Chapter 43
They’re Coming For Us
LYRA
Boone and I balance side by side on a ledge barely wide enough to stand on tiptoe, pinned on the framework of the practice course for Poseidon’s Lock between the stabbing swords behind us and the Thor-like hammers ahead, which are flying around like helicopter blades as they swing off a thick center pole above us.
“You can do it, Lyra,” Persephone calls from the sidelines.
Like we’re friends. I’m still not entirely sure about her. I might be able to see the glamour covering her eyes, but I can’t tell what it makes her believe or do. A glamour, by the way, that I attempted to remove. After all, as the goddess of glamours, shouldn’t I be able to affect them?
It didn’t budge. It’s still there every time I look at her beautiful face now. She could be a ticking time bomb. Boone seems determined to not trust her, mostly pretending she doesn’t exist.
I needed to physically work off some of the pent-up, confusion-driven energy, so we came down here to practice the course.
Even able to see glamours, I still don’t know what to believe.
The goddess of irony and I really need to have a chat someday. I don’t know why she keeps targeting me, but it feels personal.
So many other questions are a giant knot in my head, like colored threads of yarn that a demon kitten has batted around and snarled into a mess.
Stop thinking about it, I tell myself for the hundredth time.
Hyperfixating means losing focus on what’s right in front of me.
Which is how I’ve already managed to get a decent slice across my cheek from one of the swords.
It was deep enough that, even with accelerated healing, it still stings.
The bruise on my forehead is from a hammer and is new, but now at least it doesn’t feel like a goose laid an egg under my skin when I touch it.
Goddess healing is pretty awesome.
“Okay,” Boone says as we both stare at the swinging hammers. “Last time you paid attention to too many of the hammers.”
He’s been sounding more and more like some kind of Zen obstacle guru as we practice.
“I should pay attention to fewer hammers?” I try really hard not to sound sarcastic. I don’t manage it very well.
He gives me a pointed look, to which I shrug.
“Yes, Lyra,” he says in a deliberately slow and overly patient voice.
“The only hammers you care about are the two or three that are in danger of hitting you. The others are just a distraction. If you get confused, pick the hammer going slowest that’s closest to you and step on it so you can ride it. Doing that allows you time to observe.”
I snort a laugh. “You seem to think I’m a coordinated person who kept training on the obstacle courses in our den.”
“Lyra…you got through Artemis’ Labor, including outrunning a dragon. Not to mention Athena’s glass labyrinth.”
It takes a lot to hide the shudder that hits me hard at the mention of Athena’s, the most brutal of the Crucible Games for me. The heads on spikes. The way Dex and Meike died. Not the best memories to hold on to.
“I had help.” My tattoos, Zai, Meike, Trinica, Amir, even the other champions from time to time. I miss them all. But nothing like I miss Hades.
The rock inside my chest from his absence never lets up. Even right now, when I’m focusing on not being knocked into electrified water, it’s there. Like he’s here with me.
What if I keep dying in here because I can’t do this without him?
Boone looks from me to the hammers and back. “Okay, new plan,” he says. “We’re going to do this together. Every time I say step, take one step in the direction I tell you. Don’t move unless I tell you to, even if I move. Got it?”
Now we’re playing a game of Simon Says? This is so not going to work. Another dousing and shock are definitely in my near future, but that’s true if I do it on my own, anyway. So we might as well give this a try. “Got it.”
“Here we go.”
It works for a hot second. The next few moves we take, I focus on the hammers closest to us and move when and where Boone tells me to, and I think I’m starting to see what he means about figuring out which ones to focus on.
But it’s too fast. My brain wants to take longer to process the trajectory and proximity and where I need to be going to get out of the path.
Probably why I catch sight of a hammer coming at me from out of the corner of my eye and flinch, instinct making me take the smallest move away.
“Nope.” Boone is somehow right there, shifting me to a safer spot.
“Like a dance,” I mutter.
He gives a single nod. “Backward.”
And we step.
A hammer whips by with a whomp, whomp, whomp.
“Exactly like a dance.” He grins. “Lateral left.”
We move.
“What do they think they’re doing?” Cronos’ voice reaches us over the sounds of the obstacle course and the blaze of fire and lava beyond in the wastelands.
Maybe I turn toward him. I’ve been expecting him to show up, but the timing still surprises me.
All I know is I hear Boone say, “Shit,” and then I’m being lifted completely off my feet.
