Standing before Ethan was a statuesque woman dressed in hanging white robes. She had braided hair peeking out from under a bronze helmet with what looked like a flat red mohawk sticking out of the top. It made Ethan think of movies about Spartans, except the helmet was tilted back on the woman's scalp to show her unsmiling face. Even stranger than the helmet was the spear she held beside her, as tall as she was, and the huge bowl-like bronze shield leaning against her hip.

For a hot second Ethan thought he'd slipped into a dream, and then he remembered that a dream might have slipped into the Worldmind instead. And here he was without a fadeblade to defend himself from getting skewered.

The woman took a step closer to him. All he could do was picture his room at Vic's house. The desk, the bed, the wall, the—

Before he could manage to project himself to safety, the tall woman raised her shield and pointed it at Ethan. There was a face on it—a horrible screaming face, wreathed with snakes.

And then he couldn't move. He couldn't look away or concentrate on thoughts of home. He could barely think at all.

"Now then," the woman said. "Let me get a good look at you."

She came nearer, her shield still facing Ethan, and looked over its rim at him. Her eyes had a starry glow.

"I," Ethan voiced without moving his lips or tongue, "I—"

"Invaded the sanctity of Eleanor's hearth and home. I am not your host and there will be no guest-friendship."

Ethan's mind reeled. Eleanor? That was Stafford's first name. But who was this woman? A dream? Someone's projection, still dressed up from a Halloween party somewhere?

"So you came looking for Eleanor's fadeblade, hmm?" the woman inquired. She had a smile in her eyes, but not on her lips. "Did that other manling tell you where to find it—Neil Edwards?"

She must have seen the flash of recognition and surprise in Ethan's eyes because she nodded as though he answered.

"I thought as much. I will release you from Medusa's gaze. If you attempt to escape before I give you leave, you will meet the tip of my spear."

She turned the face of the shield away from him, and all at once his bones seemed to turn to jelly. He fell to his knees, his chest crashing against the locked trunk, and he fought for breath. Then he remembered he didn't technically need to breathe in the Worldmind and quickly calmed down. He hoped his body was breathing just fine in Violet's car.

"Medusa?" he said hoarsely. He avoided glancing at either the shield or the starry eyes of the tall woman.

"My aegis—my shield—bears her countenance. And her powers of paralysis."

Ethan wanted to tell her that Medusa wasn't real, but it felt like a very stupid thing to tell to a goddess.

"You're Athena," he said. He should have known. He'd drawn pictures of Greek gods before. He didn't remember why. Either for fun or for a school assignment. "At least, you look like—"

"I am Athena," Athena said firmly, pounding the butt of her spear into the concrete floor. "Tell me who you are, manling."

Once again Ethan had to use his old trick of pretending he was a character in a movie just to mentally deal with what was currently happening. "Shouldn't you be on Olympus or something?" he asked. "Shirewood is pretty damn far away from Greece."

Athena cocked her head. "You must be new to this world. Yes, I see the ignorance in your eyes."

"Uh, okay, ouch. But fine, I'm stupid. Sure. I'm a new psychic, okay? One of Stafford's—Eleanor's—students. So, like, are you a real goddess, or...?"

"I am the Athena of your species' unconsciousness, given form and presence by Eleanor Stafford from her childhood to her present." Athena rattled this information off as though she were reading from a cue card. Ethan got the impression she'd had to explain herself like this plenty of times before.

"So, like, you're her imaginary friend?"

Her eyes flashed in anger and she jabbed him in the ribs with the butt of her spear.

"Does that feel imaginary to you, mortal?"

Ethan coughed and clutched his bruised rib. "An argument could be made that everything I feel in the Worldmind is in my imagination... but yeah. No. Ow."

Athena's lips curled up just a little. "I can tell you are no sneak-thief. What is your purpose for Eleanor's fadeblade? Tell me now or I will call to her and draw her here to judge you herself."

"No, don't, that's... not necessary." He showed her his palms. "It would take a long time to explain everything to her, and even if I did she wouldn't let me help."

"Perhaps there is a good reason for that. She is wise and strong. You are a brainless thief."

Ethan scoffed. "If I was brainless I couldn't be here at all. Right? Checkmate."

Athena raised her spear again and Ethan flinched.

"Okay, okay! Look, there's this rogue projection—maybe—or there's some nightmares—"

"It is the middle of the day. Day-mares are rare."

"It's complicated, but latent psychics are going brain-dead and I think I know how it keeps happening. And... listen, I made some mistakes." He sighed, thinking of Neil in his stupor, of Kara and Pryce's anger. "I need to put things right. But I can't do that if Stafford puts me on the bench."

"A quest, is it?" Athena arched a bronze eyebrow.

"This isn't some epic poem. Nobody descended from the heavens to bestow this task on me."

