Chapter 88
What’s The Question
LYRA
Silence, I’m starting to learn, is not good.
Not around the Titans. Silence means bad things.
“What does this mean?” Eurybia’s dire question drops into the room like a small explosive device, setting all of them off in arguments and discussion.
But Koios’ answer drags them all back under the silence. “It means we were wrong that the key to Aphrodite’s Lock is Boone and Lyra together.”
I happen to glance at Cronos’ face then, and shock ricochets through me at the set lines. He truly believed that fate had sent him two saviors, I think.
“Whoever is doing this, they must not want us to get out,” Phoebe says in a strangled voice.
As if all of Tartarus sucks in a shocked breath at the Titaness’s revelation, the ground under our feet starts shaking violently.
Persephone throws herself over Boone as cracks appear in the ceiling, starting in one corner and sweeping across it, growing longer and wider in fast bursts.
Again. The damned rock ceiling is trying to come down on top of my head again.
That’s my only inane thought before Cronos is grabbing me by the arm and pulling me up against the wall, shielding me with his body.
I peek around him, squinting my eyes against the dust and rock coming down on top of us to see Hyperion, Koios, Crius, and Iapetus all standing in a circle, holding up the ceiling that makes up the floor of the tunnels and cells above us, like the pillars at the corners of the earth they originally were, protecting us from being buried now.
When the shaking stops, none of us move for a shocked second.
“Is the hallway whole?” Koios demands.
In seconds, Cronos is opening the door, though he’s hardly able to because the partially dropped ceiling is blocking the way. He has to punch up to pulverize a hole big enough before he can swing it wide to step out. Then there’s the sound of more pounding.
There’s a groan from Boone. “What happened—”
His eyes blink open, still heavy-lidded, but he takes one look at Persephone leaning over him and his eyes grow wide.
With memories or the realization of his glamour, I’m not sure which, because he doesn’t say anything.
He just threads his fingers in her hair and pulls her down to kiss her like she’s the air he breathes.
“It’s clear,” Cronos pokes his head in to say. “Get him out of here.”
He means Boone.
Persephone groans, then pulls away. “Later,” she whispers. Then points at the ceiling.
“Fuck,” Boone says. “I was out for a second, and the world fell apart?”
Quickly, Rhea and Persephone drag the pallet he’s lying on out the door, Boone holding Persephone’s hand and complaining all the way. I’m not sure he even sees that I’m back, but now is not the time to be pointing that out.
The rest of us follow.
I don’t see how the four Titans holding up the ceiling get out. All I know is there’s a massive rumble and crash, blowing debris out the door and all over us. But when it clears enough to see, the four of them are standing in the hall with us.
“Why is this happening?” Phoebe asks through a bout of coughing.
Koios wraps an arm around her.
The others don’t even seem to notice the question, but I’m frowning. Persephone said the cracks in Tartarus were new. They started the first time I was sucked in here.
It can’t be coincidence, can it? Is someone trying to bring down all of Tartarus on my head to stop me? Or was Hades unable to keep from burning down the world when I disappeared in here?
The Titans clearly don’t have answers.
“We need a new safe room.” Koios breaks into my thoughts.
As the others discuss where to go and how to get Boone there, I tug on Cronos’ arm. “I need to talk to Hades.”
His frown is slow to come on. “How—”
“The Hades in the Lock.” I rush to catch him up with my thinking. “He tends to have a lot of answers.”
A grim sort of amusement steals across the Titan’s features. “It appears my son can’t resist you even down here.”
Warmth spreads through my cheeks unexpectedly. “That’s not the reason—”
“I’m teasing, Alani.” Before I can respond, he turns to Rhea and murmurs in her ear. The Titaness glances over her shoulder at me before she nods at him.
“Come with me.”
I can hear Rhea softly explaining to the others as I follow Cronos down the hall. Which is when I remember that I’m not sure exactly where I am in this place. I ran through hallways that I didn’t recognize, more focused on getting to the screaming than where I was going.
