Chapter 58
Tell Me No Lies
LYRA
“What? That’s not possible.” I take a jerking step away from all of them, Boone included, and there’s a distressed noise that I’m pretty sure comes from Persephone.
At the same time, a harsh, “Over my dead body,” sounds from behind us.
Loud enough that the Titans all make shushing noises, and I should probably look toward the tunnel where the obelisk lies in wait. But I can’t.
Because that protest came from the copy of Hades watching us from inside his Lock.
Boone turns and slaps a hand on the symbol. “Bye-bye,” he says to Hades as solid stone slides down between us.
Which is when Persephone runs from the room.
“Shit.” Boone spits the word but stays by my side.
“What do you mean?” Cronos asks Phoebe sharply. “Fated how?”
Wait. There are more fates than the lines linking lovers?
The Titaness glances around at the others. “Not lovers.”
Thank the gods. Because no. I love Boone, but not like that. Nothing will ever make me turn from Hades, not even fated fucking lines, but I’m glad I don’t have to make that choice.
Phoebe makes a face. “It’s something else.”
“Cosmos save us.” Cronos mutters the words. “Can you see a new future?” Cronos demands of Phoebe, and Rhea sneaks another look at the tunnel the Pandemonium would come from if triggered.
But no bell goes off.
Phoebe shakes her head. “Other than their fated thread, I still can’t see anything about Boone.”
“It makes sense, though.” Iapetus jumps in. “It’s Aphrodite’s Lock. It must have something to do with love and bonded hearts.”
“And fire,” I remind them all. “Fire doesn’t sound like love to me, or all that promising, at least. And Phoebe said the fated line isn’t lovers.”
My gaze cuts across the Titans, and bile rises in my throat, because now all of them are staring at me with a new kind of hope.
They’ve all, every single one of them, reached the same conclusion together—that things are different this time for a reason.
They are all wondering if our fated bond means this is it, the final time.
No more resets. All the stars aligned. All the right steps were taken. Escape is within their grasp.
I move several feet away, hard and fast. “It could be a lie. All of this could be lies. What if you’re manipulating us so we let you out?”
Even as I’m saying it, I don’t believe it. I know what I witnessed in the past. I know it was real. “We don’t even know if time really resets down here. You keep telling us it does, but there’s no way to prove it. There’s no way to—”
“I can prove it,” Mnemosyne says. “I can show you the memories of the past.”
“No!” Cronos yells.
All of us freeze, dread tensing our bodies and contorting our faces as we wait for the bell to go off. It has to. He was so loud.
But it doesn’t.
“Careful, my love,” Rhea urges quietly.
“Seeing all of the past could reset her.” Cronos slashes a hand through the air, and lightning crackles over his skin as he does.
It’s not exactly quiet, either. “The cracks in the walls, the differences this time, now Boone, and them being fated… All of it points to this being the last time. We’re too close. We can’t risk it. I forbid it—”
“You forbid it?” Mnemosyne murmurs. There’s a sweetness to her voice that should be a warning.
One even Cronos recognizes, cutting himself off to glare at her.
“She can handle it,” Mnemosyne insists. She is the Titaness of remembrance, but should I believe what she shows me? What if, like the gods, all her memories are made of glamours?
Keeping my gaze trained on her mask, I turn on my ability to see glamours with a flick of my will. No veil of light covers her face or eyes. I can’t decide if I’m relieved or more worried, but I turn the power back off. “Show me.”
“No!” Cronos and Iapetus both lunge for Mnemosyne as she takes a step, but she puts on a burst of speed, evading their reach to get to me.
She threads her hands into my hair on either side of my face, and she presses her forehead to mine, her owl mask feathers tickling my skin, and I close my eyes. “I’ll only show you enough,” she whispers.
“This is a bad idea—” I hear Cronos say. Or at least start to say before the sound of his voice cuts off abruptly, and in the same instant, my mind is filled with flashing images.
Not just images. Moments, like movies—all of my past lives.
I see different things as they happened.
I discover what it would have been like if I hadn’t been cursed, growing up with my parents.
No matter the timeline, they treat me more as a burden than a beloved child.
So many different ways my life would have turned out when the Greek gods had nothing to do with me.
Or did turn out. I was a nurse. I was a teacher.
I ran a little shop on the pier. I became an addict who died of an overdose in an alley.
With the images come the sensations I felt in those moments. The smells of my parents’ home—slightly dank with a waft of unwashed socks. The damp of fog as I open the shop one morning. The dizzying high of the drugs hitting my blood before death claims me.
Then I get more versions of my life, different versions, now, with the thieves. And after that comes me in the Crucible.
All the ways I die.
Over, and over, and over. At least once on every single one of the Labors. More than once in Athena’s and in Zeus’.
Worse than the sensations are the emotions. I feel what I felt in each and every one of those lives, especially in those ends—terror, pain, despair, a terrible kind of hope only to have it destroyed, regret, guilt, anger. All of it ripping through me like electric shocks.
And at the exact moment when my life would end in one timeline, a new life flashes before me. It’s like I’m being yanked from the end of one story and shoved into the middle of another.
But they’re all my story.
It’s not just me, either. It’s watching my friends die in the Crucible…or watching them live. There are versions where even Dex makes it to the end, although Meike never does.
The metallic taste of blood in my mouth. The horrible pain as I burn from the bite of the water dragon in Poseidon’s Labor, consumed from the outside as Isabel watches in horror instead. Isabel lives. More than that, we would have been friends when we both lived.
I can save her. I could reset time and save Isabel.
Mnemosyne clearly follows the train of my thoughts, because she shows me how many times I tried, and there’s not a single one where I end up in Tartarus with Isabel still alive.
Oh gods.
Hearing the dull thud of Zai’s body as he hits the rocky ground in the cave during Dionysus’ Labor, his eyes open and already sightless as the poison ivy combined with his allergies kills him quickly, because he didn’t win Hermes’ sandals that time.
Zai rarely makes it through the Crucible alive.
The scenes of all my lives changes again, moving on to Tartarus. Trying to get through different Locks and all the ways I died in those, too. Though she doesn’t show me beyond Poseidon’s Lock, which is next.
I would ask, but it’s as if I’ve been paralyzed, unable to speak or move or do anything but experience.
Finally, she shows me different moments that caused the resets.
They’re right.
My death is what triggers it maybe the most, but just as often, the resets are because of other moments.
My mind not being able to take the truth of what they tell me.
That does it a lot in the early years, until they learned.
But also moments when one of us, not always me, is taken to the past and someone there discovers too much. Those minds also can’t take it.
Why does it matter, if they’re in the past? I want to ask.
But it matters.
Time resets.
It’s real. It happens.
The feel of the memories is too much, as if they are physical things being filed into my brain and I can’t expand enough to hold them, the pressure pushing outward on my skull.
A moan manages to escape from my paralyzed lips.
“Stop.” I hear Cronos outside of myself. “Stop. You’re hurting her.”
Then there’s a scuffle of running and more yells.
“Lyra, watch out!” Cronos’ shout penetrates the memories that I’m drowning in.
The memories that are trying to destroy me. Already have destroyed me in previous lives, previous versions of me. Have destroyed my friends. Have destroyed Hades. Have destroyed the world.
I’m going to be sick.
Although I don’t know if it’s the past lives I’ve witnessed that send the surge of nausea rising up in me, or if it’s the disorientation of being yanked out of Mnemosyne’s memories and straight into the grim shimmer of broken time, followed by dead silence as it takes me wherever it’s taking me.