Chapter 55
Save…Me
LYRA
Is the goddess watching? Is she taunting me now? Making me save the worst part of myself?
As if Demeter is answering that question I didn’t voice with a definitive “yes,” there’s a thud overhead, and then, through the open hatch in the roof, grain pours down on top of me and past me in a forceful whoosh.
Demeter is filling the silo. The grain doesn’t just pour, it dumps down on top of us.
A wave of dust fills the air, and I pull my shirt up over my nose and mouth, coughing hard and eyes watering.
The deluge comes so fast and hard that I’m quickly up to my ankles in the stuff, and a mound is forming in the center of the space.
Meanwhile, the hallucination of past me, standing around the curve of the wall from where I am, stares at me in horror.
What I should do is run along the wall as fast as I can, trying to stay on top of the grains, grab her, and shove us both through the door opposite of where I am before the grain buries it.
But I don’t move.
I can’t.
Demeter knew well what she was doing.
I know what’s holding my feet in place when I should be saving myself.
Guilt.
Dex was glamoured that day in Athena’s Labor. I know he would not have killed Meike if he hadn’t been glamoured. He was a dick, but the way he competed in the Crucible Games was only to fight for his sister and nephew. He wasn’t a murderer.
While I’m not the one who delivered the killing stroke, what if I’d made different choices? What if I’d stopped him in that glass labyrinth instead of letting him run by? What if I’d tried to help him, even after he killed Meike?
But I don’t think I could have. Even now, anger at what he did burns like venom in my veins, scouring the guilt with something poisonous and awful.
I think the thing that’s cementing my feet to this floor is that I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve to be the one who lived through all of that.
Another realization slams through me like a thunderclap.
What if Phoebe’s vision has always been wrong? What if everything they’ve done to get me down here to save them has never worked, not in hundreds or maybe even thousands of attempts, because I’m not the one who is going to save them?
Not really.
What if that vision was a glamour, too? Or, equally likely, what if the one they’ve really been waiting for isn’t me…but Boone?
Since I’ve been in Tartarus this time around, the Titans have been surprised and even confounded over and over, in big ways and in small, by how differently this is going, all the changing parts. But what if what’s changed this time around isn’t me?
What’s changed is him.
That thought is stuck on repeat in my head.
It’s him.
It’s Boone.
He’s the one, and I’m just a distraction or, at best, a lure to get him here. Maybe it’s time to stop fighting so hard and just let the real savior step up and do his job.
“Why in the name of Tartarus are you just standing there?”
I didn’t even notice that I closed my eyes until the sound of my own voice yelling in my ear has me snapping them open. I have to squint to see my own face through the dust, but there I am.
“We need to get out of here!” past Lyra yells over the thunderous rush of pouring grain.
I shake my head. Because I’m convinced now of the truth. I should die down here.
The hallucination of my past self grabs me by the shoulders, shaking me hard. “Get your shit together! Run!”
I’m supposed to save her. If she gets out of the silo without me, would that count toward unsealing this Lock and save me, too? I can’t take that risk. Luckily, I know myself. She’s not going to leave someone else behind if it means she lives but I die. She’ll die in here with me.
But she’s just a hallucination. I can live with that.
Right to the end.
“I—” A violent cough seizes me, and it takes me several seconds to clear my lungs. “I’m not going.”
All I can see is her green eyes over the shirt that she’s also pulled over her mouth and nose. I see them go wide and then snap to narrow slits. Her black eyebrows, now covered in dust like the rest of her, draw together.
“We don’t have time for this.” She clamps a hand down on my wrist and starts dragging me.
The grain is high enough now that she has to lift her knees to walk through it, and it feels like wading through wet cement, thick and sucking at us.
Not that I’ve ever waded through wet cement, but now that I’ve accepted my fate, little details like that are filtering in.
Loss of fear is…peaceful. Lovely.
With a twisting motion, I jerk out of her hold, but she rounds on me, lunging to grab me again. “Come on!”
Still in my serene little bubble, I observe—almost like watching a movie—that she’s turning frantic. Her pupils dilate beyond what the dim light in here would cause.
“This is Boone’s story, not mine.” I pause, reconsidering the wording because of who I’m talking to. “Not ours.”
“What do you mean?” she lowers her shirt to yell. Then doesn’t wait for my answer but tries even harder to get a grip on me.
“I was always a non-player character,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “No! That’s not true!”
It is. She just can’t see it yet.
“Cursed to be unlovable. Stuck down here time after time. My purpose was to get Boone here.”
“What the hells are you talking about?” She ducks and jukes and manages to grab my arm hard, immediately dragging me through the grain. But now I’m fighting her. I’m not letting this hallucination of me keep me from my true purpose.
I fight so hard, I bite her.
The other me yelps. “What’s wrong with you?”
Out of the dust and growing darkness, a dark figure steps between us, and she gasps, letting go of me so that I trip in the deep grain and fall on my ass.
“Hades,” she calls to him.
“Go!” he yells at the other Lyra and points toward the door. “Wedge it open.”
She looks at me, back to him, and then, without another word, she turns and runs—or, more accurately, plows her way through the heavy grains piled up in here.
“Hades?” His name slips from my lips as I stare at his face, waking up from the numbness that had me in its grip. “Did you open Tartarus? Is that how you’re here?”
He freezes for a moment at my questions. “I’m not him, my star. I’m from down here.”