her so much that she glanced around, uncertain as to where she was. After a few moments she decided that, yes, she was in the dry lands, but this time the hilly terrain was flatter and more open. The dark, empty sky seemed lower and heavier somehow. Then she looked over her shoulder. It took her a few moments to understand what she was seeing.
Miles away, there was a line across the land and sky, where the flat nightscape turned back into the more familiar, hillier dayscape. The different time zones sat next to each other like two paintings in an artist’s studio—unmoving, unchanging, and both equally as real. Here, time was a place and it never moved. Somehow that made sense.
Helen walked. It was cold in the night version of the dry lands, and her teeth chattered uselessly. In the dayscape, there was no relief from the heat, so Helen knew that in the nightscape there would be no warmth no matter how much she rubbed her arms and shivered. She saw someone up ahead. He was panicking.
She hurried forward until she could see that it was Lucas. He was on his hands and knees, feeling around as if he were blind—grabbing at the sharp stones, cutting his hands on their edges. He was very afraid. She called out to him, but he couldn’t hear her. She knelt down next to him and took his face in her hands. He flinched away from her at first and then reached out blindly with relief. He mouthed her name, but no sound came out. In her arms, he felt very light. She made him stand up even though he was so frightened he hunched over on shaking legs. He cried silently, and Helen knew he was begging her to leave him behind. He was too frightened to move, but Helen knew she couldn’t heed him or he would never leave this dark, dry land.
Even though he screamed, she forced him to get up and walk.
Helen was in terrible pain. She wanted to groan but she didn’t have the strength to make any noise. She could hear the ocean close by, but she couldn’t move or open her eyes to see where it was. She felt her head bob gently up and down, as if she were lying, stomach down, on a lumpy raft, and her lips twitched in the faintest of grateful smiles. Something had broken her fall and was gently supporting her. She concentrated on that bit of good fortune as she divided her pain up into manageable little bits, one heartbeat at a time. After ten heartbeats she counted to twenty. At twenty she asked herself to get to forty, and so on. She heard another steady rhythm under her, and after a short time her heart was in sync with the sound coming from her life raft. They beat together, each encouraging the other. She kept very, very still.
After what seemed like hours Helen was still immobile, but she could finally open her eyes and focus them. All she could see in the sweeping, blinding flashes sent out from some distant lighthouse were walls of sand. Under her right cheek was a warm T-shirt. After a few moments she realized there was a person in it. She was lying on top of a man. The lumpiness under her head was his chest and the bobbing sensation was him breathing. She gasped. The Delos boys had caught her.
“Helen?” Lucas asked, his voice faint and breathy. “Make sound. If alive,” he barely managed to say. He didn’t sound like he was going to kill her so she answered.
“Alive. Can’t move,” she whispered back. Every syllable sent threads of pain radiating out from her diaphragm.
“Wait. Listen to waves. Calm,” he said, struggling with every word as her body weight tried to press the air out of him.
Helen knew she couldn’t so much as raise her arm, so she relaxed like he told her to and just watched as the world swayed up and then back down with every breath he took. They waited in the intermittent light and dark of the lighthouse signal, listening to the surf fizzing in the sand.
As the agony began to lessen into something semiendurable, Helen was able to notice more things about her body. From what she could see, her outward shape seemed mostly normal, but her insides felt gooey and soft, as if she were a freshly microwaved chocolate chip cookie. Her bones were barely