There’s a confusing swirl of motion as I’m swung around.
It takes a second for me to realize that he’s stepped both of us up onto a hammer that’s turning in circles.
“Don’t distract her!” he yells at Cronos, somehow managing to keep his gaze on the Titan while we spin.
How is he doing that? I’m getting dizzy and nauseous.
“She wasn’t ready for that part!” Cronos yells back.
“She was,” Boone insists. “You were holding her back.”
In a passing whirl, I catch the Titan’s frustrated scowl. “This isn’t how she—”
“Let them get through the obstacle first, my love.” Rhea doesn’t speak loudly. I don’t know that she ever does.
She’s here? The tiniest gasp escapes my lips as I look around and find her standing beside Cronos.
The last time I saw the Titaness’s face, it was streaked in silent tears, drawn into despair by a soul-deep sadness and the knowledge that her children had been forced to attack her.
To believe she was terrible. To believe even worse things about their father.
I told her I’d come help her.
I promised.
She didn’t know in that moment how long she would have to wait. How long they all would have to wait. For me it’s been instant, but for them it’s been thousands and thousands of years.
Every question, every worry, every confused backtrack of the thought process trying to figure this out abandons me at the sight of her face now.
And I realize that, whatever else happens, I’m going to try to keep that promise.
Other than that one small gasp at the sight of her, I don’t say anything or do anything else. I don’t make another sound.
But Rhea’s gaze on me changes. Not sharpens, exactly, but settles.
She knows that I know now.
“Ready?” Boone asks.
I force myself to suck in another sharp breath and mentally shake myself back into focusing on getting through the rest of the obstacle when what I want to do is go to Rhea. Even if she can’t give me any more answers than I already have.
I’m almost tempted to jump into the stupid water, but that electric shock is no joke.
So I nod, and we move.
Which is when the damned bell decides to go off. Even out here, near the lava flows and burning lands, with all the noise it makes, it’s like it’s ringing right beside my ear.
“Shit,” Boone mutters and gets us up on another hammer so we can look toward the others on the ground.
“Stay there!” Cronos yells. “The Pandemonium shouldn’t be able to get to you there.”
Then all three of them run as if their lives depend on it.
Leaving us dangling on the swinging hammer like sacks of food hung in a tree so a bear can’t get to them.
“We can’t stay here for hours,” Boone says. “Let’s try to get back to the platform between obstacles.”
Which means backing up without getting knocked off. “Is taking that risk really any safer?”
He looks down at me, then over the obstacle course, only to go horribly still.
“What?” I track the direction of his gaze. “Can you see the Pandemonium?”
Nothing is coming from the tunnels, the sight of which is blocked by the pillars between us and the mountainside, so I only get glimpses with each swing.
It’s probably the blur of motion that hides the initial sparkle of red.
But it takes Boone swearing again for me to realize that broken time is coming directly at us.
“Shit,” Boone repeats. “Back one.”
But I hesitate.
I’ve learned things in the past that are important—things that the Titans can’t tell me in this timeline because I have to learn them for myself.
So far, other than Hades’ replica in his Lock, everything I’ve learned has been by witnessing it myself…
in the past. As long as I can avoid resetting anything, wouldn’t it be better if I went into the breach?
At the same time, we still need to sit down and talk with the Titans. Right this second is so inconvenient to be time traveling.
“Lyra.” Boone grabs my arm and yanks me back.
What comes next happens fast. Because we can both tell that the crack in time is moving toward us faster than we’re moving away.
Boone reacts, completely in charge. Moving me this way and that, spinning me around, setting me on a hammer so that I swing away from him, only to grab me as I come back by. And all of this is moving us backward through the hammers as fast as he can—away from time.
But it’s almost as if that sparkling shard is chasing us. I know Boone sees it, too.
“Hopefully the Pandemonium don’t like electrified water,” I hear him say as he swings by.
“What?”
In response, he whistles—the signal for get ready.
I’m on a hammer by myself. When he whirls by on a different hammer, he suddenly grabs me by the hand. Our combined momentum swings my legs out wildly. I’m not even a little bit surprised when he yells, “Brace!”
Then lets go.
I’m catapulted away from the obstacle course and out over the pool, dropping fast. But not fast enough.
In the next instant, a now-familiar shimmering light closes over my head—I never even saw the second break in time below me. Neither did Boone, apparently, because I see the shock on his face right before he spins away and the first shard of time swallows him up.
Then everything around me goes silent.