Chapter 42
Persephone’s Story
LYRA
We start toward the rooms where we’d been sleeping. Or trying to.
“Who are you thinking?” Boone asks.
“Persephone.”
He straightens so hard I’m surprised his spine doesn’t snap. “No—”
“She’s the only non-Titan down here to ask for help.”
“And clearly on the Titans’ side.” He’s shaking his head.
“Do you have any better ideas? We won’t tell her why we want to learn this. Just say it’s for our own protection.”
Boone’s jaw tenses. He does not like this idea at all. “Fine,” he mutters.
At least now I know why he doesn’t trust her. Although, having been stuck in the past with Hades and unable to tell him much, maybe he should give Persephone some slack.
When we get to the rooms, I stand in the doorway to the shared space where all the Titans gather—just a safe place to wait or sometimes to sleep, which is what they are doing now.
Boone tiptoes across the Titans littered across the floor—Iapetus snoring loud enough to wake the dead—to shake Persephone’s shoulder.
I can’t see his face, but I do see hers, especially the bleary-eyed fog clearing in a burst of a smile when she realizes it’s him.
Boone leans away from her, like he’s trying to avoid the beam of it touching him.
Dimmed a bit, she quietly gets to her feet and follows him out into the hall where I wait, and even after sleep, her dark-to-pink ombre curls still manage to lay perfectly over one shoulder as she rubs at her big lavender-blue eyes.
The woman doesn’t have so much as a pillow crease marring her perfection.
When she wasn’t in Tartarus, she probably slept with clouds for pillows.
“I need you to glamour something of your choosing,” I say once we get down the hallway. “It can be small. You can’t ask why.”
Persephone blinks. Blinks again. Then smiles, not nearly as bright as a second ago, but still, the hallway might as well fill with rays of sunlight and butterflies. “You want my help?”
Boone makes a choking sound at my back, and I’m tempted to throw an elbow.
“Happy to,” she says, then steps away. Her gaze slides from me to Boone, and then she lifts her hand in a flowing motion, like a ballerina.
Boone jerks back, one hand coming up between them. “Not me. No way.”
Persephone pouts, even as her eyes twinkle. “You’re no fun.”
Boone’s response is a basic grunt, but he lowers his hand. Not that he relaxes.
With a teasing smile, Persephone waves her fingers, and from behind the flowy skirts of her dress, a tiny little bunny with gray fur and ears so long it almost trips itself tentatively hops out and right into her palm.
She lifts it to her face to give it a nuzzle before setting the sweet little thing back on the floor.
I know the bunny itself is a glamour, so I glance at Boone’s face. No veil. “Do you see that?”
“Of course he sees it, silly.” Persephone laughs, but not meanly.
He still nods.
“Right,” I mutter.
“Let’s try this.” Again, with the ballerina-perfect hand move, she waves her fingers over the bunny. “Today, you are a frog.”
Just like Rhea with the hawk, the bunny immediately changes its seated position so that it’s upright, front legs straight and back legs on either side.
Then the thing…ribbits.
Or tries to. The sound is like a squeaky version of a ribbit. It tries again, then hops. Not bunny hops…frog hops…across the stone floor.
Boone leans forward, fascinated. “I’ll be damned.”
“Yes, you will,” I say quietly, not nearly the same amount of amused.
He jerks his gaze to me. “You can see it?”
After a breath, I give a jerking nod. Also like the hawk, the covering of light appear over the bunny’s eyes as soon as she waved her hand. “But this is a glamour on a glamour, right?”
“Essentially,” she says slowly. “But the bunny is more a manifestation. It’s real enough, like the training course.”
That doesn’t help us much if fake can be real and real can be lies. “You can stop it now.” I nod at the bunny that thinks it’s a frog.
She calls the bunny to her, and—just like Rhea with her hawk—gently peels the glamour from its eyes.
That small veil of light disappears as soon as it’s removed, and the bunny immediately adjusts how it’s standing, no longer frog-like, and it looks visibly confused.
She waves her hand again, and the bunny disappears.
A twinge of sadness for the little thing that was “real enough” tweaks in the center of my chest.
“See what, exactly?” Persephone glances between us.
I’m not ready to share that with her yet. “How did you get down here?”
Persephone leans back like she wants to get away from that question. “I already told you we don’t know, but…”
I’m expecting her to say something about breaking time if she tells us, but she doesn’t.
Instead, she drops her gaze to her fingers, which are twisted in front of her. She holds herself very still. “The first time you and Hades came for me with Pandora’s Box, trying to get me out that way, I snuck up to the gates of Tartarus alone, as agreed.”
Boone and I exchange a look. That’s not what I asked about. But I don’t say so, waiting for her to keep going.
She peeks out from under the curtain of her hair as if she’s checking that we’re listening.
I’ve seen false smiles before a thousand times—ones hiding judgment, ones hiding lies or hiding the truth, ones patiently waiting for you to mess up.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like hers now.
Sadness and a hopeless sort of resignation.
“You have to understand,” she says. “Before you finally arrived in Tartarus, Lyra, we already knew you were coming, thanks to Phoebe’s prophecy. And Rhea. She always said you’d come.”
My heart flip-flips like a fish out of water.
I promised Rhea. That was today for me but thousands of years ago for her.
Is that something I always end up doing?
Do I always go to that moment and promise her?
Or did I make that same promise in other situations?
