either—nothing that would force her to come back to him later to ask for what was hers.
She stood at the back of his car with her head down and her arms crossed tightly over her sore heart. She knew he was looking at her in the rearview mirror, so she angled her body away. Finally, he popped the back. She got her bike out and rode off without another word.
When she got home she fell into bed without even taking her clothes off. She could hear Jason moving around on the widow’s walk as he settled down for the night, but she didn’t feel guilty about leaving him up there. All Helen wanted was to run as far away from the Delos family as fast as she could.
She was on the edge of the dry lands, in a new place that she had seen from a distance, but had never thought she could reach. It was still rocky, but interspersed with the tufts of razor-sharp grass, there were tumbledown drums of mason-carved marble, a thousand Parthenons’ worth of scattered columns. There had once been an empire here. No longer.
Far off, there was the promise of a river. Helen couldn’t tell if she could hear it, or if she felt the extra part per million of moisture in the air, but she knew there was running water nearby. She felt so dry and empty inside. Where was the river?
As she searched, she looked down at the fallen architecture and read the names graffitied on its sides. Gracus loves Lucinda. Ethan loves Sarah. Michael loves Erin. For what seemed like days she ran her fingers over the names carved into the fragmented bones of ruined loves, stepping around the broken pillars of unkept vows and dusting the headstones in the graveyard of love with her hands. Every kind of death had a resting place in the dry lands.
She walked until her feet bled.
Helen woke to a room filled with sad blue light. She tried to roll over and felt tied to her mattress, like she had been jumped by the Lilliputians in the middle of the night. Somehow in her sleep she had shucked off her shirt and shoes, but her jeans were so tangled up in her sheets that she had to push herself off the bed and fight it out on the floor to unwrap herself. It was an ugly battle, especially since she was still covered in dirt from the trench Lucas had dug with Hector’s body, dried blood from her cut feet, and a gray, powdery dust from the dry lands. Her feet had healed themselves, of course, but still there were blood-encrusted foot smears all over her sheets. They were ruined, and she would have to buy new ones. Luckily, her dad was too squeamish about girl stuff to ask questions.
She shimmied out of her jeans on her way to the bathroom and climbed into the shower before the water even had a chance to heat up. Opening her mouth, she gulped down as much of the cold spray as she could catch. She was so dry inside. Her body ached from walking hundreds of miles under a dead sun—the cold water was like a blessing even though it made her shiver. Helen looked down at her skin and watched the water get forced into little rivers by the raised hairs of her goose bumps. It made her think about the river she had seen from a distance right before she woke up.
She couldn’t remember it.
She knew she had felt a sigh-worthy relief, and only one thing could have made her feel that way in the dry lands. Water. But she couldn’t remember anything about it. How could she forget a river in the dry lands? It was unthinkable, so she stopped thinking about it.
It bothered her that her brain refused to think about it. She walked, still naked and dripping wet, to the vanity in her bedroom, picked up some old viper-green eyeliner Claire had left the last time she slept over, and wrote THE RIVER I CAN’T REMEMBER on the mirror, just in case she forgot again. Then she got dressed.
It was getting cold out, and the air was damp with fog. Helen zipped her jacket up to her throat and regretted not bringing gloves. As she rode to school she had to keep one hand in her pocket and one on the handlebars, and then switch off when the hand she was using to