“Only been to Tartarus once—when we first, ah, met,” Orion said, referring to the time he had pulled her out of the quicksand. “And that was enough.”
“It’s where all the Titans are imprisoned, too. Definitely not a pleasant place to spend eternity,” she said grimly. “So, there’s Tartarus, Erebus, the Asphodels, the Elysian Fields—aka heaven. I’m sure I haven’t found them yet. What am I missing? Oh, yeah, there are the five rivers. The rivers!” Helen exclaimed, catching on at the last second. “Everything down here is about the rivers, isn’t it?”
Like something recalled from a fever dream—more emotion than image—Helen had an uneasy feeling about a river, but she wasn’t sure which one. As soon as she tried to turn her mind’s eye directly on it, the memory swam away like a pale fish.
“The Styx, the Acheron, all of them. They sort of define the space down here, don’t they?” Orion mused as he processed this new line of thought. “They could lead us, like paths.”
“And just how did you come up with this little slice of genius?” Helen asked with admiration, her former thought lost as if it had never existed.
“From what you said about your favorite lake over there,” he said with a wry smile. “It should be a river, but it isn’t. That got me thinking that the rivers must be different. The rest of the landscapes down here are always switching around like they’re interchangeable. But the rivers stay put. They’re always here. I mean, even most full mortals know about the River Styx, right? The rivers are in every reliable account of the Underworld I’ve ever read, and most of the books say that at some point or another all the rivers meet.”
“So, we find any river and follow it, and eventually it will meet up with the one we need,” Helen said, staring unblinkingly into Orion’s eyes, as if moving would ruin the new hope she felt. “Persephone’s Garden is next to the Palace of Hades, and the palace is supposed to be near a river. We find that river, and we might find Persephone.”
“Yeah, but that’s a whole different kind of headache. The river around the Palace of Hades is Phlegethon, the River of Eternal Fire. Not pleasant to stroll along its banks, I’m sure.” Orion’s brow furrowed in thought. “And then we still need to convince Persephone to help us get rid of the Furies.”
Orion suddenly broke eye contact and started looking around in a tense way, as if he heard something.
“What?” Helen asked. She glanced over her shoulder but she didn’t see anything.
“Nothing. Come on,” he said uneasily. Orion tugged on Helen’s arm, urging her onward.
“Hey, what’s the rush? Did you see something?” Helen asked as she trotted alongside Orion, but he stayed silent. “Look, just tell me if it’s got fangs, okay?”
“Did you hear about a robbery at the Getty?” he asked out of the blue.
“Ah, yeah,” Helen said, surprised by his sudden change in topic. “Do you think that has something to do with what you just saw?”
“I don’t know what I saw, but regardless, we’ve been standing in one place for too long,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I shouldn’t have let that happen. I can’t believe I . . .”
Helen waited for him to finish his sentence, but he didn’t. Instead he kept frowning, like something was off, as he walked bes
ide her. Helen kept looking around, but she didn’t see or hear any kind of threat.
The tiny bones that littered the ground, the ones Helen had so carelessly kicked earlier, were getting bigger with every few paces. As she and Orion walked a few yards, the skeletons grew from mouse- to cat- to elephant-sized. Soon they were wandering amidst skeletons that were many times larger than any dinosaur’s. Looking up at the massive calcified structures sticking up out of the ground, Helen felt as if they were walking through a forest of bones.
Arching ribs soared overhead like the pillars of a Gothic cathedral. Lumpy joints, covered in branching colonies of dead and dusty lichens, lay like massive boulders in their path. Helen noticed that many different types of anatomies were jumbled up, as if hundreds of beings the size of skyscrapers had died heaped on top of each other. The scale was increased to such an extent that it was as if Helen were looking through a microscope. From her perspective, each pore inside the sequoia-sized bones was so large it appeared as though they were made out of layers of lace. She ran her hand over one of the latticed surfaces and looked over at Orion.
“Do you know what these creatures were?” she whispered. Orion dropped his eyes and swallowed.
“The Ice Giants. I’ve read stories about this but never believed it was real. This is a cursed place, Helen.”
“What happened here?” she whispered, as awed by what she was looking at as she was by Orion’s emotional reaction.
“It’s an entire battlefield brought directly to the Underworld. That can only happen when every last soldier fights to the death. The Ice Giants are extinct now,” he said in a hopeless monotone that was so unlike him. “I’ve had nightmares about another field like this, transported to the Underworld. Except instead of Ice Giants, all the bones belong to Scions.”
His usually smiling mouth was pinched and forbidding, and Helen was reminded of what Hector had said. Orion had lived a rough life. She could sense it in him now, like a sad note in what was otherwise meant to be a joyful song.
She tilted her face under his until she caught his eye. Pulling him closer to her, she shook his arm gently as if to wake him.
“Hey,” she said softly. “You know what always bugged me about history class?”
“What?” Orion was startled out of his morose reverie by Helen’s seemingly random question, just as she intended.
“It’s all about war and battles and who conquered whom.” Helen wrapped both her hands around one of his thick forearms and started to lead him along again. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
His face broke into a smile as he allowed her to lead. Helen was delighted to see the storm clouds that had darkened his face clear so quickly, as if she had the power to banish them at will.