Chal let me go when I had no more questions. The gods would tell Grillo Negro where we were, she said, as soon as they could introduce themselves to the villagers without causing panic. I needed to process everything from that and yesterday, and Jem probably wanted time alone, so I went to find Emma. The sound of her giggles led me to an open door near the hallway's end. The room beyond was gigantic and bare, lit by the grey sky through a large skylight. Tlaloc sat at one end of it, almost as tall seated as Emma was standing. Emma crouched at the other end.

The rain god lifted his hand, and the ceiling loosed a rainshower like the ones Miguel and Rosa liked to dance in. Emma sprang into motion. She twirled around the room with hands out and feet as light as an antelope's. Where she passed, the raindrops hit the ground as slush.

"Better," rumbled Tlaloc when the rain ran out. His huge glasses magnified pleased eyes. "Try for freezing rain next."

Emma noticed me at the door and grinned. Her face was sweaty and her hair was making a break in every direction at once, but I hadn't seen her this happy since the party in Grillo Negro. That had been her happiest in years. The only thing missing from the scene was the rest of the village's children, who would have joined this game in a heartbeat, ice magic be damned.

A large splash dropped on Emma's head, and she shrieked.

"Focus," chuckled Tlaloc.

Emma's tongue poked from her mouth in concentration. She pointed her hands straight down. There was a crackle.

"I did it!" She gave an ecstatic hop and wiped out on the ice she had made. Tlaloc started the rain again. Most of it still splattered to the ground, but the drops that came closest to Emma's fingers now left tiny disks of ice where they landed.

My thoughts right now were a soup of disjointed fragments swirling through everything I needed to sit down with for a bit. In the midst of it all, something curious wondered what I might be able to do if I too had magic. It might be nice, at least, to be able to summon water or light fires as easily as the gods did. I packed the idea away. The less I had to do to manage this disease long-term, the happier I would be.

Tlaloc and Emma were having fun, and it didn't look like they planned to stop before lunch. I left the room and wandered, finding myself among the couches again. Tochtli was asleep on one. Grifo was asleep on another. I chased him off and looked in dismay at the Grifo-shaped patch of loose hair he had left. Xolotl's dogs at least were hairless.

I retrieved the brush I used to rid Grifo of burrs and was halfway back up the hallway when a sound behind a door stopped me. It was a voice, smooth and quiet, half-singing in a sinuous language that was neither Spanish nor Nahuatl. It belonged to Tezcat.

The eerieness of the sound and the fear of being caught eavesdropping overwhelmed my curiosity. I hurried back to the couch room and cleaned up the fur as best I could. Grifo had sulked off somewhere. There were no gods or goddesses in sight, so I took up my circling again. Now and then, a brushstroke of black would punctuate the endless grey on some part of the desert. I wondered if any of the village remains were Grillo Negro under its magical camouflage. The thought, coupled with Tezcat's low, singing incantation voice, was unsettling.

The next window held mountains I felt I'd seen a hundred times now. I moved on to the next, the first of the set looking onto Tlalocan. I was just in time to see a shooting star.

Some deep, visceral instinct made me wrench back below the windowsill. I slid to the side, my heart thundering like four hands on a dog-sized drum, and I willed with all my strength for the glyph-lights to go out. They remained undimmed. I couldn't call, and my legs barely held me. Coyol's army, her four hundred eldest brothers, who had shot Quet and slain an entire village fifty-one years ago, who were looking for the gods with the intent to kill them, were in Tlalocan.

I dove across the room, sprinted to the hallway and hammered on the first door I knew led to a god. Tezcat swung it open. My feet stepped back of their own accord. Anger shadowed the night god's face, and crackles of deep purple danced at his fingertips. In the room behind him, Xochi scrambled to her feet.

"Shooting star," I said, and my body reclaimed the fear I had arrived with. "In Tlalocan."

A purple bolt hit the floor, and the lights went out. Tezcat walked swiftly down the hallway, singing as energy shot like static bolts between the walls and his outstretched fingertips. Things slammed in the rooms. Tezcat slipped past me like a wraith, and moments later a ripple of slams from the couch room told me he was sealing the windows. A string of soft glyph-lights near the floor lit the way down the hall. Other gods left their rooms in the darkness and headed after Tezcat, sweeping me along.

The glyph-lights in the couch room had dimmed to a gloom just strong enough to see each other by. Black blocks filled the windows. Tezcat circled the room, still singing, and touched each window and piece of furniture in turn. When he reached Tlaloc's giant chair under the Tlalocan windows, he darted to the room's center and crouched with both hands on the floor. At a word, purple light whizzed outwards. A great, patterned disk like the one from the fire-cave shimmered over the rug. Its concentric circles of glyphs and patterns spoke sorcery to me without my needing to understand a word. Tezcat finished the spell and slumped back against a couch like he'd just sprinted a mile.

The other gods had crouched on the floor during the casting, but it seemed safe to touch the furniture now. Chal flicked furs into a bed shape on Tlaloc's chair, and the rain god laid down what I realized was a still-unconscious Quet. If he'd been brought here, how much danger was the rest of the house in? Chimalli fretted around their feet until the god was settled, then jumped up and curled up against him. Tezcat pulled his knees up and dropped his head on crossed arms. The other dogs licked his fingers.

Xipe was supporting Xochi, who rested her head on his shoulder. A finger snap piled the remaining furs on the floor by a couch. Xipe brought his sister to it and sat her down gently. Even in the low light, she looked pale. Her butterfly was on her shoulder, but its wings were down like they had become too heavy to lift.

Emma slid over to me, one hand knotted in Grifo's thick fur. "What happened?" she whispered.

