Chapter 16
Losing My Shit
LYRA
“Resetting time,” Boone mutters. “More bullshit.” He prowls the tiny space, running his hands over the walls, the floors, every inch. “Are we even going to be able to breathe in here?” he asks me over his shoulder.
I’m only vaguely aware of his question. My mind is spinning. Broken time. Resetting time. Starting over…
Wait.
Why not reset things? Then we won’t end up down here.
The bubble of elation that rises pops just as quickly. Rhea said that I always end up in Tartarus.
I always end up here.
“The gates enter into a foyer of sorts,” Boone mumbles nearby, and I watch as he lowers to one knee in front of me to draw a circle with the bridge over it. “The drop leads down to the Locks.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know what he’s doing. The first thing thieves do when scoping out a potential score is to understand the layout of the location. Every nuance. Every blind spot. Places we can get trapped or hide. Exits and entrances, even the ones normal people don’t think about.
But I can’t…focus.
Cracks of time. I look at the axe still in my hands and remember a conversation with Hades.
About ten mortal years ago, I thought I lost one, he said.
The next time he saw it was in my hands during the Crucible…
because years before that, it had appeared in my bedroom in the den and wouldn’t let me get rid of it.
Oh. My. Gods.
Meanwhile, Boone is nodding to himself. “Definitely more than one Lock, but we don’t know how many.”
Then he traces a line around the circle, creating the cavern that sits outside the bottom of the Locks, where we just came from. “I assume this goes all the way around.”
He glances at me but doesn’t seem to notice when I don’t respond.
I look at my axe again.
If I was able to take his axe…did Hades remember me showing up in the water garden?
Remember kissing me? Have I gone to other earlier times in his life that I don’t know about yet?
The night I thought we first met, when he stopped me from chucking a rock at Zeus’ temple—that night he demanded, a few times, if I knew who he was.
I thought he was being an arrogant ass, making sure I knew the powerful being I was dealing with. Was he asking if I actually remembered him? From before?
But why didn’t he say something?
The implications hit me in a thousand different ways, like being tossed around in a storm-ridden ocean. Hades never said a single word about any of it.
He didn’t tell me.
My damned god and his damned secrets. If I get out of here, he and I are going to have a reckoning.
I lower my axe, staring at the dirt floor.
Boone is still mapping out what he knows of Tartarus.
“Tunnels that hold the prison cells run throughout the surrounding underground mountain. We’ll have to figure out if that also goes all the way around the abyss and Locks.
” He frowns, then mutters, “We know this part is different.” He erases the mountain face to make another semicircle shape, then draws in the pillars where we are now and the lava fields beyond.
He leans back, looking at his map. “We’ll need to explore the tunnels first. Good for hiding. Seems like the best place to start. What do you think, Keres?”
He looks up at me and goes quiet, finally realizing that I haven’t said a damn word.
I swallow, trying to hold on to the way I could hear Hades bellowing for me, the slamming of the gates of Tartarus as he tried to break them down to get to me. The same way I want to get back to him. No. I need to get back to him. And I will.
“Lyra?” Boone’s tone is soft. Tentative, even. Not very Boone-like.
I suck in a sharp breath. “I can’t be here,” I whisper harshly. To myself as much as to him. “I can’t do this. I can’t be here.”
I won’t, damn it.
There’s got to be another way out.
“Lyra?” he checks again.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say in a whisper. Any of it.
Immediately, he comes back with, “We’ll figure it out.” His voice doesn’t even wobble. He sounds so sure of himself. Of that truth.
It helps.
Not that he should be that confident. Neither of us points out the obvious—that if there was any other way out of here, the Titans have had enough time, power, and intelligence to solve it long before we got involved.
No matter what, I end up down here.
“I can make it brighter in here if you’re still afraid of the dark.”
“I was never afraid of the dark,” I whisper.
He nods. And then I stare at the floor, not moving. I’m not sure how long I stand here just…not processing…before my skin starts to crawl. Like spiders and bugs are all over me, even up in my hair, making my scalp tingle.
Pivoting hard on my heel, I make Boone hop out of my way as I start to pace the tiny hollowed-out space. My thoughts are going to drive me off a cliff if I don’t give them some physical release. Back and forth I go, and all the while, I can feel him watching me.
Because I’m acting like this.
I kick the root, which shivers, making a hissing-type noise. Which only pisses me off, so I kick it again. When I go to do it a third time, Boone is suddenly there, putting himself between me and the roots.
“We don’t have to talk about any of it yet,” he says. “But I need to know that I’m not alone, Lyra.”
My frown is slow. “I’m right here.” The words come out kind of grumpy because it seems pretty obvious to me.
He shakes his head. “Your body is here,” he says.
“But the way you’re shutting down… I can’t get us out of this place on my own.
Not without help. If you need to freak out, then take a moment and freak the fuck out.
But you only get a moment.” He gives me a long, hard look. “I need you, Lyra. Do you understand?”
He needs me.
Not in the way Hestia’s illusion tried to play off my childhood dreams of being needed. This is about survival and escape.
Boone doesn’t push. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t lecture. He just waits. Steady.
And I guess being needed is something that past me must’ve really craved. This isn’t just about me. I need to help get Boone out of this, too.
The bands of numbness that were wrapping tighter and tighter around my chest like steel belts ease, and the small voice in my head that I don’t think I’d even realized I was listening to—telling me that we’re fucked and should just give up, telling me that I can’t do this—goes quiet.
Or quieter.
Boone dips his chin, his gaze going hard and serious in the way I’ve seen him do when he’s ready to really dig in and start planning a score.
When he gets like that, all the joking, all the teasing disappears, and you’d better be ready to keep up because he’s going to get shit done. With or without you.
Something about the familiarity of that look and what it means settles in my chest. Staying stuck down here for eons is not an option.
Get your shit together, Lyra, and start working the problem.
I take two long breaths, letting them out slowly. “I’m here,” I say.
A sudden rumble sounds, and the floor beneath me…vibrates. It doesn’t shake. Not like an earthquake. Having grown up in San Francisco, I know what those feel like. This is different.
“The noise is coming from all over,” I say.
Boone hitches his chin toward the wall. “It’s shivering.”
I turn my head and see it shaking just slightly. “Are the Titans trying to get in here?”
We both stiffen at that idea and jerk our gazes to the spot where Rhea made her doorway. But then the rumbling stops.
I’m already shaking my head. “There was something off about that.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not good, whatever it is.” I leave him there to go run my hands over the wall where Rhea’s door opened.
Seven swears on the Styx. “What we need is a plan,” I say mostly to myself. Something we can do while we wait.
“What we need,” Boone says from behind me, “is to get away from here.”
“How exactly do you think we’re going to do that?”
“Like this…”
“Like what—”
A slight red glow sends glitters of light across the room. With a frown, I half turn.
Boone grabs my hand and yanks me through the broken crystal shard of time I didn’t see coming at us. Apparently, unlike the Pandemonium, those things do move through walls.
That oppressive silence presses in as colors flash all around me.