
1 IANUARIUS, AD 404
The air was wild with anticipation and smoke. Laurel crowns wreathed the heads of the statues filling the arches of the Flavian Amphitheatre, as if the gods and goddesses standing guard over the place had already claimed the victor’s status. And indeed, they might have.
All Telemachus could feel was his failure weighing heavier than the plate armor of acrupellarius.That this day had come at all was a failure in itself. He could feel the death on his hands already. So much death.
All of his best-laid plans and ideas had come to this. This final desperate measure.
