Chapter Six
It was nighttime in the dry lands. Helen was surprised that there was such a thing as time here.
It confused her so much that she glanced around, uncertain as to where she was.
After a few moments she decided that, yes, she was in the dry lands, but this time the hilly terrain was flatter and more open.
The dark, empty sky seemed lower and heavier somehow.
Then she looked over her shoulder. It took her a few moments to understand what she was seeing.
Miles away, there was a line across the land and sky, where the flat nightscape turned back into the more familiar, hillier dayscape.
The different time zones sat next to each other like two paintings in an artist’s studio—unmoving, unchanging, and both equally as real.
Here, time was a place and it never moved. Somehow that made sense.
Helen walked. It was cold in the night version of the dry lands, and her teeth chattered uselessly.
In the dayscape, there was no relief from the heat, so Helen knew that in the nightscape there would be no warmth no matter how much she rubbed her arms and shivered.
She saw someone up ahead. He was panicking.
She hurried forward until she could see that it was Lucas.
He was on his hands and knees, feeling around as if he were blind—grabbing at the sharp stones, cutting his hands on their edges.
He was very afraid. She called out to him, but he couldn’t hear her.
She knelt down next to him and took his face in her hands.
He flinched away from her at first and then reached out blindly with relief.
He mouthed her name, but no sound came out.
In her arms, he felt very light. She made him stand up even though he was so frightened he hunched over on shaking legs.
He cried silently, and Helen knew he was begging her to leave him behind.
He was too frightened to move, but Helen knew she couldn’t heed him or he would never leave this dark, dry land.
Even though he screamed, she forced him to get up and walk.
Helen was in terrible pain. She wanted to groan but she didn’t have the strength to make any noise.
She could hear the ocean close by, but she couldn’t move or open her eyes to see where it was.
She felt her head bob gently up and down, as if she were lying, stomach down, on a lumpy raft, and her lips twitched in the faintest of grateful smiles.
Something had broken her fall and was gently supporting her.
She concentrated on that bit of good fortune as she divided her pain up into manageable little bits, one heartbeat at a time.
After ten heartbeats she counted to twenty.
At twenty she asked herself to get to forty, and so on.
She heard another steady rhythm under her, and after a short time her heart was in sync with the sound coming from her life raft.
They beat together, each encouraging the other. She kept very, very still.
After what seemed like hours Helen was still immobile, but she could finally open her eyes and focus them.
All she could see in the sweeping, blinding flashes sent out from some distant lighthouse were walls of sand.
Under her right cheek was a warm T-shirt.
After a few moments she realized there was a person in it.
She was lying on top of a man. The lumpiness under her head was his chest and the bobbing sensation was him breathing.
She gasped. The Delos boys had caught her.
“Helen?” Lucas asked, his voice faint and breathy. “Make sound. If alive,” he barely managed to say. He didn’t sound like he was going to kill her so she answered.
“Alive. Can’t move,” she whispered back. Every syllable sent threads of pain radiating out from her diaphragm.
“Wait. Listen to waves. Calm,” he said, struggling with every word as her body weight tried to press the air out of him.
Helen knew she couldn’t so much as raise her arm, so she relaxed like he told her to and just watched as the world swayed up and then back down with every breath he took. They waited in the intermittent light and dark of the lighthouse signal, listening to the surf fizzing in the sand.
As the agony began to lessen into something semiendurable, Helen was able to notice more things about her body.
From what she could see, her outward shape seemed mostly normal, but her insides felt gooey and soft, as if she were a freshly microwaved chocolate chip cookie.
Her bones were barely supporting the muscles and tissue they were supposed to, and there was an itchy heat in her marrow.
She recognized that sensation as being similar to the one she’d experienced once when she was learning to ride a scooter and accidentally flipped the thing.
Some part of her knew at the time that she had broken her arm, but by the time she got it X-rayed it was as good as new. The itch meant she was healing.
