Chapter 32 Seven Locks & One Savior
Seven Locks & One Savior
LYRA
As we file into the room, there’s a thump, and I look back to find Boone blocking Persephone from entering.
“You go with them,” he says, nodding in the direction the others went.
For the first time, a shadow of hurt clouds the goddess of spring’s features. “But—”
“Nonnegotiable,” he insists. Then steps inside and closes the door in her face.
Turning my focus from him, I take in the room. It has a massive oblong table with no chairs, more a raised slab of rock that appears to be carved from the mountain. At first, I swear there’s a faint red glow coming from it, but when I blink, the glow is gone.
Rhea waves a hand over the table, and it changes form, or I guess just reshapes the top to render a 3D structure.
A map.
I glance at the Titaness. “It’s a glamour,” she says.
They can glamour at that level? Conjure real things and not just visions or ideas?
Boone steps closer, studying the layout. While it doesn’t match the map he drew in the dirt when we were hiding inside the pillar, he got pretty close.
“We are here.” Rhea waves her hand, and the 3D model moves, starting at the Locks and then cutting through the path we took to this room.
Zoomed in, I can make out specific offshoots of tunnels, the way they curve and snake.
Some bend back to meet others, and some are dead ends.
They go up hundreds, maybe even thousands of feet.
Some are deep. And not all of them have cells.
Were the Titans trying to dig out? Clearly, it didn’t work.
She waves, and the table flattens and then re-forms, recreating the bridge over the abyss that they keep throwing me into.
The perfect circle shows the gates at the top, as well as the bridge across to the tunnel that winds down the outside of the abyss to the cavern at the bottom.
Then, at the bottom of the abyss, it shows that the circle is cut into seven larger pie-shaped slices.
Koios points. “Those are the two Locks you opened.”
Two of the seven slices bear the glittering marks of Hestia and Hades. I lean over the table, taking in the details. Carved into the 3D relief, a Nightmare stands within Hestia’s pie piece, and a team of horses within Hades’.
“Why don’t you unseal them yourselves?” Boone asks.
Hades said something about me being mortal to start, and now I’m pretty sure I know why.
“Because they can’t.”
Boone’s head angles my way, gaze confused. “What?”
“They die when they go in one.” I look at Rhea. “Right?”
The Titans with us turn as solemn as pallbearers at a funeral, the heaviness filling the room, and I know I’m right.
The Locks strip supernatural powers before we are tested.
It’s happened twice now. Boone and I were born mortal with no powers, so we must’ve returned to that state. But the Titans are different.
That has to be it.
Savior.
I’m their savior.
I’m their only way out.
Then Rhea takes a breath. “We lost Themis before we realized that.”
That’s who else is missing.
Themis. The Titaness of justice and mother of the Horae and the three Fates. They lost her?
“She thought she could manage Hestia’s because they were close,” Phoebe says. “But strip us of our power, and we cease to exist.”
To kill a Titan, all you have to do is strip them of their power? Is that true of gods as well—the ones not born mortal first, like Boone and me? No one gave me the fine print to read before I signed up for this goddess job. That’s for damn sure. Not that I signed up, exactly.
They learned the hard way.
I’m not sure how to address that, or if they’d even want me to, so I move on. “I have more questions about the time travel situation,” I say, then give them Boone’s theory. “If it takes us to the past, why do we come back? Couldn’t we just run away and stay there? Isn’t that a way out?”
Rhea crosses her arms. Even that move is elegant.
“Damn,” Mnemosyne says dryly. “Why didn’t we think of that?”
I shoot her an impatient look.
“We’ve tried,” Rhea says in an overly calm voice.
Of course they have.
“No matter where you go, that crack will find you and bring you back here. Iapetus once made it two years before it found him.” Rhea says this almost like she thinks that’s impressive. But he was brought back to Tartarus.
Years. I was just gone for a full day, but that time down here seems to have basically been lost.
Can years just be erased?
“So is that why Koios and Iapetus are dressed in modern clothes and you all know modern language?” I ask. “Because you visited modern times through the breaks?”
They all nod.
“But you’re afraid of the cracks now?”
Another glance at Rhea. “We have to be careful,” she says slowly.
Which is when I realize that when they watched me get taken—twice, now—they weren’t afraid for themselves…they were afraid for me. Why? “Does time stop coming for you and start coming for me instead?”
Judging by the way Koios’ eyebrows rise slowly, I think that I might have impressed him with that leap in logic.
“We don’t know for sure,” is all he says, though. “Better to focus on the Locks.”
After a shared glance with Boone, we lean over the table, studying it with a thief’s sharp eyes.
“Fire for Aphrodite,” Boone murmurs, pointing at the icon.
“I’m more worried about this.” I wave at Hera’s Lock, in which a small child appears to be crying into its mother’s lap. There’s something…sinister…about the positioning.
“Yeah.” His eyes narrow in a manner I’m more than familiar with. He’s planning. Then he looks up at Rhea. “You’ve taken her through this before. Right? Is it better to focus on one at a time, or are there any we need to start preparing for now?”
For the first time since we landed down here, I think the Queen of the Titans looks at Boone with something akin to respect.
“Like other information, it helps if we don’t overwhelm her with what she’ll face in all the Locks at once. Poseidon’s is worth preparing for more. Otherwise, taking them one at a time is fine. The problem is Aphrodite’s.” She points.
“Told you,” Boone mutters at me.
“Lyra has never come out of it. Obviously, or we’d be free by now.”
Boone sobers so fast he might be carved from granite. “What does that mean…never come out of it?”
Rhea’s features soften the tiniest bit, like she’s trying to figure out how to make this less bad. “She dies in there,” she says gently. “And other than a wall of fire, we’ve never been able to see what she faces.”
For a second, I’m pretty sure Boone is about to forbid me from doing that one. But, after shaking his head twice at whatever thoughts are running through it, he says nothing. I relax just the slightest bit. Because I can’t fight them and unseal the Locks and argue with him, too. I just can’t.
“You can’t use your strength or speed as a goddess inside the Locks, either,” Phoebe reminds us.
Learned that the hard way. Twice.
“And her human muscles are still pathetic, so that’s going to be a problem again,” a voice says from the doorway.
It’s like the Titan couldn’t help himself.
I sigh, because there’s no point excluding him now. “Any other wisdom to impart?”
Cronos cuts his gaze to Phoebe. “What about him?”
Him who?
She shakes her head. “The thief is nowhere in my visions yet.”
Oh, Boone.
“You can still use me,” Boone says. “I go in first. If I die, then you still have Lyra to send in after me.”
“And if you think that’s how that’s going to go down, you’re as delusional as him.” I wave a hand at Cronos.
“We train you both and decide later,” Cronos says.
A situation I don’t think any of us are happy about, but nobody argues. Boone and me included.
I sigh. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Excellent,” Cronos says, then claps his hands, rubbing them together. “Time to set up the obstacle course again.” He eyes me. “How are you with a sickle these days?”