I told her what I'd seen. The bunker we now huddled in layered fear onto whatever instinct had struck me at the sight of the falling star. My chest hurt from my lungs working overtime, and all of yesterday's talk now felt all too real. Had I paid enough attention? If we were in danger right now, did I know everything I needed to? What would happen to Jem, Emma and I if we were found?

Emma was a goddess. Did that put her on Coyol's kill list, too? Would Coyol's minions recognize her at all?

We couldn't die here. This was the gods' battle. They owed us our safety. 

Chal perched on the back of Tlaloc's chair with one hand pressed to a blocked window. Her gaze was unswerving, like she could see through to the world outside. She probably could. A faint blue-green glow concentrated at her fingertips, and the block shimmered where they touched.

"They're out there," she said. "Two more just arrived."

"Do they look like they know we're here?" rumbled Tlaloc.

"Like they know we're around here. But this looks like all of them... five, same as last time. And no spellcasters. I doubt we'll have to move."

There was a breath of relief from everyone in the room. I wondered if it was the gods who would have to move, or the whole house.

"But we might be here for a while," said Chal.

Tezcat stole a pillow from the nest around Quet with a finger snap, earning him a glare from Xolotl. He lay down on the floor with his back to the rest of the room. Tlaloc replaced the stolen pillow and sat on the chair arm, like he'd be keeping watch if he could see through the windows. Only the two spellcasters could, apparently. Chal stayed where she was, and Tezcat wasn't moving. Was one guard enough? Chal's words about the threat level were reassuring, but what if it was a trap? I'd never been in a battle. I didn't know how this worked.

The rest of the gods stayed low, sitting on the rug with their backs to the couches. Xipe kept fidgeting. I hated not being able to see outside. Chal couldn't possibly watch every direction at once. What if others were sneaking up on us? Would she see them? Sense them?

Not knowing which side of the room would be safe, I opted for the next-best thing and located Jem. He was hunched across from me with an empty mug and a look of determined self-distraction. He didn't see Emma and I coming, and jumped when I poked him.

"Anything?" I said, sitting beside him. Emma hunkered down against the wall just out of earshot.

Jem tipped the mug, which released a trickle of water like it had when Chal was there. It really had been his doing. Now he laid a hand on the wet patch on the rug. When he lifted it, the patch was markedly smaller.

"You were practicing?"

"And thinking."

"Anything you want to talk about?"

I wasn't really in the mood for conversation, but we both handled stress better if we could talk our way through it. Or talk about anything, really. It gave us both back a sliver of control.

He glanced around us. The room was silent, but the rug and couches padded it enough to muffle our lowered voices. "I was thinking about what Chal said. About staying here being the best thing for all of us."

"You looked pretty upset about it."

"I feel like I got dragged into all this."

I waited for him to continue.

"You caught the disease," he said, "then had a god's Xolo appear to you, and now apparently have Fuego's magic permanently. Emma belongs here, and now I feel like everything we knew about her was just... wrong, you know? Look at her. I mean, she's happy, so I know I should be happy, but... ugh." He put his head in his hands. "I don't know what to feel. Every time I think I've found it, it changes. And now I apparently have powers, too."

"Were you planning on leaving?"

"Not without you. But I was."

Hearing him say it out loud made me feel so much better about my own desire to get out of here. Granted, we probably wanted to go very different places once we left, but at least we could escape together.

Jem put his head down. "I mean, after we got what we needed here. What you needed, for leaving to be safe."

My hopes withered. Of course he wouldn't let me leave without taming Fuego first. He was also treating this too much like an obsolete topic for my liking. "You're speaking in past tense."

"I don't know what I'm doing."

"Thought-dump, then."

"That plant." He lifted his head. "I want that. I mean, not the actual plant, but what I did with it. What I could do... you know what I mean."

I nodded. Panic was bubbling to life somewhere in my intestines. I kept an empathetic look fixed to my face, hoping my fear wouldn't show. Jem wanted to stay?

"And this." He tipped the mug again, redoubling the wet patch on the carpet. It might just have been me, but it looked like more water this time. "I would love to pretend that this is all a dream, and wake up at home and go back to a normal life. But it's not, and it wouldn't be normal anymore, you know? Home isn't any safer than here, so I can't even pretend that's a factor. And if I left here, I feel like I'd regret not knowing what I could have learned. About Emma, or you, or this."

He set the mug down and put a hand on the wet patch. I could tell he still had more to say, so I stayed silent. He had not yet given me good ammunition for a counter-argument, and I needed it desperately.

"And helping them, I guess," he said at last. The words I'd most dreaded to hear knocked all the breath out of me. "The gods. If they mean it, and they need us. If they really did just protect Grillo Negro. If there really is a war going on and this isn't just some family drama we could let them sort out themselves. If Coyol really could end the world."

The gods had not yet fully explained just how that would happen. But... "Fuego."

"Yeah." Jem tossed a small splash onto my hand. "Then there's that."

I managed a smile. This should still be the gods' problem, not ours. "Kind of hard to ignore."

"Yeah, especially when the person you... when someone you love catches it and nearly dies."

I would have choked had my throat not been so dry already. Diez madres, I was not ready to deal with this on top of everything else. On top of everything he'd just told me. And certainly not trapped in a bunker under magical assault by god-killers.

Jem kept his eyes on the mug. Another trickle. He could make them faster now. He didn't seem to realize.

"So, are we staying?" I said, changing the topic. I nearly had to cough out the word we.

"Until it's safe to go, at least." He was so clearly forcing the words. "Preferably until I have answers."

Chal's cry and a hard thunk cut us short. The goddess had leaped to the side, and the head of an arrow stuck through the block in the window. It crackled silver and exploded.