Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence, rape, child abuse, child sexual abuse, child death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, animal cruelty and death, substance use, addiction, graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, illness and death, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.

Lysander continues northward, borne forward by anger, and eventually reaches a different region where he finds sustenance and an abandoned farm. Hesitant to leave the farm, he continues forward—“as if [his] spirit were drawn by gravity” (356)—seeking to unite and change the Golds. Arriving at Erebos, a city on the edges of the Ladon, Lysander finds it destroyed by a broken dam and sees the impaled bodies left by Atlas. A survivor asking to be put out of his misery draws Lysander in, tricking him into triggering a boobytrap. Lysander is trapped in a tacNet and taken by Gorgons (ruthless guerrilla forces under the command of Atlas).

Lysander is imprisoned with Alexander and a few other Golds whom the Gorgons have captured and tortured for information. Badly injured, Lysander gives them a false name—Cato au Vitruvius, a pseudonym prepared for him in case of emergency—and he tells them that Heliopolis hasn’t fallen yet.