Somehow, she had fallen out of the sky and survived. She really was a monster. A freak. Maybe even a witch. She started to cry.
“Don’t be scared,” Lucas managed to say in one try. “Pain will pass.”
“Should be dead,” she whined quietly through her liquefied jaw. “What’s wrong with me?”
“No. Not wrong. You’re one of us,” he said with a slightly stronger voice. He was healing just as fast as Helen was.
“And what’s that?”
“We call ourselves Scions,” he said.
“Offspring?” Helen mumbled, remembering the definition from one of Hergie’s despised Word of the Day assignments. “Offspring of what?”
Lucas answered her. Helen heard him, but she didn’t. The word demigod was so far from what she was expecting to hear she had to think about it for a second. She had prepared herself for it to be something horrific, possibly even evil, which made her the way she was.
“Huh?” she blurted out stupidly, so confused she had stopped crying. Her view jiggled, and Helen realized that Lucas was laughing.
“Ouch. Don’t make me. Laugh,” he said even though his chest kept bouncing up and down.
It felt funny to have her head bobbing around like that so she started laughing, regretted it, but couldn’t seem to stop. It was almost as if the pain was so awful she had to laugh it off.
“This really hurts,” he said as he started to get hold of himself.
“If you stop, I’ll stop,” she said, her fit winding down as well.
In between recurring snickers, they went back to quietly managing their pain and waiting for their bodies to knit themselves back together.
Despite the pain, the time ticked by soothingly.
Out of one ear, Helen could hear the steady thump of Lucas’s heart, and out of the other she could hear seagulls.
Dawn was on its way, and she felt completely safe for the first time in weeks.
“Why don’t I hate you anymore?” she asked when she felt like her head bones were solid enough to enunciate properly.
“I was just wondering the same thing. I think the Furies are gone.” Lucas sighed deeply, like a huge weight had just been lifted off his chest, even though Helen knew her head was probably as heavy as a bowling ball.
“I was scared for a moment when we were in the air. It was very hard not to engage you.”
“We? Oh, you can fly!” Helen said, realizing.
She remembered how Lucas had a habit of appearing and disappearing so suddenly, and how she had heard the thuds and scuffs of his takeoffs and landings. She had never seen him fly because she had never thought to look up.
“How did you get under me?” she asked, shifting her position ever so slightly.
“I caught you. I saw you faint and slowed your fall as best as I could, but we were already close to impact when I got an arm around you.” He shifted as well, and then flinched in pain. “I can’t believe we’re alive.”
“Neither can I. I thought you were coming to kill me tonight, but instead you caught me,” she marveled, still stunned. “You saved my life.”
It was as if the fall had knocked all the rage right out of her. She didn’t hate Lucas at all. She felt the pressure of his arms lying across her back increase slightly, quickly, and then relax again.
“The sun’s coming up,” Lucas said after a while. “Hopefully, my family will be able to see us now.”
“All I can see is your chest out of my right eye and mounds of sand out of my left. Where are we?”
“At the bottom of our impact crater on the last bit of beach before Great Point Light at the absolute tip of the narrowest strip of sand on the northernmost end of Nantucket Island.”
“So . . . easy to find,” Helen quipped.
“Practically in my backyard,” Lucas joked, and then flinched painfully when he laughed. He went quiet for a moment before speaking again. “Who are you?” he finally asked.
“I’m Helen Hamilton,” she replied hesitantly, not sure what he was getting at. She wished she could see his face.
“Your father’s name is Hamilton, but that’s not your House,” he said.
Helen could feel the capital H in the word House just from the inflection he used.
“You would normally have taken your mother’s Scion name rather than your father’s mortal one.
Who was she?” he asked as though he had been meaning to ask her that question all night.
“Beth Smith.”
“Beth Smith. Right,” he said sarcastically.
“What?”
“Well, ‘Smith’ is obviously an alias.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about her. How can you say that isn’t my mother’s name?” Helen asked, getting defensive.