the Delos kids sleeping on her roof anymore. She especially didn’t want Lucas listening to her while she had nightmares, and she had just woken up from another horrible one. She looked around at the empty widow’s walk, feeling desolate and lonely, but she wasn’t sure if that was because of a dream or because of her waking life.
She went back down to her bedroom and forced herself to notice the writing on the mirror. Then she wrote I SAW IT AGAIN in Claire’s green eyeliner and made herself stare at the words. That was two nights in a row she’d seen the river she couldn’t remember. She was racking her brain trying to picture it, but her mind’s eye kept looking away. Suddenly, she spotted her own reflection in the mirror and gasped.
Her cheeks were sunken in, her nightshirt was pulled out of shape, and her arms and legs were covered in icky black muck. River muck.
She had seen a river with black banks and gray water. She could remember thirst and not being able to drink. But why was it such a struggle to remember anything else that had happened? She focused her thoughts to try and bring the memory back.
Her thirst was tormenting her so she had gone down to the water. She leaned over the foul banks of black mud and saw pale, crippled fish bumping around clumsily, as if they had forgotten how to swim. She backed away from the river, refusing to drink that water even if she died of thirst with the sound of its current rushing in her ears. . . .
Helen ran to the bathroom and threw herself into the shower, rubbing at the black mud and rinsing her mouth out with gulp after gulp of water. She felt polluted. She scrubbed until her skin turned red and her eyes were stinging from being open in the spray.
When she got out of the shower, she dragged her sheets and nightshirt over to the washing machine. There was no blood this time, but Helen doubted she’d be able to get out that river mud. She put a half a cup of bleach into the washing machine and made sure the water was hot, hoping that she would be able to salvage something. Then she went back upstairs to clean all the dirty footprints she’d tracked through the house.
It was early Saturday morning, and usually her father would be home during the day and working at night, but he had opted to work a double to give Kate the day off. Helen had a feeling that the two of them were avoiding each other. She had tried to talk to Kate about it the night before, after Claire left to go to the bonfire, but she just didn’t have the energy to push Kate to open up. Everything felt duller to Helen. Muffled, like her feelings were in storage, buried under mounds of packaging peanuts.
Helen went to her room and switched gravity off and on, alternately floating up and thumping down until she figured out how to swing her legs under her and land on the balls of her feet instead of all over the damn place. She worked a bit with the air currents, but she couldn’t do anything more than finesse her position as she floated or she risked blowing her room to pieces. After a few hours, the constantly ringing phone drove her out of doors. The Delos family wanted to know why she wasn’t at their house yet for practice, and they wouldn’t stop calling until she answered.
Helen had been thinking. She just couldn’t see the point of learning how to swing a sword if she couldn’t be wounded by weapons, and she didn’t need to fight if she could simply fly away. She knew that eventually Hector or Jason would come looking for her at home, so she wandered outside with no clear destination, hoping that a little speed would help clear her head. She was in jeans and a sweater, not exactly running gear, but it didn’t matter. As soon as she was out of the town center she went off Polpis Road, heading east. She didn’t care where she ended up, as long as it was away from people. As she ran she realized that she had come this way once before, and although she didn’t want to think about her first flight and everything that came after it, she knew it was the perfect place