No one touched the two thrones. One was supposed to be mine, but the ceremony hadn’t f inished, and even if it had, I didn’t want to be up there without Henry. I wasn’t ready to rule alone—I wasn’t even sure I was ready to rule by his side. With him and the others now gone, I didn’t want to think about what that would do to the natural order of things around the Underworld. Were souls stuck in limbo until Henry returned? What if he never came back?

No. I wasn’t going to think like that. There had to be a way for this to work out—something Calliope wanted more than revenge.

A sick feeling crept over me. She did want something more than revenge. She wanted Henry—and she wanted me dead.

That wasn’t an option yet. Even if I marched up to her and offered her my neck, there was no guarantee it would end things. Cronus was more powerful than I could possibly imagine, and from my vision it was clear that no matter how in control Calliope pretended to be, she wasn’t. She wasn’t the one who was going to decide when this was over.

“What do we do now?”

My voice echoed in the dead silence of the throne room.

It’d been nearly ten minutes and no one had said a word, and I could no longer take sitting there while Henry and my mother were in danger.

“What do you mean?” said Ella, who shared a wide armchair with Theo. The two of them were wrapped together as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I en-vied them. They still had each other.

“I mean, how do we help them?” I said. “If Mom and Sof ia can’t free them, if they—” If they got captured, too.

“What are we supposed to do?”

Ella and Theo exchanged looks, and next to them, Irene sighed. “There is no helping them, not when Cronus and Calliope have them.”

I blinked. That was it? “There has to be something we can do.” I looked around the circle for support, but no one met my eye. Not even James. “We can’t leave them there.

How is that even an option?”

“Because anything else would be suicide,” said Dylan with a sneer. “While you were getting your beauty sleep, the rest of us went over every feasible plan. With Diana and Sof ia, our options were limited. Without them, we have no choice but to wait until Calliope makes her next move.

We can’t face her head-on, not if you want there to be any of us left to f ight Cronus when he f inds a way to escape.” When, not if. “There has to be something we can do.”

“They knew that this was a possibility,” said Irene. “They knew our powers are limited in this realm, and they took that chance and left us anyway.”

The note of hurt in her voice surprised me. Did they think my mother and Sof ia had abandoned them?

“Besides,” added Theo, “there’s still a chance they’ll succeed.”

“And if they don’t?” I said. As much as I wanted to grasp on to the hope that my mother would come back safely without the rest of the council’s intervention, if three of the six couldn’t withstand Calliope and Cronus, I didn’t see how it was possible that only two would.

“Then it’s only a matter of time before Cronus escapes,” said Dylan. “Once he does, he’ll tear the world apart, destroy humanity, and if we’re lucky, kill us quickly.” The temperature in the throne room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “And none of you are willing to do anything about it?” I said, stunned. “You’re just going to sit back and let it happen, even though he’ll kill you anyway?”

“No,” said Ella sharply, and she glared at Dylan. “If we stay out of it, he might leave us alone.”

“So you’d rather lose the only hope you have of defeat-ing Cronus and saving billions of lives, so long as there’s a chance you’ll be allowed to live?” I said. “Is this a joke?” No one answered. Of course it wasn’t a joke. They were all serious, and I didn’t know what to say to that. These weren’t the people I’d met and gotten to know in Eden.

They were cowards, and the idea that the most powerful beings on the planet could let humanity die—it didn’t make sense. They were supposed to protect them, not sit back and let Cronus kill everyone.

I balled my hands into f ists. “You tested me for six months to make sure I was good enough to be one of you—moral enough and strong enough and self less enough.

And now you can’t even help save your own family?” A small part of me understood that it must have been terrifying to face death when they’d lived for eons thinking they never would. Or at the very least, when they faded, it would be peaceful and without any pain. Death was part of being human, and I hadn’t forgotten what that felt like yet. They’d never had the chance to learn. But that wasn’t an excuse.

“Just because you had to be good enough to be one of us doesn’t mean the rest of us are.” Ava glared at Dylan as well, and he seemed to shrink under the intensity of it. “We’ve never exactly been upstanding, you know. We’re just good at acting holier than thou when it suits our needs. And some of us are better actors than others.”

I stood, and the screech of my stool against the f loor gave me goose bumps. “I don’t care what you do. I’m going to f ind them. You can stay here and sit on your asses all day, or you can help. It doesn’t matter to me. But I would rather be torn to shreds than live with the guilt of knowing that I could have done something and didn’t.” I didn’t want to die, and in a perfect world, no one would have to. This wasn’t a perfect world though, and they weren’t perfect beings. I wasn’t exactly making the smartest move either, storming off without a plan or an inkling of which direction to go in, but it was better than sitting around and driving myself crazy waiting for something that might never happen.