They're close enough in age, and Darlington knows it, but all the same he marvels once more at how...prescient Caleb is, in a way he doesn't think he had been in his final year of high school. He'd had other concerns, to be sure; other things pulling his attention and consuming his time, but his maturity had taken a far different form.

"I told you before how Lethe had failed Alex," he says after a moment. "And not just this last year, not just as my Dante. Before then too, which is only something I came to think about, at least in that particular form, in getting to know her." He thinks about their argument after the Aurelian ritual, before the wine and the smashed crockery, the sudden realization he'd had that she'd been chased to this very point by forces beyond her control. "They'd been aware of her, of what she could do, almost her entire life. Monitoring her, or at least...keeping tabs. They could have helped her. But they didn't."