Valens took no pleasure in the execution. The Pyrrhaeus needed to die. Cerasus had been right about that. No one could be allowed to attack a Lightbearer, and this boy assaulted a mere child.

But the boy was as young as the girl he had attacked. If the crime had been anything else, such drastic retribution would have been unnecessary. The boy might still have had time to learn the error of his ways and turn his life around.

But the fact remained that the Pyrrhaeus assaulted a Lightbearer. And so it came to this.

The lightning bolt struck the Pyrrhaeus's head and discharged through his feet, throwing him and his nearby companion across the alley.

The red-haired Pullatus yelped and writhed for a moment in pain, but soon found their feet.

The raven-haired assailant did not rise. There was no way he survived a direct strike. Millions of volts of energy had passed through his body at a temperature twelve times hotter than the crimson sun burning behind the Trellis. He lay motionless, brown eyes fixed, unseeing, on the violet sky.

The execution complete, Valens turned to leave, trying to ignore the prick of regret in his heart. He killed a criminal. A violent one. He had done the world a favor.

Something, some small noise, made him pause. Turn.

The red haired Pullatus stood frozen in the alley, eyes wild, head darting back and forth, too terrified still to even flee. But it was not their shuddering and panting that drew Valens's attention.

On the ground, the dead Pyrrhaeus's eyes fell closed. One of the boy's fingers curled. Then he groaned.

What?

Valens strode back to the corpse. What he had thought was a corpse, anyway.

"Domi!" The red-haired youth staggered to their companion's side. Trembling fingers patted at his chest, his neck; they didn't seem to know how to check a pulse. There was no need, however. Their friend drew a shaky breath.

Impossible. Unless...

Valens pulled the lapis translationis out of his pocket. Red veins still ribboned the blue rock face. Cerasus had thought the blood came from a donor, but there was another possibility.

Eyes narrowing, Valens strode to the injured Pyrrhaeus's side and knelt at his shoulder. His companion cringed away, trembling. "Please, don't hurt us."

Valens ignored them and held the stone to the fallen boy's throat. To his utter shock, blood welled and beaded on the unconscious youth's skin, floated in the air in a small bubble of iridescent promenia, and flowed into the promenia artifact.

The redhead stared for a moment, wide-eyed, and then lost their mind. "What are you doing?" they shrieked and slapped Valens's hand. The stone clattered down the alley.

For a moment he could not react. Never in all his life had a Pyrrhaeus treated him with such disrespect, let alone a Pullatus. What a strange day.

Valens scowled at the youth. "Who is he?"

"You struck him with lightning, and you don't—" The redhead broke off, tugging two fistfuls of crimson curls. "You're a monster! You're an evil, murderous—"

"I need you to answer my question," Valens said, pushing away the pang of guilt. He'd killed no one. The kid still lived, right? For now, at least. He fixed the Pullatus with a stern glare. "Your friend's life depends on it."

The youth's mouth opened and closed. Emotions warred on their face. Fear. Shock. Anger. Disbelief. In the end, better sense won. "His name's Dominulus Lodicis." They pulled their friend's head into their lap and stroked sweaty hair back from his face with gentle hands.

Valens lifted a brow. "You must be joking. Why would anyone name him that?" He reached out and tugged the collar of the boy's paenula back from his throat. No laurel, though that was not surprising. The kid had shown no sign of understanding how to use promenia when Valens confronted him.

The redhead glared. "He was found in some fancy blanket."

"Found?"

"Abandoned at the comitii basilica as a newborn."

"Interesting," Valens said. Well, this presented a bit of a problem. He stooped over and gathered the semi-conscious youth into his arms.

The Pullatus clung to their friend as Valens took him. "What are you doing? Let him go! Haven't you done enough?"

Valens snorted, taking a step back. "I'm saving his life, like you asked."

"What? But you just—No!" The youth scurried after him, grabbing first at their friend's soaked paenula and then, surprising him for the second time today, clasping Valens's arm.

Valens scowled at the redhead's hand, then shifted his death glare up to the youth themself. "What are you doing?" he asked, enunciating each word.

The Pullatus set their jaw and glared right back. "You're not taking him anywhere without me."

It would have been child's play to toss the kid aside, but he did not. Nor did he have time to deal with this nonsense. Cerasus could sort the whole mess out.

He sighed and grasped the back of the youth's midnight-blue tunica.

"What are you doing?" the redhead gasped.

Valens fixed them with a firm glare. "You said you wanted to come. Stop struggling, or I might drop you."

"Drop?"

Valens gathered the promenia in the air around the three of them and tugged them up into the sky. One kid shrieked the whole way. The other moaned but never truly regained consciousness.

When he alighted in the Collegium courtyard with not one but two adolescents, Cerasus gawked at him with an expression caught between incredulous dismay and amused exasperation. "You know, Valens, when I said I wanted you to take a kid or two under your wing, this was not what I meant. If you don't want a worldholder, fine, but they at least need to be Promethidae."

Valens sighed, lowering both youths to the ground. The injured boy stayed motionless. The Pullatus staggered away and vomited on a sculpted shrub.

"Well, you're in luck." Valens inclined his head to the unconscious boy on the ground. "The blood came from him."

"The blood?" Valens's friend asked, brows furrowing.

Valens pulled the stone out of his paenula and tossed it to Cerasus.

The Praetor caught the artifact with a surprised grunt and peered from the blue rock in his hand, to the unconscious youth, and back again. He gaped at Valens. "You can't be serious."

Valens sighed. "I'm afraid I am, and that means we may have some explaining to do, or this curia of yours is going to lose its best worldholder to the work camps. I prefer to do other things with my time than toil there."

"Why would you be in trouble?" the Pullatus asked, wiping their mouth and stumbling away from the bush. They collapsed at their friend's side, stroking his hair with shaky fingers.

Cerasus stared at the kid like a man trying to figure out why a dog sat at the dining table.

"Because," Valens said, "trying to kill a Trueborn or Empowered Lightbearer is a crime."

"All right..." The youth patted the boy's cheeks with a gentle touch. "But why would you be in trouble for what Domi did?"

Were all Pullati this dense? "I'm not talking about what he did." He kept his words slow and simple. "I'm talking about what I did."

"When you struck him with lightning, you mean? Wait." Their jaw dropped. "You think Domi's a—"

"There is nothing else he can be." Valens sighed. "The lapis translationis only extracts blood with prometus in it. Your friend is a Lightbearer."