The fields smelled of wild thyme and diesel.
He stood in it until the stars faded and the sky went grey and the grey became the specific pale gold of a Greek September morning, the light arriving in a way that was nothing like torchlight and nothing like the blue of lightning — it was warm and source less and it came from everywhere at once, and he understood, standing in it, that he had spent his entire life reading the world through stone and that stone had given him everything except this.
He let it happen. He stood in the light and let it arrive.
Then he began assessing his situation, because the light was real and infinite and he had work to do.
He was standing in a field approximately forty kilometers northeast of Athens, by his best estimation from the stars he had spent six hours memorizing. The road he could hear to the west was small — two-lane, intermittent traffic, the sound of engines with the specific acoustic signature of older vehicles on poor pavement. The cluster of lights he had seen on the horizon before dawn was a village. Behind him, the wound in the earth had already closed — Tartarus did not leave doors open.
The chain wrapped around his forearm from wrist to elbow, the star-iron links dark and warm against his skin. The mask at his belt — he had wrapped it in a strip of material torn from his own clothing during the ascent. His clothing was what it had been for two centuries: rough fabric, Tartarus-made, holding together through whatever properties the stone of that place had pressed into everything it touched. It would not pass for anything contemporary. This was the first problem.
He walked west.
The village was called Kalamos. He reached it at full daylight and stood at its edge for ten minutes, watching a woman hang laundry from a line strung between two olive trees, watching a man load ceramic pots into the back of a truck, watching a child chase a dog across a dirt path. The world was performing itself for him with complete indifference to his presence, which was the only way the world had ever performed itself for him and which he found, unexpectedly, not isolating but clarifying.
He understood a significant portion of what he was seeing. He also understood that he was wearing what looked, by contemporary standards, like elaborate rags.
The Architect began building the first practical plan of his life outside a cell.
Resources required: clothing, money, shelter, time. Procurement method: not theft, not violence — too visible, wrong phase. He had time. He walked to the edge of the village and found a church, which was unlocked, as small Orthodox churches in rural Greece tend to be in the morning, and sat in its cool interior and waited.
The priest arrived at nine-thirty. He was old, unhurried, not particularly surprised to find a stranger in the pew — or if he was surprised, he had the specific courtesy of a man who had administered to many kinds of strange in his years and had learned that the strange often had reasons.
Korvos spoke to him in Greek.
The Greek he had was ancient — the practical dialect of Themyscira overlaid with three centuries of linguistic accumulation from the dead, who had brought their contemporary Greek into Tartarus along with everything else they had been. The result was something that sounded, to modern Greek ears, like a very educated man affecting an archaic register. The priest frowned but understood. By the end of the conversation he had donated a set of his own spare clothes — dark trousers, a grey shirt, a jacket that was too short in the arms — and fifty euros from the church's discretionary fund.
He bought a newspaper from a kiosk with the money. He sat on a low stone wall at the edge of the village and read it from front to back.
The language gap was smaller than he had expected. The vocabulary of contemporary Greek journalism was accessible from what the dead had deposited; the syntax required adjustment but not reconstruction. He read about politics, about the economy, about a football result, about a diplomatic meeting in Brussels. He read about the Justice League — a brief item on page twelve, a sidebar about the Watchtower's orbital position being adjusted. He read about a woman in Athens named Eleni who had won an architectural prize.
He read for two hours. He did not look like a man who had been underground for two millennia. He looked like a very tall man with unusual eyes sitting on a wall reading a newspaper, which was ordinary enough that the three people who passed him said nothing.
In the afternoon, he walked to the bus stop and took a bus to Athens.
* * *
The city was enormous and it smelled of exhaust and bread and the sea.
He had known the facts of cities — Cronus's accumulated knowledge had given him the structure of them, the way populations organized themselves into grids of function and economics, the specific grammar of urban life. He had not known the weight of it. The sound pressure of ten thousand people within earshot simultaneously. The way the visual field was never still, never empty, never offering the single-source-of-information that a twelve-foot room had trained his attention to expect.
He walked through it and he did not allow himself to be overwhelmed, because being overwhelmed was not an option and the Boy understood this even when it was loudest.
He found, over four days, the following: that ATMs dispensed money when presented with a card he did not have but could manufacture, using the chain pressed flat against the card reader in a way that aged its internal mechanism until the security logic believed it was running a much older, pre-encryption transaction; that clothing could be purchased without a card if you had enough small bills and appeared confident; that a hotel would accept cash if the hotel was the right kind of hotel and the amount was large enough to make the inconvenience worth it; that the internet was available in public libraries and contained an amount of information that made Cronus's accumulated knowledge look like a pamphlet.
He spent forty-eight hours in a library near Monastiraki, working through it systematically.
On the evening of the fifth day in Athens, he sat on a bench near the base of the Acropolis and watched the city arrange itself for night. The Parthenon was lit from below, the columns orange against the dark sky, the whole thing sitting on its rock above the city with the specific permanence of something that had been there long enough to stop caring whether anyone looked at it.
He looked at it.
He looked at it for a long time.
Athena had built that. Athena, who had created Achilles Warkiller from nothing, had blessed him with near-invulnerability, had given him everything that divine attention could bestow. Athena, who had never looked down into the room.
The Boy said nothing. It did not need to.
He opened the library printout he had folded into his jacket pocket. The photograph at the top showed a man in white and gold armour, arms spread, expression of uncomplicated heroism. The caption read: Aristides Demetrios — The Olympian. Greece's greatest hero and founding member of the Global Guardians.
He understood what needed to happen next.
He went back to his hotel. He unwrapped the mask and held it in both hands in the dark, the left half's fractures faint and unlit, the right half cold and smooth. He put it on. The fit was exact. It had always been exact.
He slept for six hours, which was more than he usually allowed himself. He was going to need the rest.