Page 127 of The Mortal Trials

The sky is ashen, too. A gray, endless twilight. Muted and dull and terrible.

“I see them!” Torsten yells to Kallik, who’s trying to catch up and struggling. “At the river!”

That curving watery serpent looms in the distance. Black and still as night, slithering through the ash staining its inky surface. Small, shallow boats float in the placid, winding river, and standing in them are people who don’t belong in this world or in this trial.

I scan face after face, looking for familiarity and finding only strangers.

Hazi veers left, following the slick bank. “Father!” He slips in the mud, but digs a hand in and somehow stays upright and keeps moving. “Father!”

And then I see him. My brother is to the right, in the last boat. “Cillian!” I shrill, racing toward him.

Veronia shoves me out of her way, screaming for someone. Tears stream down her face. “Gods, Vanessa!” she shrieks.

An ash cloud overtakes me when I finally reach Cillian and stop. My brother is holding a long pole that reaches the river bottom. “Cillian, come to me!”

He doesn’t even flinch. Just stares ahead, looking not at me, but through me. I yell for him again and again, but he doesn’t realize I’m here. This isn’t right.

Torsten roars for his mother. Thanks to the gods’ querulous design, she’s in the boat beside Cillian’s. The Norseman steps into the squelching mud and gets stuck in it. He tries to work himself free but the more he moves, the more it swallows him. His silver armor is too heavy.

I pace the shore, trying to understand what we’re supposed to do to reach them. Or are they supposed to reach us?

“Help,” Torsten grits, sunken to his shoulders. “Callalie, help me. Please. I don’t want to die in front of my mother.”

I debate whether I should. If the mud sucked him under, he would deserve it, but his mother is here. And he’s right. Some part of her would watch if I let him drown in the earth. She doesn’t deserve that. Muttering a curse, I hit my knees and extend the end of my golden spear to him.

He grabs it, panicked as he sinks to his neck.

“Do you know how to swim?” I ask.

“Yes!” he hisses, his eyes wild.

“Then lean backward and wiggle your toes and feet. Work them up to the surface. Act like you’re swimming on your back. Keep your movements small and don’t let go of the spear.”

He grips the gold and leans his head back, working his legs until they start to rise. “I’m doing it!” he gasps.

I give a short nod. “Good. When you can, crawl on your back to the ash. Stay on it from now on. The ash is safe.”

“Okay.”

When I look back at Cillian, he’s moved farther away, closer to the opposite shore. “No! Cillian, come back to me. Move this way! Toward me.”

No emotion graces his face as he takes the pole and shoves his boat a little farther away.

“Cill?”

“I don’t think,” Torsten grunts, finally freeing one foot, then the other from the mud, “I don’t think they know us. We must make them remember. This is meant to represent the river Lethe.”

Lethe is the river of forgetting that winds through the Greek Underworld.

My eyes narrow. “How do you know that’s what it is?”

Torsten unflinchingly holds my stare as he pushes toward the ash. His champion, Frejya must have told him what he’d have to do here. I shake my head. The moment he’s close to shore, I jerk the spear out of his hands and turn my attention back to my brother.

Make him remember. Remember me, our lives together, and who he is.

I start with something happy.

“I gave you a slingshot for your ninth birthday, Cillian. You ran outside, found all the stones your pockets could hold, and started pelting everything in sight. Abuela had a fit when you accidentally hit one of her birds. You were aiming at a blossom – which also made her furious – when the quetzal flew past. She heard its cry and came outside, livid.”