‘Dione?’
‘Yes,’ she breathed, willing her voice not to betray her.
‘We turn right.’ Odysseus’ words rang clear through the tunnel.
Danae did not know how she forced her legs to keep moving. Her thoughts raced so fast, they blurred into images she could not divine.
The group turned right again, and Danae stopped, her breath raking over her dry lips. She could no longer feel stone beneath her fingers but damp earth.
‘No,’ she hissed to herself between gritted teeth. ‘Keep moving.’
Her leaden legs obeyed, and soon the terrain of the wall changed once more. She felt a groove in the earth, then a lip of stone. She lay her palms flat to the wall. The stone bore markings.
They must have reached the tombs.
In Danae’s sight-starved mind, her imagination caught fire. She pictured the corpses coming alive and dragging their bones to dance with the living. She saw ghostly trees and people with no skin, the laugh of a dead man echoing through her skull.
Her legs gave way, and her lungs shrank to the size oforanges. Lights flashed across her vision, sparks that elongated as they burst, stretching into glowing threads that scurried away in the darkness. Almost feverish with terror, she believed she had become trapped in the omphalos shard, her life fleeing from her until there would be nothing left but a sightless husk floating endlessly through time. All the while, her life-threads pulsed from her in waves, shooting uncontrollably into the earth.
‘Dione!’
The ground shook, clods of earth and pieces of stone raining down on them.
‘Dione!’
‘Danae.’ Her true name. Barely a whisper, spoken so close only she could hear. ‘Danae, stop.’
Arms lifted her from the ground. She did not know when she had fallen.
‘I’ve got her,’ said Hylas. She clung to his voice, the warmth of his body pressed against hers.
‘Run!’ shouted Odysseus as the passage behind them collapsed with an almighty crash.
They hurried through the blackness, half sprinting half stumbling, Hylas’ arm firm around Danae’s shoulders.
Then the darkness shattered, and starlight bled through the cracks.
They emerged from the mouth of the tombs in a gust of dirt and dust, halfway up a hillside overlooking the fortress city. Behind them, the tunnel groaned like a dying beast, and they all fell to the ground as the last of the passage collapsed.
Beyond, the sea was like a sleeping beast, silver light dancing on its watery scales. The wind had chased the clouds from the sky, and the moonlit world was colder for it.
‘What in Tartarus is going on?’ called Palamedes.
‘Poseidon, earth-shaker!’ replied Nestor, unaware that his god’s body rotted at the bottom of a lake on Delos.
‘Dione,’ Odysseus’ voice rang out like a bell. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I’m all right,’ Danae called weakly.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Palamedes, pushing himself to his feet. ‘That was a god’s doing back there. If not Poseidon, then one who clearly loves the Trojans and has set their will against us.’
‘If a god wished us dead, we would not be standing here now,’ said Nestor.
As the rest of them heaved themselves up, Odysseus moved towards Danae.
‘Do you not remember what I said to you before we left the Greek camp?’
Frail as she felt, a rod of defiance straightened her spine. ‘I remember.’