"Then why do it?"

Ethan gaped at her. "Because people are dying! People I care about are getting hurt and I need to stop it. I just came here for a fadeblade so I'd have a fighting chance."

Athena leaned on her spear, nodding slowly. She studied him for a moment, then said, "Do you know what a hero is, manling?"

"Yeah, yeah," Ethan rolled his eyes, "someone who rises to the occasion, something-something truth and justice, but I don't—"

"You are wrong." She smiled for real this time. "A hero is the offspring of a mortal and a god or goddess."

Ethan opened his mouth to argue. Then he sighed. Right, that was the original idea way back in the day.

He said, "Unless you've got a demigod under your robe with a fadeblade for me, I'm not sure what your point is."

At this, Athena took a deep breath. Her eyes wandered away, as though looking beyond the dingy basement to some mythical place and time.

"When your teacher was a little girl, she read stories about gods and heroes—demigods, as you call them—and dreamed that she was the daughter of a human and a goddess. With every myth she read, her imagined mother took on a clearer form. She held deep conversations with this goddess, whose responses formed in Eleanor's mind as though they were truly from someone else.

"Of course, being the daughter of a mortal and a goddess, Eleanor knew herself to be a hero. And so her divine mother gave her quests. Liberating magical cookies, delving into basement dungeons and fighting monsters made of cotton and plastic. Running to the woods to live free from the tyranny of curfews and broccoli...."

Athena laughed softly. And then she frowned.

"These quests were what prompted Eleanor's mortal guardians to take her to a healer of the psyche. Put simply, Eleanor was getting too old for imaginary friends, as you call them. But if she learned anything from this healer, it was how to pretend to have a healthy mind.

"Her conversations with her goddess mother stopped happening—at least out loud. The quests she embarked upon became more practical to the reality her guardians expected. Get good scores in school. Acquire a license to operate a steel chariot. Determine a lifelong vocation. All of these she achieved through regular consultation with the woman her psyche healer told her did not really exist.

"Then one night she drifted away from that reality. She thought she was dreaming, but in truth she ascended to this world we are in now, this manifestation of collective psyche. There, she found her imagined mother waiting for her."

Athena stopped speaking but continued looking off in the distance.

"But you aren't... really her mother," Ethan said after a while. "I mean... she made you."

"The Worldmind made me," Athena said. Sorrow softened her starry eyes. "It made me thousands of years ago. I emerged fully formed from humanity's head and have been given immortality through stories and songs and dreams and prayers."

At last she faced Ethan again. "Eleanor only willed a version of me into her life. There are few left who believe in me so... fully. And so I have stayed with her. Protected her and her home."

Ethan tried to wrap his brain around everything Athena was saying. Ms. Stafford didn't invent Athena from whole cloth. The Greeks did. But this lady isn't a figment of memory or a kid's nightmare; she's talking to me like a real person.

"There's more to the Worldmind than just memory," he thought aloud.

"More... and less." Athena cast her eyes to the trunk Ethan had been looking at when she found him. "Your aim in coming here was finding a weapon capable of protecting others. I will give you what you seek."

From somewhere behind her shield she lifted her left hand and showed him what looked like the hilt and cross-guard of a sword with no blade. It might have been the hilt of Neil's regular fadeblade. Ethan frowned a question at her. When Athena offered it to him, he eventually reached out and accepted it.

"Have you held a fadeblade before?" Athena asked him.

"Yeah. Few times." He held the sword away from both Athena and himself in case the blade suddenly ignited from the hilt. "But it was always given to me with the 'blade' part attached."

Athena nodded. She gestured to the trunk. "The gap you were peeking in before. You did not see anything inside. That is because there is nothing there."

"So it's empty?"

"You do not understand. It is not just a gap in the chest, but a gap in the world. There is nothing there. Including emptiness."

Ethan furrowed his brow. "You're right. I don't understand."

"You said before that the Worldmind is more than memory. That is true. And I said it is also less, and that is also true."

"I get that you've lived thousands of years or whatever, but we mortals like to get to the point sooner rather than later. Uh, ma'am," he added when he remembered he was talking to a goddess. Idly, he wondered whether Athena was stalling, waiting for Stafford to come back home.

"Very well," Athena said. "Imagine the gap in the lid of that chest is the throat of your sword's sheath. Hold your hilt to it as though it is so."

The chest? Oh, the trunk. Hell of a big sheath.... Ethan crouched down beside the trunk and put the bladeless hilt against the dent in the lid. "Okay, now what?"

Athena shrugged. She seemed to hesitate. "Now you have a blade. You need only draw it from its sheath."

Ethan didn't feel any difference in the hilt, but he remembered that fadeblades mostly felt weightless unless you were actively swinging them. Slowly, he pulled the hilt back. Nothingness came with it.

