WINNIE IS WAITING IN the arena when Valerie enters at eleven o'clock on the dot, an hour before when the group is meant to be meeting for training.

    "You're here!" The little girl shrieks, her auburn hair threatening to escape from its pigtails. She's bounding up to Valerie in an instant, eyes bright with mirth. "I didn't know if you'd come early, but you did!"

    Her excitement would have been infectious if the crackling pain living behind Valerie's ribs—a lingering side effect of her tumble through Althea Knight's dreams two weeks ago—hadn't reared its ugly head. It dims whatever spark of joy has started to bloom in the dark place within her chest.

    When she doesn't reply, Winnie's expression barely falters. "Are you here to help me with my stuff?" She asks, sincerity in her voice.

    "What stuff? Swordfighting?" Valerie's eyebrows tick up with her unsaid thoughts: Swordfighting, or dreamwalking?

    Winnie shakes her head, and her nose scrunches. "My sister, Lou Ellen—you know her, she's your age—says I'm a mimic. I can copy other people's powers." She speaks quickly, with no space for argument between her words. "I can prove it, too. Name a superhero." She laughs then, a tinkling, happy sound that is far too similar to Noelle's. "Just kidding. I can only copy people I've touched. Duh."

    Her words create a different kind of ache in Valerie's chest, less of a fracturing and more of a longing, a missing. She misses her sister.

    Winnie's confidence is striking. "Have you had a run-in with Jason Grace?" Valerie asks, testing the waters.

    "He pulled me up the lava wall last year." Winnie grins. Something in her expression flickers.

    No, her expression isn't what flickers. Her eyes flicker, flashes of white gleaming  across the depth of her hazel irises. Her hands begin to spark, bright bolts that arc between her tiny fingers.

    Lightning.

    Holy gods above and below.

    Valerie lunges for Winnie, trapping the little girl's hands between both of her own. "Have you shown anyone else this? Does anyone else know?" Her voice comes out in a hushed whisper. Panic. Another emotion she has no idea how to deal with.

    It's not unusual for demigods of the Greek variety to be exceptionally, extraordinarily powerful—Valerie herself is one of the abnormally gifted ones, although there is not a single person other than herself who knows how deep that power goes.

    But a mimic...

    A mimic who can copy the power of a child of the Big Three, of Zeus, is an incredibly dangerous thing. A mimic can start a war. A mimic this young, with no true understanding of her abilities, can alter the course of humanity if she falls into the wrong hands.

    Winnie's grin drops, and she looks startled. "No. Just you. Lou Ellen only knows that I'm a mimic because I copied some Dionysus kid that pushed me in training last week."

    Valerie kneels in front of Winnie, still so tall that they are eye-level now. Even more panic rises in her throat. "You can't tell anyone else what you can do, okay?" Winnie's lower lip wobbles, and gods, damnit, tears well up in her eyes. "I'll help you as much as I can, but you can't tell anyone else. Especially not about the lightning."

    When Winnie sets her jaw, grinding her teeth, Valerie expects a deep breath, maybe a reluctant agreement.

    She doesn't expect Winnie to invade her mind.

    It's invasive, a sharp but untrained claw against the wall of her sanctuary.

    Valerie blocks the attack easily. Winnie bursts into tears.

    "No." Valerie says sternly. "If I'm going to help you, you don't get to use my power against me. That's not what we do."

    What we do. As if she hasn't used the power that gathers at the nape of her neck every day of her life, for benevolent or malicious reasons, sometimes both. Often both. She's done more evil deeds than anyone, even Alyssa, even Travis, knows, yet here she is, lecturing a child on the morality of a dark and beautiful gift that can harm as much as it can help.

    "What do I do?" Winnie sobs, her fingertips beginning to spark again.

    The normal, human response would be for Valerie to wrap the crying child up into a hug, to rub her back and whisper soothing words to ease the fear and utter panic she feels.

    But Valerie cannot. Her body and brain will not let her. So she settles for chewing on the inside of her cheek, her jaw tight and chest aching. "I'll get you through this," she says, her voice even and certain even as her hands shake. "You'll be alright, I promise."

    "Swear it," Winnie says, low and even. "Swear it on the River Styx."

    A whisper, barely there and cold, breezes across the back of Valerie's neck. "I swear it."

|

    She dreams of the Underworld that afternoon.

    She looks down upon the Fields of Punishment, feels the rage and malice of those who came before her, wrongdoers in every sense of the word. People who had done the worst possible things imaginable, who had gone against the gods and the sanctity of mortal life.

    Her stomach does a flip when her traitorous brain wonders if someday, when something or someone manages to finally kill her, if she will be down there, too.