Sure enough, we pass doorways I know I haven’t seen yet, all marked with Xs—one marked with bottles of poison, another with a sheaf of wheat, and the creepiest of all looks like a sea of children’s faces frozen in screams. Definitely not going through that door.
Eventually, I recognize the doors we pass as we make our way down to the Locks. When we get to Hades’ archway, I raise my hand to press my palm against the symbol, only to pause and look at Cronos. “What if another earthquake happens?”
“I’m coming in with you.”
“Oh.”
His small smirk tells me he caught the thread of disappointment in my voice. Am I really so desperate for time with Hades that even a few seconds alone with his replica is like a gift? I never pegged myself for the pathetic type, but maybe twenty-three years of feeling unloved made me that way.
I press my palm to the sigil. “Hades—”
I don’t even finish speaking his name before the door slides open and he’s standing on the other side.
He stares at me with eyes that shimmer with an emotion I can’t pin down and yet sends a spark of heat through me all the same. Heat that cools instantly when his gaze slides over my shoulder to Cronos, and whatever emotion he was letting me see disappears behind narrowed eyes. “Why is he with you?”
“To keep me safe.”
The silver of Hades’ eyes glints dagger-bright as his gaze flashes back to me. “Don’t you believe it,” he says. “He must have some other plan.”
I ignore that. “If he comes in this way, will it kill him?”
Hades’ eyes sharpen to silver edges. “Not after a Lock has been unsealed, but he’s not welcome—”
“I don’t have time to argue about this right now,” I say. “I need to know something, and I hope you have the answer.”
“If you think I’m helping you let him out—”
The sound of the bell going off sends an immediate shiver violently ricocheting up my spine.
If we didn’t have time a second ago, we really don’t now. Cronos and I both go to step inside the Lock, but Hades blocks our way, arms raised to ward us off. “You can come in,” he says to me. “But not him.”
I take two rapid steps backward until Cronos stands between me and Hades. “If he doesn’t come in, I don’t come in.”
It’s a gamble. Hades could just leave me to become the feral monster the Pandemonium will create if they get to me out here in this round room with no place to run or hide.
In my head, I’m making a plan to run to Demeter’s Lock next if he doesn’t budge on this.
But I’m pretty sure she’s not going to let Cronos in, either.
I think neither of us was thinking that the damn bell would go off so quickly after the earthquake.
Someone really is determined to keep the Titans from getting out.
At least that’s how it feels.
Slaps of running feet sound, coming from the tunnel that winds up past the obelisk to the bridge over the abyss. Too many to count, all coming in our direction.
I glance over my shoulder and yelp. Because it’s not the Titans running at us. It’s…
I can see them.
The Pandemonium.
My glamour-seeing is still on. I don’t know what I was picturing when there was just nothing and silence—monsters, maybe, with terrible faces or fangs and claws, or holes with no shape like Hades’ copy described.
Instead, the glowing outlines are human shaped.
And yet the way that they move is anything but. Unbelievably fast but also jerking. Like stop motion animation, or maybe like their limbs don’t quite work right and they have to keep aligning them to move forward, and their mouths are open in silent screams.
“Damn it, Lyra.” I’m vaguely aware of Hades snapping, “Get in here. Both of you.”
Somebody’s grabbing me and dragging me into the Lock a second before the door streaks closed past my nose.
“You stay here by the door,” Hades orders.
Part of my mind processes that I heard him, and even then, I’m not sure if he’s telling both of us or just Cronos. But most of my brain is still occupied with what I just saw. I’m still staring at the door, unseeing, unable to get the vision of the Pandemonium out of my head.
What are they? Does Hades, the one reigning in the Underworld above, know about them? Does he know what they do to us down here?
“Lyra?”
Maybe because Hades’ voice is soft when he calls my name, it gets through, and at the touch of his hand on my shoulder, I turn around to stare at him.
His eyes widen slightly.
Do I look as shaken as I feel? Pale, even? I feel pale. I feel like all the blood abandoned my head, leaving me woozy. I can’t even force my lips, which are pressed together tightly, holding in a scream, to unlock and speak.
