Think, Penelope. Think!
Another bolt of lightning flashes right in front of me, so close that I feel the burn in my retinas. I jerk back and start to run—at this point, who cares which direction is the right one? If I don’t get into those trees soon, I won’t survive long enough for it to matter if I miss that logic exam or not.
But I’ve barely begun to run before I trip over something on the ground and go flying. My stomach drops to my knees as I prepare for the fall, but before I hit the dirt, a tiny part of the ground opens up and the next thing I know, I’m falling headfirst into who knows where.
43.Snake and Slide
I HATE TO ADMIT IT,but I scream all the way down.
If my mother was here, I’m sure she would remind me that Athena girls never scream. But I’m pretty sure no Athena girl has ever found herself in this situation before, so I decide to cut myself some slack. If I’m going to die, I at least want to make some noise before that happens.
I also try to twist myself around. Sullivan may not mind landing on his head, but I’d prefer not to. Unfortunately, the passageway I’m falling down is narrow, and there’s no room to so much as roll over.
At least until I belly flop, hard, onto the very top of an open, circular slide.
What the actual heck?
I glance around, trying to figure out where I am, but it’spitch dark around me except for this slide, which is lit up with electric green lights. I have one second to try to shift around to sitting on my butt, but before I can do much more than get to my knees, the slide decides it’s time for me to go.
The top part of it, where I’m currently lying, lifts itself up until I’m at a seventy-five-degree angle. Which is more than enough to send me barreling down the slide, whether I want to go or not.
Which, by the way, I definitely don’t.
There are a lot of curves to slow me down, but just as many straightaways to help me build up speed, and as I slide around a particularly sharp turn, I’m going so fast it almost feels like I’m flying.
For someone who has spent so long trying, and recently failing, to control every little aspect of her life, it’s more than a little terrifying.
As I go around an extra tight curve, I slam my eyes shut. If flying off a slide midway down is the way I’m going to die, I really, really don’t want to know about it.
But the second my eyelids close, images start bombarding me from all sides.
A woman with a long, brown braid and the kindest silver eyes I’ve ever seen.
A golden man riding a horse with golden hair.
A dark-haired man laughing and laughing and laughing as a glass full of burgundy liquid sloshes in his hand.
Some of the images I begin to recognize—Medusa with her head full of snakes, Icarus with his wings melting aroundhim—but most of them mean nothing to me. Not even the tall, beautiful woman with the knowing eyes and the peacock feather in her hair who seems impossible to forget.
They all look so perfect—so important—that I can’t help wondering if they’re all from myths. But that doesn’t seem right, because I would recognize them from my birthday gift and the zillion other books I’ve read on the topic throughout my life. There’s no way I wouldn’t know this many people from the myths.
Which means they’re something else. Maybe the echoes of myths that could have been? Or…
Memories.
The word comes to my mind as the slide moves into a quick straightaway followed immediately by another curve. And once it’s there, I can’t shake it. Are they memories? And if so, whose? Because they’re definitely not mine.
Suddenly the woman with the peacock feather is back, and she looks so interesting that I almost wish Ididhave some memory of her. She definitely looks like the kind of woman I admire—the kind who really can get things done.
This time, though, she actually holds a hand out to me, her fingers brushing against my hair. The moment she touches me, all the fear goes away, and for one long, perfect second it feels like everything is going to be okay.
But then I hit another curve followed by a long straightaway and she disappears—right before I go soaring out of the slide and across a small, dim, dusty room.
I throw my arms up to cover my head and do my best toroll into a ball so that I don’t hurt or break anything vital on landing. It’s a good thing, too, because I slam into a concrete-block wall before dropping onto the dusty floor.
I really have to start figuring out how to get places the normal way.
I lie there for several long seconds trying to get my breath and catalogue any injuries. My arm hurts from where I scraped it against the wall and everything hurts a little from being slammed against something, but other than that I feel relatively okay. I think my backpack took the worst of the hit.
