Chapter 103
If I Could Turn Back Time
LYRA
Cronos warned me, even prepared me for what I’m seeing, but it’s still a shock as I watch Hades move backward, watch past versions of all of us appear and interact with him, also moving backward. Watch the past version of myself from only minutes ago argue with him.
I can’t watch him go or I’ll lose my focus, so I look away, concentrating on Tartarus for that part. When I glance over again, he’s gone.
It needs to go faster. The longer I do this, the worse for me.
I speed the outside world up, like watching an old VHS tape rewind. Then our past selves disappear, me up to the Underworld and then Olympus with Hades, the others to wherever they hid earlier.
After a short time, Hades’ fire-and-smoke tentacles reform and return to Tartarus, digging in deep, searching for me even though I was no longer there.
“There they are,” Mnemosyne whispers.
The gods of death return, reappearing in the cavern, followed by the Titans and Boone and Persephone from where they went to hide.
They all watch the fight in reverse, but it’s happening behind me. I’m solely focused on Tartarus in front of me. Waiting for the first of two specific moments in time that I’m looking for. Any second now.
A strangled gurgle sounds to my right, followed by Theia urging, “Don’t let go, sister.”
Tethys.
We were able to save Tethys.
Relief spikes through me, sharp and uneven, and the world outside glitches—the fiery smoke monster in front of me does the same thing three times before I finally get a handle on it.
“Focus,” Rhea whispers.
I nod.
Eventually, our fight with the gods winds down, until our past selves are inside Tartarus with the doors wide open and the gods of the Underworld are before them, their lights wound together overhead already having done damage with Hades’ smoke-and-fire tentacles battling them off.
Deliberately, I slow the pace of the outside world’s reversal, looking for the moment. The single, perfect moment. Then the debris clears, and the bridge over the abyss is whole. The light of the gods of death pulls out from inside Tartarus, but the gates are still open.
“Now,” I whisper. I push pause on the time outside, and the smoke freezes. “Hurry,” I say.
Still holding one another within my bubble, we run at full immortal speed. But with every jarring step, I can feel time slipping away from me in here. I can feel the pull of the power from my chest, and each step gets harder, my legs turning heavy.
But we get there, to the massive, open double gates of Tartarus.
A whimper escapes me the second I stop, and I have to take several breaths.
“Lyra?” Concern laces Rhea’s voice.
“I’m okay.” Except it’s taking too much of my energy to make my lips form the words now. I need to work faster.
I press my free hand to the open gates and extend the bubble surrounding us.
I picture it flowing through those doors, over the bridge, down the abyss to the seven Locks below, out to the pillars that feed the cosmos, then back into the tunnels, covering every inch of the prison that held the Titans for so long and all the souls still captured within.
By the time I finish, I’m shaking so hard, I can hardly hold up my arm. I slide my hand down the door until it’s waist level, then lean into it, pinning it in place against the gate with my body weight.
“Iapetus,” I say.
He’s standing closest. He also volunteered for this part.
He lets go of our chain, linking Mnemosyne and Phoebe’s hands together behind him.
The fact that he doesn’t disappear or freeze is a good sign.
Then he closes the gates while we’re all still on the outside.
Testing them. No Locks snap back into place, and he’s able to open them again.
He nods at me.
That’s when the nausea hits.
The next sign that I’m being drained too fast. Cronos warned me what to look for.
Work faster, Lyra.
Iapetus rejoins us, placing a kiss on Mnemosyne’s hand and getting a smile from her. Hoping like hells I’ve got everything covered inside Tartarus, I hold all of it—us and the prison—in this moment of time after the door was opened and I was given Cronos’ power.
Cronos warned me not to go to the past before that. Not even to save him. World-ending, time-breaking paradoxes and all that. I’d lose my power. We would still be trapped in there. He made me promise.
So I made him a second promise to get him out of there. Somehow. In another time.
I try not to think about the underlying sadness and the smile that he gave me when he told me I should do that. He should know by now that my version of stubbornness tends to get shit done.
Maybe I didn’t learn my lesson with Isabel after all.
But right this moment, I have no godsdamned choice about it.
I continue reversing time outside my bubble.
Turning the world backward. It takes a while now, even though I’m making it go as fast as I can. Light and smoke and fire duel throughout the chamber. No wonder we were having earthquakes. Then Hades’ tentacles leave, and eventually the gods of death behind us take their light and leave, too.
After that, we’re not sure what’s happening because it’s happening outside of this chamber.
I’m not even sure how long I’ve been down here at this point.
Thanks to all my time traveling, it feels like lifetimes.
But out here? I haven’t asked how much time passed, making it tricky to reset it.
The only way I know time is still rewinding is the effect on my body.
My head falls forward because I can’t keep it up.
“What’s happening to her?” I vaguely hear Boone demand.
I’m too busy trying to stay on my feet to care. My legs are shaking so hard, I’m not sure if my knees are going to give out on me.
I have to keep going. I can do this.
And I have to see it to know when to stop.
I force one eye open, and the view outside our bubble stutters again. Not like before, though, repeating the same second over and over. It blinks from the solid gates to the rubble and back.
“What the fuck was that?” Koios asks.
“Lyra—” I think maybe Rhea looks at me then. I’m not sure because I’m keeping my one open eye on the gates, waiting for the exact right moment, and if I move even a little, I’m going to lose it. I can feel both sets of time slipping out of my control. It’ll be utter chaos.