What about in the time resets that happened before I ever arrived in Tartarus?
Boone’s reaction—since I told him about what I saw and did in my most recent visit to the past—covers my own. Suspicion lends an edge to his voice. “This is the first we’re hearing about it.”
“You know why.” Persephone just shrugs. “We have to be careful not to overwhelm either of you. There’s a lot you haven’t heard about yet.”
She’s right about that.
“Anyway, the Titans had time to prepare, to go through hundreds or even thousands of different scenarios. Apparently, I was a bit of a surprise when I showed up down here almost a hundred and fifty years ago.” She makes a face.
“I wasn’t any happier about it than you.
But I’ve learned patience after waiting for Lyra to be born and then grow up enough for Hades to find you and choose you for the Crucible. Only…the first time around, he didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” I ask.
“Choose you. He didn’t play in the Crucible Games at all, like usual. So you didn’t meet, you didn’t win, you didn’t end up here. We had to reset time and try again.”
Because of Phoebe’s prophecy?
I could really use a seat for this.
“That’s—” Boone starts, then waves like he’s erasing the question. “Never mind.”
Persephone scrunches up her nose. “We’ve had to reset time a lot, actually. We’ve been patient. We’ve prepared, thinking and even going through all the possible futures you might face. Whittling down the perfect combination of events and exact steps to get you here and then get us out.”
“Gods above,” Boone mumbles.
“I’m not sure those are the gods we should be praying to,” I mumble back. We might have a better shot with the gods of death. Anubis, maybe?
Persephone doesn’t seem to notice, almost like she’s lost in the memories of all the pasts they’ve experienced.
“At this point the Titans have been down here so long that they’ve learned there are infinite possibilities.
They’ve also learned when to start avoiding those broken bits of time so that they don’t accidentally reset things when they don’t want to, in order to hurry the future to them faster. ”
Which lines up with what Koios told us. Persephone wasn’t in the room when we talked about how the broken time works.
She gives a small sigh. “I haven’t been back to visit the past in a while.”
Boone leans forward, suddenly harshly focused. “You’re admitting you’ve also traveled back in time?”
The way he says it, it’s like he’s accusing her of murder. But I know why.
She opens her mouth, only for him to wave his hand and mutter, “Never mind,” again.
The disappointment that crosses her features makes me want to hug her. I am having way too many urges to hug people down here. Dangerous urges. We still don’t know who to trust.
“It’s better if we don’t risk changing things anyway.” There is real fear in her voice, in her eyes, which shift like she’s checking the corners of the room for broken time.
A series of emotions cycles through Boone’s eyes—confusion, concern, and then a gradual, hardening anger… I’m guessing because of the concern and that he felt concern at all.
“It’s also better if you share anything you know with us,” she urges.
“I’m not telling you shit,” he says. “I don’t trust anyone down here with anything about my past,” he adds in a voice I’ve never heard him use on anyone except maybe Chance, the biggest bully in our den.
Not even the time Boone got into a bar fight with a motorcycle gang—him against them—was he like this. I wasn’t even there, but I saw the video because I had to wipe it. He made five rough dudes think a second before coming at him, just with that tone.
The fact that all Persephone does is look down at her hands says a lot about her. When she looks up again, a smile is pinned back in place, though not quite as glowy. “I wouldn’t trust us, either,” she says, “if I were you.”
“And I don’t need your approval,” he shoots back.
With a sigh, she trains her gaze on me. “Like I said, the first time you finally won the Crucible and Hades got his hands on Pandora’s Box, we tried to get me out the way we had planned.
Instead of sucking me through a keyhole, the door cracked, but it shut before I could go through. The Titans had me try two more times—”
“Wait…they knew you were trying to escape without them?” I ask before Boone can.
“Yes. Because I am never part of Phoebe’s prophecy. If they could get me out sooner…” She shrugs. “But then they figured out that Pandora’s Box was how to get you in with us.”
Boone’s hands clench. “That makes no godsdamned sense. The gods made it to work a specific way.”
Her smile wavers, turning serious even as she keeps her gaze on me. “At first they thought, when I showed up, that they’d get you in the same way I got in.”
“Which was?” I ask.
“That was the problem. I don’t know. Neither do they.”
She’s said that before. No change in the story.
Boone makes a scoffing sound in the back of his throat. “Seriously—” He cuts off when I kick his foot.
Persephone is frowning. “I remember I had just gone up to Olympus after a several-months-long visit in the Underworld. I can picture laughing with my mother. Hades was there.” Her brows furrow even more as her gaze turns inward. “There was something funny about his face.”
His face.
A shiver snakes around me. Over my skin, setting my teeth on edge.
She shakes her head. “I went to sleep in my room in Mother’s house, and then I have a vague memory of someone else in the dark with me.” She screws up her face as if she’s trying to force the memories to clear. “Then I woke up in Tartarus.”
“Bullshit—”
“Stop,” I interrupt, and he just looks at me.
“I believe you,” I tell Persephone.
She straightens, smile brightening. “You do?”
“The fuck you do,” Boone snaps.
I swallow. “I believe you because of what I can see right now.”
Boone flops back in his chair. “Since when?”
“Not before tonight. But as soon as she woke up.” I shrug. I’ve been trying not to stare this entire conversation.
“See what?” Persephone demands.
I hope she doesn’t freak out. “You’ve been glamoured.”