    The Fields of Asphodel are remarkably silent, no whimpers or whispers coming from the spirits scattered amongst the trees.

    Even in the Fields of Punishment, there are no screams of anguish and torture.

    The Underworld is unnervingly quiet.

    From her vantage point, high above the ground but far below the surface of the earth, she can see everything, from Hades's dark palace and those belonging to the gods and godesses reigning from his realm, to the River Styx, to the shadowed pit of Tartarus.

    She's been here once before, in a dream so different than this one. In that dream, the wails and mumblings of the spirits had been nearly deafening, loud enough to drown out the thundering of her heartbeat in her ears.

    The silence is unsettling, until that stillness is shattered by an ear-piercing howling, echoing out of Tartarus.

    She startles, going cold all over at the familiarity that initially washes over her.

    At first, her reaction is hysteria—the voice is masculine, rough around the edges and in a tortured sort of pain. It sounds just enough like Travis that her entire body lurches into motion, making any attempt to get to him, even if it means that she dives head-first into the darkest depths of the Underworld.

    But then the realization hits her. The voice ripping out of the void is too angry to be Travis. Travis, who doesn't have a mean bone in his body, who's let her treat him so horribly for the past sixteen years without a complaint or a callous word.

    The voice coming from Tartarus is the god of dreams, the original Sandman, Morpheus himself.

    His anger is a bitter thing, tasting of rot and decay. She can feel it in her bones, stuck within her skin like shrapnel. It's an ancient and immortal anger, something that has been around since the beginning of time and will last until she's long dead and buried.

|

    Valerie wakes before dinner, peacefully, without alarm, nothing on her mind but the silence that she can still feel.

    The silence is sharp, too sharp. She rolls over, feeling the metal hilt of one of her daggers press into her shoulder, and flips the switch on her beat-up record player. She lets AC/DC's The Razors Edge record, the last she'd listened to before her nap, play, the loud bass rattling the stained glass door.

    She knows someone—Chiron, Alyssa, someone—will come soon to tell her to turn it down, but she doesn't care.

    Her dagger still digs into her shoulder blade as she flips onto her back again, but it's comforting, in the same way that the rock music is comforting, despite the grating guitar and pounding drums.

    It's like how her mother finds comfort in Sinatra, or Josslyn finds comfort with her husband and child, or Eloise in her books, the twins in their make-believe stories. Alyssa in her languages. Travis in his dream world where she is there with him.

    Comfort has always been a difficult thing for Valerie Greenwood to find. As a child, she searched for it across the world, leaving no stone unturned in her own dreams before moving on to someone else's. Then, for a while, she had discovered it in the mind of a boy—a boy with lanky limbs and dark hair and sky-blue eyes, who looked at her like she was his guardian angel.

    But then there were doctor's visits, appoitments and diagnosis after diagnosis, never one that fit her well. There were lots of acronyms back then, little letters on a piece of paper that were supposed to describe why she screamed when certain fabrics touched her, or couldn't sit still for more than a few minutes.

    Humans are comfort-driven creatures, mortals and demigods alike, and she is no exception. Valerie will take whatever small slice of peace where she can get it, whether it be from the cool metal hilt of a dagger or a rock song from decades ago.

    The dinner bell breaks her from her thoughts, and she shakes her head to rid the lingering feelings from that dream. It still clings to her like a heavy perfume, showing in her dark under-eye bags and weak posture.

    Alyssa notices this as Valerie sits down next to her at the Athena table, a plate of kosher stir-fry in front of her. Alyssa doesn't ask her if she's alright, though. She never does, simply because she doesn't have to—the answer to that question has always been, and will forever be, no. A large, massive no. If the answer is ever yes, hell has frozen over.

    Valerie picks at her stir-fry, spinning one of her chopsticks around her finger as if it's a dagger as she surveys the dining pavilion.

    She sees the people she's known for half of her life, people who have shunned and ostracized her at any given opportunity, just because her power manifested in a darker, more twisted way than theirs. She can't even resent them for it—their fear had been in response to the very real threat she'd been at only ten years old.

    In truth, she'd laid her life on the line for them, both in the Battle of Manhattan and during the Roman invasion. She had been willing to die for them, but they would never know or understand that. No one ever talks about how she decimated the enemy—they only talk about her darkness on those days, how she looked more monster than human.

    "V, stop staring at Loverboy." Alyssa's hands are gentle as she pries Valerie's fingers from the chopstick, cracked into two halves with the force of her grip.

    Valerie's mouth flattens. "I wasn't." She says, denial in her voice. She hadn't been doing it on purpose, but when she is deep in thought, her gaze often travels to Travis, as if he can hear what is going on inside her head and understand it.

