“I can’t let you leave this house. You know that,” she said forcefully.
“Then maybe you can take him?” Helen asked.
“I’m sorry, I can’t right now,” Pandora said, looking down at her unadorned hands. “Why don’t you ask Ariadne? She’s in the library.” She smiled briefly at Helen and Matt, and silently hurried off toward the fight cage. It took Helen a moment to realize what was missing. For the first time Helen could remember, Pandora wasn’t wearing any jewelry.
Helen led Matt to the library, where Castor, Pallas, Hector, Ariadne, Cassandra, and Lucas were all talking in a tight circle around Cassandra’s chair. The conversation ended as soon as they saw Helen.
“Matt needs a ride home,” Helen announced nervously. She tried to keep her gaze away from Lucas, but her eyes kept jumping back to him.
“I’ll take him,” Ariadne offered, immediately coming forward and motioning for Helen and Matt to leave the room.
“What’s going on?” Helen mouthed to Ariadne, who took her hand and led her away. When they were a few paces from the library, Ariadne answered.
“We’re trying to figure out what Creon’s up to,” she said.
“Why was I excluded?” Helen asked, offended.
“Come on, Helen,” Ariadne replied with a chiding look on her face. “Lucas can’t bear to be in the same room with you right now, and no offense, but he’s a much better soldier than you are. We need him at the table and we need him focused.”
Matt shot her a confused look, but thankfully, he didn’t ask any questions about her and Lucas. It wouldn’t matter in a few hours, anyway. Helen would be gone and she would never see him or any of them again. Later, she’d crawl into some strange bed in some strange state and then she didn’t care if she ever got out of it or not. But she couldn’t let herself think about that yet. First, she needed to make sure that the people she loved were taken care of.
When they reached the kitchen, Ariadne grabbed her bag off the back of one of the chairs and fished her keys out, looking around like she had misplaced something. She looked out in the garage, counted the cars, and then glanced back into the house, whispering, “She’s back?” to herself. Before Helen could ask what was wrong, Ariadne said good-bye and hurried Matt out to her car.
Helen waited a few moments for Ariadne’s little car to disappear down the drive before she crept out onto the lawn. It wasn’t dark out yet, but Helen still felt like even the shadows under the bushes were reaching out to grab at her. As soon as she was clear of the house she jumped up into the air, frantic to get into the sky, the one place she knew Creon couldn’t catch her. Calmer once she was safely airborne, Helen flew home, circling high for a few moments to watch for random neighbors before coming in steep and fast to avoid being seen. Touching down in her backyard, Helen listened for the usual sounds of her father and heard that he wasn’t alone. Kate was with him.
They were talking softly, and here and there they would laugh or lapse into silence as one or the other gathered their thoughts to make sure the words came out right. Helen looked in the window and saw them sitting on the couch together, TV off, having what looked like an important conversation. If she concentrated she could probably make out what they were saying, but Helen didn’t want to intrude on such a private moment between two people who were obviously falling in love.
She touched her heart-shaped necklace and wished them perfect happiness together. She wasn’t sure if the cestus worked like that, but all that mattered was that Jerry would have someone to care for him when she was gone. Helen realized that if she left now, without confronting him, he would never have to know about Daphne returning to the island, and if that wound was left unopened, then this fragile understanding between him and Kate might stand a chance.
She stood at the window for a moment, deciding which course to take, until finally the sharp drop in temperature and the tangerine color staining the clouds told her she had run out of time. She flew up to her window, sat down at her desk, and wrote a note to her father. She told him that she loved him, that she was safe, and that she was never coming back, making the note brief so she wouldn’t have to fill it up with lies. He had been a good father, and if she couldn’t be completely honest with him, the least she could do was lie as little as possible.
She flew out of her window and back to the Delos compound as soon as she was done writing. It was a comfort to Helen to know that while she was sneaking away later that night her father would still be oblivious. Hopefully, for all of their sakes, Kate would be there for Jerry in the morning when he found the note. Thinking of that, she flew east across the darkening island with a feeling that approached peace.
Before she even touched down, Castor was running out of the house to meet her on the lawn, waving his arms over his head as if to signal her to hurry. He was shouting something about her mother.
Daphne had to wait until the little strategy session broke up before she could sneak into the library and look around. All she needed was the return address on the last few bits of mail from Tantalus to the Nantucket faction of the House of Thebes. Then, after so many years, she might finally be able to figure out Tantalus’s pattern of motion.
She was only missing a few bits of information—a city name and she would know where to go from there. Then she would find Tantalus and kill him exactly the same way he had killed her sweet Ajax. Daphne had imagined it a million times. As soon as he came to the door she was going to chop off his head while his wife watched. If she avenged him, then maybe when Atropos cut her string, Ajax would be waiting for her on the other side of the river. She still had a ways to go and a lot of work to do before she could allow that to happen. First, she needed a city.
Daphne started reading the postmarks on the topmost letters on Castor’s desk, but a quick glance told her that what she was looking for wasn’t there. She knew Tantalus’s handwriting like she knew her own, and she didn’t see it anywhere. Then she realized that although Castor was the smartest and the bravest of the Delos clan, he would be the last person Tantalus would contact. She went over to the other side of the library and began another search in another desk.
She saw a safe under the other desk, put her hand on the spin dial and hoped that it wasn’t designed by a Scion. After a few moments on her knees listening for the click inside the tumbler, her search was abruptly ended. She felt the hot, thick jab of a needle invading the vein in her neck. She gasped, recognizing the drug cocktail she used on other Scions. She dimly remembered that when she had subdued Helen, she had left a spare syringe in her bag, loaded and ready, just in case. In seconds, her field of vision shrank to nothing.
When she woke, Daphne could feel that her hands had been shackled with something metallic. As she blearily tried to focus her eyes she saw that she was on a dark beach. She heard the jingling of chains as she moved her hands closer to her face, and saw that her wrists had been cuffed. There were deep vertical slashes on both her forearms that were still leaking fast-pumping blood even as they healed. She was thirsty from the blood loss, but she ignored that and summoned a bolt.
The cuffs heated up until they glowed so bright Daphne had to turn her closed eyes away or be blinded by the light. The brightness was nearly unendurable, but the cuffs didn’t melt, not even as she drained the last of her volts. There were few substances that could withstand so much heat at normal atmospheric pressure without turning into a liquid or a gas.
“Tungsten,” she whispered through her dry, cracked lips, angry with herself for acting without thinking first.
The white-hot links of nearly unmeltable metal led to a lightning rod that was jammed into the ground like a stake. Not only was she immobile, but any attempt she made to throw a bolt at an enemy would only end up dissipating in the sand.
“I wouldn’t have thought you had any bolts left,” a woman’s voice called from down by the waterline. The crouching shape rose and walked over to Daphne. “I took a lot of your blood to dehydrate you, or at least I thought I did.”
“Why are you doing this?” Daphne asked softly. “You’re not a killer, Pandora.”
“I know I’m not,” Pandora admitted with a humiliated nod. “I tried to kill you while you were unconscious, but I couldn’t do it.”
“Then let me go,” Daphne said with a sad smile. “I know why you’re doing this. Denial is a powerful thing, and grief can make a good person evil.” Daphne hauled herself up onto her knees. “But why don’t you believe me? Or if not me, why not Lucas, your own nephew? He’s aFalsefinder.”