Cronos warned me about that, too. That once I got started, got too far down this road, I couldn’t stop until I was done.
“Lyra?” Rhea sounds worried.
Like a mother.
Tears spill out of my eyes and down my cheeks, but even those are doing strange things, rolling down and then rolling back up.
“Lyra,” I hear her say like she’s far away.
Then she’s telling somebody to hold on to her shoulder.
The next thing I know, two arms come around me from behind, holding me up.
“What’s happening?” Mnemosyne sounds scared.
She’s never scared. I don’t want her to be scared. After everything they’ve been through to get out of that place, everything they’ve lost, they’ve earned the right to never fear again.
“The power to do this is draining her,” I hear Rhea say. The sound is up against my ear. “One of the only limitations Cronos had. He couldn’t see the future, and the power to see the past literally drained him.”
Is she the one holding me?
She lost Cronos today. Partly because of me. I can’t fix that. I can’t save him. And still she fights to help me.
“Don’t worry, darling,” she murmurs. “I’ll give you all the power you need.”
Energy surges into me.
Like grabbing onto one of Zeus’ lightning bolts, reminding me of the day I became a goddess.
I don’t know how Rhea is doing it, but I gasp long and hard, sucking oxygen into lungs that had stopped functioning.
The world around us stops glitching. The tears on my cheeks roll in one direction.
“If you don’t think you can do it,” Rhea whispers, “stop it here. It’s enough. We’ll figure out another way. But it’s enough.”
“It’s not. I don’t want him to regret—”
I don’t want Hades to regret this one thing. I can save him that much pain.
“Then hurry, love. Hurry.”
I keep going. I keep time outside the bubble backing up, reversing. I don’t stop until suddenly Charon and Cerberus and Demeter appear in the room.
That’s when I slow it down. Then Hades is here. I see the way they had to pull him off the door as he’s screaming for me. I manage to stop it then, when they’re all standing in front of the closed gates, looking shocked, right after Boone and I were pulled inside.
I stop everything outside.
I would have stopped it sooner, but I needed to see them show up here to know I wasn’t guessing at the moment.
“Did it work?” Phoebe asks shakily.
If it did, then Tartarus is still open. Cronos is still dead. Only the world outside of the bubble, outside of us and Tartarus, reversed.
I hope.
I’m still holding our time in the bubble, but I release the outside world.
We watch in regular speed as Hades loses his shit, pounding on the doors and yelling my name.
Past Lyra would have been on the other side with her hand to it, worried about him.
Only she’s not in there anymore. Tartarus’ timeline is being held on my current timeline—the me now, not the me from my past.
I hope. I really don’t want there to be two of me.
I’m almost done.
We have to wait until the others try to drag Hades off, but then he abruptly teleports away. I know where. To go beg his siblings to unseal each of their Locks so I can get out.
And finally…finally…I let go of my grip on time in both places.
The protective shield around us pops like a soap bubble.
I didn’t realize how much I’d cut us off from the world until sound subtly resumes and the air moves against my skin.
I stare at the closed gates of Tartarus.
Please, gods, let this have worked.
Hopefully there aren’t duplicates of all of us who were in my time bubble now, too. Cronos wasn’t sure of that.
“Iapetus?” Rhea asks.
He tests the gates again, and they still swing open and closed easily. Tartarus is still unlocked. And Cronos isn’t with them. He would have been if I messed up and duplicated all of us.
Thank the Titans for that much.
Rhea is still holding on to me or I’m pretty sure I would collapse. “Thank the mother goddess,” she whispers, echoing my own thoughts.
“Good enough for me,” Iapetus says.
Propping myself up on the wall, I draw Rhea around to find that she looks like death warmed over with sallow skin, eyes sunken into her face and dark circles around them. I think I nearly killed her. Thank the cosmos I didn’t. “Thank you.”
She cradles my head in her hand. “You are as much a daughter to me as you were to him.”
To Cronos, she means.
She’s lost him, and she doesn’t blame me, and I can’t deal with it. Maybe later. We still have more to do here.
I give her a watery smile. “Go,” I say.
The Titans hurry inside Tartarus, closing the gates behind them and leaving only me, Boone, and Persephone on the outside.
They will find a way from the inside to make the prison appear as if it’s still locked up tight.
No doubt the gods of death are going to come down here to check after what they’ll remember happening.
My legs go out from under me, pure jelly. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Boone half catches me but ends up squatting in front of me. “Are you okay, Keres?”
“Well, ain’t that a bitch,” I say with a smile. “I don’t think I can walk until I recover.” I can’t feel my legs, or really anything below armpit level.
Boone glances at Persephone. “If they see her like this, they might suspect that she did this instead of Cronos.”
Cronos was adamant that we hide my power over time from everyone. The Queen of the Underworld and goddess of glamours is power enough, but time, too? I would be viewed as a threat. Especially after what Hades did. They’ll all remember it.
So Cronos is part of our cover story. We need the world to believe that, while dying in the rubble, he reversed time, coming up with a new plan to try to get out, and spitting the three of us—me, Boone, and Persephone—out when Hades bypassed the wards with Pandora’s Box.
Everyone will assume he did that so that his son wouldn’t bury him alive again.
Persephone purses her lips. “I have an idea.”