    He always looks back, every time, without fail. This time, he offers her a smile, kind but knowing.

    Alyssa mutters something under her breath, something that sounds like magnets,  but it's too low for Valerie to hear properly. But Alyssa is grinning like a madman, in the way she only does when she's solved some puzzle, cracked some code, learned a new language that she'd been struggling with for weeks.

    "Finish your food," Alyssa says, still smiling like she knows every secret known to man. "We need to talk."

|

    The stained glass door of Cabin 21 rattles when Alyssa slams it, steering Valerie to sit on the bed. The sunset filters through the colored glass, dyeing the room and everything in it shades of violet, emerald, and gold.

    Alyssa is pacing, her sneakered feet noiseless on the rug. "I have a theory." She says, dark eyes bright.

    "Oh, gods," Valerie's eyebrows raise slightly, teasingly. It is the most emotion she's shown all night. "You, with a theory? I'm shocked. Truly, I never would have thought."

    With a withering look, Alyssa hisses, "Shut up!"

    Valerie raises her hands in mock-defeat. "Fine. What's your theory?"

    She regrets asking, because Alyssa's theory is long winded:

    "So. How old were you when you first saw Travis in your dreams? Four? Five?" She pauses, giving Valerie a moment to confirm. "That's when your powers started manifesting, right?" Another pause, another nod. "When I saw you looking at him at dinner, all I could think about was magnetic theory—if the magnets are strong enough, they'll find a way to each other, no matter what. Like, if you swallow magnets, they'll rip through your digestive track to get back to each other."

    Valerie blinks. "Your theory is magnets?"

    Alyssa huffs, finally stopping her pacing to face Valerie. "No. My theory is Plato's other half theory. How humans were originally beings with four arms, four legs, and two faces, and Zeus split them in two. He condemned them to spend the rest of their lives searching for their other half."

    "So your theory is...?"

    "How else would you explain the fact that something was calling you to him when you were four? Something in that evil little head of yours was drawn to him." Alyssa says, voice raised. "My theory isn't magnets. It's soulmates."

    A tiny muscle twitches in Valerie's face, just to the right of her mouth. "My head is not evil."

    Alyssa takes two steps towards her and presses the palms of her hands to Valerie's temples. "V, I love you. You are my best friend. Please just admit that I'm right."

    A bigger twitch this time. Valerie jerks her head out of Alyssa's grasp and stands, eyes narrowed. "My mother also believes in soulmates. She's on her, I don't know, fourth one right now." She takes a shaky breath. "You know the situation is complicated with him. I don't need to make it more complicated by throwing that word into the mix."

    She's remembering their fight from nearly two years ago, one that was so similar to this and ended with Valerie running back to Manhattan out of fear, not anger. She was terrified then, and that same panic wraps around her heart and squeezes now.

    The thing she won't admit to herself rises once again in her chest, making its way practically to her throat before she can swallow it back down.

    No. No, to admit that will kill her. It will cleave her right in two, will tear her in half from the inside out. To admit that will turn the universe upside down, will make the Sandman good and vulnerable and, the worst possibility of all, happy.

    The dream that she does not let herself dwell on or even think about, the one that she only sees in her sanctuary, tastes like honey-sweetened hot tea, like coffee cake from her favorite bakery, like chicken noodle soup. It tastes like a home that she has not yet discovered.

    Valerie chases those thoughts away with a knife. There is a reason she is not allowed to think them, a self-imposed rule that she follows more than any law, because when she does, she gets that look on her face that makes Alyssa give her a pitying glance.

    "Oh, gods," Alyssa whispers. "I was just talking out of my ass, but... V, stop making that face. It's scaring me."

    That face is a frown that takes up Valerie's whole expression, pulling her eyebrows and the corners of her lips down, and her forehead is creased. And then her lower lip starts to wobble.

    "Get out. Get out, now. Alyssa, get out." Valerie's words come out jumbled, and she's rushing to push Alyssa out of the cabin.

    Alyssa fights the grin that so desperately wants to take place on her lips. "I'll see you tomorrow!"

    The door slams behind her, and Valerie attempts to blink back tears.

    Tears.

    There are reasons for her rules, the strict guidelines to the way she lives her life. And as she swallows down her tears, the feelings that bubble up in her throat, the bile that churns in her stomach, those mental shields she's spent half of her life fortifying click into place.

    Her expression cools, eyes drying and mouth flattening into a thin line.

    There will not be another slip up. She will let herself be the cold, heartless monster her peers think she is, because the alternative is something she cannot bear.