I walked back to Olympos as the sky was getting light, an orange glow shining against the quiet buildings.

Dimitri, the overnight receptionist, was at the desk drinking coffee, eating finikia, and reading the newspaper. This was the first I’d seen him since returning to the city. His look of disgust was so immediate, I reached up to touch my scraped head, but it seemed the expression was meant for all of me.

“What you’re here for?” Dimitri said. “I thought he went to meet you.”

“Who?” I said.

He opened a drawer in the reception desk and sifted around in it. “The runner’s key is gone. You must have it.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Who was meeting me somewhere?”

He kept eating, didn’t answer. Dimitri was younger than Sterious but not by much. In the early morning light his skin looked gray and doughy, and he breathed heavily.

“Milo?” I tried again. “Did you mean Milo?”

The sounds of traffic were picking up outside. He turned a page of the paper.

“Dimitri,” I said, “do you know? Did he leave an address?”

He pointed a finger at me and swung it forward twice, as if banishing a dog from the room.

* * *

On the top floor I saw my key dangling in the lock, the door open a crack. I pushed it gently and crept inside, shutting it and locking it behind me. Then took off my boots and lay down, thinking of Delphi.

* * *

I had waited for Murat in the dark on the cracked granite steps. The early tide of traffic hushed past—glowing headlights streaking through the dim blue calm of morning. The air was warm and still. He came down in hiking boots, a light backpack. Smiled when he saw me and we headed out, not talking, stopped to buy water and a loaf of bread on the way to the station.

The bus to Delphi was an hour late in leaving. We dozed and woke and saw Athens drift past our window, whitewashed, graffitied, people just beginning to come out onto streets and squares. We rode through the industrial outskirts, past factories and warehouses and windowless concrete sprawl. Sunburned yellow hills dotted with olive trees rose in the distance. And then we were on the highway watching the groves and pines slip by. I watched the landscape and Murat flipped through a small field notebook as we rolled through smaller towns and onto a narrow switchback road, climbing precariously into the mountains, the peaks of Mount Parnassus, blue and white and enveloped in an ethereal haze. Down in the hollow yellow valley narrow cedars rose and low broad olive trees spread their branches and the smell of pine was vibrant in the heat of morning.

* * *

The bus dropped us off at a newsstand in a tiny town across from an overlook and a modern white hotel built into the side of the mountain.

We sat on the stone wall above the deep valley, ate the loaf of bread, and drank the water, gazing out from the top of the sharp slope at the sea in the distance. Birds were flying below us, diving down into the mist.

When we were done eating, we headed farther up the hill. Sun glared bright on the massive white stones and the gravel paths that snaked through the site. Signs carved in marble at the bottom of each treasury and temple and altar read Ascent Is Not Allowed. Numbered and cataloged chunks of columns and massive stone slabs lay side by side all along the way and the place had a haunted crowded emptiness; a long-dead city in the hollow and wooded hillside, the constant flow of tourists passing through, climbing the steps and walking with their cameras inside the ruin to stand before an ivy-covered stone, home to an absent oracle. A ceaseless drift of voyeurs, still traveling from distant cities to walk the stadium steps, to see the field of low golden flowers that now grew there; to walk through an empty theater, the spectator’s seats eroded, covered with lichen; to stand before the remaining pillars of Apollo’s temple and to be a supplicant of nothing, to dream of the dead and of how beautiful their own cities would look once everyone was gone.

Murat wrote in his notebook. I stood close enough to smell him and it made me think of fire. Not the smell of something burning but the smell of the flame itself, pure, elemental. I loved that he had not found any reason so far to talk about what we were seeing.

The gravel path ended at the stadium and we walked into a wood, heading up a slope tangled with roots and stones. We found a dirt trail blanketed with pine needles and cedar fans, and followed it deeper into the trees. If I’d been alone, I would have missed the entrance to the cave, sheltered as it was by pines and so low to the ground.

The air inside was close and dank and the temperature cool. Murat set his pack on the ground, took out the bottle of water, and drank. Handed it to me.

“This has got to be the place where they talked to muses,” I said.

“That’s it exactly.” He turned, looked as he had on the train that first day. “How did you know that?”

“It’s not a secret,” I said. “They used knucklebones, prophesy by knucklebones,” I said. “It was like gambling. The rich people down there at the oracle. The poor people up here in the cave. You know this.”

“How old are you, Bridey?” he asked.

“Seventeen.”

“How did you know about the caves and The Clouds? Did you come to Greece to study about these things? Were you in school?”

“I came to Greece because I ran out of money,” I said.

Everything about Murat radiated a kind of health I’d never known. I took a step closer to him to be near it.

“I knew you would want to see this place,” he said.

“You were right.”

I walked closer, and when he didn’t step back I touched him. Put my arms around him. His breath was impossibly clean, no liquor or smoke, but a kind of mineral bite. When I kissed him he tasted like the smell of stones.

“Let’s not do that,” he said turning away. The side of his face twitched. I slid my fingers along his body and hooked them into the belt loops of his shorts, pulled him to me. I could conceive of no better spot than this to be alone with him.

“C’mon, Bridey, stop it.”

He tried to walk away but I tripped him, and when he staggered forward I shoved him hard and fast to the ground. He got up, kneeling, blood on the heels of his palms where he’d tried to break his fall. I kicked him in the chest, then threw my weight against him.

He said, “Stop it. What are you doing? Stop it.”

His eyes were black and he was weaker than I expected, and I could feel his heart racing, feel him getting hard. I pressed my chest to his, crushed my shoulder up into his throat, and listened to him gasping while I undid his belt.

If he had truly meant no, I’d never have been able to knock him down.