“You saw them?” he asks, again gently.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch how Cronos looks at me more closely. “The Pandemonium?” he asks.
I manage a nod, answering both of them at the same time. Finally, my jaw seems to unhinge a little. “You told me to…” I stop to clear my throat, trying to force my voice to be something other than reedy. “You told me I needed to see them.”
Hades nods once—hesitantly, almost.
I stare at him with a thousand questions. “I know you want me to protect myself…”
“What did you see?”
The way he asks that… “What do you see?” I ask.
“Just…light. Energy, I think you’d call it these days. A glow.”
Oh.
“Lyra.” His voice drops into a command. “What did you see?”
I take in a shaky breath. “Tormented souls.”
“Not souls.” Cronos’ correction is quiet. “Soul. Only one.”
Hades and I both look at the Titan.
“I thought you couldn’t see them?” Hades demands. He’s only asking exactly what I’m thinking.
Cronos grimaces. “I can’t. But I’ve seen where they come from.
I once happened to be standing right at the source when that damned bell went off.
They come from the obelisk that marks my mother’s tomb.
I think they are manifestations of her grief at the death of my father.
Like her soul shattered and the shards want everyone else in the world to feel her pain. ”
Hades jerks forward, fists clenched at his sides. “You mean her grief from when you, her son, murdered his father, her husband.”
Then he’s grabbing me by the wrist and tugging me behind him as if he, a fraction of Hades’ soul himself, could protect me from the Titan. “I told you that you can’t trust him.”
“I can,” I insist.
Hades rounds on me. “You are too trusting—”
I cover his mouth with my hand to stop the words. “Someday, you’re going to learn to trust me. But until then, we will get nowhere arguing about this.”
Hades’ eyes swirl with anger and something else. Another unidentifiable emotion. Even as a copy, the man is an enigma. A fact proved by the way his eyes change again, turn warm as they trace the lines of my face before he presses a kiss in the center of my palm.
I gasp, yanking back my hand to curl my fingers around that tingling spot. “What was that for?”
“It seemed a better option than biting you to make you take your hand away,” he drawls. Then glances from Cronos to me and back. “You remain here by the door, or I kill you,” he commands the Titan.
With the grip he still has on my wrist, Hades leads me away. I look back over my shoulder to Cronos, who, surprisingly, stays where he is. He points at the ground and crosses his arms, and I nod my understanding. He’s going to wait for me there.
Not that there are many places to go. It’s a pie-shaped rock room.
Except when we cross the center, my vision blurs, different colors forming shapes that I can’t make out properly.
Just as I’m about to protest, my surroundings sharpen again, and I’m not standing in the Lock anymore.
Instead, I find myself on a rocky beach dotted with boulders and surrounded by cliffs.
It feels so real—the sea air against my skin forming a fine sheen of salt, the smell of the brine, and the rhythmic roll of the waves against the shore. It’s gentle today.
“This is where we met,” Hades says. “Do you remember?”
Where we met when he was not much more than a baby and I protected him from his grandfather, but also where we met on the bluff above when he was nineteen.
He must not remember either time the same way, though, or he wouldn’t be so angry with Cronos now.
Unlike with the real Hades, I don’t see mesh over his apparition’s face.
How am I supposed to take the glamour away from him if he is only a single piece of soul, not much more than a memory, to begin with?
“I remember.”
He turns to face the sea. “I formed this place from my memories and come here sometimes.” His lips quirk disparagingly. “More than sometimes.”
Then he glances at me. “You haven’t changed since that day. Exactly the same as you are now, except for the clothes.”
I smile. “You’ve changed a little.”
A peek of what I am pretty sure is very real amusement has his dimples winking out at me, but only for a second before he sobers. “You had a question?”
“Not about getting out of here,” I assure him. “It’s one I think you can answer.”
He crosses his arms. “Ask it, and we’ll see.”
Not exactly promising, but it’s better than no. “Do you know what’s causing the earthquakes?” I know he can feel them now.
I’m not sure what I expected, but it’s not for him to go so grim that I shiver and have to force my heart not to run away from me.
“Me,” he says.