The Tyrant's Tomb

encounter any mortals, I’ll just say I was hiking and got lost. You guys wait
here. Guard my exit. If you hear barking, that means trouble.”
She jogged across the field, Aurum and Argentum at her heels, and
disappeared inside the building.
Meg peered at me over the top of her cat-eye glasses. “How come you
made her laugh?”
“That wasn’t my intention. Besides, it isn’t illegal to make someone
laugh.”
“You asked her to be your girlfriend, didn’t you?”
“I—What? No. Sort of. Yes.”
“That was stupid.”
I found it humiliating to have my love life criticized by a little girl
wearing a unicorn-and-crossbones button. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Meg snorted.
I seemed to be everyone’s source of amusement today.
I studied the tower that loomed above us. Up the side of the nearest
support column, a steel-ribbed chute enclosed a row of rungs, forming a
tunnel that one could climb through—if one were crazy enough—to reach
the first set of crossbeams, which bristled with more satellite dishes and
cellular-antenna fungi. From there, the rungs continued upward into a lowlying
blanket of fog that swallowed the tower’s top half. In the white mist, a
hazy black V floated in and out of sight—a bird of some sort.
I shivered, thinking of the strixes that had attacked us in the Burning
Maze, but strixes only hunted at nighttime. That dark shape had to be
something else, maybe a hawk looking for mice. The law of averages
dictated that once in a while I’d have to come across a creature that didn’t
want to kill me, right?
Nevertheless, the fleeting shape filled me with dread. It reminded me of
the many near-death experiences I’d shared with Meg McCaffrey, and of the
promise I’d made to myself to be honest with her, back in the good old days
of ten minutes ago, before Reyna had nuked my self-esteem.
“Meg,” I said. “Last night—”
“You saw Peaches. I know.”
She might have been talking about the weather. Her gaze stayed fixed on
the doorway of the relay station.
“You know,” I repeated.
“He’s been around for a couple of days.”