Free Dreamless by Josephine Angelini Page B

her room. The silence pounded in her ears and the walls spiraled in on her. She didn’t want to be the Descender anymore. For all her suffering she had learned nothing, and she was no closer to freeing the Rogues and the Outcasts from the Furies than she had been when she first descended. She was a failure.
    Helen was at the end of her endurance. She was beyond tired, but she couldn’t let herself fall asleep in this condition. If she did, she didn’t know if she would ever have the strength to wake up again. She needed something, anything, to look forward to.
    A fragment of a thought flashed across her mind’s eye—the sweet image of a strong hand that was open and ready to take hers. Behind that helping hand was a mouth that smiled as it said her name.
    Helen didn’t just want a friend, she needed one. And she didn’t care if she had to go to hell to find him.
    Automedon saw the Heir to the House of Atreus circle her house twice, staying high in the night sky before she landed in her yard. At first, he thought she stayed aloft because she had spotted him. He sank back into the neighbor’s bushes and took on the preternatural stillness that only a creature of nonhuman lineage could achieve. He knew the Heir was powerful and should not be underestimated. He hadn’t seen lightning like she had made during the battle in the woods in many years.
    But like most modern Scions, she was oblivious to her true potential. None of these gifted infants knew that power was meant to be wielded. The strong should rule. That was what nature intended, from smallest microbe to the great leviathan. The weak die, and the strongest becomes queen of the nest.
    Automedon willed the chitin in his skin to harden and hold fast until he realized that the Heir’s focus was not on him, and that he could relax his rigid outer camouflage.
    The Heir was taking her time to land so she could look at the fenced-in platform on her roof. Strange, he thought, it was almost as if she expected someone to be up there, and yet he had never seen anyone use that platform in the three weeks he had been watching her. He made a mental note of her interest in the widow’s walk, trusting in his instinct that there was more to that place than met the eye.
    She landed in the yard and looked over her shoulder, the moonlight catching her smooth cheek. Many years ago in a faraway country, Automedon had seen that same exquisite face, kissed by the same adoring moon, as it looked back over the ocean of blood that had been spilled to possess it.
    The Heir went inside her house but turned on no lights. Automedon heard her pause and stand very still just inside the kitchen at the front. Her strange behavior made him wonder if one of the Hundred Cousins had been incited by their failure to seize the Outcast that afternoon to disobey Tantalus’s orders. Was one in the house? Automedon rose out of the bushes. The Heir was not to be touched, not yet. He took a step forward and heard her go upstairs. She went into the bathroom, turned on a light, and started washing up as if nothing was wrong. Automedon retreated back into his nest and listened.
    He could hear the Heir lay down in her bed. Her breathing was elevated, almost as if she were frightened. Automedon extended the proboscis that lay under his human-looking tongue, sliding it out to taste her pheromones on the air. She was afraid, but there was more than just fear in her chemical signature. There were many conflicted emotions bubbling to the surface, changing her chemistry too quickly for Automedon to identify them clearly. The burden of her task was weighing heavily on her. He heard her sniff a few times, then finally she relaxed, and he heard her breathing turn into the slow rhythm of sleep. As she unlocked the portal, the unearthly cold of the Void sucked the last vestiges of warmth out of her room.
    For a millisecond, her body vanished from this world altogether, but Automedon knew that it would reappear, like all