But it’s not a god that finds me today. Or at least, not a godentirely. Griffin’s tall frame appears through the broken door of the ranch.
“I’ve found him,” he says to his hand. To the black bracelet he has around his wrist that connects him to Beet.
I blink away sleep and shock as he strides toward me. “Griffin?”
He gets a hold of my shoulders. “For fuck’s sake, Helios. Are you hurt?”
“What?”
“Are you hurt?” he repeats.
I shake my head. “No. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” He looks me up and down, making sure that I’m not hiding a serious wound, even though I told him I was fine. “You’re hard to track, you know that? You leave almost no clues.”
“I know,” I whisper.
The fact that I survived alone on so many of my travels is not a coincidence.
“Helios. I’m sorry,” Griffin says. “I’m sorry for losing you.”
And that might be the last straw. No one goes this far just to find a stray who got lost. No one cares if I’m lost in the wastelands.
Or at least, that’s what I thought. But Griffin spent the last two days looking for me.
I reach for him, but stop right before doing something he might dislike. He doesn’t seem so big on human touch. Instead, I get a hold of the front of his shirt.
“Thank you for finding me,” I say, my heart in my throat.
7
Crushing expectations.
“Humans are not meant to share DNA with legends. Some behaviors are unpredictable, and the side effects are often devastating. Maeve once destroyed the entire west wing of the labs because we wanted her to finish her vegetables. She was three.Gods do not like to be told what to do, and neither do their human counterparts.”
Audio transcription of an interview with Dr. Nolan Max, a scientist who worked on theRevival Project, 2047.
As soon as I cross the hatch and enter theBeetle, Beet makes her opinion known.
“Helios! You son of a cod. Why are you running amok in the wastelands alone?”
I laugh. I have no idea what a cod is. “You didn’t come back to the canyon, so I figured you were done with me,” I say.
“Helios. On the day we’re done with you, you’ll know. The nomads scattered when they saw the Beetle. We thought they had taken you, so we gave chase. But they went in four different directions, trying to save their skins. We had to track all of them before understanding that they never took you. And when we got back to the canyon yesterday, you were already gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
Griffin grabs something on the couch and gives it to me. It’s my red hoodie. He got it back from the man who took it.
“Thanks.”
It’s difficult to express how moved I am by all this, so I keep my mouth shut.
“Go take a hot shower,” he says. “You’re shaking. I’ll bring you new clothes and fix you some food.”
I’m not shaking from cold or fear. I’m shaking because my heart is beating too fast and I’m trying in vain to contain my emotions. I never thought I would see him and theBeetleagain.
“No, it’s okay. I can cook,” I say. That’s the least I can do.