He turned his face, blinking away the dark spots in his vision as though someone flashed a light in his eyes. He pulled back the hilt some more, thinking that it must be fully removed by now. And so it was.

He stood, raising the fadeblade. Now he felt the weight as the blade dragged through the empty air. Athena nodded at him but tightened her grip on her spear.

"I have so many questions," Ethan said.

And then he heard voices. Familiar sounds in the shape of nonsensical words. They came from somewhere outside one of the high windows that looked out onto the front lawn of the house. Even though he couldn't tell what was being said, he recognized the voices. One was Stafford, which made sense since there would be idle memories of her voice floating around the Worldmind version of her house.

But the other voice belonged to Violet. Violet said she barely knew Stafford and hadn't really spoken to her much before.

Which meant that the conversation was happening right now.

"Time for you to attend to your quest, manling," Athena said in a quiet voice. When Ethan looked up at her she seemed to read his mind and said, "Eleanor will not know of what transpired here. But of the many questions you have, she will be the one to answer them—when you are ready to ask her.

"Now go. Say nothing more. And remember what you hold, for it will vanish from your hand if you return to the mortal realm. May you be victorious in your mission."

Then Athena was gone. It happened so suddenly Ethan wondered if she had ever really been there at all. His memory of the whole encounter felt fuzzy, like a dream right after waking.

His hand tightened around the hilt of the fadeblade. Whatever it was that just happened, he had what he came for. There were so many things about the Worldmind he simply didn't know that, despite having a weapon to defend himself with, he felt even less prepared for his encounter with Westbrook than he did before coming here. He hoped he would have the chance to get answers from Neil when he recovered, or from Stafford if Ethan ever had the guts to let her know he broke into her Worldmind-house.

Violet's voice was getting higher pitched. She must have been buying him time. He thought about projecting himself back into her car, but he didn't know if he could without accidentally fading it. He hadn't planned this far ahead.

And since he didn't have a clear enough picture of Stafford's neighbourhood to be able to project himself out of the house, he had to leave by foot. Astral foot.

He stumbled his way up the basement stairs, tripping over the appearing and disappearing steps and taking care not to touch anything with his fadeblade. He didn't expect fading a wall by accident would make Stafford forget she had a house, but he didn't take any chances anyway.

When he got to the main floor, he could see a memory ghost of Violet on the other end of the little fence that surrounded Stafford's yard. She was rambling, that much he could tell even if he didn't know specifically what she was saying. When Stafford spoke, she sounded much closer. Ethan guessed she was on the other end of the door right in front of him. He'd have to leave the back way.

It was a straight shot through the hall into the kitchen and out the back door, but the main door popped open before he could so much as turn tail and run.

Stafford stood on the threshold of her front door, saying something that sounded polite but final. A firm goodbye to Violet, Ethan supposed, even as his astral projection froze in surprise.

Ethan couldn't see details of Stafford's face, but he saw the faint silhouette of astral light that stood in her shape and knew she was right there. Did she see him? No, he was in the Worldmind. Unless he did something to alert her half-conscious projection, she wouldn't know he was there. Or so he hoped, until she waved at him.

Another jolt of surprise at being caught rooted Ethan into place. Except there was something off about Stafford's hand.

The realization caught him at once. How many times had he screwed up trying to accurately draw perspective and anatomy? All he had seen of Stafford was her silhouette. Judging by the smallness of her hand and the way her arm tapered when she waved far in front of her, it was clear she had been facing away from him the whole time. Violet was still distracting her.

He turned and stalked away as quickly and as silently as he could. When he reached the back door he fumbled at the knob and bumped into the door when it didn't open. Locked? Could it even be locked? Right, this happened at Violet's place too... It's all in my mind. He looked over his shoulder and wondered if Stafford heard him hit the door. He still didn't know for sure whether the impact sound was only in his head or if he could generate sound in the Worldmind.

Stafford was shutting the front door and paused, as though listening. Shit. Ethan twisted the lock above the knob and pushed the door again. This time it swung open. Wasting no more time, he wheeled around the back of the house and ducked under the window before heading toward the next yard over.

He faded away a couple boards in Stafford's fence, thinking that as long as the full fence was there she wouldn't notice. It was like the stairs—no one knew exactly how many boards they had on their fence. Once he got into the neighbour's yard he was less conservative about what he faded. More fence boards, some bush, a gate door, a bike in one case (only because he accidentally tripped over it), and just like that he was back on the street, with a couple houses of buffer room between him and Stafford's.

If Stafford caught him at any point, he had no idea. Even if she did, and even if Athena told on him, they had no way of knowing where he was going next. So he'd worry about everything later.

He had his fadeblade. There were no excuses left.

It was time to face Westbrook.