“Let me help you.” My heart pounded as the air began to thin. “Please. I want to. And maybe—maybe we can help each other.”

The air turned bitter cold as all the warmth of the desert disappeared, and I shivered. I’d barely moved, but it was enough; the fog touched my bare skin, cold and silky and much more solid than I’d expected. Like feathers, maybe, or snow.

It didn’t hurt.

Instead, like he’d done to Calliope, he caressed my cheek, and through that single touch, I felt power beyond imagining. It was nothing like the force that Henry and the others had used to chase Cronus away. It was immeasurable, as if the entire universe was compressed into that lone tendril of fog. At last I understood why they were all afraid of him.

His touch lasted half a second, and he was gone before I could open my eyes. My mind reeled as I tried to comprehend what had happened, and despite the sun once again beating down on me, my skin felt like ice. I collapsed onto my hands and knees, the coarse sand scraping my palms, but it didn’t matter.

He’d spared me.

* * *

James and Ava were by my side in an instant. Sand flew everywhere as Ava fell to her knees, and James hovered over me, his hands an inch above my back, as if he thought one touch would make me disintegrate into ash.

“You’re alive?” said Ava with wide eyes, as if she weren’t willing to believe it. She took my hand and held it like she was the only thing anchoring me to this place. I wasn’t so sure she was wrong.

“What happened?” said James, urgency and concern warring in his voice. I shakily leaned back on my knees, but I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at either of them. I’d lied to Cronus and stolen any chance James and Ava had of walking out of there alive. I had no idea how to open the gate, and when I admitted the truth—

It wouldn’t come to that, I thought firmly to myself, or at least as firmly as I could manage when my brain felt like jelly. I’d bought us time. Anything could happen before we reached the gate, if we ever did. In the meantime, I had a little longer to come up with a plan.

“Water,” I said, my mouth as dry as the desert around us. My lips were cracked, and my muscles screamed in protest every time I moved, but I was alive.

I trembled like I hadn’t felt warmth in years, and together James and Ava hoisted me up and helped me toward a small oasis in the distance. It looked so picture-perfect that if I hadn’t known this was someone’s idea of a desert instead of the real thing, I would’ve guessed it was a mirage.

We covered the distance faster than I’d expected, or maybe time was moving quickly for me now that I knew I no longer had a chance of walking out of that cavern alive. The best I could hope for was that the others would leave before Cronus had a chance to strike.

They set me down underneath a grove of palm trees, and I leaned against one and closed my eyes. I hated being weak compared to them. They’d fought Cronus with barely a complaint, and I couldn’t even talk to him without feeling drained.

“Tell us what happened,” said James. He cracked open a coconut, splashing milk all over his shirt, but he didn’t seem to care. He dipped one of the halves into the pool of water and offered it to me, and my hands shook as I took it.

I drank deeply. The deliciously cool water spread through me, and once I’d finished my second drink, I sat up and took inventory of my injuries. My leg throbbed and I was dizzy, but Cronus hadn’t hurt me again. I ran my fingers through my hair in an attempt to comb it out, but it was too much of a sweaty mess to bother, so I searched my jacket pocket for a hair tie to pull it back.

Instead of elastic, my fingers brushed up against something that felt like silk. No, not silk. A flower petal. Startled, I fished it out and cupped the crushed yellow blossom in my hand. It was small, with seven pointed petals that looked as if the ends had been dipped in purple, and slowly it began to uncurl.

I’d never seen anything like it, let alone picked it and put it in my pocket. And it was alive; it wasn’t dead or crushed like I’d thought it was. In seconds, it was whole and open, and the center looked like a shimmering drop of nectar. It couldn’t have possibly come from the surface.

From one of the afterlives we’d walked through? It had to be. But I’d stuck my hands in my pockets in the woods before Cronus had chased us, and it hadn’t been there then. Had I simply not noticed it? That was the only explanation. Or maybe I was too dazed to think straight.

Tucking it back into the safety of my pocket beside the quartz-and-pearl flower from Henry, I combed my hair out with my fingers and said shakily, “What did you two—what did you see?”

Wordlessly Ava offered me a hair tie, and I took it. It was bright pink. “We saw Cronus eat you.”

“You were engulfed,” said James, and he hesitated. “We thought you were gone.”

I stared into the clear pool. My reflection stared back at me, and I leaned forward to splash some water onto my grimy face. I was a mess. “Me, too,” I mumbled as I rubbed off the dirt.

“So why didn’t he kill you?” said Ava. She held a coconut in her hand, and a second later, a neon-pink curly straw appeared from inside of it. She sipped it, and I could see the milk rise through the swirls.

I didn’t answer right away. I had to tell them the truth, but they weren’t stupid. They would see what I planned to do, and if James and Ava thought I was so much as considering sacrificing myself, they would march me right back to the palace.

I needed James to find Persephone, and he would only show me how to get there if he thought he would be showing me the way home, too. That left only one option. Avoiding the whole truth.

“Because I told him I’d open the gate if he didn’t hurt us,” I said.

James stilled, and Ava dropped her coconut. “You did what?” she screeched. “Are you crazy? Do you have any idea what that means? When you don’t release him, he’s going to kill you. You do know that, right?”

I nodded numbly. “So I guess that means we have a limited amount of time to come up with another plan.”

Ava let out a string of curses and stood, pacing around the pool. “We can’t let him out. Even if he kills all of us, it’ll be better than what he’ll do the minute he gets out into the world. You know that, Kate.”

“Of course I know that,” I snapped. “But what else was I supposed to do? He was going to kill all three of us, and everyone else is too busy being scared to come after us if something went wrong.”

“You should’ve done something else. Anything else.” Ava’s face turned red, and she balled up her hands into fists. I’d never seen her so angry before. “You don’t understand—we can’t let him out. We can’t.”

“Then we won’t,” said James. He gestured for Ava to sit back down, and she stood there for a moment, as if daring him to make her, but finally her shoulders slumped and she gave in. “You did good, Kate. You bought us time.”

At least James understood. “I’m sorry,” I said to Ava as I tugged up my sleeves. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“It’s all right,” she mumbled, and she picked up her coconut again to take a halfhearted sip. “It’s not like we had a better plan.”

“We do have a better plan,” said James. “Find Persephone and figure it out from there. If anyone can help, it’s her.”

Ava made a face, apparently as happy with the thought of the fate of the universe resting in Persephone’s hands as I was. “At least we don’t have to worry about Cronus until we get there, I guess.”

“Exactly. And we don’t know how to open the gate either, so it doesn’t matter what Kate promised him to get him off our backs. We’ll figure a way out of this.” James offered us a smile, and she returned it, but I looked at my hands.